The Philippines’ great statesman-author-educator Carlos Romulo always demonstrated a keen but also whimsical appreciation of his country’s politics. On one of my visits to Manila a member of the Philippine Senate had made a vicious attack on the U.S. I asked Romulo about him. He replied, “He’s a great friend of the U.S.” “Well,” I said, “he sure has a strange way of showing it.” With a twinkle in his eye Romulo responded, “You don’t know Philippine politics. The basic rule for a successful politician here is ‘Give the Americans hell and pray that they don’t go away.’ ” Another time he told me, “You Americans taught us much too well. We took all the excesses of the American political system and magnified them.”
Magsaysay was an exception. It may have been partly because of his deep inner confidence, but I think it was also because of his total dedication to his country and its people. In what he sought to achieve he was an idealist. But he had also seen war at firsthand and outfought the enemy, both the Japanese invaders and the Communist terrorists. He understood how difficult the balance was between order and liberty. He saw through the masks of the new totalitarians. He was determined that they would not prevail in the Philippines. He was a realist, aware that there was a long way to go, with much hardship and many disappointments along the way. But he pressed his country forward, steering a careful course between too little hope and too extravagant promise. He felt passionately that he had a mission to provide honest, progressive government for the masses of the Philippine people.
During my 1956 visit Magsaysay took me on an eerie tour of the dark tunnels on the island of Corregidor, where MacArthur had lived with his family during the seige of Bataan. Despite the fact that Magsaysay had fought the Japanese, he had a statesman’s understanding that the Japanese were destined to play a major role in Asia again. He told me that the Japanese were a great people and that he believed the Filipinos, who suffered more at their hands than any other nation, would be able to accept them into the Asian community.
He took me to Corregidor on his presidential yacht. It had been a long day, and the two of us went below and stretched out on a pair of bunks. He was tired but seemed relaxed, and he clasped his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling and talked reflectively about the successes he had had and also the failures. Land reform was proceeding. Many farmers had been moved from the crowded island of Luzon and had been given land and houses on other islands. He had embarked on an ambitious plan to clean up government. It was all going to take time. But he still had irrepressible vigor and optimism about the future.
He also knew that what he was doing had importance beyond the Philippines. “Everywhere in Asia,” he said, “people look at the Philippines and realize that American values are being tested here. I feel that if we can succeed here in bringing prosperity and freedom and justice to our people, our example and through us the American example will be a powerful magnet for others in this area and in other parts of the world as well.”
The next year he was dead, killed in a plane crash that many believe may not have been an accident. His loss was a tragedy for the Philippines and for all of Asia. He was a charismatic leader who understood the difficult art of nation building, whose leadership his country needed and whose example the world needed.
ISRAELI PIONEERS: BEN-GURION, MEIR
The same years of the twentieth century that saw the dismantling of the old colonial empires, the emergence of competing nuclear superpowers, and the shrinking of the globe into a day’s journey or an instant direct-dial telephone call also saw a sometimes cataclysmic transformation of the Middle East. New nations emerged there, old nations regained full independence, age-old rivalries flared. Impatient modernizers clashed with fierce defenders of ancient ways. Cultures collided. Sullen resentments simmered, subsided, and erupted.
The Middle East is the crossroads of the world, the cradle of civilization; its shrines are holy to three great religions. Today it is an area of nomads and scholars, bazaars and laboratories, oil fields and kibbutzim, parliaments and Ayatollahs. In some places farmers till the same stony fields their ancestors tended centuries ago. In others smartly dressed women read the latest magazines from Cairo or London on their way to modern offices. The Middle East is volatile, vulnerable, crucial to the conflict between East and West, and caught in shifting political crosscurrents that can be more explosively emotional than those in almost any other part of the world.
In its time of extraordinary change, the region has brought forth some extraordinary leaders.
