Honoring and Remembering
Phillips Talbot (1915-2010)

Honorary Trustee Phillips Talbot passed away on Friday, October 1st, at age 95, in his New York home. Phil was a dear friend whose loss is deeply felt in our community. He was wise man, whose sagacity and kindness seemed to shine through more clearly with each passing year. He hardly missed an Institute meeting. Although Phil said less and less at each board meeting as the years went by, his words were precious. He had a wonderful self-deprecating sense of humor that was both charming and full of wisdom.

Phil’s ties to the Institute are long and deep. Phil graduated from high school in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Illinois, where he graduated with a BS in journalism in 1936. Then Executive Director Walter Rogers picked Phil out of the newsroom at the Chicago Daily News in 1938 and sent him off to India as the Institute’s first fellow in that country. His fellowship was interrupted by war, when he served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He resumed his fellowship in 1946, when he wrote remarkable dispatches on Indian independence and the partition of the sub-continent. In 1951 he became Executive Director of the newly formed American Universities Field Staff, where for ten years he managed a group of talented, scholarly journalists who send dispatches from around the world and lectured on university campuses. Phil, and his AUFS colleagues such as Ned Munger and Albert Ravenholt, would later serve multiple terms as Trustees for the Institute, helping to provide much of the cohesiveness and vision that guided ICWA over the following decades.

Phil stepped down as AUFS director in 1961, when he joined the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs until 1965, when he was appointed as Ambassador to Greece (1965-1969). He was President of the Asia Society in New York from 1970 until his retirement in 1981. In truth, Phil never retired, remaining active in foreign affairs circles in New York and elsewhere until shortly before his death. After his wonderful and lively wife Mildred passed away in June 2004, help from his daughter Nancy played a critical role in allowing Phil to remain active until the end, as he gradually weakened.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/06/...
www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/world/08talbot.html?ref=world
asiasociety.org/centers/new-york/phillips-talbot-witness-history

Remembrances ____________________________________________

Dear Steve:  
               We met Phil through Tom Blakemore and Albert Ravenholt in the 1950s and he became and remained a close friend throughout the remainder of his life. Blakemore’s account of his experiences with Phil are related in Tom’s letters to Walter Rogers when they both were ICWA Fellows in England in the late l930s and took the same boat to Asia in 1939, Tom to Tokyo and Phil to India to begin their respective ICWA programs.  Later when Phil started the Universities Field Staff  which Ravenholt joined we saw Phil often on his trips to meet with Al in Seattle.  It was always a pleasure to see Phil and hear from him and Al of the rapid growth of the Field Staff.  
               When Tom and Frances Blakemore founded the Blakemore Foundation in 1990 Phil was a most helpful advisor and remained a close supporter after Tom’s death in 1994 and Frances’ in 1997. Phil was generous and wise and a friend we will never forget.

Griffith and Patricia Way and the Blakemore Foundation
Seattle,WA
October 17, 2010

Phil and Mildred

It was 1969. Karen and I had been living in Japan under an ICWA Fellowship. We had a newly arrived daughter underfoot, and many unanswered questions about what we would be facing, post-Fellowship, in our forthcoming life at the University of California in San Diego. Our Japanese existence had centered on collaborative music-making with Japanese counterparts (I as a composer/conductor, Karen as a designer and flutist). Music was the central element in the skein of threads that included Japanese composers, performers, artists, theater directors, novelists, poets, critics, architects, even renegade engineers. We met then and worked with many who became their generation’s cultural leaders.

So we were participating in exactly the sort of amazing, life-affecting encounter with another culture and its ways that ICWA intends to foster. As is often the case with Fellows, we were also not entirely certain about the expected relationship between the resources we were receiving and our obligations. That was part of the Fellowship experience then: learning to balance.

Into our lives came, providentially, Phil and Mildred Talbot. They were returning to the States from India through Japan, and ICWA Executive Director, Dick Nolte, proposed a meeting between the four of us in Tokyo. We had lunch, and as we (well, mostly as they) talked, I remember feeling a wave of clarity wash over me. Phil was aware that our time in Japan was coming to an end, and asked whether we were planning to experience more than we had so far – especially of South East Asia. Startled, I responded that such a thought, the idea of asking for more than we had already been granted – asking for something as grand as a swing through South East Asia – had never entered our minds.

Phil (with sagacious moderation) and Mildred (with no nonsense – none at all – resolve) made clear in the time we spent together that day that it was not only possible but reasonable, even imperative, that we should visit Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, before heading back to the States. I didn’t feel a twinge of doubt the next day in writing to New York and proposing in fact what the Talbots had floated as a capstone dream. Our odyssey was approved, of course, and served, as intended, to place our time in Japan in a larger frame.

Thereafter, at Institute functions, both as a former Fellow and an occasional Trustee, I got to see Phil in action with some regularity. During a fairly itinerant life, I’ve encountered some extraordinarily knowledgeable, measured, observant, and wise individuals. Phil was as good as they come. Often in his presence, one had the sense that his view was both rooted in deeper knowledge than one (or one’s companions) had, but also of someone who existed in a space of greater dimensionality and inclusiveness than others. When he spoke, I paid particular attention.

