'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Sadat and Saudis tried to prop up failing Nixon?

Yet more from the Nixon tapes, which will prove to be, I think, a huge treasure trove. (The Nixon Archives link to the new releases is here.) The WaPo's Walter Pincus evidently spent time poring over them yesterday and came up with a cable to Kissinger from then-US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Jim Akins (mis-spelled by Pincus as Adkins) describing a "secret" letter Pres. Sadat wrote to King Faisal in January 1974 saying that Nixon

"could easily be impeached" and that "Arabs must do everything they can to strengthen" Nixon...

Well, the letter was supposed to be "secret", but Akins reported that a "senior Saudi official" had read it out to him...

That was in the middle of the post-1973 War oil boycott. Pincus continues:

"The one thing they could do which would be most effective," Sadat wrote Faisal, "would be to assure the president that the [oil] boycott would be lifted as soon as disengagement [with Israel forces] could be accomplished." Kissinger traveled to the Middle East in February 1974, and the boycott was lifted the following month.

The linking of the termination of the oil boycott with the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement agreement has always been well understood. A motivation on the behalf of at least some of the Arabs to do this to "save" Nixon seems new to me, though perhaps not to others. It is also quite possible that that the oil-exporting states needed to end the boycott for their own reasons, as well. (And that the US needed to get the disengagement for its own reasons, too.)