The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership (42 page)

To me, an observant Jew, this was heady stuff indeed. I had served Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and, until this morning, Yitzhak Rabin
–
all illustrious pioneers and idealistic Zionist diehards, but none of them possessed the depth of Menachem Begin’s reverence for Jewish tradition, his cozy acknowledgement of God, his familiarity with ancient customs, and his innate sense of Jewish kinship. He came from the heart of Jewish Poland, and though not strictly observant, was an old-school traditionalist with an infectious common touch which made Jews everywhere feel they really mattered. Here, at last, was a prime minister after my own heart
–
the quintessential Jew.

Yet even as I drank in this intoxicating brew, there lingered in my mind the image of Begin the politician, the iron-cored patriarch who was neutral in nothing. He was the most ideological prime minister Israel had ever elected. So I was stunned when he put the phone down, and asked me with the fullest expectation of being obeyed, “I take it you will remain a member of my personal staff?” That he, the leader of a victorious, power-hungry party, many of whose stalwarts had fought under him in the underground and had stood by him through thick and thin during his decades in the political wilderness
–
that he should invite me, an unknown outsider, onto his personal staff, was flattering and staggering
–
so staggering that I blurted out impulsively, “But Mr. Begin, I’m not a member of your party.”

“I never asked you if you were. Are you saying this to disqualify yourself?”

“No, but
–
”

“But what?”

I paused, hesitant to express my next thought, which was
I’ve always thought we should agree to territorial concessions; a piece of land for a piece of peace
. But those words never came out, because my throat went dry. My throat went dry because those words were not my own; they were Eshkol’s, they were Golda’s, they were Rabin’s. They were the essence of the speeches and letters and memoranda galore I had written for almost twenty years in their names and upon their instruction. That had been my job. But now I needed to find my own voice, sort out my own thoughts, arrange them in my own way, and speak them in my own name. So, I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, may I take a little time to think this through?”

“As much as you need,” he said forbearingly.

I rose, and was halfway to the door when he called me back. “What exactly was your status working with the previous prime ministers? Were you a political appointee or a civil servant?” he asked.

“A civil servant,” I answered, “seconded from the foreign ministry at the request of each of the prime ministers.”

“In that case,” said Begin, emphatically, “I renew that request. This government has come to serve, not to reap. Do you understand that?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Then I shall elucidate. This is the first time there has been a change of political administration in Israel, and we have no intention of plundering power. There has to be continuity. This is a democratic transition. The world must see this; the nation must see this. I will allow no dismissals of the professional civil service except in exceptional cases which I consider reasonable.” And then, wryly, “My model is the British system, where civil servants know to say the right thing in the right way at the right time to the right people in the name of the right government. And the right government is always the elected government of the day. Now do you understand?”

I said that I did, but he was no longer looking at me. He was looking past me, at the door, his eyes bright. “Nehamale!” he exclaimed. “What a surprise! How wonderful! Like the good old days!”

A tea lady in a red cardigan waddled across the carpet with her trolley and shook the prime minister’s hand, her wrinkled face beaming.
“
Mazal to
v
, Mr. Begin!” She smiled. “Congratulations! Good to see you back.”

They were obviously old acquaintances from the days when Begin had been minister without portfolio in Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir’s national unity government.

“Same as usual?” asked Nehama archly.

“Same as usual,” answered Begin heartily.

She poured him a plain glass of tea, with lemon and a sweetener.

To me, he said, “Whatever your response, please meet me at four o’clock this afternoon, when we’ll go over my reply to President Carter, and you shall shakespearize it for me.”

Back in my room I picked up the phone to Rabin. “Yitzhak,” I blurted, “Begin has just offered me a job. Should I take it?”

“Of course you should take it. He is an honest man and a responsible man. I’ve known him for a very long time and I can tell you that he always puts the national interest above his own. Besides, he’s your kind of Jew. You’ll enjoy working with him.”

Menachem Begin’s draft reply to President Jimmy Carter covered three pages which had been ripped out of a shorthand notepad, apparently the only paper he had to hand. It was written in red ink, in a handwriting that was tight, taut and cramped. My pen was black, and as I painstakingly navigated my way through his congested scrawl, stylizing as I went, my black ink increasingly superimposed itself upon his red, so that in the end, the pages looked as if a spider had scrawled across it. His way with words was skillful; his syntax less so.

