Abba Eban: An Autobiography

...BOOK REVIEW Stained Glass William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Meanwhile, he was busy securing the badly-needed materiel reinforcements...

...One finishes it and hopes that Buckley will take another vacation soon, assuring his admirers of another of these by-products of his leisure hours...

...Under cover as chief engineer in charge of restoring St...

...The Arabs and the Soviet Union, however, were still demanding as a condition of a cease-fire Israel's immediate withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders...

...For those who know the_ bureaucratic ways of Washington, the astonishing fact is that the airlift (carrying war supplies) was in massive motion about three days after the idea was first conceived," Mr...

...In Washington...

...As with Saving the Queen, it is impossible to separate William F. Buckley from his hero...

...It is an engaging adventure written with elegance and a host of amusing purposes, not the least of which must be to stifle the allegations that his novels are only as good as Gore Vidal's...

...Here Buckley is confronting a modern dilemma: the conflict between commitment to one's superiors and commitment to one's personal code...

...Blackford Oakes does not follow orders which he finds unconscionable, though unfortunately he makes his decision too late to matter...

...Across Israel's borders with Jordan, Syria, and Egypt came a constant torrent of violence, with military units and marauders—the latter organized under the name of fedayeen, precursors of the PLO—bringing mutilation and death to Israeli civilians in the frontier areas and sometimes in the very heart of the coastal plain...

...Eban remembers...

...Oakes, like Sartre's Oreste in Les Mouches, is aware by the end of the novel of responsibilities to others and to his own principles...

...Anselm's Church, Wintergrin's pet project, Oakes and he become close friends...

...Though such serious questions underlie Stained Glass, they never detract from the great fun Buckley has with his narrative...

...1 Please check the appropriate boxes and mail this form to: The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...

...As for President Johnson, instead of giving forceful lead, he was eagerly scanning the editorial pages of the major American dailies waiting for the pundits to make up his mind for him...

...Somewhat later his mother is entertaining public officials and the mayor delicately raises a question: Did the countess—the subject could now safely be raised without opening the year-old wound—have any private opinion what might have happened to her son...

...It was a Sisyphean undertaking punctuated by short-lived triumphs to be inevitably followed by new pressures...

...When it was all over and Israel emerged victorious, all hell broke loose at the United Nations...

...In Paris, General de Gaulle curtly told Mr...

...He condemns the Americans who allow themselves to be bullied by the Russians into assassinating Count Wintergrin lest a Third World War break out...

...Doubleday / $8.95 Judy Mathews If the public was wary of William F. Buckley's gifts as a novelist, his best-seller Saving the Queen relaxed and gratified them...

...Although liberals dwell on this problem, Buckley shows that they do not have a monopoly on such concerns...

...Carter's difficulties are in fact immense: His contradictory internal impulses between liberalism and conservatism mirror well America's general ideological confusions, but those contradictions and confusions do not make for a serene and contented political order...

...Kissinger stood firm: "Such a resolution is impossible...

...The Four Great Powers...

...The United States then opposed any retaliation, without suggesting an alternative method of defending Israeli lives...

...r. Eban has praise for Henry Kissinger who, he says, deserves more Israeli appreciation than he received...

...he tries hard, but what he himself terms his "Jewish-Unitarian-agnostic" perspective renders him incapable of understanding the evangelical Christian mind...

...But Dr...

...His autobiography spans much of contemporary history and, of course, the entire history of the state of Israel...

...Rabin, facing a difficult election at home—an election he was to lose—may not have told the Israelipeople the whole truth about the attitude of the new Carter administration...

...Eban one of his belligerent looks...

...He loves America, even in its unredeemed state...

...He viewed the initial Arab victories as adverse to basic American interests...

...Ten years later, when Egypt's President Nasser ejected the UN forces from the Sinai, I asked AP in New York for a copy of this picture to illustrate my feature on the doubtful validity of international commitments...

...On the train to Gstaad, they pass "the orange-shuttered chalet of David Niven...

...For example, in a flashback to Wintergrin's World War II service, the young nobleman mysteriously disappears on the Polish front and is declared Missing in Action and Presumed Dead...

...Abba Eban, Israel's scholarly diplomat, had learned this early in his career, and it stood him in good stead during the long years he served as Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations and to Washington, and as Israel's foreign minister...

...By 1939, when Chamberlain issued his White Paper forbidding further Jewish immigration into what was then British Palestine—and this 34 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 at the very time when Hitler was taking preliminary steps to implement his Final Solution—the Jewish-British friendship was shattered and the fate of European Jewry sealed...

