DON PEPE AND GOLDA
The year 1848 saw revolutionaries storm royal barricades in Germany, Italy, France, Hungary, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their fiery Communist Manifesto. In contrast, for 1948 a time line in the World History Encyclopedia aimed at schoolchildren cites two important events: first, a man named Peter Goldmar invented the long-playing record. The second was even less important, a meeting of the World Council of Churches.1 For us, though, 1948 teaches many lessons. In this chapter we will look at two individuals who had virtually nothing in common with each other—except that both ascended to power while their countries convulsed with radical change. Furthermore, each confronted common excuses that ordinary politicians give for their country’s failings.
Our first example is Jose Maria Figueres Ferrer from Costa Rica, known as Don Pepe. He battled a corrupt government and launched a revolution that brought long-lasting peace and democracy forty years before neighboring leaders in Central America did so. He could easily have reached into the rusty bucket of bad excuses and said, “This neighborhood is too corrupt to expect us to do better than Nicaragua and Panama.” We will see that Don Pepe got his hands dirty in the process of gaining power and could even be accused of taking part in terrorist acts. Does this invalidate his later deeds? A second excuse available: “Costa Ricans can’t take pride in a country whose modern founder fired bullets and lobbed bombs.” Don Pepe shows us that a country can be full of pride and patriotism, even if its founders were less than saintly.
Golda Meir came to Palestine to plant vineyards and gardens. She found heavy rocks, drought, and chauvinistic men of all religions. Quite often, we hear of countries blessed by extraordinary natural resources—oil in Venezuela, gold in Ethiopia, copper in Haiti. Palestine had none. Golda joked that the only natural resource was sand. As an early leader of the Zionists and as prime minister of Israel, she could have also dipped into the rusty bucket of excuses and said, “We have no natural resources.” But she kept planting and recruited others to do so, and within a few decades the land she settled was exporting fruits and vegetables throughout the world. In recent years, that sand that Golda joked about has been turned into silicon and Israel’s own “Silicon Wadi” launches more tech start-ups per capita than any other region in the world.
Come read about Don Pepe and Golda Meir, who arguably made 1948 far more remarkable than the guy who invented the long-playing record.
DON PEPE: WHAT MAKES A MONSTER AND WHAT MAKES A MAN?
His Mission
• Abolishing a corrupt army
• Creating a durable democracy
• Making the children of black immigrants citizens and bringing women into the voting booth
• Walking away from power, rather than clinging to it
He had slender shoulders and a nose that drooped down his face. He was short, dark, and balding, not exactly leading man material. An FBI agent said he looked like the owner of a mom-and-pop candy store. But on this day in 1971, Don Pepe was not toting a Snickers bar. He was clutching a submachine gun and playing the role of hero. Just moments after a plane had taken off from Miami, a band of Nicaraguan terrorists burst into the cockpit and pulled guns on the pilots, demanding to land in Havana. When a passenger tried to resist, they shot him. The pilots convinced the hijackers that they must refuel in San José, Costa Rica. Don Pepe, serving his second term as president (the first was in the 1950s), rushed to the tarmac alongside the police. He grabbed a submachine gun in his unshaking hands, stared down the terrorists, and joined the police in firing at the engines and flattening the tires. “I saw that inside the plane, one of them [the hijackers] was pointing a gun at a stewardess,” he said. “At that very moment I ordered tear gas to fill the plane.”2 The bullets killed two of the hijackers and wounded one other. All the passengers survived.
Why was he so nimble with a submachine gun, this man who turned Costa Rica into Latin America’s most stable democracy, the only one in Central America until the 1990s? Few of his fans, especially the pacifists, remembered his roots. Don Pepe launched his political career by himself blowing up buildings and scaring civilians. So what moral standing did he have to attack terrorists? A lawyer might invoke the “clean hands” doctrine. A literature professor might bring up that pesky spot that Lady Macbeth could not rub off her hands. For us Don Pepe brings up the following question: can a country rebuild its pride, its democracy, and its economy, even if its leader himself once took up arms in a way that could be described as terrorism?
A PROUD GRADUATE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
Though Jose Maria Figueres Ferrer did not exactly come from noble blood, his father was an immigrant doctor from the Catalan region of Spain, putting the family in a pretty high class from the start. His mother was a teacher and also from Spain. Costa Rica was downright primitive in 1906 when Don Pepe was born and did not improve much for the next fifty years. Dirt roads, flies, no toilets, naked children, and water rationing for peasants. Jose Maria was a smart boy, excelled at math and physics, and even took a correspondence course from a school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He must have liked what he read about the United States in correspondence school, because a few years later he hopped onto a boat and, against his father’s instructions, enrolled at MIT to study engineering and hydroelectricity, while working on the side as a translator for a tea company. He soon dropped out of MIT but then created his own curriculum by hanging out at the Boston Public Library and reading engineering texts, as well as Cervantes, Martí, and Kant. Despite Don Pepe’s dropout status, today MIT claims him as its son.3 He would disagree. He said that his alma mater was not MIT, but BPL.
