Spheres of Chaos

In June 1976, Communist parties from East and West convened in East Berlin to consider the growing tide of Eurocommunism in countries like Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Washington was very concerned.

I covered the event for the Washington Post.

On a spring trip from Moscow to Venice, my wife and I had stayed at the luxurious Gritti Palace, with a letter of introduction to the manager. He was in despair, certain that in a year or so Italy would have a Communist government and the hotel would go under.

That did not happen. Nearly fifty years later, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez spent millions at the Gritti Palace, apparently in lavish luster, for their over-the-top wedding last summer.

Since the end of World War II, epochs, situations, and national groups have been defined in shorthand: the Cold War, the non-aligned, the Axis of Evil, the Global South, the end of colonialism, ISIS, and so forth. This year we were supposedly on the cusp of the era of Spheres of Influence, the world divided among three domineering powers: the United States, China, and Russia.

As it happened, within a few years after that East Berlin meeting, Eurocommunism’s influence peaked and ebbed. It is now the far right that poses the greatest threat to democracy and security. Looking around, what we see everywhere are forces massing to the left, right, north, south, east, and west. All these threats and violence amount (updating a previous term) to the New World Dis-Order.

So, how will this chaotic era evolve? My sense is that it will end in a climax that will defy most of the predictions being made.

Donald Trump is increasingly frenetic. Vladimir Putin is intransigent and cruel. Xi Jinping is seemingly cool, presiding without public rambunctiousness but with dictatorial authority over China’s vast strengths.

And Benjamin Netanyahu, the belligerent leader of a country of ten million people, has shown extraordinary skills at political survival and fomenting mayhem in his region — and, to a great extent, in the United States, certainly among American Jews.

My great fear is that this period will explode rather than subside. Trump and Putin both have nuclear arsenals, with arms treaties having expired. When their control is directly challenged, I worry that one or both will do something no longer unthinkable: prove that they can mount a nuclear strike as a demonstration of what can happen.

I imagine that there are still restraints on Trump, though when I hear Pete Hegseth’s bluster, I’m not so sure. But who will stop Putin from doing whatever he wants? Of all the great dangers in the world — Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Taiwan, et al. — the gravest is Vladimir Putin’s nuclear cache and his absolute power over it.

I am, by instinct and experience, not an alarmist. Declaring crises of all kinds — foreign (Vietnam and Iraq, for instance) and domestic (illegal immigration) — has a self-fulfilling tendency, and usually does not solve the problems before making them worse, one way or another.

I believe the current Trump-Putin do-si-do is an exceptional relationship. This is not Hitler and Mussolini, a cliché of repetitive history, but it certainly does rhyme.

Their assembled weaponries — strategic, tactical, and cyber — can destroy civilizations with far less use of conventional military power than in the past. I do not know what Xi Jinping would do if he thought matters were really getting out of control, but I can’t imagine he would not take whatever action he felt he needed to protect his interests.

Here’s where I try to calm down, at least to myself.

Threats to civilization have been around since the beginning of recorded time, and great civilizations have collapsed. Think of Greece and Rome, the Aztecs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs, the Soviets. To some extent the “clash of civilizations,” as Sam Huntington so vividly foresaw, is inevitable, but at least before the nuclear age civilizations could regroup and progress would continue to a better world.

Will that happen now, when multiple civilizations are clashing and empires are asserting their influences?

Sometimes, in the midst of our vast political challenges. small signs — spring’s green shoots — become apparent, showing that societies can make surprising, peaceful pivots.

From 1945 until 1989, the fate of Berlin was considered a potential trigger for nuclear superpower confrontation. But on that 1976 trip to East Berlin, I encountered something completely unexpected, which I wrote about in a “Letter from Berlin,” as follows:

“Most evenings after work, Heinz, a young shop foreman, and his wife, Ellie, an English teacher, settle down with beer and pretzels in front of their big television for several hours of cops-and-robbers (Kojak is popular), commercials and the latest news.

“What makes the routine surprising is that they live in East Germany, not far from the Berlin Wall, and the television they watch is three channels beamed every day from the West. Heinz, moreover, is a Communist Party member.”

I wrote that as much as 80 percent of East Germany was receiving West German television channels on ordinary sets, and even senior party officials conceded that the programs were widely watched.

My coverage of the Eurocommunist summit was on the front page. My Berlin letter was somewhere inside the newspaper. On reflection, I have concluded that the television story was the one that had the really significant lasting impact on how East Germany would evolve.

I wish I could cite similar indicators that forecast a less chaotic future because of the way most people want to go about their lives. At the moment, though, I don’t have any in mind.

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HOW?

Jeff Bezos came to Washington last week and hosted at his mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood a four-hour meeting and lunch with the Washington Post’s (interim) CEO Jeff D’Onofrio, executive editor Matt Murray, and about thirty “executives, editorial leaders and journalists” for a presentation and discussion about the company.

The most detailed account of the occasion I found was in the Puck newsletter, behind a paywall, from which I will share what, to me, were the most relevant points. Attendees were not permitted to have their phones in the room and presumably chose not to publicly share what was said.

• Bezos made it clear that he wants to “save” the Post and has turned down seven offers to sell it.

• The layoffs of three hundred people from the news staff in February were based on results of data collected about what subscribers of the Post were reading. For example, readership of the sports section was judged not significant enough to be maintained.

• The data showed that the core of political and national security news and investigative reporting should be the Post’s focus and would be henceforth.

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Having watched the continuing tribulations of the Washington Post for more than two years, I have been thinking and consulting with Post alumni from its glorious past and others who might have ideas to share about a turnaround strategy that could restore the Post’s stature and financial viability.

What I have learned about the apparent plan for the Post partly reflects my thinking but is not nearly enough to resolve the crisis. Nor did what I heard in an interview with Murray on a Puck podcast just after the firings, the day before Bezos finally sacked the hapless CEO, Will Lewis, after he was spotted at a Super Bowl event in San Francisco.

Murray’s message was that with the layoffs, the “table had been set” for the Post’s recovery, which was apparently also Bezos’s message in the meeting last week.

So what would I argue is a different and better strategy? Let me start by saying with emphasis that this is THE WASHINGTON POST, the only major news organization based in the capital of the United States, where monumental decisions of global national consequence are made.

It is also (or was) far and away the most important news organization in a metropolitan area of roughly 6.5 million people — and what could be, with energy and innovation, a financial base again for a revived Post, as it was for so long in the past.

Recognizing the Post’s strengths and the limitations that have been revealed in the recent years of decline, this should become two news organizations, with subscription models for one or both.

