Top diplomat Antony Blinken’s mentor ‘saved by Australia’

Australia played a highly symbolic role in the upbringing of America’s next secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

Samuel Pisar, right, is reunited with Sir Zelman Cowen after delivering a lecture at Melbourne Law School in 2007.

Australia played a highly symbolic role in the upbringing of America’s next secretary of state Antony Blinken.

An internationalist who speaks French fluently, Blinken, 58, moved from the US when he was nine and his parents had divorced. In Paris, he lived with his mother and his new stepfather Samuel Pisar.

“I was his friend and maybe his mentor a little bit,” Pisar understatedly told The Washington Post in 2013 about his step son, who was then deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama.

A confidant to world leaders and an international lawyer, Pisar, who died in 2015, was a young survivor of the Holocaust. After the war, stealing to survive, he was a self-described teenage hooligan, and “might have become a terrorist or gangster”, he declared, had an aunt not helped bring him to Melbourne where his two uncles had arrived before the war.

Having survived multiple concentration camps, in Australia, a deeply diminished Pisar “began his physical, moral and intellectual rehabilitation,” according to his 2008 citation for an honorary doctorate of law from Melbourne University. Far from Europe, Australia loomed as a place of moral rebirth.

Having lost six years of education and his entire immediate family, Pisar resumed his education. He finished high school at 19, and won a scholarship to study law at Melbourne University.

‘I was his friend and maybe his mentor a little bit’: Tony Blinken. Picture: AFP

As a young student, his mentor was the dean of law, Zelman Cowen, whose support Pisar later described as “the greatest miracle of all”. The future governor-general became an enduring influence. “It was he who guided my comeback from oblivion,” Pisar told the annual Harvard-Oxford dinner in 2012.

A naturalised Australian, Pisar graduated from Melbourne University in 1953. He then headed to Harvard, where another future secretary of state Henry Kissinger was a classmate, and to the Sorbonne in Paris.

From there his extraordinary world reach began. Admitted to the US, English and French bars, he was an adviser to John F Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev, a legal counsel and special envoy for Holocaust and genocide education for UNESCO, a Nobel prize nominee, a Knight-Commander of the French Legion of Honour, and a Commander of Poland’s Order of Merit. An officer of the Order of Australia, he also acted as counsel for International Olympic Committee chief Juan Antonio Samaranch in the late 1990s.

Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates remembers meeting him in Monte Carlo in 1993 in the days before Sydney was announced as the host of the 2000 Games. “I quickly learned that he was a lawyer to the Packers and he certainly was known to the Lowys,” he said. “He was big time.”

“He was very proud of his connection to Australia and very grateful to Australia. He said to me and I know he said to others that Australia saved him,” said Carolyn Evans, vice chancellor of Griffith University. “Coming to Australia, a country that was safe, he was given the opportunities where his formidable intellect could develop and he was able to turn his life around.”

Although he lived mostly in Paris, Pisar returned to Australia many times, delivering a distinguished Alumnus Public Lecture at the Melbourne Law School in 2007. He was special guest speaker at the Sydney Jewish Museum’s 10th anniversary in 2002.

He was also a renowned host. Pisar’s elegant Paris home, where his stepson lived for many years, became an unofficial embassy for many Australia visitors. As composer Jonathan Mills wrote in an obituary published in The Australian in November 2015: “His firm, friendly greeting was always the same: ‘Australia made me what I am today. It took a frightened, feral Polish exile from the Holocaust, put him back together and gave him hope. How can I help?’.”