Special Section: CRISIS AND CONFRONTATION

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imagination. Television was inconceivable. Paradoxically, their physical reach was likely to be accompanied by an impoverishment of the imagination. My generation had been brought up on books, which force the reader into conjuring up his own reality.

My children's reality was being presented to them on television screens; they could absorb it passively. Yet they lived in a world in which journeys of hundreds of millions of miles were determined by an impetus given in ten seconds, and were then in large part unchangeable.

For better or worse, I thought I was now one of those who had the power to provide an initial impetus, making future gen erations into passengers on journeys they had not selected. If our aim was wrong, even the most skilled navigator would not be able to correct it. We had to find a trajectory toward a world where no one had ever been; but we also were in danger of hurtling toward a void. Our most important decisions would be whether to start a journey, and the crucial quality we needed was faith in a future created in part through the act of commitment.

Golda Meir

She was an original. Her childhood in the Russia of pogroms and her youth as a pioneer in the harshness of Palestine had taught her that only the wary are given the opportunity to survive and only those who fight succeed in that effort. Her craggy face bore witness to the destiny of a people that had come to know too well the potentialities of man's inhumanity. Her occasionally sarcastic exterior never obscured a compassion that felt the death of every Israeli soldier as the loss of a member of her family. Every inch of land for which Israel had fought was to her a token of her people's survival; it would be stubbornly defended against enemies; it would be given up only for a tangible guarantee of security. She had a penetrating mind, leavened by earthiness and a mischievous sense of humor. She was not taken in by elevated rhetoric, or particularly interested in the finer points of negotiating tactics. She cut to the heart of the matter. She answered pomposity with irony and dominated conversations by her personality and shrewd psychology. To me she acted as a benevolent aunt toward an especially favored nephew, so that even to admit the possibility of disagreement was a challenge to family hierarchy producing emotional outrage. It was usually calculated.

Mrs. Meir treated Secretary of State William Rogers as if the reports of his views could not possibly be true; she was certain that once he had a chance to explain himself, the misunderstandings caused by the inevitable inadequacy of reporting telegrams would vanish; she then promised forgiveness. As for Nixon, Mrs. Meir hailed him as an old friend of the Jewish people, startling news to those of us more familiar with Nixon's ambivalences on that score. But it gave him a reputation to uphold. And he did much for Israel if not out of affection then out of his characteristically unsentimental calculation of the national interest.

Fast-Food Fan

During one Nixon visit to Europe, the President of Italy gave a luncheon in the tower room of the Quirinal Palace, overlooking the lush roofs and beautifully proportioned squares of the Eternal City. In this glorious setting, because of Nixon's tight schedule, an exquisite meal was served in about