One would not have expected Benjamin Netanyahu and Kevin McCarthy to have very much in common. One is the second son of a famed and brilliant scholar, whose elder brother, by all accounts his father’s favorite, was killed in one of most audacious and celebrated rescue missions in his nation’s history, while the other is the son of an assistant fire chief in a middle-class town in central California, whose first business venture was selling sandwiches from the back of his uncle’s yogurt shop. Netanyahu graduated from MIT, where he received degrees in architecture and management and was pursuing a PhD in political science, but left school to go on to a distinguished stint of his own in Israeli special forces, while McCarthy never served in the military and has a marketing degree from a local college.
Their careers took different paths as well. Netanyahu rode his family name and impeccable Zionist credentials to accelerate his way up the political ladder of the Israeli right wing, while McCarthy, whose parents were Democrats, was forced to work his way up slowly and methodically through the California Republican Party. In the end, however, both have achieved their dream—Netanyahu is prime minister of Israel, a job in which he has served longer than any of his predecessors, and McCarthy is speaker of the United States House of Representatives and third in line for the presidency.
Now, however, at the pinnacle of their careers, each finds himself stymied by his own ambition, forced into adopting a more radical agenda than he might have favored by party firebrands even more extreme than he. As a result, each is threatened with what he dreads the most—losing his job.
