From the Persian Gulf scenario, you could draw one of two conclusions. The first is that our State Department negotiators are idiots. The second possibility is that this was a situation where we wanted to create a deadlock, because it served our purpose. We had no intention of settling for the three things that George Bush demanded in his State of the Union address. General Schwarzkopf, in his biography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, said, “The minute we got there, we understood that anything less than a military victory was a defeat for the United States.” We couldn’t let Saddam Hussein pull 600,000 troops back across the border, leaving us wondering when he would choose to do it again. We needed a reason to go in and take care of him militarily.

An attorney friend of mine, John Broadfoot, from Amarillo, Texas, tested this theory for me. He was representing a buyer of a piece of real estate, and even though he had a good deal worked out, he thought, “I’ll see how Roger’s rule of ‘Asking for More Than You Expect to Get,’ works.” He dreamed up 23 paragraphs of requests to make of the seller. Some of them were ridiculous. He felt sure that at least half of them would be thrown out right away. To his amazement, he found that the seller of the property took strong objection to only one of the sentences in one of the paragraphs. Even then John, as I had taught him, didn’t give in right away. He held out for a couple of days before he finally and reluctantly conceded. Although he had given away only one sentence in 23 paragraphs of requests, the seller still felt that he had won in the negotiation.

In big things. In 1982, we (the United States) were negotiating the payoff of a huge international loan with the government of Mexico. They were about to default on an $82 billion loan. Their chief negotiator was Jesus Herzog, their finance minister. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker represented our side. In a creative solution, we asked Mexico to contribute huge amounts of petroleum to our strategic petroleum reserve, which Herzog agreed to do. That didn’t settle it, however. We proposed to the Mexicans that they pay us a $100 million negotiating fee, which was a politically acceptable way for them to pay us accrued interest. When President Lopez Portillo heard what we were asking for, he went ballistic. He said the equivalent of, “You tell Ronald Reagan to drop dead. We’re not paying the United States a negotiating fee. Not one peso.” Now we had the negotiating range established. We asked for $100 million dollars. They’re offering zero. Guess what they ended up paying us? That’s right: $50 million dollars.

There was once a very old couple who lived in a dilapidated thatched hut on a remote Pacific Island. One day, a hurricane blew through the village and demolished their home. Because they were much too old and poor to rebuild the hut, the couple moved in with their daughter and her husband. This arrangement precipitated an unpleasant domestic situation, as the daughter’s hut was barely big enough for herself, her husband, and their four children, let alone the in-laws.

The daughter went to the wise person of the village, explained the problem and asked, “Whatever will we do?”

The wise person puffed slowly on a pipe and then responded, “You have chickens, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied, “we have 10 chickens.”

“Then bring the chickens into the hut with you.”

This seemed ludicrous to the daughter, but she followed the wise person’s advice. The move naturally exacerbated the problem, and the situation was soon unbearable, for feathers as well as hostile words flew around the hut. The daughter returned to the wise person, pleading again for advice.

“You have pigs, do you not?”

“Yes, we have three pigs.”

“Then you must bring the pigs into your hut with you.”

That seemed to be ridiculous advice, but to question the wise person was unthinkable, so she brought the pigs into the hut. Life was now truly unlivable, with eight people, 10 chickens, and three pigs sharing one tiny, noisy hut. Her husband complained that he couldn’t hear the radio over the racket.

The next day the daughter, fearing for her family’s sanity, approached the wise person with a final desperate plea. “Please,” she cried, “we can’t live like this. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it, but please help us.”

This time, the wise person’s response was puzzling, but easier to follow. “Remove the chickens and the pigs from your hut.” She quickly evicted the animals, and the entire family lived happily together for the rest of their days. The moral of the story is that a deal always looks better after something has been thrown out.

Many years ago, I bought 100 acres of land in Eatonville, Washington, a beautiful little town just west of Mount Rainier. The seller was asking $185,000 for the land. I analyzed the property and decided that if I could get it for $150,000, it would be a terrific buy. I bracketed that price and asked the real estate agent to present an offer to the seller at $115,050. (Specific numbers build credibility, so you’re more likely to get them to accept an offer like this than to counter it. More about this later.)

I went back to my home in La Habra Heights, California, leaving the agent to present the offer to the seller. Frankly, I thought I’d be lucky if they came back with any kind of counteroffer on a proposal this low. To my amazement, I got the offer back in the mail a few days later, accepted at the price and terms that I had proposed. I’m sure that I got a terrific buy on the land. Within a year, I’d sold 60 of the acres for more than I paid for the whole hundred. Later, I sold another 20 acres for more than I paid for the whole hundred. When they accepted my offer, I should have been thinking, “Wow. That’s terrific, I couldn’t have gotten a lower price.” That’s what I should have been thinking, but I wasn’t. I was thinking, “I could have done better.”