My friend and colleague Sherle Schwenniger passed away recently. He will be sorely missed. He was a key program organizer and author at the World Policy Institute in New York, where we were both Senior Fellows since we first met. He organized the World Economic Roundtable, where I was also an active participant. He was also an active researcher and program director at the New America Foundation. During recent years he got me involved in a massive global private debt project, which he worked on for years. He had enormous energy and insight that pulled together hundreds of lecture and discussion seminars involving thousands of participants, including many business leaders, foreign policy experts, journalists and writers, especially in the New York City and Washington DC areas. He also wrote extensively on foreign affairs for policy journals and other public media. His calm and reasoned views will be sorely missed in this era of wild rumors and unprecedented disruptions in the relations among people globally.
A great many of the people I met in New York during the past 25 years I met through Sherle. He opened many opportunities to me. Even though to some degree we lost touch during the seven years I lived in China, as soon as I returned, he roped me back into the projects he was working on and the roundtables he was running. It was one of those meetings that resulted in my coming to the attention of NYU’s Department of International Relations, where I now teach, thanks in part to him. I owe a lot the Sherle. My only chance to repay that debt is to continue my efforts to do what he did so much better—public diplomacy—involving the general public in the vital concerns of international relations, including both issues of war and peace as well as political economy.
Obituary of Sherle Schwenninger – https://lexch.com/obituaries/sherle-ray-schwenninger/article_33017c5c-fc1e-11ea-a19c-e705c1952df6.html
A Facebook memorial page has been created:
https://www.facebook.com/