When an old, dear friend passes - Robert Reich

As we age, it happens more often. I remember asking my father, in his late 90s, what was the most challenging thing he faced about being very old. “I’ve lost my friends,” he said. The giant baby boom cohort, 60 million of us, is beginning to reach the years when the loss of old friends becomes common. This doesn’t make it any easier. I feel Chris’s loss acutely. Christopher Edley was a decent, brilliant, kind, funny man. I worked with him on and off for the past 43 years — on the Harvard faculty, on several presidential campaigns (Mondale and Dukakis), in the Clinton administration (he served as an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget), here at Berkeley. I first met him when he joined the faculty of Harvard Law School, in 1981. Among his many students in subsequent years was Barack Obama. He had a kind of rare courage to speak truth to power, without rancor or defensiveness. When affirmative action was coming under assault, Bill Clinton asked Chris to oversee a rev

As we age, it happens more often. I remember asking my father, in his late 90s, what was the most challenging thing he faced about being very old. “I’ve lost my friends,” he said. The giant baby boom cohort, 60 million of us, is beginning to reach the years when the loss of old friends becomes common. This doesn’t make it any easier. I feel Chris’s loss acutely. Christopher Edley was a decent, brilliant, kind, funny man. I worked with him on and off for the past 43 years — on the Harvard faculty, on several presidential campaigns (Mondale and Dukakis), in the Clinton administration (he served