At the start of Coexistence, on the page opposite the Acknowledgements, Pisar quotes Alexander Hamilton, 1787: "The spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humors which so often have kindled into wars."
I never met Samuel Pisar, though I was hot on his trail in 1979 when I accompanied the Vice President, International of Burger King Corporation to Moscow for negotiations with the Moscow City Council and the Russian Olympics Organizing Committee ahead of the 1980 Summer Olympics. The objective was to win designation as official supplier to the Olympics, to open a hamburger restaurant on the grounds of the Olympics stadium at Luzhniki and also a number of downtown restaurants to serve visitors to the Games. In parallel there was the ambition to get a 10-year exclusivity on hamburger restaurants opening in the USSR similar to what Pepsico received for cola drinks at the start of the decade.
We were welcomed into the Organizing Committee just days after McDonalds had been shown to the door following its protracted and ultimately unsuccessful talks on the same subject. McDonalds was guided in their negotiations by"Samuel Pisar, who reportedly received fees of $150,000 for his sage advice. The Russians were less than impressed. More details on this adventure can be found in my Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I.
However, a decade later, at the end of the 1980s, I did meet several times with one of Sam Pisar's former colleagues in his Paris law firm, Jeffrey Hertzfeld. In the Acknowledgements page of Coexistence, Pisar mentions Hertzfeld as having "collaborated in the long, arduous, multilingual research and in the drafting of Book Two." They had in common their law profession, transatlantic culture and French-English bilingualism. In addition, Hertzfeld was fluent in Russian and his clientele when we met consisted heavily of companies entering the Russian market.
Indeed, Jeffrey Hertzfeld was paid by the International Business Development manager of the French household appliances and Teflon pots and pans company SEB-Calor to interview me in Paris and check my Russian language ability when the company was vetting me to take over management of the joint venture manufacturing facility they were planning to build in St Petersburg. I was duly given a written employment offer which I turned down to join UPS. A year later, our paths crossed again, this time fortuitously near the World Trade Center in Moscow. Hertzfeld told me that the position at SEB-Calor was still vacant. A nice hint...
Pisar's Coexistence and Commerce is now long out of print. In case his stepson, our incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken should wish to take a look at what his stepfather wrought and to reconsider his own political positions on the question of sanctions and cold wars versus de'tente, I will gladly lend him my copy.
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