...The fury of President Eisenhower and the U.S...

...We found ourselves transformed from David to Goliath overnight...

...Eban speculates that Mr...

...The macabre vision of Israel's demise had been nourished in speech and sentiment during all the years of suspense...

...He decries the automaton of power whether he be John Dean or Albert Speer —those who attempt to justify their misdeeds with the explanation that they were following orders from above...

...Eban that "the United States would take a heavy responsibility if Israel were to withdraw and the blockade (of the Straits of Tiran) were to be renewed...

...Eban reached the rank of major, but as soon as the war was over he abandoned both his military and scholarly pursuits to devote himself fully to the nascent state of Israel...

...Things are made more difficult by the continuing decay of the two-party system and by a Congress that, in its post-Watergate wisdom, seems persuaded that cooperation of any kind with the White House constitutes a violation of the separation of powers...

...Carter's patriotism is positive, unselfconscious, and uncomplicated...

...And the driving force in surmounting the obstacles was Dr...

...After the war it was the Soviet Union and the still-independent Czechoslovakia that armed the embattled state of Israel...

...When, in the initial stages, things went badly for Israel and the government was willing to accept a ceasefire "in place," with the Egyptian and Syrian armies in their new advanced positions beyond the 1967 Israeli borders, Dr...

...As for its citizenry, he never ceases telling us how good, kind, and decent we all are and how our greatest current need is to have a government reflective of our high civic virtue...

...His latest novel, Stained Glass, will make them yearn for more...

...Eban had elicited binding * There was a famous AP photograph of Henry Cabot Lodge—then U.S...

...When Oakes is ordered to "eliminate" the Count to prevent a Soviet invasion of West Germany, he is torn by conflicting loyalties...

...They share political ideas, they look alike, they are both connoisseurs of food and wine, and they both ski in Gstaad...

...They gave the Soviet Union excessive prestige and contained no incentive for cease-fire, still less for negotiation...

...We may not be willing to settle for ambiguity, but for the foreseeable future we have no choice but to live with it...

...One expects a rather more skeptical view of human nature from a Southern Baptist deeply versed in Reinhold Niebuhr's neo-orthodoxy, but the psychological understanding behind such rhetoric is as shrewd as its specific content is dubious...

...Buckley now even incorporates friends into the novel...

...Yet they did not do so before Mr...

...Shogan suggests that perhaps "we are fed up with eloquence and are prepared to settle for ambiguity...

...Oakes emerges in this novel as a hero engage in the Sartrean sense of the term, committed not only to his country and the CIA, but to his ideals of freedom and anti-Communism...

...At the moment the nation appears pluralistic to the point of incoherence...

...Still, things could be worse: If under Carter the engine of state seems to be running around in circles, under McGovern it would have plunged straight off a cliff...

...They are well-suited...

...State Department knew no bounds...

...This steadfastness is in stark contrast with the stand taken by President Jimmy Carter almost from the moment he assumed the Presidency...

...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...

...Andrei Vyshinsky at least was honest about it: International policies, he explained to Mr...

...and the Russians, well, they are the brooding thugs of the real-life Soviet gerontocracy...

...Unfortunately, he appears to be only half right...

...In Stained Glass, the young CIA agent Blackford Oakes returns for his second assignment: to penetrate the political movement in Germany led by anti-Communist Count Axel Wintergrin, whose promise is to liberate East Germany upon his election as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany...

...His academic career was interrupted by the war, at the outset of which a desperate sergeant-major was trying to make some 50 Cambridge scholars, young Eban included, march in step—a futile endeavor...

...Eban's account of the broken promises that litter Israel's brief history...

...Eventually, the massive power of the United States, coupled with threats from the Soviet Union, forced the Israelis to evacuate the Sinai...

...Allen Dulles is eventually manipulated by the Russians...

...Eban achieved the F.S...

...Eban writes...

...Israel had committed the dark sin of survival...

...Manor Throughout Israel's 30 years of existence, and indeed during much of the half century of the Zionist movement that preceded it, Jewish politicians have had to follow Burke's dictum that most political decisions are a choice "between the disagreeable and the intolerable...

...My request was answered in a brief telex message to the effect that this particular photograph had been "withdrawn" and was no longer available...

...near-impossible: a Triple First...

...Nobody was going to burn his fingers trying to open the blocked Straits of Tiran...

