Alexander Comstock Kirk

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Alexander

Alexander Comstock Kirk (November 26, 1888 – March 23, 1979) was an American lawyer and diplomat.

Alexander Comstock Kirk a adăugat o fotografie

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R.I.P
Alexander

Diplomatic career Kirk joined the American Diplomatic Service on March 6, 1915. In 1916, he was transferred from his post as secretary of the embassy in Berlin to a position in Constantinople. Kirk served as private secretary to the Secretary of State during World War I and accompanied him in that position to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. He then lived in "a commodious old house in Georgetown with his mother to act as hostess on the occasion of his entertainments", until posted to Peking as secretary of the embassy. He managed the State Department budget for a time in the 1920s, and later said he thought it "an obligation" to spend the entire amount in order to support the argument for additional appropriations. Kirk was counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Rome in 1932. His mother was presented to Queen Elena of Italy on March 9, 1932. She lived in Rome during his service there, and Kirk entertained important guests at her home, the Villa Spada on the Janiculum. Even in 1930, long before rising to ambassadorial rank, he entertained lavishly. He hosted an opera party for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst on her 1930 tour of Europe. Kirk was…Citește mai mult

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While ambassador in Rome, Kirk lived in the Barberini palace, which he redecorated. He filled a large enclosure the size of a tennis court with "Renaissance tables and settees covered in ivory silk", according to Life magazine, to create what he termed "a sort of cozy sitting room". When Life profiled him in 1945, it reported that he had always established fine residences wherever he was posted: "The Ambassador is fond of houses, and especially big ones. Equipped with ample private funds and the courage of his complexes, Kirk sees no reason why he should not capitalize the chance his profession gives him to indulge this fondness, all the more since such indulgence usually works out to the benefit of the State Department in one way or another." His nickname around this time was "Buffy". In 1945 he attributed "his excellent health to the fact that he has never worn himself down by any form of exercise more violent than scratching, which he only does when suffering from insomnia at 6 a.m." He planned to retire to Arizona and bought a piece of land in the White Mountains at the end of World War II. He joked that he would…Citește mai mult

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Alexander

Alexander Comstock Kirk was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 26, 1888, the son of James Alexander Kirk (1840–1907) and Clara Comstock (1851–1936). His family lived in Hartland, Wisconsin. Their wealth derived from one of America's largest soap manufacturing concerns, which was founded by Kirk's grandfather in Utica, New York, in 1839, relocated to Chicago in 1860, and capitalized as James S. Kirk & Co. in 1900. James Alexander Kirk was a director of the company. Its two national brands were "American Family" for laundry and "Juvenile" for the bath. Kirk was "fat" and "unhappy" in childhood and enjoyed drawing. At age 9, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago until his family decided he was too young to be drawing nude models. He was then sent to work incognito in a soap factory until his identity was discovered. He was then tutored at home for half the year by Hughell Fosbroke, future head of the General Theological Seminary of New York, spending the other half traveling in Europe with his mother and sister. Kirk attended the University of Chicago for one year and then Yale University, where he excelled in physics and graduated in 1909. He appeared with the…Citește mai mult

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Personal life In the 1920s, when he was counselor to the American Embassy in Rome, Kirk remodeled a significant building in Georgetown, the Robinson house, at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and R Street and "filled it with furniture, rugs, hangings and objects of art brought from the Orient." In 1942 he sold this estate, including its "elaborate formal gardens, outsize ballroom, marble-floored billiard room, and swimming pool", to Evalyn Walsh McLean, mining heiress and owner of the Hope Diamond. While posted to Berlin, he lived in an "enormous mansion" in the "swank" Grunewald neighborhood. One German who visited described it as "one vast hall after another, and he quiet alone in the midst of it. Very funny; a little like the theatre." His staff of servants spoke only Italian. He held "a large buffet luncheon every Sunday noon, as a means of revenging himself for such hospitality as his position required him to accept."

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He was a carryover from an older day when to be rich entitled you to be eccentric, and he made the most of the privilege. ... Deliberately, I think, as a gesture of defiance and self-protection, and in the indulgence of a fine sense of the theatrical, Kirk worked at giving himself the aspect of exactly that sort of American career diplomat of which the American philistine has always been the most suspicious: elegant, overrefined, haughty, and remote. It was a manner of enlivening life by playing the buffoon. ... His understanding was intuitive rather than analytical. His conversation consisted largely of weary, allusive quips. His posing sometimes went so far as to raise doubts whether he was serious. But behind this facade of urbane and even exaggerated sophistication there lay a great intuitive shrewdness and a devastating critical sense of humor, directed to himself as well as others. No one impressed him. ... He despised the Nazis and held them at arm's length with barbed irony. ... The only thing worth living for, he once told me, was good form. He himself had little to live for; there were moments when he would have liked to leave this life;…Citește mai mult

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After service as Ambassador in Egypt and Italy, he sidled, quietly and unobserved, out of all of our lives. Kirk claimed he escaped from diplomatic functions by whatever ruse the situation required. At one embassy in Rome he found it necessary to leave by a door he could only reach by going under a grand piano. "In a case of this sort, Kirk recommends slow motion, which, he says, often prevents witnesses from even noticing a maneuver which, if executed fast, might horrify them." He insisted his favorite color was gray. He never had fresh flowers, rather he collected artificial ones in his favorite color. His wardrobe and household were maintained by a servant named Mario, who joined the Kirk household in Mexico early in Kirk's career and continued through his stint as ambassador in Rome.