Ties that bind: at last, all parties were ready to make peace in the Middle East. Whoops ... not so fast.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-SEP-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution

Seconds before showtime, Bill Clinton received an urgent warning from a young aide: "Mr. President, you need to straighten your tie."

Clinton reached for his neck. Taking a cue from their host, three Middle East leaders reached for theirs. Only the tieless Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, kept his hands at his side. That's him in the kaffiyeh, of course, no less a part of this fraternal tableau for his lack of Western attire. The man who was once his mortal enemy, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, is on the left. In an instant, they would walk into the White House East Room to sign the latest installment of the delicately crafted peace plan known as the Oslo Accords.

It was a silly picture that White House photographer Barbara Kinney snapped--"People tend to smile when they see it," she says--but also an intimate and intensely hopeful one. Or so it seemed that afternoon ten years ago, September 28, 1995. Here were...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.