LOVE, THEN WAR
He returned to Costa Rica in 1928 and a few years later settled on a farm about a seven-hour horseback ride from San José. He became a successful farmer of coffee beans, hemp, and agava cactus, from which he extracted the cabuya fiber and turned it into rope and gunnysacks. Apparently, the MIT engineering training did come in handy. In 1940 an odd couple was formed. A twenty-two-year-old Presbyterian girl from Montgomery, Alabama, with a fitting name, Henrietta Boggs, and little knowledge of Spanish came to dinner while visiting her aunt in San José. Don Pepe was invited, too. The aunt was convinced of two things: first, that the young couple would marry, and second, that Don Pepe would become president. Henrietta explained that her aunt made wacky predictions about lots of thing—hurricanes, droughts—but the predictions never came true. Except her forecasts for Don Pepe. The aunt just knew, Henrietta recalled, because “the curve of the back of his head was just as beautiful as a Greek statue, and that proved he was going to be President.”4 Henrietta soon accepted Don Pepe’s marriage proposal and expected that she would begin an exotic but charming, old-world life on a plantation, married to a suave Latin, albeit one with a magnificently curved skull. It did not turn out that way.
Don Pepe was restless. When World War II broke out, Nazi U-boats sped across the Atlantic to drop off spies and to attack ships in the Gulf of Mexico and the western Atlantic. Most Americans today have no idea that German submarines infiltrated waters from the entrance of the Panama Canal to Long Island Sound. On July 30, 1942, a U-boat blew up the Robert E. Lee with 406 passengers aboard, just forty-five miles from the mouth of the Mississippi.5 A few weeks earlier a U-boat known as U-161 snuck into the harbor of Puerto Limón, Costa Rica’s largest port. The Kriegsmarine commander looked through his periscope and spied dockworkers unloading freight from the steamship San Pablo. He directed his men to fire two torpedoes directly into the side of the San Pablo. The ship exploded and fire ripped through the dock. The attack killed twenty-three Costa Rican civilians, along with a sailor.6 During that year in the Gulf of Mexico, twenty U-boats sank over seventy ships in a mission the Nazis called “Operation Drumbeat,” or “Second Happy Time.”
When the San Pablo exploded, so did Costa Rica. On July 4, twenty thousand Costa Ricans rushed to a public square to hear President Rafael Calderón’s response to the German treachery. He did not show up. Protests turned into riots and speakers condemned Calderón for not protecting them from the Axis forces. Mobs stoned buildings and then looters took advantage and broke into 123 shops owned by Germans, Italians, and some Spaniards. A man threw a bicycle into a German-owned camera shop, as looters swiped everything from the shelves.7 Police arrested one hundred Germans and Italians, mostly from families that had immigrated to Costa Rica generations earlier to run sugar, coffee, and banana plantations. (In the 1930s Germany was purchasing 40 percent of the country’s valuable coffee crop.) Four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, Costa Rica had already begun constructing an internment camp in the capital for suspicious foreigners and immigrant families. The newspaper La Tribuna called it a “campo de concentración,” with capacity to house four hundred people.8
ON THE RUN AND RUNNING GUNS
It was a confusing time in the capital. Calderón, the target of many protests, said that the demonstrations “greatly pleased him.” Presumably he was referring to the attack on German-owned businesses, not the marchers denouncing his leadership. Don Pepe, whose shopkeeper friends lost their livelihoods in the riots, bought time on a local radio station and began blasting Calderón for incompetence and for allowing looters to destroy civilian property. After Don Pepe harangued for too long, the police broke down the studio doors, flipped off the microphone, and dragged him to a prison. The government accused him of treason and giving away military secrets to the Nazis. Henrietta visited him in prison, and described her bloodied, dirty husband as too weak to hold himself up by the bars in the prison cell. But suddenly Don Pepe was a national hero and the government could not “disappear” him. Instead Calderón exiled him to El Salvador, from which he made his way to Guatemala and then Mexico. Henrietta came along for the treacherous ride, carrying her toddler daughter and young son. During the next two years in exile, they ate badly and consorted with renegades and guerrilla fighters in the mountains: “What in the world am I doing here?” Henrietta asked, “I should be back in Birmingham working for a newspaper, going to the country club and just living a normal life of a Southern woman. Instead, here I was wandering through the mountains, scared out of my head, being shot at.” She survived and in 2011 at age ninety-three wrote a charming memoir of these harrowing years.9
Don Pepe plotted to return, even if it meant carrying a belt of machine-gun bullets under his poncho. He smuggled weapons back to Costa Rica, sneaked out for late-night meetings, and even dragged Henrietta along as a decoy while ducking out to pick up shipments of rifles. He said that “you can’t make chocolate (rebellion) without cacao (weapons).”10 Meanwhile in San José, Calderón formed a bizarre and unwieldy coalition including the Communist Party, fascist police thugs, the Catholic archbishop, and some feudal lords of the coffee plantations.11 In 1944 Don Pepe returned from exile and was permitted to form the Social Democratic Party, which gave him a platform from which to accuse Calderón and his successor, Teodoro Picado, of embezzlement.
At this time, all of Central America was inflamed and rebels of all stripes shared rifles and formed battalions that resembled the cast of The Dirty Dozen, including twenty-one-year-old Fidel Castro, who was pegged by the others as more of an egotist than a communist. Journalists called them the “Caribbean League.” During an attempted invasion of the Dominican Republic, secretly backed by Cuba’s president, Castro was arrested aboard a navy vessel, but jumped overboard and swam away.12 Don Pepe trained with a ragtag group of ex–World War II soldiers and in 1945 and 1946 schemed with some landowners and student revolutionaries to overthrow the Calderón/Picardo government. His soldiers practiced at his farm, called La Lucha Sin Fin (The Struggle without End). One of his allies, a former president, called Don Pepe the “war chieftain” and “loco.” Their tactics would include terrorism.
