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His parents bought him every Christmas gift he picked out in the F. A. O. He’d tried to bear up bravely his whole life.

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Day’s guffaw made everyone except Jerry Ford crack up, and that photo was the keeper. “That kind of photo costs more, George,” she shot back. When the photographer pointed out that Mom’s hand was obscuring Bush’s thigh, Bush remarked, roguishly, “Leave it, Elizabeth, it feels good where it is.” At his retirement dinner, where she wore an auburn wig after chemotherapy, we all had our photo taken with two of the foundation’s chairmen: Gerald Ford and George H. W. If Day was a gravel truck juddering off to mend the broken world, Mom was a coupe cornering at speed. Like America, he had a missionary temperament, and his sweeping doctrines applied even to the three of us children, the smallest of tribes.Īfter twelve years at E.E.F., he stepped down, at sixty-five, to take care of our mother, Elizabeth.

brought foreign go-getters to the United States to trade ideas-and, at Day’s urging, sent Americans overseas for the same purpose. After being passed over, he ran the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships. Nudged out at Swarthmore, he sought a spot on Reagan’s National Security Council, hoping to rise to the Cabinet. He possessed a resonant baritone and a self-deprecating manner, and hopes were high.

By then, he was fluent in the histories of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Korea, and all of Southeast Asia. Theodore Wood Friend III was Dorie to his contemporaries and Day to his children, from my first tries at “Daddy.” (We’re one of those Wasp families where baby names stick for life.) A believer in letters to the editor and global rapport, he drove four hundred miles to witness Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech, won the Bancroft Prize for his history of the Philippines, and became president of Swarthmore College in 1973, at forty-two.

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His pockets were always full of business cards inscribed with pleas to keep in touch, as if he were a human Wailing Wall. At conference dinners, he’d linger over the Sauternes to draw out his tablemate’s knowledge of Persian poetry once, with a Korean man who spoke almost no English, he was able to convey baseball’s arcane balk rule using only pantomime. They met a different man, the handsome polymath with the much stamped passport. Strangers often told me how wonderful my father was.

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