Three weeks ago Daniel Pierre Krauthammer, our first, entered the world. It was a noisy and boisterous entry, as befits a 10-pound Krauthammer. It has been just as noisy and boisterous since. I had been warned by friend and foe that life would never be the same. They were right.
Of course, like all exhausted newborn fathers, I am just looking for sympathy. It is my wife, Robyn, whose life has been fully merged with his, in a symbiosis profound and delicate. His sucking, did you know, causes the uterus to contract and helps shrink it back to normal size. Twenty days old, and he is healing her.
What she does for him, of course, would not fit in a month’s worth of columns. What do I do? It seems my job is to father, a verb which must count as one of the age’s more inventive creations. How exactly to father? I don’t really know. The women’s movement, to which the idea owes its currency, is right to insist that the father do more.
But more of what? I have been asking myself that lately as I rock him and hold him and speak to him in the gravest of tones. But we both know, we all three know, the truth: Nature has seen to it that anything I can do, she can do better. Mine is literally a holding action.
Of course, the imperative to father is only the last of the social conventions one must bend to on the road to parenting. (I am learning the language.) First, there is Lamaze, the classes that teach you to be natural. Robyn does not fancy oxymorons. And I, as a former psychiatrist, know a placebo when I see one. We said no to Lamaze.
We said yes to the Volvo. In fact, on the Volvo we went all the way. We got the station wagon with roof rack: the ultimate yuppie conveyance. “For safety reasons only,” I explain to friends, a protest that meets with knowing smiles.
Finally, there is the supreme modern convention: the now-absolute requirement that father, in surgical gear, attend the birth. Of course, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. You can, if you wish, wait outside, like Dagwood Bumstead, pacing and smoking and fretting until it’s over. You have the perfect right to betray your wife, spurn your child and disgrace your sex. It’s a free country.
The transformation of expectant father from nuisance—packed off to boil water, find towels and generally get out of the way—to conscripted co-producer of the birth epic is one of the anthropological wonders of the age. And on the whole, apart from the coercion, a good thing. Father’s presence serves two purposes. One is to reduce the anguish of the mother. The other is to increase the anguish of the father. Both seem to me laudable goals. It makes up a bit for the extraordinarily unfair imbalance of suffering that attends childbirth.
Thank God, the new convention does not (yet) command fathers to attend a caesarean delivery. I speak from experience. Robyn needed a caesarean and, hoping I could comfort her, I was with her in the operating room. I was not looking for a Maslovian peak-experience, the kind of epiphany that reputedly accompanies the moment of birth. I was doubtful, not just because of my usual skepticism, but because of my previous career. In medical school, I had assisted at several births, including a couple of caesareans, and always had trouble seeing the poetry for the blood.
There was little poetry this time either. It was an agonizing hour for her, and for me. (Daniel did very well.) The poetry came afterward, in the recovery room, where I found Daniel asleep in Robyn’s arms.
It has been poetry and reverie ever since. Having a child, I discovered, makes you dream again and, at the same time, makes the dreams utterly real. Lately I have been dreaming of the future. I find entirely new meaning in what we in Washington call “out-years.” Take 1989, the year the budget deficit comes down to $100 billion. A time far, far away…until I figured it is the year when we retire Daniel’s Pampers. A manageable deficit, only a few thousand nappy changes away.
Stranger years, years of exotic immensity, years that till now had meaning to Arthur C. Clarke only, become utterly mundane. 2001, the year of the mystical obelisk, and Daniel should be getting his learner’s permit. 2010, the obelisk returns and Daniel is looking for a job. 2050, a year of unimaginable distance: his first Social Security check.
“Checks? Social Security?” my friend Pepe interrupts. “Where’s your imagination, man? They’ll all be memories. Think big. 2050: the year he takes a sabbatical on Saturn.”
I’m thinking small. I gaze at his body, so perfectly formed, so perfectly innocent. It has yet to be written on. I look at his knee and wonder where will be the little mark that records his first too-hard slide into second base.
The Washington Post, June 28, 1985
After the plain pine box is lowered into the grave, the mourners are asked to come forward—immediate family first—and shovel dirt onto the casket. Only when it is fully covered, only when all that can be seen is dust, is the ceremony complete.
