aged to solve them.
Warren Christopher was born in the tiny farming hamlet of Scranton, North Dakota, 69 years ago. His parents had moved there from Iowa in 1914. His "'great-great grandfather had emigrated from Norway to Iowa, bringing with him his wife and four poor daughters'" (Ginsburg, 1994, p. 72). The original name Christopherson had apparently been shortened when they came to the United States. In his interview with Scheer for the Los Angeles Times soon after his appointment to Secretary of State, Christopher attributes the reserve for which he is famous - at one point the New Republic called him a "sphinx" - to his ancestry: "'I'm shy. It's probably genetic. I'm Norwegian and Norwegians are quite reserved, generally speaking" (Scheer, 1993, p. 18).
Christopher's father was a strong supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal and engaged his son in long political conversations. It is here that Christopher traces the origin of his own liberalism: "'He just to me about the needs of the people and concern for the people. He talked about the substance of issues connected with Roosevelt rather than trying to intellectualize'" (Scheer, 1993, p. 20).
Yet another factor came into play in Christopher's life and ended up shaping both his fate and his sociocultural vision. In the winter of 1937, still at the height of the Depression, his father, manager of one of the two small local banks, suffered, at 49, a massive stroke, which left his right side paralyzed. This, as his son explains 56 years later, "'was almost certainly occasioned by overwork from trying to keep his bank solvent'" (Scheer, 1993, p. 20). A very hard period in Christopher's life started when his father sold his house and moved with his family to Los Angeles hoping to recuperate. His mother Catherine was trying to support her invalid husband - who died four years later after several strokes - Warren and her younger child, Lois, out of a rented apartment in a...