The in-person interviews took place at the two high-rise apartments he owned, in succession, in Friendship Heights, just northwest of the D.C. line in Maryland. The encounters took years off my life. I could not wish otherwise, then or now. Throughout the time I was meeting with him about the prospective biography, Karski chain-smoked filterless Lucky Strikes in the hermetically sealed rooms where we conversed. A non-smoker, I wheezed through the days and invariably returned to Nashville in clothes that smelled like the waiting room of an East German train station. 

(One day around 1997, I walked into Karski’s home to find the usual miasma absent. “My doctor, he says is not good for my health,” he blithely explained. “So I quit.” The man had smoked for more than 60 years.) 

Professor Karski would allow me to query him in detail for hours on end. At pauses between the formal interviews, he would coach me on issues we might want to cover next. Whatever the topic, as soon as we reached the hour of 5 p.m., he would pause and look at me with a gleam in his eye. “Meester Wood,” he would say in his deeply accented baritone. “This is a very interesting conversation. But don’t you think we ought to have a drink?” 

Off went the tape recorder; out came the bourbon and Cinzano as we recessed to his dining room. Karski dispensed the vermouth into his Manhattan in tiny amounts. I would later witness him politely bedeviling bartenders across the U.S. and Europe over an excess of vermouth in his drink. He generally raised the issue after his third sip, beckoning the server with his craggy index finger: “Excuse me. Ees this a Manghattan?” The result was always a topping up of the offending libation with more bourbon. Intentionally or not, Karski thus made sure that any hour was happy hour. 

Our evening conversations across the table often served as an antidote to the horrors and disappointments I had made him revisit in the day’s interviews. For me, they served as tutorials in foreign policy analysis, clandestine tradecraft, Central European history and a host of other subjects ranging from opera to academic politics – always interspersed with plenty of gossip. I treasure the memory of the time I spent just hanging out with the Professor. I wish I had been able to record those chats, but of course he would never have spoken so freely in that case.