Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to travel quite extensively.
Not through time, like Marty McFly, our hero from Back to the Future, but at least through time zones, and plenty of those.
And what never fails to amaze me is how so many people can constantly be on the move.
Don’t get me wrong – of course anybody is entitled to as much mobility as they need, enjoy, and can afford. But I sit at an airport and am bewildered by the amount of flying going on around me.
Back in the days before the automobile and planes, travel of the voluntary kind was mostly a perk for the well-to-do and maybe not-so-busy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey (1786 – 1788) and Lord Byron’s Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (1809 – 1811) are cases in point.
But nowadays, it seems nobody stays at home anymore. While the world is not a safe place, if it ever was.
From the shopping mall in Nairobi, to the beaches of Sousse and the Sinai, and to the center of Bangkok, innocent people are falling victims to deadly attacks, and the economies of Kenya, Tunisia, Egypt, Thailand, and any other country affected, heavily dependent on tourism as they are, suffer.
That’s the idea of course: Terrorism is not about the number of people killed – it’s about the number of people frightened.
But the attraction of visiting faraway places clearly outweighs the risks involved:
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” St. Augustine
I recently spoke to someone who explained to me he was a collector of countries – with every year of his life, he visits a new one he has never been to. He is now forty, and he admits to “banking” countries in anticipation of growing old when travelling may become less easy. Just as long as he keeps up his golden formula – one for every age.
A very admirable concept, and I will spend some time over the weekend counting the countries I have gone to. The rule will be at least one night spent there – merely changing flights at an airport doesn’t count.
Cue the Lonely Planet rankings for “Best in Travel – Top Ten Countries” for 2016:
1. Botswana
2. Japan
3. USA
4. Palau
5. Latvia
6. Australia
7. Poland
8. Uruguay
9. Greece
10. Fiji
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/best-in-travel/countries
My own version of marking travel is to buy a Starbucks mug in every town I visit – provided there is an outlet of this typically American retail and restaurant success story of course. We have quite a collection, as you can imagine.
The Lonely Planet rankings for “Best in Travel – Top Ten Cities” for 2016 are:
1. Kotor, Montenegro
2. Quito, Ecuador
3. Dublin, Ireland
4. George Town, Malaysia
5. Rotterdam, The Netherlands
6. Mumbai, India
7. Fremantle, Australia
8. Manchester, UK
9. Nashville, Tennessee, USA
10. Rome, Italy
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/best-in-travel/cities
And while we are on fun facts and travel-related rankings, here’s an interesting one from the Canadian Financial Services firm, Arton Capital that they call “The Passport Power Rank”. It lists passports by the number of countries worldwide their holders can enter without need to apply for a visa.
The Top Three are:
1. USA and UK: 147 countries
2. Germany, France, and (South) Korea: 145 countries
3. Italy and Sweden: 144 countries
http://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php
One place I definitely want to go to, sooner rather than later, is Myanmar, aka Burma. With great interest, bordering on fascination, I have been following developments in that country over the past years as the military junta after five decades of ruling their 52 million compatriots with an iron fist since 1962 had an epiphany and embarked on a risky adventure – free elections, modernisation and democracy (of sorts).
Relinquishing power voluntarily, without being ousted by force, is a very unusual thing to do for any military dictatorship, and so we are truly witnessing History in the Making.
And then, of course, the nation and its politics harbour a global super star, for better or for worse.
Her name is Aung Sam Suu Kyi, and she is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, no less. She has also received just about every national award for Freedom and Democracy other countries have to bestow on worthy individuals.
Back in the 1990 general election, her opposition party National League for Democracy (NLD) already won the vast majority of seats in parliament, which the military junta had not anticipated and didn’t appreciate, and as a consequence she remained under house arrest for almost 15 of the 21 following years until her final release in November 2010, in the process becoming one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners.
I’m sure you all remember the TV pictures of her in solitary confinement, including the reports about a crazy American who twice, in 2008 and 2009, literally swam across a lake to visit her in her compound.
