Raymond Duncan GASTIL

They still don´t come any better.

I was saddened to learn, belatedly, of Ray Gastil's death. I knew him primarily through his work at Freedom House and his involvement with democracy strategies and assessments abroad in the early 1990s. I was fortunate to be included in one of his Freedom House conferences, on Muslim Central Asia, and in the subsequent Freedom in the World volume. I was also grateful when he phoned, some time later, to invite me to participate in a democracy strategy team in Pakistan. He led our small team...

I first encountered “Big Ray” as a 7th grader when I became fast friends with his son Raymond. At that age, one of the first questions you ask a new friend is “what does your father do?” Raymond explained – repeatedly, because I never could quite understand what it meant -- that his father worked at a think tank. The answer only produced hazy images of my aquarium with the guppies and gouramis replaced with an exotic mix of thinkers and ponderers. At 12, it was simply beyond my comprehension...

I knew my uncle, Raymond D. Gastil, as a scholar and public intellectual who showed me the relevance of rigorous social science to the largest questions of our time.

In his doctoral studies at Harvard, Uncle Ray created a special program for himself in “social humanities,” the title of his 1977 book that showed how values and science could inform one another, rather than stand in opposition.

His 1958 dissertation on modern Iranian culture launched his career as a...

Ray Gastil was a model of intellectual that becomes harder and harder to find. Super-smart but modest, wide-ranging but balanced and deep, free of ideology but full of principle. His colleagues respected him, his friends cherished him.

Read at River View Cemetery, Essex,CT,
December 18.

Thank you so much for being here on this cold, clear, Connecticut afternoon. My Dad loved days like these, and he even loved this special place, right on the Connecticut River. Thank you for honoring his memory and our family.

I have a simple message to share: my Dad made life interesting. He made life interesting because for him, everything was a topic for study and discussion, No subject was too humble or too...