IT IS TO JOB, and the French minister of culture Jack Lang, that I owe my encounter with François Mitterrand. And it is because of René Bousquet, organizer of the infamous roundup of Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris, that we went our separate ways.
Philippe Nemo, one of the young right-wing “new philosophers” who later reproached me for my friendship with President Mitterrand—who, as everyone knows by now, had a right-wing past and a left-wing future—had written a book on Job. Having also read my own commentaries on that particular biblical figure, he proposes to interview me for the radio station France-Culture.
Nemo is referring to my Célébration biblique, published in the United States as Messengers of God, and we agree to devote a series of broadcasts to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. And what we imagine happens in fairytales comes to pass. An important political person listening to his car radio hears a few thoughts about Jacob, the weakest, the palest, the most awkward, the most malleable of the Patriarchs, until he became Israel. The future president of France finds it an original way of approaching the Bible. He likes it. He listens to several broadcasts, obtains all the cassettes, then decides to offer another set to his longtime friend Charles Salzman, but is told his supplier has just run out of stock. Of the author, he knows only one book, the witness account The Jews of Silence.
During the electoral campaign of 1980, Lang, matchless as an intellectual and artistic impresario, learns of the Socialist candidate’s interest in me and invites me to one of his debates, the real purpose of which is to illustrate François Mitterrand’s impact on the outside world. I am quite aware that this initiative is not an innocent one: The elections are looming on the political horizon. As an American citizen I should not get involved. But I play the game.
The first meeting takes place at the house of one of his friends. We exchange a few words. There are too many people around us. Never mind; next time.
Next time will be at the Élysée. And I shall return there often.
I welcome François Mitterrand’s victory as an act of justice.
There is joy everywhere. The capital is festive, especially the Place de la Bastille. Socialism is being celebrated. There is singing and dancing in the streets. The Socialist victory has turned people’s heads. Some go so far as to hiss the outgoing president as he leaves the Élysée—a regrettable lapse of tact.
Celebrations are in progress both at the Arc de Triomphe and at the Pantheon, where Roger Hanin, the actor and President Mitterrand’s brother-in-law, is directing the ceremony. The newly elected head of state stands in solitary but regal splendor before the crypt of the heroic résistant Jean Moulin.
From outside, the sound of pouring rain. Bareheaded, the new president listens, motionless, to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Hoping to please his new boss, a future minister sends a message to the young maestro: Couldn’t he conduct a little faster? I go back to the hotel drenched to the bone.
Mitterrand wishes to receive me the following day. I am flattered and tempted, but I cannot delay my return; I am scheduled to spend the weekend at Yale. A pity. It’s not every day that one is officially declared to be a “friend of the president.” But the people at Yale wouldn’t understand. Would there ever be a next time?
Once established, the contact proves solid, fruitful. Mitterrand insists that I come to see him every time I’m in Paris. When I tell him of my hesitation to disturb him, he answers that he always has time for his friends. I see him again a few months later, during a Sorbonne conference. He scolds me: “I know you come to Paris often, but you don’t call me.” I promise to call the next time. And I do, certain that I shall run into one of those barriers behind which the great and not-so-great of this world hide. But to my surprise, I’m told he will receive me that same day.
The man, as much as his power, intimidates me; I feel ill at ease. At first I answer his questions evasively; I need time to overcome my inhibitions. But little by little I feel free to speak. I like the way he listens and smiles.
We sometimes lunch together in his private quarters at the Élysée. He is interested in the complicated laws of kashrut: Why is one meat ritually pure when another is not? Why are Jews forbidden to mix meat with milk? What is the difference between biblical commandments and their rabbinical interpretations? And again and again, he asks, what does Jewish tradition say about the immortality of the soul?
Our relationship grows more intense. I have also become fond of his wife, Danielle. Gracious, sincere, she has convictions and knows how to share them with others. Her activities on behalf of human rights have won her admiration and affection. The president often feels he has to explain her absence at the table: “She’s off somewhere … in Latin America,” or, “She is in Africa.” I’m often too taken by the conversation to eat. So this is how it works: When the president eats, I speak; when he speaks, I listen. He takes an interest in my activities; he asks about Marion’s, too. He invites me to accompany him to Normandy for the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of D-Day. I would give much to go with him, but June 6 falls during the festival of Shavuot. (He will renew his invitation for the fiftieth anniversary, and this time I’ll accept.) I explain our festivals. His interest in everything that touches the Jewish religion—and religion in general—is genuine. We sometimes spend hours discussing related subjects. He would make an excellent professor of religious studies and of literature, possessing as he does a profound grasp of both the classics and modern works. His quotations are always perceptive. And he’s rarely wrong. He knows his biblical texts: Jacob amuses him, Moses intrigues him, and Jeremiah irritates him: “First this prophet demoralizes his people, then he snivels about its defeat.” He calls him a “very ambitious thunderer, ambiguous in his relations with the Babylonians.” It so happens that I like the author of Lamentations. This leads to endless discussions that I propose to end by consulting the text, hoping thus to rehabilitate in his eyes this man from Anathoth who moves me so. “Some other time,” says the president.
Usually, according to a tacit agreement, we avoid touching on French domestic politics. On the other hand, we often discuss Israel. His admiration for David Ben-Gurion and Yigal Allon, the former chief of the Palmah; his respect, with some reservations, for Menachem Begin; his affection for Shimon Peres. Though he disagrees with Yitzhak Shamir’s policies, which he considers extremist, he nevertheless remarks that if he were Israeli he might act similarly. He stresses the fact that he has never referred to the “occupied territories” but to the West Bank; “occupation” for him, too, is a word with specific connotations.
His visits to our home in New York have left unforgettable memories. The first time, he arrives from Washington, where he has been on a state visit to Ronald Reagan. The chairman of the telephone company calls in person to inform us that a special line is to be installed for the exclusive use of our guest of honor. The French later tell me that this line will connect him with the French army’s strike force, just in case. Amused and slightly worried, we ask to have the instrument installed in Elisha’s room, among his toys. And when I show Mitterrand the supersecret telephone’s location, I tell him that if it rings I am thinking of answering: “Sorry, wrong number.” I am not looking forward to having World War III start in my apartment. The guests we have invited are happy; the other tenants in our building are not: The security agents have closed the street and taken over one of the elevators.
For every one of his visits, we invite intellectuals—artists, journalists, writers, professors—to meet him. He likes their company more than that of politicians or diplomats, and he, in turn, always impresses them with his eloquence and erudition. People tend to compare him—favorably—to other Western heads of state. His preeminent standing in cultural affairs, in France as well as abroad, is unchallenged.
We rarely, if ever, discuss my writings. When I offer him my most recently published book, the conversation invariably revolves around its implications rather than its theme. If it’s a novel, we talk about literature in general. An essay on the Talmud? We discuss the Talmud’s complexity, its capacity for synthesis, and the magic of its style. A book on Hasidism? The subject draws him into a comparative analysis of various forms of mysticism.
One evening he invites me to dinner not in his private apartment but in a restaurant. But which one? He reflects a moment and decides: Le Train Bleu. A quarter of an hour later, we’re there. Two bodyguards sit at the next table. I ask him whether he isn’t worried about security. “What could happen to me here?” he answers. “How could a terrorist prepare an attack here, since I myself didn’t know a half hour ago where we would dine?” He didn’t realize, I was told later by Pierre Joxe, his interior minister at the time, that some twenty Internal Security agents were scattered among the customers. A fatalist, François Mitterrand?
