Abba Eban on Just About Everybody

One of the many delights of reading Abba Eban's Autobiography (see previous post) is to imbibe his aphoristic judgments on just about everything and, more notably, just about everybody. Here's a selection:

Israel Sieff [a Zionist worker in London] was more relaxed, and seemed to have been invented by lexicographers in order to justify the existence of the word “urbane.” (66)

Herbert Evatt of the UN Special Political Committee: His self-confidence was absolute. Behind his abrasive exterior lurked an abrasive interior. He never allowed his resolution to be blunted by any confession of fallibility. . . . He did not suffer fools—or, for that matter wise men—gladly. He expected deference and was seldom inclined to regard any praise of himself as excessive. (91)

Harry Truman: I had not expected his air of self-reliance. I had imagined more diffidence and reserve. It seemed that the experience of winning the election in his own right had transformed his demeanor. I have always been willing to accept the New Testament prediction that “the meek shall inherit the earth,” but I have often wondered whether, having inherited it, they would continue to be meek. (156)

John Foster Dulles: He was a complex personality, physically shy and clumsy, but full of intellectual self-confidence. He was able to pass from moral elevation to an extraordinary deviousness and back again with little visible transition. He was marked by a thin and achromatic spirituality; but whatever was thought of him, I knew that nobody would count as much as he in determining our international position for the next decade, and I was resolved to find a way into his mind and heart. (175)

Dulles again: He was already famous for his nomadic impulse. He founded the tradition according to which diplomatic eminence is measured by air mileage. (194)

British Foreign Minister George Brown: He had no excess of false modesty. He sincerely believed that there was no middle ground between George Brown’s views and plain stupidity. (437)

Henry Kissinger: I felt that if he wanted to sell us a car with a wheel missing, he would achieve his purpose by an eloquent and cogent eulogy of the three wheels that remained. (562)

On Israeli public figures, making speeches in the runup to the 1967 war: If there had been a little more silence, the sum of human wisdom would probably have remained intact. (319)

And finally, on Jewish history: Many things in Jewish history are too terrible to be believed, but nothing in that history is too terrible to have happened. (333)