Back to the Future

In its heyday, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, the Washington Post’s newsroom grew from about the size it is now, around five hundred people, to the larger numbers it was before this latest round of layoffs.

The Post had a formidable and eventually outstanding national and foreign staff, where I spent most of my eighteen years at the paper. The emergence of the Style section in the late 1960s was transformational, not just at the Post but also more widely in the world of journalism, because of its lively approach to feature coverage that was as readable as any in upscale magazines.

The Post also had a small but talented group of cultural critics, who were nationally known. Many won Pulitzer Prizes in their fields.

Over the years a common shorthand for newspapers of power and impact became “the Times and the Post,” as though they were virtually twins. (It has to be said that the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times resented being relegated to a second tier.)

In fact, those of us at the Post always knew that in many respects the New York Times was much bigger in scale and reach. New York was the cultural and financial capital of the country, which was reflected in the coverage of those subjects and the advertising base that they provided.

For all its stature and international reputation through its location in the capital and its joint publication with the Times of the International Herald Tribune, the Post was fundamentally a metropolitan paper with, by choice, virtually no national distribution.

The Times’s current dominance of sidelines such as puzzles and cooking has been longstanding. In the 1990s, when I was the publisher of Times Books at Random House, I (somewhat improbably) was responsible for a crossword and games franchise, which was one of the most reliably profitable pieces of the company.

We would occasionally slip in a Post crossword puzzle book.

Craig Claiborne’s writing about food for the Times was also enormously popular, as were his cookbooks.

Perhaps the greatest fallacy in this misbegotten era is that the Washington Post’s role is to compete with the New York Times — or anyone else, for that matter.

The Post should not try to match the Times, where it can’t do so and never has. At last count, the Times has 2,300 people in the news operation.

Instead, the Post should renew and expand its demonstrated expertise in politics, national security, international reporting, and investigative journalism, emphasizing depth and expertise. Breaking news is available everywhere. Murray has said that this is his intention. Good.

An interesting new model for global reporting in the digital age is Noosphere, the enterprise recently started by Jane Ferguson, who made her name at the PBS News Hour. She has assembled a group of experienced freelance correspondents in a number of places who provide video, podcast, photo, and text pieces that are distributed to subscribers.

Today’s generation of journalists have to be multifaceted, presenters as well as reporters.

A revived Style section should devote itself again to Washington in its current guise, where matters colorful, controversial, and bizarre are rampant. A Style signature was the publication of profiles of luminaries, with a captivatingly fresh voice. Today’s Washington is replete with likely subjects for portrayals of this kind.

How to attract the talent for these spirited coverage areas?

As I wrote months ago, most of the Post’s stars — the people who have left for other jobs or have recently been laid off — became stars through the work they did at the Post.

With a much-needed assurance of the owner’s support beyond what has been heard from Jeff Bezos so far, and a commitment to a determined outreach for possible hires and raising the morale of the many excellent reporters and editors still at the Post, the effect would soon become clear in this particularly turbulent era.

The Homecoming

The Washington Post’s other traditional great strength was its metro and sports coverage for what is known as the DMV — the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Politics, education, business, and other local topics, along with major sports franchises, connected the sprawling region.

This metropolitan area, with a prosperous and diverse population, should be served by a news organization with resources appropriate to its size and, significantly, its enormous commercial potential.

This metro version of the Post would restore local news and sports coverage. (Under the rubric of “for further reading,” the Post as a good neighbor could cross-promote with the smaller and upstart news organizations in the region.)

Ultimately in any business, fiscal success comes from earned revenue. My much-repeated mantra about the Post, quoting the late Katharine Graham, was that it was “Woodward & Bernstein and Woodward & Lothrop” (the downtown department store) — great journalism and abundant advertising that made it so profitable.

The Post, like all news organizations, now relies mainly on digital news delivery, and the belief is that advertising online cannot match in revenue what it had been in print.

But an imaginative and aggressive approach to metro advertising solicitation and presentation would enable businesses across the region to reach all potential customers, the way zones were designed for the print editions in the past.

Craigslist famously replaced classified advertising in newspapers. How about a Post version of Craigslist across all the categories that people now need to search from any number of sites? Local tech support is as important today as plumbers and electricians always have been. Paid obituaries seem to be lucrative.

The Post maintained its extensive metro circulation for so long by keeping the price of the daily paper artificially low, at a quarter or so. Today, the Post’s online subscription price is also kept low with offers and gimmicks.

Continue that policy — but develop a different pricing strategy for the national and international version of the daily report, whose readers generally expect subscription costs that are somewhat higher.

A word about the opinion section. The reaction to Jeff Bezos’s announcement in February 2025 about the restructuring of the section to conform to his views on liberty and trade was intense, resulting in mass cancellations.

In our online news universe, opinions come from every direction. Every point of view is easily available. That is an accepted reality. The Post should accept this as well.

The print paper is still distributed. I subscribe. It makes me sad. There is a front section of news, but everything else is, bluntly, pathetic: the remnants of sports, comics, and the classifieds come before a couple of pages of local news.

Digital first and foremost is inevitable. But if you want to continue with a niche print newspaper, make it feel worth the price. To get the New York Times, daily and Sunday, delivered to your door now costs about $1,000 annually.

If you want a print paper, be ready to pay for it.

“Back to the Future” and “Homecoming” may seem awfully retro. But consider this: the current trajectory for the Washington Post is oblivion.

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WHY?

I always project myself to age eighty, but as I get older, I’m starting to do ninety — so I know that when I’m ninety. It’s going to be one of the things I’m most proud of, that I took on the Washington Post and helped it through a very rough transition.

— from Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos (Harvard Business Review Press and PublicAffairs, 2020)

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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos Will Be Honorary Chairs of the Met Gala.

— The New York Times, February 23, 2026

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By now, everyone anywhere who could possibly care knows that Jeff Bezos is reducing the Washington Post to a remnant of what he bought and has owned for more than a decade. Explanations and theories of why he is doing this abound. The Post is losing money. Bezos is cultivating Donald Trump. Bezos wants Pentagon contracts for Blue Origin, his space passion. With his new wife and his own buff new looks, Bezos favors glamour over accountability.

The reality is that no one can really explain to me why Jeff Bezos has made this decision. I have asked the only people I know who might have an answer. Either they won’t say or their response is a chilling “He doesn’t care.” I find that hard to believe.

