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He married twice. The second marriage was with Antony Blinken’s mother, Judith, whom Pisar met in New York in the late 1960s. Judith was married at the time to Donald Blinken, a prominent investment banker and arts promoter, but the two divorced and Judith moved with her son to Paris to begin a new life with Pisar in the early 1970s. Judith and Pisar later had a daughter, Leah. Pisaralso had two daughters, Alexandra and Helaina, with his first wife, Norma; the pair divorced at the end of 1970.
Judith—a leading promoter of arts, music and French-American ties—pressed Pisar to write about his life experiences, the result of which was his 1979 autobiography, Of Blood and Hope.
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The Pisars’ spacious home in the swanky 16th arrondissement of Paris was filled with music, art and lively, substantive conversations, people who knew the family say.
Even at a young age—he was 9 years old when arriving in the French capital—Antony found himself discussing geopolitics with his stepfather, the family’s many prominent acquaintances and classmates at the elite school he attended. As a youth, Blinken was seen as exceptionally thoughtful, and there were early signs he possessed diplomatic chops. His stepmother, Vera, who married Donald Blinken in 1975, noted that Antony “gave me the best possible wedding present when he told me how grateful he was to me for making his father so happy.”
His stepfather certainly admired him. “He thought the world of Tony,” said John Huhs, a former law partner of Pisar’s. “The first time I met Tony, he gave him such a build up, like he walked on water.”
The two talked about Pisar’s survival story, and the impact on young Antony was profound, people who know Blinken say. Years later, when he served as a top national security official under President Barack Obama, Blinken pushed for more U.S. involvement in Syria, where dictator Bashar Assad was using chemical weapons to stamp out a rebellion. “When he has to worry today about poison gas in Syria, he almost inevitably thinks about the gas with which my entire family was eliminated,” Pisar told the Washington Post for a 2013 Blinken profile. In 2017, Blinken praised Trump’s launch of a missile strike on Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons, a show of force Obama ultimately had decided to avoid.
Blinken’s friends and colleagues stress that it would be wrong to cast Pisar as the sole or even primary influence in his life. His mother showed him the importance of building societal bridges through arts and culture; he’s called his father, Donald, who in the 1990s was a U.S. ambassador to Hungary, his “role model” and “hero.” He also invokes his stepmother Vera’s story of fleeing communist Hungary and helping later generations of refugees.
But Pisar’s life story, perhaps more than anything, helped infuse in Blinken a belief in the value of American power—including its military power.
“Looking at his stepfather’s life, saved by the United States, attributing that salvation to the United States and, frankly, U.S. military intervention, has reinforced Tony’s belief that the United States and U.S. power can do big, important and moral things in the world,” said Philip Gordon, a former Obama administration colleague of Blinken’s who knew Pisar. Gordon added, however, that Blinken “fully understands the risks of U.S. power and the limits of U.S. power. He’s a thoughtful, balanced guy.”
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For many years, Pisar tried to avoid conversations about what had led to “B-1713” being tattooed on his arm. He did not want his past to define him such that people treated him as a symbol more than a person or friend. He found himself saying “Forget it! It’s over,” to the horror-struck reaction of a fellow Harvard student, from West Germany, when he rolled up his shirt sleeves for a game of Ping Pong. An anthropologist he conversed with “seemed fascinated by my early life, as if I were some exotic, nearly extinct animal,” he wrote in Of Blood and Hope.
Still, there’s no question the experience deeply affected his view of the world, and as the post-World War II tensions between East and West rose alongside the threat of nuclear annihilation, Pisar sought to shape the debate.
In his dissertation for his doctorate at Harvard, he focused on the legal aspects of trade between communist and capitalist countries. It was a relatively unexplored field, and given the political climate it “seemed devoid of any practical application for the foreseeable future,” Pisar wrote. His thesis won a major 1956 Harvard prize; the work also was published in the Harvard Law Review. In the coming years, Pisar’s expertise on the topic drew the attention of U.S. politicians and policymakers, including John F. Kennedy, whom Pisar had met when Kennedy was a member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard. In discussions with lawmakers, he proposed a “charter of ground rules for expanded East-West trade.” Pisar, a young man on the rise, would go on to serve in various advisory roles for Kennedy, U.S. lawmakers and U.S. government bodies.