Such is the Jewish way of burial. Its simplicity, austerity and unsentimentality would have appealed to Irving Kristol, who was buried by friends and family Tuesday. Equally fitting for this most unsentimental of men was the spare funeral service that preceded the burial. It consisted of the recitation of two psalms and the prayer for the dead, and two short addresses: an appreciation by the rabbi, followed by a touching, unadorned remembrance by his son, Bill.
The wonder of Irving was that he combined this lack of sentimentality—he delighted in quietly puncturing all emotional affectations and indulgences—with a genuine generosity of spirit. He was a deeply good man who disdained shows of goodness, deflecting expressions of gratitude or admiration with a disarming charm and an irresistible smile. That’s because he possessed what might be called a moral humility. For Irving, doing good—witness the posthumous flood of grateful emails, letters and other testimonies from often young and uncelebrated beneficiaries of that goodness—was as natural and unremarkable as breathing.
Kristol’s biography has been rehearsed in a hundred places. He was one of the great public intellectuals of our time, father of a movement, founder of magazines, nurturer of two generations of thinkers—seeding our intellectual and political life for well over half a century.
Having had the undeserved good fortune of knowing him during his 21-year sojourn in Washington, I can testify to something lesser known: his extraordinary equanimity. His temperament was marked by a total lack of rancor. Angst, bitterness and anguish were alien to him. That, of course, made him unusual among the fraternity of conservatives because we believe that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. That makes us cranky. But not Irving. Never Irving. He retained steadiness, serenity and grace that expressed themselves in a courtliness couched in a calm quiet humor.
My theory of Irving is that this amazing equanimity was rooted in a profound sense of modesty. First about himself. At 20, he got a job as a machinist’s apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He realized his future did not lie in rivets, he would recount with a smile, when the battleship turret he was working on was found to be pointing in the wrong direction. It could only shoot inward—directly at the ship’s own bridge.
He was equally self-deprecating about his experiences as an infantryman in World War II France. (“Experiences?” he once said to me. “We were lost all the time.”) His gloriously unheroic view of himself extended to the rest of humanity—its politics, its pretensions, its grandiose plans for the renovation of…humanity.
This manifested itself in the work for which he is most celebrated: his penetrating, devastating critique of modern liberalism and of its grand projects for remaking man and society. But his natural skepticism led him often to resist conservative counter-enthusiasms as well. Most recently, the general panic about changing family structures.
Irving had an abiding reverence for tradition and existing norms. But he thought it both futile and anti-human to imagine we could arrest their evolution. He never yelled for history to stop. He acknowledged the necessity of adaptation (most famously, to the New Deal and the welfare state). He was less concerned about the form of emerging family norms, such as France’s non-marriage Civil Solidarity Pact, than whether they could in time perform the essential functions of the traditional family—from the generational transmission of values to the socialization of young males.
That spirit of skepticism and intellectual openness was a marvel. One of Irving’s triumphs was to have infused that spirit into the Public Interest, the most serious and influential social policy journal of our time. Irving cofounded it in 1965, then closed it 40 years later, saying with characteristic equanimity, “No journal is meant to last forever.”
A new time, a new journal. On September 8, 2009, the first issue of a new quarterly, National Affairs—successor to the Public Interest—was published. Irving Kristol died 10 days later, but not before writing a letter to its editor—two generations his junior—offering congratulations and expressing pleasure at its creation.
That small tender shoot, yet another legacy of this great good life, was the last Irving lived to see. We shall see many more.
The Washington Post, September 25, 2009
What made Ronald Reagan the greatest president of the second half of the 20th century? Well, he certainly had the one quality Napoleon always sought in a general: luck. Luck in his looks, luck in his voice, luck in his smile, luck in his choice of mate (although for Reagan the second time was the charm).
And the greatest luck that any president can have: trouble, serious trouble. An acquaintance of Bill Clinton’s has said that he felt frustrated that September 11 did not happen on his watch. That is understandable (if characteristically self-centered) because the best chance any president has for greatness is to be in power during war or disaster. Apart from the Founders, the only great president we have had in good times is Theodore Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were the “luckiest” of them all, having had the opportunity to take the country triumphantly through the two greatest wars in US history.
Reagan’s luck was to find a nation in trouble—in post-Vietnam retreat and disorientation. His political genius was to restore its spirit. And his legacy was winning the longest war in American history, the long twilight struggle of the Cold War.
