To those who deride as hopeless dreamers the generation that came of age in 1968, I liked to respond with the story of the Hon. Stuart J. Beck, as his friends liked to call him. Sad to say, he died of cancer this week in New York.
His is the tale of a man who started off as wise-cracking college bon vivant (he tooled around Harvard, where I met him, in a red Corvette).
But he wound up devoting his life to the people of a poor Third World nation, and I came to admire him greatly, even though we ended up worlds apart politically.
After getting a law degree at Yale, Beck hung out his shingle and invested in TV stations. He didn’t become rich, as far as I know. He affected a cynical air and talked out of the side of his mouth.
One day, though, Beck received a phone call that would change his life. A friend was calling from the Micronesian islands of the vast Pacific to ask whether Beck would fly out to meet with the people of Palau.
They needed a lawyer to help gain possession of their islands from the US-run trust in which they’d been held since World War II.
Beck would not only devote the rest of his life to their cause but take it far beyond their tiny land.
After Palau approved a constitution and became a republic in 1981, Beck helped draft an instrument, called a Compact of Free Association, that allied Palau with America. It makes us responsible for the tiny nation’s defense.
Beck met and married a brilliant Palauan woman, Tulik, and they raised four children, dividing their time between New York and the Pacific. Beck himself became Palau’s ambassador to the United Nations.
How he loved that assignment. He made Palau one of the United Nations’ few pro-Israel votes, and escorted Palau’s president, Tommy Remengesau, to Israel. And it was at Turtle Bay that Beck found his issue — saving the oceans and the seas.
Beck was really something when he got up on, as I put it in the New York Sun the other day, his “high fish.” He once put me on the phone with the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, Tony de Brum, who, as a child, had witnessed Castle Bravo.
Castle Bravo was the first American test of a dry-fuel hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. De Brum, then 9 years old, had been fishing with his father.
De Brum remembers the suddenness with which the sky lit up with a bright but silent flash. “Everything turned red — the ocean, the fish, the sky, and my grandfather’s net,” de Brum told the United Nations just last year.
The bomb had gone off at Bikini — 200 miles away.
Over several meals I tried to convince Beck that the H-bomb test was important to a heroic cause, deterring the Soviet regime. But he saw Castle Bravo as what he called “the greatest trust violation in history.”
Beck never got the chance to test his theory in court. But the country that made him an honorary citizen did do something radical. It declared it was imposing a ban on industrial fishing in its vast territorial waters.
Just the other day The New York Times, in an account of Palau’s adventures, likened it to a city with the area of Philadelphia trying to patrol an ocean the size of France. Beck himself was given the title he liked the most — ambassador to the oceans and seas.
In 2014, Beck founded the Ocean Sanctuary Alliance. Its goal is to reverse the decline of fisheries worldwide and to regenerate fish stocks through the establishment of a global network of marine protected areas.
Next week in Rome, the OSA will convene scientists from around the world and diplomats from 37 countries to start working on Beck’s vision, less than a week after Beck himself slipped the mortal coil.
As Palau was about to become independent, it fell to Beck to find a printer to produce some stamps. When he finally got one on the phone, the printer barked the words that became the title of Beck’s autobiography — “Call me when you’re a country.”
Palau has issued many stamps since then. It would be nice to think, the Sun noted, that someday it’ll issue a stamp with a picture of Beck himself.
In a generation of hopeless dreamers, there may be no one else who can call himself a founding father.