One of the most remarkable was David Ben-Gurion, the founding father and first Prime Minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion devoted his whole life to a cause that shook the Middle East and, in its own particular but fundamental way, changed the world.
President Eisenhower used to refer to two men as “Old Testament prophets”: John Foster Dulles and Ben-Gurion. I found this ironic in both cases. Dulles was a devout American Protestant who carried the doctrines of the New Testament engraved in his heart and mind. Ben-Gurion was a scholar of the Scriptures, but he described himself as secular rather than religious. “Since I invoke Torah so often,” he once explained, “let me state that I don’t personally believe in the God it postulates. I mean that I cannot ‘turn to God,’ or pray to a superhuman Almighty Being living up in the sky . . . Yet, though my philosophy is secular, I believe profoundly in the God of Jeremiah and Elijah. Indeed, I consider it part of the Jewish heritage . . . I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers. Yet their passion for this land stemmed from the Book of Books.” He described the Bible as “the single most important book in my life.”
However ironic, Eisenhower’s description was also apt. Both Dulles and Ben-Gurion drew from the Bible a sense of mission that was each man’s strongest characteristic. Dulles’s mission was the protection of liberty from totalitarianism. Ben-Gurion’s was to reestablish the Jews in their historical homeland of Palestine.
Ben-Gurion was a short man, only five feet three inches, but he gave an impression of massive size. It was partly his square build, his huge head, his ruddy face, and his great bursting crest of white hair. But it was also his imposing presence, magnified by a jutting lower lip, a determined jaw, and the sweeping way that he moved. Some people make waves. Ben-Gurion was one of those who part the waves.
Ben-Gurion moved from Poland to Israel in 1906, the same year in which Golda Meir emigrated from Russia to the United States. Arriving at Jaffa as a twenty-year-old illegal immigrant, he went to work as a farmer in the Galilean village of Sejera. If the Zionist movement was his life, he insisted that farming—making the desert bloom—gave him his greatest pleasure. When he finally retired, he returned to the desert to live out his life on the land.
Throughout his life, Ben-Gurion also read voraciously and wrote voluminously. When he was in his fifties he learned Greek, so that he could read Plato in the original. He also studied Hinduism and Buddhism. He spoke nine languages. In 1966, together with Mrs. Nixon and our daughters, Tricia and Julie, I visited him at his home, which was then on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He took me to his study. All four walls were lined with books, in a close-packed clutter that seemed almost overflowing. I was reminded of that room when I visited Mao in 1972 and 1976. His room, too, had books and manuscripts piled and tumbling all over the place. In each case they were obviously not for show but were a much-used part of the man’s daily life, unlike those I have seen in so many of the formal libraries in fashionable great houses, where the books are often dusted but seldom opened.
Over forty years passed between the time Ben-Gurion landed at Jaffa and the day in May 1948 when he stood before a microphone in the Tel Aviv Museum and read Israel’s Scroll of Independence to the world. During those forty years he struggled under Turkish, British, and international rule to bring his dream to life. However, unlike other revolutionary leaders, Ben-Gurion could not celebrate peace when independence came. Within a day of his announcement, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon,
Jordan, and Iraq went to war against the new country.
Militarily Israel’s toughest battles did not precede independence; they followed it. In that sense Israel’s was a continuing revolution—first against British rule, then against the hostility of its Arab neighbors. Fortunately for Israel, Ben-Gurion showed that he had the capability not only to lead a successful revolution—peaceful or violent, as the situation indicated—but also to build a state after the revolution had succeeded.
Ben-Gurion was an idealist who pursued the dream of Zion for eight decades. He was a realist who understood that a limit to Israel’s geographical growth was imposed by the hostile forces that surrounded it and who was proudly confident of Israel’s own capacity to make the best of what it already had. And he was a utopian in his belief that the Negev, Israel’s southern desert, could someday flower into a home for Jews that would be neither wholly urban nor wholly rural in character.