He achieved all that with two qualities: courage and conviction. Conviction led him to initiate economic shock therapy to pull the United States out of the stagflation of the 1970s. Courage allowed him not to flinch when his radical economic policies (and those of a merciless Federal Reserve) initially caused the worst recession since the Great Depression—and during a congressional election year (1982) to boot.
Reagan didn’t waver, and by 1984 it was morning in America. The new prosperity gave a lilt to the rest of his presidency. But you don’t get called great for lilt. You get called great for victory. And Reagan won the Cold War.
Conviction told him that the proper way to deal with this endless, enervating, anxiety-ridden ordeal was not settling for stability but going for victory. Courage allowed him to weather the incessant, at times almost universal, attacks on him for the radical means he chose to win it: the military buildup; nuclear deployments in Europe; the Reagan doctrine of overt support for anticommunist resistance movements everywhere, including Nicaragua; and the pièce de résistance, strategic missile defenses, derisively dubbed Star Wars by scandalized opponents. Within eight years, an overmatched, overwhelmed, overstretched Soviet Union was ready for surrender, the historically breathtaking, total and peaceful surrender of everything—its empire and its state.
Reagan won that war not just with radical policies but also with a radically unashamed ideological challenge, the great 1982 Westminster speech predicting that communism would end up in the “ash heap of history” and the subsequent designation of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” That won him the derision of Western sophisticates, intellectuals and defeatists of all kinds. It also won him the undying admiration of liberation heroes from Vaclav Havel to Natan Sharansky. Years later, Sharansky testified to the life-giving encouragement that Reagan’s unadorned words about Soviet evil and Western determination gave to those buried with him in the Gulag.
Rarely does history render such decisive verdicts: Reagan was right, his critics were wrong. Less than a year after he left office, the Berlin Wall came down.
The ungenerous would say he had a great presidency but was not a great man. That follows the tradition of his opponents who throughout his career consistently underestimated him, disdaining him as a good actor, a Being There simpleton who could read scripts written for him by others. In fact, Reagan frustrated his biographers because he was so complex—a free-market egalitarian, an intellectually serious nonintellectual, an ideologue with great tactical flexibility.
With the years, the shallow explanations for Reagan’s success—charm, acting, oratory—have fallen away. What remains is Reagan’s largeness and deeply enduring significance. Let Edward Kennedy, the dean of Democratic liberalism, render the verdict: “It would be foolish to deny that his success was fundamentally rooted in a command of public ideas….Whether we agreed with him or not, Ronald Reagan was a successful candidate and an effective President above all else because he stood for a set of ideas. He stated them in 1980—and it turned out that he meant them—and he wrote most of them not only into public law but into the national consciousness.”
There is no better definition of presidential greatness.
Time, June 14, 2004
Thomas Jefferson will ever haunt us. The right eyes him suspiciously as a limousine Jacobin so enamored of revolution that he once suggested we should have one every 20 years. The left disdains him as your basic race hypocrite. And in the popular imagination, inflamed by Hollywood, the man is Mr. Sally Hemings.
All these views wildly miss the mark because no one view can begin to comprehend so large a man. In everything—talent, imagination, writing, indeed, curiosity—Jefferson was prodigious, Continental and, hence, supremely American.
The Library of Congress bicentennial exhibit of Jefferson’s books and writings offers a splendid display of the vastness and the complexities of the man. The complexity begins, of course, with the central contradiction: prophet of freedom, owner of slaves. You see in his own hand the journal entry deploring the removal from the Declaration of Independence, at the insistence of Georgia and South Carolina, of the clause condemning African slavery. You recall the famous line regarding slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
But then there is that most peculiar door at Monticello, the revolving serving door outside the dining room. One side has shelves. The other is flat. Food would be brought up from the basement kitchen and placed on the shelves on the outer side of the door. It would then be swung around. What did Jefferson and his guests see? Dinner, minus the slaves who prepared it.
Jefferson resorted to many devices, architectural and intellectual, to enjoy the bounties of plantation life without having to face its injustices. He was more clear-sighted, however, in facing that other American conundrum, the Native American. Jefferson had great respect for the Indians. He considered them the equal of the white man. And yet he fully understood that America would have to be built at their expense. Hence his remarkable letter to Benjamin Hawkins on August 13, 1786: “The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded are justice and fear….After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us.”
