Editor’s Note: David Horowitz’s dispatches from the UN appeared regularly in The Jewish Press for many years. Journalist Vanni Cappelli knew him like a grandson knows a grandfather.
What everyone will always remember about him with loving joy is his smile.
It is the exact same smile that captured the hearts of Metropolitan Opera greats like Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar when he was an office boy at the Old Met from 1918, and is preserved in a group photograph taken on the occasion of the legendary tenor’s last visit to the opera house shortly before he sailed back to Italy and died in the summer of 1921.
It is the exact same smile which shines forth in numerous pictures taken over the course of almost six decades at the United Nations which hung above his cluttered and picturesque desk. They show him greeting and engaging with the great and the obscure, the saints and the sinners, the statesmen and the journalists, Wiesel and Khrushchev, Begin and Vyshinsky, Hammarskjold and Netanyahu, Eleanor Roosevelt and U Thant.
That beautiful smile, warm and sincere, which proceeded from a transcendent mastery of pain and loss, both personal and that of his people, first beamed at the beginning of the 20th century. It was still going strong at the beginning of the 21st, despite all of the intervening and continuing horrors that had confronted it, from the First World War through the Holocaust to 9/11.
David Horowitz, the dean of United Nations Correspondents from the founding of the world organization in San Francisco in 1945 until his passing at the age of 99 last October, worked next to my father, John Cappelli, in Room 371 of the Press Section there for more than forty years, starting in 1960.
I first met him in March 1964, the week I was born, when my proud parents brought me to the UN to show me off. David was 61 at the time, and I am now 39 — put our complementary dates together, and you have a full, rounded century. A tragic century to be sure, but not without bright lights giving hope in the darkness. And one of the brightest was that, whatever else it was, it was also the century of David Horowitz.
‘Kings and Rulers’
That it was going to be an extraordinary century was foretold in its very first decade, when the rabbi at the synagogue where David’s family worshiped in his hometown of Malmo, Sweden, placed his hand on the toddler’s head and proclaimed, “David, you will go before kings and rulers.”
Literally and metaphorically, this proved to be the case, and in his later years it was the “kings and rulers” of various sorts that would troop up to the third floor press section to pay homage to him — Jews and Gentiles, faithful and unbelievers, advocates of freedom and supporters of tyranny.
There was a simple, compelling reason for this, and it went far beyond his venerable age or his standing as the dean of UN correspondents. It was that David represented, as no one else I have ever met, the ancient ideal upon which the world organization was supposed to be founded, and which it has so often fallen short of in its troubled history — the Brotherhood of All Mankind. His own adherence to this truth was a constant reproach to the hypocrisy of the world body. Yet, incredibly, this passionate defender of the State of Israel was never anti-UN.
How could a pioneer Zionist who had first visited the Holy Land in the 1920’s not be against a body that has hurled so much invective against the Jewish state over the decades – It is because the UN is supposed to be about dialogue, and David was always ready to answer invective with its opposite — a calm reason based on passion. That is why everyone loved him, and everyone was willing to talk to him. And when you talked long enough with David Horowitz, invective became dialogue — you just couldn’t help it.
