Shepard Stone

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Memorial plaque for Stone, contains the quote "An American by birth a Berliner by inclination"
Memorial plaque for Shepard Stone at the Aspen Institute on Schwanenwerder (Inselstraße 10)

Shepard "Shep" Arthur Stone (born March 31, 1908 in Nashua , New Hampshire as Shepard Arthur Cohen , † May 4, 1990 near White River Junction , Vermont ) was an American journalist , historian, diplomat and founder of Berlin Aspen Institute , of which he was director from 1974 to 1988. For his services to the German-American friendship and the promotion of Berlin , he was awarded honorary citizenship of the city on March 24, 1983 .

Live and act

Education and journalism

Shepard Stone was the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After graduating from Nashua High School, he followed his older brother's example and had his last name changed from Cohen to Stone, then studied at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and then at the Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin Political Science and History. Stone wrote his work on German-Polish relations for the historian Hermann Oncken and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy at the end of 1932.

On August 15, 1933, he married Charlotte Hasenclever-Jaffé and returned to the United States that same year. Stone worked there as a political publicist until 1942 and was also a reporter for the New York Times from 1934 to 1935, and then until 1942 as deputy editor-in-chief of the Sunday edition. During her 11 years with the New York Times, Shepard Stone was often in Eastern European countries .

Development of the newspaper system

Stone returned to Germany in 1944 as a volunteer in the first American advance detachment, which landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944 . He advanced as far as Torgau with the American army and was there when the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated. After the end of the war, Shepard Stone advised the American occupation authorities on rebuilding the newspaper system until 1946. When he was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel, he resumed his previous work in 1946 as second editor-in-chief of the Sunday edition of the New York Times.

But in early November 1949 Stone was appointed deputy special advisor for public affairs and information to the American high commissioner in Germany . He then replaced special adviser Ralph Nicholson as head of this office from September 1950 to late July 1952 . Stone was responsible for the media, but also for the areas of culture and science. He strove to build a democratic press in post-war Germany by helping publishers and journalists find sources of money and promoting various exchange programs.

Ford Foundation, Congress for Cultural Freedom, IACF, and the CIA revelations

After his tenure ended, Stone returned to America in 1952. A year later he was accepted into the staff of the Ford Foundation and was director of the department for international affairs there from 1954 to 1968. During this time, Shepard Stone appeared particularly as a sponsor of West Berlin: He arranged donations of millions for the expansion of the Free University of Berlin , for the Deutsche Oper and for various scientific institutes such as the Kennedy and Eastern European Institutes .

Shepard Stone was a sponsor of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) through his work with the Ford Foundation. In the early 1960s it became known that the basic financial resources of the CCF came from the CIA via the Ford Foundation. When the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) ended in 1967, Shepard Stone became the president of the successor organization International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF). However, their influence was much less.

Aspen Institute

In October 1974 Stone returned to Germany for a fourth time and this time stayed for 14 years. As director of the newly founded Berlin Aspen Institute on the island of Schwanenwerder , the only European branch of the Aspen Institute for humanistic relations in Aspen , of which he was also a member of the board of trustees, he pursued his life's work: Shepard Stone enabled scientists from all over the world to exchange ideas internationally and Research projects in over 270 international conferences and seminars carried out by the institute under his leadership.

In 1983, on the initiative of Shepard Stone, the McCloy Academic Scholarship Program was founded for outstanding German students at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University .

In March 1988 he handed over the business of the Berlin Aspen Institute to David Anderson. The Shepard Stone Foundation , which was founded in the same month and endowed with two and a half million marks, secured the existence of the institute, of which Stone was still an honorary member of the board of trustees. The Free University of Berlin set up a Shepard Stone visiting professorship , to which personalities are to be appointed who have endeavored to develop the university and expand its international relations.

In addition to these activities, Stone served on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Conference .

On May 4, 1990, Shepard Stone suffered a heart attack at the wheel of his car on the way to a conference at Dartmouth College, as a result of which he died.

literature

Festschriften

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Dennis Hevesi: Shephard Stone, 82, a Diplomat, A Journalist and a Philanthropist . In: New York Times , May 6, 1990
  2. ^ Volker R. Berghahn: America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy . Princeton University Press, Princeton / Oxford 2001, ISBN 978-0-691-07479-5 , 373 pp.
  3. sehepunkte.de
  4. ^ Former Steering Committee Members . In: bilderbergmeetings.org . Bilderberg Conference . Accessed in 2015-13-05.