Appreciation: Ira Glasser, Retired - American Civil Liberties Union - Brief Article

National Review, May 28, 2001 by William F. Buckley Jr.

The retiring head of the American Civil Liberties Union is a singular figure. Ira Glasser has served as executive director of the ACLU since 1978, and has been a great personal presence owing to his intelligence and capacity to laugh. I attended a party given in his honor by the ACLU that glowed with pride and pleasure, and featured a 15-minute documentary on Glasser's life and accomplishments that was Hollywood- caliber.

I recall another departure, recorded in the book I wrote on the United Nations. " . . . I had promised to attend a little party. In honor of Roger Baldwin, founder and godfather of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was celebrating his ninetieth birthday. There is a lot about Roger Baldwin I have disagreed with-over the years he sometimes fused his social ideas with civil-rights doctrine. There he was, in the large living room of a friend, surrounded by what seemed a mob-maybe 150 people, of every age. Old warriors from the social-democratic movement in America of the Thirties, young starstruck lawyers, groupies of the civil-rights movement, pretty graduate students. Norman Cousins gave a little talk, witty and warm, and Baldwin rose to speak, a truly beautiful face, a virile, poised, incorruptible man: the high commissioner, in a way, of the American human-rights movement. They brought in a cake with 90 candles. I was asked by the lady with the cake, would I (standing at the door-there was no way to move into the crowded room) start singing 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow'? I whispered that I had no singing voice, so she did it, and the crowd took it up. There was more devotion to human freedom in that living room than I had seen in three months with the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations."

The contrast is considerable. Baldwin, after graduating from his brief pro-Soviet spell, was the stoutest of them all in defense of the purposes of the Cold War. Ira Glasser's involvement in the human-rights scene didn't directly face the Communist question. The ACLU is lopsidedly concerned with the right to abort and the right not to hear a prayer uttered or see it written down on public property. The emphases are less engrossing than those that were made in the ACLU day of Roger Baldwin, but Ira Glasser, by profession a mathematician, is brainy, tough, and engaging. We will miss him both as friend and antagonist.