As a mogul who created Amazon from scratch decades ago, he must know that there are reputational aspects to business. Trashing a media icon is a guarantee of public vituperation. Combining it with the incessant self-portrayal of luxury living, which chairing the Met Gala symbolizes, is clueless and/or cruel, accompanied days later by the firing of hundreds of people at the Post and then the hapless CEO Will Lewis.

Bezos became executive chairman of Amazon’s board of directors in 2021, telling Amazon employees that the new position would give him the time and energy to “focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”

My connection to Bezos was his book, Invent and Wander, which I conceived and published — a project that he said pleased him and was profitable to all concerned. His $750,000 in royalties went, I was told, to the New Orleans Public Library system. We have not been in touch since.

So, how to explain what has happened to Jeff Bezos?

My explanation is essentially these factors:

In 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Scott, divorced after twenty-six years of marriage, with a financial settlement giving Scott 25 percent of his Amazon shares. In 2026, Bezos’s wealth is around $230 billion, about ten times what it was when he bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million.

Bezos’s affair with Lauren Sánchez went public in lurid detail in the National Enquirer immediately after he and Scott announced they would divorce. He was fifty-five years old. He married Sánchez in 2025 at a lavish wedding in Venice.

Whatever else Bezos had accomplished up to then, he plainly wanted a different style of life. He and the new Mrs. Bezos became fixtures at every conceivable venue of vast wealth, on his $500 million yacht, at new Gilded Age events around the globe, at the inauguration of Donald Trump to his second term.

By comparison, Bezos’s philanthropy received little attention, including his establishment in 2021 of the Courage and Civility Award, with $100 million each going to Van Jones, a lawyer, civic activist, and CNN contributor, and José Andrés, the chef and humanitarian, to distribute to charities and nonprofit organizations of their choice. Dolly Parton received $100 million, and the actress Eva Longoria and the retired admiral and bestselling author William McRaven received $50 million each, on similar terms.

After the Post achieved a major turnaround in scale and financial results, the situation there began to deteriorate. Marty Baron, the executive editor Bezos had inherited, who was credited with the enhancement of the Post’s journalistic achievements, retired. Bezos found a distant sinecure for the publisher, Frederick J. Ryan, who was deemed a failure in business and leadership terms.

Will Lewis, a British journalist with a background in the Murdoch publishing empire, was named publisher and CEO. Sally Buzbee, who had been hired from the Associated Press as Baron’s successor, resigned in an early dispute with Lewis. The simple summation is that matters steadily worsened from then on.

Instead of declarations of pride in the Post, Bezos said publicly he would “save” it a second time. He was quoted as calling the news organization a “complexifier” in his extensive professional and reinvented personal life.

Which brings me to the second factor in what has happened to the Post.

I think of it as the Michael Jordan metaphor. One of the greatest basketball players of all time was at best mediocre in baseball. Jeff Bezos is unquestionably one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American history. He has flailed in journalism because he demonstrably doesn’t understand how it is done — both in its role as an indispensable public asset and as a business.

And, from what little I have been able to find out in my efforts at excavating the Post debacle, Bezos is not prepared to listen and learn from people who could advise him on a now-essential transformation. His newly named interim publisher, Jeff D’Onofrio, joined the Post in 2025 after a career at the digital companies Raptive, Tumblr, and Google.

Matt Murray is the executive editor, and his view is that with the contraction in the newsroom the “table has been set” for the Post’s recovery. That will be the subject of my piece next week.

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What Makes A Great Book Publisher?

On Sunday, April 17, 1960, a four-column headline at the top of the front page of the New York Times declared:

Knopf, Random House in Publishing Merger

Deal Made on Handshake Over Luncheon

— Cerf’s Company to Buy Stock, but Knopf Will Stay on Job

The byline on the story was Gay Talese, who amazingly in 2026 is still doing journalism of distinction.

This was clearly a big deal, although the sale price was about $3 million.

In fact, Random House had acquired Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf’s illustrious publishing company, which had been established in 1915. Bennett Cerf and his partner, Donald Klopfer, had founded Random House in the 1920s. Random House was itself a major book publisher, but with a bit less literary panache than Knopf.

In 2026, Penguin Random House, which still includes Knopf, is owned by Bertelsmann, a family company based in Gutersloh, Germany, and is the world’s largest book publisher, with billions in global revenues and solid profits.

What was a transaction small enough to be agreed over lunch was arguably the beginning of the modern corporate multi-billion-dollar business that book publishing has become. Whereas the media and technology companies are enormous business stories, book company finances are now mainly footnotes.

Gayle Feldman has recently published Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, a masterwork of biography and a history of the evolution of book publishing in the twentieth century that in narrative and meticulous detail reflects the two decades Feldman devoted to writing the book.

For my purposes, I want to focus on the question of what made Bennett Cerf a great publisher — and what that means in today’s era, in which more books than ever are being sold.

The portrait Feldman provides of Cerf is of a man who wanted to enjoy life (and succeeded) and who had the talent for choosing which books to publish and how to do that best.

From James Joyce’s Ulysses, the controversial book that gave the fledgling publisher an initial boost, until Cerf’s death in 1971, with Klopfer as his less colorful but rock-solid partner, an extraordinary outpouring of books of quality (mainly) and notice appeared.

There were authors whose fame endures, from Gertrude Stein to Ayn Rand and literary geniuses like William Faulkner, John O’Hara, and William Styron. Cerf’s nurturing of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and James Michener provided Random House with a stream of vastly popular and profitable books long past his death.

There was a flip side to Bennett Cerf. He wrote bestselling joke books, which were published by other companies. He was a regular Sunday night panelist on the game show What’s My Line?, which made him a recognizable, national celebrity.

(His equally formidable and entrepreneurial wife, Phyllis, originated “Beginner Books,” which established Random House as a leading children’s book publisher — a market that was then and is now indispensable to its business success.)

Cerf didn’t just publish books, he made them into events, drawing comparisons to Broadway and Hollywood producers. There was zeal in every format and in the advertising, publicity, and relations with booksellers.

I spent a dozen years at Random House in the 1980s and ’90s, hired by Cerf’s successor, Robert L. Bernstein, also a publisher of flair, when the company was owned by S. I. Newhouse of the Conde Nast dynasty.

These were the years of increasing consolidation and corporate domination in book publishing, but the industry still could generate media fascination and headlines. I especially remember the day when on the front page of the Times it was reported that Joni Evans, the publisher of the Random House trade division (not the whole company), was being replaced by Harry Evans. (The two were not related.)

I chuckled at the notion of the New York Times editorial meeting that day: “Evans is out! Evans is in!”