Here is something that may surprise some who knew him better and longer than I: I never heard him say anything derogatory about his opponents, even in the midst of the electoral campaign or during the first cohabitation, which surely was painful for him. Of course, he did not cover them with compliments either, and I could tell when he did not like this or that person—his face would cloud over abruptly. But he rarely used his sharp sense of humor to wound.
Still, I know that he could be severe, unfair, even merciless with anyone stupid enough to annoy or cross him. He had no tolerance for contradiction. He was incapable of ever admitting that he might be wrong on any subject. A saint he was not; far from it.
That he loved gossip, political and other, became evident only when we were not alone. In his entourage, official and private, there were always people whose company he enjoyed because they knew how to entertain him with funny tales about public figures.
I like his simplicity—which is genuine. At the beginning of his seven-year term, he went home every evening to his apartment on the Rue de Bièvre. The Élysée, he explains, is only a workplace for him, an office for dealing with affairs of state.
For many, his most appealing trait is his intelligence. For others, it is his tenacity. For me, it is his loyalty to friends. Those closest to him repeat this to me often enough: Friendship for him is more important than anything else, the only thing that matters. I am told he never lets down a friend, even when the friend is wrong. That pleases and touches me. Of course, that was before …
My notes are full of impressions of our encounters. Of course, as is usual for me, every time I walked into the Élysée Palace, I remembered where I came from and wondered in what possible way a former yeshiva student from Sighet could interest the leader of France and one of the world’s great men. Probably too respectful and certainly more than awkward, I let him go on indefinitely without ever interrupting him. Even when we had our dialogues—I’ll return to that subject a little later—I chose to make him talk rather than to express myself. I liked listening to his confidences, to his analyses of the workings of high international politics. The man intrigued me. I saw in him a living symbol of the Resistance. Whenever I left the Élysée, I felt that I had been close to a leader with great impact on current events, and I would rush to the Bristol to jot down his every word in my diary.
Some of the questions:
God? “I’m an agnostic.” A strange agnostic, fascinated by mysticism.
Nuclear peril? It preoccupies him, of course. I say: “Let us imagine the following scenario: Your red phone rings; it is late at night. A general informs you that the Soviets have just launched a nuclear missile in the direction of France; it will hit its target in seven minutes. What will you do? Whom do you call first? On what basis will you decide to give the order to respond?” Silence. I insist: “Do you know now what you would do then?” He says very quietly, “Yes, I know.” And he immediately adds: “But I also know that we must do everything to prevent this from happening.”
Israel? Israel holds a crucial place in his political philosophy. He knows the country that according to him belongs more to history than to geography. Israel, for him, is the land in which the Bible and its characters still live and communicate with one another. For him it is the place possibly inhabited by God, and certainly by Abraham, David, and Ezekiel.
The Middle East conflict? The historical claim of the Jews on the one hand, and that of the Arabs on the other, the tragedy of two peoples bound to the same—largely arid—soil. “What is evident,” says Mitterrand, “is that over these last centuries the Arabs have settled there; therefore it is their country too.” That is his view of the “incredibly confused” situation in which we live today: “two peoples, two Gods, two religions, two prophets all crowded into one small land.”
Israel, a political challenge? For Mitterrand it transcends politics. Politics deals only with the present, albeit with an opening toward the future; Israel defines itself by its past as well. Israel is Jerusalem, and Jerusalem signifies the ineffable. One day, contemplating what he might do at the end of his mandate (he was then finishing his first seven-year term), he formulates a sort of wish, a hope: “I’ll go to Israel, to Jerusalem…. I feel like spending some time there … perhaps I’ll do some writing…. It’s one of those places that arouses all kinds of aspirations in me. It’s not the only one, but it may be the one that brings together the most spiritual, intellectual, historical, and political elements….” I tell him that all my life, since my earliest childhood, I have done nothing, in a way, but sing of Jerusalem, the light, the luminosity of Jerusalem. He responds: “Everything in that region is intensity. Not only Jerusalem. One must wonder about all those peoples who, over centuries and centuries, have been burned by faith…. As though each stone contained a force, as though there were explosive atoms with religious characteristics…. It is a land scorched by passion.”
What is it that fascinates him the most: the people, the country, or the history of Israel? Perhaps it is the destiny of Israel. Everything Jewish arouses his interest. The Jewish attitude toward death and toward the stranger. What Judaism says about suffering. The role of Exile in our tradition. Is there such a thing as specifically Jewish ethics? Can one be Jewish outside Israel, or against Israel? Can one be a Jew outside the Jewish community? And anyway, what exactly does it mean to be a Jew?
He has his own ideas about all these questions. So do I. Often they are not the same.
In preparing my “dialogues” with François Mitterrand in 1988–1989 and again during the summer of 1993, I plan to keep the theme of memory for the end. Memory in regard to the Holocaust, that is. We had often spoken of World War II and even of the death camps, but not of Vichy and Pétain. That was before the heartbreaking—and for me at the time, incomprehensible—report of the wreath he chose to lay secretly on Pétain’s grave. And before the publication of Pierre Péan’s revelations about his connections with the Vichy regime. The deportations, the death camps, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising—he told me that he knew about them at the time, through the underground press. But what about Vichy and the complicity of the French authorities? How was one to understand his measured views of Vichy and his silence about Pétain? I hoped he, a former member of the Resistance, would explain it all to me one day. I still didn’t know about his own past at that time. It was well before the Bousquet affair.
Until September 1994, our most serious disagreement had to do with Yasir Arafat’s visit to Paris. I had picked up warning signals a few weeks earlier and had confided them to an Israeli friend, who in turn hastened to inform Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who refused to believe him: “How can President Mitterrand receive Arafat when he has just welcomed me so cordially?” Shamir was naive. A more seasoned diplomat would have understood the connection between the two events, the policy of “evenhandedness.” Mitterrand most likely had received him so cordially as part of the groundwork for the invitation to Arafat.
Whose idea was it? Jacques Attali acknowledges that it was his during a painful discussion over dinner, in the presence of Marion; his wife, Elizabeth; and his publisher, Claude Durand. And why? To start things moving in the Middle East, to exert pressure on the Shamir government; for Israel has to be saved in spite of itself. Because, for Attali, Israel embodies the Book, the triumph of the spirit, the power of its ethical message. His brand of logic leads him to say that if he had to choose between the State of Israel and the Book of Israel, his choice would be easy. Out of concern for justice and truth I must specify that all this took place during the Intifada. According to him, Israel was in danger of losing its soul—and I my credibility, if I did not publicly denounce Israel.
Later on, Attali told me that he had had mixed feelings about the visit of the PLO chief, and that he had had trouble coping. He told me that on that day, which happened to be the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust, he had put on a black tie.
What is certain is that Mitterrand had been encouraged by Jewish (and non-Jewish) intellectuals to reach out to Arafat. They probably told him that since a number of Jews, Americans and others, were meeting with Arafat, why should he continue to boycott him?
