The name of Carl Gershman is associated with freedom, democracy, and human rights — and rightly so. He was the founding president of our National Endowment for Democracy. He served as president from 1984 to 2021. NED was founded at the instigation of President Reagan.
Gershman and I have done a podcast together, a Q&A: here.
Last year, I cited NED’s “statement of principles” — cited it in a piece about democracy. The very idea of democracy is in bad odor in some quarters. Some misunderstand democracy (at least liberal democracy); others simply prefer authoritarianism. But millions, if not billions, crave democracy.
And no one appreciates it more than those who don’t have it.
Carl Gershman is a fairly unusual type: someone who favors freedom, democracy, and human rights for all, not just for select peoples or individuals. He is against tyranny, whether its boot is red or black or some other color.
Again, this is not as common as you may think. (I have long experience in this area.)
Gershman was born in 1943 in New York. When he was a kid, his family moved to 173 Riverside Drive. Babe Ruth had lived there but had recently died. Carl’s family lived above that of John Garfield, the actor. Later, when he was married, Gershman and his wife lived in the Belnord.
Does that name ring a bell? The building is notorious, infamous. It is the setting of Only Murders in the Building, the current TV series starring Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez. (In the show, the building is called the “Arconia.”)
Gershman went to a yeshiva and then the Horace Mann School. In our Q&A, he says, “I always had kind of a bifurcated identity, coming from a traditional Jewish home but then also becoming part of the Sixties.” He went to Yale, studying English (with Cleanth Brooks and Harold Bloom, among others). He spent some time in Mississippi, doing civil-rights work: registering voters, etc.
He became an activist. He was prominent in the Social Democrats and other groups. As we talk, we go through some famous names: Bayard Rustin, Max Shachtman, Sidney Hook, Leszek Kołakowski, Pat Moynihan . . .
In the early ’80s, Gershman worked with Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations. “She had a group of people who were her core group,” he says, “all of them wanting to fight the battle against the Communists and others who hated America.” Kirkpatrick asked Gershman to be the U.S. representative in the Third Committee, which deals with human rights. “And she instructed me, when I gave speeches, not to clear them with the State Department.”
Gershman gave speeches that gave the Communists fits. One of them, he gave on the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor, i.e., the terror-famine committed by the Kremlin against the Ukrainians.
Over the years, people wanted to kill off the National Endowment for Democracy. This was especially true after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Seymour Martin Lipset made a point (quoted by Gershman to me). It went something like this: The battle between freedom and tyranny is perpetual. It started long before 1917. It will not end. In many a country, there will be a party of freedom and a party of dictatorship, and the party of freedom is always pro-American.
In retirement, or semi-retirement, Carl Gershman is active. He does what he can for political prisoners: in China, Iran, and elsewhere. He is intensely concerned about Ukraine and Russia. He has been involved with Russian dissidents and democrats for a long time.
One was Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist, incredibly brave — murdered in 2006 (on October 7, Putin’s birthday). Another is Vladimir Kara-Murza, confined to an isolation cell in Siberia today, and gravely ill. (In the past, FSB agents tried to murder him with poison, twice.)
Gershman recalls a meeting in Lviv, Ukraine, in 2009. Václav Havel sent a message to the meeting. He said, in essence, Don’t put oil and economic relations with the Kremlin above human rights and human values. To do so would be suicidal.
It is a pleasure — a pleasure and an education — to listen to Carl Gershman. Again, our Q&A is here.
At the very end, I ask him about his name, “Carl” — “Carl” with a “C,” not a “K.” There have been many excellent “Carl”s, he says: including Carl Erskine, a pitcher for the Dodgers (in Brooklyn and L.A.). I have looked him up: He’s still with us, age 97.