He sat silently as I worked my way down the page, occasionally leaning across the desk to scrutinize my ‘shakespearization.’ And when I handed him the finished product, he carefully studied the corrections and, allowing himself a hint of a smile, complimented me on my touches, but expressed reservations about certain word changes I had made. He didn’t like my ‘misting’ his adjectives, as he put it. For instance, where he had written ‘lofty,’ I had written ‘noble.’ ‘Fruitful’ should be ‘fruitful,’ not ‘constructive.’ And, yes, he deliberately chose to open his letter with ‘Your Excellency,’ and not ‘Dear Mr. President.’ After all, he was addressing a head of state.

Try as I might to persuade him that ‘Your Excellency’ was simply not accurate in this situation, he simply shook his head in disbelief, saying that it was inconceivable not to address the president of the world’s mightiest power other than by such an honorific. So he decided to call the chief of protocol at the foreign ministry to double check. And while he cross-examined the poor man I sat wondering how many times a man stranded for well nigh three decades in Israel’s political wilderness might have had cause to write a letter to the president of the United States. Whatever Menachem Begin’s grasp of international affairs might be
–
and I was to discover that it was vast
–
his familiarity with the trivialities of diplomatic etiquette on that first day on the job was inadequate.

He acknowledged as much when, replacing the receiver, he threw me an amiable shrug and owned up, “You’re right!” and with a chuckle added, “but I’m in good company. When Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States he received letters of congratulation from the kaiser of Germany and the king of England. Not caring about diplomatic protocol, and never having communicated with either of them before, he blithely addressed the kaiser as, ‘My Dear Emperor William,’ and the king as, ‘My Dear King Edward,’ instead of ‘Your Royal Majesty,’ which was appropriate for both. Eyebrows were raised in the royal courts and American ambassadors were sent in to apologize.”

Menachem Begin related this nugget of gossip with absolute delight, and when I asked him whether history was his preferred reading, he concurred, saying, “History and political biographies are my favorite topics, and these I generally read in English.” By way of illustration, he cited four different authors he had recently read, and by the offhand way he tossed out their names I realized that here was a man of many parts: not only meticulous, but erudite, an intellectual of the Polish mold but in the Jewish idiom.

Waiting for his letter to be typed up, he entertained me with the tale of how he had perfected his command of English. It was during his days in the Irgun, when he was hiding from the British
–
a time of sharp wits and subterfuge, when survival hung on knowing what the other side was thinking, saying, planning, writing, reading, and broadcasting. Words were weapons; he had to learn them. So day by day, night by night, he sat glued to the
BBC
World Service, frenetically mastering the news and the King’s English. He loved the
BBC
’s economy of style, its unexcitable precision, and its clarity of speech.

He developed a lush English vocabulary; one could sense his love of words for their own sakes. As in the underground, so too, throughout all his years in opposition, words were his sole arsenal. He was a man of passionate polemic and gripping oratory. He loved the Knesset. He loved to debate. He loved to write. He loved to read. He loved to preach. He loved journalism. He loved letters. Letter writing, he lamented, was a dying skill. Language was being robbed of precision and clarity. Politicians were the prime pirates of this despoilment. Parliamentary debate was on the wane everywhere. Congress and Westminster were still relatively decent chambers, and the Knesset, too, had its rare moments. Too rare! But, generally speaking, good talk for good talk’s sake was gone. A man or woman gets up to speak, and says nothing. Nobody listens
–
and then everybody disagrees. Duels occur without real cause. Politicians had become hard-nosed, bottom-line pragmatists, bereft of humor. “Where is the parliamentarian today,” he remarked cuttingly, “who can dispose of an opponent with the elegance of Benjamin Disraeli calling across the aisle to Gladstone, ‘The Honorable Gentleman is a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity?’”

The exactitude with which he pronounced this quote was so stunning I asked him how on earth he remembered it. Smugly, he replied, “I learned it by heart from the
BBC
when I was in the underground. I used it as a vocabulary exercise. To this day, the first thing I do on rising at five in the morning is to switch on the
BBC
.”

