Yitzhak Rabin, of Blessed Memory : Israel: A Washington insider remembers the slain prime minister as a man who earned his country’s trust.

Since the death of Yitzhak Rabin, commentators have said he was central to the Mideast peace process just as Richard Nixon was central to U.S.-China rapprochement: The war hero Rabin was so clearly dedicated to his country’s security that Israelis trusted him not to endanger them in seeking agreement with the Palestinians.

Rabin was a hero of the 1948 War of Independence and the commander who led the capture of the West Bank in 1967. But it wasn’t simply his military exploits that prompted the trust. It was the common knowledge that this was a man utterly without sentimentality or self-delusion.

I first met him in Israel in the summer of 1969. He was Israel’s new ambassador to Washington and had now come home to report to his government.

This was my first trip to Israel. I had come from the Soviet Union, where I attended the Moscow Film Festival and was given a confidential message--the State Department insisted that I memorize it--warning Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that the Soviets intended to be intransigent in maintaining their military aid to Egypt. My errand was in fact a teaching exercise: President Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger were training me to be the White House’s back-channel courier to the Israelis. I perceived this only dimly. I was largely uninformed about Mideast complexities, a Rosencrantz without even the companionship of a Guildenstern.

Having delivered my secret news to Mrs. Meir (she knew it already, of course), I was introduced to Ambassador and Mrs. Rabin. We met for an open-air fish dinner in ancient, fish-famous Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv. The winds were soft, the setting exotic. Rabin’s beautiful wife, Leah, dominated the conversation. She was witty, warm and strong. Many years later, with world attention focused on her mourning, she would publicly hold the leaders of her husband’s political opposition responsible for his death. I was not surprised at her fierceness.

Rabin, at that Jaffa dinner, was physically unprepossessing. He chain-smoked more than he talked. But his pedestrian aspects paled before the extraordinary force of his blue eyes. They glared impersonally, like headlights, when the conversation turned ignorant, they searched the room for alternative objects of attention. He had an extremely expressive mouth, which collaborated with the eyes and eyebrows to convey critical judgments that he preferred not to put into words.

The “war of attrition” with Egypt was then heating up the skies over Israel. Yet I remember our mood as relaxed and even carefree--perhaps because our later meetings were often tensely grim, involving some attack or other on Israel’s paper-thin security.

For all Rabin’s taciturnity, his closest Washington colleague, and one of his most beloved friends, had a radically different temperament. This was Shlomo Argov, Rabin’s deputy at the embassy. Argov was my friend, too, and my most frequent liaison with the Israelis. He was voluble where Rabin was tight-lipped, visibly passionate where Rabin was self-contained. Argov later became Israeli ambassador to Britain. During the 1982 war in Lebanon, he served as Israel’s most eloquent, powerful defender to the world. He was shot in the head by an Arab terrorist outside a London hotel. Surgery saved Argov’s life but not his mind, which was almost wholly destroyed.

I saw Rabin soon afterward and asked about Argov. Rabin didn’t speak. His face flushed, his eyes filled with tears, and he bent his head, trying to gain control of himself. It was the most open display of emotion I had ever seen in him. After some seconds, he was again the matter-of-fact soldier. “Those British surgeons,” he said with his characteristic shrug, “did not do Shlomo any favor.”

Rabin was the same single-minded soldier when I saw him in later years. Once, when he visited the United States as prime minister, I somehow ended up heading a delegation of American businessmen that met with him. As they made their pitches, he gave me a look that, from long acquaintance, I recognized. It said, “Lenny, what are you doing with all these rich men? You don’t know or care any more about economics than I do.” Another time I was in Israel with a group calling on Rabin to sell him on the joys of infrastructure development. He gave me the look again. “Get me jobs,” he said. “Some dress factories.” Then he sat back, eyes glazed, blowing smoke at the ceiling.

Few Israelis could have been in doubt about what drove Rabin to pursue peace. Everyone knew that it was not because he was too tired to fight; everyone knew that it was not because he had become an optimist or experienced a surge of affection for Yasser Arafat. Rabin came slowly, reluctantly, empirically and unavoidably to the belief that Israel’s future required the large calibrated risk involved in creating an Arafat-led de facto Palestinian state. People trusted Rabin because they knew that this opinion sprang from calculation as clear-eyed as it can be in a human being.

Having reached this conclusion, he pursued the strategy it entailed with as much toughness and unsentimentality as he showed in waging his wars. In this, too, he was a hero. He has more than earned his own time of peace.