The era when book publishing had that level of fascination and notoriety is definitively over. There are famous authors, but the publishers and editors responsible for them are rarely visible, except when they are caught up in scandals or takeovers, or when the legendary ones die.

So, what does it take to be a great book publisher in 2026? I recently spoke with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster, and in my view the closest comparison today to Bennett Cerf.

Jon started at Random House as an editorial assistant in 1989, earning $17,000 a year. Over time and with demonstrated skill he rose through the editorial ranks and was made CEO of Simon & Schuster following the death in 2020 of Carolyn Reidy, herself an exemplary book person.

What is the comparison to Cerf? In our conversation, Jon described every phase of his publishing career as “fun,” sharing stories of acquiring and wrangling books and coping with author egos and literary agents’ demands that others found stressful and even excruciating.

He took a brief detour working for Scott Rudin, a famously difficult film and theater producer (with whom he got along), although he quickly decided he preferred books. Jon also wrote a musical called How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes and had it staged off-Broadway in 2006.

Cerf imagined how to publish in a variety of ways. Aside from Beginner Books, there was a young-adult history series called Landmark (which as a boy I read assiduously) and other innovations.

In 2005, Jon devised what he called Twelve, a publishing imprint that would release and promote one book a month, as a way to focus closely on each title, in recognition that getting the public’s attention for books was growing more difficult.

And now, as he leaves the CEO position, he is launching Simon Six, with a similar concept. In 2026, it is even harder to reach readers than it was when reviews and advertising drove sales, unless you understand social media and fragmented audiences.

This is what I consider the most significant aspect of my Cerf-Karp comparison. A great book publisher also has to be a very savvy businessperson. Cerf dealt with RCA when it acquired Random House in 1966, and Karp contended with Paramount’s determination to sell Simon & Schuster and the failed merger with Penguin Random House, which collapsed after a protracted antitrust trial.

A publisher has also to be able to select books that will sell, mass as well as class, and across our political and cultural divide. That explains how S&S could publish Mike Pence and Kamala Harris and the enormously popular genre called “romantasy” — romance mixed with fantasy.

Bennett Cerf would never have heard of romantasy, but like Jon Karp he would have known what to do with it.

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Twarda 28

This is how the decrepit tenement would look, restored with AI imagery.

With the assistance of a genealogist, I traced the branch of the Osnos family that lived at Twarda 28 to around 1740, when Jews in what was then the Russian empire, including large swaths of Poland and Ukraine, were mandated to add surnames to what had been only first names and patronymics, as in Ivan Ivanovich (which means “son of Ivan”).

The explanation provided was that individuals could now be added to tax rolls under a surname and thereby be available for the draft into the czar’s armed forces.

Osnos is an adaptation of an Old Testament name: Asenath, the wife of Joseph. The name is rendered in English in various spellings — Osnes, Osnoss, and so forth. We found Osnos families (with baptismal certificates) as far removed as Norway and Nebraska.

Over the years, I gathered fragmentary information from my father about his family. He expressed pride in their heritage, generations of university education and business prosperity.

Only now do I realize that he did not include their tragic demise. And I did not ask for more.

On a visit to Auschwitz in 2019, I encountered the scroll of names of people who were killed during the Holocaust, on which there are nineteen Osnos names. I now realize that this list certainly includes members of my father’s family, as enumerated on the headstone in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery.

I had known that my father’s brother Jakub, a doctor who lived at Twarda 28, became a Polish army officer at the start of the war and was murdered at Katyn Forest, the massacre of Poles carried out by the Soviets in the spring of 1940, while Stalin was still an ally of Hitler.

This was a particularly notorious and much-studied episode of the war.

After the Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed in June 1941, another brother (whose name I so far haven’t found) became a Red Army officer and survived the war, the only sibling aside from my father who did. I was told that he was exiled to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1948 and that my father had been able to reach him at some point, years ago.

In 1977, while I was in Moscow for the Washington Post, I received a telephone call at the office from a person who identified himself as my “cousin from Siberia” and who said his name was Piotr, Russian for Peter.

At the time, the Soviets had launched a campaign against Western journalists, and I was repeatedly identified in the press as a “secret agent of the United States,” allegedly working for the CIA. A call from a “relative” on an open phone line seemed unlikely, and for his sake, mainly, I said I had no cousins in Siberia.

In 2020, I tracked down a man named Vladimir Osnos in Moscow, who I was told was related to us. He was the son of one of Russia’s most celebrated chess masters. I asked him by email whether in the 1970s he had ever been contacted by “authorities” about me. His response was classically ambiguous: “I can say nothing about that.”

My father had a nephew in New York named Zarka. In an oral history he said he had made it out of Poland to New York because he spoke fluent German and “did not look” Jewish. There was doubtless much more to that story, but, frustratingly now, I never asked and he never offered.

Finally, my great aunt Bassya Osnos married Nachman Syrkin, a leader in Socialist Zionism, of sufficient stature for Israel to name a naval vessel after him. When Bassya died at thirty-eight, Nachman, who was living in New York, went to Warsaw and married her younger sister Machette. Nachman’s daughter, Marie Syrkin, had an illustrious U.S. career as a writer, professor, and biographer of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.

All these details amount only to clues about the Osnos family. I would have known much more had I asked or if my father had not been so focused on his full life in the United States. After my mother died and he was nearing ninety, he would talk to my wife, Susan, a bit about the past. By then the details tended to be confused.

Readers: While it is possible, get as much as possible about your background. It helps to explain your own life and character, and for second- and third-generation offspring of immigrants or refugees it can be of great interest and benefit.

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Twarda 28 in the early months of the war was something of a sanctuary for my mother and brother, in particular. My father had left Warsaw, initially to join a military contingent; when that became impossible, he made his way to Bucharest, where he succeeded in arranging a way for his wife and son to escape Poland.

As described by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier in In the Garden of Memory: “In June 1940 Robert Osnos and his mother left Poland. . . . Very few people managed to get out of Warsaw so late in the day in the day; it is a miracle that they succeeded. To bring it off, two superhuman powers combined forces: his father’s and his mother’s.”

It was at Twarda 28 where much of the miracle unfolded. There are three sources for what happened. One is Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book. The others were memoirs written by my mother, Marta, and my brother, Robert, describing the months in Warsaw after the war started and how they finally escaped. The full versions can be downloaded at the “virtual attic” of anespeciallygoodview.com, in the memoirs section.

