Assessing Leaders at a Distancehis quest for an independent Palestinian nation, been willing to
break from the radical absolutists in the Palestinian movement. But
both leaders took major risks for peace in the wake of confronting
their mortality, which emphasized that their time was limited to
accomplish their goals. It was only after Arafat's helicopter crashed
in the Libyan desert, killing the pilot and resulting six weeks later in
a medical evacuation to the King Hussein Hospital in Amman for
emergency brain surgery to remove blood clots on the brain, that he
broke with the radical rejectionists and agreed to participate in the
Oslo negotiations, leading to the remarkable handshake with Prime
Minister Yitzakh Rabin of Israel in the Rose Garden and to the
Nobel Peace Prize. Several weeks later, King Hussein was hospital-
ized in the same hospital to remove a cancerous kidney. Subse-
quently he entered into independent peace negotiations with Israel,
his attempt to remove the stain on his historical record of losing cus-
tody over the holy sites in Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War
and to fulfill his historic destiny. To be sure, his grandfather,
Motalil, who had held meetings with Israeli Palestinian Jews in an
effort to achieve peace, provided a positive model for such efforts, but
the timing, coming as it did in the wake of his confrontation with
mortality, suggests that this provided an impetus to abandon his
customary caution and boldly strike out individually as he faced the
ebbing of his life. From a distance, of course, we never can know to a
certainty what drives and influences a leader, but, as this example
makes clear, the more solidly we understand the foundations of the
leader's identify and ambitions, the more confidently we can infer
psychological influences on political behavior.
But reactions to frustrated dreams of glory have led to intemper-
ate acts that have been destabilizing as well. The Shah of Iran had
written of his mission for his country, what had been termed the
White Revolution, his goal of transforming Iran into a modernizing
Middle Eastern nation. When he was informed by his French physi-
cians in 1973 that he was ill with a slowly developing malignancy,
he accelerated dramatically the pace of his efforts. Breaking with the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), he quadru-
pled the oil revenues pouring into Iran, which had a poorly devel-
oped infrastructure. This led to a tidal wave of rising expectations,
which destabilized the social structure, leading to profound discon-