When he sat down to talk to you, you felt as if you were at the center of his orbit.
When they met in 1943, Morris Abram saw in Jane Maguire everything he was looking for in a wife: she was elegant, intelligent, and comfortable in social settings. Abram said that he always felt more at ease going to parties with her: “She knew what to wear and she knew what to do, and she had been properly trained and she knew how to entertain, she furnished what I thought were the keys that opened all the locks.”1 As Ruth Abram put it, “My mother certainly wasn’t an outsider. I think he was marrying someone who knew how to act inside.”2
Abram was particularly impressed with his wife’s compassionate identification with the underdog. From the beginning of their time in Atlanta, Jane Abram supported her husband’s involvement in liberal causes. And following their divorce, she spearheaded fundraising efforts to make possible the archiving of the papers of Grace Towns Hamilton, the first black woman to serve in the Georgia legislature.3
For a young lawyer starting his career in the big city, taking on unpopular causes was not the clearest path to financial security. That was particularly true for a growing family. Between 1948 and 1962, the year the Abrams left Atlanta, their daughter Ruth acquired four siblings: Ann, Morris Jr., Adam, and Joshua. Abram was deeply devoted to each of them. When an interviewer asked what provided him the most happiness in his life, he mentioned his children first. Abram would frequently take them with him, one at a time, while working on projects. And until they were all grown into adulthood, he would leave his office early enough to have dinner with them. These dinner discussions became the model for those he conducted later in his life on Cape Cod and in Geneva.
Hamilton Fish, the future publisher of The Nation magazine who spent a lot of time with the family during the early 1970s, said that Abram “had a style of interrogating his children with the overt goal of encouraging them to frame an insight or some kind of factual response or to be implicated in some way in the topic at hand.”4 Abram’s youngest son Joshua said that he always looked forward to participating in these discussions, but even as a youngster, “you had to come to dinner ready to ask questions.” The happiest place for his father, he noted, was with a curious child.5 “Ham” Fish had met Abram’s son Morris Jr. during his sophomore year at Harvard in 1971. According to Fish, “B,” as he was called, then a senior, was “an astonishingly versatile and skillful young guy, the most talented political mind I’ve ever encountered of anyone at that age.”6
In July 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the right to vote at age eighteen was ratified and signed into law by President Nixon. Morris Jr. and Fish believed that without a concerted effort to register young voters, they would be stymied by local officials, particularly in college towns where they might be subject to strict residence requirements. Together they created an organization called the National Movement for the Student Vote.
According to Fish, their campaign struck a chord among the liberal establishment, many of its members parents of radical students from whom they had become alienated as the result of political, cultural, and social changes that were rocking the country. Fish was aware that B’s father was working behind the scenes, enlisting some of the leading figures in New York’s legal community and national political affairs who signed on and joined the group’s board of directors.7 (The group’s New England director was Billy Keyserling, a member of a South Carolina family prominent in both state and national Democratic Party politics who knew the senior Abram as a student at Brandeis.)
The Abrams invited Fish to move in with them and their three sons—Ruth and Ann were no longer living at home—in the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan. As Fish recalled, “When I met Morris (senior), he was charismatic, extremely charming, accessible, extremely generous, fatherly, solicitous of his children’s friends in the same manner as he was with his own children.” He found Jane to be extraordinarily welcoming and unquestioning in making a place for him in the household. The senior Abram included his son’s friend in the dinner discussion. “The experience,” he said, “wasn’t quite as if you were having breakfast with the litigator, but it had this mix of intellectual formality and southern informality always. It was very seductive.”8
Fish remembers another frequent guest at the Abrams’s breakfast and dinner tables. When the family left Atlanta for New York, they brought with them their housekeeper and her husband who did their gardening and performed additional household chores. But this vastly understates Ed Brown’s value to the family, which regarded him as a revered figure. Joshua remembers as a child being given rides by Brown in the family’s wheelbarrow. But his value to Morris Abram was both more significant and intangible. The two had a special bond, and Abram would refer to Brown as his “psychiatrist.”9
Brown had come from a sharecropping family in Wilcox County, Georgia, adjacent to Abram’s home county of Ben Hill. There he grew up picking cotton and fighting to survive the hardships of grinding poverty and relentless mistreatment. His story, told in a voice that is both poignant and humorous, was faithfully recorded by Jane Abram for a book published shortly after the Abrams’s divorce.10
Fish recalled that during a discussion at the dining room table, Abram would suddenly turn to Ed Brown and break into a monologue, describing what the two of them shared from their Georgia experience. Often, he would explain how whatever was being discussed was something Ed would certainly understand, or something “he could tell you more than anyone alive.”11 To Fish, there was a powerful bond between the two, and Brown seemed to respond positively to the attention he received. “I didn’t feel Morris treated Ed Brown inappropriately,” he said. “He spoke lovingly, tenderly, and truthfully about him, often more so than about a wide range of people he was very close to.”12
