Golda's Odyssey

After their three days of talks with Israeli Premier Golda Meir, Richard Nixon and his aides could only be impressed by her single-mindedness. She came to Washington to seek jets and arms, but not peace through compromise. Outwardly, the Premier is the archetypical, haimisheh (homey) Jewish grandma. In fact, as she amply demonstrated on her visit, Golda Meir is among the toughest, ablest and most zealous Zionists who ever lived. She repeatedly discounted all U.S.-Soviet efforts to find a solution to the dangerous Mideast crisis.

Even after leaving Washington for a cross-country odyssey last week, Golda took every opportunity to press Israel's hard line. During a Zionist youth rally at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, she scoffed at those who ask "us to give something to help Nasser. He's been humiliated," she said. "Somehow I just can't bring myself to feel too sympathetic."

Jewish Vote. When a reporter mentioned a rumor that she was going for a medical checkup before returning to Israel, she said: "It's nothing serious. A touch of cancer here, a little tuberculosis there--you name it." Then she disposed of the rumor with one of her favorite words: "Nonsense!" At a kosher affair for 2,500 held at the Brooklyn Museum, she even did a little campaigning for hard-pressed Mayor John Lindsay, who desperately needs the Jewish vote to win re-election next month. Golda called him "my good friend John," and wished that "I had Mayor Lindsay's eloquence to tell what is in my heart tonight."

From New York, the Premier's El Al Airlines jet (christened by the crew "Golda a Go-Go") winged westward to Los Angeles. At a star-studded formal dinner, Jack Benny explained that he was acting as toastmaster "only because Bob Hope is a gentile." Golda, who is not a moviegoer, was a bit uneasy in the receiving line--unable to quite sort out the Kirk Douglases from the Rita Marrows. She realized that film stars and politicians have inflated egos, and that not being recognized is, for them, the crowning insult. Later, TIME Correspondent Leo Janos, who traveled with Mrs. Meir, asked how many of them she had recognized. "Only Robinson," she admitted. "What is it? Edward Robinson. I met him in Israel."

After one day in Los Angeles, Mrs. Meir flew to Milwaukee to visit the Fourth Street School. When Goldie Mabovitch was eight years old, her family emigrated from Kiev, Russia, to Milwaukee. The three-story brick school, which she attended for six years, is physically almost unchanged. However, it is now in the center of the city's ghetto, and all the students are black.

They had prepared for two weeks for the visit, and when Golda entered the school's auditorium she was greeted by black children wearing paper hats topped by the Star of David. The proud principal presented her with a scrapbook, which included a report card from Goldie's seventh-grade class. The grades were all in the 90s, but the teacher complained that young Goldie was something of a chatterbox.

As the Premier was about to leave the auditorium, the children began to sing--in Hebrew--Shalom Chaverim (Peace, Friends). Obviously moved, Mrs. Meir ignored her security guards and plunged into the audience, shaking children's hands and hugging many of them. On the return flight to New York, Golda recalled Milwaukee not so much for her life there, but for what it led to. "That was the city," she said, "where I made the most important decision of my life." That decision was to move to Palestine in 1921. Since then, the establishment of a safe haven for Jewry has been her life's only ambition. As one of her aides put it: "When her husband proposed to her, she made marriage conditional on their moving to Palestine. He promised that they would, but later he wanted to return to America. So she divorced him."

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