A Great Big View of the World
By Maureen A. Nolan
At 86, Ambassador William Luers ’51 has never really retired. He’s liked every job he’s had, starting with the work at a Coca-Cola plant in Springfield, Ill., when he was 14 or 15. He spent much of his time loading returned bottles onto a conveyor belt that ran through a big, three-drum washing machine. He was a strong kid, and out on the occasional delivery he liked to walk into a restaurant with a case of Coke in each hand. In the big picture, the job gave Luers a chance to meet people from outside his sphere as a banker’s son, which he saw as a great opportunity.
His résumé grows fatter by the decade. A single piece of it could anchor a distinguished career: naval officer; 31 years in the Foreign Service and diplomacy, including ambassadorships to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia; president of the United Nations Association and The Metropolitan Museum of Art; professor; and these days, director of The Iran Project, an organization dedicated to improving the relationship between the U.S. and Iranian governments.
“His capacity to think through all of the surrounding issues of Latin America, long-term relations to the U.S., was very, very impressive. It’s just a great big view of the world,” says Tim Wirth, a former U.S. senator from Colorado and past president of the United Nations Foundation. “He did the same thing when he was in Czechoslovakia as the ambassador there. That, I think, is his very, very special talent — as well as his own personal warmth and eagerness to learn. He’s very curious.”
An expansive intellect and abiding conviction that there’s work to be done keep Luers in motion, and glimpses of Luers in motion over the years are glimpses of history unfolding. He was a foreign-service officer in the mid-1960s Soviet Union, when the Cold War was entrenched, and sought out the company of underground artists and writers to gain a more nuanced understanding of the communist system. As the KGB kept watch, Luers says, he got to know dissident writer Andrei Amalrik and artist Anatoly Zverev, who was persecuted by his government and acclaimed outside his homeland.
As acting assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, Luers negotiated and signed a 1977 agreement that established the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba. The co-authors of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana wrote that Luers and the Cuban vice minister celebrated the deal by lighting up a couple of Cuban cigars. “Absolutely true,” Luers says. “I don’t smoke so the preferred Castro cigar — Cohiba — got me dizzy, but all for the good of diplomacy.”
His final diplomatic posting was ambassador to communist Czechoslovakia, in 1983, the year that writer, dissident and eventual president Václav Havel was released from prison after serving several years for subversion. Luers and his wife, Wendy, would become Havel’s supportive friends. When the Velvet Revolution toppled the government and Havel (often described as “rumpled” during his dissident days) was about to become president, Havel asked his friend to supply him with some ties, one of which he wore to his inauguration.
By then Luers had pivoted from the Foreign Service into a job as president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 13-year stint during which he helped secure a gift of a roughly $1 billion collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings from his friend Walter Annenberg. Then, in 1999 at age 72, Luers turned back toward diplomacy by taking a job with the United Nations Association, where he worked with secretaries general Kofi Annan and Ban Ki Moon to improve the strained U.S.–U.N. relationship. That job would be the bridge to his current work, The Iran Project.
For more than a dozen years, and especially since 2009, Luers has focused on the back-channel diplomacy with an interest that edges toward obsession (his word). The project, which he co-founded, aims to reduce misunderstandings between the U.S. and Iranian governments, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980. As part of its mission, the project, especially in its early years, has organized informal dialogues with influential Iranians and kept U.S. government officials informed about those conversations. The project was a vocal supporter of the efforts by the U.S. and five other world powers to negotiate a deal with Iran to curb its ability to develop a nuclear weapon. The parties came to terms in July on the controversial agreement after nearly two years of talks.
With Luers taking the lead, Iran Project participants have written position papers and op-ed pieces for major publications, spoken on scholarly panels, given interviews and met with lawmakers to talk about the benefits of a diplomatic resolution to Iran’s nuclear status. The project put out letters of support for the negotiations and subsequent agreement. Dozens of major bipartisan figures in diplomacy and foreign relations, academics and experts have signed the project’s letters, including Ambassador Edward Walker ’62, the Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Global Political Theory and former ambassador to Egypt and Israel. Luers met personally with some 50 senators over roughly three years to talk about diplomacy as an option. At the height of the work, he made at least a trip a week to Washington, D.C. Luers lives in New York City and Connecticut. With a touch of awe, colleagues say Luers was seemingly indefatigable in support of diplomacy.
Luers loves swimming in Uruguay with his grandchildren and was vacationing there with a contingent of family in February 2014 when he contracted the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus in the water through a wound in his leg. Within hours he went into a coma that lasted six days. Doctors put his chances of survival at 10 percent, and his family gathered close. The experience, although terrible, strengthened their bond, says Luers. He recovered reinvigorated for the Iran work. “I think it focused me more. Rather than having me think profoundly about life and death, it really made me realize that I wanted to get some things done, and the Iran thing was one of them. It’s probably, if anything, given me more energy on this seemingly intractable issue,” he said several months before the deal was struck.