Robert attributes his memories to the personalities of his parents: “Optimistic, very strong willed, amazingly competent, and resourceful. That is why I could write this, rather than being buried in Auschwitz. . . . As far as I know they were pillars of integrity.”

At Twarda 28, Marta wrote, people from elsewhere in the building moved into the ground-floor apartments, thought to be the safest, “so they would slowly move down, bringing pillows, covers, food, and advice. In a way it was good for Robert. He has children to play with all day long. . . .

“The last 24 hours before surrender, we spent all 18 people in a small bathroom in the middle of the apartment. Somebody had a pocket full of raisins, so from time to time, we nibbled some.”

With the immigration papers my father had managed to obtain in Bucharest, and my mother’s conversion to Catholicism in order to be able to travel, Marta and Robert left Warsaw on June 9. My father greeted them in Bucharest with roses.

Those in the Osnos family who did not leave were the ones whose names are engraved on the headstone and who are listed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as victims of the Shoah.

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When the boundaries of the Small Ghetto were drawn in 1940, after Marta and Robert had left Warsaw, Twarda 28 was included. Conditions in the ghetto have been collected in great detail. In the 1970s Marta herself was the translator of the major study of hunger disease carried out by Jewish physicians about conditions in the ghetto.

The study’s leader, Dr. Israel Milejkowski, wrote that the symptoms of hunger “consisted of crowds of beggars and corpses often lying on the street covered with newspapers.”

Somehow after the war, Twarda 28 was refurbished and once again became an apartment building. Professor Jakub Lewicki’s account reports that in the 1960s it was taken over by the State Treasury, and a general renovation was carried out, removing the decorative elements of the building’s exterior — which explains why the building now is so grim an apparition in downtown Warsaw.

A news story in the spring of 2025 reported that the district including Twarda 28 had submitted documentation to Warsaw’s Office of City Property and to the State Treasury about preparing the building for sale. The district “argues that private investors have funds for renovations, which local governments do not. It is worth emphasizing that the new buyer of the building will be obligated to maintain it in accordance with the guidelines of the historic preservation officer, and if they decide to remodel or add to it, they will do so in consultation with the preservation officer.”

So, once again Twarda 28 will escape destruction, if a sale happens and the buyer has an interest in Warsaw’s Jewish history.

The history of the building and the family that owned it, or those few that survived the war, is a tribute to their resilience against enormous odds.

An abandoned building is their legacy.

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Twarda 28

The all-white Museum of Modern Art . . . gleaming beside the hulking Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science. . . . For decades, the Polish capital has been seen as pragmatic rather than magnetic . . . it demands to be seen anew.

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This building, close to the museum and the palace in the center of Warsaw, is called the Lieb Osnos Tenement. In the process of publishing In the Garden of Memory about my mother’s family, I began to learn more about my father’s family, who had built it in the early years of the twentieth century. There were fifty apartments, eleven stores on the ground floor, and a doctor’s office.

I found out that it was the only building in what was known as the “small ghetto” that remained standing after the end of World War II. And in 2019 it was included in the official Registry of Objects of Cultural Heritage, protecting it from being demolished.

I assembled a history of the building and the family that owned it, including the discovery that my grandmother Rachela Olga Osnos did not die before the war, as I had always believed. She died in the ghetto or in a concentration camp, as did so many others in the family.

Their fates were not really a secret. But except for the gravestone my father had erected in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery decades after the war, the subject was never discussed in any detail by my parents, and I never asked for more. Here is what the gravestone says:

LIEB OSNOS

CITIZEN OF WARSAW

LIVED 67 YEARS

DIED 20.VII.1939

RACHELA OLGA OSNOS

CHILDREN

JAKUB MARIA ANNA

MAREK FRYDA

GRANDSONS AND GRANDDAUGHTERS

DIED

A MARTYR’S DEATH

MURDERED BY

NAZI BARBARIANS

1940-1944

**************************

The building is badly in need of renovation, shuttered completely and adorned with graffiti, with bits of plaster falling on passersby. No funds have been available to get this work started.

I had only been vaguely aware of the building. In family papers, there was correspondence in which my father was approached by lawyers in the 1960s, urging him to seek some compensation for the state seizure. That did not happen.

Against all odds, the building was not destroyed by bombings in 1939 as the Nazis occupied Poland or by the continued barrage of attacks as the war progressed. In the severe housing shortage in Warsaw after the war, it was resettled by tenants. The last residents left in 2009 because the building was no longer safe.

Controversies surrounded what had become a decrepit concrete eyesore until it was registered as a monument by the authorities as a vestige of pre-war Warsaw and the thriving Jewish community that had been virtually annihilated.

On a visit to Poland in the spring of 2025, I mentioned to the concierge at the Hotel Europejski, itself an elegantly refurbished remnant of pre-war café society, that I was planning to visit Twarda 28, showing him a photograph that I had found in, of all places, a Wikipedia entry.

Startled and clearly impressed, he called over a colleague and exclaimed that I was of the Lieb Osnos family. That was when I realized that while this structure may be shabby and uninhabitable, it was symbolically significant. I decided to find every shred of information I could about what it was like when my father’s family owned it.

I was shocked to realize for the first time that my grandmother and most of my aunts and uncles had disappeared after the war started and were Holocaust victims. Because in my mother’s family everyone had managed to survive, I chose to think that my close relatives had been exceptions to the greater catastrophe.

My father, Josef, as formidable in his way as the family building, never reflected on the tragedies, leaving only the symbolic gravestone in a prominent place at the front of Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery.

********************

Over the years, Polish publications have written about the building’s history, reporting on its symbolic importance and/or complaining that it is now a blight in the midst of skyscrapers and high-end retail.

The most detailed description was provided by Urbex Travel, a website run by a couple who describe their “passion” as visiting “abandoned places . . . houses, mansions, warehouses, factories and many others.” Their portfolio of interior photographs shows that the apartments were spacious and ornamental, homes for families with the means to live in comfort.

Quoting from a book called Roots of the City: “In 1936, the building generated over 5000 zlotys in rental income. The owner charged 180 zlotys for a four-room apartment, with a kitchen and bathroom, and 19 zlotys for a single room apartment in the basement. The ground floor housed numerous shops, a butcher shop, a dairy shop, a hairdresser’s salon, and a wine shop.” A document written after the war by a lawyer in Canada who had represented Lieb Osnos reported that there were fifty apartments in the building and eleven stores on the ground level.

The doctor’s office and apartment belonged to my father’s oldest brother, which my mother described in her memoir of that period as “beautifully furnished.” Of particular note,” she wrote, there were “green velvet chairs” in the dining room. The premises were on the first floor, which meant that they were a relatively safe place during the Nazi bombing in 1939.

