Harvey Sicherman

A fair bit has happened lately--third son finished undergraduate school, which makes three for three; a two-week first trip to Brazil, involving five cities; more, too. But all this pales next to the fact that a very dear friend, colleague and mentor passed away last night after a fairly brief illness. It has driven all other thoughts far away. So I want to devote this note to him, to Harvey Sicherman, from whose funeral I have just returned, driving three hours in the falling snow and wind, a natural gesture that seems altogether appropriate to the moment. Harvey would have to go out of this world in a flair or fanfare of one sort of another—the Holy One would have it no other way.

I barely know how to do this, however. I don't know how to do this. So I'll have to just tell a story or two that, unfortunately, are as much about me as about Harvey--because I only know how to tell this story in my own voice, out of my own memory.

It was on May 17, 1972--and I am pretty sure about the date--that I first met Harvey. I met him at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, which at the time was located at 3508 Market Street, in the new science center near Penn. I had been invited to come in about a research/writing job, and maybe a fellowship to continue graduate school (I was getting a BA and MA simultaneously in December 1972, but hoped maybe to do more), by one of my professors, William R. Kintner--a retired US Army colonel and unrepentant Cold Warrior.

Dr. Kintner liked my performance in class, and at the time I had a summer job, which had just started two weeks earlier, killing termites with Orkin out in retirement villages in New Jersey. This was no fun. I was paired with a total brick-brain, at least twenty years my elder, who had swastikas tattooed on his arm, and who was, I believed, incapable of uttering a single English sentence, or phrase even, without use of the word fuck or shit. Usually both. I was no innocent--my father was a Teamster, and I knew the language. But still......

My job with Orkin involved crawling on my belly underneath crappily built structures, with nails, broken glass and other indescribable sharp junk all over the place in the dark, dragging a 40-pound drill and a light along with me as I went. My job was to drill the concrete cinder blocks. My "associate's" job was to go in afterwards with the anti-termite chemical and shoot the holes I had drilled. While I worked, he drank beer. While he worked after me, house to house to house, I mixed, loaded and pumped the chemical. I never saw a single termite. So, naturally enough, I was interested in Dr. Kintner's invitation.

But when I got to FPRI, Dr. Kintner said a quick hello and sent me off to see his associate, Harvey Sicherman, in the smallest office I ever saw. It was really just a closet... with no windows. Heck, the walls were too small even to fit a window had there been an outside wall available for the purpose. It was piled high with books, papers and other stuff. But that closet seemed to me like a great mansion because of the man inhabiting it.

Harvey stood as I entered. He was wearing a three-piece cream suit, with a watch fob in his right vest pocket. He held a burning garbage dump, otherwise known as a cigar, in his left hand. He smiled and held out his right: "Harvey Sicherman.....(we shook hands).....Dr. Kintner has told me about you. Please have a seat." And so I first met Harvey who was--please don't take this wrong, because I am not that way and neither was he--tall, dark and handsome. Maybe 6'1" or 6'2"; dark hair and eyebrows, and sculpted very nicely indeed about the head and neck. I, at 5'8" at my maximum, noticed these things.

As it happened, Harvey had done his undergraduate work at the University of Scranton, in his hometown. He was from an Orthodox family, and had gone to yeshiva as a boy. I was from a non-nondescript, unaffiliated family, and had gone to public school in Arlington, Virginia. I knew close to nothing about Yiddishkeit until I was at least in my mid-teens, for reasons I'll not go into now. But by the time I met Harvey, all that had changed. I lived (more or less) as a modern Orthodox Jew--shabbas, yom tov, kashrut, kiddush, much study though most of it not formal, the whole works. Not only that, but I had spent from late April to early September 1971 in Israel, and had been thinking hard about going there to live.

So in that very first conversation closeted literally with Harvey, I not knowing at meeting's outset anything about him, some curious exchanges took place. I was an earnest young man at the time (fortunately or not, I still am earnest as a not young man now). So, before our conversation had proceeded very far, I told Harvey that I might not be as conservative a person as that of FPRI's reputation, it having been founded by the-then Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe, and besides, I didn't know if I'd be a very good investment since I was thinking about leaving the country to return to Zion, though I think I did not use that phrase. I also told him I could not ever work on Jewish holidays or the sabbath, and that if he thought all this disqualified me from employment, so be it, because on these matters I was not willing to compromise.