Other Israeli leaders, then and since, have coveted more land. Not Ben-Gurion. He called himself a “crazy Negevist” and argued that Israel’s mission was to reclaim the desert. Unimproved, he said, the desert was “a reproach to mankind” and “a criminal waste in a world that cannot feed its population.” Improved, he insisted, it would provide all the space the Israelis needed. He spoke bitterly about the terrorists and other expansionists who wanted forcefully to enlarge Israel’s territory; he argued that Israel had no reason to exist unless it was (a) a Jewish state and (b) a democratic state. The “extremists,” he said, who advocated absorbing Arab lands, would deprive Israel of its mission: “If they succeed, Israel will be neither Jewish nor democratic. The Arabs will outnumber us, and undemocratic, repressive measures will be needed to keep them under control.”
After the Six Day War of 1967, he surprised and offended many Israelis by suggesting that, except for East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the land captured from Egypt and Syria was “mere real estate” that should be returned to the Arabs. “The supreme test of Israel . . .” he declared, “lies not in the struggle with hostile forces outside its frontiers but in its success in wresting fertility from the wasteland that constitutes sixty percent of its territory.”
Ben-Gurion was Israel’s Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton; his influence over Israel and Israeli life today is pervasive. He wrote the Israeli Declaration of Independence. He organized the first underground Jewish army and, acting both as Premier and Defense Minister after 1948, defended Israel against the Arabs on four fronts. After the bloody war of independence, he devised a defense strategy based on preemptive strikes that was designed to minimize Israeli casualties and that is still in force today. He approved the public trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, but also opened unofficial relations with West Germany and accepted war reparations from Konrad Adenauer, in spite of strong opposition among his countrymen. And his domestic policies were based on his egalitarian vision of a unified people working in common for one purpose: the development and defense of a modern Jewish state.
Unlike many others whose lives have been devoted to a single cause, Ben-Gurion was not parochial. I found him strong, articulate, and decisive in his observations, not only about Israeli-U.S. relations, but also about world affairs generally. He had a sense of proportion. After the Six Day War of 1967, de Gaulle had been openly critical of Israel and in the heat of the moment had made some mildly disparaging comments about the Jews. Golda Meir never forgave him. But Ben-Gurion later commented, “I think we have done de Gaulle a great injustice. The question is not whether he likes Jews. He saved France.”
On a personal level he could be both gracious and patient. In 1959 he visited our home in Washington while he was in the United States on an official trip. Tricia was studying Judaism in the seventh grade at the Friends School, and she had an exam the next day. She plied him with questions. He gave her a half-hour dissertation on our common Judeo-Christian heritage while explaining to her such things as why the Jewish Sabbath falls on Saturday rather than Sunday and the meaning of the menorah. Tricia got an A on her exam and ever since has treasured an unforgettable experience.
David Ben-Gurion was a unique phenomenon, an elemental force of history. He had about him the fire, the faith, the certainty, of one whose stride carries him where none have gone before and who knows that his footsteps change the world. Some may argue that the creation of Israel was inevitable. But it often takes someone of extraordinary strength to make the inevitable happen.
• • •
The United States and Israel share one distinction that creates a powerful bond linking them together: They have been the two principal destinations for Jewish emigration from Europe and the principal havens for Jewish refugees. The intense spiritual and emotional attachment Jews everywhere feel toward Israel creates a special relationship between Israeli Prime Ministers and American Presidents. Many people assume that this relationship is merely a matter of politics. Politics enters into it, as do shared ideals and strategic considerations. But more fundamentally Israel has a unique importance to the United States because of its unique importance to so many Americans. Every President is aware of this and responds to it. To him Israel can never be just another country.
Nor, to me, could Golda Meir be just another leader. We both took office in 1969. We both resigned in 1974. She became Prime Minister just two months after my own inauguration, and she served until two months before my resignation. In effect, she was “my” Israeli Prime Minister; I was “her” American President.
