It must be draining to do eight interviews in a row, but Benjamin Netanyahu seemed energized by it. The Israeli prime minister walked into our meeting in a New York hotel room bantering and smiling. He commented on the shades (pulled down to avoid a backlit photo) and noticed a novel that our engineer had brought along. Netanyahu picked it up and looked it over — a novel by Joe Hill, the pen name for the son of Stephen King.
When we settled into the interview, Netanyahu picked up the book that he had brought along, which he held up in more than one of his interviews Thursday. This book was authored by Hassan Rouhani, the new president of Iran, who had written about his past experience as Iran's nuclear negotiator. When Rouhani was in charge of the nuclear file from 2003 to 2005, he made some progress in his talks with the West, but only temporary progress, even as Iran continued its nuclear development. Netanyahu took that book as a confession of Rouhani's duplicitousness. "He's an open book," Netanyahu said, "and we have the book!"
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