The Fish That Ate the Whale (24 page)

Schind told Zemurray these people could not be left in the camps.

Zemurray agreed, saying something like, Yes, yes, but what do you want from me?

Everything, said Schind. Money, ships, documents, expertise.

Zemurray raised his hand, summoning a servant. He asked for whiskey.

The man returned with a bottle and glasses. Zemurray poured shots, one for himself, one for Schind, drank his, poured another, drank that, then started to talk. Sam did not tell his story often. When asked about his past, he might shrug. “I was there. It happened. What's there to say?” This occasion was different. It was as if, in response to the picture painted by Schind—it spoke to Sam on frequencies the average person might not detect—the story of his life was all he had to offer.

He talked about Selma and Mobile, the strangeness of the delta towns, the first banana, the first ripes. He talked about Puerto Cortés, the vaqueros, the soldiers for hire. He cried when he talked about his son, then chased away his tears with another whiskey. Told this way, the incidents of Zemurray's life, which might otherwise seem disconnected, reveal themselves as a cohesive narrative, an epic, an adventure, the story of a generation and the story of a people. Only at the very end did he speak about Russia, and the fields, green in summer, black in spring, and his father, and the death of his father, and his last view of his first home, a house swallowed in the immensity of the steppe. Everyone has an Eden, a perfect world lost when they were small. For Sam, it was that wheat farm in Russia, and his father was alive. When Sam was finished talking, he sat quietly, the bottle drained, the sun gone, the room dark, then turned to Schind and said, in essence, I cannot help you. Not openly. Nearly half of United Fruit's ships fly British flags and much of our business is done there. A British company cannot run the British blockade. But I will send you to a man who will help. He'll tell you what to do, and give you what you need. If you get stuck, come back.

The Bricha was soon under way. Contacts established, money raised, ships purchased, papers issued—documents that caused the harbormaster to sign the manifest and open the gates. Zionist agents spirited refugees out of the DP camps, leading them over mountain trails to ports in Romania, France, Italy, where ships waited at anchor. Some of these tubs, jammed with poor lost souls, made it through the blockade. Others were stopped by the Royal Navy, boarded, turned back. Every few months, Zemurray received an update, sometimes followed by a meeting at 2 Audubon Place in New Orleans, the Ritz in Boston, the Roosevelt in New York, or the plantation near Hammond. Schind might turn up alone, or he might bring a colleague such as Meyer Weisgal, the executive director of the Jewish Agency. According to Weisgal, Zemurray helped the Bricha in several ways, crucially in the procuring of ships and getting those ships out to sea. He did it by putting Schind together with the men who ran the docks—“[Schind] was always making trips to Boston or New Orleans to see people to whom Zemurray directed him for papers of registry and visas for crews,” Gottlieb Hammer, the head of the United Jewish Appeal, wrote—and by pressuring Central American officials to flag Bricha ships as their own. In one case, three ships, refused exit papers from the port of Philadelphia, were released after Zemurray made a few calls. One of them, purchased with money partly donated by Zemurray, was the
Exodus
, the refugee-packed steamer that, in its pitiful, homeless wandering, personified the Jewish people, demonstrating the need for a Jewish state. “Zemurray helped raise the purchase price and pushed through the registration of the
Exodus
, which carried emigrants through the British blockade into the Promised Land,” Thomas McCann wrote. The most famous vessel of the Bricha, the
Exodus
is one of the storied ships of Jewish history, right up there with the fishing boat that carried Jonah away from Tarshish.

The British Mandate of Palestine was terminated in May 1948. According to
The Jews' Secret Fleet
by Joseph Hochstein and Murray Greenfield, the Bricha had by then carried thirty-seven thousand Jewish refugees to Palestine—many of them on American ships procured or sped along by Sam Zemurray.

Well, that's the story people tell you in Israel, where the name Zemurray is better known than it is here. The historical record consists of a mere scattering of letters, diary entries, documents. The fact is, Zemurray, always wary of drawing the wrong kind of attention, was, for the most part, able to disassociate his name from the cause. Gottlieb Hammer described him as “an international mystery man” who “made and overturned governments at will according to business needs. He was one of the richest and most powerful men in the United States, yet Zemurray was able to avoid publicity and keep his name out of the newspapers. The only condition he put on his aid to [the Bricha] was that he never be publicly identified and that the entire relationship be treated with the utmost discretion.”

