Partly because of my age, and partly because I am an historian who believes in human agency, I am an avid reader of New York Times obituaries. While it seems to me that jazz musicians are overrepresented lately (even though I am a jazz aficionado), several times a week there are fascinating memorial biographies. I wrote recently about the Polish scholar-statesman, Bronislaw Geremek, who died in the Times (well, people also get married in the Times, don’t they?). Last week the paper carried a couple of long and fascinating obits, a study in contrasts.
The first was of the medical geneticist Victor McKusick. McKusick was one of the earliest to establish a medical genetics clinic (in 1957), only a few years after the Crick-Watson discovery of the DNA molecule. He studied rare genetic disorders such at Marfan’s syndrome and dwarfism among the Old Order Amish. He was one of the first to propose mapping the entire human genome, and over the course of his long life he was much honored at home and abroad. I knew Victor McKusick only slightly, through our mutual membership in the American Philosophical Society, where I more than once greeted him warmly, mistaking him for my friend and his identical twin brother, Vincent, the former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court. My other connection to Dr. McKusick was through a project some 20 years ago based at the Welsh Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught in the medical school. I was on an advisory committee working with the library, the medical school, and the university press to design an online version of McKusick’s great genetics textbook — which he and the medical librarians were bright enough to see could no longer adequately be presented in analog form. He was an admirable and elegant man who made great contributions both to science and to public policy.
Charles Wick, who had died two days previous to McKusick, was memorialized on the same day. Wick was a short, blunt and inelegant man who doubtless had virtues that escaped me in my brief dealings with him. Wick emerged out of the music and movie business in Los Angeles, a producer of TV shows and a real estate magnate.
I met him in Washington in the early 1980s when President Reagan appointed him director of the United States Information Agency (U.S.I.A.) then fairly recently separated from the State Department and charged with managing our public and cultural diplomacy. To say that Mr. Wick had no obvious qualifications for this federal appointment would not be an exaggeration. But he had raised millions of dollars for Reagan’s 1980 campaign, and celebrated Christmas each year with the president, who clearly loved him.
I was, at the time, involved with the management of the faculty part of the Fulbright Program (C.I.E.S.), which was administered by U.S.I.A. In that capacity I met on several occasions with the director, who seemed to know nothing about either public diplomacy or any country outside the U.S. He also presided over the politicization of the agency — it was discovered that one of his associates had compiled an “enemies list” that included such unlikely names as Coretta Scott King; he secretly taped telephone conversations with important individuals, and made a series of appointments of poorly qualified political figures.
My favorite conversation with Mr. Wick began with him saying, “Professor, you represent the academic community, so what do I have to do to keep them in line?” How would you have answered that question? The Times obit is a softball, giving no indication that Wick was a complete disaster at public management.
These were two very different memorials of two completely different individuals. From my point of view, Dr. McKusick contributed a great deal more to his country and to the world.