In the 1948 presidential election, Calderón ran for another term but lost narrowly. Street violence broke out, the building housing the ballots burned down, and his party annulled the election. Looters charged into the streets again. Don Pepe began his march to the capital, which had been shut down by a strike.13 Along the way his troops captured the cities of Cartago and Puerto Limón. They were relentless. Their opponents included Calderón’s army and the “mariachis,” a ludicrous mix of fascist and communist-leaning banana pickers from the lowlands who wore blankets over their shoulders to keep themselves warm in the hills. Two thousand people, most of them civilians, died during the forty-day civil war, which ended when Calderón stepped aside. Don Pepe took power as the leader of the “Founding Junta of the Second Republic of Costa Rica.” If he did not have blood on his hands, he certainly had gunpowder smudged on them. What would he do next, this hemp-farming, guerrilla-fighting, arms-smuggling rabble-rouser? And no matter what he did, could Costa Ricans feel proud about a government won by the ammo belt of a machine gun?
REFORMATION IN THREE ACTS
At the time Don Pepe took power in 1948, future Latin American leaders seemed to be getting fitted for camouflage (à la Fidel Castro) or called themselves generalissimo and dressed more like a doorman in front of the Plaza Hotel than a democratic leader. Don Pepe was done with epaulets, epithets, and guns. His first act as leader was to abolish the army. He symbolically knocked over a wall at Bellavista Fort and turned the keys over to the minister of education to establish a museum. Ever since that day, Costa Ricans have proudly quoted Don Pepe and boasted that they have more teachers than soldiers. When he announced to a crowd that he was abolishing the army (which was actually a small force), Henrietta asked the minister of public works why the audience was not applauding. He replied that they thought her husband must be crazy, since other Latin American leaders relied on the army to keep them alive. Don Pepe’s move was not motivated solely by charity. He knew that a standing army could just as easily murder him in a coup d’état as support him. By liquidating the army, he probably made his own position more secure. Still, his other reforms were just as striking. In his eighteen months as leader he gave citizenship to the children of black immigrants, enabled women to vote, guaranteed public education, outlawed the Communist Party, and put forth a constitution that was written in plain language. Then, most impressively of all, he escorted a properly elected president into the presidential mansion and returned home to his farm.
WALKING AWAY FROM POWER, RATHER THAN CLINGING TO IT
To walk away from absolute power—that is a test that has been passed only by remarkably confident leaders, starting with Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus was the Roman farmer-statesman who was plowing his field in 458 BC when panicked senators chased him down to ask whether he would take charge of the republic. Rome was losing key battles to rival tribes on horseback. The senate offered him the title “Dictator.” Cincinnatus accepted the title, personally charged Rome’s enemies on the battlefield alongside infantry soldiers, and won. Then he disbanded his army and gave up his crown. For fifteen days he had been dictator. He could have stayed for decades. About twenty years later, the senators chased him down again. Cincinnatus became dictator again, defeated a coup, and returned to his farm. George Washington twice gave up ultimate power, once after winning the Revolutionary War and again after resigning his presidency. Lord Byron eulogized Washington as “the Cincinnatus of the West,” and the American poet Philip Freneau composed this rhapsodic rhyme in Washington’s honor: “Thus, He, whom Rome’s proud legions sway’d/Return’d, and sought the sylvan shade.”14 They might have written a similar ode to the narrow-shouldered Don Pepe.
Here are the key questions: Were Don Pepe’s reforms merely a shrewd and temporary strategy to enable his power grab and allow him and his allies to survive their time in the presidential mansion? Or were they intended to permanently imprint a stable democracy on Costa Rican’s national culture? The evidence strongly points toward the latter. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Costa Rica was located in a very hazardous neighborhood. In the 1950s Nicaragua tried to invade Costa Rica. Thirty years later Sandinistas carrying Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47s took over Nicaragua and emblazoned the assault rifle in their artistic murals.15 El Salvadorans were plagued by death squads on one side and ruthless friends of Fidel Castro on the other. Manuel Noriega ran Panama like his own franchised drug dealership. In the decades following Don Pepe’s reforms, Costa Ricans had numerous legitimate reasons to rearm the military. But they passionately believed that Don Pepe had put them on a path that they should not veer from, despite dangers on either side of the narrow landscape. To this day, Costa Rica spends proportionately far less on security than most of the other countries on the continent. In less than ten years after Don Pepe took power, Costa Rica’s education spending climbed from about 3 percent of the budget to about 20 percent.16 When he rolled out a new cultural initiative, he asked, “Why tractors without violins?”
When I was a teenager I sent an op-ed to the New York Times entitled “Your Terrorist or Our Freedom Fighter?” (I never heard from the Times, but they really should have published it.) The essay argued that you cannot confidently identify someone as a terrorist or freedom fighter until after the questionable individual takes power. What do they do then? Do they build hospitals and schools? Or do they buy more tanks and machine guns? Do they try to institutionalize peace, or do they spread warfare internally and externally? Don Pepe, George Washington, and Mustafa Atatürk said he was a man of honor. But we could not believe it until after the bombs had stopped exploding. We had to wait and listen to hear whether the next loud blasts came from laying the bricks for schools, hospitals, and symphony halls. In the case of Don Pepe, yes, he had gunpowder on his hands when he took power. But in 1998 his proud constituents unveiled a bronze statue near the Bellavista Fort—the fort at which he knocked down a wall in 1948. In the statue, Don Pepe wears plain clothes. And his hands look pretty clean.