As for me, for personal and objective reasons, I do not agree. I feel Mitterrand is making a mistake, which could well harm Israel and the Jewish community and himself as well. To the journalists who try immediately to get my reaction, I do not hide my disappointment: “As far as I can tell, Arafat does not yet deserve to be received at the Élysée. There is still time to cancel the invitation. If the president considers it useful to strengthen the relations between France and the PLO, that is his right. Let the minister of foreign affairs negotiate with Arafat, or the prime minister. But not the president of the republic….” My words, however respectful and cordial, reflect my disenchantment. Nor do I have any illusions: Our friendship is at stake. One of his close aides suggests I come to Paris to speak to Mitterrand, as friend to friend. I ask: “And if I succeed in convincing the president, will he cancel the invitation?” The answer: “No, it’s too late. Arafat is coming.” I stay in New York.
I write these lines toward the end of 1995. Meanwhile the Rabin-Arafat handshake has altered the image and role of the Palestinian leader. This citizen of Gaza, president of the Palestinian National Authority, is now considered a moderate by public opinion. For the government of Shimon Peres he was the only valid interlocutor. The terrorist of yesterday has become Israel’s ally. Fine. I support with all my heart their policy of reconciliation and their aspirations to peace. Nevertheless, I still think that Arafat’s visit to the Élysée was a mistake. The head of the PLO, with his bloodstained past, with his charter that stipulates the annihilation of Israel, should not be received by the head of state. I was told to note the difference in certain details of protocol: three motorcycles instead of seven, no red carpet, reception by a deputy rather than by the minister of foreign affairs or the head of protocol. Nonsense. This time it was a matter of image, of symbols, and details were of no importance.
Arafat has scarcely left Paris when I receive a call from the Élysée. Mitterrand wants to see me. Urgently. I drop everything and go to Paris. I come to the appointment tense and frustrated. He wishes to explain his actions to me: “Please understand me. I am not an Israeli, I am not a Zionist; I am responsible for French policy, which, as such, must take the Arab world into account….” He tells me of his meeting with Arafat, who evidently not only knows his lessons well but knows how to present his case to best effect. He tells Mitterrand of his brother’s death; he was buried like a thief somewhere in Egypt. What about Arafat the terrorist? He is renouncing terrorism. And the infamous charter of the PLO? Dead. “Null and void.” Mitterrand tells me that it was in his office that this phrase was proposed, studied, and adopted.
What Mitterrand did not know at the time (did he find out later?) was that while Arafat was showing him a peaceful if not pacifist face, Faruq Khadumi, his assistant, was chatting in the antechamber with several high French officials and told them, in an astonishing outburst of candor: “The old man is talking nonsense; the Palestinians refuse all compromise. We do not want a part of Palestine; we demand all of Palestine.”
Mitterrand continues to think—and no one has the right to doubt it—that he was acting for the good of Israel. Hurt by the attacks from Jewish extremists, he keeps repeating: “One day people will know who is the real friend of Israel.” He does care about what he considers his privileged relation with the people of Israel. He keeps coming back to it. Wasn’t he the first president of France to make a state visit to Jerusalem? Did he not speak out for a Palestinian state before the Knesset? Why are people reproaching him for that now? He informs me in strict confidence of certain actions he has undertaken on behalf of the Jewish state since 1981. And at the time of the terrorist attack at Goldenberg’s restaurant, hadn’t he gone immediately to the scene of the tragedy? It seems there had been some excited young people who greeted him with cries of “Murderer!” This incident pains him as much as it does me. How can anyone subscribe to the notion that he is not or is no longer Israel’s friend? From his point of view, he invited Arafat for the good of Israel. Though I try to refute his argument I feel I have no right to attack his motive: I do believe he wanted to do the right thing and that he is psychologically and morally incapable of wishing to harm Israel.
But … what about Arafat and his past? He trusts him. Not totally, but enough to believe in his sincerity. Did his attitude toward him change a little later? After the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, wasn’t it he who expressed astonishment, speaking of the last spectacular Communist congress organized by the Romanian dictator: “And to think that Arafat was treated there as a sort of guest of honor….” He wanted me to explain that to him. I answered that he was in a better position to explain.
As for his explanations of Arafat’s visit to Paris, he didn’t convince me, but neither did I judge him. You cannot judge a man on one isolated act. What counts is the totality of the person. From that perspective—we’re still long before the Bousquet affair—I continued to declare that Mitterrand had remained a friend and faithful ally of Israel and the Jewish people. I cannot forget his participation in the demonstration that followed the desecration of the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras, and his second trip to Israel, and his decision—a symbolic gesture—to designate July 16 a day of national commemoration of the rounding up of Parisian Jews in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Nor can I forget his many statements against racism and anti-Semitism.
My friendship with him has earned me criticism and recriminations from Jewish extremists. I have been asked many questions about it, and some of them were painful to hear. I find them unfounded, regrettable.
Around that time, Elizabeth Schemla, one of the best journalists in Paris, asks me on behalf of Le Nouvel Observateur if I still have confidence in Mitterrand. I reply unequivocally: “I have no doubt that for him as a man, the survival of Israel constitutes an imperative. I haven’t a moment’s doubt of his loyalty. When the chips are down, François Mitterrand is a friend of the Jewish people and of Israel.”
And so we continue to see each other. The question remains: Did he manipulate me? Did he use our friendship as an alibi vis-à-vis the Jewish community, as he made use of it when he sent me, after the coup d’état in Moscow, to take a message of support to Gorbachev? That is what people say. I don’t believe it.
August 1991: Marion, Elisha, and I are spending the last two weeks of the month at the house of friends on the Riviera. I’m having breakfast when I learn of Mikhail Gorbachev’s arrest. It is Monday morning. Has perestroika come to an end? Can history, as proclaimed by Marxism-Leninism, be reversed? Are we going to witness a return to Brezhnevism, perhaps Stalinism? Nervous, I listen to the news, switching from station to station. The rumors are alarming: The life of the Soviet head of state is supposed to be in danger; Boris Yeltsin’s as well. The Western capitals are getting worried. Is there to be a politico-military insurrection? How is one to know how it will end? The fact is that when Moscow moves, the whole world trembles.
That afternoon my New York office calls. Jack Lang is trying to reach me, urgently. The situation in the USSR is alarming; the danger is real. The process of democratization is in jeopardy. Though worried, the minister of culture is, as always, bubbling over with ideas. He wants me to come to Paris immediately to cochair with him an international committee to safeguard democracy in the Soviet Union. I agree. We quickly make up a list of personalities whose collaboration we deem necessary. Tomorrow we’ll announce it to the press. Then he proposes a second task to me, to take to Gorbachev and Yeltsin a message of support from Mitterrand. Why me? His “logical” explanation: “Gorbachev is a Nobel Prize winner, and so are you. Nothing could be more normal than one laureate coming to the aid of another.” No need to think about it; I accept.
Later on, Mitterrand’s political opponents claim that both initiatives were designed to make up for his blunder that first Monday evening on television, when he seemed to insinuate that the news from Moscow might be a fait accompli, going so far as to read from a letter he had just received from the chief conspirator, General Yanaiev. Who was manipulating whom? Mitterrand explains to me that from the first he had thought of following a twofold strategy: On the one hand he quoted the promises of the conspirators (without approving them); on the other, keeping in mind their victims, he entrusted me with a message of total support. Did this mean that at first he had believed that the rebels might win, however temporarily? He explains to me that in the beginning the situation had seemed unclear. “The French needed to be reassured,” Mitterrand tells me, while giving me instructions as to what I should say to Gorbachev in his name. He also says that “it was necessary to show that France was ready for all eventualities.”