Urbex’s account says the building was a “center of Jewish life and business, and everything was owned by Lieb Osnos,” who had made an apparently prosperous living by “trading textiles.” This had enabled him in around 1910 to buy the land and develop the property.

The technical description of the building from Urbex said it had “architectural features typical of a 19th century tenement house,” which in modern terms indicates that it was not a single-family mansion but rather the residence of a successful upper-middle-class businessman and his family.

A report by Professor Jakub Lewicki, the Mazovian Voivodeship (the Warsaw district) Conservator of Monuments, calls the building a “priceless relic of its heyday . . . a valuable document of the history of old Warsaw, particularly the history of the Jewish community and the ongoing stylistic and formal transformations, which are clearly visible within the confines of a single building.”

Lewicki wrote: “Despite the damage sustained during World War II . . . the building possesses significant artistic value . . . particularly noteworthy are the exceptionally rich stucco decoration and the introduction of parquet flooring in most rooms . . . and above all the entrance doors and joinery inside the apartments.”

The windows have been shuttered with concrete. Of course, I was moved to see it as an uncanny connection to my ancestors, but to other passersby it would be just another glimpse of a world that had been destroyed between 1939 and 1945.

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Naming Rights

Before the holidays, we happened to be driving by the Kennedy Center in Washington with our grandsons, Ben, twenty-one, and Pete, twenty, the morning that a crew added Donald Trump’s name to the building.

l sensed that this close-up look at the Trump presidency could be as memorable to them as images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was for their grandparents so long ago.

Then, days after Trump’s rebranding of the nation’s memorial performing arts center, Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died of leukemia at thirty-five. The message Trump chose to share on Truth Social was: “The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys.”

By now we should be attuned to the scale of Trump’s multiple obsessions and stunning insults. Once in possession of the Kennedy Center, he ordered it closed for construction under his direction and presumably to his taste. Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize so badly that he eagerly accepted someone else’s prize and then told the prime minister of Norway that he would seize Greenland because he had deserved the prize. In his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he confused Greenland and Iceland.

And his press secretary insisted that, despite video evidence, he had not been confused. Claiming the prize, the Greenland demands, denying irrefutable video of what he had said — it’s all bonkers.

Did anyone vote for Trump to take Greenland or so that he could get the Nobel Peace Prize?

Having Trump’s name emblazoned everywhere has been a long-standing fixation. The shimmering Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan was built in 1983, followed by additional high-rises in New York and casinos in Atlantic City. Then he started licensing his name around the world, including to buildings he did not build.

Placing your name on edifices and a range of other things because you paid for them or squeezed the recipients into awarding the distinction has always been a function of some deep-rooted, primordial need for recognition in your lifetime.

By his own personal designation, and in amassing things with his name enshrined where he could bask in the glory, Trump is the all-around GOAT (“greatest of all time”).

In recent years, others in our gilded age have been similarly prodigious in having their names attached to their philanthropy and activities as they were launched. I have noticed two in particular.

David M. Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a major asset manager, is an American history buff, and he has made significant contributions to preserving our heritage. Thank you.

He is also omnipresent by name as the chair of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kennedy Center — the latter before Trump ousted him and took the position for himself. Although not a natural media presence, he hosts interview programs on C-SPAN, PBS, CNN, and Bloomberg, and in leading public venues in New York and Washington — always with the imprimatur of David M. Rubenstein.

Repeat the same word over and over, and after a while it sounds silly. The same with names.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, is another billionaire and serial brander of his many activities, buildings, and programs. His penchant for naming glory does not guarantee admiration from people he doubtless would like to impress.

Some years ago, Paul Volcker, the great former chair of the Federal Reserve, was invited to the grand Fifth Avenue home of the New York Public Library to talk about his new memoir in its largest venue. He declined.

“I don’t go into the Schwarzman building” (which is what the NYPL building is now called), he told me, his publisher, when I informed him of the offer.

Excessive glorification can become self-parody, raising the question of why it is so ardently pursued by rich notables in their lifetimes, rather than postmortem, as was generally the case in the past. Is it vanity, insecurity, vulgarity? It could well be all three.

As regards the president, the Washington Post is keeping track. Aside from the Trump imprimaturs already adopted, there is the projected class of Trump battleships and a Trump fighter jet called the F-47, for the number of his presidency.

And these being bruited: A Washington NFL stadium, a triumphal arch on the National Mall, the grandiose White House ballroom, and, it has been reported, the rebranding of Dulles Airport and the people movers there to be called “Direct Jet Transports” — DJT, get it? Just this past week, Trump tried to pressure Senator Chuck Schumer to rename Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after himself, as a condition for freeing up federal funding for a rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey.

The coming question is what happens after he is, one way or another, gone from the scene. Whose role will it be to rename so many artifacts of his era? Can the names be resold, as happened when Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center’s main concert hall, became David Geffen Hall in exchange for a donation of $100 million?

Names can also lose luster as selling tools. When Trump was still a developer, he bought up industrial lands and abandoned railyards on Manhattan’s West Side along the Hudson River and erected a string of high-rise apartment buildings that dominated that stretch of skyline.

The buildings had Trump-style accoutrements, including his name. After Trump became president, condo owners and tenants removed the nomenclature. What was known as Trump Place is now a series of numbered buildings on Riverside Boulevard.

Trump had intended to put up the world’s tallest building there. That did not happen. The swankiest residential, office, and retail area on the West Side now is further to the south. It is called Hudson Yards, named for the majestic river discovered by the explorer Henry Hudson more than four centuries ago.

And there is a stretch of the West Side Highway along much of this same route, which is named after another icon closely identified with New York, Joe DiMaggio, an honor justly bestowed after his death.

Naming rights that are legitimate honors should be awarded, rather than solicited, demanded, or just outright paid for.

*********************

I should explain that this Substack is branded with my name as a condition of its being called Public Affairs Press, to distinguish it from the publishing imprint I founded, which is now owned by Hachette and is still called PublicAffairs.

Used appropriately, I am in favor of names as signifiers, not as cockeyed displays of self-anointed eminence.

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Rick Cotton’s Valedictory

What a journey this has been. Serving as the Executive Director of the Port Authority has been one of the great privileges of my life.

Tonight, a short reprise: a reprise of how we approached the challenge and thanks to all of you who helped along the way.

The Port Authority is a storied, century-old institution that was built to do hard things across borders, across rivers, and across political cycles.