THE LEADER WORE SENSIBLE SHOES: GOLDA MEIR
Her Mission
• Sweating and working the land
• Embracing technology, but keeping emotional ties
• Creating a more mobile nation
• Defying chauvinistic men
She could have had a comfortable life in Milwaukee. She had a best friend, was valedictorian of her school, and in 1909 as an eleven-year-old organized a fund-raiser to buy books for poor immigrants kids. Richard Nixon would later joke with Golda Meir that though Milwaukee lost the Braves baseball club it was lucky to have had her and, Nixon added, “as a matter of fact, the Braves could use you as a pinch-hitter right now.”17 Golda Meir was no pinch-hitter lounging around in a clubhouse sauna until some late inning when the team was down and needed a hit. She slogged through just about every pitch and every risky play in Israel’s early history—the drought that sent farmers begging for drops of water; the gunshot that killed the driver sitting next to her; the British soldiers who blocked bedraggled Holocaust survivors from getting off ships and instead forced them back to detainment camps. She had the bags under her eyes to prove what she had seen, and when she was sworn in as prime minister in 1969, she already looked remarkably like the exhausted Lyndon Johnson who had just stepped down from the White House, give or take a foot and a half in height.
ATTITUDE, NOT LATITUDE
This section is not focused on the controversies of Israel’s numerous battles or its tense relations with Palestinians today. Instead, Golda Meir’s life gives us an opportunity to examine the following oft-told excuse for a country’s woes: “We do not have natural resources.” Golda frequently scoffed at the problem and admitted that it was hard to forgive Moses for dragging the Jews forty years in the desert only to bring them to the one place in the Middle East without oil. But these were laugh lines, not leadership strategies. She was gritty, undaunted, and unstoppable, as long as she got a meager four hours of sleep and a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. It is common for laypeople, historians, and even professional economists to get hung up on natural-resource worries. When I was a kid I would flip through atlases and feel a little envious that the USSR had not only more land than the United States, but also more gold and even bauxite. I didn’t know what bauxite was, but it must have been a good thing if Rand McNally put it on the map. Economics textbooks speak of “factor endowment,” implying that the stuff buried under the ground may dictate economic growth. Jared Diamond’s best-selling books direct us to ecological explanations for the rise and fall of nations: Eurasia was blessed with docile horses, but Africa got stuck with bucking zebras. Alpacas marched around Chile, but the Andes were too tough to climb so the Aztecs were denied lush wool and strong pack animals. When Europeans colonized the Americas, the Caribbean looked far more promising than the North American landmass, with Cuba’s and Barbados’s per capita GDP at least 50 percent higher than the American colonies’.18 Voltaire could not understand why France and England bothered to clash with Indians in the 1750s. Canada was just a country “inhabited by barbarians, bears and beavers,” and in Candide Voltaire sneers that Europeans were battling in a “beautiful war” over “a few acres of snow.”19 Some experts seem to look at countries as if they are model homes and care only about “location, location, location,” as if that determines economic health: “Australia is too far away!” “Look, Venezuela has oil!” Yet Australia is clearly a much wealthier place than corrupt Venezuela, even though it’s a twelve-hour flight away—after changing planes at LAX—and it was settled by exiled criminals. What matters most to an economy? Attitude, not latitude.
Golda Meir and the founders of Israel had the attitude to work hard and did not care very much what was under the ground or what was growing in the sand and rocks when they began. Mark Twain had been to Palestine and described a despondent wasteland:
Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective—distance works no enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.20
GROWING UP: POPCORN, HOT DOGS, AND COSSACKS
Golda had seen even rougher, less hopeful settings. She was born in Pinsk, Russia (now Belarus), at a time when Jews were either corralled into special precincts of fetid villages or huddled from pogroms perpetrated by the tsar’s soldiers and their marauding accomplices. When Golda was a little girl walking with a friend, a drunk peasant grabbed their heads and banged them together, saying, “That’s what we’ll do with the Jews.” She recalled that her father’s only weapon to protect his family was just a few planks nailed together. Moshe Mabovitch was a carpenter and by all accounts not a terribly successful one. The cupboards were bare and dinner consisted of a few spoonfuls of porridge. After a short and miserable stay in Kiev, Moshe did pull off one wonderful achievement: he figured out how to escape Russia and how to bring Golda, her mother, and her sisters to Milwaukee. Traveling was dangerous, of course, and required a visa. Merely the process of applying for a visa could stir up extortion (as if the family had anything to give) or kidnapping, especially for girls. When they arrived in Milwaukee, they were not alone. Hundreds of thousands of other immigrants lived nearby, including Russians, Poles, Germans, and Italians. The luxuries were slim, although the Schlitz Brewing Company apparently provided free steam baths. The immigrants learned American songs and cheered at patriotic parades, seemingly in a competition to see which ethnic group could come off as more Yankee than the next. Golda’s synagogue held special services on Thanksgiving, even though the Bible does not does mark the fourth Thursday in November as a particularly sacred day. Naturally, some scars of Russia remained. Golda remembered applauding on the sidelines of a Labor Day parade. “The brass bands, the floats, the smell of popcorn and hotdogs—symbolized American freedom,” she wrote. But when the police rode by on horses, her little sister began to “tremble and cry, ‘It’s the Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!’ The America that I knew was a place that a man could ride a horse to protect marching workers: the Russia I knew was a place that men on horses butchered.”21 Her sister was sobbing so loudly she had to be taken home and put to bed. Golda stayed.
