What made Meir so appealing was the straightforwardness of her approach. She was the subject of a Broadway play and then a made-for-television movie that starred Ingrid Bergman in her last performance. Something about this homely grandmother with thick ankles and an unmistakably Midwestern accent (she grew up in Milwaukee after emigrating from Russia) captured the public's fancy in the United States and abroad. Later she was Israel's first ambassador to the Soviet Union, labor minister and for 10 years foreign minister. Before Israel's independence she had undertaken important missions abroad, including a clandestine and probably dangerous meeting with King Abdullah of Transjordan, King Hussein's grandfather. She was eminently qualified to serve as head of Israel's government. She became the fourth prime minister of Israel at a critical juncture, after the lightning victory in the Six Day War in 1967, and stayed on through the trauma of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Golda Meir was one of those accidents of history-like Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill-who turn out to be larger than life.
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