Remembering a Wise Man of Paris

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/world/europe/remembering-a-wise-man-of-paris.html

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PARIS — Sitting on the terrace of a cafe, near where Islamic State gunmen killed scores of people who were guilty only of enjoying themselves on a Friday night, I kept thinking of one wise old Parisian and what he would have made of this horror so close to home.

For decades, even as Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, I often turned to a friend and former colleague, Ronald Koven, for context, analysis and history about this complicated country.

French-born, Rony was raised in America, the country to which his father, a Jew, found refuge from the Nazis after the fall of France in 1940. Rony later returned to France as a distinguished correspondent and advocate of press freedom.

But by the time of the attacks on Nov. 13, Rony was two weeks dead, having finally succumbed, at 80, to the complications of thyroid cancer.

For years, he managed with an artificial voice box, hiding it with a dashing silk scarf; nothing prevented him from keeping up his contacts and his friendships with many of the most interesting people in French intellectual life, contacts he was always willing to share.

Something of a pack rat — a lovely apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement was so stuffed with piles of newspapers and magazines that maneuvering to the kitchen took a dancer’s dexterity — Rony practiced old-school journalism, with subtlety, cultural nuance and historical context.

We often met at a small neighborhood restaurant, where the staff reserved him a table by the window, providing us privacy and the French beer he preferred to wine.

There, he would explain to me why Nicolas Sarkozy was viewed as such an outsider by the French, as an immigrant’s son with no roots in the countryside, or how the experience of French colonialism, and especially the Algerian war, still reverberated through political life, as an unhealed wound creating division, anger and even terrorism.

Educated at a Quaker school, Brooklyn Friends, Rony studied at Antioch College and Columbia University, where he worked as a copy boy and stringer for Time magazine and The New York Times.

By the 1960s, he was working for the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune, which morphed into The International Herald Tribune and now The International New York Times, covering President Charles de Gaulle. He then joined The Washington Post, becoming foreign editor and Paris bureau chief.

Later, he wrote for The Boston Globe from Paris, where I first met him. After The Globe allowed me to cover the Iranian Revolution, we wrote together, from his living room in Paris, the first articles about the secret diplomatic papers the Iranian revolutionaries seized from the United States Embassy, which they captured in 1979.

Laying out the jumbled strips of shredded documents in airline hangars, the revolutionary students pieced them together and published them in books. Indicative of the reach of his contacts, in early 1982 Rony got the first 10 from a former Iranian deputy foreign minister, who was in exile and running a Latin Quarter bookshop. So we had something of a world scoop.

Later Rony became the European representative of the World Press Freedom Committee, a watchdog group, and he kept track of the plentiful threats to press freedom at Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency.

Efforts to license journalists and create a “new information order,” which Rony sharply criticized, helped prompt the United States to withdraw from Unesco in 1984, not to return until 2003.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he sponsored aid and education programs to bolster the nascent free press of the former Communist world and ran seminars on subjects including the Rwandan genocide and the revelations of WikiLeaks and Edward J. Snowden.

After his death, Irina Bokova, director general of Unesco, called him “a man of tremendous moral stature, an outstanding advocate in standing up for the human rights and dignity of women and men across the world.”

The encomiums, for once, read true. “Without a free press, free even to make mistakes,” Rony wrote in 2006 for the Index on Censorship, “a society can only be un-free.”