Although she is barred by the constitution from becoming president of Myanmar, because she has two sons of foreign – UK – nationality (her deceased husband was British), Suu Kyi recently has said she will become the country's de facto leader, acting "above the president," if her party forms the next government.
The latest general election results from last weekend, while still being counted as I am writing this, indicate a landslide victory by her party. It will be interesting to follow how that all pans out.
So, basically, she’s a super star, and in the interest of democracy in Burma / Myanmar, I wish her and her political movement good luck.
Apart from the unfortunate, yet helpful, factors that led to her becoming the international public figure that she is – what else is it that makes a political rock star in our saturated media world?
Like it or not, good looks help. Mark Carney, the (Canadian) Governor of the Bank of England, goes by “the George Clooney of the financial industry”, but as he charmingly says himself – “the bar is low in the banking world”. In a national contest, he would also be competing with the newly elected Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau who has the advantage over Carney of being significantly younger, born on Christmas Day 1971.
Trudeau additionally benefits from a dynastical background – his father Pierre Trudeau (1919 – 2000) was also Prime Minister of Canada, twice even (from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to 1984).
There’s a wonderful anecdote illustrating young Justin’s political lineage: On 14 April 1972, Trudeau's father and mother hosted a gala at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa where visiting U.S. President Richard M. Nixon said, "I’d like to toast the future Prime Minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau"; to which Pierre Trudeau responded that should his four months old son ever assume the role, he hoped he would have "the grace and skill of the President". This was pre-Watergate, mind.
Earlier that same day, U.S. First Lady Pat Nixon had come to see little Justin in his nursery to deliver a gift, a stuffed Snoopy toy. What a spoilt brat!
While speaking of looks: Nixon – who had to resign in ignominy over the Watergate scandal in order to avoid impeachment but is unfairly reduced to this unfortunate episode (a negative case study in crisis management by the way) as he earned himself an impressive track record in foreign policy while at the helm – narrowly lost the 1960 Presidential election to the young and handsome John F Kennedy not least because of a new element first introduced in that campaign, televised presidential debates.
Especially in the first of four such on-camera clashes of the candidates, Nixon (who had injured himself when getting out of the car on arriving at the studio) appeared pale and sinister, with a “five o'clock shadow”, in contrast to the photogenic, always impeccably coiffed and turned-out Kennedy who insisted on having make-up applied to his face before the show. In polls after the program, Nixon’s performance in the debate was perceived to be poor by the TV audience, while interestingly many people listening on the radio thought that he had won.
Bottom line: appearance does matter. And Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire, a TV host and media personality born in 1975 remind me a lot of Jack and Jackie Kennedy who brought a whole new (life) style, including small children, to the White House in 1961. To this day, at 43, Kennedy remains the youngest person to have been elected President of the U.S. In case you were wondering, by contrast, the youngest to assume office is actually Theodore Roosevelt, but he was Vice President under William McKinley and took up the Presidency after the latter’s assassination in 1901.
So back to our initial question – what (else) does it take to achieve true super star status?
Well, of course it helps to have done or at least said something memorable and under remarkable circumstances. JFK again: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (26 June 1963 – see the previous blog post)
Winston Churchill, who may have been a lot of things but in all fairness was not a looker, ticks that box amply, as does his wartime counterpart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. President from 1933 through 1945, who had to see his country through the Great Depression and World War II.
In his first inaugural address on 4 March 1933, to instil confidence in themselves, he famously told the American people:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
What a line. Make it your own.
Barack Obama certainly had super star status when he first ran for President and got elected (“Yes We Can!”), but after seven years in office I would argue it’s worn off a little – and boy, has he aged.
Sometimes, Serendipity or Fate will have it that the right person happens to be in the right place at the right time. One such politician sadly died two days ago, aged 96: Germany’s fifth post-war Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (23 December 1918 – 10 November 2015).
Like Churchill and FDR, while in office Schmidt had to steer his nation through turbulent times, and he succeeded because, “We trusted him.” (Chancellor Angela Merkel on the news of his death).