Golda was headstrong and her mother griped that she was always talking. Her mother called her the kochlefl, the spoon that stirs the pot. Sometimes she stirred too much, as did her sister Sheyna, who was nine years older and spoke as if Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were whispering in her ears. Utopian socialism did not make much sense to Golda’s parents. Even more disturbing to the parents’ old-world ways, Golda and Sheyna demanded an education. Golda had to lodge her own personal protest just to get permission to attend high school. Her father wanted her to wear frilly dresses and tried to calm her down, confiding that “men don’t like smart girls,” and her parents suggested she work in a hat shop or maybe go to secretarial school.22 When she found out that her parents had already picked out an old man for her to marry (in his “early thirties,” Golda recalled), she erupted at the “Pinsk on the Milwaukee River” attitude and followed her rebellious sister to Denver.
It is not clear why Sheyna thought Denver would be the next hot spot for socialist dreamers, but the clean Rocky Mountain air helped her symptoms of tuberculosis and Golda found the social climate more progressive than her parents’ small clapboard dwelling. She listened in as Sheyna’s friends debated Lenin and Trotsky and discussed the early Zionists who followed the ideas of Theodor Herzl. Golda’s mother described Sheyna’s boyfriend from Denver as a “lunatic with grand ideas and not a cent in his pocket.” She would not have thought more of Golda’s boyfriend Morris Meyerson, who was a sign painter when he found work and the rest of the time a sensitive, underemployed admirer of Byron and Wordsworth. Golda told her best friend in Milwaukee, “He isn’t very handsome but he has a beautiful soul!” Morris made a romantic marriage proposal and sixteen-year-old Golda thought about accepting. But she had a different life plan from the one Morris proposed. He pictured the two of them alone and cozy together as a Victrola played a Brahms lullaby. She pictured them in Palestine digging trenches by day and sleeping in the barracks of a kibbutz at night, while fellow kibbutzniks stared down at them from their bunks. After some time Golda accepted his offer of marriage, but laid down one irrevocable condition: he would have to move with her to Palestine. Their marriage, which lasted until his death in 1951, never made much sense to anyone, including their children.
ESCAPING TO A BARREN PLACE
Zionists had been escaping Russia and Europe for the Holy Land for years, and Golda was ready to dirty her boots and help them. It took a long time to get there. In New York, she and Morris boarded a former cruise liner that had been turned into a US Navy transport ship during World War I. In the spirit of a famous heroine, it bore the name SS Pocahontas and its infamous and calamitous one-month voyage to Naples sounds like a Mafia potboiler. According to a contemporaneous New York Times report, the ship collided with a dock in Boston; two days later the engine room was flooded and a sailor who was accused of starting a fire on another ship was placed in irons.23 The next day a fire broke out at a generator and the electricians were placed in irons. The engineer was told to “remain in his cabin by the ship’s doctor, as he was suffering from nervous strain.” His body was later found overboard, his hands tied to a large pipe so he couldn’t swim. That same day a crewman was found with two hundred pieces of stolen silver; this was followed by the boiler mate being put in irons, along with the first and fourth engineers. By the time the ship made it to Naples, eight feet of water flooded the lower decks, and presumably Golda and Morris Meyerson were convinced that Palestine would be safer and more comfortable. When they teetered off the ship in Naples, they discovered that the Arab boatmen who controlled the transportation to the port of Haifa would not allow any Jews to sail. Golda and Morris had to sail to Alexandria, Egypt, and then find a way to get to Palestine by jeep, train, or camel.
When they finally climbed off the Palestinian Railway at the Tel Aviv station, they stepped into ankle-deep sand. They saw just about nothing. Tel Aviv was a few paved streets, the smell of donkeys, open latrines, blowing dust, and a mayor who rode around on a white horse.24 Golda saw one tree. They had no running water and shared an outhouse with forty other people. And yet this offered more privacy than the kibbutz they would try to join. I use the verb try because they were rejected at first. The kibbutz men thought they looked too soft and, besides, the kibbutz men would have preferred a single woman, not a married one. Some of the more ardent socialists believed that marriage was an oppressive legal construct. They finally relented when Golda proved herself by climbing up and unclogging a water tower. Golda went to work in an area the local Arabs called the Death Swamp. The latrine, four holes in the ground with no partition, was a quarter-mile walk from the barracks. They were told to plant trees, but the land alternated between marsh and rocks. In the summer work began at 4 a.m. because swarms of tiny flies attacked each afternoon. Workers would slather themselves in Vaseline to cover up, but insects would plug up their eyes, ears, and noses.25 Golda also worked in the chicken coops and tried to maintain some dignity by wearing a dress and stockings to Friday night dinners. The other women frowned on her attempts to appear less rustic.