Although Abram’s feelings for Brown were genuine, Fish, among many others, could not help but notice his penchant for hyperbole, a practice that was aimed at overdramatizing the circumstances of those he was describing. Reflecting on this style, Fish believes that Abram was “a little out of water” in New York, by which he meant that “the manner and style that worked for him in the South probably didn’t work so well in the North. And there probably was a Northern prejudice toward Southerners that he ran into without it being overt.”13
According to Ruth, her mother had to teach her father how to act in formal environments. “And that served him very well,” she said,
because he found himself in a lot of them. But at the same time, he wanted his Cool Whip and his ketchup on his everything. His favorite thing was to go to a dive and eat barbeque and he wasn’t into trying fancy dishes. He had his country ways, and he enjoyed them and in some cases my mother found them inappropriate. But mainly, the real fact is that he gained a lot by learning how to use your forks and knives, not to drink the finger bowl and all that kind of thing. And how to conduct himself in social situations.14
But Abram’s unsophisticated down-home style was deeply ingrained in him and destined to survive the many advances in his life. Growing up in South Georgia, Abram recalled with affection the fish fries he attended as a child with his family, the catfish brought in by local fisherman and placed on a giant skillet made from the boiler of a steam locomotive.15 Many years later guests at the dinner parties he and his second wife Carlyn held at their home on Cape Cod would be greeted in the kitchen by the host in the middle of frying the fish that would soon be served.16
Joseph Lefkoff said that Abram would find many excuses to return to Atlanta after leaving for New York, mainly to experience authentic Southern cooking once again. Receiving the call from the airport, Lefkoff would pick up Abram’s friend Osgood Williams and the three headed straight to Harold’s Bar-B-Que.17 Abram’s tastes extended to cheap eats and fast food. Jeh Johnson remembered the morning Abram was about to make a presentation to the partners of Paul, Weiss about a case he was trying on behalf of the board of directors of the global services firm Marsh and McClennan. When Johnson, who was serving as his associate on the case, arrived at Abram’s office that morning to pick him up on the way to the meeting, he saw him sitting in the rocking chair he used instead of a desk eating junk food. “It was like Yodels or Twinkies or Ring Dings,” Johnson recalled. “I’m addicted to those things. I was twenty-seven years old at the time. It was a validation for me to see the great Morris Abram eating junk food. I continued it for years after that, figuring if it was good enough for Morris, it was good enough for me.”18
At the end of a vacation with his father in England, where Abram would take his family to show them the sights of his and Jane’s days in Oxford, Joshua remembers his father, now the U.S. ambassador at the UN in Geneva, getting his newlywed wife Bruna out of a meeting to say he would be picking her up upon his arrival to take her to lunch. No doubt the patrons of the McDonald’s in Geneva were surprised to see the U.S. ambassador’s limousine pull up in front of the fast food restaurant.19
While living in Geneva, Abram would appeal to his former law partner Bob Hicks, who also grew up in rural Georgia, to visit him. Hicks would ask, “Why do you want me to come all the way there, Abram? We’ll have breakfast together and you’ll just go off on all your business and I’ll have nothing to do.” But Abram was desperate, he said, to hear someone who could speak the English language properly. And while he was at it, he asked his old partner to bring him two South Georgia delicacies, Agrirama grits and Claxton fruit cakes.20
It was his frugality that impressed Abram’s young executive director of UN Watch Michael Colson when they were working together in Geneva. Toward the end of his life, a frail Abram would cut off a conversation to tell Colson he had to leave to do his grocery shopping in France. When Colson asked why he couldn’t simply let his housekeeper take care of it, “he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, ‘Michael, she will buy Swiss eggs which are four times the price of French eggs!’” Colson told a reporter covering Abram’s funeral on Cape Cod that his favorite place to eat in Geneva had been the self-service counter at the local supermarket.21
During his extended time spent as a guest in the Abram’s home at the Dakota, Hamilton Fish did not sense any tension between Morris and Jane. “They were always impeccably gracious to one another,” he recalled, though she did exhibit some unease at the grilling of their children at the dinner table. But during the time Fish was a guest of the family, the relationship between Morris and Jane was in fact deteriorating. For all his admiration for her intellect, character, and devotion to her children, Abram found his wife of thirty years domineering, much like his mother, and felt himself ultimately stifled by the relationship. Shortly after his divorce, Abram told Eli Evans, “The older I become the more I feel that touching is the most important thing in the world. I think you get strength and sustenance from touching, and Jane was not a toucher.”22
But there was also the fact that he had begun to rekindle a relationship with a woman he had known many years earlier in Atlanta. When Abram met Carlyn Feldman in 1940, she was a high school senior. Struck by her extraordinary physical beauty, Abram courted her for three years, but because she was so young, they were not thinking of marriage. There was also the matter of their diverging interests, his in law and politics and hers in the visual arts. She was also reluctant to be drawn into the world of someone so ambitious. But as his marriage to Jane was ending, Abram began seeing his long-lost love during business trips to Atlanta.