I try to help him in a modest way. The press conference, at the Ministry of Culture, has attracted a great many journalists. Yves Montand, Jorge Semprun, and Jack Lang all make political statements. There is much indignation and determination. In a few sentences I explain my own position: “Let us not respond with silence to the man who broke the silence in the Soviet Union….”
I hurry back to the Côte d’Azur to pack a few things. Elisha and Marion are not convinced that my trip to Moscow is reasonable or necessary. But one does not refuse such a mission. Gorbachev deserves to be encouraged by Mitterrand, and Mitterrand deserves that I accept the role of his emissary. My son likes to argue, and he knows how to convince, but this time he does not insist.
As she prepares my bag, Marion asks me questions about the practical aspects of the mission. A government airplane is coming to pick me up tomorrow morning. “Got your passport?” “Yes I have.” “Your Soviet visa?” I had forgotten about that. “Do you think they’ll let you in without a visa?” By God, she’s right. I rush to the telephone and call Jack Lang, who calls the Élysée, which calls the Soviet Embassy, which remains silent. It seems that the ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, prefers to keep a low profile until things become more clear. As do his colleagues. Hours go by before a consular official can be tracked down. He asks me whether I have submitted a visa request to the consulate. The question is absurd; he knows the answer. In that case, no visa. Fortunately there is such a thing as the fax. What about photos? We urgently look for a photographer, find one. But the official at the Soviet Embassy informs me that only Moscow can deliver the visa. And that it will take some time. How long? A few days at least. At the Élysée they’re getting nervous, and I am told to leave without a visa. What? Go without a visa? The refugee in me protests: never, hear, never! Even carrying a supernormal visa I quake as I go through passport control. Do you see me landing in Moscow (Moscow!) without the miraculous stamp of an obscure consular clerk? And what about the Gulag? A product of Solzhenitsyn’s imagination? At the Élysée they reassure me: In a government plane there is nothing to be afraid of; nothing can happen to me. I am no hero, and my heart tells me not to yield, not to expose myself to stupid risks. But I’m ashamed to admit my cowardice, and so I fly off to Moscow without a visa.
It turns out that I shall not be traveling alone. Jean Lecanuet and Michel Vauzelle will accompany me. Their situation is more comfortable than mine; their visas wait for them on arrival. The former represents the Senate, the latter the National Assembly. But I am the one charged with transmitting the French president’s message—that is, if I’m not turned back or thrown into prison.
Upon landing I finally accept the evidence that my fears were unfounded. In spite of the late hour an impressive welcoming committee has come to greet us. The French ambassador brings us up-to-date on events: The putsch has failed; Gorbachev will be back tomorrow. We spend the rest of the night at the embassy residence. There is comfort, courtesy, friendliness. In spite of the unscheduled nature of our visit everything seems minutely prepared, as if we had been expected after all. Tomorrow, with a little luck and persuasion, we shall get a chance to fulfill our mission.
An embassy staff member has already contacted the Yeltsin team and a high Kremlin official. Thus they are aware, at the highest level, of our visit and its objective.
Another member of the staff takes care of the formalities, which are as simple as they could be. In fact there are none. I don’t dare mention that I have no visa; but in fact no one has asked me. I don’t even remember anyone opening my passport.
Next morning we’re taken to the “White House,” the Russian Parliament, where, we’re told, Yeltsin will receive us with full honors. In the capital, which we cross at high speed, everything looks normal. With the exception of the district we are about to visit, it all looks peaceful, sleepy, quiet. But where then is the revolutionary atmosphere the media keep talking about? Paris in 1968 was stormier. Here and there some women are standing in line in front of a department store. Taxis are circulating on the main avenues. It is business as usual, a morning like any other. The city does not seem to be living through a “historic” crisis and ordeal or experiencing anything exceptional.
The only place where one perceives unrest is around the Parliament. There are scores of idle soldiers, a multitude of young people. You might think you were in the Latin Quarter with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the “sixty-eighters.” People stand around in groups; everyone is debating, remaking the world, reinventing humankind.
Parliament is in session. The hall is packed: The deputies have not closed their eyes since the beginning of the putsch. On some of the benches young “revolutionaries” are dozing. Owing to the lack of space in the galleries, we are seated among the deputies. Yeltsin is on stage witnessing a noisy debate. I don’t understand what it’s about, but the thought flashes through my mind that I could vote, like the deputies next to me, just by pressing one of the three buttons in front of me. Fortunately I see the world-famous Russian-born cellist Mstislav (Slava) Rostropovitch, who sums up for me what is being said by the representatives of the people.
We’re all waiting for Gorbachev’s arrival, but after several false alarms we give up. In fact, Yeltsin leaves, too. Outside a demonstration is taking place. On the balcony a dozen fiery speakers are haranguing the growing crowd, which keeps applauding.
Suddenly, I notice Edward Shevardnadze. A solitary figure, he keeps aloof from the people and their leaders. He seems remote, thoughtful. The bold minister of foreign affairs of perestroika hardly matters anymore. He is a “has been” who might as well be absent. When our eyes meet, we rush toward each other to embrace. He invites us—the two French parliamentarians and me—to his office in the early afternoon. I tell him: “I was watching you a moment ago. You looked sad, melancholy. Why? After all, things are falling into place. The putsch failed, perestroika is saved. Gorbachev is back in power. You should be happy.” He admits he’s not. How could he be? He tells us that everything is going badly in the country; it is coming apart. Poverty is so widespread that if the West doesn’t help, there will be famine. And anything could happen. We ask him why he is angry with Gorbachev, whom he has just criticized with astounding frankness in an interview. Yes, he is angry: He should never have gone on vacation to the Crimea; he should have foreseen the putsch, taken the necessary measures. No doubt there are other reasons he chooses not to discuss. To cheer him up, I ask as I’m about to leave: “Shall I have to call you Mr. President one of these days?” “Never!” he answers laughing. “I have seen the nature of power; I don’t want any part of it.”
His later accession to the presidency of his native Georgia confirms to me the popular wisdom that says no political figure should ever use the word “never.”
Gorbachev’s press conference, the first since his return from the Crimea, is tumultuous. His account of what happened to him is poignant. You listen to him, afraid to breathe, stirred by his courage. He tells of his comrades’ treachery, his feeling of isolation, and that of those close to him. One of the two most powerful people on the globe cut off from the outside world: How could it happen? If it hadn’t been for the loyalty of a small group of bodyguards, there would have been no way out. But why does he think it necessary to defend Communism? The disappointment in the hall is palpable. People continue to listen but in a different way. Does he realize that, for him, this is the beginning of the end?
The French ambassador takes us over to him. Three sets of security agents, automatic rifles at the ready, guard him. His face shows lines of fatigue, insomnia, perhaps bitterness. I am so moved by his appearance that I don’t hear what Vauzelle and Lecanuet tell him or what he says in reply. A French student acts as interpreter. He thanks me for having come from so far away. I transmit Mitterrand’s message to him, adding how pleased I am to be here. And that as a Jew, I really owe it to him; after all, he was the one who allowed the “Jews of Silence” to leave for Israel. I may be wrong, but I believe his eyes fill with tears. But all he says to me is: “I know who you are, but I did not know how influential you are.” Seeing my astonishment, he explains with a smile: “You must be someone very important; President Mitterrand has called me three times today, always about you.” I feel like answering him: I am the same man who for years wrote you letters and letters on behalf of Shcharansky, Sakharov, Slepak, and Nudel, the same man who for years implored you to speak out, preferably on television, against the anti-Semitism that is still rife in your country. But this is not the time. There will be other opportunities to speak of that.