For both countries those were difficult and, at times, searing years. The strains on our relationship were sometimes intense. She often wanted more than I was prepared to give. I sometimes took actions or pressed for conditions that she found it difficult or impossible to accept. We both knew that together we were playing for the highest stakes, that the balance between East and West, the lifelines of the industrial world, and Israel’s existence all were at risk in the explosive conflicts of the Middle East. It was one of those situations in which each watches the other warily, knowing that a misstep by either can prove fatal for both. And because there were no entirely clear solutions, there were bound to be widely differing views about how the conflicts should be dealt with.
But going through crises together can also forge very strong bonds. Seeing the other leader tested gives a good view of what he or she is made of.
Georges Pompidou once described Golda Meir to me as “une femme formidable.” She was that and more. She was one of the most powerful personalities, man or woman, that I have ever met in thirty-five years of public and private travel at home and abroad. If David Ben-Gurion was an elemental force of history, Golda Meir was an elemental force of nature.
Every good leader feels strongly protective toward his country. But her protective feeling toward Israel went beyond the usual. It was fierce, instinctive, as intense as a mother’s toward her child. Israel to her was more than her country: It was a cause that transcended nationhood.
Some leaders are masters of intrigue, spinning webs of deception, planting suggestions that the unwary will take as promises, wheeling and dealing, constantly, even compulsively, plotting and maneuvering. For Lyndon Johnson this was second nature. FDR was a master at it. For many, scheming is the essence of statecraft, the most effective and sometimes the only way of navigating the threatening shoals of competing interests and getting things done. Not for Golda Meir. She was absolutely straightforward. There was nothing devious about her. The corollary is that she was implacably determined. There was never any question about where Golda Meir stood, or what she wanted, or why. She could be either the irresistible force or the immovable object, as the situation required. But as an object she was immovable; as a force she was irresistible.
Golda Meir had the look of a woman who had worked all her life. Her body showed signs of her years of backbreaking physical labor, and her face showed signs of mental and spiritual strain. But there was also a warmth in her face that photographs often fail
ed to capture. Though a hard-headed negotiator, she could be openly and unabashedly sentimental. Brezhnev, too, could be sentimental, erupting with seeming spontaneity in a tearful outburst of goodwill. But with Brezhnev this was compartmented; a few hours later he would return for a snarling confrontation. With Golda Meir it was all of one piece. Her sentimentality and her determination flowed from the same source. She was stubborn in negotiations because she cared deeply about what she was negotiating to protect.
Her warmth came through spontaneously, in simple human ways. I remember well her first visit to the White House as Prime Minister, in 1969. It must have held a special meaning for her, having first come to this country at the age of eight as a poor immigrant from Russia, having been raised here, and having taught school in Milwaukee before moving to Palestine in 1921. At the state dinner we held for her, tears welled up in her eyes as the Marine band played the Israeli national anthem and then “The Star-Spangled Banner.” For the entertainment after dinner, we had arranged for special performances by Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein. She sat between Mrs. Nixon and me, totally absorbed in the music, and when it was over she impulsively got to her feet and went over and embraced both musicians.
The episode that was most agonizing for her during her term of office was the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When Israel was threatened with defeat, I ordered that “everything that can fly” should be used for a massive emergency airlift of supplies. She wrote later that “the airlift was invaluable. It not only lifted our spirits, but also served to make the American position clear to the Soviet Union, and it undoubtedly served to make our victory possible. When I heard that the [cargo] planes had touched down in Lydda, I cried for the first time since the war had begun . . .” She told me later that she thought my actions, including the airlift and worldwide alert of U.S. forces when the Soviets threatened to send forces into the area, had saved Israel. The following January, when the Egyptian-Israeli troop disengagement agreement was announced, I called Mrs. Meir. The Watergate crisis was totally dominating the news in the U.S. at that time. At the end of the conversation I was deeply touched when she said, “Take care of yourself and get plenty of rest.”
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