I believe you live on in the acts you do, in the attitudes you transmit.
On Sunday, March 19, 2000, family, friends, and dignitaries gathered at the Cape Cod synagogue in Hyannis to pay tribute to Morris Abram, who died earlier that week in Geneva. Abram, who was born six months before the end of World War I, died three months after the close of a tumultuous century for America and the world.
The executive director of UN Watch, Michael Colson, spoke of Abram’s youthfulness, his vigor, his devotion to ideas, his incomparable warmth and charisma. “He had a love of life,” said Colson, “that was unparalleled.” Abram’s daughter Ann noted her father’s enormous desire to connect with people and his insatiable intellectual curiosity. The latter was echoed by his son Joshua. “Until the day of his death,” he remarked, “he woke up every morning wondering, ‘What can I learn today?’”1
One of Abram’s earliest law partners, Robert Hicks, told the assembled guests that none of the many obituaries that had been written in the U.S. and European press could possibly capture the “intangibles” that marked his departed friend, among them his wit, his remarkable sense of humor, and his charm, “which enabled everyone in his presence to feel significant.” Abram’s adopted stepson wept, as did Eric Block and Jonathan Tepperman, both of whom worked for him in Geneva for a single year while embarking on successful careers on which he left an indelible mark.2 At Abram’s request, the family asked that donations in his name be made to three organizations: the United Negro College Fund, UN Watch, and Brandeis University.
Just over a week later, a memorial service was held at Geneva’s Hotel President Wilson attended by ambassadors and other notables from around the world. The U.S. ambassador to the UN in Geneva, George Moose, said of Abram that no one had represented his country abroad “with greater dignity and grace.” Reviewing Abram’s career, Ambassador Moose noted, “Having been a fierce defender of those who had been denied their rights in the United States, he was no less fierce in his conviction that those same rights should be extended to every individual, everywhere.” Like his friend Martin Luther King Jr., Moose observed, “the passion Morris brought to his convictions as well as his life left no one indifferent.”3
This is how David Harris described Morris Abram’s legacy: “To this day, and God knows, we have many complex and difficult situations, I say to myself, where is Morris? What would he have said; how can we fill that space? His legacy is indelible in defending the highest Jewish and American values, but also in a way in inevitably creating a vacuum after his death that can’t be filled by anyone else on the stage.”4
At the contentious hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 1983 as it considered his nomination to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Abram asked himself why he was accepting this assignment amid so much controversy just after receiving his Medicare card, a time when most Americans are looking to slow their lives down. Quoting one of his heroes, Justice Holmes, he answered his own question this way: “It is required of a man,” he said, “that he should take part in the actions and passions of his time, at the peril of being judged not to have lived.” Abram’s friend and AJC colleague Alfred Moses said about him, “Whatever the cause, Morris was passionate in everything he did. What he felt was what he thought. But that’s okay: the world could use a few more Morris Abrams.”5
Abram’s passion, not to mention his idealism, often came with a measure of naivete that, at various times in his life, resulted in his having to react to events rather than anticipate them. This quality went all the way back to his boyhood in Fitzgerald. Abram described how he was amazed to learn that an eighth grade teacher whose intelligence he respected harbored prejudice toward Jews, a quality the young Abram had previously associated exclusively with the backwoods. Years later, when he began his legal career in Atlanta, he was crushed to learn that a Rhodes Scholar was unacceptable to the most prestigious law firms because of the same prejudice.
And it was not until the latter part of the 1960s that he began to realize that the progressive views he had held in locales in which they were particularly unwelcome were themselves under siege, this time not from Southern segregationists but from those who were undermining traditional liberalism from the left. During the Six-Day War of June 1967, attacks on Israel from the liberal side of the political spectrum came as a surprise. “I could not believe it,” he wrote, “the ‘advanced’ religious leaders of the Protestant establishment began turning their backs on Israel and Jewish Americans, whose history and fates were intertwined with the survivors of Hitler’s gas ovens.”6
In his inaugural address at Brandeis the following year, he told his audience how amazed he was to hear a professor at a prestigious university voicing agreement with those who thought that certain points of view were so wrong they should not be tolerated within the institution. Three months later, when he found himself challenged by a group of black students who were occupying the building that housed the university’s communications system, he tried to convince them that he was on their side.
