A dear friend, colleague and mentor, Harvey Sicherman, passed away on the evening of December 25 after a fairly brief illness. Times like these make me struggle yet again with the apparent impossibility of reconciling the intensity of feeling we know deep down to be real and of enormous importance with the coldness of a large universe that speaks to us in anonymizing tones. But I know and trust what I feel to be important, and what I feel is a deep loss accompanied by a faint but persistent faith in its meaning.
I knew Harvey for more than 38 years, from a time sunk deep back in the mists, when he was nearly 27 and I was nearly 21 years of age. As several appreciations, including those by Dov Zakheim and John Hannah, have already noted, he was an extraordinary man: brilliant and incisive, creative and personable, learned and kind, stylish and an exuberant lover of life. A 1971 Penn Ph.D., he came to work in the world of universities, think-tanks and government. He served as a close aid to three Secretaries of State: Haig, Shultz and Baker. He is responsible, behind-the-scenes, not only for many memorable secretarial turns of phrase as a speechwriter in Policy Planning at the Sate Department, but also for several key policy directions those Secretaries took, from dealing with Saddam Hussein after the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the masterful diplomacy that accompanied the reunification of Germany.
Since leaving government and Washington some 15 years ago, Harvey was director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. During these years we continued to work together, at FPRI and elsewhere. Harvey wrote brilliantly for The National Interest when I worked there, and even more brilliantly for The American Interest since it was founded in 2005. His final published essay, “For Richer, for Poorer”, appears in our November/December 2010 issue. But don’t miss, if you have not yet read it, his magisterial essay from May/June 2007, “Adventures in State-Building: Bremer’s Iraq and Cromer’s Egypt”, which I think remains the most insightful essay yet written on U.S. policymaking in the Iraq War.
Six years my elder, he served as a mentor to me during the many years we worked together, and as a mentor not only in professional life, but in all of life. We shared certain tastes—in humor, literature sacred and otherwise, old cars, fine whisky, sartorial punctuation and fountain pens—but he educated my tastes in all these domains and more. We shared more than that, too. I was with him during his father’s illness and passing; and he was with me, by my side, to bury my father. He attended my wedding; I attended the circumcision ceremonies of his sons and grandsons. I saw Harvey’s every mood—when he was, as ever, graceful, eloquent, charming and vivacious in public, but also when he was frustrated, worried, angry and tired in private.
From these experiences I know that Harvey was not only brilliant, creative and almost impossibly personable, but also wise. Many people may be said to be devoted, but not as many devoted to the right purposes. Harvey was: A perfectionist as an intellectual, he would not let fly in writing until he was sure he understood the material, had mastered its meaning, and took the necessary pains to express himself as clearly and carefully as possible. He cared about quality, not quantity, and he cared about making a positive difference, not pontificating for its own sake. He was, in short, the antithesis of the shoot-from-the-hip, naked-opinion-to-spite-learning style of the blogosphere.
In his insistence on doing things both well and for the right reasons, Harvey constantly elevated my understanding of what diligence in thought and expression is all about. He knew what was worth taking seriously, and he did. He knew how to have some fun, too, and he did that as well. Above all, however, he understood how to balance what was serious and what was fun because he also knew the difference between right and wrong, and never wavered from it.
It has been one of the greatest of honors in my life to have had Harvey as a friend and colleague, someone enough my elder to give me unfailingly good counsel over many years, but not so much so that he was unable to speak with me as an equal on matters of substance as we both grew older. He could talk and teach with the best, but he could also listen and learn from others–and to find someone capable of doing both is a great rarity in this world, in these days as in any. I miss him now, and I will miss him always.
(N.B.: I have written a more personal and longer reflection in my blog: thenewestdealer.blogspot.com.)
