Kerr Embraces Peace

CHICAGO - An hour before his first Chicago Bulls practice a few weeks ago, newcomer Steve Kerr considers a part of his life that has nothing to do with professional basketball.

At 9:10 a.m. on Jan. 18, 1984, an assassin, using a handgun equipped with a silencer, stepped from a staircase in the American University administration building in West Beirut and fired a bullet into the back of Malcolm Kerr's head as Kerr walked from an elevator toward a meeting in his office.

Malcolm Kerr, 52, a prominent and widely admired Middle Eastern authority, was president of American University, described by The New York Times as "a model of liberal Western education in the Arab world."

An extremist Arab group, the Islamic Jihad, which opposed the American military presence in Lebanon and U.S. support of Israel, would take responsibility for the murder.

Steve was 18 and a freshman basketball player at the University of Arizona. "Something like this opens your eyes," he says. "It made me understand the pain that others experience, the effect that death can have. It's made me realize that millions of people go through these things."

Always in thoughts

Since his assassination, Malcolm Kerr has never been far from the thoughts of his four children - Steve at age 28 is third oldest - and his widow, Ann. But some events evoke particularly strong feelings.

The historic handshake of Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and the PLO's Yasser Arafat on Sept. 13 at the White House was such a moment.

Says Ann Kerr, who was at her husband's side minutes after he was murdered: "Our entire lives were tied up with the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was always the backdrop in Malcolm's work and the indirect cause of his death. To me, the peace agreement is the culmination of an era for the Middle East and, in a very personal way, for our family. We are enormously grateful for it."

"Almost 10 years have passed," Steve Kerr says. "I'm a lot more healed than I was. But it's tough. It's always tough when you lose a parent, and I'm no different from a lot of other NBA players who have lost parents. Violent deaths get more attention, but death is death, and no matter how it happens, whether it's cancer or an auto accident, the pain is still there."

He played through his pain with dramatic resolve. Two days after his father's death, he came off the bench to hit five of seven shots from the field and lead Arizona to an upset victory over rival Arizona State, 71-49.

"The legend of Steve Kerr was born that night," writes author John Feinstein in "A Season Inside," a book about the 1987-88 college basketball season.

One of several players and coaches featured in the book, Kerr would make All-America as a 6-foot-3 guard that season, helping to take Arizona (35-3) to the NCAA's Final Four.

"In a strange way," says Ann Kerr, "Steve's visibility in basketball has brought more recognition to his father and to AUB," as American University of Beirut is known.

But his basketball celebrity may also have tended to overshadow the considerable accomplishments and activities of his siblings and mother.

A family roll call

-- Susan, 34, has an undergraduate degree from Oberlin College and a doctorate in education from Harvard University, where she met her husband, Hans van de Ven, who has a doctorate in Chinese studies and teaches at Cambridge University, England. Hans and Susie are the parents of 2-year-old twin boys.

"When the peace agreement was signed," she says, "I wished I could ask Dad what he thought. He could tell me what was really happening. I miss that."

-- John, 32, a graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, has a doctorate in economics from Stanford University and is a natural resources economist in Hyderabad, India. He is employed by Icrisat, a company that promotes management of natural resources in developing nations.

"I read about the peace agreement in the newspapers here," John says. "I thought how thrilled my father would have been. I also remembered how both sides would get annoyed with him, because he was willing to criticize either or both when he thought they were wrong."

-- Andrew, 25, a 1992 graduate in political science from the University of Arizona, is on the staff of the National Security Council and was on the South Lawn of the White House for the Sept. 13 ceremony.

"I felt like I had a reason to be there - as a representative of my father and of my family," he says. "My father would have known many of the people who were there. Take the top 15 members of each Arab government, and probably half are graduates of AUB."

-- Ann, 59, a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles, taught English at American University of Cairo for five years after her husband's death. She returned in 1989 to the family home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., which she and Malcolm bought after he joined the faculty of UCLA in 1961. They maintained it through his 20 years there, interrupted by four sabbaticals in the Middle East.

She is coordinator of the Fulbright visiting scholar program at UCLA; a member of the board of trustees of AUB, which provides Malcolm Kerr scholarships to about 100 students from around the world; and a member of the advisory board of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, serving as guide for its Malcolm Kerr scholar program in which American high school students each summer visit the Middle East.

Next year, to mark the 10th anniversary of her husband's death, Syracuse University Press will publish her memoir, "Come With Me From Lebanon," whose title is from the Bible's Song of Solomon.

-- Steve has been a self-described journeyman with three teams in five seasons in the NBA. He and his wife Margot are the parents of 1-year-old Nicholas.

Compensating for a lack of size by canny play and long-range shooting, Kerr holds the NBA's top career percentage for three-point field goals and led the NBA in that category three seasons ago with a .507 average.

Discounting his chances might be a mistake, for he has a history of exceeding forecasts.

In his 1988 book, Feinstein writes that Steve's story "reads like a movie script," except it's "too corny" for Hollywood: "Bright, articulate kid" who's "recruited by no one" winds up at Arizona. Barely, that is, for the school seems to hedge on offering its last scholarship to him. At the last minute, Malcolm Kerr calls new coach Lute Olson, who was hoping to rebuild Arizona from a 4-24 record, and asks if there's an offer or not; there is.