History

Just in its first decade alone, it built three iconic bridges and an astonishing tunnel under the Hudson River, all still in use today.

Over time the agency’s portfolio expanded to include the Region’s airports, the four bridges and two tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey, the world’s busiest bus terminal, the second largest Seaport in the US, the PATH commuter railroad, and the 16-acre World Trade Center campus that has become a gem of lower Manhattan.

But somewhere along the way, the Port Authority began to falter and lose the public’s trust.

Think back just a decade ago.

The Midtown Bus Terminal was an embarrassing eyesore in the heart of Midtown Manhattan with no plan to rebuild it or even where to start.

All three major airports were consistently ranked at the bottom of every single passenger satisfaction survey. They were regularly mocked by the media, comedians, and even a Vice President.

The Port Authority had become synonymous with dysfunction and gridlock.

The World Passes Us

In contrast, places like Shanghai or Dubai and other Asian and European cities became symbols of best-in-class, efficient transit hubs – especially their airports, which stood as shining, welcoming beacons.

In contrast, the Port Authority had been written off. The public did not believe that the agency could deliver the best-in-class infrastructure needed to compete with the great cities of the world.

New Leadership

Thankfully, the region was fortunate to have leaders emerge who believed in a strong infrastructure agenda.

Leaders like Governor Kathy Hochul, who has kept me on as Executive Director when she became governor; Governor Andrew Cuomo, who appointed me originally and introduced me to the infrastructure industry; and Governor Phil Murphy, who provided essential support.

And Governor, knowing that you delivered your State of the State speech yesterday and the demands on you surrounding that event, I want to say that I am particularly grateful for your being here tonight.

And a key part of the turnaround story was that, the same day I was nominated to serve as Executive Director, Kevin O’Toole was selected by the Governor of New Jersey to chair the Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners.

In what was frankly an extraordinary break with the past, Kevin and I formed a true and uniquely fruitful partnership that focused on getting things done in service of our region and ending the agency’s paralyzing conflicts and dysfunction.

New Standards

World class

No matter how difficult and no matter how distant that goal might have felt when Kevin and I first took office, we were intent on applying this standard across the agency, including not only our employees, but also our partners, contractors, and consultants.

True believers were few and far between back then when we started, including I suspect, many if not most of you here this evening.

Action not words or promises

And best in the world meant new approaches

Taking risks and doing things differently – all in the interest of achieving results better or faster – needed to be the order of the day.

The phrase “But we’ve always done it that way,” needed to be banished from the agency’s vocabulary.

That empowered the agency to operate differently. Integrity was non-negotiable.

What did that mean in practice?

Public private partnerships

We focused on the scale and role of public-private partnerships across our ambitious agenda. Without these partnerships, we would not have been able to achieve the true best-in-class transformation we are making at the airports and at the Seaport.

Five different large-scale public-private partnerships at the airports enabled us to leverage tens of billions of dollars of private financing – a scale never seen before – and without which the scale of our $50 billion dollar airport redevelopment program would never have been possible.

It’s not just about the money they brought to the table – they also brought expertise. We have been able to draw on the skills and knowledge of these private companies. They, in areas like customer service, have experience and capabilities that are not the bread and butter of government agencies.

At the seaport, we focused on restructuring our marine terminal leases with the private operators who run our public port facilities. These new unprecedented lease arrangements tied long-term leases to higher performance expectations, more favorable revenue sharing, higher capital investment, and shared responsibility for keeping the system competitive.

During Covid, our Port became the second busiest seaport in the nation and outperformed virtually all of the ports in the nation in avoiding congestion. Our new lease provisions put us on an ambitious path to even higher standards and are setting the gold standard around the country and around the world.

Elevated focus on customer experience

We also focused on the experience of the customers and the travelers that we serve, and the airports are probably the most visible and relatable example to most of you in this room.

They are a prime example of our new playbook, which is now our standard practice, with results that showed what achieving best-in-class meant in the real world.

We made customer experience a daily test and constantly asked ourselves – does this best serve the public?

The answer meant demanding excellence in the big things — dramatic, appealing design and architecture: bright natural light, floor-to-ceiling windows, inspiring views of the airfield, the city skyline, or the waterfront.

We focused on creating a signature “sense of place” — meaning New York and New Jersey — at each of our new airports that reflected the character of the region.
We focused on putting public art front and center – commissioning respected local and international artists to create New York– and New Jersey–themed artworks that energize and delight travelers.

We elevated another key element of the customer experience, which is the level and variety of the concessions – food, beverage, and retail – again with major participation by local New York and New Jersey shops and brands.

And it meant elevators and escalators that actually worked and are consistently monitored remotely with maintenance crews on call 24/7.

Because those are the things people remember, and the clearest proof to the public that the traveler comes first.

We backed these changes with measurement: credible third-party surveys, real tracking of wait times, coupled with serious work to identify and focus on addressing other pain points.

Keep facilities open during construction

Given their role as gateways to the region, we had to keep LaGuardia open and are keeping Kennedy and Newark Liberty open and operating while rebuilding them. This is an extraordinary feat of engineering and planning.

We acknowledged that short-term disruptions would be difficult for our customers but continually reminded them that they would ultimately be rewarded with major long-term benefits.

Safety, security and sustainability

We treated sustainability and innovation as fundamental responsibilities that should be baked into our redevelopment projects from the outset, not future aspirations with distant implementation dates.

We recognize climate change is an existential threat. We design to the highest resiliency standards in the business to protect against seawater rise, higher storm surges, and intensified storms. We have one of the largest solar and renewable programs in the business. We remain intensely focused on converting our fleet vehicles to electric.

To put it plainly: we are committed to being Net Zero by 2050. And, I’ll add, we just hit our 2025 greenhouse gas reduction target of 50 percent.

Concern for Community

So, we set out to change that: we showed up, engaged with the communities where our facilities operate, and delivered tangible benefits in return.

At our airports, for example, we delivered record-setting levels of contracts and business opportunities to local, small, and diverse businesses. Specifically, these record-setting efforts delivered: $2.3 billion of contracts to minority-and-women-owned businesses at LaGuardia and a staggering $3 billion of such contracts at Kennedy.

And beyond the airports, the $11 billion transformation of the Midtown Bus Terminal that is now finally underway may be the clearest example of what it means to listen to and work with the community.

So, we listened. We held hundreds of meetings. We assessed the feedback. And we decided the community comments were right and we methodically changed the design. Dramatically!

The result was nothing short of astonishing.