...Eban writes...

...PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip X71 The American Spectator August/ September 1978 35 Kissinger procrastinated...

...The countess leaned over to him and pointed to the little gray kitten, asleep near the fireplace, and whispered: "Do you believe in reincarnation...

...It joined Britain and France in the Suez venture, occupied the Sinai, opened up the Tiran Straits, and cleaned up the Gaza Strip, then a nest of murderers...

...The first friends of the Israelis were the British who, in 1917, issued the Balfour Declaration and thus set the foundations for the state of Israel...

...It might strike readers as odd that Buckley, a middle-aged conservative, seems intent on celebrating youth throughout his novel...

...Kissinger therefore declined any official American initiative in this matter, although ostensibly trying to find other sponsors for such a cease-fire "in place...

...Yet, whatever the present pressures from Washington, Israel cannot forget the lessons of 1957 and 1967...

...Buckley's book thus serves a Judy Mathews is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...political as well as an entertainment purpose...

...We are old friends, said the mayor: Confide in me...

...He told Mr...

...Carter is our first post-liberal liberal, and his fundamental problem involves nothing less than the construction of a coherent and substantive post-liberal order of things...

...BOOK REVIEW Abba Eban: An Autobiography Random House / $15.00 F.S...

...When Premier Rabin visited Washington early in the spring of 1977, President Carter greeted him with the ominous remark about "the American hope of a full withdrawal of Israeli forces in a peace settlement...

...Anthony Harrigan, Syndicated Columnist Join the thousands of thoughtful people who read The American Spectator—the magazine Time magazine has called "one of the nation's most energetic and sprightly journals of opinion...

...A decade later, a heavily-armed Egypt told the UN force in the Sinai to go home, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and deployed a huge army in the Sinai close to Israel's border...

...The Czechs did so because of their own bitter memories of Munich...

...It is important to be popular—but even more important to be alive...

...Eban's achievement gave rise to letters to the Times...

...The Journal-American of New York wrote: "President Eisenhower has placed his tremendous influence and this nation's prestige behind his assurances to Israel...

...His role in the 1973 Yom Kippur War was vital for Israel's final victory...

...All this, of course, carries no guarantee of easy political resolutions for Carter, as his decline in the popularity charts shows...

...Now, suddenly, the dream seemed ripe for fulfillment, and what had brought it within reach was Israel's apparent solitude," Mr...

...Eban, "but it is not worth five cents unless I have the American people with me...

...Eban, were governed by "interests" and not by "sentiments...

...It was during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 that Israel saw a way out of the trap...

...The years from 1953 to 1956 were gloomy for the young Jewish state...

...At the United Nations "the United States and the Soviet Union were arrayed in an unusual alliance against us," Mr...

...The Arabs were being heavily armed by Britain and the Soviet Union, while Israel received no arms from anybody...

...Buckley's wife Patricia was recently quoted as saying she had a superb sense of the ridiculous...

...Now was the time for Israel to present for payment the ten-year-old promissory notes issued by Paris and Washington...

...The allies fell by the way, one by one...

...and the head of the metalworkers' union is named Heinrich Regnery (Henry Regnery was Buckley's first publisher...

...and there was a danger that the UN Security Council would pass such a resolution...

...Against them all Buckley sets Blackford Oakes: "...the ladies loved his stunning good looks, his fair hair and inquisi36 The American Spectator August/September 1978...

...Americans are impatient with words and uncertain about deeds, but settling for ambiguity is a state of blessedness few democracies achieve...

...It is the custom of great powers to exhibit impatience when faced with irritating problems caused by small nations (the irritation in this case being compounded by the deep-seated, universal dislike of Jews only fleetingly overcome by remorse at Hitler's holocaust...

...The present stalemate cannot, therefore, be blamed on the alleged inflexibility of Premier Begin...

...On the other hand, Oakes' gray and forbidding superior, Rufus, is a ruthless man of middle years...

...Kissinger, who knew there could be no cease-fire and no negotiation unless the military situationforced the Arabs to stop fighting...

...Further than that, he does not feel he should go...

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...Ambassador to the UN—and Arkady Sobolev of the Soviet Union voting together in the UN Security Council against America's NATO allies, Britain and France, and against Israel...

...Eban speaks directly to Israel's dilemma--the same today as ten or thirty years ago—in his conclusion: "Our international posture cannot exclude the capacity to stand alone for certain periods of time when a vital interest is at stake...

