Lyme
A Lyme resident from 2003 until his death at age 89 in February, Levintow shared his expertise, instinct to help and vivid stories with the Upper Valley, teaching continuing education classes at Dartmouth’s Osher and volunteering with a local men’s service organization.
A member of Those Guys, Levintow was a regular at the Lyme group’s monthly 6:30 a.m. breakfasts and its service projects, including cleanups along Route 10. But unlike his cohorts, he declined the reflective neon-colored vests provided by the Department of Transportation. Instead, he wore one he’d picked up on an assignment.
“I’m sure it’s the only Arabic language safety vest in the Upper Valley,” quipped Stephen Campbell, a fellow member of Those Guys.
The writing prompted questions, and Levintow was happy to oblige. An energetic, intellectually curious person, “he always had a sort of bright, engaged expression on his face,” Campbell said.
Levintow was full of wonderful stories about his postings, some of which were in “pretty dicey places,” Campbell said. “You could listen all day.”
In his late 20s and early 30s, Levintow served as education director for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America union in Philadelphia, an experience that would be echoed in his 26-year career with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
One of his sons, Nick Levintow, often wondered what attracted his father to the work. Nick, a labor lawyer whose own career choices have been influenced by his father’s, imagines he was sensitized early on to the concepts of “vulnerability and exploitation.”
“David grew up as a slight-of-build Jewish kid in Philadelphia during the Depression,” he said in an email from Geneva. “For sure he didn’t have it easy, and it would have had great impact on him to see large numbers of unemployed, to hear stories of families impoverished, to see the dreams of friends and acquaintances shattered in those difficult years.”
In hard times, good jobs with decent wages and benefits would have been crucial, and knowing some private employers might take advantage of difficult circumstances by driving a hard bargain with their workers would have resonated with him, said Nick Levintow, who heads the International Labour Organization’s Safe and Healthy Youth Project, a global occupational safety and health project in developing countries.
As a student at Antioch College in Ohio, the elder Levintow had worked with the National Labor Relations Board in Louisiana and Mississippi.
“In my mind he would have come to the realization that he could make a difference in the working lives of others,” one of the factors, perhaps, that led him to international development work, Nick said.
As a foreign service officer with USAID, Levintow’s main interests were the Middle East and Africa. From 1958 to 1984, he and his wife, Arsenia (Gonzalez) Levintow, and their children lived all over the world.
According to the timeline, compiled by a friend of Levintow and edited by Nick, his posts included Tehran, Iran, where as chief of the labor division he was in charge of writing reports on the labor movement, which was oppressed under the rule of the Shah. From 1967 to 1969 he was assigned to Saigon, where his work included training Vietnamese citizens to “support their economy.”
Levintow and his family spent the early 1970s in Monrovia, and then Afghanistan, where key projects included a dam providing irrigation, flood control and power. According to the timeline, he ran into some trouble for admitting to a New York Times reporter that USAID support for agriculture irrigation was also helping support “a bumper crop of opium.”
And in 1979, three months into his post in Ghana, where he was filling in for the mission director, the country was rocked by a bloody military coup.
The lifestyle wasn’t easy for their family, said Alexandra Howell, Levintow’s daughter.
Their mom raised four children born in a six-year period overseas, said Howell, who remembers cleaning produce in Liberia with bleach water to kill pathogens. “I think she liked the diplomatic life, but she didn’t like the hardship that it entailed.”
In Afghanistan, U.S. embassy vans they traveled in were shot at, and in Turkey, Howell had rocks thrown at her, which she saw as “anti-Americanism.”
“We were there to help,” she said. “USAID was not really the American embassy, but we were putting our values onto foreigners, and it didn’t always go well.”
Yet, looking back, she can “totally appreciate” the international experience she and her siblings had as children.
“Most of the countries I lived in, Iran, Afghanistan, you wouldn’t go to them,” said Howell, a Geisel School of Medicine professor and research biologist at White River Junction VA Medical Center who is studying HIV. “It’s a much more dangerous world today than it was back then.”
Howell recalls the adventures she and her family took, often between postings. They once spent eight days traveling in Russia, seeing Tashkent and Samarkand and going on “amazing tours,” all organized by Levintow. “He must have done his research somehow.”
