The Slippery Rope

On Plymouth’s Barbican, a short walk from the Mayflower Steps, there is a blue sign fixed to a planter of cyclamen and ivy. “Did you know?” it asks, and then tells the story of John Howland, who fell overboard from the Mayflower in a storm, grabbed a rope and was saved by the crew. His descendants, the sign says, include Franklin D Roosevelt, George HW Bush, George Bush, Ralph Waldo and Humphrey Bogart.

“Ralph Waldo.” Emerson’s surname has slipped off the end of the line, much as Howland nearly slipped off the end of the ship. It is a small error with a large truth inside it. We see the names that made it onto the board. We never see the ones that would have been missing had a young man’s grip given way in the autumn of 1620.

In Peter Howitt’s 1998 film Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow runs for a train on the London Underground. In one version of her life the doors close in her face; in the other she slips through. History never gets to screen the second reel. Occasionally, though, we can see exactly where the doors were.

For Howland the door was a rope. William Bradford, who sailed on the same ship and later governed Plymouth Colony, left the fullest account. With the Mayflower lying ahull in a mighty storm, Howland, “a lusty young man”, came up on deck and was pitched into the sea by a roll of the ship. He caught the topsail halyards, which hung overboard and ran out at length. Bradford gives no more detail than that; the rest is ours to imagine, a wet line trailing in a heaving sea. He held on, “sundry fathoms under water”, until the crew hauled him to the surface and got him aboard with a boathook. He lived many years after, Bradford wrote, and became “a profitable member both in church and commonwealth”.

Profitable is an understatement. Howland married Elizabeth Tilley, a fellow passenger orphaned in the first terrible winter, and they had ten children and more than eighty grandchildren. Genealogists now put his living descendants at around two million. Among them are three men who between them led the United States through the Second World War and both of its wars against Saddam Hussein. Follow that rope far enough and it runs straight through the modern Middle East.

A word of caution before the conceit runs away with itself. Remove Howland and America would still have had presidents, Hitler would still have had to be beaten, and Saddam would still have marched into Kuwait. Genealogy is not destiny. But individuals make particular choices, and these three made choices that another man in the same chair might not have. Sliding Doors is not a film about whether Helen gets home. It is about which home she gets.

Start with Roosevelt. Lend-Lease, signed in March 1941, kept Britain fighting when it stood almost alone, and the American war machine he built was indispensable to destroying the regime that murdered six million Jews. That is one reel. The other is less flattering. In 1939 the St Louis, carrying 937 passengers, most of them Jewish refugees, was turned away from Cuba and denied entry to the United States before sailing back to Europe. The War Refugee Board, Washington’s first serious rescue effort, came only in January 1944. Both reels are true.

Then came the meeting that still shapes the Gulf. On 14 February 1945, fresh from Yalta, Roosevelt received King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud aboard the cruiser USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake. The king had never been to sea. Roosevelt asked his advice on the Jewish refugees of Europe; the king replied that they should be given living space in the Axis countries that had persecuted them, not in Arab lands. Roosevelt assured him that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs, and on 5 April he put that pledge in writing. Seven days later he was dead.

The oil and security relationship sketched on that deck is still the spine of American policy in the Gulf. But the man who sketched it never had to decide Palestine. Harry Truman did, recognising Israel minutes after its declaration in May 1948. Would Roosevelt have done the same? Historians still argue. The door closed at Warm Springs, Georgia, and we only ever saw one side of it.

Forty five years later the rope ran through George HW Bush. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush assembled a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. Saddam’s answer was to fire 39 Scud missiles at Israel, gambling that an Israeli response would shatter that coalition. Bush asked Yitzhak Shamir to hold fire and sent Patriot batteries crewed by American soldiers. Israelis sat in sealed rooms with gas masks, and Israel did not respond.

The restraint bought something. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, turned victory into the Madrid Conference, which opened on 30 October 1991, thirty five years ago this Friday. For the first time Israel sat at one table with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians. Bush leaned hard on Shamir to get there, asking Congress to defer $10 billion in loan guarantees while settlement building continued. Its track with Jordan led to the 1994 peace treaty that still holds. Earlier in 1991 Bush had sent a personal envoy, Rudy Boschwitz, to Ethiopia’s crumbling regime, and in May Israel flew 14,325 Ethiopian Jews home in about 36 hours. One president, one year: a war, an airlift and a peace conference.

There is one more door in that year. In February 1991 the coalition stopped short of Baghdad and left Saddam in power. Twelve years later his son walked through the door his father had left shut.

George W Bush invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003. Seen from Israel, one reel is plain. Saddam had been paying $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and those cheques stopped. Iraq, which had sent forces against Israel in 1948 and 1973 and missiles in 1991, ceased to be a threat on the eastern front. A year earlier, in the Rose Garden, Bush had also made a Palestinian state living beside Israel the stated aim of American policy.

The other reel ran through Tehran. No weapons of mass destruction were found. Iraq’s Shia majority, long shut out of power, took control and drifted towards Iran. By late 2004 King Abdullah II of Jordan was warning of a “Shia crescent” reaching from Iran through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and soon afterwards Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister was describing the war as a handover of Iraq to Iran. Israel has spent two decades contending with what grew along that arc. Father and son stood at the same door twelve years apart and made opposite choices. Both changed Israel’s neighbourhood for a generation.

The rabbis had a name for this arithmetic long before the Pilgrims sailed. The Mishnah, in tractate Sanhedrin, warns witnesses in capital cases that God told Cain the bloods of his brother cried out from the ground. Bloods, plural: Abel’s and those of all who would have descended from him. Hence the teaching on the medal Yad Vashem gives the Righteous Among the Nations: whoever saves a single life saves an entire world.

The Mishnah does not promise that the world saved will be a tidy one. The worlds that hung on Howland’s halyard include a war that defeated Nazism and a refugee ship sent back across the Atlantic; a coalition that freed Kuwait and a dictator left in place; an invasion that ended Saddam’s bounty for bombers and opened Iraq to Tehran. Israel lives on the far side of every one of those doors.

When I photographed the sign, a fallen leaf lay on the paving beneath it. Somewhere beyond the breakwater lies the route the Mayflower took, and far beyond that a patch of Atlantic where a wet rope ran out to its length and did not run out of hands. In the film the doors belong to a Tube carriage. On the Barbican they are a halyard, and nobody stood on the quay to watch them close. Two million people are standing up for Howland anyway, and one of them has lost his surname on the way.