Remembering the Ambassador

The letter turned out to be from Sol M. Linowitz, a partner at the firm, conveying kind and generous words about the essays I had been writing in the American Scholar magazine. I don’t have the letter before me, but I recall that there was nothing perfunctory about it, and it showed that its author had read my scribblings with care. The letter ended on an invitation to lunch with him when I was next in Washington, D.C.

I was pleased and curious, too. I knew that Sol Linowitz had been present at the creation, and was later chairman, of the Xerox Corporation, that he had been U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, and that he was a hardy perennial at the time of year when universities gave out honorary degrees. He was also a figure in the contemporary Jewish pantheon, one of those men who, having done well in business, went on to cover themselves with honor in public service. He was–as I once overheard a Jewish man say to his train companion, tapping the headline of his Tribune announcing Edward Levi’s appointment to the presidency of the University of Chicago–“one of our boys, you know.”

We met for the first time for lunch at the F Street Club, a house turned into a dining club for the old-line Democratic party establishment. Awaiting Sol in one of the club’s outer rooms, I noted Edwin O. Reischauer, for many years the American ambassador to Japan, and Senator Mike Mansfield, in his day Senate majority leader, both now aged and rather desiccated figures. “Ambassador Linowitz is here,” the very impressive gray-haired African-American maitre’d told me, and led me into one of the club’s inner rooms.

There a slender, smiling man greeted me with a good handshake, telling me how much he had looked forward to this meeting. He had salt-and-pepper, wavy hair without any sign of balding, an aquiline nose, a good tan, and impressive character lines that did interesting things when he laughed, which, I was to discover, he did often. He was well-tailored in an unshowy way. He must have been vastly wealthy from his Xerox days, but nothing in his manner suggested the bullying rich man used to getting his way.

He was courtly and old shoe (heimish is the Yiddish word), serious and whimsical, all at once. In conversation he could shift easily from grave talk of the muddle in the Middle East to a splendid joke about a man who had his rabbi do a memorial service for his dog Buster (“I’m so grateful to you, Rabbi,” the punchline to this joke runs, “until this afternoon I had no idea how much Buster had done for Israel.”).

The F Street Club had no menu, but each day a different single dish was served that, in my experience, was so good that any complaints about the lack of choice were eliminated. Young women with Irish accents served the meal. On our first lunch, Sol had arranged for a room in which we were the only occupants. He told me that Ellsworth Bunker (with whom he had negotiated the Panama Canal Treaty, which he didn’t tell me) had arranged his membership for him, informing him that the F Street Club was a place where a diplomat could meet in assured privacy to discuss significant matters.

He also told me that, when he was admitted to the club, he scanned the membership list, noting that there seemed to be no Jewish names on it. He went to the manager, told him how pleased he was to be a member, but added that, seeing no other Jews among the membership, he felt, don’t you know, a bit of a token. Wasn’t there, he wondered, something that could be done about that, if only to make him feel more at home? Other Jewish members were soon added.

Once, when we got on to the subject of family feeling, Sol told me: “I’ll tell you about mother love. When I was a boy, about to be bar mitzvahed, my mother asked the rabbi if it would be all right if, while reading my Torah portion, I could accompany myself on the violin?” I thought that a superior joke, but in the New York Times obituary for Sol I learned that he had actually played violin in the Ithaca Symphony Orchestra (he went to Cornell Law School) and, to pick up needed cash, in summer dance bands.

What he never played was his own horn; at least he never tooted it in my presence. I hadn’t known, for example, that he had been a president of the National Urban League, or that he had won a Presidential Medal of Freedom. He rarely talked about his other accomplishments, past or present. I once asked him what he supposed Bill Cosby did with all the hoods from his honorary degrees. “Probably the same thing I do with mine,” he said. “Hang them in a closet and forget about them.” When I asked him how many he had, he said, if I remember correctly, 64.

Sol went to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, and was proud of the place. Ezra Pound, Alexander Woolcott, and Elihu Root, who as secretary of state won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, were its other, odd-trio, notable graduates. When Sol was a student at Hamilton, in an early version of a work-study job, he read to Root, who had lost his sight. One day he asked the old gentleman whether he should become a rabbi or a lawyer, and Root told him that, between the two jobs, being a lawyer would present him with a life of greater moral complexity. Sol took the moral complexity of the legal profession very seriously, and in his 1994 book The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century, he attacked contemporary lawyers for their thoughtless careerism, their want of loyalty to their clients and to one another, going for the money above all else.

Loyalty Sol admired, and practiced it. He was loyal to Hamilton College, he was loyal to his Jewishness (his three surviving brothers all changed their last names to Linowes), he was loyal to the Democratic party (insofar as it didn’t go off the rails), and he was loyal to his friends.

He was the sage uncle most of us at one time or another could have used but never had. Various Democratic presidents availed themselves of his advice: Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. I never had occasion to come to him for counsel, but we had a running joke that he was my physician, and when a long stretch went by during which we hadn’t seen each other, he would send a note informing me that it was time I came in for a check-up and that, frankly, my X-rays didn’t look good.

Sol Linowitz was a quietly confident man who distrusted the show of certitude in others. The only people I ever heard him criticize were those journalists, politicians, and intellectuals who specialized in knowing what he felt was the unknowable. He was also death on vulgarity. I recall him looking contemptuously at a long row of stretch limos outside the F Street Club, and remarking that the pervasiveness of such gaudy display was not a good sign for the country. As a lifelong Democrat, he couldn’t have much enjoyed the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky fiasco, though he laughed when I told him that the moral I drew from it was that you didn’t want to fool around with a Jewish girl.

He was a man of high energy, whose health seemed to hold well into his eighties, though he required a defibrillator and wore a copper bracelet. I remember his showing me a letter about his sixtieth class reunion at Hamilton College, in which, in a postscript, it was announced that walkers and wheelchairs would be provided. Pointing to the postscript, he said, “This is why I’m not going.”

Wealth and even wisdom are of no avail against the juggernaut of old age. The last time I saw Sol, he was on one of those three-pronged aluminum canes, and one eye was drooping badly. For the first time in all our conversations, he had memory lapses, and couldn’t call up names or the titles of books. “‘As long as you’ve got your health,’ the old Jews used to say,” he remarked, “and about this they weren’t wrong.”

Before his death at 91, Sol was for a long time removed from the center of power, where he enjoyed being. The New York Times referred to him as “one of the handful of people who truly fit the description ‘wise man,’ applied to those in Washington whose counsel was regularly sought by presidents, senators, and others in power.” How wise Sol was would be difficult for me to calibrate. He was, though, thoughtful and kind, and what made him rare in our time was that he was concerned above all about the good of the country. This gave him a largeness of spirit and even a touch of grandeur that seems to be disappearing from American life.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.