In 1966, the family drove from Turkey to Italy with a camper in tow.
“Who would drag their family in a car and a trailer from Ankara, Turkey, to Italy in the ’60s?” Howell asked, smiling. “He took risks, but in his mind the value of the trip outweighed (the) risk.”
Howell said Levintow’s demeanor, and his empathy, made him an effective diplomat.
“There’s an Iranian saying that means ‘You go ahead.’ He always had that sort of body language,” she said. And he knew how to converse with people who had different opinions and, whatever country he was in, “could get inside the culture of the people to get something accomplished.”
Howell’s husband, Peter Tenney, recalled a certain word Levintow often used after he’d prepared a meal, or if they were eating in a restaurant: Enjoy.
“He was always very gracious,” said Tenney, a history teacher at Crossroads Academy who recorded hours’ worth of conversations with Levintow about his life. “And he was happy to give.”
It’s a spirit his students also recognized.
With Iran in the news, Sandy Huff wanted a deeper understanding of the nuclear negotiations. She found what she was looking for last spring in Levintow’s Osher class, “Nuclear Negotiations with Iran: Events Shaping the Iranian Approach to Diplomacy Today.”
“He had great insight into what was going on now,” said Huff, of Orford.
A “kind and gentle man,” Levintow had a lot of good stories, she said. “They didn’t puff him up at all.”
Students would often supply snacks for the class, and one morning Huff arrived early with a basket of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
“I said, ‘Sir, would you like a cookie to go with your coffee?’ ”
Levintow, who was reading a newspaper, “got the most darling little old smile on face and said, ‘How charming,’ ” Huff said. “I thought, ‘As a diplomat, he must have been a honey.’ ”
That semester, the class watched Argo, the 2012 movie about CIA operatives’ rescue of six Americans hiding in Iran during the 1979 embassy crisis.
Afterward, Levintow excused himself, Huff said. “He went to the men’s room because he was crying.”
After retiring from USAID, Levintow and his wife lived in and around Bethesda, Md., but he continued working, this time as a consultant and trainer in private-public partnerships in more than 30 countries. After his wife’s death in 2003, he decided to move north, to be near Howell and her family.
“And I want to live on Golden Pond,” he would say, referring to Squam Lake, where the 1981 movie was filmed.
The lake was too far away, so he built an apartment on their house in Lyme. By all accounts, except for the last year, when his health deteriorated, his time in the Upper Valley was idyllic.
Levintow had a lust for life, Nick Levintow said, horseback riding in Afghanistan, scuba diving and flying when he was a younger man. After moving to Lyme, he kept active, biking, playing tennis and swimming.
He bought a canoe and a kayak and got a dog, Taz, his hiking partner.
Monthly meetings of the international affairs group at the Norwich Inn were also part of his routine.
The gatherings include working people and retirees, among them scholars, diplomats, journalists, government officials and international businessmen, Tenney said.
It was among the many places Levintow would meet up with his friend, Raymond Malley, who has a house in Hanover.
The two men had met decades earlier when Malley was appointed head of the Trade and Development Agency under the Reagan administration. Levintow, the TDA’s program officer, helped him get accustomed to the agency, which Malley knew little about.
“I was a newcomer,” alien to the staff, whose favorite boss had been fired, he said. “He could have been alien, too, but he was exactly the opposite, warm and friendly.”
Over the years, while Malley served in the Foreign Service, a tight-knit community, they kept track of each other, he said. And when Levintow moved to Lyme they stayed in “constant touch.”
“He was a fine fellow,” Malley said.
In April 2015, Levintow’s health started failing. A chronic condition he had previously managed flared up and in February turned into full blown leukemia, Howell said. “Leukemia was my field before HIV, and I just knew sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease. Plus, he was too old, 89. You can’t give the big guns, chemotherapy. Plus, you get so sick.”
Taking the advice of Howell and that of her son, a nurse at the VA, where Levintow received his medical care, he opted against chemotherapy, she said. “He just listened to us, basically, and said, ‘I’ve had a good run.’ ”
Aimee Caruso can be reached at acaruso@vnews.com or 603-727-3210.