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Rabin had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was not one of them. If he had been handed the entire U.S. Strategic Air Command as a free gift, he would have (a) affected the attitude that at last Israel was getting its due, and (b) found some technical shortcoming in the airplanes that made his accepting them a reluctant concession to us.
Up in Smoke
A presidential visit to the Vatican in 1970 led to one of those scenes that are comic in retrospect but mortifying when experienced. Our advancemen had conceived the extraordinary idea that the President should leave for the Sixth Fleet from St. Peter's Square in a U.S. helicopter. The Curia, feeling that this represented enough martial trappings for one day, suggested that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird not be included in the audience that the Holy Father would offer. However, as the official party was moving into the papal chamber for the general audience, Laird, a politician of considerable ingenuity, suddenly appeared, chewing on his ubiquitous cigar. Asked what he was doing there, he mumbled something about looking for the helicopters, though it was not clear what he thought these might be doing inside the Vatican when they were so conspicuously parked in St. Peter's Square. I urged Laird at least to do away with the cigar.
The group was placed in two rows at right angles to Nixon and the Holy Father, who were seated side by side. The Pope was making a graceful little speech when suddenly smoke came pouring out of Laird's pocket. To quell the fire caused by his cigar, he started slapping his side. Some of the others whose angle of vision prevented them from grasping the full drama of the Secretary of Defense immolating himself in front of the Pope took Laird's efforts at fire extinguishing as applause, into which they joined. Only wisdom accumulated over two millenniums enabled the Vatican officials to pretend that nothing unusual was going on.
Charles de Gaulle
When he visited Washington in 1969 for President Eisenhower's funeral, he was the center of attention. At the reception tendered by Nixon, other heads of government and Senators who usually proclaimed their antipathy to authoritarian generals crowded around him. One had the sense that if he moved to a window, the center of gravity might shift, and the whole room might tilt everybody into the garden.
Nixon and De Gaulle met in the Oval Office. There was about De Gaulle a melancholy air of withdrawal, of already being a spectator at his own actions—a harbinger of his imminent retirement. He called to mind a story told by West Germany's Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger on the basis of which he predicted that De Gaulle would not serve much longer. According to Kiesinger, De Gaulle had said Franco-German relations: "We and the Germans have gone through a lot together. We have traversed forests surrounded by wild animals. We have crossed the deserts parched by the sun. We have climbed peaks covered by snow, always looking for a hidden