Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

Jackie. His father, who owned flour mills and traded commodities, spoke Galician Yiddish at home. He fled from the Nazis with his family, and eventually became a diamond broker in New York.

“His father was a trader in industrial diamonds, an unsophisticated man, very hardworking, somewhat on the crude side,” said an old-timer in the diamond business. “Maurice’s mother was a traditional Jewish mother. Maurice himself had enormous drive. From an early age, he sought to fulfill himself and his destiny. He was simply determined.”

Maurice’s father worked for several important diamond merchants in America, including the renowned Sydney Lamon. An elegant, well-educated Dutchman who decorated the lobby of his office with Mogul paintings, Lamon left a lasting impression on Maurice, who sought to emulate Lamon’s refinement and understated style.

When Maurice was sixteen, he dropped out of school and went into the business. A couple of years later, he traveled alone to South Africa, and managed to wangle a private meeting with Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, then the uncrowned king of the Central Selling Organization, the secretive De Beers diamond empire. Sir Ernest was duly impressed and christened him “the boy wonder,” and from then on, Tempelsman enjoyed a direct pipeline to the world’s chief source of diamonds.

“Maurice never bought or sold a diamond himself as a trader,” said a knowledgeable source in the business. “That wasn’t his forte, to be a diamond dealer. He was a diamond thinker!”

Though Tempelsman was never as rich or famous as Onassis, the two men had much in common. Both had a compelling desire to break with their fathers and their pasts, to better themselves, and to be accepted by people of quality. And both had a psychological need to prove themselves by making huge deals.

“The Tempelsmans are a trading family,” said someone who worked with Maurice. “They understand the art of the deal better than most businesspeople. What’s more, they can see opportunity, and go after it.”

In the mid 1950s, while Tempelsman was still in his twenties and a budding millionaire, he retained Adlai Stevenson as his lawyer. The former Democratic presidential candidate was viewed sympathetically in the soon-to-be-liberated colonies of black Africa, and Tempelsman asked him to accompany him on a get-acquainted tour of the Dark Continent.

“We visited several countries,” said someone who was on the trip, “and stayed on in Ghana, trying to get a diamond license for Mr. Tempelsman. I finally hired a local lawyer, and we got the license.”

By then, various heads of state were indebted to Tempelsman, who had better connections in black Africa than most of their ambassadors. In addition, Tempelsman was a heavy hitter among Democratic Party contributors, and in the late 1950s another one of his lawyers, Ted Sorensen, arranged a meeting with the skinny presidential hopeful John Kennedy, who wanted to get to know Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. Tempelsman set up the meeting, and Kennedy brought along his exotic-looking wife, Jacqueline. She was the personification of everything that Tempelsman had always dreamed of.

Building on his special relationships with Oppenheimer and Kennedy, Tempelsman devised a daring commodities scheme. This required some heavy lobbying in Washington to get a bill passed by Congress, for it involved the barter of several hundred million dollars’ worth of American surplus wheat and other agricultural produce for industrial diamonds, cobalt, and uranium to replenish the strategic materials stockpiled by the United States in case of emergency.

“Maurice stood to make in the neighborhood of $50 million on the deal,” said a member of the Kennedy Administration who dealt with him. “He went to Jackie, and Jackie went to Jack and said, in effect, ‘Here’s a guy you ought to see.’ JFK asked me to see him, and Maurice met me in my office.

“I said, ‘We’ll never get your scheme past Congress. There are thirty-five members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which is headed by Senator Anderson of New Mexico.’

“Maurice said, ‘Who’s going to raise objections?’

“I said, ‘Every member of the committee.’

“He said, ‘Let me talk to them.’

“I said, ‘I can’t prevent you from doing that. You can talk to anyone you want.’

“He went to every member of the committee, and somehow managed to get their approval, and then he came back to me.

“And I told him, ‘Well, you’ve taken care of one problem, but there’s still the press. They’re not going to like it.’

“Maurice said, ‘What would it take for the press to like it?’

“I said, ‘If you’d cut your fee, then no one would object.’

“Maurice said, ‘I might be willing to do that, but I’ve worked on this for two years, and I think I deserve something.’

“I said, ‘I guess one percent or half of one percent would not be objectionable to anybody in view of all the time and money and travel you’ve spent on it.’

“And he agreed to cut his fee from $50 million to under $5 million. We approved the deal, and it went through Congress, and it was done.”

Tempelsman’s plane touched down at the airport in Gbadolite. The runway had been carved out of the bush to accommodate Mobutu’s private Concorde, which Zaire leased from Air France to ferry the president and his family to shopping sprees in Europe. Gbadolite had once been a modest market town on the banks of the Ubangi River. But Mobutu had transformed it into a thriving jungle city with its own Coca-Cola bottling plant, modern telephone system, luxury hotel, and presidential palace.

This gaudy white marble retreat was often called “the Versailles of the Jungle,” though in fact it was modeled after the Belgian royal family’s Laeken Palace. It had its own casino, and it was surrounded by lawns where lions and elephants roamed freely. There was also a moat, which Mobutu had stocked with crocodiles.

The funeral took place in a crypt of white marble that evoked the royal crypt of Laeken. A priest bid the mourners bow their heads in prayerful silence in memory of Mama Mobutu (whose husband, after mistreating her during her lifetime, was now eager to see her beatified).

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