Helmut Schmidt’s political career within the Social Democratic Party began in his native town, the self-governed Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, to this day a city-state and one of the 16 Bundesländer making up the Federal Republic of Germany, where he established his reputation as a sterling crisis manager and somebody who gets things done under the most adverse of conditions.
43-year-old Helmut Schmidt was a member of the Senate, the Government of Hamburg, as Interior Senator when a natural disaster hit the port city in February 1962. Swollen to unprecedented levels by heavy rainfall, the Elbe River poured over its dikes, causing a calamitous flood which killed 315 people. In the absence of the Mayor, who was travelling, Schmidt took charge of the emergency response that saved thousands of citizens from drowning. Without legal authority to do so, he called in the army and NATO forces to join in the rescue efforts, and famously said later: “I did not look at the Constitution during those days.”
After stints as Minister for Defence, for Economics, and for Finance, Helmut Schmidt became German Chancellor in 1974, succeeding to Willy Brandt, and held the office until 1982. During his tenure, he faced a worldwide economic crisis caused by an unprecedented sharp increase in the price of oil in 1973. In 1977, during the so-called “German Autumn” he dealt with a home-grown terrorist threat emanating from the RAF organisation (Rote Armee Fraktion - Red Army Faction). He remained uncompromising towards their demands in hostage-taking scenarios and thereby assumed the ultimate responsibility both for the successful storming of the hijacked Boeing 737-200 Lufthansa plane, “Landshut” at the airport of Mogadishu by German special forces, liberating all 82 passengers and five crew members unharmed, and for the murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the President of the German Employers’ Association. The victim’s family never forgave him.
Finally, in the field of foreign and defence policy, Schmidt remained tough during the days of Soviet domination of East Germany. In the single major European security issue of the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was the driving force behind the NATO decision to answer the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles with the installation of American Pershing missiles in Western Europe, provided the Soviets refused to withdraw their new weapons. This stance was deeply controversial at the time, provoking demonstration marches by hundreds of thousands Germans and creating The Greens as a political party. It eventually led to Schmidt’s losing office in 1982 because leftist Social Democrats would no longer follow him.
While deeply sceptical of U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s capabilities, the German Government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt also showed itself fully supportive of the American reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 which included a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In the end, only four countries in Europe held the line – Norway, Monaco, Turkey, and West Germany. I still vividly remember the public discussion around this divisive decision, as a whole generation of athletes accused Schmidt of having deprived them of their biggest career highlight.
As a person, Schmidt was intellectually brilliant; a gifted debater, witty and eloquent; widely read; a philosopher as much as a politician; of Lutheran faith while self-avowed “not religious, but neither an atheist”; the epitome of the proud Hamburg Hanseatic; married to his childhood sweetheart Hannelore “Loki”, a biologist and amateur botanist for 68 years (she died in 2010 at age 91; they had one daughter); after retiring from politics the co-publisher of one of Germany’s leading weeklies, Die Zeit; a prolific author; a serious chess player; and an accomplished pianist with several records to his name. He was awarded 24 honorary doctoral degrees in his lifetime, including from Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the Sorbonne in France, Harvard and Johns Hopkins in the U.S., Keio in Japan, and the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium. For many decades, he and his wife lived in the same unassuming semi-detached house in Hamburg-Langenhorn where they would privately host famous guests from all over the world. One of his closest friends was Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State under, you’ve guessed it, President Richard Nixon.
Helmut Schmidt’s self-confidence bordered on arrogance at times, and he could be quite sarcastic. When invited by The New York Times to assess his successor, Chancellor Helmut Kohl he said: “I think there are still two or three fields in which he still needs a lot of education.” Asked which ones, he answered, “International affairs, arms control and military strategy, and economics and finance.”
Early on in his career, Schmidt earned himself the nickname “Schmidt Schnauze” (Schmidt the Lip), and it stuck. My top three favourite quotes?
“Politicians and journalists share the sad fate that they often speak about things already today which they will completely understand only tomorrow.”
“I divide humanity into three categories: We normal people who at some point in their youth stole apples; the second has a small criminal inclination; and the third consists of investment bankers.”