Bill and Wendy Luers went out for a quiet evening after they learned the governments had reached the landmark agreement. It wasn’t the time for champagne and a party. The agreement reached by the Obama Administration and other world powers wasn’t a done deal as far as Congress was concerned. “I was tired because we had worked so hard. And our job basically now is with the Congress and the public, trying to make the case in this heavily partisan world,” Luers said last summer, when it was still uncertain whether the deal would survive Congressional opposition. He remained steadfastly optimistic throughout, and by mid September, those who opposed the agreement had failed to bring a “resolution of disapproval” to a vote. The deal had withstood its Congressional foes.
Common interest worth pursuing
Luers was drawn into the Iran work through his job as president of the U.N. Association when he worked closely with Iran’s representative to the U.N., Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif, now Iran’s foreign minister, was his country’s chief negotiator in the nuclear talks. After the 9/11 attacks, Luers says, Iran stood strongly against Osama Bin Laden, and he thought that presented possibilities. He began what is now The Iran Project in 2002 with the strong support of Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The project spun off from the U.N. Association in 2009 under the direction of Luers, when he stepped down as association president.
The project’s avowed objectives: promote an official U.S.-Iran dialogue, develop a peaceful resolution to the nuclear standoff and encourage greater cooperation between the two governments for greater regional stability. Then, as now, a dialogue with Iran wasn’t a wildly popular idea.
“When things began with our Iranian contacts back in 2001 and 2002, it was high on the rank of hopeless causes,” says Ambassador Thomas Pickering, a Luers friend and core project participant. Luers believed, however, that it was crucial to deal with the Iranians and to address the problems between the two countries, particularly the nuclear issue. Pickering credits Luers with having the vision early on to start working with Congress to share that view with its members.
Luers says he doesn’t know if the project’s efforts have changed any minds in Congress, but believes the project at least has provided lawmakers with better information with which to work. He also makes no claims that The Iran Project was the major player in the negotiations. “We’ve just helped get them where they are,” he says. Pickering is more forceful in his assessment. The project’s major concern was to encourage the U.S. government to believe there was a diplomatic opportunity, and in that, it played a major role, as did similar projects, Pickering says.
Ambassador Walker credits the U.N. Association and The Iran Project with keeping alive a track-two approach to diplomacy with Iran. When Walker was the deputy permanent representative to the United Nations in 1990 under Madeleine Albright, and Zarif was Iran’s U.N. representative, there was the beginning of a “thaw around the edges” in a long process of improving U.S.-Iranian relations, he says. But that promising dialogue went back into the freezer when President George W. Bush named Iran as part of the “axis of evil” in a 2002 speech. “Without The Iran Project, it is highly unlikely that we would have had the confidence in each other to engage in serious dialogue and negotiations,” Walker says. “Nonprofit organizations like the U.N. Association do a lot of the heavy lifting in establishing personal contacts between enemies, which governments cannot do for political reasons.”
A positive approach
Luers is a tall, courteous man with a sweep of white hair and an air of informality, even in a staid suit behind a lectern. When he teaches his Talking With The Enemy graduate course at Columbia University (he’s taught it at Hamilton, too) he tries not to venture too far into stories of his personal experience with major players and events. If he did, he’d never get through the course material. Yet in conversation, Luers is as willing to listen as he is to hold forth. You may walk away from a chat with Luers thinking you are the important one. You may also walk away sharing a bit of his conviction.
“He’s passionate about building peace and making relationships work across global landscapes. He’s a believer that all of this can happen, and he puts all of his skills and his energy and his life in making that happen — and that’s a parade anyone would want to get on,” says Emily Rafferty, emerita president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Luers protégé. “You just always want to be helping Bill whatever he’s doing because it’s always in the better interest of a better world.” His protégés, mentors, friends and colleagues inhabit NGOs, boardrooms, governments, business empires, political archives and the pages of history books.
Luers is a family man who calls his adult sons “sweetie” and may politely suspend a conversation to take a quick call from one of his kids. Between them, he and his wife have six children and 10 grandchildren, one of whom, Erin Luers ’14, went to Hamilton. Wendy Luers has had her own long and varied career that includes co-founding in 1987 the Foundation for Art and Preservation of Embassies and becoming its first president. In 1990, she founded a nonprofit now called The Foundation for a Civil Society. She’s also founding president and vice chair of the board of directors of the Václav Havel Library Foundation, among other work.