SWEATING AND WORKING THE LAND
Let’s take a few moments to look at two intertwined themes for Golda, and for us today, work and land. As I discussed in chapter 4, work imparts dignity and it raises one’s individual standard of living as well as the community’s. But for Golda and the Zionists work did something else: it helped create a national culture and bound them to the soil. An early Zionist, A. D. Gordon, wrote that Jews are a “people without a country, without a national living language, without a culture.” Therefore he argued that Jews themselves must roll up their sleeves, sweat hard, and toil in the land, and not “let Ivan, John or Mustafa do the work, while we busy ourselves with producing a culture.”26 Sweat must be central to the culture. In 1934 David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister, told a Palestinian leader, “We do not want to create a situation like that which exists in South Africa, where the whites are the owners and rulers, and the blacks are the workers. If we do not do all kinds of work, easy and hard, skilled and unskilled, if we become merely landlords, then this will not be our homeland.”27 This line of thinking goes back to John Locke, who begins his treatise on property by quoting King David, and then states that whoever has taken raw nature and “hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own . . . thereby makes it his property.28 For the Zionists, planting, plowing, and harvesting would finally give roots to the long-pitied or despised wandering Jew. The Jewish National Fund extended this quest by launching in 1901 a worldwide, century-long campaign to plant trees and build reservoirs in Israel. Ben-Gurion said, “We must clothe every mountainside with trees, every hill and rocky piece of land which cannot successfully be farmed, the dunes of the coastal plain, the Negev.”29 When a child was born outside Israel, parents and relatives were asked to plant a sapling and a certificate would show an enduring link between the child’s name and the tree. In his book Landscape and Memory, British historian Simon Schama recalls his childhood memory of filling boxes with sixpence donations, which were commemorated by gluing small green leaves to a paper tree pinned on the wall:
When the tree was throttled with foliage the whole box was sent off, and a sapling, we were promised, would be dug into the Galilean soil, the name of our class stapled to one of its green twigs. All over north London, paper trees burst into leaf to the sound of jingling sixpence, and the forest of Zion thickened in happy response.30
Every nation and every national culture is ultimately linked to soil. President George H. W. Bush embraced an initiative to plant a billion trees, and when Queen Elizabeth II visited the White House in 1991 he invited her to help plant a small linden tree. In 1937, it turned out, the White House had planted two linden trees to honor the coronation of her father, King George VI. During a recent storm, one of those trees had been uprooted. Bush said, “I can think of no better way to show our friendship, nor salute the children of both countries than to plant a new linden tree.”31 I watched the ceremony from the lawn and the event became somewhat infamous because the advance men had forgotten to place a box behind the lectern for the queen to stand on. She was about a foot shorter than the president. So when she began speaking, the audience could see only her purple hat. The press photographers, waiting for their Pulitzer Prize–winning shot, began cursing in terms that you usually do not hear in front of Her Majesty. One more detail on royal protocol. A friend of mine who organized the event, a wonderful, spirited Yankee from New Hampshire named Emily Mead, called up Buckingham Palace to find out whether the queen would be willing to pick up a shovel. “Just a moment,” Emily was told. Then the chief protocol officer gave his pronouncement on this important matter: “Yes, Her Majesty will pick up the shovel. Two scoops.”
The call of terrain is as primordial as salmon returning to their spawning grounds and it shows up in high culture and low culture. Some of the most climactic and enduring scenes in literature call upon the spiritual strings that bind people to terrain. King Lear howls from the windswept, desolate heath about the birthright he has foolishly given away; Scarlett O’Hara returns to Tara, grabs a withered radish from a clump of earth, and declares, “I’ll never be hungry again! No, nor any of my folks . . . As God is my witness.” Even Dracula needs some soil from Transylvania if he’s going to sleep in his coffin. For the Zionists, it was clear: for two thousand years those in the Diaspora greeted each other, “Next year in Jerusalem.” In Hebrew, Arabic, and ancient Syriac the word Zion denoted Jerusalem. They would return to that same earth that had been waiting two thousand years, though it had been both trampled and tilled by Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, and Bedouins.
LAND OF ZION AND CLIFFS OF ALBION
Golda’s husband, Morris, knew that English poets had a strong tradition of tying land to folk fables and national culture. The Zionists thought that the British would be more decisively on their side and more passionately feel the millennia-old yearning for an ancient homeland. Let’s take a few paragraphs to connect the land, the people, and the literature of the British and the Zionists. In Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a man must reconcile himself to his inescapable memories of an enduring place that has not changed, though he has: “Of five long winters! And again I hear/These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs/With a soft inland murmur.” In Richard II, we hear of “this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty . . . This other Eden, demi-paradise . . . This precious stone set in a silver sea . . . this realm, this England.” It is so stirring that a few years ago British tourism officials used a voice-over of these lines for a television advertisement in the United States. But let’s read a little further for something very interesting. Later in John of Gaunt’s speech, we hear that those from this land are “Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry.” Remember that after World War I Britain controlled faraway Palestine through the so-called mandate. Echoing Gaunt’s words “far from home” British soldiers and civil servants were called to administer a troubled, brawling place. At first the Zionists were pleased and felt a kinship. In 1917 Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration, which “looked with favour” on a Jewish national home (while preserving civil rights for non-Jews). Britons had shown heroism in World War I; and later, during World War II, amid bombs landing in London living rooms, Britain proved itself the bravest, most chivalrous island in history (with the possible exception of Malta during the Great Siege in 1565). Ben-Gurion said, “I am amazed by the . . . inner confidence of this wonderful nation.”32 When Golda begged Americans to support Israel, she dramatically paraphrased Churchill’s stirring pledge to “fight on the beaches.” She promised that her people “will fight in the Galilee and will fight in the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end.”
