HENRY A. KISSINGER

August 28, 1984

To the Richard Burton Family:

The Richard Burton described by the media was not the man I knew. I can contribute to this occasion best by recounting a few episodes.

Richard Burton and I met during the negotiations of the second Sinai Disengagement Agreement in 1975. We were both staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. It was a tense period because the future of peace in the Middle East hung on intangibles of complex and volatile personalities. Richard Burton and I spent the best part of a long evening together, and it was an extraordinarily comforting occasion. For one of Richard Burton's most astonishing qualities was an almost mesmerizing intuition about the recesses of one's inner being, however one might try to hide them. And so he found exactly the right mood for the occasion. He did not try to lecture. He was extraordinarily gentle. He spoke wittily about his views and his art, yet there was not a trace of condescension. He was moving because his strength seemed to grow out of a deep melancholy; because one sensed a fierce pride denying a profound vulnerability; because an awareness of the ephemeralness of human endeavor went side by side with a determination to leave behind something important.

The very consciousness of being in the presence of a barely banked volcano made for a strange and special kind of serenity.

A few years later during the run of "Camelot" in New York, Richard Burton and I had dinner. I told him how much my son admired him. A few days later, David received a call from a man claiming to be Richard Burton. He was not easily convinced that he was not being put on. Richard invited him to see "Camelot" and to visit him backstage afterwards. Richard was already in great pain from his illness, but he spent an hour with David--an encounter which belongs to my son's proudest moments.

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Some time later, Richard Burton spent an afternoon and evening with us in the country. He was not well, but he struggled valiantly and successfully not to show it. He seemed frail; Nancy said he was trying to come to grips with mortality. Still, we had a visitor who was in great emotional trouble at the time, and even though he had never met her, Richard Burton intuitively spent a great deal of time trying to make her feel more at peace.

Richard Burton was a giant whose biggest problem was how to come to grips with a Lilliputian world. He was a genius eager to succeed in an environment envious and sometimes unforgiving of the extraordinary. He was too proud to wear the cloak of conventionality, but no more than other great men did he fully solve the dilemma of how to do the unusual when standards are set by the average. There are many people here who knew Richard Burton much better than I did. All I can say is that a nearly chance encounter had become a relationship that meant a great deal to me, and now my world is lonelier without that brave, gentle, learned and driven personality.

Henry A. Kissinger

Dictated but not read