All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [173]
In my opinion, Ben-Gurion was a better statesman than a philosopher. I can understand why his advisers and assistants were so totally loyal to him. He raised them to his level, inspiring them and teaching them to be sensitive to history. He had a paternal relationship with them for which his enemies unfairly reproached him.
His aide-de-camp, a man called Nehemia, was so completely devoted to him that he had always resisted getting married. When he finally fell in love, the head of the Mossad informed him that the woman was a foreign agent. In his despair, he put a bullet through his head. Ben-Gurion’s advisers were afraid the news would upset him too much and they decided to keep it from him. All the Israeli newspapers, including the organ of the Communist Party, agreed to print a special copy of that day’s issue, one that made no mention of Nehemia’s death, for Ben-Gurion alone.
My daily reporting went on: the ongoing struggle of blacks for civil rights; the first American triumphs in space, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion; Khrushchev’s visit to the United Nations, with the unforgettable image of him taking off his shoe and pounding it on the table. There was Jacqueline Kennedy and her children; the scandal of the rigged TV quiz shows; the beginnings of the conquest of space; John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize; Betty Friedan and her feminist prophecy. I did many interviews and almost as many political commentaries.
One interview left a bitter taste. Yaël Dayan, the legendary general’s daughter, had just published her first novel and the Forverts asked me to interview her. She was in the United States on a speaking tour.
When I arrived at her hotel room, I found her in tears. Critics back home had panned her book. I said what one is expected to say: Pay no attention, reviews come and go, the work endures. I must have managed to console her because she called me several times and briefly I became her confidant. She told me of her troubled childhood and of her stay in Greece, where she had had an unhappy relationship with a famous filmmaker. She wrote me letters that I thought had been lost. An assistant recently found them among my papers. They are embarrassingly personal. She went on to write more books, no better or worse than the first. Why was she always so angry? Fortunately she abandoned literature for politics, where she made many enemies and was not taken seriously. Is that why she wrote so critically about her father and her own family life? She is a woman who wanted to live great passions and wound up letting herself be borne by great hatreds. For some reason in recent years, I, too, have become a frequent target.
In October 1962 there was the Cuban missile crisis. What would the Soviet Union do? Would there be real war or fake peace? Kennedy gave a televised speech. That evening I was blinded by an unusually painful migraine: it was hard to watch and listen to the young president defy Moscow and to ponder and analyze the options and imagine the possibilities. The future of all humanity seemed in peril. Gromyko sat in the Oval Office with Kennedy and dared to deny the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. At the UN Adlai Stevenson exhibited aerial photographs that proved the opposite. General de Gaulle magnanimously aligned himself with the United States. It was a nuclear standoff. One false move by either side, a single imprudent act or an ill-considered decision, would mean a continent in flames. The bombers of the Strategic Air Command were put on alert. The population was on edge; shelters were stockpiled with food and bottled drinking water.
I remember sleepless nights when everyone wondered whether by dawn the planet would be plunged into the ultimate nightmare. I wrote as though