Behind-the-Scenes Diplomat Championed Human Rights and Ethics

Serendipity gave Abraham M. Sirkin a New Year's Eve he never forgot. He was a newly drafted Army private in 1941 when he followed up on an acquaintance's suggestion to send a wartime radio drama that he had written to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, the same man told Sirkin to call the first lady while he was on leave in Washington, which he also did, and Mrs. Roosevelt's office invited him to tea.

After tea, the first lady asked Sirkin if he had plans for that New Year's Eve, and learning that he did not, she invited him to the White House for dinner. When he arrived to a room filled with prominent people, he was "goggled-eyed" and "gawking at the scene," Sirkin recounted in an oral history.

It was Dec. 31, 1941, three weeks after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and the festivities were tempered by the weight of war. As midnight approached, Sirkin happened to be standing next to a somber President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was listening to the radio as a boisterous crowd in New York's Times Square waited for the ball to drop. No one else was nearby, so Roosevelt turned to Sirkin with a frown and asked, "Why do these people have to make all this noise just because it's a new year?"

Sirkin recounted the story many times to family and friends, mentioning also that he later learned that Winston Churchill and his war cabinet were holding a subdued celebration in another part of the White House. During his six years in the Army, he continued to exchange correspondence with Mrs. Roosevelt, many letters expressing concern about the low morale of soldiers fighting the war.

Over the years, Sirkin had many encounters with history and history-makers. An unassuming man, slight and soft-spoken, he was a behind-the-scenes player in the diplomatic arena who held strong views on freedom of the press and human rights as part of U.S. foreign policy.

Sirkin, who died Jan. 7 of pneumonia at Casey House Hospice at 92, spent 20 years with the U.S. Information Agency. He promoted U.S. goodwill overseas, not just from an official stance but from long-held convictions rooted in the ethical teachings of Judaism.

"Dad believed that support for human rights would lead to a more peaceful world," said a daughter, Susannah Sirkin, who is deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Mass. "He knew tolerance and understanding of difference would only occur with human communication -- through the media but also through personal contact."

He was born Abraham Meyer Sirkin in Barre, Vt., the only son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to the United States after fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. His father died when he was 13, and his mother died four years later.

At Columbia College in New York, he worked on the campus newspaper. While getting his master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, his interest in foreign affairs was sparked by lectures from newspaper employees, government officials and foreign affairs specialists.

He worked as a publicist until being drafted into the Army in 1941.

After the war, he worked for Gen. Douglas MacArthur's press office in Tokyo, where he led the first media tour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese cities on which the United States dropped atomic bombs.

Sirkin once said that one of the toughest assignments during that period was keeping secret sealed indictments of Japanese war leaders. Premature release of the announcement he had written would trigger a mistrial, he was warned. The document was guarded by the U.S. Marines until the indictments were opened in court.

Later, while chief of information for the U.S. Marshall Plan mission in London -- the beginning of his government public relations career -- Sirkin met Helen Winsor Ball, an economic analyst with the Marshall Plan. They married in 1951 and had four children.

In 1953 and still in London, Sirkin joined the U.S. Information Agency. He supervised cultural centers in south India from 1963 to 1966, before becoming USIA's counselor for public affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Athens. Under the military dictatorship there in the late 1960s and early '70s, Sirkin championed a free press by meeting with the opposition press corps, and at one point the ruling dictator, Col. George Papadopoulos, tried to get him removed.

Walter Kohl, a USIA colleague of Sirkin's in Greece, recalled that Sirkin took personal risks to reassure Greeks that the United States had not forsaken them.

Assigned to the policy planning staff of the State Department under Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance during the Nixon and Ford administrations, Sirkin helped craft proposals that promoted human rights as a critical element of U.S. foreign policy. He also assisted in forming formal policy positions supporting human rights that were adopted during the Carter administration. Some of Sirkin's writings on human rights policies have been debated in college courses.

Beyond his work, Sirkin enjoyed playing Beethoven full blast, skiing (until age 86), fast-walking for his health and attending Adas Israel in Washington, which he had done since 1958. A student of history, he passed on to his children a worldview that he didn't want them to forget -- a worldview his son Samuel said included "the obligations to improve the world."