All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (51 page)

She offered me a deal: I would come less often to UN headquarters and she would personally supply me with information. Who could ask for a better source? That very evening I presented myself at the Essex House, where she usually stayed. She greeted me warmly, gave me dinner, and let me look through her papers. The same scene took place again the next day and the day after that. Gideon Rafael, one of her advisers and himself a future UN ambassador, walked in on me one night as I pored over confidential documents. He expressed astonishment, but Golda simply said: “I trust him.” As a result, while I was better informed than my colleagues, they were more effective, for I practiced a rigorous self-censorship so as not to betray Golda’s trust. My competitor from
Maariv
took advantage of leaks I knew about but kept to myself. Golda appreciated that. I became one of her confidants.

In 1967, while she was out of office (a situation that was commonly referred to as being in “the wilderness”), I was among the few New Yorkers to visit her at her hotel. Even Israeli officials considered her a has-been and were too busy to come and say hello. Pointing to the flowers on the table, she told me to guess who had sent them. The consulate, the UN delegation, the UJA? No, Golda said, laughing—the hotel management. Her humor spared no one, not even herself. Over time our friendship had grown stronger, and that fact was known. When she succeeded Levi Eshkol as prime minister, her entourage of courtiers and flatterers became very friendly to me. As a consequence, during my visits to Israel I noted—not without pride—that all doors were open to me. The honeymoon lasted until 1973.

It was also in 1957 that the Old Man, Yehuda Mozes, died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-five. From now on I would visit the tombs of the Kabalists in Safed alone.

His widow, Manya, told me of his last weeks and days. “He liked you very much,” she said. “And because he liked you, so did I.” She lowered her voice. “I have to admit that at first it bothered me. My husband was too fond of you and Dov. I was jealous, not for me but for my children. But I always followed him in everything he did.” She expressed her desire that his heirs make me a present of a symbolic, founding share of the newspaper: “It’s what my husband would have wanted.” The heirs refused, but no matter. One share would hardly
have made me rich, and in any case I always thought of
Yedioth Ahronoth
as “my” newspaper.

“My” paper was keeping me busy. I covered Ben-Gurion’s second quasi-official visit to Boston, Washington, and Ottawa. I attended his historic meeting with Konrad Adenauer. I also covered Ben-Gurion’s meeting with the newly elected American president, John F. Kennedy, on the eve of Kennedy’s trip to Vienna to meet Nikita Khrushchev. The young leader seemed better prepared than his visitor. It was reported that Kennedy had deliberately raised an unexpected issue. (Too busy to meet with the Israeli leader, Kennedy had been pressured into reconsidering by his Jewish supporters. He reportedly wanted to take revenge.) He demanded that Ben-Gurion give an immediate answer to the question “How many Arab refugees is Israel prepared to take back?” In short, that meeting between the two men was not auspicious.

In Ottawa, Ben-Gurion attended a Shabbat dinner at the home of his ambassador, Yaakov Herzog. The correspondents were invited for coffee with the prime minister. Since he looked tired, I suggested we discuss philosophy rather than more politics. Everyone in Israel knew it was his favorite subject apart from the Bible. He loved to comb bookstores for obscure philosophical works, and read Plato in the original. He seemed pleased by my suggestion. “You know philosophy?” he asked. “I’ve studied it, that’s all.” He mentioned Spinoza (whom I revered), I cited Maimonides (with whom he was less familiar), someone else invoked Kafka (with whom he was completely unfamiliar). When someone referred to a Talmudic saying, the conversation became awkward. Ben-Gurion didn’t like the Talmud, which he associated with exile.

In my opinion, Ben-Gurion was a better statesman than a philosopher. I can understand why his advisers and assistants were so totally loyal to him. He raised them to his level, inspiring them and teaching them to be sensitive to history. He had a paternal relationship with them for which his enemies unfairly reproached him.

His aide-de-camp, a man called Nehemia, was so completely devoted to him that he had always resisted getting married. When he finally fell in love, the head of the Mossad informed him that the woman was a foreign agent. In his despair, he put a bullet through his head. Ben-Gurion’s advisers were afraid the news would upset him too much and they decided to keep it from him. All the Israeli newspapers, including the organ of the Communist Party, agreed to print a special
copy of that day’s issue, one that made no mention of Nehemia’s death, for Ben-Gurion alone.

