If toughness in a crisis was typical of Golda Meir, so, too, was that motherly admonition.
To the people of Israel she was known affectionately as Golda Shelanu—“Our Golda.” She moved among her people with ease and informality. She was the Prime Minister who made soup and coffee for her cabinet while they gathered around her kitchen table, discussing affairs of state while shuttling back and forth from the stove.
Even in her seventies she drove herself unmercifully, working until the early morning and keeping her attention focused simultaneously on the biggest issues and the smallest details of government. She signed no letter, no matter how routine, without reading it first. She went to the airport to meet groups of immigrants, often breaking into tears of joy at the sight of them. She was shattered by letters she received during and after the Yom Kippur War from parents who blamed her government for the deaths of their children. Every soldier lost was a personal blow to her. When Nasser was waging his war of attrition in the Sinai, she left orders that she be notified immediately, at any time of the day or night, whenever an Israeli was killed. Her instructions were taken so seriously that once she was awakened with the news of the loss of twenty-five sheep.
Many leaders drive to the top by the force of personal ambition. They seek power because they want power. Not Golda Meir. All her life she simply set out to do a job, whatever that job might be, and poured into it every ounce of energy and dedication she could summon. When she emigrated to Israel in 1921, it was because she was committed to the Zionist dream. She wanted to help and to serve. She was seventy when she became Israel’s fourth Prime Minister. Levi Eshkol had died suddenly of a heart attack, and the other leaders of the Labor party turned immediately to her as the only person who commanded the across-the-board respect to succeed him without touching off a divisive struggle. At first she protested. Then she accepted. Later she wrote, “I became Prime Minister because that was how it was, in the same way that my milkman became an officer in command of an outpost on Mount Hermon. Neither of us had any particular relish for the job, but we both did it as well as we could.”
Mrs. Meir thought that too much attention was paid to the fact that she was a woman in high public office. To her, being female meant one thing: more work. Especially in her earlier, child-raising years, she had had to find time both for her public duties and for her family responsibilities. When my daughter Julie Eisenhower interviewed Mrs. Meir for her book, Special People, she asked how it had felt to be appointed the first woman Foreign Minister in 1956. Her reply was characteristic: “I don’t know,” she said with a smile. “I was never a man minister.”
In 1971 I held a meeting in the Azores with French President Pompidou. At one point Secretary of State Rogers, in trying to make light conversation, observed that in the world’s two major trouble spots, South Asia and the Mideast, women happened to be serving as Prime Ministers. “In India,” he said, “we have Indira Gandhi, and in Israel Golda Meir—another woman.” Pompidou, a faint smile on his lips, said, “Are you sure?”
Pompidou said this not disparagingly, but with a whimsical sort of admiration. And the point, of course, is that as Prime Minister, Golda Meir conducted herself in such a way that whether she happened to be a man or woman simply made no difference. Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi were alike in that each more than held her own in negotiating with a member of the opposite sex. Having dealt with both, however, I found that they were strikingly different in the way that they did it. While both were very feminine, Indira Ghandi used her femininity; Golda Meir did not. Mrs. Gandhi expected to be treated as a woman and acted with the ruthlessness of a man. Golda Meir expected to be treated like a man and acted like a man. She neither asked for any quarter nor gave any because she was a woman.
She dressed plainly, wore no makeup, and kept her hair pulled severely into a bun at the back of her head, though she admitted that the reason she kept her hair long was that her husband and her son had liked it that way. She was always very gracious in her conversations with Mrs. Nixon, and she showed an obviously sincere interest in our children and in personal matters. But generally her approach was to make short shrift of the “getting-to-know-you” sort of icebreaking comments at the beginning of a session and go directly to the serious issues at hand. The first time we met in the Oval Office, there was the usual idle chitchat while the photographers clicked away. But as soon as they had been ushered out, she crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and got right down to business, running through a list of equipment she wanted for her armed forces.
Once wronged, Mrs. Meir was not one to forgive and forget. She carried a satchelful of grudges. She never forgave de Gaulle for his critical comments after the 1967 war. She never forgave the Germans, even their new postwar leadership, for the Holocaust. She never forgave Arab terrorists, and those Arab nations that supported terrorism, for the innocent blood they shed. She even bore a long grudge against Ben-Gurion after he split away from the ruling Labor party in the 1960s.
She particularly distrusted the Soviet Union. While she was a devout Socialist, she had no illusions whatsoever with regard to Soviet tyranny and the threat that it presented to Israel. One of her first conscious memories was of her father nailing planks across the door of their home in Kiev, hoping to protect his family from one of the periodic pogroms in which mobs with clubs and knives went hunting for Jews. She also told me of her horror when drunken policemen would knock on the door every Saturday night and beat up her father for being a Jew. Her memories of those early years in Russia were few, but they were mostly of cold, hunger, poverty, and fear—especially fear. To her the pogroms of czarist Russia continued, in different form, in Soviet Russia. She felt that Soviet support for Nasser, who was pledged to the destruction of Israel, was a further insult to Jews.