In the summer of 1973, only six weeks after separating from his wife, Abram contracted acute myelocytic leukemia, thought widely at the time to be a death sentence. The agony of his treatment was compounded not only by his uncertainty of whether he would survive the illness, but also by the guilt he felt over the breakup of his marriage to Jane, his concern about the well-being of his children, and his strong desire to marry Carlyn, who had been divorced the previous year. During that period, he later said, he was more preoccupied by his marital problems than with his medical condition.23
The two were married in January 1976, three years before his treatments were ended. From the beginning of his illness, Carlyn Abram played a key role in her husband’s physical and psychological recovery. But their marriage was fraught with complications almost from the beginning. For one, there were the differences in their interests that had played a role in keeping them apart after they had begun dating many years before. By the time of their marriage, Carlyn Fisher had established a solid reputation in Atlanta as an accomplished painter who had been a cofounder of the city’s annual arts festival.
Although she was able to practice her craft in New York and on Cape Cod, where she developed her skills as a landscape painter, Carlyn Abram resented her husband’s preoccupation with his career and the lack of interest he showed in her daughter from her first marriage as compared with his own children. There was also the matter of his infidelity. In a letter she wrote to Abram after discovering it, Carlyn Abram said, “I hoped and believed that I was high on your list of priorities. I discovered unmistakably, on the contrary, I was low on the list.”24
Two years later, Abram informed his siblings and their spouses that he and Carlyn would no longer be living together. “She is a fine woman,” he wrote, “a beautiful one too, vivacious, spiritual, articulate, and ever so meaningful to me for years particularly in the terrible crisis of my illness. Not that she had not been loved by me since then; far from it. Yet we grew apart and except for times, wonderful times, at the Cape we found it hard to mesh.” He continued, “However, Carlyn and I differed profoundly in so many ways. Once, I did see this fact for so long as an intriguing, complementary circumstance. These differences, however, developed, I fear, into a situation in which each had unfulfilled needs.”25 By the time of their divorce two years later, Carlyn Abram had returned to Atlanta.
Deborah Forman, an artist on Cape Cod, had become friendly with Carlyn in the early 1980s when the two were exhibiting their work at the same gallery in the town of Orleans. Soon they began working together on a documentary about the artist colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts that was later shown on PBS. In addition to her career as an artist, Forman was then a feature writer for the Cape Cod Times. When she found out who her friend’s husband was, she thought it would make a great feature story for the newspaper. When she went to interview him at the Abrams’s home in Dennis, “he started, as he always did, asking questions. And I kind of felt like I was at Brandeis for an admission interview.”
Although it made her a bit uncomfortable at first, Forman was flattered that he was interested in her opinions. Thus began a friendship between the two, along with her husband Jerry, that would last until Abram’s death. She remembers the many dinner parties that began with Abram in the kitchen frying fish. “And then we’d sit down to dinner. He would present an issue and then everyone else would talk. Morris was a great listener.”26
He was also an effective flatterer. Michael Colson vividly remembers the dinner parties he and his third wife Bruna Molina hosted for ambassadors and other dignitaries in Geneva. Typically, the dinner began with a welcome by Abram, presenting the guest of honor and offering brief introductions of everyone sitting around the table. This he did entirely from memory that, according to Colson, managed to be flattering without being obsequious. (Once he saw tears coming from the eyes of a leading international banker while the host was saying nice things about him.) When dessert was served, Abram would present an issue in the form of a question, turn to the guest of honor for his or her reaction, and then sit back and listen to the discussion.27
In the appreciation she wrote for the newspaper after his death, Forman noted that while Abram was passionate about his beliefs, “he always wanted to hear what others thought. He asked a lot of questions and listened intently. He was always curious, always exploring, always learning. . . . When he sat down to talk to you, you felt as if you were at the center of his orbit.”28
This trait was also observed by Abram’s law partner Max Gitter, whose wife reminded him that
if you spoke to him, regardless of who you were, you were the only person in the world. He never started to look around the room for people more important. You know, he continued, you go to a cocktail party with a lot of big shots and the first thing you notice is that they’ll be looking around the room for somebody more important. Morris had this trait. It’s a fabulous quality. Not many important people have it. You have to have self-confidence and you have to be genuinely interested in people.29