...As a campaigner, his traditionalist affirmations and' secure sense of self made his appeals to trust and decency effective, but as President he has to govern, which means making choices, and that in turn means making enemies, particularly at a time when Americans don't generally know what they want but are intensely urgent and vocal about their discontents...

...In the final moment Oakes, like Oreste, resists "mauvaise foi...

...A Triple First is so rare that Mr...

...But he, too, would not cash President Eisenhower's note...

...President Johnson gave Mr...

...So much then for the "heavy responsibility" and the "tremendous prestige" of President Eisenhower and the United States...

...Yes, she said, she did have a private notion, but it was so ridiculous, she did not really want to share it...

...If you are alive, you can work hard to reconstruct your popularity, whereas if you are dead, you will be conspicuously popular during the funeral oration, but the consolation will be transient and brief...

...The Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping, as was the Suez Canal...

...Eban recalls that "The current of world opinion flowed away from the embattled victor toward the defeated aggressor...

...If, as Mr...

...we are against it...

...But it is now obvious that the plan for Israel's return to the wholly indefensible pre-1967 borders was in Mr...

...Eban writes, the Israelis prefer their clouds without a silver lining, they have a point: With President Carter, Israel seems to have reached the end of the line...

...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 ^ New subscription ^ Renewal ^ One year (ten issues) $10 ^ Two years $18 ^ Three years $25 ^ Payment enclosed ^ Please bill me Canadian and foreign subscribers, please add $1 per year for postage...

...After that, the Americans took over...

...the Russians in order to get the British out of the Middle East...

...Stained Glass is more interesting than any fiction Vidal has ever fussed over...

...The narrative begins with charming vignettes of life in prewar London and Cambridge, where Mr...

...They are also more likely to think and act decently when they are encouraged to think well of themselves thanwhen they are urged to ritual self-flagellation...

...His heroes—Oakes, Winter-grin, even Erika Chadinoff (the Russian spy who later defects)—are all under thirty-five...

...His guideposts are few and they are almost entirely negative...

...Israel was alone, and as the West became increasingly timid, Soviet militancy grew more intense...

...Those who marvel at the obstinacy of Premier Begin, and puzzle at Israeli reluctance to accept President Sadat's sudden professions of friendship or President Carter's vague talk of guarantees, should study Mr...

...Nonetheless, Mr...

...Carter's mind from the very beginning...

...Eban's dry wit, and is enhanced by revealing sketches of the principal statesmen who, over the past two generations, bestrode the world scene...

...Flushed down an Orwellian Memory Hole...

...The American people are all over the map ideologically but they are firmly united in their love for their country and themselves...

...Avoid McGovernism" is a wise slogan, but it doesn't by itself take us very far...

...All effort is important," he told Mr...

...one of the most important journals of ideas and opinions in the country...

...John Foster Dulles argued at the time that an American commitment to a free passage through the Straits of Tiran was worth far more than an Israeli occupation...

...Others have clothed their hostile policies in the lofty expressions of a quest for peace, justice, impartiality...

...Next came the French connection that lasted until 1967...

...The American people have thoroughly rejected McGovern's New Politicsand are seriously disenchanted with the shopworn liberalism of the New Deal, but for all their mutterings about a government too big and too inept and too intrusive they do not not seem prepared to forego the support and security provided by the welfare state...

...The author's irrepressible humor, his ability to capture a totally ridiculous situation, inheres throughout the novel...

...Who the hell are the other two...

...Eban that "1967 is not 1957," and that Israel should do nothing, leaving the matter to the "Four Great Powers" to resolve...

...As Mr...

...Double first-class honors, or a Double First as it is known, is generally considered the acme of British academic distinction, a dignity that pursues the holder all his life—something on par with a Victoria Cross...

...Eban writes, "The idea that Arabs could kill Israelis without any subsequent Israeli reaction was close to becoming an international doctrine...

...Which brings to mind Lord Vansittart, the prewar head of the British Foreign Office, who used to say that there are not two sides to as many questions as we think, and that there is a catch in impartiality: "Having refused to distinguish between Right and Wrong, you will next be careful not to offend Wrong...

...It is written in the elegant style one expects from this polished diplomat, a style informed with Mr...

...guarantees from France and from President Eisenhower, who pledged America's word in a personal letter to Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion...

...Carter is a moralist, and his moralism is Christian in nature, but it relates fundamentally to personal behavior rather than public ideology...

...Carter is as much a victim of the nation's inconsistencies as of his own...