Kennedy’s presidency felt like a breath of fresh air, and Washington was awash in new ideas. “It was a little unreal, but it made me feel very good to be alive,” Pisar wrote. His push for more connections with communist countries “must have appeared rather heretical in the political context of that time,” he wrote, but Pisar believed that the Soviet communist system was vulnerable economically and ideologically, despite its bellicosity. He also saw little chance that either side—free enterprise or state enterprise—would voluntarily give up its institutions or ideologies. Pisar was driven nonetheless by a fervent desire to prevent an atomic holocaust, and for that he saw no other option but to push the two sides to engage and get along. He felt his background gave him a special window into Soviet thinking, having temporarily lived under its occupation in Poland. At the same time, he felt he owed an emotional debt to the Soviets. “The Americans liberated me,” he wrote, “but if it had not been for the Russian effort that hastened Germany’s defeat, I would not have survived long enough to be liberated by the Americans.”
It seemed “absurd” and “dangerous” to Pisar for the United States to try to exclude Russia, Eastern Europe and China from the increasingly globalized economy. Rather, Pisar proposed drawing “the East into a web of agreements that would create an irreversible commitment to peace; and to accept the bet that human freedom would progressively benefit from this process.” Pisar expounded on his ideas in a widely read 1961 U.S. government report titled “A New Look at Trade Policy Toward the Communist Bloc—The Elements of a Common Strategy for the West.” In such policy writings, always cautiously worded, he suggested that Washington limit the list of goods it refused to sell to the Soviets and allow in some Soviet goods, such as Kamchatka crabmeat, that had earlier been barred on grounds such as suspicion that slave labor was involved. The goal, in part, was to encourage post-Stalinist reforms, Pisar wrote in his autobiography.
Pisar’s ideas were indeed heretical to many Cold Warriors; some on the American political right attacked him. A general he liked and respected told him, “You can’t coexist with the Russians and the Chinese. You can only fight them with their own methods,” Pisar wrote. As the 1960s went on, he left Washington for Paris to launch an international law firm whose clientele included Hollywood royalty and international corporations. He helped advise on some significant business deals, such as the building of Pan American Airways InterContinental hotels in Eastern Europe. On the whole, however, East-West trade did not develop to the extent he’d hoped. He understood the hesitation on both sides—especially Western concerns that engaging with the Soviets could strengthen a regime that was ghastly toward its citizens. He wrote, however, “I could not overcome my belief that to run the risk of permanent nuclear confrontation would be a policy of madness and would accomplish nothing in the field of human rights.”
So he went about pulling his ideas together into Coexistence & Commerce: Guidelines for Transactions between East and West, which was published in 1970. To his gratification, the book was well-timed and well-received across the political spectrum; even Soviet officialdom seemed more receptive than a decade earlier. It sparked international debate, and he was told that the National Security Council prepared a special report on his ideas for President Richard Nixon. (Pisar had encountered Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, while at Harvard.)
The tome, which runs to more than 500 pages, is not exactly beach reading. An often technical survey of the state of East-West trade and its possibilities (“Communist Recognition of Western Copyrights” is a typical section heading), it is as much a practical handbook as it is a treatise. Under a chapter on U.S. views on commerce with the East, Pisar has a section titled “The Emotional Issue.” He notes in various parts of the book that Americans appear less inclined to pursue the possibility of trade with the East than even their allies in Western Europe. The highly politicized U.S. debate made it harder for businesses to pursue what they felt were worthy commercial transactions with the Soviet bloc, Pisar argues. The debate described in the book has echoes today as the United States uses sanctions to try to kill a gas pipeline project between Germany and the post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin.
Coexistence & Commerce was “groundbreaking” work for its time, said Anthony Gardner, a former U.S. ambassador to the European Union and decades-old friend of Blinken’s who often sought advice from Pisar. “This was a bold piece of work, and he was completely open-eyed, clearly, about the Soviet Union,” Gardner said. “This was not a work to turn a blind eye to that regime, but saying that we could deal with the Soviet Union and influence them through commerce, particularly, and also through raising issues of human rights and also through other means of soft power.” The soft power idea, in particular, likely affected Blinken, who has spoken often of the influence America has on the world simply through its example, Gardner said.