“If someone has visions, they should go to see a doctor.” About his predecessor Willy Brandt…
I had the pleasure many years ago of working with the chief aide to a former Irish Prime Minister, and he told me that at EU summit meetings the whole room would go silent once Helmut Schmidt walked in because everybody expected him to come up with something no-one else had thought of: “The man just exuded superior intelligence.”
In a 2013 poll by Stern magazine, he was ranked as Germany’s most significant Chancellor. As Angela Markel said: “We trusted him.”
And then, there’s one more thing about Helmut Schmidt that simply cannot go unmentioned – he was a lifelong heavy smoker of menthol cigarettes and until the very end the only person in Germany allowed blatantly to disregard smoking bans wherever he appeared in public, including TV studios. In response to the European Union’s proposed ban of menthol cigarettes, he procured 200 cartons of his favourite brand Reyno, enough to see him through two or three years. As it now turns out, he will not have the opportunity to use up his stockpile anymore.
And in wondrous ways, this anecdote brings me back to John F Kennedy. It is well documented that he sent out his Press Secretary, Pierre Salinger to shop for 1,200 Cuban cigars before signing the trade embargo law on 7 February 1962.
Winston Churchill once said: “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.”
An old saying of unknown origin optimistically postulates, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”. When a time of need arises, the right person to do the job will appear. Of Jefferson Davis, President-elect of the Confederacy at the outset of the American Civil War in 1861 it was stated, “The man and the hour have met”.
There’s a song from 1984, Holding Out for a Hero, with lyrics that express the same sentiment (although I suspect Bonny Tyler’s “needs” are of a specific nature, this being Rock’n’Roll). The song is part of the soundtrack to the movie Footloose with Kevin Bacon, by the way.
Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the Gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need
I need a hero, I'm holding out for a hero
'Til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero, I'm holding out for a hero
'Til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life
(Larger than life)
The leading local daily newspaper, Hamburger Abendblatt has entitled its obituary for Helmut Schmidt, “Farewell to a Century Man”. It ends: “Since yesterday, the voice from Hamburg-Langenhorn has gone silent. It will be missed.”
We all trusted him.
And what never fails to amaze me is how so many people can constantly be on the move.
Don’t get me wrong – of course anybody is entitled to as much mobility as they need, enjoy, and can afford. But I sit at an airport and am bewildered by the amount of flying going on around me.
Back in the days before the automobile and planes, travel of the voluntary kind was mostly a perk for the well-to-do and maybe not-so-busy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey (1786 – 1788) and Lord Byron’s Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (1809 – 1811) are cases in point.
But nowadays, it seems nobody stays at home anymore. While the world is not a safe place, if it ever was.
From the shopping mall in Nairobi, to the beaches of Sousse and the Sinai, and to the center of Bangkok, innocent people are falling victims to deadly attacks, and the economies of Kenya, Tunisia, Egypt, Thailand, and any other country affected, heavily dependent on tourism as they are, suffer.
That’s the idea of course: Terrorism is not about the number of people killed – it’s about the number of people frightened.
But the attraction of visiting faraway places clearly outweighs the risks involved:
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” St. Augustine
I recently spoke to someone who explained to me he was a collector of countries – with every year of his life, he visits a new one he has never been to. He is now forty, and he admits to “banking” countries in anticipation of growing old when travelling may become less easy. Just as long as he keeps up his golden formula – one for every age.
A very admirable concept, and I will spend some time over the weekend counting the countries I have gone to. The rule will be at least one night spent there – merely changing flights at an airport doesn’t count.
Cue the Lonely Planet rankings for “Best in Travel – Top Ten Countries” for 2016:
1. Botswana
2. Japan
3. USA
4. Palau
5. Latvia
6. Australia
7. Poland
8. Uruguay
9. Greece
10. Fiji
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/best-in-travel/countries
My own version of marking travel is to buy a Starbucks mug in every town I visit – provided there is an outlet of this typically American retail and restaurant success story of course. We have quite a collection, as you can imagine.
