September 1973
Now General Moshe Lev is here, and I have just taken him to the White House mess. That’s the juicy part of the privilege, getting to bring guests there. Lev telephoned me from the Israeli embassy, and said he wanted to talk to me about Sandra, so I invited him to lunch. Lev was not as bowled over as the Pells. He found himself elbow to elbow with the Vice President at the next table, and he murmured to me, with a narrow side-glance, “That’s him?”
“That’s him.”
His little headshake expressed eloquently how military men feel about most politicians. The Vice President was chatting cheerily, now and then laughing out loud, blithe as a skylark. A short week or two ago this man was a heartbeat away, as the newspapers love to put it, from the most powerful political office on earth, and from command of the world’s most awesome air force, armed with enough hydrogen bombs to wipe out the human race; and there he sat, skidding out of office for taking petty bribes, with every prospect of landing in the penitentiary. His color was good, his laugh genuine, his bearing altogether jocund. The President looks much worse. Maybe once things are hopeless a man can laugh again; it is clinging to an eroding hope that sickens the soul.
It’s quite a perquisite, at that, the use of the White House mess. The navy runs it, so it’s a smart and tidy eating place. Its main function, however, is to feed not stomachs but egos. The White House staff can be divided roughly into those who have mess privileges and those who don’t. Those who don’t are employees, menials, ciphers, who keep their egos inflated to working pressure by casually telling people, “Give me a ring at the White House.” Those who have access to the mess may be nobodies too, like me; but the excluded nobodies make us feel like somebodies.
***
The mess privilege was granted to me a few days after I got back from Israel, a spin-off of my surprising new intimacy with the President. I do very little honest work here otherwise these days. Arts-and-culture liaison has been languishing, since artists and cultured folks are avoiding the Executive Mansion like a cancer ward; and he makes few speeches, as he hunkers down to try to survive the typhoon howling over his head. At the moment, besides the nasty exposé of the Vice President, he is sweating out the wait for a court decision on the tapes. I am not writing about Watergate here, I am keeping that historic insanity out of these pages with great exertions of willpower. I am simply placing in time the strange development that has made me a confidant of the President.
This new status began, as I say, with my return from Israel, and it caused a bit of marital infelicity for a while. Jan and I jogtrot along in harness amiably through the days and nights, but lately I’ve been getting an acerb needle whenever I venture an affectionate pass at her; thus, “Are you sure, dear, that you won’t be hearing from the President?” The night I got back, you see, she welcomed me with unusual demonstrativeness, for her; we opened a bottle of champagne, and a warm connubial reunion was in clear appetizing sight, when the telephone rang. President’s secretary: if I wasn’t feeling too jet-lagged, could he see me right away? Well, off I went, leaving Jan in her lacy negligee with half a bottle of champagne. When I came home hours later she was fast asleep, or giving a brilliant imitation of it. I clattered and thumped around, hoping to rouse her and collect that sweet reunion. No soap.
The President was impatient for Golda Meir’s reply. “Amazing woman,” he said, nodding gravely at the verbal message. “More balls than most men around here.” He asked how my mother was. My description of our meeting at the airport really tickled him. “Sounds like my own mom,” he said. “They don’t come like that any more. Real moxie.” He was sitting in a small air-conditioned room, with a fire going in the fireplace. That’s one of his many peculiarities. He loves to sit and think by a fire in all seasons. If it’s too warm for a fire—and it was above eighty outside, a heavy Washington summer night—he just refrigerates the place and has his fire anyway.
He began to reminisce about his mother. The inevitable clipboard with the yellow legal pad, on which he marshals his ideas, was turned down on his lap. He seemed to be warding off with chitchat the reality that glared from those yellow pages. He talked and talked, and we had a few drinks. Color returned to his wan face. His filmy eyes took on life, and he rambled all over the place, loosening up as the time passed. About two o’clock he came around to the subject of Israel again. Between jet lag and the booze I was getting droopy, but he shocked me awake with some secret and disturbing things he said, about the way Eisenhower and Johnson behaved during Israel’s wars. I can’t go into any of that, but I have to note one paradox. Not only have the Jews never liked this man, never trusted him, never voted for him; throughout his career they have shown solid hostility to him, led by the journalists, the academics, and the famous writers and performers. This is one President who owes the Jews nothing. Yet unless I am more wrong than I have ever been on any subject, he is a friend such as we have not had in the White House since Truman.
