Healing Wounds; Sabotage; Dianne's Debut; Front-Runner; U.S. at War?; Perot Inc.
Clinton may offer Bush a role in the new administration; Iran trying to wreck Israel-Syria detente; Sam Nunn new leader in race for secretary of state
Healing wounds. Insiders say that Bill Clinton's meeting in the White House this week with George Bush could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The sources say Clinton plans to "look the president in the eye" and ask him "to heal the wounds and move on." If he responds positively, the president-elect may then ask whether Bush would be willing to consult regularly on foreign policy, particularly on issues involving the former Soviet Union. Eventually, sources say, Clinton could make a formal offer to Bush to serve as a special envoy.
Sabotage. Arab sources in Washington blame Iran for the recent upsurge in guerrilla attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon. They say that Tehran ordered its militant fundamentalist allies to stir up a maximum of trouble on the Jewish state's northern border to undercut the blossoming dÏetente between Syria and Israel. Iran's goal: to prevent what the sources predict will be a meeting of the Israeli and Syrian foreign ministers sometime this winter, probably in Cairo. The sources believe that such a session could produce a framework for a peace treaty between the two nations, which have been at war for 44 years, and also set the stage for a dramatic summit between Syria's President Hafez Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Dianne's debut. The swearing-in last week of Dianne Feinstein as California's new senator--less than a week after her lopsided election victory--has bruised the feelings of her predecessor, John Seymour, and the 36 members of his staff. By law, Democrat Feinstein, who is technically filling out the unexpired term of Pete Wilson, was within her rights when she insisted on taking the senatorial oath and evicting Seymour and his crew from their Capitol Hill offices as soon as her election was officially certified. However, Seymour, appointed to the seat by now Governor Wilson, had assumed that the certification process would take the usual 30 days, allowing a grace period in which he and his aides could clean out their desks and turn over their files to Feinstein. But since she won by such a large margin--55 to 38 percent--California's Democratic secretary of state gave her imprimatur only 72 hours after the last vote was cast and Feinstein took over as senator last Tuesday. Seymour was sent packing almost immediately afterward. "It was asking a lot to have us out in three days," says one miffed Seymour staffer. The former senator, however, has had his revenge: Feinstein was surprised to inherit 2,000 items of casework on behalf of constituents.
Front-runner. Based upon recent conversations with Clinton insiders, here is how one well-connected foreign policy specialist sees the race for secretary of state: Georgia's Sen. Sam Nunn is the new front-runner. Nunn, who discouraged offers to become defense secretary under Ronald Reagan, still does not want the Pentagon job, but after 20 years in the Senate he might be tempted by the prestige of the ranking cabinet post. While Warren Christopher, head of the Clinton transition team, will almost certainly gain a top job, it will not be at State, since the president-elect does not want highly visible Carter administration retreads. Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton is also said to be fading because, even though he heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in the past four years, his only official trip abroad was to Panama, in 1989.
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