My daily reporting went on: the ongoing struggle of blacks for civil rights; the first American triumphs in space, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion; Khrushchev’s visit to the United Nations, with the unforgettable image of him taking off his shoe and pounding it on the table. There was Jacqueline Kennedy and her children; the scandal of the rigged TV quiz shows; the beginnings of the conquest of space; John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize; Betty Friedan and her feminist prophecy. I did many interviews and almost as many political commentaries.

One interview left a bitter taste. Yaël Dayan, the legendary general’s daughter, had just published her first novel and the
Forverts
asked me to interview her. She was in the United States on a speaking tour.

When I arrived at her hotel room, I found her in tears. Critics back home had panned her book. I said what one is expected to say: Pay no attention, reviews come and go, the work endures. I must have managed to console her because she called me several times and briefly I became her confidant. She told me of her troubled childhood and of her stay in Greece, where she had had an unhappy relationship with a famous filmmaker. She wrote me letters that I thought had been lost. An assistant recently found them among my papers. They are embarrassingly personal. She went on to write more books, no better or worse than the first. Why was she always so angry? Fortunately she abandoned literature for politics, where she made many enemies and was not taken seriously. Is that why she wrote so critically about her father and her own family life? She is a woman who wanted to live great passions and wound up letting herself be borne by great hatreds. For some reason in recent years, I, too, have become a frequent target.

In October 1962 there was the Cuban missile crisis. What would the Soviet Union do? Would there be real war or fake peace? Kennedy gave a televised speech. That evening I was blinded by an unusually painful migraine: it was hard to watch and listen to the young president defy Moscow and to ponder and analyze the options and imagine the possibilities. The future of all humanity seemed in peril. Gromyko sat in the Oval Office with Kennedy and dared to deny the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. At the UN Adlai Stevenson exhibited aerial photographs that proved the opposite. General de Gaulle magnanimously aligned himself with the United States. It was a nuclear standoff. One false move by either side, a single imprudent
act or an ill-considered decision, would mean a continent in flames. The bombers of the Strategic Air Command were put on alert. The population was on edge; shelters were stockpiled with food and bottled drinking water.

I remember sleepless nights when everyone wondered whether by dawn the planet would be plunged into the ultimate nightmare. I wrote as though every dispatch would be read by the military chiefs in Havana and the Kremlin. The situation relaxed as Kennedy gained the upper hand and Khrushchev backed down. The nuclear peril receded, and the world sighed in relief.

The following year Kennedy was assassinated. It was a Friday, and I had just left the
Forverts
editorial office. As I got into the car, I turned on the radio. “We interrupt this broadcast …” By the time I arrived at my apartment, the nation was in mourning, paralyzed by the shock. A new president had been sworn in.

“The gods were jealous.…” So began a long article I wrote for the following Sunday’s
Yedioth Ahronoth
. I wrote and wrote, feeling as though I were present at history’s destruction. Like everyone else, I felt personally affected by the tragedy. Like everyone else, I will not forget John-John at his mother’s side saluting his father’s coffin. Like everyone else, I got no sleep until after the funeral. That day strong men and women wept.

My last dispatch on the Dallas assassination reported a conversation with Golda Meir, who, with so many other chiefs of state, came to pay homage to the dead president, offering the condolences of the Israeli nation to his young widow. Golda was greatly moved by Jackie Kennedy’s dignity and courage, and described to me her impressions of the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, the atmosphere in the White House, and the new president, Lyndon Johnson. An excellent observer, she enabled me to report the events as if I had been there myself.

“During the funeral,” Golda told me, “I remembered my visit with Kennedy in Palm Beach.…” He had been vacationing there. As she told me this story, she was chain-smoking and dropping her cigarette butts into strategically positioned ashtrays. She was visibly agitated, unable to sit still. “I have to tell you about it,” she said, flushed with emotion. “Kennedy received me in great secrecy. And something happened. Something I still don’t understand.…”