Oh, yes, he can toss off phrases like “All those eastern Jews and intellectuals,” which can jar you. He is a friend none the less. He thinks Israel and the Jews have “moxie.” I’m not saying that he likes us, or that if realism dictated it, he wouldn’t let Israel go down the drain. He is a wholly cold customer. Acts are what count, and his acts so far have been helpful. Jewish history, if not the chic Jewish set, judges rulers by what they do about Jews.
Since that night he has taken to summoning me at odd hours, just to sit around and talk. This must be the way he relaxes with those bizarre millionaire cronies who ride around with him on the Presidential yacht. And I’m handier. I’m right here in the White House, at his beck and call. He does not ask my advice on his crushing problems. In fact, we scarcely talk politics; I say “we,” but he does the talking. I am a congenial, and he thinks a trustworthy, ear. “You can wear that, uh, yarmulka of yours,” he once said to me as I was pouring refills for both of us, “if you feel more comfortable with it on.” He was plainly pleased with himself for knowing the word.
My study of the Talmud really is what got to him. He as much as said so. He feels he has struck in me some kind of exotic paragon of integrity, probity, and discretion. Of course it is absolute hogwash, but there you are. I am just another Wall Street tax lawyer, as devious, scheming, and self-seeking as the rest. He is far too impressed by a Talmud volume and a skullcap. I have known Talmud experts who gossiped like washerwomen, and whom I wouldn’t trust with my telephone number.
I’ve read that Hitler used to blither for hours every night to his entourage at Berchtesgaden, until they were collapsing from boredom. The President doesn’t bore me, at least not yet. He has had an interesting life. He does get a bit soppy about his family, especially his mother and his daughters, but I am a family man myself. I can put up with that. If by chance, just by sitting and listening to him ramble, I relieve this strange, isolated, very withdrawn person of some of the pressure that’s destroying him, well and good.
I feel no shred of affection for him. He does not invite affection, being so utterly knotted up and shut in on himself. Yet I more and more discern, as he opens up, a keen pragmatic intelligence, which only makes his ham-handed Watergate blundering all the more incredible. What fatal flaw nullified all the “moxie” which raised a penniless loner to the White House? So I often wonder, as he sits there by the fire in a refrigerated room, bending my ear for no earthly reason but to get his mind off the Philistine temple he has pulled down on himself, now falling, falling, falling in on top of him, in agonizing slow motion.
***
But about General Lev. He is a little man. He looks shorter than my sister Lee. To my knowledge they have not met since their romance forty years ago. Still, I can understand her taking to him.
The Herz family tree has branches in America, Israel, and South Africa. The Germans got the grandfather, his wife, and all of their children—there were eleven—except for three sons who emigrated, much against their father’s will, back in the early twenties: one to Tel Aviv, one to Cape Town, and the third to New York. To that extent the family survives. Grandfather Herz had strongly objected to his sons’ leaving Poland, fearing they might become less religious.
Like Mark, Moshe has a thatch of thick hair, but his is white, not grizzled. They don’t look much alike. Tall as Mark is, and hale and wiry as he has kept himself, I suspect Lev could break him in half. Past sixty, Moshe Lev looks poured out of pig iron. His manners are abrupt, like most Israeli army men’s. He is mild in conversation unless it turns to military matters. Then you get clipped sentences of hard authority.
He told me a lot about himself in such clipped words. I knew he was one of the most rabid doves in Israel, advocating returning the Sinai to Egypt, and setting up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I didn’t know much of his background. He was a fighter pilot in the 1948 War of Independence; far too old, but they weren’t fussy then. He was a sport flyer when Lee knew him. During World War II he went to Rhodesia, volunteered for Britain’s Royal Air Force, and flew in combat against the Germans. He walks with a slight limp, because in 1948 he had a leg maimed in the crash of a Spitfire. The machine was assembled from pieces of scrapped planes the British left behind in Palestine, and it wasn’t very good. When the ever-trustworthy French suddenly stopped selling Mirage fighter planes to Israel—slapped on an embargo, just when the Egyptian dictator, Nasser, mobilized and announced he would annihilate the Jewish State—the Israelis decided they had better build their own fighter plane, the celebrated Kfir, the “Young Lion.” Lev was in on designing and producing the Kfir. And that is a quick rundown on General Moshe Lev.