It is very difficult for me to describe the look on Harvey's face after this little speech of mine, not because I don't remember it; I certainly do. But because some things are just hard to describe. Let me put it this way: A small, constrained smile began to trace across his mouth and climb his cheeks, he lifted his chin slightly, and seemed to very subtly roll his eyes. He told me curtly but gently that I shouldn't worry about any of that. He changed the subject, asking me whether I was interested in technology's impact on politics, and in truth I told him that yes, indeed, I was already fond of Penn's very fine History and Sociology of Science (HHS) department, and that the book sounded like something I would be happy to help with. I was hired. Bye, bye termites. I have not crawled on my belly with a 40-pound drill since. I have also never again worked side by side with anyone sporting swastika tattoos.

I soon set to work under Harvey’s able direction on the project about technology and international politics. I did OK, I guess, because as a result of my early work I was given several scholarships through FPRI, which William Kintner controlled, and, having been invited into the Ph.D. program without having to take GREs or even apply, I was able to pursue that degree. One of the scholarships I had was the Salvatori scholarship, which Harvey had earlier had when he was in graduate school. I think maybe William Kintner saw me as a six-years-younger version of Harvey, who had finished his Ph.D. at Penn in 1971. In some ways, I guess I was. I finished mine in 1979. I was 28. When I met Harvey in May 1972, he was, I think, 27.

I found out fairly soon after our first meeting, of course, that Harvey was an Orthodox Jew, and had been to yeshiva, and knew a great deal more than I ever would about Judaism's intellectual legacy. I soon found out, too, that with his new wife Barbara, he intended to set off for Israel himself. I then realized how hilarious my self-introduction must have seemed to him, and admired his discipline in not breaking out in uncontrollable laughter.

We worked together pretty closely on that book, he designing and drafting, me doing research fill-in and general critique. The book came out, under Dr. Kintner's name, of course. I learned quickly how real ghosts operate in this world, good training for my later days as a State Department speechwriter, an occupation in which Harvey preceded me, too, by some years.

As anyone could see, Harvey cut a notable figure. He had his passions and his own ways of doing things. He was very admirably stylish, endearing and memorable--yet never brash or anything but humble at the same time, which is no easy feat. Some who did not really know him may have thought he was merely displaying a series of affectations, trying to be a cross between Disraeli, Churchill and Don Isaac Abarbanel in the wrong century. But they would have been mistaken. Harvey was just Harvey, no matter where the pieces came from. On him, everything he chose fit naturally right.

He was certainly a mentor to me in many ways; but not in every way. He was indeed a mentor when it came to the English language. He always insisted that style mattered, and that you didn't have to write like an automaton to do social science and policy work well. He gave me early on a list he had compiled of "Most Wanting Words", which was instructive as well as very funny. I already had a knack for writing, but Harvey helped me refine it. He encouraged me along the right directions to refine it, and in the drafting process he showed me very specifically how to take mediocre writing and make it sing.

He also influenced my sartorial style, at least to some degree. Coming from a proletariat home, I had no idea how to dress for a profession. My father appeared often enough in his Sealtest Dairy overalls. I still have a fondness for overalls. Harvey liked tailored suits cut out of the 1920s and 1930s. He knew an Italian guy on Bancroft Street in South Philly named Letieri, and that's where he had his suits made. If you picked out the fabric at certain stores near 4th & Bainbridge, you could take the material over to Mr. Letieri's workship and he'd make you a three-piece suit for less money than you could buy a two-piece in a retail store. Little old Italian ladies sewed all his buttons. You get the picture.

I went with Harvey one afternoon for a fitting on a new suit he was having made. I liked Mr. Letieri; it was a case of tailor at first sight. For all I knew, too, he could have carved Pinocchio in his spare time. I had no suits, and realized that I needed at least one. So I said what the heck, and ordered up a three-piece black pinstripe, with waistcoat instead of mere vest--similar to the style Harvey liked best, but adjusted somewhat to take into account my different shape. Harvey bought me a shimmery red tie to go with the suit when it was done.

Now, I did wear a pocket-watch, with fob, with that suit. And here Harvey, too, was something of an inspiration. But it is more accurate, I think, to say that he was an enabler. I already owned and occasionally used a pocket-watch. It had belonged to my Uncle Willie, and I had obtained it via my father. I never wore a wristwatch; I don't like rings either, or anything else fixing to strangle any part of my body. And all the photos of both my grandfathers, neither of whom I was born soon enough to meet, showed the watch-fob style and, more often that not, the bowler hat as well. So I was ready for all that. What Harvey did was make it permissible. He did it, slightly outlandish as it was, so that meant I could do it, too. I realized from the start, however, that I could never cut a figure like Harvey did. Me at a maximum 5'8"--somewhat less than that today--could never look like someone at 6"2".