The Lonely Planet rankings for “Best in Travel – Top Ten Cities” for 2016 are:
1. Kotor, Montenegro
2. Quito, Ecuador
3. Dublin, Ireland
4. George Town, Malaysia
5. Rotterdam, The Netherlands
6. Mumbai, India
7. Fremantle, Australia
8. Manchester, UK
9. Nashville, Tennessee, USA
10. Rome, Italy
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/best-in-travel/cities
And while we are on fun facts and travel-related rankings, here’s an interesting one from the Canadian Financial Services firm, Arton Capital that they call “The Passport Power Rank”. It lists passports by the number of countries worldwide their holders can enter without need to apply for a visa.
The Top Three are:
1. USA and UK: 147 countries
2. Germany, France, and (South) Korea: 145 countries
3. Italy and Sweden: 144 countries
http://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php
One place I definitely want to go to, sooner rather than later, is Myanmar, aka Burma. With great interest, bordering on fascination, I have been following developments in that country over the past years as the military junta after five decades of ruling their 52 million compatriots with an iron fist since 1962 had an epiphany and embarked on a risky adventure – free elections, modernisation and democracy (of sorts).
Relinquishing power voluntarily, without being ousted by force, is a very unusual thing to do for any military dictatorship, and so we are truly witnessing History in the Making.
And then, of course, the nation and its politics harbour a global super star, for better or for worse.
Her name is Aung Sam Suu Kyi, and she is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, no less. She has also received just about every national award for Freedom and Democracy other countries have to bestow on worthy individuals.
Back in the 1990 general election, her opposition party National League for Democracy (NLD) already won the vast majority of seats in parliament, which the military junta had not anticipated and didn’t appreciate, and as a consequence she remained under house arrest for almost 15 of the 21 following years until her final release in November 2010, in the process becoming one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners.
I’m sure you all remember the TV pictures of her in solitary confinement, including the reports about a crazy American who twice, in 2008 and 2009, literally swam across a lake to visit her in her compound.
Although she is barred by the constitution from becoming president of Myanmar, because she has two sons of foreign – UK – nationality (her deceased husband was British), Suu Kyi recently has said she will become the country's de facto leader, acting "above the president," if her party forms the next government.
The latest general election results from last weekend, while still being counted as I am writing this, indicate a landslide victory by her party. It will be interesting to follow how that all pans out.
So, basically, she’s a super star, and in the interest of democracy in Burma / Myanmar, I wish her and her political movement good luck.
Apart from the unfortunate, yet helpful, factors that led to her becoming the international public figure that she is – what else is it that makes a political rock star in our saturated media world?
Like it or not, good looks help. Mark Carney, the (Canadian) Governor of the Bank of England, goes by “the George Clooney of the financial industry”, but as he charmingly says himself – “the bar is low in the banking world”. In a national contest, he would also be competing with the newly elected Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau who has the advantage over Carney of being significantly younger, born on Christmas Day 1971.
Trudeau additionally benefits from a dynastical background – his father Pierre Trudeau (1919 – 2000) was also Prime Minister of Canada, twice even (from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to 1984).
There’s a wonderful anecdote illustrating young Justin’s political lineage: On 14 April 1972, Trudeau's father and mother hosted a gala at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa where visiting U.S. President Richard M. Nixon said, "I’d like to toast the future Prime Minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau"; to which Pierre Trudeau responded that should his four months old son ever assume the role, he hoped he would have "the grace and skill of the President". This was pre-Watergate, mind.
Earlier that same day, U.S. First Lady Pat Nixon had come to see little Justin in his nursery to deliver a gift, a stuffed Snoopy toy. What a spoilt brat!
While speaking of looks: Nixon – who had to resign in ignominy over the Watergate scandal in order to avoid impeachment but is unfairly reduced to this unfortunate episode (a negative case study in crisis management by the way) as he earned himself an impressive track record in foreign policy while at the helm – narrowly lost the 1960 Presidential election to the young and handsome John F Kennedy not least because of a new element first introduced in that campaign, televised presidential debates.