In the plane that takes us back to France, I review everything I’ve just heard and lived through. Yeltsin’s populism. The passivity of the Muscovites. Gorbachev’s emotion. He above all is the object of my reflections. Rarely have I seen a man so disillusioned, so solitary. Almost all his friends betrayed him. Almost all his comrades abandoned him. His collaborators—almost all repudiated him. Moreover, he had been convinced that he held great power, when all that remained was illusion and memory. And his religion, Communism, is bankrupt. What is left? Nothing but ruins.
Back in Paris, I demonstrate my total ignorance of foreign policy as I present my report to Mitterrand. Gorbachev is not finished, I say with certainty. He will recover. And Yeltsin? the president inquires. Yeltsin? Not a chance! It would have been difficult to be more wrong.
Mitterrand remains in power, but the people are disenchanted. He drops dramatically in all the polls. His own party seems to be turning its back on him. Certain Socialist leaders tell me: “Before, he helped us; now he is in our way.” Others go further: “Before, he was the solution; now he’s the problem.” And others go even further: “If we lose, it will be his fault.”
All that is rather unfair. Few men have as broad a vision of the world. But it seems that the gods have abandoned him. In biblical terms one would say, Grace has left him. Before, people went so far as to like his failings, and now he is blamed even for his virtues.
In 1988, Jack Lang proposed to Mitterrand the creation of an international intellectual body whose purpose would be the exploration of the larger social and cultural themes that confront mankind at the close of the twentieth century. The president authorized the project. Two top advisers on cultural affairs at the Élysée—Laure Adler first, then Bernard Latarget—together with a representative of the culture ministry were to act as liaisons to the government. And that was how the Académie Universelle des Cultures was born. Among its members, many prestigious names of the literary, artistic, and scientific worlds. Ten Nobel laureates, a movie star, novelists, teachers, musicians, architects: Each occupies a singular place in his or her domain. We devise an exciting agenda: annual prizes, various scholarships and projects.
As usual, things drag. The inauguration—at the Louvre, no less—by Mitterrand takes place a few months before the legislative elections. As a result the promises and commitments made on the ministerial level are not fulfilled. The relatively modest annual budget of six million francs (around a million dollars) remains an objective, if not a dream. Nevertheless, the academy functions. Its first conference, held in the main amphitheater of the Sorbonne, deals with the problem of “intervention.” In Sienna, as guests of the municipality, academy members gather for a debate on “intolerance.” Whatever the academy does, it does well. It could do better—if it were given the means.
There is no doubt that Mitterrand could intervene to release the funds, even during the era of cohabitation, especially since this is a project conceived with him. I speak to him about it several times. Each time he replies that he will mention it to the prime minister and to the minister of culture. The last time I bring up the subject, he simply says: “What can I do? I no longer have the power I used to have.” I had never found him so pathetic. That was in 1994.
Until the Bousquet affair, I believed that history would be kind to him. Since then, I no longer believe it. And I say this with sadness. From now on, whenever the name of René Bousquet is spoken, another name will instantly come to mind: that of his friend François Mitterrand.
The Bousquet affair breaks into the news in September 1994 like thunder announcing the days of awe and anguish of the Jewish High Holiday of Rosh Hashana.
I am in Paris for the publication of Tous les Fleuves vont à la mer (All Rivers Run to the Sea). Invited by France-Inter radio for its 1 p.m. news program, I am waiting for my turn when I hear someone speaking about Pétain and Mitterrand. A staff member tells me the speaker’s name: Pierre Péan. The man himself seems pleasant and restrained, but what he says nevertheless upsets me. How can he pronounce the names of Mitterrand and Pétain in one breath? I listen to him unaware that he will be the tangible cause of my estrangement from Mitterrand.
Even before I have a chance to read Péan’s Une jeunesse française,* I must endure the onslaught of the media as his revelations take on proportions reminiscent of the first stages of Watergate.
When I read the book, my first reaction is disbelief. I refuse to believe that a man like François Mitterrand could have concealed his Vichy past, formed intimate relationships with former cagoulards (members of La Cagoule, a clandestine right-wing organization), and become the friend of Bousquet, the French chief of police who, always surrounded by SS officers and the Gestapo, had organized the deportation of French Jewry. It couldn’t be. None of this fits in with the personality and life of the man I thought I knew so well.
True, from time to time, I had heard rumors, mostly vague. The person telling me this or that would be content to grin at me with an air of complicity or allow a sentence to go unfinished. Like everyone else I ascribed all this gossip to right-wing propaganda. I would wonder what else they would invent to harm him. I rejected these defamatory reports; I refused to discuss them. Rabbinic law teaches that it is forbidden not only to spread calumnies but even to listen to them.
Péan’s book is something else. These are not calumnies. In light of his revelations, and those they lead to, my attitude has become untenable. How can I defend a political figure who praised Bousquet even after he had been indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity? He said he found him “sympathique” and saw him “with pleasure”! Was that all he could say about the former accomplice of the SS? To Nicole Leibowitz-Boulanger of Le Nouvel Observateur, I admit feeling pained, offended. I say the same on television, and to audiences that come to hear me in Nancy, Lille, and elsewhere. But I refuse to go any further. It is not in my nature to join a mob, especially since Mitterrand is ill, seriously ill. The public’s reaction is hostile. Here and there people tell me they cannot understand how I could be the friend of the friend of Bousquet. My answer: “The president honors me with his friendship; I owe it to him to listen to his explanations. The sooner the better.” But we are getting close to the Jewish High Holidays, and I must go home for Rosh Hashana.
It is when I come back to New York that I pick up the echoes of Mitterrand’s television interview with Jean-Pierre Elkabbach. I experience the same shock and outrage that is expressed by the French press. Some of the comments are offensive, but they come from precisely those who until recently showed him nothing but loyalty and affection. I hear disillusioned remarks from all sides. How is it possible that a man so intelligent, knowledgeable, and informed could not have been aware of the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy? The plundering, the persecutions, the arrests, the roundups—how could he have failed to know about them? And the “Vél d’Hiv”—he claims not to have known about that either, he who always wants to know everything? And if he knew, is it conceivable that he remained indifferent, which would be a thousand times worse? I find it difficult to cope with this affair, which gets more poisonous by the day. Abandoned by many of his political allies and personal friends, Mitterrand balks instead of confronting the problem. Or so I am told by a close female aide who when she dared to suggest to him that a new course of action was necessary, drew his wrath. That same day she handed him her resignation—which the president refused. Will he ever understand what is happening to him?
I call Anne Lauvergeon, who has succeeded Attali as the president’s right hand. Anne is discreet, superbly intelligent, and highly effective. She knows the depth of my dismay and appreciates my restraint. An appointment is made with the president for the week of Sukkot.