Justice and fear. What modern politician would be bold enough to characterize foreign policy so starkly? “Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” said Balzac. Behind every great nation too. Jefferson certainly wanted to do justice to the Indians. But he knew the white man needed to instill fear in the Indian or the American experiment would fail. How characteristically Jefferson: an offhanded trope that sublimely captures the central tension of all foreign policy—that between morality and necessity, power and principle.
Jefferson could not only hold two contradictory ideas in his head, he could also act on both. Here, after all, is the great champion of small, limited government perpetrating the Louisiana Purchase, arguably the grandest exercise of extra-constitutional executive power in American history. But what else should we expect from the founder whose great vision of America was the Empire of Liberty, as profound an oxymoron as political theory can provide?
The most delightful example of the duality of the man is to be found in the library that Jefferson gave the US in 1815. Two-thirds of the books were destroyed in a fire in 1851, but now the Library of Congress has found equivalent editions and put the entire 6,487 volumes on magnificent display. The tall stacks are arranged as Jefferson had them at Monticello. What strikes you first is how brilliantly and methodically they are cataloged. Jefferson’s classification system—used by the Library of Congress for 82 years—divided all knowledge into three parts: memory (history), reason (philosophy, the sciences) and imagination (art). Within these categories, he had 44(!) subcategories.
But wait. As you walk around the room, you notice something: The shelves are not of equal height. The tallest ones are at the bottom. And they are full of the tallest books. Then you understand. Jefferson, the philosopher, worshipped reason. Jefferson, the librarian, understood that sometimes you must surrender to reality and classify a book by its size.
Which is why we will be celebrating Jefferson at the next Library of Congress centenary too. He so embodies America in all its sprawling contradictory greatness: the Wilsonian idealist prepared to engage in ruthless Rooseveltian realism; the worshiper of system, order and science who is given to romance—with France, with revolution, with the American West; the practical inventor and tinkerer, yet endowed with the capacity to compose the most lyrical, most transcendent assertion of human liberty ever penned.
If Washington is father of our country, Jefferson is father of the ever restless, ever hungering American mind.
Time, May 22, 2000
Not too many people can point to a specific day when they sat down with a book and got up cured of the stupidities of youth. I can. I was 19. The book was Four Essays on Liberty. The author was Isaiah Berlin. He died last week at 88.
Berlin was one of the great political philosophers of his time. Yet he never produced a single great tome. He left behind essays. But what essays. His most famous is “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” a wonderfully imaginative division of the great thinkers of history into those who have one big idea (hedgehogs) and those who have many small ones (foxes).
Berlin was partial to foxes. He believed that single issues, fixed ideas, single-minded ideologies are dangerous, the royal road to arrogance and inhumanity. Against those who proclaimed they had found the one true path to political salvation, Berlin stood in the way, a champion of pluralism, the many-pathed way.
Four Essays on Liberty is his great argument for pluralism. Why was it such a powerful book? It came out in 1969. In 1969, to be young was heaven—and to be seized with intimations of heavenly omniscience. It was a time of grand theories and grand aspirations—liberation, revolution, historical inevitability—and we children were mightily seduced.
The temptations were many. There was, of course, Marxism; for the masochistic, there was Trotskyism; for the near-psychotic, there was Maoism. And apart from Marxism and its variants, there was the lure of such philosophers as Rousseau, the great theorist of mass democracy and the supremacy of the “popular will.”
In the midst of all this craziness, along comes Berlin and says: Look, this is all very nice, but what the monists—the believers in the one true truth, Marx and Rousseau and (by implication) such Third World deities as Mao and Ho and Castro—are proclaiming is not freedom. What they offer may be glorious and uplifting and just. But freedom is something very different. Freedom is being left alone. Freedom is a sphere of autonomy, an inviolable political space that no authority may invade.
In fact, said Berlin, these other “higher” pseudo-freedoms peddled by the monist prophets are very dangerous. They proclaim one true value above all else—equality in Marx, fraternity in Rousseau—and in the end the individual with his freedom is crushed underfoot. Heads roll. Millions of them.
And another thing, said Berlin: Historical inevitability is bunk, a kind of religion for atheists.