*   *   *

For reasons never fully disclosed, Zemurray resigned as president of United Fruit in 1948, turning the office over to his colleague Thomas Cabot. Sam remained the largest stockholder and retained ultimate control, but he relinquished daily operation. Perhaps he did it with his mortality in mind (he was seventy-one). He must have been exhausted. Or perhaps he did it for the Jewish cause in Palestine. With the coming end of the British occupation, the fate of such a state had been turned over to the United Nations, where it would be decided by a vote in the General Assembly. The resolution to divide Palestine into two nations—one Arab, one Jew—needed a two-thirds majority to pass. A season of politicking would begin as soon as that vote was scheduled, a game Zemurray was uniquely positioned to play.

His involvement began in October 1947, when he was approached by Weizmann, who, according to his own writings, told Zemurray, “The situation is such that your help is very much required at this critical stage. Believe me, it's urgent.”

Early tallies showed the partition vote lining up this way: the European states, members of the Western Alliance as well as the Soviet bloc, each with its own history in mind, would approve; the countries of the Muslim world, for reasons I don't have to explain, would oppose. This would leave the issue to be settled by unaligned countries that seemingly had no direct interest at stake, several of them, it just so happened, in the Torrid Zone of America where the banana flourished. According to Ignacio Klich, in his article “Latin America, the United States, and the Birth of Israel,” the Zionist leadership had neglected the region, believing “Central American support might be won through UFCO's president and largest shareholder Samuel Zemurray.” But the politics were complicated by the large Arab populations in several of the Latin American nations.

There were two votes for partition. The first, on November 25, 1947, resulted in a deadlock, the nays and abstentions leaving Resolution 181 just short of passage. A second was scheduled for November 29, four days after the first vote. It was in these days, a crack of light between dispossession and statehood, that Sam Zemurray went to work, calling key players in banana land, wheedling, cajoling, strong-arming. It was the culmination of his career, the hour when Zemurray could finally use everything he had learned to play a secretly decisive role on the world stage. He asked each leader in the region two questions: How do you intend to vote on partition? and Can your vote be changed? Zemurray told Weizmann that every vote from Mexico to Colombia was for sale, but the price was often prohibitively high. Zemurray apparently suggested they focus on just those nations where he carried great influence. The ensuing bribing and lobbying became so intense that President Harry Truman complained to Weizmann of the hardball tactics: Truman found it “unbecoming.”

“The pressure was unlike anything that had been seen there before,” Truman wrote in his memoirs. “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me.”

Weizmann promised that no such pressure was coming from the Zionist leadership. “[While] generally accurate in what he said,” wrote Ignacio Klich, “Weizmann passed over in silence the more important activities of the supporters of Jewish statehood who were not part of the Jewish Agency leadership, including his own approach to UFCO's Samuel Zemurray.”

The president of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, later claimed he'd been offered money, “a bribe of millions,” by a powerful businessman associated with the Zionist cause, to vote in favor of partition. (India voted against.)

By the time of the final tally, enough countries had changed their vote—Haiti from no to abstain; Nicaragua from abstain to yes—to pass Resolution 181. Knowing about the work of Zemurray, certain yes votes that might otherwise seem mysterious—Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Panama—suddenly make perfect sense. Behind them, behind the creation of the Jewish state, was the Gringo pushing his cart piled high with stinking ripes.

*   *   *

Walking through 2 Audubon Place, Marjorie Cowen, the wife of the president of Tulane, stopped in the window-filled room on the third floor. “This is where Mr. Zemurray made the calls,” she told me. “He sat in a chair right here, calling every leader in Central and South America, talking and explaining until he got enough of them to change their vote to make modern Israel a reality.”

