Photo by Jerry Bowles

Small gestures reveal enormous things about people. Take my former neighbor Vartan Gregorian, the lovely gentleman seen here reading his paper in the plaza next door to the Parc Vendome in mid-town Manhattan where I lived for more than 40 years. In all that time, I was never able to even once persuade him to get into the elevator before me. If I bowed or made a hand gesture, he would grip my arm firmly and guide me in ahead of himself.

He did — and still does, I imagine — the same for everyone. Famous actors, directors, politicians, delivery boys from the local diner. “Everybody is somebody so you don’t need to introduce anybody,” he once said.

“The universe will not see someone like you again in the history of creation,” he wrote. He truly believes every human is special and treats them accordingly.

Vartan was born in Iraq, a descendent of Christian Armenians who had survived the Armenian Genocide which began in 1914 and 1923 and left 1.5 million dead at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. His mother died of pneumonia when he was only six (“They told me she had gone to America”) and he was mostly raised by his grandmother, who was poor and illiterate.

With the help of other ethnic Armenian survivors, the brilliant young boy made it to America in 1956 as a freshman, attending Stanford University, where he completed his B.A., with honors, in two years. He received dual doctorates in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964.

After a distinguished career as a teacher and academic, he was named president of the New York Public Library, then Brown University, and is now president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Along the way, he has picked up an army of friends — including Presidents and Prime Ministers and Kings — and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

My favorite story about Vartan and his wife Claire, who died last year, was told to me by someone to whom it happened. When he was president of Brown University, they used to stroll around the campus on Thanksgiving looking for students who weren’t able to make it home and invite them to come to their house for a family dinner.

In this divisive era of anti-immigrant rage, loud dehumanizing rhetoric, and fake patriotism, Vartan Gregorian, the motherless immigrant boy who grew up to be a distinguished educator and academic, as well as a trusted advisor to global leaders, is testimony to the power of character, openness to and acceptance of others, and the kind of common decency that have made this country the envy of the earth. He is my idea of the beautiful American.