And one more thing, he said (in the fourth and final essay of the book): The true heart of the liberal political tradition is the belief that no one has the secret as to what is the ultimate end and goal of life. There are many ends, each deserving respect, and it is out of this very pluribus that we get freedom.
I read this book and a great fog—made of equal parts youthful enthusiasm, hubris and naïveté—lifted. I was forever enlisted on the side of limited, constitutional government—flawed as it was and despised at the time as “the system.”
Berlin’s argument seems blindingly obvious now. But the anti-“system” ravings of, say, the Unabomber, which seem grotesque today, were common fare on the campuses of 1969. Today history has buried Marxism’s pretensions. In 1969, when history had not quite played itself out, Berlin’s book was a tonic.
It was not without its flaws. It was brilliant in deconstructing the political romantics. But it did have its logical conundrum. Philosopher Leo Strauss, in his essay “Relativism,” surgically exposed the central paradox of Berlin’s position: that it made pluralism—the denial of one supreme, absolute value—the supreme, absolute value.
This paradox and Berlin’s fecund, restless mind—which moved from one idea to another (often in the same sentence!)—prevented him from establishing a grand intellectual edifice of his own. He remained forever a fox.
But just as there are hedgehogs and foxes, there are creators and there are curers. Berlin was one of our great curers.
Four Essays is available everywhere. Buy it. Make your children read it before they go to college, the last redoubt of romantic neo-Marxism. If they think the book is obvious, you have raised them well. If they don’t, Berlin will challenge their complacency.
And keep one copy at home. The idea of limited government has triumphed. But the moment may not last. The pluralism Berlin championed will be challenged again. Whether by religious fundamentalism, by some reconstructed Marxism, or by an ideology whose outlines and ugliness we cannot even imagine today, it will be challenged. When that day comes, Berlin and his Four Essays will be needed again.
The Washington Post, November 14, 1997
It was Stalin who gave us the most famous formulation of that cynical (and today quite fashionable) philosophy known as “realism”—the idea that all that ultimately matters in the relations among nations is power: “The pope? How many divisions does he have?”
Stalin could have said that only because he never met John Paul II. We have just lost the man whose life was the ultimate refutation of “realism.” Within 10 years of his elevation to the papacy, John Paul II had given his answer to Stalin and to the ages: More than you have. More than you can imagine.
History will remember many of the achievements of John Paul II, particularly his zealous guarding of the church’s traditional belief in the sanctity of life, not permitting it to be unmoored by the fashionable currents of thought about abortion, euthanasia and “quality of life.” But above all, he will be remembered for having sparked, tended and fanned the flames of freedom in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, leading ultimately and astonishingly to the total collapse of the Soviet empire.
I am not much of a believer, but I find it hard not to suspect some providential hand at play when the white smoke went up at the Vatican 27 years ago and the Polish cardinal was chosen to lead the Catholic Church. Precisely at the moment that the West most desperately needed it, we were sent a champion. It is hard to remember now how dark those days were. The 15 months following the pope’s elevation marked the high tide of Soviet communism and the nadir of the free world’s post-Vietnam collapse.
It was a time of one defeat after another. Vietnam invaded Cambodia, consolidating Soviet hegemony over all of Indochina. The Khomeini revolution swept away America’s strategic anchor in the Middle East. Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas, the first Soviet-allied regime on the mainland of the Western Hemisphere. (As an unnoticed but ironic coda, Marxists came to power in Grenada too.) Then, finally, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
And yet precisely at the time of this free-world retreat and disarray, a miracle happens. The Catholic Church, breaking nearly 500 years of tradition, puts itself in the hands of an obscure non-Italian—a Pole who, deeply understanding the Eastern European predicament, rose to become, along with Roosevelt, Churchill and Reagan, one of the great liberators of the 20th century.
John Paul II’s first great mission was to reclaim his native Eastern Europe for civilization. It began with his visit to Poland in 1979, symbolizing and embodying a spiritual humanism that was the antithesis of the soulless materialism and decay of late Marxism-Leninism. As millions gathered to hear him and worship with him, they began to feel their own power and to find the institutional structure—the vibrant Polish church—around which to mobilize.
And mobilize they did. It is no accident that Solidarity, the leading edge of the Eastern European revolution, was born just a year after the pope’s first visit. Deploying a brilliantly subtle diplomacy that never openly challenged the Soviet system but nurtured and justified every oppositional trend, often within the bosom of the local church, John Paul II became the pivotal figure of the people-power revolutions of Eastern Europe.
