Colleagues remember journalist and Stanford professor of communication emeritus Elie Abel as a great storyteller who drew on experience that ranged from the Nuremberg war-crimes trials to the Hungarian and Tibetan uprisings to the fall of the Soviet Union. “He knew everyone from presidents to prime ministers to thieves,” recalls professor emerita Marion Lewenstein, adding drily, “in the days when they weren’t one and the same.” In a year she taught overseas, she says, “I might be at a party and the minute it was established that I knew Elie Abel, I was surrounded. Everyone wanted to be with anyone who knew Elie.”
Abel died July 22 in a hospice in Rockville, Md., of pneumonia complicated by a stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. He was 83.
Abel had worked for NBC News, the New York Times, the Detroit News and others, sharing a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Times staff in 1958 for international reporting. He won a 1967 George Foster Peabody Award for his weekly NBC Radio series “The World and Washington.” In 1966, he published the first of four books, The Missile Crisis, about the 1962 U.S.-Soviet standoff over Cuba. His last book, The Shattered Bloc: Behind the Upheaval in Eastern Europe, was published in 1990.
In 1979, Abel joined the Stanford faculty from the Columbia School of Journalism. He headed the communication department from 1983 to 1986 and served as Faculty Senate chair in 1985-86, where he successfully lobbied to open senate meetings to off-campus journalists. He was director of Stanford in Washington in 1993-94.
“My sense was that he was enormously proud that he achieved what he did from humble origins,” says professor emeritus Henry Breitrose. Abel’s father was a printer; his mother had sewed in a New York sweatshop and routinely been arrested as a union organizer. Elie grew up in Montreal, graduated from McGill University in 1941 and earned his master’s in journalism from Columbia in 1942. “He left Canada because he wanted to be in the maelstrom [of world affairs],” says his daughter, Suzanne Abel, director of development at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service. In an author’s note in Shattered Bloc, Abel wrote that he thought “nothing could be finer than the life of a foreign correspondent.”
“He was deeply interested in history and current affairs,” Breitrose says. “Small talk with Elie might be the way in which Tito managed to hold off Dimitrov when Stalin sent him to bring Yugoslavia back into the Soviet camp.” He thought good reporters needed to have “long memories, rely on the public record, and make sense of what is being said. This notion of making sense was terribly important to him.” Michael Boskin, professor of economics and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, says Abel would urge Knight journalism fellows to take Econ 1, a “maniacal program” in which first-year economics was crammed into a single quarter.
A gracious man with a gruff voice, Abel enjoyed reading and classical music. He counted violinist Nathan Milstein and composer Leonard Bernstein as friends. He and his first wife, Corinne Prevost Abel, who died in 1991 after 45 years of marriage, were involved in the restoration of the lighthouse at Point Arena.
His other survivors include his wife, Charlotte (Sherry) Page Abel, ’64, who was president of Washington’s Stanford Club when they met in 1993; his son, Mark Abel, ’70; and a granddaughter.