The old Mr. Letieri in time gave way to his son, Tommy, who was a uniform maker and did tailoring on the side. I did buy a three-piece suit from him some years later on, cream color. I was married in it on June 21, 1981, and Harvey is there in the pictures, in a red-maroon sport coat, holding one of the four poles of the huppah as we all gathered in our first house at 48th and Larchwood in West Philly. (He was also with me, right by my side, some two and a half years later when I buried my father.) But here is another difference between Harvey and me: Harvey's basic body shape seemed never to change, while over time mine did. Harvey seemed to never gain weight, never to develop a paunch, never to change his bolt upright royal posture. He remained forever handsome, even when his hair began to gray and thin a bit. For all I know, as of a few weeks ago he could still wear tailored suits he had had made in 1975. As for me, I have long since out-girthed my tailor-made items, including most certainly my wedding outfit.

Now, about cars. Harvey loved cars, old cars especially, Packards and Cadillacs particularly. Back in 1972, or soon thereafter, he had a two-toned green Packard, possibly two -- I can't remember exactly. But he liked Cadillacs, too. Now, as it happened, I bought a 1952 Fleetwood in 1978 0r 1979--`79 I believe it was--and it was through my friendship with Harvey that this occurred. He knew a guy named Gary Anderson who had a fix-in shop not too far from the office. He used Gary to work on his cars. I was momentarily carless, having gone through one `64 Impala and three `66 Impalas since leaving Arlington--that's another story, or set of stories, I will not relate here. Anyway, Gary had this `52 Fleetwood outside, midnight blue, in a kind of dilapidated but still running condition. $400. So I bought it, and handed it back over to Gary to get fixed into safe and reasonably reliable running condition. That he did in about ten days for about another $400, and I still have the car today, some 31 years later. Harvey later bought a red `55 Caddy; nice car. I wonder where that one is now...

The point, however, is that Harvey did not have to endear me to old GM cars; I was already there, long before I met him. I knew every car on the road by the time I was four, a real automotive idiot savant was I. I had from the time I was 8 years old always wanted a `58 Impala, and never have got one. But I certainly never had anything against Caddys, and my `52 has treated me well all these years. Every time I drive it I think of Harvey. I will continue to do so.

And now, let us discuss booze. Harvey had a very refined taste in good liquor, mainly single malts but also encompassing Slivovitz--one has to have something to wet the whistle on Pesach, after all. When I met him, in 1972, I was already well introduced to alcohol. I liked good Scotch, but couldn't afford it most of the time. Like a lot of younger people who appreciate whiskey, I was satisfied with a nice bourbon or a sour mash. In this my father had been my mentor, having once, in a succah, conned me as a 5 year old into drinking `ol Four Roses on the pretense that it was apple juice. I did him surprisingly proud then, but as I have gotten older, I have come to prefer the single malts and good Irish. So Harvey did not mentor me or introduce me to any of this, but, as with clothing, he functioned as a provider of excellent, reinforcing company and some well appreciated fine-point counsel. (Harvey also tried to turn me on to cigars, but that I just could not do, and do not for a moment regret it.)

Anyway, after mid-May 1972 Harvey and I saw each other every work day for a little while, and in shul as well, for I started walking down to the American Jewish Congress House downtown, on Locust Street, for shabbat. And then Harvey and Barbara disappeared......they went to Israel. My own intentions about aliyah had by then been muddled by graduate school, the needs of elderly parents and the presence of certain women. Harvey and Barbara didn't stay in Israel, however; it was a tough year for them, as I heard it.

When they came back, they rented a place downtown, and I remember once being called over to help them assemble a nice piece of old furniture--some kind of armoire, I think--they were trying to set up. My mechanical skills are just average, at best, but compared to Harvey I might have been a master carpenter. He was extraordinarily capable at many things, but things that involved machines and tools were not his forte, as reflected in the fact that he never really took to typing, did not like computers and pretty much disdained the Internet.

Instead, he liked fountain pens, and again, so always did I. I have one thing from Harvey, a gift from long ago, an old ink well device. It sits on my desk, as it has all these years, and I still use it. It replaced an inferior one I had from home. I still have a lifetime supply of Esterbrook nibs from my father's last store—three boxes of 100 each--which I had been using even before I ever met Harvey. Here, too, his tastes reinforced, ratified and shaped mine, but did not create them.