While the success of these popular movements demonstrated the power of ideas and proved realism wrong, let us have no idealist illusions either: People power can succeed only against oppression that has lost confidence in itself. When Soviet communism still had enough sense of its own historical inevitability to send tanks against people in the street—Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968—people power was useless.
By the 1980s, however, the Soviet sphere was both large and decadent. And a new pope brought not only hope but political cunning to the captive nations yearning to be free. He demonstrated what Europe had forgotten and Stalin never knew: the power of faith as an instrument of political mobilization.
Under the benign and deeply humane vision of this pope, the power of faith led to the liberation of half a continent. Under the barbaric and nihilistic vision of Islam’s jihadists, the power of faith has produced terror and chaos. That contrast alone, which has dawned upon us unmistakably ever since September 11, should be reason enough to be grateful for John Paul II. But we mourn him for more than that. We mourn him for restoring strength to the Western idea of the free human spirit at a moment of deepest doubt and despair. And for seeing us through to today’s great moment of possibility for both faith and freedom.
The Washington Post, April 4, 2005
Christianity, whose presence in the Middle East predates Islam’s by 600 years, is about to be cleansed from the Middle East. Egyptian Copts may have found some respite under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, but after their persecution under the previous Muslim Brotherhood government, they know how precarious their existence in 90% Muslim Egypt remains. Elsewhere, it’s much worse. Twenty-one Copts were beheaded by the Islamic State affiliate in Libya for the crime of being Christian. In those large swaths of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State rules, the consequences for Christians are terrible—enslavement, exile, torture, massacre, crucifixion.
Over the decades, many Middle Eastern Christians, seeing the rise of political Islam and the intensification of savage sectarian wars, have simply left. Lebanon’s Christians, once more than half the population, are now estimated at about a third. The number of Christians under Palestinian Authority rule in the West Bank has dwindled—in Bethlehem, for example, dropping by half. (The exception, of course, is Israel, where Christians, Arab and non-Arab, enjoy not just protection but civil rights. Their numbers are increasing. But that’s another story.)
Most endangered are the Christians of Syria. Four years ago they numbered about 1.1 million. By now 700,000 have fled. Many of those remaining in country are caught either under radical Islamist rule or in the crossfire between factions. As the larger Christian world looks on passively, their future, like the future of Middle Eastern Christianity writ large, will be determined by Iran, Hezbollah, the Assad dynasty, the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, various other local factions and by regional powers seeking advantage.
Meanwhile, on a more limited scale, there are things that can be done. Three weeks ago, for example, 150 Syrian Christians were airlifted to refuge and safety in Poland.
That’s the work of the Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund. It provided the flight and will support the refugees for as long as 18 months as they try to remake their lives.
The person behind all this is Lord George Weidenfeld: life peer, philanthropist, publisher (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, established 1949), Europeanist (founder of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to promote classically liberal European values), proud public Jew (honorary vice president of the World Jewish Congress), lifelong Zionist (he once served as the chief of cabinet to Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann) and, as he will delightedly tell you, the last person to fight a duel at the University of Vienna—with sabers, against a Nazi. (No one died.)
Weidenfeld, now 95, once invoked Torschlusspanik, “a German phrase which roughly translates as the ‘panic before the closing of the doors,’ ” to explain why “I’m a man in a hurry.” Remarkably healthy and stunningly energetic (as distant cousins, we are often in touch), he appears nowhere near any exit doors. But he is aware of and deeply troubled by the doors closing in on a community in Syria largely abandoned by the world.
In context, the scale of the initial rescue is tragically small. The objective is to rescue 2,000 families. Compared to the carnage in Syria wrought by the pitiless combatants—230,000 dead, half the 22 million population driven from their homes—it’s a paltry sum. But these are real people who will be saved. And for Weidenfeld, that counts.
Yet he has been criticized for rescuing just Christians. In fact, the US government will not participate because the rescue doesn’t extend to Yazidis, Druze or Shiites.
This comes under the heading of no good deed going unpunished. It’s a rather odd view that because he cannot do everything, he should be admonished for trying to do something. If Weidenfeld were a man of infinite means, the criticism might be valid. As it is, he says rather sensibly, “I can’t save the world.” The Arab states, particularly the Gulf monarchies, are surely not without resources. With so few doing so little for so many, he’s doing what he can.
