Stuart Eizenstat, a most serious fellow in placid times, is verging on the grim as he endures a state of High Frazzle.
The deputy treasury secretary of the United States is running late, having just exited the spacious office of his boss, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. He is being forced to juggle a prominent German politician calling from overseas, me, and a desire to quickly contact Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) on a legislative matter related to taxes.
“Where were we?” he says, seated at a conference table, looking up from some papers with the air of an undertaker and the apparent craving to finish up in six, maybe seven, seconds.
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For sure, we were discussing a somber and tortuous matter that has taken up much of his time: nothing less than the partial righting of an awful historical wrong. In a city in which 90 percent of the media tends to cover 10 percent of the news, the tale of his admirable labors is another that has slipped through the press cracks.
“The passions here are beyond anything I have ever encountered,” he said with scant emotion about his latest handiwork.
Eizenstat, 57 and a wonk’s wonk who has served the Clinton administration in various trouble-shooting capacities, is about to complete a delicate, passion-filled trifecta, all related to Holocaust-era atrocities and misdeeds.
First he brokered a deal in which the German government and some companies will pay $5 billion to an estimated 1.5 million survivors. Then, he bargained a settlement that will see Swiss banks pay $1.25 billion to more than a half-million victim plaintiffs who allege that the banks hoarded their money.
Now there is the somber footnote of 1 million mostly non-Jewish workers dispatched by Adolf Hitler to Austria from six Eastern European nations. They were used, and often brutalized, as forced and slave laborers, with some women raped by barracks guards and forced to have abortions.
The whole matter was entangled in Austria’s ambiguous relationship with the Nazis and its own Jewish citizens. It was complicated by the embarrassing recent rise of that nation’s Freedom Party, led by Joerg Haider, whose ultra-right sentiments led to a brief European diplomatic boycott.
But Eizenstat is on his way to completing an agreement, which includes a $400 million Austrian fund for the roughly 150,000 survivors, including some in the U.S., as well as compensation for confiscated property, notably 70,000 apartments. The crux of the deal was completed in Vienna on Friday.
“There are few negotiations that involve moral, not legal, issues, and can bring a sense of moral justice,” he said.
There is also no shortage of critics of Clinton foreign policy, including those who don’t really think there is a foreign policy. And when it comes to moral justice, the administration has often fallen short, including its shameful passivity in the face of the genocide in Rwanda and the president’s own dissembling on the topic.
The Holocaust-era accords, however, reflect American clout and finesse, with plaudits due a raft of victims’ rights lawyers, such as Washington’s Martin Mendelsohn, and Eizenstat. The U.S. became a middleman in each instance because everybody looked to it for help, ultimately forcing Eizenstat to deal with very complicated politics even within the respective negotiating groups.
There were rough spots, said other negotiators, and at times it seemed as if Eizenstat had fumbled and talks had been blown. But he persevered.
Born in Chicago’s Garfield Park Hospital, he was raised in Atlanta, where he was a high school basketball star. His mom was a Chicago native, his dad a wholesale shoe businessman, and remaining Chicago relatives are “divided between Cubs and White Sox fans.” He went to the University of North Carolina, then Harvard Law School, joining an Atlanta law firm and dabbling in politics.
He helped Hubert Humphrey’s failed presidential bid in 1968, then later met Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. He became an informal adviser, making suggestions on policy matters when Carter decided to make a long-shot bid for the White House.
“He was at an Atlanta law firm and, once Carter decided to run, he educated Carter on a great many issues,” said Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s White House chief of staff. “He was a straight shooter and honest broker, who gave Carter all the facts, detailed each side of an issue, but also made clear where he personally stood.
“Give the guy a spoon and tell him to move a mountain 4 feet and he’d go out and do it.”
When Carter won, the young attorney came to Washington as his domestic policy adviser. He soon gained a reputation as personally decent, a strong family man, very confident intellectually (some thought arrogant), funny in informal settings and a political progressive.
Frank Greer, who worked in the Labor Department back then and is now a hotshot political and media consultant, recalls, “On labor issues, he was more liberal than anyone in the White House and willing to stand up to OMB,” the Office of Management and Budget, namely the numbers-crunching bureaucratic devil.
His post-Carter years saw him stick around town as a lawyer and lobbyist before joining the Clinton administration as our ambassador to the European Union, undersecretary of commerce for international trade, the State Department’s undersecretary for economic, business and agricultural affairs and, finally, his current Treasury position.
In the Washington pecking order, these aren’t exalted positions, though he has handled very tough matters for the administration, including sanctions against Libya and Iran and the Helms-Burton embargo against Cuba, among others. But he clearly has been viewed as a Mr. Fix-It.
There was a sense of urgency in all Holocaust-related talks because of the ages of those still alive. In the latest case of the Austrian talks, “these people are mostly in their 80s, in Central Europe, and there’s a need to compensate them quickly.”
These talks quickly became tangled up in the issue of compensation for confiscated property (by the Nazis with the help of the Austrians), with a bitter divide on the amount of money. Payment for having been forced or slave labor, even for the women raped and forced to have abortions, was easy compared to the property dispute. A huge breakthrough was reached in Vienna early Friday on a process to settle that question, with Eizenstat hopeful of resolution by year’s end.
An example offered by Mendelsohn, the victims’ attorney: A Jewish family in Vienna was given a piddling sum by the Nazis for their apartment and told to get out of the country. After the war, people buy the place and live there for the next 50 years.
“Now, there’s a knock on the door and a guy says, `This is mine!’ Should you have known? Maybe. Should you be penalized? Not so simple.”
Eizenstat confronted factions within factions, even nasty disputes about the relative treatment of forced, as opposed to slave, laborers (the Germans, for example, employed 12 million forced and slave laborers to keep their economy going).
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There were divides among Jewish groups, the involvement of lawyers for corporations that helped the Nazis, rifts involving arbitration processes, differing perspectives of certain Eastern European nations and, in the Austrian talks, the profound ambiguity of Austria itself.
“Austria had to face its own history,” Eizenstat said. “They kept telling themselves they were the first victims,” a reference to Hitler’s annexation (with ample public support in Austria) of the country in 1938.
A fatigued Eizenstat returned to Washington on Friday afternoon after a whirlwind 48-hour trek to Lithuania, then Vienna. In the midst of a typically craven presidential campaign, he had reason to be satisfied with his recent service.
“There’s a sense of helping real people, needy people and gaining a sense of justice,” he said. “There is in this world a chance to close a moral circle on injustice.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.