Word: sadat
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Within a few years, Sadat managed to overcome these riddles. He went to war when no one thought it possible and, having restored Arab self-respect, he made a peace that no one had dared to imagine. He moved his people toward a partnership with the West, recognizing that a sense of shared values is a more certain spur to support than a defiance based on striking poses. He eschewed romantic posturing in favor of attainable steps. And he shaped the attainable with a fine sense for the dramatic. He understood that a heroic gesture can create a new reality...
...Sadat bore with fortitude the loneliness that is inseparable from moving the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been. He raised our gaze toward heretofore unimaginable horizons. And when he had transformed the paradox and solved the riddle, he was killed by the apostles of the ordinary, the fearful, the merchants of the ritualistic whom he shamed by being at once out of scale and impervious to their meanness of spirit...
...Sadat was a very great man who made the difficult seem effortless. The difference between great and ordinary leaders is rarely formal intellect but insight. The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to place obstacles into perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders...
...Sadat was a noble man with a passion for peace. One day I sat with him in the study of the modest sandstone house that he used in Aswan. As occasionally happened, Sadat was brooding about something or other, puffing on his pipe. One could see the dhows on the Nile, the mighty river bisecting a very narrow strip of green and flanked on both sides by the vast dunes of a seemingly endless desert. The silence was interrupted by an aide, who whispered something into Sadat's ear. Sadat rose with tears in his eyes...
...statesman must never be viewed as starry-eyed. He must have vision and depth; he must also translate his intuition into reality against sometimes resistant material. Sadat was neither starry-eyed nor soft. He was not a pacifist. He did not believe in peace at any price. I never doubted that in the end he would create heroes if no other course he considered honorable was left...