I did not ask him what he was doing in Washington. He volunteered not a word. We talked a bit about Watergate, which, like most Israelis, he finds a puzzling tempest in a teapot. My prediction that the President would fall saddened him. “Who knows what kind of guy you’ll get next?” he said, with another quick glance at the jolly man at his elbow. “He has been very good on your foreign policy, you know. Very shrewd.”
“Invading Cambodia to capture rice bags?” I said, in suitable low tones. “Bombing civilians in Hanoi and Haiphong? Shrewd?”
“How do you stop a war you didn’t start,” inquired Moshe Lev, “when your people decide they’re sick of it? And your enemy knows they’ve lost the will to fight? And you have half a million men to get safely off a continent ten thousand miles away? And thousands of prisoners to recover? And an ally right there on the ground who won’t fight? It was a mess. He hadn’t made the mess, but it needed drastic action, and he acted.”
“I thought you were a dove,” I said.
Moshe gave me a quizzical look. “That’s a stupid newspaper expression.”
“Maybe you should meet him,” I said. “He can use a kind word.”
“Him?” Lev shrugged. “Not him. He’s a tough guy. Your daughter’s not for him, you know. Mention his name, and she hisses and spits. If she had fur, it would stand up.”
“Sandra holds nothing but strong opinions.”
“Naturally. She’s very Jewish.”
An odd thing for him to say, I thought, considering Sandra’s attitude toward Israel, her refusal to go to Hebrew school or to have a bat mitzva, and her bypassing of all the rules at home as soon as she was too big to be spanked. To give you an idea: for years Sandra has been eating on Yom Kippur. Says she won’t be a hypocrite. Shades of Yisroelke rolling his sleeves up and down! Jan and I talked that out long ago and decided to do nothing about it; a sapient conclusion, since there was nothing we could do but lock the girl in a closet all Yom Kippur, or clamp a dog muzzle on her.
Moshe Lev seems fond of Sandra. His tone about her is amused and warm. When I met him at the kibbutz he remarked that at first sight Sandra had shocked him, she looked so much like my sister Lee. He did not refer to Lee again, but that one time there was a wistfully wicked glint in his eye. I will never know, of course, what went on forty years ago, but it must have been something.
“I tell you, though,” he now said, turning somber, “if there’s anything you can do about it, make her come home. And if you can’t do that tell her to go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.”
“She seems to like it at Fields of Peace.”
“She has no combat training,” Lev said. “These American volunteers are good for kitchen work and sorting oranges. That sort of thing. If there’s trouble, they’re in the way.”
“Are you expecting trouble?”
He looked at me without words.
“Israel is sitting pretty,” I went on uneasily. “At least that’s my informed belief.”
“It’s the informed belief in Israel,” said Moshe Lev very abruptly, “up to and including the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense. Well, now I can tell my grandchildren I’ve eaten in the White House. Thank you. I have to get back to the embassy. By the way, where did you say your sister lives?”
“Port Chester,” I said.
“Port Chester. That’s New York, isn’t it?”
“New York, yes.”
“Does she have grandchildren?”
“Three.”
“I have four. Well, give her my best.”
Oh, Lee, poor Lee! The glimmering glint in old General Lev’s eye!
***
Yes, poor old widowed Lee! All knotted up with arthritis, all gray, smoking three or four packs a day of unfiltered Camels, living alone in that big house in Port Chester, except when Mom “drops in” for a few weeks or months, or her married sons turn up with their wives and their runabout progeny. God in heaven, how beautiful she was when she first met Moshe Lev! But oh, that series of catastrophic boy friends before that, all of whom I remember: how they looked, the way they danced, the way they held their cigarettes or pipes, the times I came on them smooching with her in a hallway, or on a sofa, or—well, never mind, never mind, it was all so goddamned long ago. Most of them must be dead. What a parade of schleppers, though; what a wringer Lee put herself through! But the master schlepper of all was Frank Feitelson. If not for Feitelson, Lee would not have met Moshe Lev, and we might never have made the grand and fateful move to Manhattan.