During one of her visits to Washington she expressed to me her strong disagreement with what she felt was the naive attitude of many European leaders with regard to détente with the Soviet Union, and she said that she was concerned about our own moves toward better relations with the Soviets. I responded by explaining how my approach to détente differed and told her that we had no illusions about Soviet motives. I said that, with regard to international relations, our Golden Rule was somewhat different from that of the New Testament—that it was “Do unto others as they do unto you.”
At that point Henry Kissinger chimed in and added, “Plus ten percent.”
Mrs. Meir smiled in agreement and said, “As long as you approach things that way, we have no fears.”
There were moments when she could deal lightly even with what were, to her, the most serious issues. She repeatedly insisted to me that none of Israel’s Arab neighbors could be trusted. As part of a broader drive toward peace in the Middle East, I was trying to build better relations between the United States and some of the key Arab countries. I pointed out to her that, from Israel’s own standpoint, it was far better to have the United States be a friend of Israel’s neighbors than to have that role filled by another nation hostile to Israel. She conceded the point, yet always insisted that in dealing with the Arab countries we should put trust not in agreements but only in deeds. At the conclusion of one such meeting I handed out to the participants small gift boxes containing gold-plated cuff links with the Presidential Seal. Each of them opened his box, and one of the boxes turned out to be empty. Mrs. Meir laughed and said, “Now you see what I mean about trust.” She also showed her light touch when, after naming Henry Kissinger Secretary of State, I commented to her that now both of our countries had Jewish Foreign Ministers. Alluding to Kissinger’s German accent, she replied, “Yes, but mine speaks English.”
Internationally Golda Meir had the reputation of a statesman of great courage, skill, and tenacity. She was highly intelligent, honest, and tough. She had the ability to make it to the top in any major country, but it probably was only in Israel that she would have, because it was the drive of her singular passion for the country and the cause that carried her to
the top. She did not seek power as a privilege. She exercised power as a duty—for Israel.
Americans rated her high on their lists of most admired women. Yet to the people of Israel she was a beloved grandmother-protector, the strong, solid, dependable woman who carried the weight of Israel on her shoulders but who also made time to serve soup to her aides at her kitchen table.
In my eulogy at the memorial service for President Eisenhower in 1969, I said that great statesmen are often loved at home and respected abroad, but that only a few, such as Eisenhower, are truly loved both at home and abroad. Golda Meir, too, was one of those few. And, as with Eisenhower, it was not for what she did, but for what she so clearly was.
I saw her for the last time in June 1974, just twelve days after she had left office in the wake of controversy over Israel’s preparedness at the time of the October 1973 war. We visited her in her modest apartment in Jerusalem, where she again thanked me for America’s support in that war. I could see the pain on her face as she tried to get up from her chair to greet us. It was only later that I learned that she was suffering from phlebitis, as I was at that time, and also cancer of the lymph glands, which she had kept secret for years. Later, at a state dinner in the Knesset, I decided to break precedent and offer a special, additional toast before the traditional one to the head of state. I said that no leader I had ever met had demonstrated greater courage, intelligence, stamina, determination, or dedication to country than Golda Meir, and added, “I thought that I, having worked with her, having become her friend, and she has been my friend, that I might have the honor and the privilege to ask you to join me in a toast to the former Prime Minister. To Prime Minister Golda Meir. To Golda.”
It was an emotional moment for her, and it also was for me. That toast was truly from the heart. I could have said “To Golda, with love,” and I think that she would have known I meant it.
MODERN LEADERSHIP FOR OLD NATIONS: NASSER, SADAT, THE SHAH, FAISAL
Few places on earth match the Middle East as a focus of story and legend or as a strategic crossroads. Its history stretches back thousands of years. Not only dynasties but civilizations have risen and fallen there. Winds still carve the ageless desert as they did millennia ago, and bones still whiten in the sun.
But suddenly, in the brief period since World War II, these ancient lands have erupted in ferment. The creation of Israel was only one of the developments unsettling the old ways and bringing new conflicts.
When Iran was plunged suddenly back into medievalism, the West got a harsh lesson in how thin the veneer of modernity can be in this new world and how severe the strains when old and new collide. We were reminded that live and let live is not a traditional concept in the Middle East. Passions are more intense there, less disciplined, less restrained. Verdicts are harsher and vengeance is swifter. Traditions are older, and are clung to more fiercely by those determined to preserve them.
Yet change is coming, there as well as elsewhere.
What we have seen in the Middle East during these recent decades has been the political equivalent of those volcanic upheavals that created the great mountain ranges and shaped the continents and oceans. And although the particular issues and the form of the struggle are peculiar to the Middle East, they illustrate the challenges confronting the whole world when changes that once would have taken centuries are compressed into decades. One person today, in the space of his one lifetime, may have to adapt to what would, in an earlier period, have been many generations of evolutionary development. The process is unsettling, both for individuals and for nations, and it can be explosive.