Pisar’s promotion of East-West ties troubled one of his closest friends, Ben, who had survived the death camps alongside him and who, years later, asked him, “What are the limits?”
“In Germany, for example, when you were advising those bankers in Frankfurt, all the hands you shook. … How do you know that some of them were not former Nazis, or even SS guards from the camps …?” Ben asked, according to Pisar’s autobiography. When Pisar responded by asking if they always had to live in the past, his friend shot back: “We may not have to live in the past, but the past lives in us.”
The late 1960s to late 1970s were a period of “détente” between the United States and its enemies. In May 1972, Nixon took a historic trip to Moscow for meetings with Soviet leaders that included productive discussions on topics ranging from the environment to arms control. A few months earlier, Nixon had made a historic visit to China, opening a new chapter in that relationship as well. Washington hardliners fought the détente policy and considered their skepticism vindicated after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter a year later in part by promising to be tougher on the Soviet Union, which he came to dub the “evil empire.”
Pisar remained undeterred. Whether at international conferences, dinners with diplomats, sessions with business leaders or on widely read op-ed pages, he tried to strike a balance between championing greater economic ties and the realities of political attitudes across the oceans. In one episode, annoyed by anti-Semitic undertones of Soviet officials at a conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Pisar delivered an impromptu speech that led the Soviet and American dignitaries to visit nearby Babi Yar, the site of the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews. He once found himself pointing out to Western businessmen that while selling photocopy technology to the Soviets would make it easier for them to spread their propaganda, it also would ease the spread of dissident literature—samizdat. He was frustrated by the fallout from a 1974 U.S. law that tied the trade issue to demands that the Soviet Union make it easier for Jews to emigrate from its soil. Pisar, of course, sympathized with Soviet Jews who wished to move to Israel or elsewhere. He argued, however, that the noise surrounding the statute, known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, actually undermined what had been steady progress on the emigration issue. It also imperiled other aspects of Soviet-U.S. ties by angering the Soviet leadership, Pisar wrote in a 1977 op-ed. In part due to the amendment, the Soviets walked away from a much-ballyhooed 1972 agreement they had signed with America to expand anemic levels of trade.
In that same column, titled “Let’s Put Détente Back on the Rails,” Pisar chided Carter, saying that the president’s decision to make human rights “the centerpiece of his foreign policy” was actually counterproductive when it came to the Soviet Union. “Personally, I believe that to link the normalization of relations to fundamental changes in the Soviets’ internal system, and to do so openly and aggressively, is to undermine the remnants of détente—and, at the same time, to bury the prospect of expanded human rights in the Soviet Union,” Pisar wrote. “The only challenge that promises to liberalize that regime is a commitment to engage its less fanatical elements in a constructive dialogue of cooperation, with expanded commercial, technological and scientific intercourse as the central theme.”
Huhs, the former Pisar law partner, credited this “rational” streak in Pisar to “his laser-like focus on survival dating from his days in the camps” and his keen awareness of the need to balance competing priorities. Gardner, meanwhile, said Pisar had no illusions about what dramatic change can come to a closed system like the Soviet Union, or at least not about how quickly that change could come.
“He was a realist,” Gardner said. “He didn’t believe in regime change in the sense that people talk about it today, because it’s just not going to happen. Other countries, as it’s obvious, have many different trajectories and some of those trajectories are long and not linear.”
The end of the Soviet Union, in late 1991, came sooner than Pisar likely imagined it would, and just a few years after he stood up for the Soviet Jews in that country’s courtrooms. The reasons for its collapse are still hotly debated. Reagan’s acolytes argue that the 1980s defense buildup, along with his forceful articulation of American values, brought the Soviets to ruin; economists say the communist system’s inefficiencies made that outcome a foregone conclusion. But greater exposure of Soviet citizens to outside goods and information as Gorbachev sought to reform the system through the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) undoubtedly played a role. It’s difficult to measure the influence of a single voice like Pisar’s, and the reality is that Soviet-U.S. trade never reached levels beyond paltry. But Pisar noted that it took clear-eyed leaders on both sides to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. He was keenly aware, too, that the world faced a slew of other problems, including religious radicalization.
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