The welcome is friendly as always. The president’s face is marked by his illness, his gaze crossed by somber shadows. His voice is tense, broken. He is tired and speaks to me of the treatment he is undergoing. I wonder how I shall bring myself to ask him the questions that are sure to pain him. But I have no choice. As an opening, I quote to him a saying of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav, already reported in the first volume of my memoirs: “The world is mistaken about two things. First, it is wrong in thinking that a great man is incapable of making mistakes; it is also mistaken in thinking that once the mistake has been made, the great man ceases being great.” I feel that I have offered him a good way out, but he refuses to take it.
He tells me squarely that he has made no mistake. None? None. Hence no remorse, no regrets. The anti-Jewish laws of Vichy? Never knew about them. But as a civil servant of Vichy, had he not been asked to fill out a questionnaire in which he was required to declare that he was not a Jew? No, he was not a civil servant; he had a contract. And what was the difference? Precisely that he was not required to fill out that questionnaire. In short, he had done nothing wrong. But what about Bousquet? How could he have maintained friendly relations with this high Vichy official, an associate of the SS chiefs Heydrich and Oberg, who had organized the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz? He shrugs his shoulders and replies that when he made his acquaintance, Bousquet had already been rehabilitated by the courts and was being received by the cream of financial society. In fact, there were in his entourage several very well known and respected Jews. How then could he, Mitterrand, have doubted his innocence? Moreover, they were not friends. They had seen each other only a dozen times and had never addressed each other by the intimate tu. As I insist on the strangeness of their relationship, he finally concedes that perhaps he should have shown himself “more vigilant.” I suggest to him that he take advantage of a future television interview to make a statement: “I was young and inexperienced; when one is young, one does things that are sometimes foolish; but after all, since then I’ve done other things.” I tell him that if he says that, the public will turn the page. He refuses. I say to him: “Even God admits to having made a mistake; read Genesis. But you have never made a mistake?” Then I suggest to him that we meet once more to record a conversation that would get to the bottom of the matter. I explain to him that I must understand. It is indispensable for me to understand. We shall then publish it somewhere. Mitterrand agrees but asks me to address my questions to him in writing beforehand.
After another hour and a half of discussion he accompanies me to the door, more cordial than ever. Did he know that we would not see each other again? With a heavy heart I linger in Anne Lauvergeon’s office before leaving for the airport. I tell her how unhappy I am with the conversation. Why had I not been able to pierce the shadows in which the president has wrapped his past? I tell Anne of my certainty that this affair will leave a black stain on Mitterrand’s passage through history; his tendency toward equivocation is doing him harm. I tell her of my suggestion for a recorded interview.
My questions—on Vichy and Pétain, the wreath and Bousquet, his writings for an anti-Semitic magazine, and the Francisque medal (Vichy’s highest decoration)—I fax to Anne for transmittal to the president. Did he read them? Certainly. His reaction is negative. Is he annoyed that I am not ready to be his defender? I am sure of it. In any case, he does not think he has to justify himself. In other words, he will not respond to my fax. There will be no further interview. No further dialogue.
I am disappointed. Sometimes I tell myself the word is not strong enough. For suddenly I understand that there’s a coherence and a logic in Mitterrand’s political course. His refusal to investigate the Nazi past of certain Frenchmen and to bring them to justice, his annual custom of secretly arranging to place a wreath on Pétain’s tomb, his links to former members of La Cagoule and other Nazi collaborators, his determination to suppress that part of his life, his habit of surrounding himself with Jews—all this must have an explanation.
I cannot believe that he wanted to deceive me, that I had been both dupe and victim of his genius for manipulation. I want to believe that there must be some other explanation. Would he give it to me, if only to complete our book of conversations that the publisher Odile Jacob is dying to publish? It is a project conceived long ago and that in the end becomes grafted onto the Vichy-Pétain-Bousquet affair, adding a new unpleasant angle.
• • •
Jack Lang had had the idea for the book since 1985, and the president liked and accepted it. Lang used the preparation for the Nobel laureates’ conference two years later to broach it again even more forcefully. Were there some ulterior motives connected with the presidential elections in May? Perhaps—but I don’t see how a book like that could have been of use to the Socialist candidate. The Jewish vote? It was his to start with. And then a book, especially a book with two authors, isn’t written in three months. And Jack knew of my reluctance to intervene in French internal affairs. Anyway, the project didn’t tempt me, as though I had a foreboding that, for me, it would become a source of great disappointment. As for the president, he procrastinated. Months went by. He was not in a hurry. Nor was I.
But Jack Lang was impatient: “These dialogues, they must be done; this has been drawn out far too long.” In the end, he got his way. In the excitement of the conference that took place in January 1988, I settled down to the task. The idea was to have a dialogue between two men linked by friendship but seemingly separated by everything else: ethnic origin, social position, religious education. It was to be a book of open-ended conversations, discussions on general, timeless themes. After considering the matter for several weeks I drew up a table of contents: power, friendship, war, childhood, death, God, the Bible, Israel, faith, writing. Attali thought it was fine, and the president approved. Our first subject: childhood, of course; comparing his with mine. The childhood of a leader who has reached the summit of power and that of a Jewish writer who will never succeed in tearing himself away from his yeshiva.
Two sound engineers busied themselves behind a screen. And suddenly the tape recorder refused to cooperate. As it happened, Jacques Attali was present—a fact that later on, in 1993, will cause me much sadness and a huge headache. But during this first session for the book I was pleased that he was there, for he made himself useful: It was decided he would take notes on the president’s remarks, but not on mine. Anyway, my memory is good. And for our subsequent talks, the tape recorder was repaired.
Our conversations, each from one hour to an hour and a half long, are carried on in an atmosphere of friendship. I ask questions and Mitterrand responds. Only rarely does he ask me questions. I don’t feel at ease in my role of interviewer; I gave that up a long time ago.
To be sure, I could be more confrontational, but that’s not in my nature. And then, too, I am respectful of the man sitting across from me. I don’t dare push him on the points he seeks to avoid. I steer clear of minefields. I don’t touch upon embarrassing subjects. Not yet. I tell myself that, in any event, this is just a draft. I’ll have a chance to rework it, as he will, too. That will be the time to urge him to review his positions. There’s no hurry. His mandate has just been renewed. Seven years is a long time.
In his replies, Mitterrand is open. I like what he says about his childhood: “I had no friends my own age.” About his adolescence: “I went from wonder to wonder.” About his parents: “They were very available. They hardly spoke. My father would say you don’t learn anything from words, only from deeds.” About his mother, traveling in a train with people making anti-Dreyfus, anti-Semitic remarks: “My mother’s eyes opened wider and wider with surprise.” About his discovery of the stranger, who is “welcomed into a closed circle like a thief.” He is severe with De Gaulle, skeptical about Mendès-France. His favorite writers: Barrès, Chardonne.
He has a talent for quickly finding answers that suit him. Sometimes he asks me to repeat my questions, saying that he doesn’t understand. Then, rather than launch into explanations, I change the subject. The major problem is time—his own, of course, but also mine, since I live in New York and teach in Boston. Months go by between appointments and more than once I consider abandoning the project. But we go back to it again and again. Seven topics have been dealt with; there are three left. Then we’ll review the entire text. We have time.
These talks require an effort of concentration on my part. I believe not as much on his. We are rarely disturbed by the telephone. He seems attentive but relaxed, and when he escorts me to the door he asks about Elisha’s studies, sends his regards to Marion, and asks me to come back every time I’m in Paris: “You are always welcome in this house, which is yours.” I come back, but we speak less and less about the book. Have both of us lost interest? Or perhaps he simply wishes to wait for the end of his second term.