We can see these processes dramatically in the lives of four leaders who took very different approaches but had what often were remarkably similar goals: Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and the Shah of Iran. Of the four, the Shah was overthrown and died in exile. Faisal and Sadat were cut down by assassins’ bullets. Only Nasser died of natural causes while still a hero, and even his fate might have been different if his life had not been ended abruptly by a heart attack at age fifty-two.
All four were modernizers. Each sought to renew his people’s pride. In doing so, Nasser, Sadat, and the Shah reached deliberately back across the millennia to the ancient roots of their countries’ cultures in order to reclaim and burnish the symbols of national greatness. Nasser and Sadat reached back to the Pharaohs, the Shah to the Persian empire of Cyrus the Great. Faisal had no need to reach back. His was the land of Muhammad, the home of the holiest Muslim shrines. Muslims throughout the world bowed in the direction of Saudi Arabia each day as they said their prayers.
I first met Nasser in 1963, but I felt that I had known him long before that.
He was an obscure army officer when, with Anwar Sadat as one of his coconspirators, he planned and led the 1952 coup that ousted the corrupt regime of King Farouk. At first he used a well-known general, Mohammed Naguib, as front man. But after two years, in 1954, the fiery Nasser had Naguib arrested and made himself Premier; in 1956 he had himself elected President.
Nasser’s leadership was pyrotechnic. He shot like a meteor across the sky of the Middle East, acting as leader not only of Egypt but of the Arab world. He meddled compulsively in the affairs of other Arab countries, staging coups, plotting assassinations, trying always to forge a pan-Arab unity with himself at its head. He made both firm friends and bitter enemies; few were neutral about him.
The constant din of his propaganda reached throughout the Arab world. When I visited the Middle East in 1957 I did not stop in Egypt, but wherever I went I heard his voice on the radio. In the markets and the streets of cities in Libya, the Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco, I saw people, young and old, rich and poor, listening to his voice with looks of almost ecstasy. He used both radio and television with consummate skill, not only for his own exhortations, but to get his message across through the medium of entertainment. He mobilized the best entertainers in the Arab world, and they made songs such as “How We Build the High Dam at Aswan” popular hits.
One of Nasser’s consuming dreams was construction of the Aswan High Dam. Through the centuries Egypt had looked to the waters of the Nile to give its desert life. Now Nasser would harness those waters to provide cheap electricity and also to create another million and a half acres of arable land. But even this dream got caught up in his foreign adventuring. When Nasser’s flirtation with Moscow led him to sign an eastern-bloc arms agreement, the United States dropped the dam as an aid project. When he heard the news he was reported to have said, “Americans, may you choke on your fury!” He responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal. Israel, Britain, and France sent forces against Egypt. The United States faced down its allies and helped engineer a U.N. cease-fire that left Egypt in control of the canal.
A key reason for Eisenhower’s intervention was that the Israeli-British-French action came just as Russian tanks were rumbling through the streets of Budapest, brutally suppressing a brave Hungarian bid for freedom. Having bitterly protested the Soviet use of force, it would have been difficult to acquiesce to its use by Israel, Britain, and France. But regardless of the reasons, Eisenhower’s intervention saved Egypt from defeat—at great cost to the Atlantic alliance. It was a decision that, in retrospect, I think was wrong. Later Nasser privately expressed gratitude, but at the time he displayed only contempt. The upshot was that he put his country in hock to Moscow both for weapons and for help with the Aswan Dam. At the same time, as Sadat later wrote, Nasser became “preoccupied with the fable . . . that he was a hero who had defeated the armies of two great empires, the British and the French. Having completely disregarded the real part played by Eisenhower to that end, which turned military defeat into political victory, he became the first to believe that he had won.”
Nasser was volatile, impatient, dictatorial, possessed by grandiose ambitions that forever got in the way of his people’s more mundane needs. While most Egyptians subsisted in desperate poverty, he squandered the nati
on’s scarce resources on foreign adventures. His implacable belligerence toward Israel bolstered his standing in the Arab world, but also brought his forces into a devastating defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. For five years he pressed a costly war in Yemen, trying to overthrow the Saudi-backed Imam and establish an Egyptian client state. Eventually he was defeated there as well. At home he did carry out a wide-ranging land reform, and he raised high the people’s hopes for a new prosperity as well as a new freedom. But when death ended his rule, the people were as poor as before, and political prisoners filled the jails.
And yet, for all that, his sudden death in 1970 sparked one of the greatest outpourings of grief the world has ever seen. Five million people jammed the streets of Cairo for his funeral, hanging from trees and lamp posts, weeping hysterically, surging against the funeral cortege, tearing the flag from his coffin. Many Egyptians were so distraught that they committed suicide. In Beirut the French-language daily Le Jour declared that “one hundred million human beings—the Arabs—are orphans.”
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