After being mired in community controversy and deadlock for decades, our new plan won the support not only of the local community board – a major feat in and of itself – but also of every elected official (many of whom are here tonight) whose districts encompassed the project – from City Council member all the way to its congressional representative.

This 10-year, multi-billion project, in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world, broke ground seven months ago and is now at long last moving forward.

It showed our new approach was working.

Results and awards

Ten years ago, LaGuardia was a punchline. Fast forward, LaGuardia has won almost every award in the book, including the Forbes Travel Guide having now named LaGuardia the Best Airport in the United States for two years in a row. And that designation was based off of the feedback of five thousand frequent flyers and travel experts

And if anyone thought that LaGuardia was a fluke, we immediately moved on to produce those same best-in-class results at Newark Liberty Terminal A when it opened, which was recognized as the best new airport terminal in the world by SkyTrax, the leading airport rating organization.

And finally BOTH LaGuardia and Newark Liberty Terminal A subsequently earned Skytrax’s highest award, its coveted five-star rating. In the entire United States, only three airports have facilities with five-star ratings – and two of them are the Port Authority’s. That’s never happened before. That’s best-in-class.

And we’re not stopping. Like I said, what once seemed impossible becomes simply the next thing we do.

We’re bringing best-in-class to the transformation of Kennedy, to a brand-new Newark Liberty Terminal B, and with the agency’s newly approved capital plan – our 10-year financial roadmap – we’ve set the stage for another decade of transformation across the agency.

These are not just construction projects.

Our region, and our Port Authority, are both thriving. And the best is yet to come. Thank you.

Rick Cotton’s Valedictory Speech

Rick’s tenure at the Port Authority has finally ended. There was recently a four-hundred-person reception at the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center in his honor, hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a prominent business group, where Rick delivered his valedictory.

Betsy sent the text of Rick’s speech to me, and I want to finish this piece by urging you to read it, at its full length. Here it is.

Thanks to those who asked for it.

Getting Things Done

There have been famous and notorious public figures in twenty-first-century New York.

Rudy Giuliani went from heroic to cringe. Mike Bloomberg was a formidable technocratic (and in my view underappreciated) three-term mayor. There was blustering Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, dapper and deficient when it came to integrity.

We are just getting to know Zohran Mamdani, whose meteoric ascent from obscurity has brought him to the city’s highest office.

Raise your hand if you knew that for the past eight years Rick Cotton has been the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a longer tenure than any executive director in more than fifty years. He is retiring, and his departure should be worthy of more than routine notice.

Along the way, he oversaw the rebuilding of LaGuardia Airport, which went from an embarrassment to a paragon of travel convenience and style.

For that alone, Rick deserved accolades, but there was much more. Appointed to a key position in the governor’s office by Andrew Cuomo who had an ambitious infrastructure agenda, he played an instrumental role in completing the first phase of the Second Avenue subway in time for its opening on New Year’s Day 2017. He got an unruly bunch of four public agencies and two of the city’s real estate “masters of the universe” to finally come to terms, enabling Moynihan Train Hall to move forward. He helped push the new Tappan Zee bridge (now the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge) across the finish line.

Then Andrew Cuomo named Rick to the Port Authority in August 2017.

When Kathy Hochul became governor in 2021, she maintained Rick’s role at the Port Authority, renewing the mandate to finish the LaGuardia work, launching the JFK and Newark airport revamps, and finally embarking on the long-delayed $10 billion rebuild of the scandalously dilapidated Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal.

In his last days at the helm, Rick was immersed in handling the largest winter storm in the metropolitan area in years.

As Rick departs, the Port Authority is committed to rebuilding JFK and Newark airports, with JFK headed this year to finish the roadway rebuild and open the first new gates of two brand new international terminals.

Considering it all, with the benefit of a full record of his tenure, the Port Authority defied the overriding belief that regulations, corruption, and inertia are the metropolitan area norm.

I know Rick as a friend and demographic contemporary. He launched in the 1960s, was educated at Harvard College and Yale Law School, clerked for distinguished jurists at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court and was executive secretary to Joseph Califano, the rambunctious secretary of health, education and welfare during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

He was then recruited to what was in its heyday the leading corporate legal department in the country at General Electric and spent twenty years as general counsel and executive vice president of NBC Universal.

Rick could easily have coasted. His wife is Betsy Smith, whose own illustrious resume in city government was followed by her role as president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy, responsible for that beloved asset of urban living. But instead, when Andrew Cuomo called on Rick (then in his seventies) to join his administration and later to run the Port Authority, he stepped up.

Here is where I make the point of this tribute. Rick took on arguably one of the most onerous roles imaginable, willingly and then brilliantly.

Why did he do it and how?

I would like to answer those questions by revealing valuable detail to anyone else who might consider rounding out his or her career with a seemingly impossible job.

But I can’t.

When I solicited Rick to explain his choices and evident mastery, he was consistently elusive. He exhibited none of the self-effacing humility behind which I often detect the irritating aura of “humblebrag.”

So, I will resort to surmise instead.

Success in corporate and government work is attributed to ability, and dexterity in managing your bosses, employees, and colleagues, who may watch you with a less than charitable perspective. And to some extent luck, being in the right place on the upswing and getting out of the way of downturns.

I asked Rick if he had ever lost his temper with a boss. Once, he said, with Joe Califano. Reason not disclosed. I know (and admire) Califano and have published several of his good books over the years. But his reputation for achievement has been matched by his known capacity to be difficult and demanding. President Carter fired him, at his first opportunity to do so.

Equanimity and inner confidence are personality traits. These are what I think Rick has. The closest I was able to get to an understanding of what it means was in a conversation about Cuomo and the subway project.

By the time Rick took it on, the Second Avenue subway was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, and almost certain to miss its promised opening date.

Cuomo was known to be especially tough with his staff, especially if things were not going well. But Rick told me, when I pressed him, that Cuomo and he had a consistently smooth and productive working relationship. Why? My conclusion is that the governor knew that Rick did not need the job, and he didn’t want to risk losing him.

The idea of writing this series of pieces about people who get hard things done came to me as I wandered through the concourses of the reinvented LaGuardia Airport. I asked Rick to tell me how he did it. Eventually, I concluded Rick had more important matters to attend to than providing me a self-portrait.

Rick’s tenure at the Port Authority has finally ended. There was recently a four-hundred-person reception at the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center in his honor, hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a prominent business group, where Rick delivered his valedictory.

Betsy sent the text of Rick’s speech to me, and I want to finish this piece by urging you to read it, at its full length. Here it is.

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