Amid the political turmoil and divisions of the late 1960s and 1970s, Abram frequently found himself at odds with longtime friends and associates. But despite his intensely held convictions, he continued to engage with those who disagreed strongly with his views, winning their respect in the process. Abram’s Paul, Weiss partner Sidney Rosdeitcher recalled, “Morris was a very open-minded, liberal person, but the thing I remember most was how easy it was to talk to Morris about these issues.” Although the attorneys in the firm were usually too busy to talk about the issues of the day, Abram frequently found the time to walk into Rosdeitcher’s office to engage with him on something he had read in the New York Times that morning that had caught his attention. “Morris was a very publicly interested figure,” he said, “an admirable trait whether you agreed with his views or not. And he discussed them in a very reasonable way. I treasured the relationship I had with him, which was one of intellectual give and take.” Although the two often disagreed, “he was never hostile. I never ceased enjoying those discussions.”30
Not that he liked to be criticized. According to Mark Levin, who worked with Abram as a young professional in the Washington DC office of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry in the mid-1980s, “Morris, as many great men or women, had quite a large ego. And he didn’t like to be questioned or criticized. He really didn’t like it when people questioned whether he was listening to what they had to say. He’d look up and say, ‘of course I’ve heard everything you had to say,’ and in the most polite, southern way, he’d say, ‘but I disagree with everything you had to say.’”31
Levin recalls the first time he heard that Abram had been named to chair the National Conference on Soviet Jewry in 1983. Then a young professional in its lobbying shop in Washington, he knew little about Abram’s background, but vividly remembers the eager anticipation in the office of what this would mean for the organization. He marks that period as the most significant in his professional development: “Morris always liked to be a teacher and he provided me ample lessons on how to do my work better as an advocate, how to look at the big picture and the big issues that confronted not just the Soviet Jewry movement but how the movement fit into the larger picture of U.S.-Soviet relations, human rights, how one defines human rights, how one defined universal human rights. He remains one of the great influences in my life.”32
Jonathan Tepperman was a twenty-three-year-old graduate of Yale when he received a one-year fellowship to work with Abram at UN Watch in Geneva in the mid-1990s. Growing up in a provincial Canadian town and majoring in English at Yale, Tepperman had not taken a single course in political science or international relations. His assignment was to write speeches and op-ed pieces, and he was terrified. At first, he found his boss intimidating, a “huge personality” who projected the aura of “a big player.”33 Tepperman recalled, “From the beginning what struck me was the way he engaged with me as a real person the moment I walked in, despite the fact that I was not a real person. I was a baby, and I didn’t know shit from Shinola, especially in this area. And he treated me like a serious professional.”34
Tepperman, who today is the editor of the magazine Foreign Policy, will never forget the first op-ed he drafted for Abram. The two of them sat at a table in Abram’s apartment and “he took a red pin and stuck out his tongue at the corner of his mouth and then started redlining everything I had written. And in his southern drawl he said, ‘Jonathan, this is terrible. I mean, this is awful! I would never write such purple prose. I can’t use this; this is just awful.’” Abram’s demanding approach paid off for the young writer. “I quickly came to realize that it was an enormous gift of respect that I actually didn’t deserve, but by treating me like I was a serious professional, Morris helped make me into that kind of a person as well as goading me into trying to become that kind of a person.”35
The two began arguing politics, which Abram indicated to Tepperman he loved to do, whether the topic related to the work they were doing or not. “And he never did what I would have done if I were in his shoes,” Tepperman says, “which would have been to say ‘Kid, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Just shut up and take notes.’ But he would engage with me on the merits no matter what the issue was. And I didn’t appreciate at the time just how extraordinary it was and how lucky I was. And so, it was an enormous education for me.”36 Tepperman says there is no way he would be in the position he is in today were it not for the year he spent working for Morris Abram.
All of the Abram children built rewarding careers. His oldest daughter Ruth, in addition to founding the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, got deeply involved in women’s rights issues. Ann Abram, who played an important role in her father’s recovery from leukemia, became a therapist specializing in depression, anxiety, and family relationships. Morris Jr., after studying art history at Oxford University and spending years abroad, settled into the California art world, founding a gallery in Los Angeles. Adam, from his base in North Carolina, has built substantial companies in real estate, insurance, and banking, taking some of them public. Joshua is an entrepreneur and early stage investor in New York who has founded several successful technology companies. Before he left the United States for Geneva, Abram told a reporter that one of his greatest disappointments was that he was not going to finish his life with Jane, “the mother of my children.”37
In 1972, Morris Abram admitted to the graduating seniors of Emory University that he did not know the answer to many questions, but he nonetheless held onto several beliefs. One was not to be too certain of anything. There was, however, one exception—namely, that love is the one thing in life that is an unmixed blessing, and that in the case of children, love “is as necessary as food and water. So, too, is education.” And while few can say, in the end, that they left the world any better, “One who leaves behind children who are questioning and actuated by a thirst for knowledge has accomplished one of the most difficult modern feats. He or she shall have gained in the process great satisfaction.”38