The next line in the Richard II speech delivers a stunner: “As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry.” The line is not a blistering insult (in Exodus and Deuteronomy God calls the Israelites “stiff-necked,” so we can’t blame Shakespeare for plagiarizing from the best). But here is the irony in Shakespeare’s snub: the Zionists admired Britain for its unfailing devotion to its own island, for its bravery, and for its industriousness. Moreover, they trusted the 1917 Balfour Declaration. For these reasons, after World War II ended, Ben-Gurion and Golda were shocked to find that even after millions of Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, the British government stymied straggling escapees from reaching Palestine. Instead, soldiers forced starved survivors into detainment camps or pushed them onto ships like the Exodus, which was ordered back to Germany with forty-five hundred souls. The British foreign minister Ernest Bevin was particularly infuriating. During the Holocaust, the Colonial Office contended that Palestine was not large enough to take Europe’s Jews. After the war, when the number of Jews had been slashed by 6 million, Bevin still did not think it was the right place and refused President Truman’s request to allow even 100,000 refugees into the territory (in 1938 the Dominican Republic had pledged to accept 100,000). Bevin simply did not believe that Jews could constitute a nation, viewing them as just another religion. Bevin’s colleague, MP Richard Crossman, challenged him and assured him that “these people are going to fight like a nation.” Bevin replied, “Well, then they aren’t Jews.”33 But their history, their book, their stories, and their working the land had transformed them into a viable nation.
In fact, throughout the 1920s and 1930s when Golda Meir and her kibbutzniks were digging trenches and trying to plant trees, various European foreign policy experts suggested that the Jews were digging in the wrong place. A new homeland, they suggested, would be better placed in Uganda, the pampas of Argentina, or Manitoba.34 Meanwhile, in 1934 the Soviets tried to create their own model Jewish homeland beyond the pale of the Pale in a Siberian district called Birobidzhan, not far from China. The pogroms in cities like Kiev and Odessa had been so bloody that thousands of Jews willingly trekked across the entire six-thousand-mile Soviet landscape to get to this remote place, which sounded like a zoo for a truly endangered species. Today, the place still has some menorahs and a statue of the Fiddler on the Roof. One recent visitor compared it to Jurassic Park.35
During the 1920s and 1930s the Zionists planted, plowed, and heaved the tractors and economy into forward gear. Golda had said that one of her first sights in Palestine was a plow on an Arab farm being pulled by two individuals: one was a woman; her yoke-mate was an ox. Golda did not apologize for ruining the romantic rural image by replacing the sore and fatigued livestock (human and nonhuman) with tractors and combines. Pulling the capital stock from tenth-century to twentieth-century standards made a difference. Real per capita income jumped 160 percent between 1922 and 1935 and the number of telephone lines multiplied fourfold between 1931 and 1933. Between 1921 and 1939 agricultural and manufacturing output multiplied fifteenfold on Jewish-owned lands. There was likely some positive spillover, for Arab-owned properties in Palestine doubled their output. These extraordinary improvements may have induced other Arabs from Egypt and elsewhere to migrate to the newly fertile areas in Palestine.36 The pioneers and kibbutzniks had no choice but to innovate and conserve natural resources. If a new tool could yield more apricots or almonds and do so without breaking the back of a picker, it was deployed. After the State of Israel was declared in 1948, the speed of innovation grew even more rapid. With scarce freshwater supplies, Israelis tried drip irrigation, keeping humidity in by covering fields with plastic, and creating hybrid plants. At the same time, they sought out European markets for export, especially in the wintertime. Jaffa oranges became a symbol of Israel, and Tel Aviv became the Big Orange, in a nod to New York’s moniker, the Big Apple.37 For the last few years the state of California has suffered through a drought and residents have been told not to water their lawns and to set a timer for their showers. In 2015 a desalination plant opened in Carlsbad, just north of San Diego. The billion-dollar plant is designed to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water each day, enough to fill three Olympic-sized pools in less than an hour.38 Seventeen other plants are being constructed in the state. An Israeli company called IDE has led the California project, using technology developed in the Israeli desert many years ago.
CREATING A MORE MOBILE NATION
Golda began traveling outside of Palestine to raise funds for this new, yet old nation. In her meetings with American diplomats and citizens she insisted that planting a tree is not simply a matter of botany—it is building a nation and bringing freedom. It might sound counterintuitive, but trees even bring mobility. In a speech in New York in 1935 she reported that young “idealists have to come to dry the swamps of Hadera and plant . . . eucalyptus trees. Now those trees have grown and they make Jewish ships.”39 Remember Golda had sailed on the mutinous SS Pocahontas, only to be told that she had to sneak into Palestine by first taking a choppy boat ride to Egypt. To her the sound of a “Jewish ship” launched into the crashing waves of the Mediterranean in Haifa was like the toll of the Liberty Bell to the founding fathers in Philadelphia. Ships, which bring self-reliance and freedom, began as saplings in the desert.