Indeed, in the fullness of time I would discover that there were occasions when Menachem Begin based his political decisions partly or wholly on what he’d heard on the
BBC
, aware that while its commentators did not spare the rod in criticizing Israeli policy, they were, for the most part, impartial, accurate, and bound by the ethic of fair play. Indeed, to Menachem Begin, the British Broadcasting Corporation was the gold standard of faithful reporting.
57

In the late afternoon the prime minister asked if his letter of reply to President Jimmy Carter was ready for checking. It was not. Norma, my secretary, was understandably edgy, trying her best to make sense of Begin’s red scribbles and my superimposed black ones. Her typing was taking much longer than usual, and by the time the letter was done, the prime minister had to leave for his next appointment. He and Mrs. Begin were hosting a tea at the King David Hotel in honor of close friends who had flown in from overseas. He suggested I accompany him to the hotel, and he would go over the letter en route.

Once we were sitting in his official limousine, he settled back and, head cocked in concentration, began reading. He disapproved of a word here and added a phrase there, and was still hastily scribbling some final corrections when the car drew up at the hotel’s entrance. Switching on a smile, he bounced out to be met by well-wishers with outstretched hands, and such was the crush inside the lobby that I had to insinuate myself behind his phalanx of security men, trying to edge my way forward in a vain attempt to retrieve the letter. As he reached the elevator he recognized a familiar face among the crowd of applauding guests. His smile widened, and with an outstretched hand, he called, “Sir Isaiah, welcome to Jerusalem!”

Sir Isaiah Berlin, the celebrated British thinker, philosopher and Oxford professor, whom I had met briefly many years before at an Oxford Union reception, flushed darkly, threw the prime minister a jaundiced look, and contemptuously turned his back on him. Begin stiffened, pressed his lips together, lifted his chin, and assuming all the dignity he could muster, stepped into the elevator, the letter crumpled in his hand. I watched, frozen, as the door glided shut in my face.

I suddenly felt the need for a drink.

The bar off the main lobby was jam-packed, and I had to elbow my way to the counter, where everybody was talking loudly, sipping drinks and munching peanuts, pretzels and potato chips. Suddenly, out of the crush, Sir Isaiah Berlin emerged, his jowled face cold and hard-pinched. In a dark-colored three-piece suit and a somber tie, he looked totally out of place among this high-spirited crowd with their shirts, cotton slacks, and blue jeans.

“Have I not seen you in the past?” he called out to me, above the hubbub.

I reminded him of the brief encounter at the Oxford Union, but he had no recollection of it.

“I have, however, seen you with Yitzhak Rabin when he was prime minister, have I not?” he pressed.

I confirmed that he had, in London and in Jerusalem.

“But did I not see you just now in the company of Menachem Begin?” he asked, a frown of disapproval on his face. With his large bespectacled eyes, scholar’s stoop, thick whitening brows, graying hair, and balding scalp, he looked like an aggrieved proctor.

I verified that he had, and I could almost taste the distaste in his voice when he growled, “So what are you doing now with Begin?”

He listened, aloofly at first, as I explained how I had become a member of his staff, but then he suddenly began to contemplate me closely, as if I represented some sort of a philosophic conundrum. “I understand,” he muttered. “You’re a civil servant, eh? Tight spot! You have no choice. Proper thing to do.” Whereupon he sternly downed a whisky and, after that, a long glass of soda, and then promptly dived into a monologue spoken so rapidly that it was partly incomprehensible. Whether this was his regular manner of speech or an emotional outburst, I could not tell. The gist of it was that, though he considered himself a well-tempered and composed Oxfordian, not given to vehement public stands, he could not, as a Jew, stand the sight of Menachem Begin as prime minister. He could not shake the man’s hand. It was too much to ask of him. He feared what harm Begin would do to the country. He feared for Israel’s Zionist dream. He feared for his own Zionist dream. He was terribly shaken and perplexed.

All his life, he said, he had been a two-state Zionist
–
a Jewish State alongside a Palestinian State. Moral life could entertain nothing less. The Arab-Israel quarrel was a conflict between two rights of self-determination of equal validity. Israel, therefore, had to concede territories. Partition! This was his profound philosophical view as a Jew.