A Hero in His Own Right

Uri Dan, who died Sunday at the age of 71, was one of the great journalists of his time. To thousands of New Yorkers he was known for his dispatches in the New York Post, which he served for 25 years as its correspondent in Israel. In 1954, he started writing for an Israel Defense Force paper. Early on, he met a young Israeli officer, Ariel Sharon, and the famous friendship began. It was Dan who, years later, forecast that those who would not have Ariel Sharon as chief of staff would have him as defense minister and those who would not have him as defense minister would have him as prime minister.I first met Dan in the early 1980s, when he accompanied Mr. Sharon, then Menachem Begin’s defense minister, on a visit to Washington and New York to explain the goals of the invasion of Lebanon that was going to take place the next time Israel was attacked by terrorist groups based there. Dan’s role seemed a bit murky. Was he an adviser to the defense minister or merely a journalist covering him or simply a friend? He turned out to be all three.What became clear over the years since is that Uri Dan had one of the truest understandings of Israel and the wider world in all of newspaperdom. This was apparent in his thousands of dispatches, broadcasts, and magazine articles, not to mention the books, that poured from his pen or the photographs that got captured by his camera. We may be in an age where the preoccupation is with the medium — the rise of the Internet, the fate of newspapers, the fragmentation of radio, the erosion of the big networks. Yet Uri Dan still worked with a pen. He made his mark not by pioneering a new medium but by championing a great cause.And by becoming a master of the scoop. Back in the days when Yuri Andropov was still Soviet party boss, Eric Fettmann once took a call on the foreign desk of the New York Post only to discover it was Uri Dan calling from a pay phone in some place like Cyprus. Dan asked Mr. Fettmann to fetch, while Dan stayed on the line, the folder of clippings on Soviet agriculture. When a panting Mr. Fettmann came back on the line, Dan asked him to read every name in the file. At the name “Mikhail Gorbachev,” Dan exclaimed, “That’s it! Take a story!” and proceeded to dictate a world exclusive about how the Soviet Politburo, meeting in secret session, had decided on an obscure official in the Agricultural Ministry to lead the Soviet Union toward the 21st century.It was as a result of such sagacity that people began to recognize that even when in the company of the greatest figures, Uri Dan himself was a man to be reckoned with. No doubt this is why his friendship with Mr. Sharon was so mutual and so enduring. It was not just that Dan had parachuted into the Mitla Pass with Mr. Sharon or been with him in the crossing of the Suez, when the future prime minister surrounded the Egyptians and saved the Jewish state. It was also his constant reporting, the vast array of his sources, and the fidelity of his spirit.Earlier this year, Uri Dan brought out his last book — the one that so many who knew him had been waiting for, “Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait.” It contains all the insights one can imagine into the life of the prime minister, a man who never believed his role was messianic but merely one of politics and security, and of his family. But it also contains extraordinary glimpses of Dan himself and his own remarkable capacity for friendship, even where there were differences, as there clearly were with Mr. Sharon.Dan was not a partisan of disengagement, but he hung back from public criticism of his great friend, taking up his differences in private. Mr. Sharon returned the favor on the advice, it turns out, of his mother, who’d coached him never to break off a friendship over politics. For his part, Dan had learned early in life one of the most important journalistic lessons, which is that it is okay for a reporter to have heroes.This has too often been forgotten in an age of cynicism and careerism. But it was talked about when, two years ago, Dan was honored at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, which had mounted an exhibit of Dan’s photographs of Ariel Sharon in the Sinai. It was a remarkable exhibit, capturing a friendship, a war, a chapter of history, and journalism as art. It was an example of how Uri Dan — in allowing himself to have a hero, in helping others to see one — became a hero in his own right.

A Hero in His Own Right

A Hero in His Own Right

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