The Man Who Turned Sharon Into a Softie

By Matt Rees

Reuven Adler accepted the daunting challenge in the 2001 election of trying to soften Ariel Sharon's image. "He's a warrior. He's quite fat, and when he walks, he stomps along," Adler, an advertising executive, recalls thinking. "We had to give him some feminine appeal." Sharon, Adler calculated, was too far to the right on the political spectrum to gain broad support. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing the extreme left wing and 5 the far right, Adler figured, Sharon was a 4.7. The winner of every previous election had been a little right of center, Adler judged--somewhere from 2.6 to 3.2. If Sharon wanted to become Prime Minister, the public had to perceive him as being in that sweet spot.

Sitting around a circular glass table at his trendy Tel Aviv advertising firm, Adler Chomsky & Warshawsky, Adler asked Sharon what he wanted to accomplish as Prime Minister. "I believe that only I can bring peace," Sharon replied. That was enough for Adler to work with. He and a team of Sharon advisers, including p.r. man Eyal Arad and U.S.-based political strategist Arthur Finkelstein, focused the campaign not on the hawkish-sounding theme of security but on peace. They produced a bumper sticker--ONLY SHARON CAN BRING PEACE (it kind of rhymes in Hebrew)--and TV ads with soft music showed Sharon strolling the fields on his farm and hugging his granddaughter. There were only a few references to the security background that, Adler believed, established Sharon as the best man to face off against the Palestinian leader at the time, Yasser Arafat. Suddenly the "unelectable" hard-line general had turned into a campaigner the Israeli media dubbed Grandpa Sharon. He won easily.

The fashionably rumpled Adler, 62, remains one of Sharon's closest friends and most trusted advisers. They met almost 30 years ago, when Adler worked on a campaign for Sharon's Shlomzion party, which later merged with Likud. Adler's politics are centrist--"I'm a 2.6," he says--but he works with Sharon out of admiration for his friend. Every two weeks, Adler spends a weekend morning at Sharon's ranch, chatting and eating with the family. The two men also speak by phone several times a week, often about soccer, not politics.

After that first election, Adler continued to advise Sharon, helping him win a landslide in his second election, in January 2003. After that vote, Sharon penned a note to Adler that hangs framed on his office wall: "Reuven, my good friend, I couldn't have done it without you." Adler isn't advising Sharon on his disengagement plan, at least not officially. (The Prime Minister's office is handling the p.r.) But when Sharon faces Likud leadership primaries and a general election by next year, Adler expects to be part of the campaign. "The message will be different," Adler says, "because Arafat doesn't exist anymore." In other words, Adler may have to reinvent Sharon all over again. --By Matt Rees