As a unit, the couple can be formidable in an engaging sort of way. One evening, when Kevin Kennedy ’70 and his wife, Karen, hosted what was conceived as a Hamilton-related dinner at their home, the Luerses transformed the occasion into a public policy discussion. It was a productive take-over. “You know, they’re positive,” says Kennedy. “It’s like: ‘Well, here’s a problem, but there’s got to be a solution. We’re not necessarily sure what it is, but if we work on this, we’re confident we can get to the right place.’ It’s a spirit of — this can be resolved.”
Kennedy, who got to know Luers through their Hamilton connections and as a neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard, thinks the ambassador could be Hamilton’s Elihu Root of this century. He admires Luers’ sense of selfless public service and wonders if anyone in his own generation will take up that mantle. “Bill Luers loves this stuff. He’s fascinated by it, and he’s a true intellectual, but his motives are incredibly pure. He really only wants the best for the United States and for the people of the world; he’s not chauvinistic about that. He’s a problem-solver, and he’s a peacemaker. He’s an extraordinary fellow,” Kennedy says.
The beginning
Luers grew up in small town Springfield, Ill., with two older sisters, a mother and a banker father who had not attended college and was determined his son would get there. Luers, however, hadn’t given college a thought. His favorite friends were headed to West Point, and he wanted to follow them. Still, at his father’s request, he agreed to try college for one year. A friend of his father suggested Hamilton, which was close enough to West Point for Luers to visit there, so Luers was off to Clinton. After seeing what the plebes at West Point endured, his attachment to Hamilton was cemented. He slid into life on the Hill as if he’d been in training for it.
He played on the golf and basketball teams and was elected president of Alpha Delta Phi. As head of Winter Carnival, he created a membership system to bypass sales tax on carnival tickets, a move he still speaks of with satisfaction. Luers excelled in math and science, cruising through his studies with little effort and having a great time. He gained entrance into the DT, Was Los and Pentagon honor societies and won the Root Prize in math.
Comfortable in the math-science niche, Luers managed to avoid formal contact with the humanities for most of his first three years at Hamilton, but the humanities were never far away. He’d grown close to Dean Winton Tolles, who was also an Alpha Delt, and when the fraternity inducted new members, Tolles would recite Polonius’ “to thine own self be true” advice to Laertes. The hoary words were new to Luers, who’d read pretty much no Shakespeare, and they resonated with him then and throughout his life. “It has been sort of a core way in which I think about my relationships with people and with issues that come up: that if you are consistent with yourself and what you think and what you believe, you will be consistent with your relationships with other people. You will be ethical and moral and honest,” he says.
Senior year, in a small history of philosophy seminar, Luers experienced what he calls the thrill of ideas. He was fascinated by Aristotle and eschewed Plato. The course kindled a passion for philosophy that eventually would lead him to study the humanists and ethical philosophy. Luers was changing; Hamilton had reordered his math-and-science life. He was thinking deeply about philosophy and the role of the individual. Even so, just out of college he heeded his practical father’s wishes: Scholarship in hand, Luers went to Northwestern University to study chemical engineering. He hated it.
He soon strayed from his prescribed agenda. He audited a course on Joyce, his first real study of literature, and was intrigued by the complex structure of Ulysses. As the semester wore on, he knew he would never become a chemical engineer. His father didn’t understand or approve, but Luers was moving on. He studied philosophy, took some theology courses and pondered becoming an Episcopal priest, until the Korean War swept aside that aspiration. Luers signed up to attend Officer Candidate School in the U.S. Navy.
The global years
Luers served for about five years, two of them as a shore patrol officer in Naples, Italy, where he discovered art, love, music and food — and mastered the language. (He also speaks fluent Russian and Spanish.) He fed his intellectual curiosity by studying philosophy, in particular ethical and political philosophy. He grew to dislike Marxism and wanted to see how its ideas worked in practice. To do that, he decided, he needed to get to Moscow, and the only route was through government employment. “And there were all sorts of agencies working in the embassy, including the CIA, and I applied to all of them,” Luers says. He was most interested in the Foreign Service.
He left the Navy and earned a master’s degree in Russian studies at Columbia, then took the Foreign Service exam, “knowing nothing,” he says, and got in. He would have a 31-year run, a life’s work for most people but an early career for Luers. His knowledge of Italian language and culture landed him back in Naples for his first Foreign Service post, but in 1959, he returned to the State Department to become the first junior officer in the newly established Office of Soviet Union Affairs in Washington, D.C. Then, from 1963 to 1965, he served in the embassy in Moscow. He had an enduring fascination with the Soviet Union. Luers abhorred how Marxism fundamentally deprives the individual of a role in society. “It doesn’t take into account the individual capacity of people to run their lives,” says Luers, whose diplomatic career goal was to become ambassador to the Soviet Union.
His first ambassadorship was to oil-rich Venezuela in 1978, a position he held for four years. In Caracas, he and Wendy were practitioners of cultural diplomacy, employing the arts to develop understanding and respect between countries. It’s a continuing interest for them.
