Press: Sadat's P.R. Man

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had not even unpacked his bag in Washington before a taped interview with him appeared on ABC's Issues and Answers; he later spoke at a National Press Club lunch, and held two press briefings. Said an admiring Gerald Ford as he greeted Sadat on the White House lawn: "You will find that many of our people have come to know you through news reports and through the many interviews you have granted so graciously to representatives of our media."

Sadat's press campaign had been carefully choreographed by Tahsin Bashir, 50, a moonfaced, cigar-smoking intellectual who had served as Egypt's spokesman at the United Nations and as Arab League information officer before Sadat last year named him presidential press adviser. Bashir's first step was to abandon the censorship and tone down the anti-Zionist rhetoric that used to dominate Egyptian press policy. "If anybody photographed a camel in our streets," he says of the xenophobic old days, "it was considered treason."

By easing access to Sadat and giving journalists almost daily nuggets of news about his Middle East peace efforts, Bashir has been trying to project Sadat as a paradigm of moderation. When that image was threatened by the breakdown of talks at Aswan last March, Bashir lined up interviews for his boss with U.S. news organizations to explain Egypt's position. Bashir was a key figure behind the extensive sightseeing tours for Henry Kissinger during his Middle East peace shuttles, tours that turned evening news programs round the world into virtual travelogues for Egypt.

Sadat's supersalesman first learned the art of getting along in Alexandria, where he grew up during the Lawrence Durrell era of cosmopolitan concord among the city's Arabs, Jews and Europeans. As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1950s, he debated with a number of young Jews who are now helping run Israel. "They were simply human beings with whom I happened to disagree," he says. Bashir has not always got along with everybody, however. He temporarily lost his government scholarship to Harvard for criticizing the nascent Nasser government, and he was fired from a foreign ministry job in 1972 for opposing the Soviet Union. "If the price of speaking freely is getting sacked now and then," says Bashir, "I'm willing to pay it."

That candor was much in evidence last week when Bashir assisted his U.S. counterpart, Ron Nessen, at a White House press briefing. Nessen first tried to ban microphones and film crews from the session, but Bashir objected. And when Nessen got into a shouting match with a reporter over a question about Saudi Arabian antiSemitism, Bashir interrupted with a polite answer: "We don't indulge in the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia or the United States." Said one White House press corps veteran: "He could teach Nessen a thing or two."