Highest praise of the late American General Walter Bedell Smith, who died in Washington this weekend, was voiced here today by Minister of Education Abba Eban. The latter knew Gen. Smith intimately during the years Mr. Eban served as Israeli Ambassador to the United States. Gen. Smith, who has been called by ex-President Dwight D. Eisenhower “the general manager of World War II, ” was among the outstanding Allied military experts during the war.
Mr. Eban disclosed for the first time that Gen. Smith had told him at a dinner in Washington once, “in a burst of emotion” that there was Jewish blood” in his veins.” He never saw the living Israel, ” Mr. Eban declared, in a eulogy of the general in the Jerusalem Post, “but the Israel idea conquered his heart and illuminated his vision.” Gen. Smith was a Catholic.
“It is difficult to convey, ” Mr. Eban wrote, “how intimately, though anonymously, Gen. Bedell Smith was entangled in our affairs. His counsel could be harsh as well as amiable, but there was no major issue in which we did not ask ourselves — and sometimes ask him — what Bedell Smith thinks.”
Mr. Eban disclosed that Gen. Smith congratulated Israel’s Gen. Moshe Dayan on the latter’s conduct of the Sinai campaign in 1956. Prior to that campaign, Mr. Eban stated, Gen. Smith had treated Gen. Dayan to “a soldierly diatribe” against a policy of retaliatory military actions. But after the Sinai campaign, Gen. Smith sent to Gen. Dayan a copy of his memoirs, dedicating the book “to the Israel general who did what I could not have done.”
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