They used the arts as a diplomatic tool, says Venezuelan Patricia Phelps Cisneros, an art and education patron who became close to the couple while they were posted in her country. She cofounded the nonprofit Fundación Cisneros with her husband, media and business mogul Gustavo Cisneros. “When they were at the embassy, they had extraordinary art,” she says of the Luerses. “My first Richard Diebenkorn that I’d ever seen was there. [Luers] would have intellectuals continuously, like John Updike, Peter Benchley, William Styron, Arthur Miller.”
The ambassador and his wife loved exploring Venezuela and the two families would go on trips to the Amazonian jungle. The families remain close. To the Cisneros children, Luers has been a mentor, the wise uncle anyone would love to have, their mother says.
Coming full circle
Luers’ next and final diplomatic posting was Czechoslovakia in 1983. When he received the offer of that ambassadorship, he took it figuring that Prague was on the way to Moscow and that he had something to contribute because he knew the city and the region. The job would take him full circle. In Václav Havel, Luers found affirmation of his belief in the power of the individual to make a difference in society — a belief that he began to develop at Hamilton and that was reinforced during his time in the Soviet Union.
Within his first two months as ambassador, he and Wendy invited about 150 guests, mostly intellectuals, to an opening of an art exhibition they hosted in their home. Havel, not long out of prison, was on the guest list, and the friendship began. Luers was drawn to Havel’s views about the responsibility of the individual in society and how exercising that responsibility could build a better, more open society. “So when I got to know him, we would talk a lot about that,” Luers says. “He didn’t spend a lot of time writing about how much he hated communism.” He preferred to write essays and plays about the structure of the society in which different ideas coexist among citizens rather than a society governed by one big idea, Luers says.
When Luers first met Havel and his supporters, none of them thought there was a chance for revolution, but for three years he watched Havel’s consensus coalition grow. He and Wendy did what they could to shine a light on Havel, bringing U.S. artists, intellectuals and writers to Czechoslovakia to meet him. By the time Luers left Prague in 1986, there was a glimmer of a chance for change. It took an irresistible job offer to draw Luers away from the Foreign Service: presidency of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When they offered me the job, it just seemed like a dream come true. And I’d lived outside the country, with my Navy and foreign service, for so many years, that I just felt detached,” says Luers, who never made it to Moscow as ambassador.
After the move to New York, he and Wendy continued to see Havel and his wife, Olga, and visit them in Czechoslovakia. Just after the revolution, in December 1989, when Havel was selected as president but had not yet been elected, he invited the couple to Prague. Before the Luerses left the U.S., they arranged to continue their tradition of hosting an annual dinner for Havel and his dissident supporters at At The Seven Angels restaurant. The dissidents had become Havel’s cabinet, and the dinner took place on the eve of Havel’s inauguration. The Luerses attended the ceremony as Havel’s personal guests. It was one of the most moving occasions of Luers’ life.
“Havel had ways of talking about the communist system that I thought were uniquely subtle, profound and ultimately effective. And when this sort of short, shy intellectual became president of Czechoslovakia with the Velvet Revolution, he symbolized for me how much an intellectual, an idea, a dimension was countering the communist idea,” Luers says.
He thought of the late Havel the day he attended the re-opening of the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C. It was July 20, 2015, a Monday, six days after the Iran nuclear agreement had been announced and the same day The Iran Project issued a major statement of support for the deal, a statement signed by 60 people, Democrats and Republicans. That day crystalized for Luers how diplomacy, not force, had eased decades-old hostilities between the U.S. and its enemies Iran and Cuba. He’d spent much of his life working toward that.
“Over my life I have become more and more convinced that learning about and talking with ‘the other’ is essential to peaceful and pleasant life,” he says. “And this principle of working and talking with and dealing with the other has been affirmed doubly in the case of Iran, particularly, and Cuba. And I thought on Monday when these two things became so clear that if, on that same day, Václav Havel had become president of Czechoslovakia, I would have had a total life fulfillment in one day.”
As always with Luers, work — all kinds of it — beckons. He continues to lead the Iran Project and teach his Talking with the Enemy class at Columbia. He’s an active member of the Advisory Board of the National Museum of Natural History in the Smithsonian. He and Wendy are working to launch a program for U.S. artists and arts administrators to support their counterparts in Cuba, and they are campaigning for the release of Leopoldo López, a jailed leader of the Venezuelan opposition movement. There are other projects. And Luers wants to return to Iran for what would be his third trip. He’ll wait until any internal Iranian opposition to the nuclear agreement has subsided. “But I’m dying to go,” he says, “because I do think that it would be reassuring to me to go back and see so many people who were working on that side to get the deal done as well.”
