Goodman, Bolton at the Top of Their Game

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The New York Sun

Senator Roy Goodman, the retired East Side icon who is now president and chief executive of the United Nations Development Corporation, can still throw quite a lunch. On Tuesday he gathered 100 of the city’s movers and shakers in the second floor dining rooms of the 21 Club to welcome the new American envoy in Turtle Bay, John Bolton. Among those joining in the welcome were the widow of the 41st vice president of the United States, Happy Rockefeller; Mayor Dinkins; President Nixon’s amanuensis, Raymond Price; a former ambassador to the Jewish state, Ogden Reid; and the ambassador of Iraq, Samir Sumaida’ie, to name but a few. Mr. Goodman warmed up the crowd with a string of hilarious jokes. He was followed by Secretary of State Kissinger, who quipped that he felt like he’d walked into a Democratic fund-raiser, and then made a warm salute to Mr. Bolton. Mayor Koch brought the lunch to attention by saying that he had followed the confirmation hearings for Ambassador Bolton “very closely, and I think the Democrats who voted against him were nuts.” Quoth Mr. Koch: “To be critical of an institution generally means you love it.”


The chairman of the United Nations Development Corporation, which is seeking to construct a new building for the world body while it renovates its famed headquarters on the East River, made a play on Mr. Bolton’s oft-quoted remark about how the secretariat building could stand to have a few stories removed, with George Klein saying that his goal was “to add 10 stories to the United Nations.” He told of how his father had taught him about the crime of silence and suggested that had there been a United Nations in the first half of the 20th century, “Hitler would have been stopped.” The secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, said that given the long time Mr. Bolton took to get to Turtle Bay, “we put him right to work,” a reference to the ambassador’s editing of the big reform documents the past few weeks. He had warm praise for the result of Mr. Bolton’s work. The ambassador responded to all the greetings by paraphrasing Talleyrand’s quip about the statesman who died: “I wonder what he meant by that.” He suggested that the person in the State Department who really understands the United Nations building program is Secretary Rice herself, who oversaw the birth of a number of major buildings when she was provost of Stanford. He went on to say that he gets up every morning and asks himself, “How am I going to advance the interests of the United States?” He left no doubt in a room of admirers that he was on his game.


***


BRIEF FIGHT Sidney Zion, James Taranto, Zachary Karabell, David Greenberg, and many others crowded Tim and Nina Zagat’s rooftop party Wednesday night to celebrate David Margolick’s book “Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink” (Alfred A. Knopf). Earlier in the week, the author appeared at the New York Public Library in conversation with Jeremy Schaap.


The Knickerbocker learned that on June 22, 1938, the referee of the Louis-Schmeling fight spoke seriously about the “responsibility” each fighter had to fight their best, fair fight. As Mr. Margolick said, when asked about the referee’s pre-fight remarks, “It was as if he were saying, ‘Let’s play by the book since we are already playing with fire here.'” The buildup to the fight had been electric. It is estimated that more people listened to the fight than had listened at one time to anything on the radio ever before. The fight lasted less than one round, as Louis scored a punishing TKO in the first round. The symbolic meaning to many people was that America had defeated Nazi Germany.


Mr. Margolick took seven years to research and write the book, with much time spent at the NYPL. More than once, he lauded the collections of old newspapers from New York’s earlier decades that only the NYPL had.


At the talk, Mr. Margolick exploded a number of myths: that Schmeling paid for Louis’s funeral; that Schmeling was shut out of German society after losing. Schmeling owned the Coca-Cola distributorship for Hamburg and became wealthy (he died this past February). Louis died virtually penniless.


But the whole world had listened. The fight contained multitudes.


gshapiro@nysun.com


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