Jacob Cohen recalled how “he kept telling everyone who would listen, believing the students would be tremendously impressed with this, I can call up Coretta King right now and she would advise you if you want me to do that. I knew Martin Luther King. Over and over, not knowing that by this point, 1969, Martin Luther King had been assassinated and was mourned, but he also had become a laughingstock of the black radicals who were coming into the forefront.”7 That transition in the civil rights movement, Cohen continued, “aggressively colorblind, aggressively integrationist, aggressively nonviolent, that civil rights movement had, by the beginning of 1965 and ’66, intensifying in 1967 and 1968, had become, not black and white, we shall overcome, but ‘Lookout, Black Power’s going to get your mama!’”8
“He never quite understood it. He was puzzled by it and hurt,” said Norman Podhoretz, whose relationship with Abram went back to his days as the young editor of Commentary when Abram became president of the American Jewish Committee, then the publication’s sponsoring organization.
He wasn’t the only one who was unable to take the real measure of what was happening on the left as it affected the liberal community in the Democratic Party. I was very close to Pat Moynihan in those years and I remember, I can’t tell you how many times he said to me, explain it to me again, why do they hate me? And I believed Morris felt the same way. He didn’t understand the radical movement of the sixties. He couldn’t understand why they were changing; he couldn’t understand why they would be hostile to someone like him.9
Mugged by reality, Abram nevertheless refused to relinquish his belief that people of good will could make the world a better place. “He became especially incensed,” said Ambassador Moose at the memorial service in Geneva, “by efforts, at times successful, to turn the voice of the United Nations against the very principles on which it was founded. But he never abandoned his faith in the capacity in the community of nations to make a positive difference in the lives of ordinary people.”10
Abram also believed that despite all the talk of “two Americas” in the 1960s, the United States could truly become a colorblind society where people would be judged, as his friend Martin Luther King dreamed, by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Did those from poor backgrounds need financial and other forms of support? Of course they did, but this had to be done without imposing the same kind of invidious racial classifications that had such disastrous results and that Abram had courageously fought in the Jim Crow South.
In accepting the American Liberties award from the American Jewish Committee at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in 1975, Abram offered what he regarded as the right way to think about affirmative action:
Let there be no impediment to development or placement on the grounds of race; let there be careful reexamination of all traditions in respect of entrance and qualification to opportunity; let there be affirmative efforts to move the disadvantaged forward, with “disadvantaged” defined without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin. For eighty-nine years, from 1865 to 1954, people such as those on this dais fought color and religious prejudice and urged the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as support for this equalitarian principle. I think that anyone who, on the grounds of expedience, opportunism, or frustration, seeks today to justify the classification of Americans on the grounds of race is making a serious strategic mistake which, if successful, may someday haunt us all.11
Anticipating the end of his life in a letter to his daughter Ruth in March 1999, Abram expressed concern that his political beliefs and actions since 1982, the year in which his autobiography was published, not be misrepresented. He quoted to her the passage from the book on what liberalism meant to him, namely, “while men differ in their natural endowments, they must be treated as equal citizens in the eyes of the law; that they should possess equality of opportunity and be afforded some minimum of social benefits.” He noted that these principles, which united liberals for generations, “now divide me from some who seek equality of result and who sanction the preferences imposed by government to attain it.”12
In fact, Abram was never really a man of the left. As he told Eli Evans, because the issues surrounding civil rights were the defining ones in the South, any integrationist such as himself was considered a liberal. But his views were never that easy to categorize. And though his break with the Carter administration over both its foreign and domestic policies marked a significant political turning point for him, his doubts about many of the assumptions of progressivism had begun years earlier. In 1972 Abram told the graduates of Emory University that during his college years he had been attracted to the view of man as essentially good, with deviations from that goodness attributable to his circumstances. He rejected the Hobbesian concept of man motivated by the search for power and the fear of death as late as the mid-1940s.13 After twenty-five years of practicing law, he told the graduates, he had concluded that men are neither as good as they pretend to be nor as bad as their enemies paint them. This view had strengthened his belief in democratic government with its built-in balance of interests. “I do not now tend to idolize the governments of any type,” he said, “for all are affected to a more or less degree by the frailties and infirmities of human nature.”14