Whether the subject was international or interpersonal, I don’t remember ever being unconvinced by what he was saying. In Phil’s presence I felt an unaccustomed confidence that what was being said and what motivated it could be unquestioningly accepted as accurate and optimal. His resources – massive though they were – never felt inappropriately coercive. It was just the way it actually was.

One thinks from time to time about the phenomenon of the polymath, a Leonardo, a Goethe, a person who, in earlier times, might actually have known all there was to know then.

I am wondering now about the future likelihood beings such as Phil Talbot who seemed able to be both in and above it all: with grace, with wisdom, able to consul with such seemingly effortless but providential impact.

Roger Reynolds, 10-22-2010

A Remembrance of Phil Talbot

When I first met Ambassador Talbot in the living room of his Manhattan home, familiar images surrounded us. A massive bronze statue of the Hindu god Nataraja, dancing within a circle of flames, stood in one corner. Scenes from Indian villages were on the walls. They depicted a world we both knew and loved, but from different points in time. I told him how envious I was that he’d had the opportunity to observe the great political and social developments in the subcontinent for over seventy years. With his disarming charm, he responded that he was envious of me! He wished he could roam the country today, as he had during his ICWA fellowship, to observe the colossal changes now underway.

We spoke for almost three hours that day. As he described Mahatma Gandhi’s final days and the Partition of India, I was moved nearly to tears. I’d read so many accounts of that tumultuous period, yet this was the first time I was hearing stories so personal and insightful from an eyewitness himself. He spoke of Gandhi’s bewilderment and even depression at the violence surrounding him; the Mahatma’s questioning of the efficacy of nonviolence. Gandhi’s chroniclers provide a triumphal account of his successful fast for peace days before the assassination. But here was a more human and battle-scarred Gandhi, with whom Ambassador Talbot had personally interacted. The tragedy of Partition never felt more vivid and horrific. Its traumatized victims are all around me here in Delhi, yet the observations of a then young, American journalist brought home the horrors like no others. I could have remained in that apartment for days, absorbing his wisdom. But he insisted I tell him about the India of today. It was deeply humbling that a scholar and diplomat of such monumental accomplishments would show this interest. He listened with flattering attentiveness, asking questions about how Hindu religiosity is evolving in contemporary times and the aspirations of young people. We discussed how this India compared with the country he knew. I’ll always cherish our time together that afternoon.

When I began my ICWA fellowship a few months later, it was with Ambassador Talbot’s newly released book, An American Witness to India’s Partition, in hand. His newsletters compiled there provide a model for how the fellowship should be done—a process of exploration and learning through immersion, inquisitiveness, a healthy dose of risk taking, and profound sensitivity. Following in those footsteps was both a daunting assignment and a great honor. When I met those in India who knew Ambassador Talbot they spoke of him not only with deep respect, but immense affection; a testament to the kind of impact he’s left on the region he loved. Now, as we celebrate his life, I know many of us must also be feeling the same regret: a wish that we’d had just one more chance to coax from him new stories and imbibe the wisdom he always so generously shared.

Derek Mitchell, 10/27/2010

Of course it is not possible to think of ICWA - or its foster-child AUFS -without the enduring and generous image and "presence" of Phil. Talbott.  Perhaps I am one of the most ancient ICWA-related persons around whose memory can travel back in vivid tones to an early winter day 57 years ago when he was in the New York office adjacent to the even then legendary Mr. Rogers.  I was not there to interview for either an ICWA or AUFS fellowship but rather timidly to present myself as the newly-minted "intended" of Doak Barnett, who I barely knew but with whom I had a dizzying summer 'fling' while he was briefly in New York prior to returning to Hong Kong and who had proposed to me by telegram from India en route back to his AUFS assignment there.  There was somehow the feeling that in this close-knit "family" even an outlying spouse-to-be needed approval before she could proceed.  Mr. Rogers was, truth be told, a bit scarry but Phil was wonderful, doubtless thrilled finally to get this aging bachelor married off and generously welcoming the whole endeavor, even offering to pay my travel expenses from NYC to HK,  a huge help to my somewhat impoverished purse and the then not affluent pay package offered AUFS fellows.  And so began a life-long engagement with this marvelous man with his quiet but radiant warmth, embracing friendship and stimulatingly and ever-probing worldview.

My relationship with Phil was one of gentle friendship, much cherished by me at least.  It seemed almost fated that he should be Ambassador to Greece at the time when my father was Ambassador to Egypt, an association they also enjoyed I believe and which added cement to the orbits in which both of us moved. Doak of course had many stories to tell about their long and mutually admiring professional  relationship, including their dramatic travels in India together during Partiition and the ensuing years as "colleagues" in both AUFS and ICWA.

To know Phil was of course to know and adore Mildred, his feisty, spicy, talented and altogether captivating spouse whose advancing birthdays were celebrated in later years - along with Phil's - with much fun and laughter.  They seemed to have been made for one another and I believed that her death a few years ago, along with the loss of their son,  would leave him bereft beyond belief, which it doubtless did but that sturdy and incandescent core kept aflame even as illness and age began to take their toll.

As friends of long standing pass from our lives some leave a glowing residue of appreciation, high regard, deep satisfaction and that illusive sense of particular affection.  We are at once diminished and yet enhanced. 

Jeanne Badeau Barnett