Especially in the first of four such on-camera clashes of the candidates, Nixon (who had injured himself when getting out of the car on arriving at the studio) appeared pale and sinister, with a “five o'clock shadow”, in contrast to the photogenic, always impeccably coiffed and turned-out Kennedy who insisted on having make-up applied to his face before the show. In polls after the program, Nixon’s performance in the debate was perceived to be poor by the TV audience, while interestingly many people listening on the radio thought that he had won.
Bottom line: appearance does matter. And Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire, a TV host and media personality born in 1975 remind me a lot of Jack and Jackie Kennedy who brought a whole new (life) style, including small children, to the White House in 1961. To this day, at 43, Kennedy remains the youngest person to have been elected President of the U.S. In case you were wondering, by contrast, the youngest to assume office is actually Theodore Roosevelt, but he was Vice President under William McKinley and took up the Presidency after the latter’s assassination in 1901.
So back to our initial question – what (else) does it take to achieve true super star status?
Well, of course it helps to have done or at least said something memorable and under remarkable circumstances. JFK again: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (26 June 1963 – see the previous blog post)
Winston Churchill, who may have been a lot of things but in all fairness was not a looker, ticks that box amply, as does his wartime counterpart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. President from 1933 through 1945, who had to see his country through the Great Depression and World War II.
In his first inaugural address on 4 March 1933, to instil confidence in themselves, he famously told the American people:
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
What a line. Make it your own.
Barack Obama certainly had super star status when he first ran for President and got elected (“Yes We Can!”), but after seven years in office I would argue it’s worn off a little – and boy, has he aged.
Sometimes, Serendipity or Fate will have it that the right person happens to be in the right place at the right time. One such politician sadly died two days ago, aged 96: Germany’s fifth post-war Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (23 December 1918 – 10 November 2015).
Like Churchill and FDR, while in office Schmidt had to steer his nation through turbulent times, and he succeeded because, “We trusted him.” (Chancellor Angela Merkel on the news of his death).
Helmut Schmidt’s political career within the Social Democratic Party began in his native town, the self-governed Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, to this day a city-state and one of the 16 Bundesländer making up the Federal Republic of Germany, where he established his reputation as a sterling crisis manager and somebody who gets things done under the most adverse of conditions.
43-year-old Helmut Schmidt was a member of the Senate, the Government of Hamburg, as Interior Senator when a natural disaster hit the port city in February 1962. Swollen to unprecedented levels by heavy rainfall, the Elbe River poured over its dikes, causing a calamitous flood which killed 315 people. In the absence of the Mayor, who was travelling, Schmidt took charge of the emergency response that saved thousands of citizens from drowning. Without legal authority to do so, he called in the army and NATO forces to join in the rescue efforts, and famously said later: “I did not look at the Constitution during those days.”
After stints as Minister for Defence, for Economics, and for Finance, Helmut Schmidt became German Chancellor in 1974, succeeding to Willy Brandt, and held the office until 1982. During his tenure, he faced a worldwide economic crisis caused by an unprecedented sharp increase in the price of oil in 1973. In 1977, during the so-called “German Autumn” he dealt with a home-grown terrorist threat emanating from the RAF organisation (Rote Armee Fraktion - Red Army Faction). He remained uncompromising towards their demands in hostage-taking scenarios and thereby assumed the ultimate responsibility both for the successful storming of the hijacked Boeing 737-200 Lufthansa plane, “Landshut” at the airport of Mogadishu by German special forces, liberating all 82 passengers and five crew members unharmed, and for the murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the President of the German Employers’ Association. The victim’s family never forgave him.
Finally, in the field of foreign and defence policy, Schmidt remained tough during the days of Soviet domination of East Germany. In the single major European security issue of the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was the driving force behind the NATO decision to answer the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles with the installation of American Pershing missiles in Western Europe, provided the Soviets refused to withdraw their new weapons. This stance was deeply controversial at the time, provoking demonstration marches by hundreds of thousands Germans and creating The Greens as a political party. It eventually led to Schmidt’s losing office in 1982 because leftist Social Democrats would no longer follow him.
