When Yitzhak Rabin thought deeply, he had a habit of thrusting his hands into his pockets, walking to a window and growing progressively more pensive until, by degrees, his features became so firmly set it was as if they carried a startling load of information. This would occur when he was grappling with a new and intricate strategic issue, striving to mentally analyze its multiple parts, separate the wheat from the chaff, cut through to the heart of the matter and neaten it into a coherent and conceptual model.
Then, typically, he would say something like, “It boils down to four salient points. They are…” And he would tick them off one by one with unmistakable clarity.
The first time I was witness to this sort of thing was on a day in March 1968, at our embassy in Washington. Rabin, the former Israel Defense Force chief of general staff and now ambassador, was preparing for a meeting with Henry Kissinger, then Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. Kissinger wanted to know Rabin’s thinking on the recently passed Security Council Resolution 242, and, most particularly, his interpretation of the terms “secure and recognized boundaries” and the steps necessary “to achieve a peaceful and accepted settlement.”
Rabin’s English was still imperfect, so it was my job to prepare his talking paper, drafted in accordance with his Hebrew dictation. While he gazed long and hard out of the window, hands deep in his pockets, I sat there awaiting his instructions for what seemed an eternity until, finally, he turned and said, “On secure and recognized boundaries, write: One — Jews have an historic right to the whole of Eretz Yisrael. Two — since what we want is a Jewish state and a democratic state and not a binational state, the secure and recognized boundaries we seek are those that will give us a maximum of Eretz Yisrael with a maximum of Jews whom we can maximally defend.”
And then, without pause: “On the steps to achieve a peaceful and accepted settlement, write: Progress toward peace depends on four steps: One — disengagement. Two — diffusion. Three — trust. Four — negotiation.”
And that was that — superbly conceptual, splendidly analytical, no frills, no superfluities, no flourishes. Measure these sentences of that old talking paper against his overall strategic record and one finds that he held to these guiding principles with absolute consistency for the rest of his life.
These principles governed Rabin’s approach toward his vision of the future of Eretz Yisrael as the land of two nations, two faiths, two languages, two historic narratives and two destinies. And they informed his doctrine of peace diplomacy as a step-by-step doctrine, as evinced in his 1975 Sinai interim agreement with Egypt, his treaty with Jordan, his formula for peace with Syria and his concept of the Oslo accords.
As a personality Rabin was an equally no-nonsense, straight-as-a-die agnostic, bereft of charismatic pretensions and strapped with emotional austerity. Shy to a fault, he was uncomfortable with small talk and did not suffer fools easily.
Personal questions embarrassed him. A stranger’s innocuous “How are you?” could make him cringe as if his privacy had somehow been inexcusably invaded. Place him, however, within the bosom of his family and his warm passions instinctively flowed in a possessive softness that was poignant.
An evening out with his old army comrades, too, unloosened his once-ginger hair as he uninhibitedly drank and chain-smoked, laughing heartily at the jokes and listening rapturously to the gossip. He belonged to that generation of sabra old-timers who could tell a tall tale of days of yore to the last vivid detail.
He could not hold a tune for the life of him, but he always sang along when his buddies chanted their old ditties, in his grating, offbeat, earnest bass. These were his people, this unique breed called the Palmachniks, veterans of the pre-state army whose males had the oddest of nicknames, suffered a strong aversion to suits and ties, and were anchored naturally to the turf of their birth.
In their oft-ungrammatical Hebrew they were capable of the most inexplicable slang. Once, in a Knesset speech, Rabin famously called Yossi Beilin “hapoodel shel Peres” (Peres’poodle).
But he knew that in public he was not one to kindle a flame. He was no orator. His words failed to resonate. Emotional speeches were foreign to his terse style. His delivery of the English speeches I once drafted was wooden.
So when an audience would rise in standing ovation, he would blush with a crooked smile and I could sense the squirming inside of him because he knew that while the thoughts were his, the rhetoric was not.
The White House employed 30 speechwriters, but Rabin was embarrassed to have one, as if it was fraudulent. Which was why, perhaps, he was so parsimonious in the distribution of praise. The most gushing compliment he ever paid me was “OK.”
A man of deeply closeted emotion, in the rough and tumble of Israeli politics he shied away from dewy-eyed sentimentality, conforming to the ethos of his Palmach generation. He never knew how to be anyone but himself. When he tried to put on a pose he looked ridiculous.
And because he spoke his mind with unembroidered frankness and didn’t much care what any one else thought, his ideological detractors could be incensed while his supporters showered him with an instinctive trust. Neither side had any doubts as to who he was.
At rock bottom, Rabin had that most elusive yet indispensable attribute of leadership — authenticity. He never wore a mask.