As the executive director of Freedom House for twenty-one years and now its Senior Scholar in International Communications, Leonard R. Sussman has had the extraordinary opportunity of both leading and serving an organization that has been at the center of the struggle for freedom for more than sixty years. Founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and other visionary Americans, both Democratic and Republican, Freedom House has championed worthy causes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the new democracies that have emerged around the world since the 1990s. In this engrossing memoir of his adventures with courageous men and women in fifty-nine countries, Sussman pays tribute to those mostly unsung heroes who contributed to freedom and humanistic ideals and in some cases paid the heavy price of imprisonment, torture, or death.
Among the many interesting individuals profiled are: Helen Suzman, a white parliamentarian who fought apartheid for three decades; Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslav anticommunist who suffered years of imprisonment; philosopher-activist Sidney Hook; Luis Muñoz Marin, Puerto Rica’s first elected native governor; Lucia Thorne, a courageous journalist who risked her life in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion; and many other journalists, politicians, activists, and intellectuals.
Also included is a never-before-published 1987 interview with civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, in which Rustin compares the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins with Martin Luther King.
This one-of-a-kind memoir, full of intriguing insights and vignettes, is a fascinating record of people, ideas, and history in the making.