Maybe these similarities between us were founded in the stars. He and I are, were, both Geminis. His birthday was June 2, which I could never forget even if I wanted to, since mine is June 1. But, of course, six years apart, he having been born in 1945 (I think) and me in 1951.

Back now to the calendar of years: Harvey and Barbara (with an odd little dog named Teddy) were back in Philadelphia in time for the October 1973 Middle East War. I was with him, and of course some several others, in shul on Yom Kippur on Locust Street, when we all heard the news. I worked with Harvey, and saw him pretty much every day back then, as I was working on my Ph.D., until after the 1980 election, after which, in the early spring of 1981, he went off with Alexander Haig to Washington and the State Department. Having finished my Ph.D. in 1979, I was then, in the first months of 1981, not yet 30 years of age. My hair was long, I had a beard, and I was not ready or suited for high or even low government position. So, I guess, it was thought, and probably correctly. So I went nowhere.

Besides, I wasn't a Republican, and never have been. I had, thanks to Dr. Kintner and the FPRI connection, earlier worked some as an adjunct to the staff of Sen. Henry Jackson, a Democrat. I was comfortable being a liberal hawk, not a conservative one--so long as we understand liberal to mean JFK, LBJ, HHH and HST liberalism, not the post-George McGovern kind. I did that work with Sen. Jackson's office for a time in 1977 and again in 1979. While down in Washington, one time sleeping on John Lehman's couch, another time staying in Scoop's house, working with Richard Perle and Dorothy Fosdick, I was always in contact with Harvey, who took in my briefs and dispensed wise and incisive advice back to me in return.

One time I remember in particular was when General Haig testified in July or August 1979 before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Harvey and I together sat just behind Haig in the Senate Caucus Room, he on Haig's direct behalf and me representing the condominium of Sen. Jackson and Sen. Tower that had been assembled to interrogate the SALT II treaty. It must have been late summer because I distinctly remember that one day of the hearings took place on Tisha B'Av. The lights were hot; we were dressed in very nice suits. Harvey and I both sat there all day, hungry, thirsty and did our jobs. During a break I napped on one of Scoop's office couches; Harvey gently woke me up when it was time to return to the caucus room. Harvey and I looked at each other, me prone on the couch, he standing over me, and we each knew what the other was experiencing, and needed to say not a single word to communicate it. A stereo chuckle was all it took. Now that’s friendship.

Harvey did not return to Philadelphia FPRI soon after having gone with Haig to Washington. He and Barbara stayed in Washington, I think for about 12 years, living in Silver Spring, while Harvey worked for George Shultz, Jim Baker and did other things as well. He and Barbara had their three children in those years; so did Scilla and I--theirs all boys, Max, Jonathan and Zack, ours with a girl in between, Gabriel, Hannah and Nate. I think Max and Gabe were both born in 1981, so Harvey did not become a father until a bit later in his life than I did in mine. I was 30; I guess he was 35 or 36 when Max was born.

I do know Max and Gabe both played baseball in the Jewish Y league, when they were around 14 or 15 years old. I vividly remember an incident in which Max was pitching for his team and Gabriel was at bat for his, and Gabe smashed a line drive right back at Max's head, knocking him apart--glasses, glove flying--like something you'd see in a cartoon. These were real baseballs. But Max is tough, and he was fine; everyone was soon chuckling and snorting, as boys on a baseball field will do. But I will never forget the sight of it. Harvey's three kids and my three still know each other, Nate and Zach much less well than the older others. But they still know each other, mainly from shul in Lower Merion and sojourns since.

So obviously, Harvey and Barbara and the boys did eventually return to the Philly area; I think it was in 1993. Harvey came to take over the reins at FPRI. The place had been through a lot of tumult, and was not in great financial shape. There was soon a split, too, occasioned by the former director's bad behavior. I had stayed at FPRI all this time, and had done some teaching on the side. I felt no Washington fire-in-the-belly. I liked FPRI; it let me read and think and write what I wanted. I did get antsy during those twelve years from time to time and did on occasion look for other work, but to no avail. I did, however, manage to spend 1992-93 in Israel with my family, partly to get away from the office, partly just to do it for its own sake.

But with Harvey's coming back to Philadelphia, I thought things would be much better--that I would enjoy FPRI more than ever. Shul, too: Harvey also used to come to Lower Merion synagogue in those years, before he found another minyan much closer to his house at the corner of City Line Avenue and Overbrook Avenue--a wonderful, sprawling old Victorian home that fit Harvey and Barbara perfectly in every way.

