Triple First: Maurice Zinkin

Writing about Abba Eban the other day, I mentioned his academic distinction—a Cambridge triple first. Can anyone match it? The answer is “yes.” Apparently there are two other Cambridge triple firsts. One is Neal Ascherson, the Scottish journalist. The other is Maurice Zinken.

Ah—Maurice who? Exactly. He doesn’t even rate a Wiki entry. But count on the obituary editor of the Telegraph to take his measure. Here’s the account from May 28, 2002:

Maurice Zinkin, who has died aged 87, excelled as an administrator in British India, where he endured malaria, a broken back and the shock of having his stand-in shot dead during the Partition riots; he later made his mark as an industrialist and author.

Zinkin entered the Indian Civil Service in 1938 with one of the highest marks ever recorded in the ICS exam; before that, he had graduated from Cambridge with a Triple Starred First.

He began as a Supernumerary Assistant Collector, touring the remote tribal lands of the Bhils on horseback, collecting revenue and enforcing law and order over an area a third of the size of Wales.

Life in the ICS was formal: even when on the move and sleeping in tents, Zinkin would bathe each evening in a tin tub filled with water heated by kerosene, then put on a dinner jacket. "Helps to keep up morale," he explained in a letter to his future wife. "It is so easy to let oneself go if one does not keep up appearances."

Each morning, after a cup of tea in bed, he was dressed by his bearer - until his wife Taya (nee Ettinger, later India correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, Le Monde and the Economist) put a stop to it after the war.

During the war, while in charge of his own subdivision, Zinkin suffered 19 bouts of malaria in two years, an ordeal he carefully omitted from his letters home. The quinine caused shaking and depression, and while riding along he took to dreaming in Marathi, the local language, waking up every time he did not know a word.

Later, in Bombay, he fell from a horse and broke two vertebrae, entailing six months in a plaster cast which began below the shoulders and ended above the knees. As head of air raid precautions for the city, he nonetheless insisted on doing his work in hospital, flat on his back, holding his files above his head. In the humidity, the itching was almost unbearable; maggots under the cast contributed to the torture.

Around this time, he was responsible for the admission of the first woman into the Secretariat, when he recruited as one of his assistants Miss Salukhere, an orphaned Brahmin graduate who later married an ambassador.

Maurice Zinkin was born on May 4 1915 in Leeds and grew up in London. His father, who owned a furniture factory in Hackney, died when he was nine. His grandfather on his mother's side was Rabbi Daiches, Chief Rabbi in Leeds. From Haberdashers' Aske, he won a scholarship to Jesus, Cambridge, to read History and Law. After graduating, he stayed on for three years as a tutor before sitting the ICS entrance exam.

Eban got his own Telegraph obit six months later on November 18 when he, too, died at the age of 87.

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)

Mini-Review: Abba Eban

To celebrate the 40^th Anniversary of the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war, I’ve been holed up most of the last couple of days reading the Autobiography of Abba Eban. And I come away a believer: he’s got to count as one of the first-tier political figures of the modern age, fit company for Churchill and deGaulle.

This is a strong claim for a guy who never served as head of government, or even head of state, and who does not rate much attention in standard histories of Israel in his time. But I think I can justify it. What Eban did was to define a nation, both to the world and (perhaps to a lesser extent) to itself. He had a clear notion of what it meant to be Israel, a notion which he stuck to with persistence and defended with skill and guile. But at least as important, he articulated that vision with almost unparalleled rhetorical skill. Israel’s founding narrative has plenty of heroes, but I doubt that there is any single person—no not even David Ben Gurion—who did more to establish the identity of the new state.

Happily (for it is a long book) his fluency and magnetism come across as well on paper as they seem to have registered in the General Assembly of the United Nations—so much so that after a while you forget you are not listening to a real person; you want to say: “Abba, this is wonderful, but shouldn’t you go back to take your place on the world stage? Oh—you’ve been dead for five years, sorry, my bad.”

Eban had a set of qualifications that peculiarly equipped him for his job although in other ways it may have served also as a limit. Among the first generation of Israeli leaders, he was virtually the only one who was not either Israel-born, or directly from Eastern Europe: he had grown up in London, where he learned Greek and Latin at day school, Hebrew from his grandfather. He went on to Cambridge where he achieved what may be the best academic record in the history of the school—a triple-starred first—plus a dazzling record as a student debater. His particular skill was languages: it is said he was fluent in ten of them in all, including Arabic (he translated an Arabic novel into English). Indeed it was the breadth of his cultural background that prompted London Zionist leaders to pluck him out early for diplomatic work.

After service in colonial Palestine in World War II, he threw himself into Zionist work full time and found himself, almost by accident, in New York at the UN as the man charged to introduce the new state of Israel on the world stage. Indeed skeptics will say that his entire career sums up in a handful of speeches. This isn’t true, but if it is true, it is true in the same sense as it is true for Churchill or Lincoln: a few speeches at the right moment can change the course of history.

Eban’s fall in that class. But like Churchill and Lincoln, he in fact did a great deal more than speak. Indeed Eban proved indefatigable in his off-stage diplomacy, establishing himself with virtually every important world leader and saving Israel’s bacon (okay, poor choice of words) more than once in his tumultuous career.

Eban worked at the UN through the founding of Israel in 1948, and on through the ill-fated Suez adventure in 1956. He moved back to Israel in 1959, hoping to find a place in domestic politics. In fact, his important work continued to be his role as Israel’s public face, which he assumed again in and around the Six-Day War in 1967, and again in the disastrous Yom Kippur War in 1973. Aside from that, he never quite made it to the top rung of national politics. Indeed he remarks in an aside, that there are any number of important diplomats who have proven more effective abroad than at him: he no doubt understood that the class might include itself.

Eban recounts all this in detail that is exhaustive to a fault, sustained by the drive and vigor of his prose. Yet one can’t help be haunted by the stark fact underlying every discussion of Israel: contrary to what we all seem to have thought at the time, the place was not empty when the Israelis got there, almost everything the Israelis have accomplished has had to be scratched unwillingly from somebody else.

This fact is inescapable. But the devil is in a thousand details, and we can imagine one, a hundred, a multitude of Israels, each different from the one we have and many uglier and less inviting. It is no small part of Eban’s achievement that he helped to define Israel at its (at least) potential best.

Eban’s book (and, in large measure, his political career) ends just about when “modern Israel” begins—with the advent of Likud, and the quarrel over continued occupancy of Gaza and the West Bank. It’s vain to speculate on how things would have been different if he had been present at Madrid, at Oslo, at Camp David, whatever. One can’t help but believe that it would have been different somehow: indeed by his own account, from the day the 1967 War ended, Eban understood that the real job was to win the peace—to use the military victory as the basis for a sustained and lasting resolution of conflict in the Middle East. And we’re not there yet.

Source: Abba Eban, An Autobiography (1977)

Background and framework: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy (2007)