Ehud, Fidel, and Me

Jerusalem was gray on the March morn­ing, twelve years back, when I met Ehud Olmert. He was the newly-​​installed mayor of the city then, not the country’s act­ing prime min­is­ter. But like now, he was fol­low­ing a leg­endary fig­ure — Teddy Kollek, who had run Jerusalem for nearly thirty years, and built a big chunk of what we know of the city today. The con­sen­sus was that Olmert would never escape his predecessor’s out­sized shadow.
A fam­ily friend, tight with the Likud party, had set up a meet­ing at the end of a month-​​long trip to the Middle East. I did my best to look respectable for the occa­sion, shak­ing out the wrin­kles and dust out my backpacker’s clothes. I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­ful.
Olmert nod­ded to me from behind his desk as I was ush­ered into his expan­sive, airy office. Then he took a puff of a long, black cigar. It was about 8am or so, not nor­mally when you think of peo­ple light­ing up. I told him I liked his style.
“Oh, these? Fidel gave them to me last month. I have boxes of them,” he said, reach­ing into a drawer, and hand­ing me a fist­ful. “Here, take.“
We started ban­ter­ing. He struck me as bright — very bright — and mega cyn­i­cal. He was sus­pi­cious about the hand­shake deal between Yizthak Rabin and Yassir Arafat that I had seen a few months ear­lier on the White House lawn. And he wanted every scrap of infor­ma­tion he could get about Hillary Clinton.
But the cigar is one of the few specifics from the encounter that still comes through clearly. That, and Olmert’s con­fi­dence. Other folks may have been doubt­ing the new mayor’s abil­i­ties. Olmert told me that morn­ing that he’d be prime min­is­ter one day.
After about twenty min­utes, it was over. I took a walk down Yaffa Street. And lit up one of my new Havanas.

January 9th, 2006 | Blog Bidness | 30211 Comment »http://defensetech.org/2006/01/09/ehud-fidel-and-me/Ehud%2C+Fidel%2C+and+Me2006-01-09+05%3A03%3A45jason You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.