DEFYING CHAUVINISTIC MEN
Of course, not all the desert bloomed, and Golda did not lose her ability to be impressed by barren terrain. In 1946 she visited her daughter at a kibbutz in the Negev. “I thought I was going to die,” she said. “For miles around, there was nothing, not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a bird, nothing but sand and glaring sun.”40 Male Zionists could be macho and chauvinistic, but they needed the labor of women, too. If a woman was not sturdy enough to dig up rocks for a vineyard or help pave a road under the searing sun, she would be directed to one of the women’s associations to build and maintain tree nurseries.41 Golda refused to be relegated to the women’s section of any task or meeting. One cannot underestimate the psychic and even physical courage it would have taken to continuously barrel through the gender barriers of pioneer builders and politicians. The comedian Jackie Mason joked that the first time he visited Israel he thought the Israeli men looked so tan and macho, he was sure they were Puerto Ricans. Golda became a key adviser to Ben-Gurion, who later called her “the best man in my cabinet.” She had no trouble confronting men and, prior to a meeting with her, a British commandant received a warning from his colleague: “Mrs. Meyerson is a very formidable person. Watch out!”42 When Israel declared independence in 1948, Golda was one of the original twenty-four signers and said that she cried, thinking it was unimaginable that a girl from Pinsk and Milwaukee could be in the middle of something so important. Ben-Gurion asked his cabinet to take on Hebrew names, to further create a bridge between them. His surname had been Green. Golda changed Meyerson to Meir. Then he made a subtle choice in the wording of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Unlike the US Declaration, the Israeli version does not mention God. The US Declaration begins by honoring “Nature’s God” and ends by asking for the protection of “Divine Providence.” Wait a moment. After two thousand years of pining for a new Jewish state and tucking prayers into the cracks between the stones of the Wailing Wall, Israel’s founding document would not honor God? Ben-Gurion insisted (and Golda agreed) that Israel must be a place even for nonbelievers and devout secularists. In place of a clear reference to “God” or “the Almighty,” the founders substituted this phrase: “The Rock of Israel.” The phrase “Rock of Ages” is found in both Jewish and Christian hymns (and in a Broadway musical from 2009). In the Declaration, the “Rock of Israel” may refer to the Bible, or to God’s promises, or perhaps to the very soil that Ben-Gurion and Golda had tilled, plowed, and harvested.
After the signing, there was no time to celebrate, though, for the Arab states immediately declared war. Ben-Gurion asked Golda to oversee the defense of Jerusalem, acquiring arms and distributing food. She imposed daily rationing, just three ounces of dried fish, lentils, macaroni, and beans. She got by on virtually no sleep. She frequently had to run the gauntlet from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, as bullets sprayed across the roads. One day while bullets strafed her bus, she covered her eyes. “What are you doing?” a companion asked. “I’m not really afraid to die, you know. Everybody dies. But how will I live if I’m blinded? How will I work?” A few days later her bus was ambushed while careening around a curve just outside Jerusalem. The man next to her died of a bullet wound, in her lap.43
NIXON AND THE KINGS OF JORDAN
For all her courage and headstrong attitude, strong, smart men found her appealing. Richard Nixon, despite all his unseemly psychological complexities, admired Golda and showed the rarely seen warm side of his personality. When she served as prime minister and it came to hard-nosed military matters, Nixon overrode Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to fulfill Golda’s requests. In the midst of the surprise 1973 Yom Kippur attack, Kissinger dithered as Egyptian forces crippled Israeli air force jets with new Soviet antiaircraft and antitank missiles. Nixon finally ordered: “Look, Henry, we’re going to get just as much blame for sending three as if we send thirty or a hundred . . . so send everything that flies.”
Even more fascinating than her relations with Nixon were her close ties with the kings of Jordan, Abdullah and his son Hussein. She would secretly meet with them for frank and friendly conversations. Just before Israel declared independence, she snuck to the Jordanian border, put on a black dress and veil, and rode with the king’s driver to a safe house in the hills. The king asked, “Why are the Jews in such a hurry to have a state?”
“We’ve waited two thousand years. That’s not my definition of a hurry.”44
Later during her years as prime minister, she developed a strong personal bond with Abdullah’s son, King Hussein. In 1970 he requested that Golda direct the Israeli air force to destroy Syrian tanks massed on Jordan’s border. Hussein would sometimes sneak into Israel to see Golda, piloting his own helicopter and landing at a rendezvous point near the Dead Sea. Just days before the Yom Kippur War in 1973 the king flew his Bell helicopter to a Mossad safe house to warn her of a possible and imminent attack.45 Although he sent a brigade to join the Syrian army, he informed Golda and promised that his soldiers would walk slowly.46 She and Hussein both regretted that he did not have enough sway to hammer out a broad Israeli-Arab peace agreement. Heavy losses in the 1973 war pushed her out of the prime minister’s position. Four years later when Anwar Sadat made his courageous trip to Israel in 1977 and told a cheering parliament that “we really and truly welcome you to live among us in peace,” Golda waited in the receiving line, wishing only that Sadat’s visit had come during her years as prime minister.
A year after Sadat’s visit, Golda Meir died at age eighty of lymphatic cancer. She left behind deserts that bloomed and she kicked into the dustbin of history the idea that a nation is only as strong as the stuff in the ground. It is the stuff that people are made of that matters most.
The year 1948 was a monumental one, a year when two leaders of two vastly different countries ignored handy excuses and instead took action that would instill new pride and patriotism in populaces that had been cowering—fearful of bullets, poverty, hunger, and a deadly geopolitical neighborhood.