ANECDOTES

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Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, was given a report that Winston Lord had worked on for days. After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation: “Is this the best you can do?” Lord rewrote and polished and finally submitted it; back it came with the same curt question.

After redrafting it one more time – and once again getting the same question from Kissinger – Lord snapped, “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do.”

“Fine, then I guess I’ll read it this time.”

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Down on his luck, screenwriter Michael Arlen went to New York in 1944. To drown his sorrows he paid a visit to the famous restaurant “21”. In the lobby, he ran into Sam Goldwyn, who offered the somewhat impractical advice that he should buy racehorses.

At the bar, Arlen met Louis B. Mayer, an old acquaintance, who asked him what were his plans for the future. “I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn…” began Arlen. “How much did he offer you?” interrupted Mayer. “Not enough,” he replied evasively. “Would you take fifteen thousand for thirty weeks?” asked Mayer.

No hesitation this time. “Yes,” said Arlen.

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Otto von Bismarck

Rudolf Virchow

The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, enraged at the constant criticisms from Rudolf Virchow (the German pathologist and liberal politician), had his seconds call upon the scientist to challenge him to a duel.

“As the challenged party, I have the choice of weapons,” said Virchow, ” and I choose these.” He held aloft two large and apparently identical sausages. “one of these, he went on, “is infected with deadly germs; the other is perfectly sound. Let His Excellency decide which one he wishes to eat, and I will eat the other.”

Almost immediately the message came back that the chancellor had decided to cancel the duel.

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In 1949, Konrad Adenauer was elected the first chancellor of post-WWII Germany. At that time, the Allied High Commissioners resided at the famous Hotel Petersberg near Bonn. Here Adenauer was to introduce his newly formed cabinet to the commission.

The three commissioners were awaiting the German delegation standing on a large red carpet. Protocol assigned the German chancellor a spot next to it.

However, Adenauer defied protocol by deliberately stepping onto the carpet. This was widely seen as a first symbolic step towards Germany’s aspirations to see eye-to-eye with the commissioners.

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Kin’yo, a Japanese officer of the second rank, had a brother called the High Priest Ryogaku, an extremely bad-tempered man. Next to his monastery grew a large nettle-tree which occasioned the nickname people gave him, the Nettle-tree High Priest.

“That name is outrageous,” said the high priest, and cut down the tree. The stump still being left, people referred to him now as the Stump High Priest. More furious than ever, Ryogaku had the stump dug up and thrown away, but this left a big ditch. People now called him the Ditch High Priest.

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In the 1970s, a young Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor John Danaher was attending a high school in rural New Zealand. One day, an “enthusiastic amateur” stuntman dropped by to perform a series of stunts for the kids. The children watched in amazement as the Australian “daredevil” set his gloved hand on fire, caught a boomerang and walked across a plank he put up between the two buildings of the school. “How can he do that?” the children wondered.

After this final trick, the stuntman took the plank and put it on the ground, letting the children cross it one by one. It was easy for the kids. Then the stuntman looked at them and said something John never forgot: “The plank is the same. I put it up higher and so it took your breath away. But you guys just ran across the plank. The plank didn’t change, your perceptions of it did.”

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