All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [163]
American current affairs absorbed me day and night, in a way that French affairs had not. To be a foreign correspondent in America is to be ever on the alert. The most extraordinary events occurred at a frenzied pace on this vast and turbulent continent. Barely had I arrived when I began to cover the civil rights struggle. All the world’s newspapers spoke of young Autherine Lucy, the first black student admitted to the University of Alabama, and of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was imprisoned for organizing the Montgomery bus boycott. My Fair Lady was the big hit on Broadway. Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe. That was surely worth an article.
And then there was Jewish life in the United States, more animated and varied than in France, and so highly structured that it was easy to follow. Each organization was headed by a personality influential in the business world. Hence the importance of public relations. As it happened, my newspaper was expanding: its circulation and number of pages were both on the rise. World decisions were increasingly made in Washington rather than London. President Eisenhower was keeping an eye on the Middle East. John Foster Dulles and his team brought back reports and proposals, and drafted accords on which Israel’s fate would depend. The slightest border incident brought reactions in Washington and at the United Nations. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s press conferences were grandiose performances. Eloquent and authoritative, speaking of himself in the third person, he charmed the press. I liked him because he was said to be an admirer of Martin Buber. Might he admire Hasidism as well? His mysticism was fully revealed only after his tragic death in a plane crash in the Congo. He considered the UN’s true mission to be theological in nature, and Israel feared him because he saw himself as a kind of messiah or global sovereign. Indeed, Israel, being the only country that belonged to no bloc and had never held a seat on the Security Council, feared anything coming from the United Nations. One political cartoon of the time showed an Israeli delegate at a cocktail party. Standing alone in a corner with no one to toast, he raises his champagne glass and says, “Lehayyim, Lord.” Listening to speeches in the Security Council or General Assembly was enough to remind me of what the Bible calls Israel’s solitude.
At first I loved the days I spent in the UN’s glass palace, center of world diplomacy. In the vast hall of delegates (where free phone service was provided) you might run into India’s Krishna Menon or the Soviet Union’s Andrei Gromyko or buttonhole a high-powered visitor for a quick interview on the problems of the Middle East. When that happened, I knew my articles would make the front page.
The delegate with whom I spoke most often was Abba Eban, Israel’s young ambassador to the UN, known for his keen intelligence and dazzling oratorical skills. His mastery of English was legendary (when Golda Meir named him foreign minister and Henry Kissinger was American secretary of state, she jokingly told President Nixon, “Mine has a better English accent than yours”), and he made fine use of his talents in defending his nation’s policies and honor. The Jewish community adored him. I admired him, though I recognized his weaknesses. His opponents in Israel chided him for the elegance of his Hebrew, his pomposity, and his tendency to repeat himself. But it’s difficult to be original when you’re making three speeches a day. Years later we were to have a distasteful, painful confrontation which I regret to this day, but at