Hell Hath No Fury (8 page)

Reference: Antonia Fraser,
The Warrior Queens,
1988.

MEIR, GOLDA

Israeli Politician, b. 1898, d. 1978

The trajectory of Golda Meir's career carried her from Kiev to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and to the position of prime minister in the Yom Kippur War of October 1972. In the highly masculine world of Israeli politics, Meir was an “Iron Lady” long before the term was coined for
Margaret Thatcher
(see Chapter 2).

She was born Goldie Mabovich in the Jewish quarter of Kiev, in Ukraine, and later emigrated with her family to join her father in the United States. In 1917 she married a sign painter, Morris Myerson, with whom she emigrated in 1921 to Palestine, where they worked for three years on a kibbutz (collective farm). The couple later moved to Tel Aviv, where Golda worked as a clerk and took in washing to support her two children and ailing husband.

By 1928, Meir had become secretary of the Women's Labor Council and was a rising force in the Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation, representing it at international conferences. She was elected as a delegate to the World Zionist Congress and in the 1930s accompanied missions to the United States and Britain.

After 1946, under the British mandate in Palestine, Meir was in the forefront of the Jewish Agency, the Jewish self-government organization. She succeeded Moshe Sharett as head of its political department, which liaised with the British. As a member of the agency's executive, she played a significant role in raising money in the United States for the nascent state of Israel.

In May 1948, on the eve of the British withdrawal and with armed conflict looming between the emerging Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, Meir was sent by the Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion on a secret mission. Disguised as an Arab woman and accompanied by Ezra Danin, a conduit between the Jewish Agency and Arab leaders, Meir crossed into Jordan to meet King Abdullah and attempt to persuade him to join an Anglo-Jordanian pact. King Abdullah, however, was already committed to an invasion of Palestine, and Meir returned to Tel Aviv to report the failure of her mission and the imminence of war. On May 14, 1948, she was one of the twenty-five signatories of the declaration establishing the state of Israel.

In January 1949, after the Israeli War of Independence, Meir was elected to the Knesset as a Labor candidate and was appointed Minister of Labour and Social Security, the only woman in the Ben-Gurion administration. In 1956 she became Israel's foreign minister and was closely involved in the secret negotiations, this time with the French, that preceded the Israeli campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, itself timed to coincide with the Anglo-French occupation of the Suez Canal Zone.

Subsequently, Meir was instrumental in restoring relations with the United States following the Suez debacle and providing assistance to emerging nations in Africa. Now a widow, she was asked by David Ben-Gurion to take a Hebrew name, and she chose Meir, which means “to burn brightly.” She always stood out from the “suits,” the male politicians all around her, an imposing but warm figure whose heavily lined features were in later years strongly reminiscent of US president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Meir became Israel's prime minister in 1969 after the sudden death of Levi Eshkol. She was the world's third female premier, after Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka and
Indira Gandhi
of India (see Chapter 2), and governed through a select band of advisers known as her “kitchen cabinet.” In 1972 she authorized the relentless international pursuit by a secret service unit of the terrorists responsible for the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

But her administration came to be dominated and defined by the Yom Kippur War, which burst upon Israel on October 6, 1972, when the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal. In the months leading up to the operation, Israeli military intelligence had failed to interpret correctly the many danger signals it had received during the deliberate Egyptian buildup. Indeed, on September 26, Israel's ambassador in the United States, Yitzhak Rabin, had declared that “there never was a period in which Israel's security situation seemed as good as now.”

However, early on the morning of October 6, when it was clear that an attack on Israel was about to be launched, Meir overruled a proposal by the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), General David Elazar, to make a preemptive air strike on Egypt's ally, Syria. Meir knew that Israel had to be seen by the world as the victim of aggression and could not risk the withdrawal of US military and political support, without which Israel might have been forced to launch a nuclear response to the Egyptian and Syrian assault.

Throughout the October War, Meir remained a firm hand at the helm while those about her faltered and panicked in the crisis. In three weeks of bitter fighting, Israel secured victory over Egypt and Syria but at a heavy cost in men and matériel. The spring of 1974 saw the publication of a report by the Agranat Commission, which had been appointed to draw lessons from the debacle. It was highly critical of all aspects of Israel's political and military leadership. The two most notable victims of the commission's findings were General Moshe Dayan, Israel's minister of defense and a leading member of the kitchen cabinet, and Golda Meir herself. Following the commission's findings, they both resigned.

Reference: Golda Meir,
My Life,
1975.

RICE, CONDOLEEZZA

US Diplomat, b. 1954

Her unusual name is derived from an Italian musical expression,
con dolcezza
(with sweetness); Rice's mother is a music teacher. Equally formidable as a high-flying academic, the first African-American and female US national security adviser, and latterly the United States' second female secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice presented the acceptable face of the George W. Bush presidency to America's allies during a turbulent era of foreign relations. However, while forging an exceptionally close relationship with her commander-in-chief—a complex transaction of deference and sweet talk—she proved unable or unwilling to change significantly the thrust of White House foreign policy during the Bush years.

Rice was born to middle-class parents in Birmingham, Alabama, heartland of American racism in the 1950s and 1960s, and was encouraged by her parents to use the opportunities opened up by the civil rights struggle to follow an academic career. Rice has often observed that to get ahead she had to be “twice as good,” and her belief in education and self-improvement is one of the keys to her character.

Rice graduated with a degree in political science from Denver University in 1974, and went on to earn a master's degree and a PhD in international studies. In 1981 she was appointed professor of political science at Stanford University and became a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation).

