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Up for sale a RARE! "Voice at U.N." George L. Sherry Hand Signed 2X5 Card.
ES-4974E
George
L. Sherry, a former United Nations official who helped calm crises around the
world — a role that evolved from his time as the leading rapid-fire translator
of speeches by Russian diplomats in the organization’s early days — died in
Manhattan on Friday. He was 87. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s
disease, his daughter, Vivien Sherry Greenberg, said. In the years just after
the founding of the United Nations in 1945, when speeches from the lectern of
the General Assembly and the Security Council were widely broadcast beyond the
earphones of the diplomats on the floor, Mr. Sherry became known as the
English-speaking voice of Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet delegate. “Deputy
Foreign Minister Andrei Y. Vishinsky spoke yesterday in tones that were in
quick succession impassioned, angry, sarcastic, sardonic, pleading and
furious,” The New York Times reported on Sept. 19, 1947. “And the English
translation came through the walkie-talkie sets in the General Assembly in tones
that were just as impassioned, angry, sarcastic, sardonic, pleading and
furious.” It was Mr. Sherry who matched that 92-minute speech, a good deal of
it delivered extemporaneously. (He would later translate speeches by Soviet
officials like Ana. At the time a 24-year-old graduate of City College in New
York, Mr. Sherry would go on to a four-decade career at the United Nations,
rising to assistant secretary general for special political affairs. For most
of his career he worked beside two highly respected under secretary generals, Ralph J. Bunche and Sir Brian Urquhart,
helping to organize mediation and peacekeeping missions. In 1963, Mr. Sherry
helped negotiate the entry of United Nations troops into what is now the
Democratic Republic of Congo, effectively ending a long war of secession in
Katanga Province. A year later, he served as senior political adviser for
peacekeeping forces in the Turkish-Greek struggle over Cyprus. When the second
Indian-Pakistan war over Kashmir broke out in the fall of 1965, he was a member
of the observation mission there. And in 1982, he was one of two Americans
assigned to the task force created by Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar
to help bring an end to the Falklands war. Mr. Sherry was director of the
special political affairs department from 1978 until he was promoted to
assistant secretary general in 1984. On Wednesday, Sir Brian called him an
“indispensable member” of the team. After retiring in 1985, Mr. Sherry became a
professor of international studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the
founding director of the college’s United Nations
program, which brings students to New York to work as interns. George
Leon Sherry was born in Poland on Jan. 5, 1924, the only child of Leon and
Henrietta Shershevsky. (The family, of Russian descent, changed its name after
immigrating to the United States in 1939.) By the time he was 15, George spoke
Russian, English, French and Romanian.