Remembering a Dear Friend - 13 December 2002

An old journalist colleague was taking his first holiday on a cruise ship.

They were sailing along the Mediterranean and the ship stopped at Tangiers.

It came up on the horizon as what he called "a featureless strip of sand".

"Not," he said, "my notion of Africa."

I suppose this happens to all of us though from not wanting to be thought a bonehead it's not the sort of thing we mention aloud.

My own experience was to the contrary.

Sailing up the bay of New York at twilight on a late September evening, a clear purple sky and thousands of people still at work which meant that the downtown and midtown skyscrapers were all lit up - a forest of giant firecrackers.

Nothing could have better fulfilled the imagined scene. New York city, in short, lived up to its billing.

However, "not my notion of America" came later.

So, it was a week later that I took the train 50 miles north to New Haven, Connecticut, where, at the Yale School of Drama, I proposed to polish up my directing skills and return to England to revolutionise the English theatre.

How that came not to be is another story you'll be relieved to hear some other time or not at all.

Yale. The only vision I had of an American university had been formed by the musical comedies of the 1920s and the silent movies of Harold Lloyd.

They were so rowdy, so facetious and all of them turned on the dopey hero winning the football game and the girl cheerleader on the sidelines that I knew this couldn't be anything but farce, set to music by Hollywood scriptwriters who had never been closer to Yale than the Bronx.

We chuffed into New Haven and later in the day I came on the campus.

First thing I was told to go to the Dean's office and he would tell me where I was going to live.

Well I was made a member of Harkness College, then called Hall, and padded off there to find my own cosy little room.

It turned out to be a suite: a large study, bedroom, little kitchen, best of all - and new to me in a college - your own bathroom with its own radiator.

It was all splendid but as an American object it was a shock, a letdown. It was a high Gothic, gloomy room - at my own college in England I'd looked out on a medieval cloister, dank, melancholy and mouldy with distinction.

And I travelled 3,000 miles to the New World, to the land of Douglas Fairbanks and George Gershwin and Bobby Jones and the lovely white colonial 18th Century houses I'd read so much about, and here I was under house arrest in a grey, grim, Gothic room with heavily-leaded, peek-a-boo, owlish windows.

I took a quick walk round the campus and I found that everything was Gothic but strangely new and I later still discovered that one architect who was put in charge was given a free hand in 1919 to go berserk with his Gothic mania and in the next 16 years practically built a small city or large campus of Gothic as being most suitable for an historic university.

On that first evening I sat alone in my cloistered prison and silently deplored my fate.

A knock came at the door. There stood a middle-sized, athletic looking young man, black hair with a lick of curl, strikingly brown-black eyes - merry eyes - and an air of geniality he was never to lose.

"My name," he said, "is Rostow, Gene Rostow, and I understand you're a new fellow."

"Commonwealth," I said.

"Commonwealth fellow," he said, "I wondered if you'd care to come over to my place and meet my room mates?"

Of course my trajectory to his room was that of Bugs Bunny in pursuit of a carrot.

And he had a rather grander suite - living room and off it four bedrooms.

He had three room mates, two of whom I knew till the end of their lives.

Eugene Victor Rostow however was plainly to me the key man and stayed my oldest American friend with nary a cross word till the day he died, which was on Monday of last week.

He was the son of a Russian immigrant, a dedicated socialist who christened his son after a famous socialist candidate for the presidency - Eugene Victor Debs.

His younger son, who was to become Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser, was named after the poet Walt Whitman.

The lithe athletic shape I noticed about Gene Rostow at first sight was well taken.

The first thing I knew about him was that he was the polo captain.

A Jewish polo captain at Yale? - which at that time had an unspoken, unacknowledged, quota system.

However Gene was captain of water polo and a powerful, thrashing performer he was.

But very soon I learned that he was an intellectual whizz, graduating after four years at Yale when he was 19, when most students are in their second, their sophomore year.

At the age of 40 he became dean of the law school, had several famous pupils, including two later presidents, and in 10 years made Yale law school quite possibly the finest in the country.

His passion for international law and his large knowledge of constitutional law made him destined for politics and not long after he went to Washington he drew the attention and the affection of Truman's later secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who looked like a tweedy Spanish grandee with a guardsman's moustache.

There was a little private talk that come the right day Gene Rostow might make a fine supreme court justice - his intellect, his tolerance of opponents, most of all his having a genuinely judicial temperament - open-minded, objective, disinterested - it is a rare possession even among justices of the Supreme Court.

However, the talk came to nothing.

Gene went on to become an assistant secretary of state, then in charge of economic warfare in North Africa, in charge, at the end, of arms control and disarmament.

But it's not politics, his character is what I wish to end on.

At the height of his fame as Yale's law school dean he was offered a visiting professorship in a famous European university.

In a postal muddle the invitation went to the wrong man, who accepted the post and enjoyed it.

Never a hint of a sigh of complaint from Gene Rostow.

He was the first public official of any standing who, in the wake of Pearl Harbour, angrily protested the unconstitutionality of herding practically the entire Japanese American population of California, three generations, into detention centres for the rest of the war.

In a Kennedy year - it was, I'll never forget, 1962 - Gene came to stay with us on Long Island but at the week's end he had business in town, as I had, and I drove him back to New York to stay the night.

We arrived late afternoon, eased off, sat down for a drink.

The telephone rang. I took the call.

A voice said: "Is Professor Rostow there?"

"He is."

"This is the White House. The president wishes to speak to him."

After what novelists call a sudden start I handed over.

And this was my end of the brief dialogue that I heard.

"Yes sir, Mr President. Well thank you and the same. Uhu, uhu, yes, yes I know of course, of course everybody knew, uhu, well ah - I understand sir, thank you all the same."

A bright, swift chuckle, and he hung up.

He came back to the sofa, he sat down and we went on with our merry conversation.

I did not think his business with the president was any business of mine.

We sallied off to dinner, came back for a nightcap and at some point, looking both cheerful and mischievous, he said: "You might wonder what went on with the president. If you can keep it to yourself for a time."

And I said something like: "For a lifetime."

To understand Kennedy's part in the exchange I have to draw in a little background.

A famous justice, one Felix Frankfurter, had decided to retire from the Supreme Court.

He was a Jew and though there is no rule, for the last 50 years or so there has been a binding tradition that there must be one Jew, since Thurmond Marshall one black, since Sandra Day O'Connor, one woman.

Kennedy had offered the coming vacancy to a former governor of Connecticut, a Jew - and everybody knew he'd had the offer but for personal reasons he quietly turned it down.

Moving swiftly forward in the dark background Dean Acheson came to Kennedy's aid - Gene Rostow must be the man.

Kennedy thought it over. After all Gene was a Jew from Connecticut. Kennedy made up his mind and put the call.

And here, this is the brief speech to which Gene Rostow responded with his usual geniality, at the end even with a chuckle.

"Gene, I have a problem. I offered Frankfurter's seat to Abe Ribicoff but the governor had to turn it down. Yes, yes as everybody knew. That's the problem.

"Well you were right up there as most qualified but I'm afraid I decided that two Jews from Connecticut is one too many. It's going to Goldberg of Illinois. I'm sorry."

"Well I understand sir. Thank you just the same." Chuckle.

Gene never to me or anyone I knew ever breathed a mention of this appalling letdown in his life.

But here in the room I speak from, in a minute or two, I saw for the first time and prayed it would never happen again, a lifetime's ambition shattered in a moment, with a chuckle.

Eugene Victor Rostow, a darling man, died last Monday week aged 89.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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