Special Section: CRISIS AND CONFRONTATION

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55 minutes —proving to him that one of his obsessions was clearly capable of fulfillment. For nearly two years his associates had heard him complain about the ineffable boredom of state dinners. He had cajoled and threatened to speed up the serving of White House meals in order to reduce the time he had to spend in small talk with his visitors. He had given personal attention to those courses that expedited service, and those that might be eliminated altogether. On some occasions he had even arranged for the interpreter to arrive late, as a means of cutting down the time for conversation. But the fastest service he had ever attained, even under the merciless prodding of H.R. Haldeman—the world record for White House dinners, so to speak—was an hour and 20 minutes. The Quirinal luncheon set a new standard that he never permitted the White House staff to forget. Alas, like many Roman achievements, it proved impossible to emulate. Even Haldeman could not succeed in reducing the White House service by more than another ten minutes. The Quirinal retained the speed-in-serving championship by a good 15 minutes, to the perpetual and vocal annoyance of the President.

Shah of Iran

History is written by the victors; and the Shah is not much in vogue today. Yet it hardly enhances our reputation for steadfastness to hear the chorus today against a leader whom eight Presidents of both parties proclaimed—rightly—a friend of our country and a pillar of stability in a turbulent and vital region. He was not by nature a domineering personality. Indeed he was rather shy and withdrawn. I could never escape the impression that he was a gentle, even sentimental man who had schooled himself in the maxim that the ruler must be aloof and hard, but had never succeeded in making it come naturally. His majestic side was like a role rehearsed over the years. In this he was a prisoner, I suspect, of the needs of his state, just as he was ultimately the victim of his own successes.

The Shah was—despite the travesties of retroactive myth —a dedicated reformer. He was "progressive" in the sense that he sought to industrialize his society; one of the prime causes of his disaster, in fact, was that he modernized too rapidly and that he did not adapt his political institutions sufficiently to the economic and social changes he had brought about.

Basically, the Shah was applying axioms of all the more "advanced" literature of the West. Political stability was supposed to follow from economic advance; it was assumed by many Western economists, and believed by the Shah, that the government that raised the standard of living would thereby gain public approbation. This theory proved to be disastrously wrong. Wise is the ruler who understands that economic development carries with it the imperative of building new political institutions to accommodate the growing complexity of his society. It cannot be said that either the Shah or his friends possessed this wisdom; but neither did his enemies.

Yitzhak Rabin

Except for his intelligence and tenacity, he was an unlikely ambassador. He had been a hero of Israel's war of independence, and as Chief of Staff of Israel's defense forces, he was an architect of the victory of the Six-Day War. Taciturn, shy, reflective, almost resentful of small talk, Rabin possessed few of the