Thirteen years later, Abram said that he considered himself a practitioner of classical liberalism “that is no longer practiced by a large number of people who call themselves liberal.” Far from looking suspiciously at government, they look “fawningly” at it. “I think it’s remarkable,” he added, “how some people who call themselves liberals will not outrightly condemn the use of a university mob to prevent other people from going to class. They claim they are acting in a moral tradition. This is not liberalism.”15
In 1986, after he ascended to the chairmanship of the Conference of Presidents, Abram told an interviewer that he considered himself “a transcendental liberal,” one who believes in the ultimate freedom of the individual. Devoted to the Bill of Rights, he never believed in treating any person as a member of a group, but as an individual. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that has ceased to be the doctrine of the organized liberals. I can’t help that, and I am not going to change simply because the doctrine has changed.”16
Although he never self-identified as a conservative, Abram was drawn to conservative intellectuals in the final two decades of his life. He carried on a friendly correspondence with the economist Thomas Sowell, and he recommended to others the writings of Paul Johnson and Joseph Epstein. He wrote to his son Morris Jr. that Epstein, whom he said had been forced from his position as editor of The American Scholar for reasons of political correctness, had become one of his favorite essayists.17 In Geneva he would look forward to receiving the latest issue of the neoconservative magazine Commentary and proceed to read it from cover to cover the morning of its arrival, making notes in the margins of each article.18
And he did gravitate to positions advocated by conservatives on issues as diverse as the relationships between the government and the individual, and between church and state. With respect to the former, the Atlanta lawyer who sang the praises of the New Deal before an audience of conservatives at Emory in the early 1960s became the New York lawyer who later told George Goodwin, the public relations counsel, that his views were conservative on economic issues such as the New York fiscal crisis.19 In an address to the AARP in the mid-1970s, he said, “America was not built on the premise that public employment should be continued when the service is no longer needed or can be more efficiently provided in some other way. Public service is not meant to serve the ends of public servants.”20 And on the threshold of the 1980 presidential election, he wrote to Reagan adviser and future national security adviser Richard Allen, “I believe that men and women in a civilized society can and should do more things for themselves if they are left alone and with untaxed resources to do them. Of course, government has a proper place in any social order, but our government has grown too large, too inefficient, too bureaucratic and too restrictive.”21
Regarding the separation of church and state, the Jewish student who grew up resentful of having to listen to the New Testament read out loud in his rural Georgia school rooms found a way to justify the use of government funds to support the enrollment of poor children in parochial schools. Although he never retreated from his view that what he experienced in Fitzgerald’s schools was unconstitutional, Abram agreed with the Supreme Court’s pragmatic accommodation of religion, one mandated by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and “the need to ensure that separation of church and state does not discriminate against religion.”22
In an address entitled “In Pursuit of Justice” at Emory Law School, Abram asked why Switzerland, the country he had lived in for the past seven years, one with diverse cultures, languages, and religions, had avoided the centuries of bloodshed experienced by its European neighbors. The country had hung together, he said, because it does not tackle issues like abortion and doctor-assisted suicide without public discussion and the building of a consensus. Quoting his intellectual mentor Justice Holmes, he noted that “Great Constitutional provisions must be administered with caution. Some play must be allowed for the joints of the machine, and it must be remembered that legislatures are ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts.”23
After Abram left Atlanta in 1962, it was his growing Jewish identity that helped give definition to much of his worldview. In 1983 he told the Southern Jewish Historical Society that under the influence of his mother, he grew up believing that Judaism was a religion, period. And since there was no synagogue that they could attend, he never received a proper Jewish education.24
Fortunately for Abram, in Fitzgerald his neighbor Isadore Gelders exposed him to texts that highlighted Jewish contributions to Western civilization. It was Gelders, the editor of the alternative newspaper in town, who helped set him on a course of learning over time that Judaism was much more than a religion. In discussing the evolution of his own views on Jewish peoplehood in 1983, he asked his audience of Southern Jewish historians to concentrate on four “resounding” themes: first, that in every Jew there is a collective unconscious that echoes the passage from the official story of Passover stating that there are those in every generation “who rise up to destroy us”; second, that there is a linkage among Jews such that each Jew is responsible for one another; third, that in each Jew there is a deep connection with the land of Israel; and finally, that Jews are natural fighters determined to follow the Biblical mandate of choosing life over death.25 This was his own choice in middle age while overcoming what was for most a life-ending illness.