When Lee graduated from Hunter and Mom and Pop offered to send her abroad, surprise! She was no longer interested. After four years of trying to get this Frank Feitelson to marry her, she thought she had him boxed in. At first Feitelson had pleaded that he had to finish medical school; then, that an intern had no time for marriage; then, that he had to save up for an X-ray machine before he could open an office and support a wife. Unbeknownst to my parents, Lee had offered to take the money for her trip and buy Feitelson the X-ray machine. Ha! She was trying to corner a greased pig.
Mama knew a slippery shoat when she saw one. For years she had tried to convince Lee that Feitelson was not a desirable doctor-husband. At last, evading Lee’s offer to buy the X-ray machine, Feitelson slid squealing through her clutches again, and so she sadly let herself be shoved aboard a boat to Europe. A year later, mind you, when Lee returned from her encounter with Moshe Lev, Dr. Feitelson came crawling to Lee, snivelling and grovelling, telephoning her at midnight and so on, and finally offered to marry her, even without her buying him an X-ray machine! Despite this magnificent concession, Lee told him to get lost, and must have enjoyed doing it.
Actually, a move to Manhattan was as yet hardly within Pop’s means, though his income was up. He was still supporting Bobbeh, Zaideh, Uncle Yehuda, and Aunt Rivka. He also had to keep sending money to Uncle Velvel. Blights repeatedly hit Velvel’s orange groves, and with each blight he would hint that maybe he should try growing oranges in California. Any serious suggestion that Uncle Velvel might leave Palestine was always good for a fast thousand from my father. So, though Mom for years had been yearning to move to Manhattan, Pop was still resisting the costly plunge.
Also, Pelham Parkway was a five-minute drive from the laundry, and Manhattan would take an hour. At forty or so, Pop was slowing down. I’d been in the car with him when he’d pull over to the side and park to catch his breath. When we walked to the synagogue on Saturday, he would halt often on the way. The doctors said the shortness of breath was due to his irregular habits, and lack of exercise and vacations. Pop was not quite as hot as he had been to ensconce Mama in Manhattan grandeur; not just yet, anyway. What changed his mind, swiftly and radically, was a letter from Uncle Velvel about my sister Lee.
Lee was never a good correspondent. Since her departure we had received one postcard from her in London, and another from Rome. She had been due in Palestine in November. Late in January Mom frantically cabled the American consul in Jerusalem to track her down. Back came a cable next day: AM WELL NEED MONEY LEE. So they sent her money, and heard nothing more until they got this letter from Velvel. Next thing I knew, they were apartment-hunting in Manhattan. Velvel had written them—I pieced this together from their anxious confabs in Russian—that Lee was involved with a married man. There was nothing they could do about it, six thousand miles away, but they made up their minds that when she returned, it would be to the best Jewish neighborhood in New York. Their beautiful but unlucky daughter would make a fresh start on Manhattan’s West Side. No more Feitelsons!
One Sunday I went downtown with them, and was startled by the size, elegance, and opulence of the flats they were looking at. Good God, I thought, can Pop afford this? He appeared worried, too. But Mama bubbled. Times were bad, and these luxury apartments were going begging. There was a wrinkle in the lease called a “concession”; the landlord let the tenant in rent-free for the first few months. When Mom figured out the year’s rental, why, it cost less to live on West End Avenue than in our Bronx apartment, at least the first year. Mama wasn’t looking beyond that. These apartments hypnotized her.
As it happened, one of the flats we inspected was not only in Randy Davenport’s building; it was the very apartment. Randy’s mother opened the door a crack in the same one-eyed way, and let in the rental agent and us with a silent bleak air. There was no mistaking that stained-glass window in the foyer, or the manner and look of this woman. The frozen-faced curmudgeon in a crimson velvet jacket, reading the Sunday Times in the big gloomy living room crowded with old furniture, had Randy’s long jaw and thin mouth. So the Davenports were moving, and were pretty sullen about it, too. They didn’t acknowledge our presence by a smile or a look or a word. Even Mama was chilled. We got out of there fast. When we were out on the street Pop said, in as bitter a tone as I ever heard from this amiable man, “Mi hutt g’zen di penimer (They saw the faces).”
Pop signed a lease for an awesomely large and handsome flat in a West End Avenue building above Ninety-sixth Street, across the street from a big temple. Occupancy, September first. The rent was more than twice what we paid on Pelham Parkway, but Mama got an unheard-of nine-month concession. She was in seventh heaven. Why, we were saving money by moving to Manhattan; and Lee would meet some worthwhile young fellows at last!