Foreword for Book on Giovanni Agnelli During the last two decades of his life, no one was closer to me than Gianni Agnelli. We spoke on the telephone three or four times a week and whenever something interesting happened in either of our lives. We spent time together when either of us traveled to the […]
Tribute To John Aspinall John Aspinall became a close friend, yet I made his acquaintance only a little less than three years ago. We met altogether perhaps six or seven times, yet his parting has left a painful void in my life. While many of our conversations were about the animals that were his guests […]
Eulogy for Rudolf Augstein Getting old, I read somewhere, is a process of becoming a stranger in your own world. Gradually, the people who provided emotional support and intellectual sustenance are stripped away. Even as the perspective deepens, it traverses an increasing void. In a way, it is strange that Rudolf Augstein’s death should inspire […]
Memorial Remarks for Egon Bahr Egon Bahr signed letters to me “In alter Verbundenheit” and, in 2013, inscribed his book, Erinnerungen an Willy Brandt, with “Es war ein langer Weg bis zur bleibenden Freundschaft.” I am proud of these sentiments growing out of fifty years of debate and collaboration. Egon was my friend. We disagreed […]
Memorial Remarks for Pat Buckley I do not recall ever having been so shocked by the passing of a close friend as by Pat Buckley’s. I somehow never thought of her as subject to the normal rules of our existence. I was amazed to read her age in the obituary pages. It was not that […]
Eulogy for William F. Buckley, Jr. Bill Buckley inspired a political movement that changed American politics; he founded the National Review that, for over a generation, has shaped American political discussion; he hosted an influential talk show for thirty years; he wrote an elegant column. Every year, he authored a beautifully written novel; in what […]
No one moved me more than Marion Dönhoff or had a deeper impact on me as a human being. We were not contemporaries; she was brought up in the tranquil time before the First World War, I in the turbulence of the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. She was serene, I more shaped by […]
Eulogy For Lawrence S. Eagleburger Who of his associates can ever forget Larry at work: in shirt-sleeves, asthma inhaler in one hand, cigarette in the other, cough drops in front of him, a telephone squeezed between shoulder and ear and very loud opera music blaring from his recorder. Larry was indispensable: as an associate and […]
Memorial Remarks for Ahmet Ertegun I do not remember precisely when Ahmet showed up in my life. I had heard of him, of course, but I did not believe what I was hearing. Suddenly, he was there, raspy-voiced, irreverent, buoyant, debonair, charming, ubiquitous, highly intelligent and occasionally, let us admit, exasperating. I still did not […]
Eulogy For Gerald R. Ford According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because, at any one period, there exist ten just individuals who redeem mankind, without being aware of their role. Gerald Ford was such a man. Propelled into the presidency by a sequence of unpredictable events, he had an […]