Page 120 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PERSISTENT

the only one on the American side who had had military service, and
naturally that made me able to converse in a slightly different way with
Rabin and the others who had been in the military. We were talking about
Israel and its history and what Rabin had done in the military. I was
listening to his war stories, and I just felt compelled to ask him a question,
so I said, ‘As a veteran soldier, what would you say is the most important
military lesson that you could pass on to a young officer like me?’ And he
replied that it was persistence.”

Prime Minister Rabin told Clark that during the War of Independence in
1948, he was a brigade commander of three battalions assigned to hold East
Jerusalem. The Jordanian Arab Legion charged in a fierce assault, and
Rabin’s troops bravely repelled the attack. The Arab Legion stormed the
Israeli position once more, and again Rabin’s troops held them off. “But
then the battalion commanders came to Colonel Rabin and said, ‘We don’t
have any more ammunition! We’re out of machine gun ammunition—we’ve
got four or five rifle rounds per man. We’re down to one or two grenades
per squad, and if they come at us again, we’ll be destroyed. We must pull
back now to save the forces.’ And Rabin said, ‘No, we’re not going to do
that. Our mission was to hold and we will hold, and we’ll fight right here.
This is our Jerusalem.’ I guess it was pretty heated with the battalion
commanders, but Rabin held his ground and the brigade stayed there, and
it turned out that on the other side, the Arab Legion troops had gone to
their brigade commander and they too were out of ammunition! They were
down to two or three grenades per squad, and they didn’t have enough
firepower to succeed. Well, the Jordanian brigade commander said, ‘Okay,
let’s fall back,’ and they retreated. Rabin had carried out his mission and
held East Jerusalem. That was the major success he had in the War of
Independence, and it all came from persistence—he refused to give up.”
After the dinner was over, Clark reflected on Rabin’s words of wisdom.
He was right, Clark thought, and he compared Rabin’s experience in 1948
to his own in Vietnam just six years before. “As a captain in Vietnam, I
had seen that when we would come under attack, the senior person on the
ground would often call for artillery,” Clark explained. “Well, sometimes
he’d get the artillery and sometimes he wouldn’t. If he didn’t get it right
away, the question would be whether he would keep asking. I then put that
experience together with what Rabin told me, and I realized that you have

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