*   *   *

The vote for partition did not assure the existence of the Jewish state. (As Zemurray knew, you get nothing without fighting for it.) Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's declaration of independence was in fact followed by calls for war across the Arab world. In the summer of 1949, armies streamed over the Israeli frontiers from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Israel would be at a huge disadvantage in the coming battle—surrounded, outnumbered, and challenged by an arms embargo that had been declared on the region. No weapons could be sent to any party in the conflict. As the Arab countries were already well armed—the Jordanian army was commanded by British officers—the embargo fell disproportionately on Israel.

You name it, they did not have enough: bullets, rifles, pistols, grenades, trucks, tanks. The Israeli Air Force consisted of a single plane, a decrepit German Messerschmitt. Israel survived on the smuggled weapon, the clandestine arrival, the box hidden behind the false panel on the container ship—it says vegetables, but it smells like gunpowder. In the first days of the war, the majority of these boxes arrived from only three places, sent by three types of interested parties: Czechoslovakia, where Communists shipped trucks, guns, and planes with the consent of the Soviets, who believed a prolonged Middle Eastern conflict would embarrass the British; New York and New Jersey, where, at the urging of Meyer Lansky and Longy Zwillman, dock bosses like Socks Lanza looked the other way as ships bound for Haifa or Tel Aviv were filled with weapons; and Central America, where banana men filled ship after ship with boxes marked
FOOD
or
SUPPLIES
, carried weapons to the Israeli Defense Force.

Much help came from Anastasio Somoza García, known as “Tacho,” who ruled Nicaragua from 1936 until 1956, when he was assassinated. According to Ignacio Klich, Somoza smuggled weapons to Israel throughout the 1948 war. Years later, when world opinion turned against Somoza's grandson Tachito, who ruled Nicaragua from 1967 until he was assassinated in 1980, only Israel continued to ship arms to the dictator. When asked about this, Prime Minister Menachem Begin spoke of an old debt that needed to be honored.

Israel's War of Independence ended in victory for Israel in January 1949. Sam returned to United Fruit soon after, reclaiming his place at the center of the banana world. He was relatively young when the Second World War began—now he was old. He was already showing signs of the disease that would kill him. Thomas McCann, who was introduced to Zemurray in these years, described the meeting this way: “The old man put out his hand and took mine, and I could feel the tremor of Parkinson's disease, a palsy that seemed to start in his feet or under the ground we stood on.”

Zemurray had considered retiring altogether, letting his leave lapse into forever. He was seventy-three, much older than most other top executives in America. A new generation had come to power in the business world, men who had fought in the Second World War. Zemurray was an ancient among them, Methuselah himself, a relic of a time when mercenaries ruled the isthmus. Minor Keith, Lee Christmas, Jake the Parrot King—the pirates were gone, replaced by Ivy League managers. High times had given way to the corporation. In truth, Sam returned only because the future of the company seemed to depend on it. The top job had been given to Thomas Cabot, and Thomas Cabot had failed. The division heads were bickering, the provinces were restive, the leadership was uncertain. Zemurray, who walked the earth when the world was new, was the only man with the requisite authority to make the moves and right the ship. He planned to stay no more than a year or two, just long enough to set things in order, train a successor, move on. But two years turned into five, seven. It's the one problem he could never solve: having designed a uniquely powerful position for himself at the top of the company, tailored to his character and style, Zemurray could not find anyone else to fill it. United Fruit had been on the verge of collapse when he took control in 1932. He gave the company twenty extra years of life, but it was far from clear it could survive his retirement.

 

18

Operation Success

Back to the isthmus! Back to the sandy loam! Back to the land of United Fruit camps, each with its swimming pool and golf course, each with its Quonset huts and its electric green fields and
Los Pericos
blue from poison! Back to port towns and jungle towns and railroads, where machete men doze in the shade of the ceiba, and the palm trees applaud when the wind blows! Back to the preserve of the banana cowboy, with his mule and pistola! Back to the land dominated by one crop, one corporation, one will! Back to the slender neck of continent south of Mexico and north of Colombia, where you can swim in the Atlantic Ocean in the morning and the Pacific that same afternoon! Back to the Mayan ruins and the Mosquito Coast and the coffee plantations where the pickers make a penny a pound and every meal is beans! Back to the land where the banana is king and the Gringo gives the orders!