"Smith was a simple man," Graham Boynton wrote soon after his death, "and it was his rather humourless, one-dimensional Rhodesian-ness that at once made him a hero among his own people and a figure of derision among his enemies". As leader of the Rhodesian Front and its successors, he was the foremost figure of his country's white community—a "symbol and father figure", in Mordechai Tamarkin's phrase, who as Prime Minister "personified white Rhodesia". Supporters hailed him as "a political visionary ... who understood the uncomfortable truths of Africa"; detractors denounced him as "an unrepentant racist".