![]() ![]() Clay, who took care of our narrow seventeenth-century town house on the Raamgracht, a canal in the heart of the old city. The latest of these housekeepers was Mrs. Instead, he took excellent care of me himself and provided me with a series of governesses and housekeepers-money was not an object with him where my upbringing was concerned, although we lived simply enough from day to day. My father never spoke of her and turned quietly away if I asked questions I understood very young that this was a topic too painful for him to discuss. My mother had died when I was a baby, before my father founded the Center for Peace and Democracy. ![]() To begin with, I was motherless, and the care that my father took of me had been deepened by a double sense of responsibility, so that he protected me more completely than he might have otherwise. It seems peculiar to me now that I should have been so obedient well into my teens, while the rest of my generation was experimenting with drugs and protesting the imperialist war in Vietnam, but I had been raised in a world so sheltered that it makes my adult life in academia look positively adventurous. He preferred to know that I was sitting attentively in class at the International School of Amsterdam in those days his foundation was based in Amsterdam, and it had been my home for so long that I had nearly forgotten our early life in the United States. In 1972 I was sixteen-young, my father said, to be traveling with him on his diplomatic missions. ![]()
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