As Golda Meir once said, Israel never had a better friend than Richard Nixon, who rescued her nation in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But the Richard Nixon the author recalls was not blind to the forces of history. He used to say, “A statesman must take the long view.” In San Clemente once, after he hung up from a courtesy call from Yitzhak Rabin, a friend we had met in Israel days after the Six-Day War, my wife, Shelley, asked the ex-president what the prospects for Israel were. “The long run?” Nixon responded. He extended his right fist, thumb up, in the manner of a Roman emperor passing sentence
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