In the spring of 1985, Abram’s daughter Ruth presented him with “what may be the challenge of your life.” She was writing to provide the text of prayers that he would be chanting in Hebrew at his granddaughter Anna’s Bat Mitzvah service for which she had prepared a tape. “Dear Anna,” he wrote after the service, “You and your family have, I feel, restored a tradition in the family which I did not as a young man appreciate but which I now hold dear and precious.” He concluded by telling her that she had given him “the greatest birthday gift I can have on my 67th this week.”26
During one of Morris Abram’s trips to Israel as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, he attended a Sabbath service at Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue and was given the honor of carrying the Torah, the sacred scrolls containing the Five Books of Moses. He told his traveling companions that it was one of the greatest honors of his life.27
In one of his transatlantic flights with his wife Bruna during his years traveling back and forth from Geneva, a passenger recognized Abram while he was reading a book about Jesus Christ. Incredulous, he asked why Morris Abram of Jewish fame was reading such a book. “Simple,” Abram replied, “I’m very interested in the story of Jesus from a historical perspective.”28
In his graduation address at Emory, Abram quoted Socrates’s aphorism that he knew nothing “except the fact of my own ignorance.” Learning, he told the graduates, is a lifelong process, which often requires one to discard many previously held views. As his wife Bruna said, her husband had an interest in life itself.
According to Anne Patterson, his political counselor in Geneva, “His intellect was what I admired most. And another thing about him, he listened. We could tell him that we thought something wasn’t a great idea, and he would listen to it. He was a person who would listen to other opinions even after all the experiences he had.”29
Jonathan Cohen, who also knew Abram well from his days in Geneva, was impressed by Abram’s relentless engagement with others in pursuit of ideas right up to the end of his life. “Morris thought he could still win people over,” he recalled. “He was charming, he was a raconteur, he admired people for their intellect, and if you could engage with him in conversation that’s all he needed to know. He would never run somebody from the dinner table for taking a point of view he didn’t like.”30
In his Memorial Lecture at King’s College, University of London, in 1944, C. S. Lewis warned of the dangers of “The Inner Ring”:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. . . . The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. . . . And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.31
Morris Abram was from his earliest years a man of deep ambition whose aggressive pursuit of the inner ring led him from a small rural town in south central Georgia to comfortable interaction with presidents, prime ministers, and even the pope. But he never forgot why he was following his ambitions.
To Eric Block, who worked for Abram at UN Watch,
he was a down to earth guy, a hard-working guy. That’s the other thing: he was not just some chairman-emeritus of this thing. He worked his ass off. He was always plotting: how do I raise more money? How do I get this issue in front of the UN? When he was hosting dinner parties, it wasn’t for the glory of Morris Abram. How do I put UN Watch on the map? How do I entrench it further? If he had worked that hard in the private sector, he could have earned millions and millions of more dollars before he died. But he didn’t. He was working for the Jewish community.32
Block’s sentiments were echoed by his UN colleague Jonathan Tepperman. “It was clear,” he said,
that [Abram] had had this incredible drive and this incredible work ethic. And had an amazing ability to push himself. But he didn’t talk about it in terms of personal ambition. He talked about it in terms of fighting the fight. That’s the story we would tell each other all the time, that the job we were in was fighting for principle. It was never defined in specific language, but it was certainly defending Israel at the United Nations, exposing the real and serious flaws of the United Nations, defending Israel from its enemies more broadly, championing the Jewish people.33
And his energy level was extraordinary. His archives overflow with boxes and boxes of correspondence. He stayed in touch with everyone from his past and reached out to others he was cultivating for the future: fellow members of the numerous organizations on whose boards he sat and for which he raised money, including Cardozo Law School, the United Negro College Fund, Morehouse University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and many others; editors and television executives he wanted to write and speak for; old friends he helped by sending their children’s resumes to people he knew in academia; and associates past and present from whom he was eager to get their reactions to articles he had just written, speeches he had just delivered, and books he had just read.
Reflecting on Abram’s life, Vernon Jordan, who had many sharp disagreements with him in his later years, remarked, “If I were assessing his life, I’d say Morris was a great man who made a great difference. He was a civil rights lawyer, a civil rights leader, and my view is that this is how he ought to be remembered.”34 That sentiment was echoed by John Lewis: “Morris was just one of these individuals that you had to know if you wanted to get something accomplished. Check with Morris Abram. He was a pillar. He was always just so caring. And it was delightful to be in his presence.”35
Asked what had attracted her to him, Bruna Molina replied, “He was, how should I put this, a straightforward person, with human qualities, very warm as a person, and interesting. He brought all his family to my home, so I would meet them to make sure this was a serious relationship. And he took me to the States to visit Fitzgerald, the place where he was born.”36
Recalling his battle with leukemia, when he had to face his mortality, Abram told a reporter that “you live on in the acts you do, in the attitudes you transmit.”37 He would be pleased to learn that those who knew him best are grateful for the rich legacy he left behind.