And for him, it’s personal. In 1938, still a teenager, he was brought from Vienna to London where the Plymouth Brethren took him in and provided for him. He never forgot. He is trying to return the kindness, he explains, to repay the good that Christians did for him 77 years ago. In doing so, he is not just giving hope and a new life to 150 souls, soon to be thousands. He has struck a blow for something exceedingly rare: simple, willful righteousness.
The Washington Post, July 31, 2015
Postscript: Lord Weidenfeld died just six months after the publication of this column, on January 20, 2016. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, Israel.
Meg Greenfield, who died last week at 68, was not just one of the best journalists of our time. In my view, she was the best editorial page editor of our time. For 20 years, she made the editorial page of the Washington Post the best in the country. She did it by applying the same talents that served her so well as a writer and columnist: a quick and deep intellect, a fine pen and a total allergy to spin and bull. She had more antibodies to pap, flacks and fakes than anyone in Washington. She was immune.
Indeed, one of her great talents in her own writing was her ability to cut through the fog produced by professional fog makers in this town—politicians and bureaucrats, journalists and publicists—to expose the ironies, the foibles, the vanities, the poses that inevitably attend the politics of a great capital.
And yet she did it—and this was the distinct Greenfield touch—without condescension, without ever letting criticism turn into contempt. That is because she had great respect for what Washington does: weigh deep and often ancient arguments and try from that to fashion action. She had respect for the difficulty of this Sisyphean task and for the fallibility of the men and women engaged in it. Nonetheless, she never flinched from subjecting everything and everyone to the two great Greenfield criteria: intellectual rigor and social decency.
She was a great student, critic, analyst, debunker and in the end, shaper of power. She could expose the innards of the Washington game without ever losing her appreciation of its more noble possibilities. She had the gift of seeing—she delighted in—both the high and the low, the sublime and the ridiculous. And she could navigate between the two with the ease that comes to those blessed with a deep and understanding humanity.
But I knew Meg not just as a writer and editor but as a friend. I knew her for 15 years. During half of those years she, George Will and I had lunch every Saturday at the Chevy Chase Lounge, a long-gone, rundown local eatery (now home to an upscale Italian “osteria”). It was wall-to-wall Formica, linoleum, canned tuna and cholesterol. Meg loved the place.
For a few months, while the Lounge was being renovated (as I recall, repairing damage suffered from the firebomb thrown into the offices of the Chinese restaurant upstairs) we looked for a suitable substitute. Meg gave the nod to Cafe Roma, another little spot (also long gone) of the same distinguished decor and menu, but with an added touch: Its walls groaned with the mounted heads of the big game that one of the early owners had bagged on safari. Our lunch guests, often senators, ambassadors or cabinet members, thought the choice droll.
It was at these lunches that I got to see Meg at her most vivid and to revel in her wit. And what a wit it was: wicked, quick, mordant and above all, subtle.
But Meg was more than that. She was a great friend: wise, generous, loyal and kind. The last of these qualities is often overlooked. Her obituaries talk of her toughness. And tough she was: She delighted in telling grandees of all stripes and nationalities where to get off, especially when they dared lay territorial claim to a column-inch of her pages. That toughness—the impossibility of pushing her around, which is what made her such a paragon of editorial and intellectual integrity—often obscured the kindness, which consisted of a bedrock decency uncontaminated by a trace of sentimentality. She never emoted. But she always did the right thing, undemonstratively.
When my father was dying, he asked me to bury him beside his parents in Israel. Knowing how difficult it is for me to travel abroad (I am in a wheelchair), we decided that, during my lifetime, he would be temporarily buried in Washington, where I could visit his grave. But that meant a funeral in a town where he knew no one (he lived in New York), and that meant a funeral lonely and sadly small for a man who had lived such a large, robust, friend-filled life. At the cemetery, there were just a few family and almost no one else—except Meg. She’d come to bury a man she’d never met simply because the son who loved him was her friend. A small act of infinite loving kindness.
Meg Greenfield was a wonderful journalist, editor and writer. Washington, journalism and American politics will sorely miss her mind and pen. I will too. But, above all, I will miss her heart.
The Washington Post, May 18, 1999