Things did get better; with Harvey around, work was fun again, and again I grew intellectually from his experience and counsel. I never met anyone who could get to the essence of problem as quickly or as elegantly as he could. Our reunion was not to last very long, however. FPRI fell on bad financial times. Harvey did herculean work keeping the place from collapsing altogether, but to do more than that took him longer to accomplish. By May 1995 things had gotten so bad that the place could no longer afford to keep me full time--not that I was all that expensive. Harvey offered me half-time work, but since I had a full-time mortgage and other full-time expenses, this could not be. Harvey later told me this was the hardest thing he had ever had to do in professional life, and I believed him.

So I headed off to Washington, first as a 4-day-a-week commuter, later in earnest, having gone back to where I was born and raised in the Washington area. I still saw Harvey fairly often over these past 15 years, when he would come to Washington, or on some occasions when I would return to Philly to do FPRI-sponsored programs. We did some work together, as well, when he wrote brilliantly for magazines I edited, first The National Interest and later The American Interest. (Harvey's last publication was in the November/December 2010 issue of the latter.) We also shared some seminar work at WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and did some work in common for MESH (Middle East Strategy at Harvard).

Even when we had no specific project to work on together, we talked on the phone from time to time just for the heck of it. And when we did we always talked Torah and interpretation as well as politics and policy. When I was writing speeches for Colin Powell and Condi Rice in 2003, 2004 and 2005, we spoke fairly often, sharing our experiences on such matters--and with navigating S/P and the State Department generally. When I drafted my book on Jewcentricity in 2008, Harvey was the only colleague I asked to read the entire manuscript, because he was the only person I knew who understood as much and probably more about the subject than I did. Around the same time Harvey asked me to read and comment on his fine manuscript on the history of cheap hawkery, which I gladly did. I think I can say, then, without exaggeration, that we were true colleagues for more than 38 years.

Harvey packed more learning, wit, style, grace, panache and love into his 65+ years than most people could hope to do in 130 years. He was brilliant, creative, almost impossibly personable and, I would not hesitate to say, wise. He perhaps did not publish as much as he might have and maybe as much as he wanted to, but I think I know why: He understood the rabbinical command to be very careful in teaching. Harvey was something of 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 perfectly as possible. He maintained excruciatingly high standards of excellence. He cared about quality, not quantity, and besides, he had administrative and fund-raising responsibilities that proved very time-consuming. It’s too bad for the rest of us that he didn’t write some of the big-sweep books he had talked about; they would have been extraordinary, like everything he did. Alas, he was the antithesis of the shoot-from-the-hip, naked opinion-to-spite-learning style of the blogosphere.

In his insistence on doing things right Harvey constantly elevated my understanding of what diligence in thought and writing is all about. He established a target for me--and others, if they know what's good for them--to aspire to. He knew what was worth taking seriously, and he did. He knew how to have some fun, too, and he did that as well. I never have known anyone who enjoyed a good story more than Harvey, and who could tell them with the very best. 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 very best, that's for sure; 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.

The funeral in Philadelphia earlier today was very hard for me. Avraham Levene helped make it a little easier, for his eulogy was in perfect pitch, as his words nearly always are. But it was almost too much for me to bear watching Barbara walk out of the chapel behind the casket. She was trying so hard to be cordial and polite, but she obviously fought a total meltdown all the way out the door.

I can't know what she felt. I can't know what Harvey's elderly mother felt. I can't know what the three boys and other family members felt. But I know what I felt at that precise moment, even if only for a moment--that what I was experiencing wasn't really happening, that it was just some horrid, cruel dream that would soon go away. I felt a vaporous hand reaching down deep within me and taking hold of my very spirit, trying to choke off my air, making my soul stutter and stumble. I closed my eyes for a second and instantly became disoriented, spinning forward, falling over myself, slightly nauseous. When I opened them again; my temples throbbed, and the casket was gone.

I am better now, physically. As Scilla and I drove home in the snowfall, mostly in quiet, I composed myself. As they say, I will get over it. But as we know, all the experiences we have become integrated into our being in one way or another, to one degree or another. One never gets over moments like this; and it seems to me now that we should not want or hope to "get over" them; that would be giving up part of life that we have earned. We process them, we layer them, we come to adapt ourselves to them by learning from them, if we're lucky. I don't want to "get over" Harvey's death, anymore than I would want to get over knowing him during his life. I want to find a way to learn and grow from his passing, using the model of his life as my guide. That is the burden from this day that I choose.