It was 1961. America was under the spell of its youthful, eloquent president. Surrounded by liberal intellectuals, he believed in the
power of ideas and ideals and was convinced that humanity, fundamentally generous, could devote itself to the quest for “new frontiers.” With the lessening of international tensions, disarmament, peace, and goodwill, anything was possible. In his optimism, he couldn’t understand why Israel was so insistent on its security needs. At one point he exploded: “All the Jews who plead your cause talk of nothing but weaponry. And you yourself, Mrs. Meir, instead of evoking the timeless message of Biblical morality, the prophets, spiritual or cultural problems, or whatever, the whole time you’ve been here all you want to talk about is missiles. Isn’t there anything else to discuss?” “You’re right, Mr. President,” Golda replied, “we are obsessed with security. We are an ancient people and twice in our history we have lost our Temple and our sovereignty. Yes, we did survive; we are dispersed but we survived because all Jews, the scholar in Vilna, the merchant in Lodz, the industrialist in Chicago, and the shopkeeper in Salonica were motivated by the same powerful dream: that one day our Temple would be rebuilt. Well, Mr. President, the Temple is not yet rebuilt. We have only just begun. And if this beginning itself is destroyed, we will not even be able to dream anymore.” Kennedy stared at her for a long moment and then, without a word, pushed a button and ordered one of his aides to set in motion the administrative process that enabled the Pentagon to supply Israel with its first Hawk missiles.

“What do you think of that?” Golda asked, beaming. “See?” I replied. “A good story can get you anything. Even missiles.”

Our relationship grew steadily closer. In Israel I used to visit her at her office in Jerusalem or at her home near Tel Aviv. Since she was often ill (she told everyone she suffered from migraines, but those closest to her knew she had cancer), I also went to see her in the hospital.

In 1965 Golda’s party, now led by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, was racked by a violent conflict with its founder, David Ben-Gurion. The issue was the repercussions of the lamentable Lavon Affair. Back in 1954 some Israeli secret agents and several Egyptian Jews had been arrested and sentenced in Egypt. The Israeli agents had exploded a bomb in an American movie theater in Cairo in an effort to damage U.S.-Egyptian relations. It was impossible to determine who had given them such a senseless order, which led to the execution of two defendants, Moshe Marzuk and Shlomo Azzar. Several politicians and
high-ranking officers, as well as a secretary who was quickly dispatched to the United States, were involved in this politically stupid, professionally inept, and morally inexcusable affair. There was talk of treachery, perjury, and conspiracy. From Sedeh Boker, the kibbutz to which he had prematurely retired, Ben-Gurion demanded a thorough judicial inquiry, which the majority of the Labor Party opposed. The result was internal warfare that led to a split in the party. Golda was appalled. She was loyal to Ben-Gurion, but the Mapai was her whole life. Forced to choose between the two, she opted for the party. “Why is Ben-Gurion making all this trouble for us?” she complained to me from her hospital bed. “Doesn’t he realize that if he keeps it up, we could end up with Begin in the government—and I don’t want to live to see that day.”

Two years later Begin was part of the government of national unity formed just before the Six-Day War. Ten years after that he was prime minister, and it was he—the hard-liner, the hawk—who made peace with the first Arab country, Egypt.

Why did Golda hate Begin so? She detested the right wing and had fought it since the start of her career in the Zionist movement. In her view, as in Ben-Gurion’s, the right could only be fascist. Conditioned by their own propaganda, they were wrong: In domestic policy Begin was no less democratic than they were. But Golda was often stubborn and inflexible; it was not easy to persuade her to change her mind about anything. Sometimes I would plead with her on behalf of this or that person she scorned, but in vain. When I praised Shimon Peres, she replied, “You don’t know him.” When I mentioned Eban’s intelligence, she sneered. A woman like her, so magnificent in her role as mother of Israel, should have been able to rise above petty political quarrels, but Golda, like other great personalities, had strong likes and dislikes. An ambassador who displeased her might easily find himself transferred across the planet overnight. And like most mortals, she was not immune to flattery.

I enjoyed listening to Golda talk about her childhood in Russia, her adolescence in Milwaukee, and her early experiences in Palestine. I was careful not to contradict her in political matters, but was less reticent where history was concerned. As I mentioned earlier, she objected to my position on the Palestinian Jews during the war. I considered them too passive; she thought me too critical. We returned to the subject several times but found ourselves in complete disagreement.
Herself a symbol of the political leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, in those years, she refused to accept any guilt, while I rejected absolution.