But neither he nor I could foresee an incident provoked by our mutual friend Jacques Attali.
When I think of Attali, I feel sad. I regret the years of our friendship. I thought it beautiful, productive. Adroit, endowed with countless talents, he loved his position at the nerve center of French and international political life. How did he manage to be in so many places at once? And to be part of so many projects? He knew so many things about so many subjects. My trust in him was total. I thought it was mutual: He would tell me about his life and his experiences at the Élysée, the challenges he had met, his struggles, his personal dreams, and his ambitions as a writer. He had no qualms about telling me of the complexity of his relationship with Mitterrand. He understood that I could keep a secret. What spoiled our friendship?
I was familiar with his project for a journal covering the years 1981 to 1986, whose title I did not yet know. And he knew that I was writing a volume of memoirs. I had even mentioned to him on the telephone (he was by then head of the BERD bank in London) that I planned to describe in it my conversations with Mitterrand and the difficulties they presented. The idea that Attali might make use of these same conversations—and quite extensively—never crossed my mind, especially since the first volume of his journal was to end with 1986, long before Mitterrand and I began our “dialogues.”
When his journal, Verbatim, appears with great fanfare, Marion and I happen to be in Europe. Stopping off in Paris we meet the publisher Odile Jacob, who asks if we have read the article devoted to Attali in Le Nouvel Observateur. “You’re mentioned,” she adds. So we read it and find a rather appealing portrait of Jacques. The article also reproduces, in italics, certain excerpts attributed to Mitterrand that seem familiar. Oh well—I’ll read the book to clear up the mystery.
We are in Venice attending the closing session of a meeting of the International Press Institute when, from New York, we learn that Odile Jacob has been desperately trying to find us. She is beside herself: “I’ve just read Verbatim…. Your conversations with the president are there in print…. It’s mind-boggling … scandalous … unforgivable….” By special courier she sends us a segment of ninety-five pages—photocopies of Verbatim excerpts side-by-side with photocopies of our manuscript.
For there does in fact exist a manuscript of my seven conversations with Mitterrand. It is based on the transcript made by the Élysée staff, and notably by Attali’s office, of the still-unfinished seven chapters. One copy is in the hands of Odile Jacob, whom Mitterrand had chosen as publisher of the Nobel conference papers and whom he has now also chosen to publish our dialogues. I had, in fact, thought that he would wish to be published by Claude Durand of Fayard, since he was Attali’s friend, while I, personally, had leaned toward either Le Seuil or Grasset. But Mitterrand had decided in favor of Odile Jacob, and it had been with his blessing that I had given her a copy of the manuscript. Evidently, Attali must have not known or forgotten this fact.
Minutely prepared by Odile Jacob, the document is devastating. Marion and I, dumbfounded and hurt, study the file at length. We take it along to Oslo, where, as guests of the president of the Parliament, we attend the official celebration of Norway’s national holiday, the most beautiful in the world because it is the children who celebrate it, and are celebrated in turn. On Sunday, May 16, I place a call to Attali in Paris. By chance he’s at home. I say to him: “I must show you something…. This is urgent, superurgent…. If I could jump into a plane now I’d do it, but I cannot. Please come here. I’m at the Grand Hotel. It’s something important that concerns you….” He doesn’t understand, or pretends not to. He wants to know what it’s all about: the president’s health, national security? I insist: “This is not something we can discuss on the phone…. Believe me: It justifies your coming.” I still think that if he had come, we could have settled matters between us. I’m profoundly convinced of it. But for whatever reason, he does not accept my invitation. Subsequently he told me he had no recollection of it.
This incident was painful for me and for him as well. I shall come back to it in another context.
I no longer believe in this book of dialogues. For that matter, I have not seen Mitterrand since the Bousquet affair. Odile Jacob does everything in her power and more, as only she can do, to keep the project alive; but for my part, since the president chooses not to answer my written questions about Bousquet and Vichy, I am less eager. Undeniably, between Mitterrand and myself things are no longer what they were.
People in his entourage now tell me he is displeased with me because I dared criticize him on television about the Bousquet affair. According to him, the laws of friendship required me to be his defender. But in opting for friendship with Bousquet, had he not violated and sacrificed ours, and much more? Did he not make his choice by receiving Bousquet at home, perhaps the same day that he saw me? I thus may have shaken the hand that had shaken that of the SS murderers’ accomplice.
In short, my enthusiasm is gone. And happily, our book seems to be deferred to messianic times. So I am surprised when Odile Jacob calls me in March 1995 to tell me that Mitterrand’s illness is getting worse, and that he now wishes the book to come out. I can’t hold back a cry of astonishment. “He wants it to come out? As it is? But it’s not finished! We were supposed to rework it! It’s nothing but a draft! Moreover, he hasn’t answered my questions about Vichy and Bousquet! Do you really think that I could cosign a book with him without raising these questions?” Odile understands. She will speak to Mitterrand. She calls me back soon after: he also understands. He’s asking me to send the questions again. I make up a new list and fax it to Odile. In time he sends his responses directly to her. They express “neither regrets nor remorse” on the subject of his past. Even in September, during our last encounter, he locks himself into this pose of infallibility, too proud, too sure of himself to recognize that to err is human. His aides had often told me that he was incapable of saying “I should not have done this.”
So how can I reach him? How can I speak to him without wounding him, listen to him without showing him my disagreement and my disappointment? I am in Paris several times and don’t call him; I no longer wish to see him, nor evidently does he want to see me. Looming large between us, the dark ghost of Bousquet eliminates any possibility of direct contact. We had been too close not to seek refuge now in distance. From now on everything goes through Odile Jacob, who is determined to publish the book before the elections. She succeeds in getting it printed in less than a week. She is equally successful, several days after the publication of the book, in getting us to exchange a few courteous trivialities on the telephone. I tell Mitterrand he has done good work—meaning he, not I. For I am not proud of my contribution. I would have required at least a month to correct and flesh out my own text. And I would have liked to respond to his responses.
The title for the dialogues was chosen by Mitterrand. I should have preferred something more sober, more discreet—and truer. A memoir in two voices? Mine can hardly be heard. For that matter, I have the impression that Mitterrand, too, considers the book not a work by two authors, but something he alone has written. Otherwise would he have dedicated it to a certain Lucia without advising me beforehand, if only out of politeness?
Journalists keep calling me. I manage to elude most of them. But I do respond to Annette Lévy-Willard of Libération and to Info-Matin. My tone is cautious, respectful; I don’t wish to hurt a sick man. But at the same time I want people to know that I have decided to keep my distance from a work I no longer consider mine.
The situation worsens as a result of an interview Mitterrand gives to Bernard Pivot. When the latter questions him on what I say in the book about his, Mitterrand’s, relations with the former chief of police, he practically cuts him short: “Take note that it was I who insisted…. I said to Elie Wiesel: ‘If you don’t question me about Bousquet, there will be no book!’”
We are in Israel for Passover and watch Pivot’s program at a friend’s home. As we listen to Mitterrand, we turn to each other in shock and disbelief. When we return to New York we see a rebroadcast of the program. Marion then records it, and I admit to watching it five or six times. I am stunned by Mitterrand’s statement. Rarely have I had so much difficulty in restraining my disappointment and anger. I want to send him a letter and write draft after draft, but all are too harsh, and so they all wind up in a drawer of my desk.