Fluent in Russian, Rice served on the National Security Council as a senior director of Soviet and East European affairs between 1989 and 1991, the years that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. She so impressed President George H. W. Bush that he introduced her to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev with the observation that Rice was the one “who tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.”

In 2000, during the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, a novice in international affairs, Rice rarely left the candidate's side. Her reward came in 2001 when Bush appointed her national security adviser, a post famously filled in the early 1970s by Henry Kissinger during the Nixon presidency. Rice's influence over the new administration's policy was equally important, and she helped to set the unilateralist mood music for the initial phase of the Bush presidency. The former Soviet-watcher saw US foreign policy in terms of
realpolitik,
the safeguarding of the national and strategic interest. Rice's uncompromising positions on missile defense, the environment, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq won grudging respect but hardened the intransigent, go-it-alone image of the Bush administration.

In April 2004, after a lengthy delaying action, Rice became the first sitting national security adviser to testify before the National Commission on Terrorism Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). While admitting that Saddam Hussein had not possessed nuclear weapons—a climb-down from her prewar position—Rice insisted that the very existence of Saddam's Iraq was a destabilizing influence in the Middle East and “part of the problem that created the problem on September 11,” a reference to the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. Significantly, however, she was silent on a postwar stabilization plan for Iraq.

In January 2006, the US Senate confirmed Rice's nomination to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state. Unlike the hapless and inert Powell, Rice had the ear of the president. On the surface at least, she seemed ready to adopt a more measured approach to such intractable problems as relations with Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

However, a halfhearted attempt at shuttle diplomacy in the summer of 2006, in the wake of Israel's abortive attempt to destroy the power of the extremist Islamic organization Hezbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon, produced little or nothing, which was unsurprising considering that President Bush gave Israel the green light for the offensive. Rice, it seems, did not caution against the possibility of Israeli failure, largely because she was party to the decision to lend full war supplies and intelligence support to an Israeli effort to smash Hezbollah in the “war on terror.”

In turn this stoked the uneasiness expressed by the United States' NATO allies over US policy on the “special rendition” of terrorist suspects to countries where, in all probability, torture might be used to extract information. Rice had long stonewalled on this issue, but her public declaration, in December 2005, of the United States' adherence to the UN convention against torture helped to clear the way for the White House's subsequent reluctant embrace of legislation banning cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. In September 2006, however, Bush's frank admission of the reality of rendition coupled with the denial that the process involved torture—to which the president ascribed a very narrow definition—left Rice further exposed and embarrassed such allies as the British prime minister Tony Blair, who had denied the existence of rendition.

Perhaps the greatest constraint on Rice was her intense loyalty to President Bush—in a Freudian slip she once started to refer to him as “my husband,” before biting her tongue—and her reluctance to push him out of the comfort zone created by his circle of cronies. Her attempts to define a “transformational diplomacy” for the Bush years had foundered by the autumn of 2006, as the situation in Iraq grew steadily worse, and Rice took to comparing the war on terror to the American Civil War, declaring, “I am sure that there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold.” Meanwhile, President Bush continued to promise “complete victory.”

In the latter part of 2005 there was growing talk of drafting Rice as the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, possibly to run against Hillary Clinton. Rice ignored the groundswell, and it remained to be seen whether, if nominated, she could successfully reach out to a black constituency that casts a mere 10 percent of its votes for the Republican Party. However, she once tellingly remarked, “My parents had me absolutely convinced that, well, you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth's, but you can be president of the United States.” However, by the summer of 2007, the train wreck of the Bush presidency had dented her dream.

Reference: Condoleezza Rice and Philip Zelikov,
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed,
1995; and Antonia Felix,
Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story,
2005.

SFORZA, CATERINA

Countess of Forlì, b. 1462, d. 1509

In one papal bull, Caterina Sforza was castigated as “the daughter of iniquity” and in another, equally bluntly, she was labeled “the daughter of perdition.” War and strife were her natural element. In her early twenties she threw herself into soldiering, and when in command she maintained an iron discipline with the aid of blood-chilling punishments.

Born the illegitimate daughter of Galeazza Maria Sforza, later Duke of Milan, she was married in 1477 to Girolamo Riario, the nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. Well educated by the standards of the day, she was also athletic and a passionate huntress. She was a handsome woman, but her beauty regime left little to chance. Lotions of nettle seed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron, and sulfur kept her golden locks in perfect condition. Her shining teeth received daily applications of charcoaled rosemary stems, pulverized marble, and coral cuttlebone. Her blue eyes were bathed daily in rose water, and unguents smoothed her breasts.

Her approach to war was equally stylish. In August 1484, on the death of Sixtus IV, Caterina was dispatched to Rome to hold the ancient castle of Saint Angelo, a papal property, until it could be handed over to Sixtus's legal successor. Seven months pregnant, she cut a striking figure in a gold satin gown, plumed hat, and belt from which dangled a bag bulging with golden ducats. The only martial touches to the ensemble were a curved sword and the ripe language she employed to curse and cajole the soldiers under her command. Caterina held the castle until October 1484, when she surrendered it by her husband's order to the Sacred College of Cardinals.

In 1488 Riario was murdered by members of the rival Orsi family. His palace in Forlì was sacked and his children held as hostages. Caterina, who remained in control of the citadel at Forlì, is said to have shouted to her enemies, “Do you think, you fools, that I don't have the stuff to make more?” and with those defiant words hoisted her skirt to expose her genitals. More polite historians have pointed out that she was pregnant when the threat to her children was made and, in a more decorous gesture, merely indicated her swelling belly. History does record, however, that with the assistance of her uncle Ludovico “il Moro” Sforza, she was able to defeat her enemies, wrest back possession of her dominions, and exact revenge on the murderers of her husband.