As Co-Founder of Pacific News Service, Schurmann Inspired Independent Writing
By News America Media
Eminent scholar, historian and co-founder of Pacific News Service, Franz Schurmann, passed away Aug. 20 at his home in San Francisco. He was 84.
The cause was advanced Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Schurmann was widely viewed as the foremost scholar of communist China during the Cold War, and was an early opponent of the U.S. war in Indochina.
He was the author of numerous books including “The Foreign Politics of Richard Nixon: The Grand Design” and “The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents and Contradictions of World Politics.”
Although Schurmann taught history and sociology at UC Berkeley for 38 years, those who knew him say he preferred to think of himself as an explorer-journalist rather than as an academic.
He was fluent in 12 languages.
During the 1960’s, Schurmann’s knowledge of the histories and cultures of the Far East gave him an expertise within the anti-war movement that few other critics of American foreign policies of the time commanded. In 1966, he coauthored, with Reginald Zelnik and Peter Dale Scott, “The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam,” documenting a parallel chain of command operating within the U.S. military and intelligence agencies that intended to thwart White House diplomacy.
His 1987 book, “The Foreign Politics of Richard Nixon,” challenged the almost universal demonization of Richard Nixon by America’s intelligentsia. The book—which credited Nixon rather than Kissinger with Machiavellian brilliance in creating the architecture of the post-Cold War world—never won an audience among official Nixon watchers, let alone academics.
Schurmann’s last book, “American Soul,” (2001) was a personal narrative, a view of the world from 29th Avenue in San Francisco, at the shore of the Pacific. He described an America that was transforming the world and being transformed by the emergence of a one-world culture and economy.
He attended Harvard following World War II on the GI Bill and earned a Ph.D. in Asian Studies, despite not having received an undergraduate degree.
A founding member of the Faculty Peace Committee at UC Berkeley in April 1965, Schurmann, along with anti-war intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Richard Barnett, Seymour Melman and Richard Falk—gave an intellectual backbone to the anti-war and Free Speech movements.
To promote independent research and writing, he founded the nonprofit Bay Area Institute and later, with former student Orville Schell, the Pacific News Service (PNS), in 1970.
Schurmann’s devotion to Pacific News Service, a progressive media source for writers and news organizations, reflected his passion for newspapers. In 1974, his partner, Sandy Close, a former Hong Kong-based journalist and founder of the Flatlands newspaper in Oakland, Calif., took over the news service. For more than 35 years the couple ran PNS as a shared enterprise.
Schurmann mentored colleagues at PNS—from noted author and essayist Richard Rodriguez to young writers at YO! and the Beat Within. Close credits him for being the intellectual inspiration for the founding of New America Media (NAM). “Franz was constantly shifting and expanding his lens, drawing on his readings of foreign-language media. PNS would never have made the breakthrough to NAM had it not been for his example,” Close said.
In the end, “This thinker and explorer whose gift was his ability to listen and learn from so many ordinary people all over the world finally retreated to the world of his mind, a universe by itself,” Close said of Schurmann’s last five years.
Schurmann is survived by Close, his partner of 42 years; his son Mark Anderson Schurmann of Olympia, Washington; his son Peter Leon Schurmann, daughter-in-law Aruna Lee and grandson Leon, all of San Francisco; his sister, Dorothy Schurmann of Oakland; and a godson, Hanif Bey of San Francisco.
A memorial service will be held at the UC Berkeley Alumni Center on Sunday, Sept. 19 from 2 to 5 pm. Contributions may be made to the Franz Schurmann Memorial Fund to support freelance journalists on special travel assignments.
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August 31, 2010 Copyright © 2012 Eastern Group Publications, Inc.
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