While deeply sceptical of U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s capabilities, the German Government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt also showed itself fully supportive of the American reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 which included a boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In the end, only four countries in Europe held the line – Norway, Monaco, Turkey, and West Germany. I still vividly remember the public discussion around this divisive decision, as a whole generation of athletes accused Schmidt of having deprived them of their biggest career highlight.
As a person, Schmidt was intellectually brilliant; a gifted debater, witty and eloquent; widely read; a philosopher as much as a politician; of Lutheran faith while self-avowed “not religious, but neither an atheist”; the epitome of the proud Hamburg Hanseatic; married to his childhood sweetheart Hannelore “Loki”, a biologist and amateur botanist for 68 years (she died in 2010 at age 91; they had one daughter); after retiring from politics the co-publisher of one of Germany’s leading weeklies, Die Zeit; a prolific author; a serious chess player; and an accomplished pianist with several records to his name. He was awarded 24 honorary doctoral degrees in his lifetime, including from Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the Sorbonne in France, Harvard and Johns Hopkins in the U.S., Keio in Japan, and the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium. For many decades, he and his wife lived in the same unassuming semi-detached house in Hamburg-Langenhorn where they would privately host famous guests from all over the world. One of his closest friends was Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State under, you’ve guessed it, President Richard Nixon.
Helmut Schmidt’s self-confidence bordered on arrogance at times, and he could be quite sarcastic. When invited by The New York Times to assess his successor, Chancellor Helmut Kohl he said: “I think there are still two or three fields in which he still needs a lot of education.” Asked which ones, he answered, “International affairs, arms control and military strategy, and economics and finance.”
Early on in his career, Schmidt earned himself the nickname “Schmidt Schnauze” (Schmidt the Lip), and it stuck. My top three favourite quotes?
“Politicians and journalists share the sad fate that they often speak about things already today which they will completely understand only tomorrow.”
“I divide humanity into three categories: We normal people who at some point in their youth stole apples; the second has a small criminal inclination; and the third consists of investment bankers.”
“If someone has visions, they should go to see a doctor.” About his predecessor Willy Brandt…
I had the pleasure many years ago of working with the chief aide to a former Irish Prime Minister, and he told me that at EU summit meetings the whole room would go silent once Helmut Schmidt walked in because everybody expected him to come up with something no-one else had thought of: “The man just exuded superior intelligence.”
In a 2013 poll by Stern magazine, he was ranked as Germany’s most significant Chancellor. As Angela Markel said: “We trusted him.”
And then, there’s one more thing about Helmut Schmidt that simply cannot go unmentioned – he was a lifelong heavy smoker of menthol cigarettes and until the very end the only person in Germany allowed blatantly to disregard smoking bans wherever he appeared in public, including TV studios. In response to the European Union’s proposed ban of menthol cigarettes, he procured 200 cartons of his favourite brand Reyno, enough to see him through two or three years. As it now turns out, he will not have the opportunity to use up his stockpile anymore.
And in wondrous ways, this anecdote brings me back to John F Kennedy. It is well documented that he sent out his Press Secretary, Pierre Salinger to shop for 1,200 Cuban cigars before signing the trade embargo law on 7 February 1962.
Winston Churchill once said: “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.”
An old saying of unknown origin optimistically postulates, “Cometh the hour, cometh the man”. When a time of need arises, the right person to do the job will appear. Of Jefferson Davis, President-elect of the Confederacy at the outset of the American Civil War in 1861 it was stated, “The man and the hour have met”.
There’s a song from 1984, Holding Out for a Hero, with lyrics that express the same sentiment (although I suspect Bonny Tyler’s “needs” are of a specific nature, this being Rock’n’Roll). The song is part of the soundtrack to the movie Footloose with Kevin Bacon, by the way.
Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the Gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need
I need a hero, I'm holding out for a hero
'Til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero, I'm holding out for a hero
'Til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life
(Larger than life)
The leading local daily newspaper, Hamburger Abendblatt has entitled its obituary for Helmut Schmidt, “Farewell to a Century Man”. It ends: “Since yesterday, the voice from Hamburg-Langenhorn has gone silent. It will be missed.”
We all trusted him.