Not only does Kerr overcome the initial shock from the death of his father six months later, but also, one night at Arizona State in his senior year, he scores 20 points in the first half, hitting six three-pointers in a furious response to a cruel home-crowd taunt: "PLO! PLO! Hey, Kerr, where's your dad?!"

While Steve's story is inspiring, it's only a subplot in the family saga, which begins in 1954.

That's when a 19-year-old student from Occidental College named Ann Zwicker persuades her parents, with the assistance of the family's Presbyterian minister, that her junior year abroad should be spent not in tame, conventional Europe but in Beirut, the "Paris of the Middle East."

She would study at AUB - "the Harvard of the Middle East" - which had been founded in 1866 by Protestant missionaries.

In a class on the Ottoman empire, she meets tall, skinny Malcolm Kerr, 22, a recent graduate of Princeton University with deep roots in Lebanon.

"We met in the same building in which Malcolm was killed," Ann says.

Malcolm was born and reared in Beirut. His father, Stanley, taught biochemistry at AUB, and his mother, Elsa, was dean of women.

Ann fell in love with Beirut: "The campus is on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean. Intellectually, it was a heady, exciting time. In the '40s and '50s, the faculty and the student body were very international, and the school was a center of Arab nationalism."

She also fell for Malcolm Kerr. They were married in 1956, returning to the United States so he could begin study for his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.

His first teaching post was AUB, from '58 to '61. There would be a postgraduate year at Oxford University, then tenure at UCLA, a stint in Tunisia and France ('70-71) and three stays in Cairo ('64-66, '76-77 and '79-81).

"Our three oldest children, like Malcolm, were born in the American University Hospital in Beirut," Ann says. "Andrew and I were born in the same Los Angeles hospital, but Andrew ended up spending much more time in the Middle East than the others. He was with me in Cairo those five years after Malcolm was killed."

Her memories of Malcolm mesh with those of their children.

Ann: "He had a wonderful sense of humor, the best I've ever known. But he wouldn't have won a popularity contest among his students. He had high standards and expectations, but not with his kids. He just adored his kids. He was always playing basketball in the driveway with his sons and taking them to the park to hit baseballs."

John, 32: "He had a good sense of humor, and he liked being with his family more than anything else."

Susie, 34: "My father was funny and very attentive. He was exciting to be around. Because of him we really felt in the thick of things. We could always ask him questions about what was happening. He loved to tell stories about his growing up in the Middle East. On Saturdays, I'd go to his office with him to study. He'd let me wash out his coffee cup."

Andrew, 25: "The heated rivalry in basketball was between John and Steve. They used to have these vicious one-on-one driveway battles. John was much bigger, taller and stronger, and he'd bully Steve and me. I remember my dad pinning John to the ground to show him what it felt like."

Ann: "One of Steve's greatest accomplishments was to learn how to handle his temper. He was so competitive against his father and his older brother. He would throw tantrums into his preteens. He was so much smaller. Finally he began to beat them at basketball."

John: "I give myself all kinds of credit for making Steve such a competitive player. The year I came back from college, I was 18 and Steve was 13. I beat him 10-8. He wasn't upset at all the way he used to get. He simply started the next game. He beat me 10-0. I could never beat him again.

"My father loved to watch Steve play basketball," John continues, "but he never saw him at Arizona, although Steve sent us a videotape of his first game. I was in Beirut with my father at Christmas 1983, less than a month before he was killed.

"The two of us stayed up late, playing the videotape of the game. Arizona had two blonds, and the tape was of such terrible quality, it was hard at first to tell which one was Steve."

Steve: "My father was a mild-mannered man with a dry sense of humor and a passion for the Middle East. One of his favorite sayings was, `You're a modest fellow with much to be modest about.' He was kidding, but he was also serious. There's a message there. Be passionate and productive and modest. I have his passion, but mine is for basketball."

In 1982, Malcolm was offered the AUB presidency. "We knew the offer was coming," Ann says. "It was only a matter of time. Malcolm was so right for the job."

Says William B. Quandt, a Middle East expert in the Carter administration's National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank: "Malcolm was among the most highly regarded specialists on the Arab world of his generation.

"He had written several important books about inter-Arab relations, and he had also visited Israel and developed contacts there. He had a good analytical mind and academic integrity. He was objective about Arabs and their shortcomings while having empathy with them.

"Finally, he relied on humor and understatement, which helped take the harsh edges off Arab-Israeli issues."

As well-suited as Kerr might be, there was the matter of safety. Civil war was devastating beautiful Beirut.

"The family hashed over the pros and cons for months," Ann says. "Susie recently read to me a passage in her diary in which Malcolm told her that he had probably a 25 percent chance of being killed if he went there.

"But he believed so strongly in AUB and he so loved Lebanon that we really had no other choice. So you carry your bubble of invulnerability with you until something happens."

Says Quandt: "Considering the sympathy he had for the Palestinian cause, it's ironic that he was killed by an Arab."

"Many families go through what we did," Ann Kerr says. "At first, it pulled us together, the children and me. It's almost an instinctive kind of clinging together. I see each of us grieving in different ways, some more than others. All of us, I think, have a kind of permanent limp of the spirit. The loss is so great, but you eventually go on with your lives."