On April 23, 1995, I fax Mitterrand—still via Anne Lauvergeon—a more temperate version:
Mr. President,
I have finally seen the “Bouillon de Culture” of 14 April, which has been broadcast by TV5 on an American station this evening. I don’t like to cause you pain. But in your presentation, in all other aspects moving and brilliant, the part concerning our conversations troubled and grieved me. You say that it was you who had insisted, personally, with me that questions regarding Bousquet be included in the book and that otherwise you would never have consented to its publication. Yet since last September until the very day the book was published, we have not spoken.
The impression given by your words is that you had to force my hand for me to ask you questions about Bousquet. And yet. Did I not come specially from New York, precisely in September, to speak to you about this subject? And above all to listen to you? Did I not send you, as agreed, a few days after our meeting, my questions—two pages of questions—which you did not see fit to answer? Do you think, Mr. President, that I would have agreed to have this book published without our exchange on Bousquet? I have asked Anne Lauvergeon to tell you: This is a subject that, for me, is painful and grave. I would like to understand. I ask you, Mr. President, to clarify it for me.
I receive no answer from Mitterrand. I ask Anne Lauvergeon whether I should expect one. She checks. Her reply is negative. I take my pen and write:
Mr. President,
This letter is the last you will receive from me. I am writing with regret and sadness. It marks the end of a friendship that for fourteen years was a part of my life.
You are ill, you are suffering. It may be wrong of me to add to your pain. But out of respect for the man I admired, and because I believe that lying to him would betray you, I feel it incumbent on me to clarify the reasons for my decision.
This is followed by three pages of explanation … that I do not send. Other drafts meet the same fate. Then the New York Times asks me for a piece on Mitterrand and how he went wrong. I take up my pen again: “I regret to have to write these lines. I regret above all to have to write them now, at a time when the man in question is old, seriously ill, and at the end of his political career. Yet I cannot, I can no longer be silent. Silence, in my tradition, means approval.”
A four-page article follows … to be buried in my desk. To the editor of the Times, I write that I cannot hurt a man so seriously ill. I give the same response to the editor in chief of an important Paris magazine. I do not say that I don’t feel like writing such a piece. The fact that Mitterrand does not see fit to answer me upsets me, but I prefer to swallow the pill, and I wait for the present volume to say what is in my heart.
Still, this time Anne was mistaken. I finally do get an answer, two months later. To say it stunned me would be an understatement. In essence, this is what Mitterrand offers in explanation: He acknowledges having received the questions concerning René Bousquet that I wished to see dealt with in the “still possible” book we were to write together and that he, alone, had edited. But when submitted to him “ready to print,” our “dialogue on Bousquet” was not in the book. This omission had to be corrected—and that was what he had explained to Pivot.
Well, now there is no longer any ambiguity. There is only contradiction and, I am sorry to note, a distortion of the facts. To Pivot he had said that he had ordered me, personally, to include questions on Bousquet. In his letter it is no longer to me but to Odile Jacob to whom he gives the instructions. And then there was the tone, the facial expressions, the body language on the screen. His letter is dry, abrupt. I do not respond to his reply. What’s the use of restating my position? He obviously refuses to understand. He may, in fact, be incapable of it.
So is this then the end, the break? I’m afraid so. Especially since there was yet another event, in May, that I and others close to me considered an affront: his speech in Berlin. On that occasion, Mitterrand praises not only the Germany of today, but Germany throughout history—hence the Third Reich as well. Standing before Helmut Kohl, who is beaming with pride, he sings the glory of the German army of today and yesterday—thus of Hitler’s army. He says that the German soldiers’ uniform meant little to him, nor did the ideas that inhabited their minds; “they were brave,” that was what mattered then, that is what matters to him today. (The next day, in Moscow, he compares the courage of the Russian soldier with that of the German soldier, and the suffering of the Russian people with that of the German people.)
How is one to explain this kind of reductionism? So the uniform means so little to him? Has he forgotten that the Gestapo too wore that uniform? And that they too harbored certain ideas? What possessed him to whitewash the German military in this way, in this, his next-to-last official speech? A desire to be provocative? To please his hosts, to emphasize the importance of reconciliation in his political philosophy? His plea for peace and reconciliation won him the enthusiasm of some and shocked others. A cartoon in Le Monde is terrifying, showing a hefty Yeltsin towering over a tiny Mitterrand, begging him to say something nice about the Russian soldier’s courage in Chechnya.
As it happened, I might well have been at his side in both capitals. He had invited me to accompany him. A seat had been reserved for me in his Concorde, and a room in the hotels. I refused. I don’t regret it. On the contrary, I believe I made the right decision. Had I been present in Berlin, I would have left the hall in the middle of his speech.
Still, even though I’ve distanced myself from him and his universe, I feel sad. This was not how I had imagined his exit from my life.
• • •
On January 8, 1996, I am in the South to lecture at a small college. The phone rings in my room at 6 o’clock in the morning. “I have sad news for you,” Elisha says. “Your friend Mitterrand is dead.” Elisha had been awakened by journalists calling from Paris.
I feel the silence slowly descending on me, leaving a familiar feeling. A whole chapter of my life is ended. The place Mitterrand occupied in my book of friendship covers many pages. There were journeys, discoveries, reunions, luminous moments, glowing images, picturesque episodes. I knew my friend in his glory, I knew him in sickness. How did he enter into death? I imagine him in his small, monastic room alone with his physician, alone with his past. Did he choose the asceticism of solitude before sinking into it for all eternity? Did he finally become reconciled with God at the moment of leaving His creation? The religion he rejected had, in fact, always interested him. The sacred fascinated him both as challenge and as shelter. And what if, in his own way, he had been a lover of God as he followed his fervent desire to conquer history?
I don’t respond to most of the requests for interviews. Why add to the verbal deluge sweeping over France? To Christine Pouget, of Agence France-Presse, I point out that Jewish tradition recommends saying nothing but good things about the dead. For Paris Match I write an article along those lines: I speak only of the good period. I recall the early days of our friendship, when he thrilled those he loved and made them dream. I have no intention of speaking about René Bousquet, nor of Vichy. No, I will not talk about the last year of his life. Doesn’t the Talmud say that death erases all sins?
But then—what happens to memory?
The media report the emotion that has taken hold of France. It is sincere and profound. That is normal: The man left his mark on his era; everyone agrees on that. Some extol his European spirit, others his political genius; still others vow never to forget his passion for freedom.
There are moving scenes of people: the silent crowds. The tears, the roses—the French recognized themselves in Mitterrand’s very ambiguities. The funeral at Jarnac. The sorrow on people’s faces. The solemn mass at Notre Dame. And thus the end rejoins the beginning.
Lucid to the last, sovereign in everything, but a victim of his body, he freely chose his hour to free himself. In summoning death he, in a way, conquered it. The last word of his book was written by him.
What was on his mind as he took leave of the living shadows before rejoining those that had come before? The great game he had played? Had it been a game?
I glance through my notebooks. How often did we speak of what is awaiting us afterward? Paradise, hell, the Last Judgment, the Apocalypse—he wanted to know. Could human life be nothing but the flutter of an eyelid? But then, what remains of what one has received and what one has given?
* Paris: Fayard, 1994.