Farewell to a friend of Dubai and UAE

 A man named Ted Sorensen was eulogised 7,000 kilometres away in New York on Tuesday. The memorial service drew the elite of American society; after all, Sorensen was the closest aide and chief speechwriter of one of President Barack Obama's distinguished predecessors in the White House, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Some of Kennedy's most memorable words ("Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country…") flowed from Sorensen's pen. And Sorensen assisted Obama with his exquisite penmanship during the presidential campaign of 2008 and beyond.

I write this because I wish I could have attended Ted's memorial service. He was a longtime mentor and a friend. He was one of the smartest, most politically savvy men I knew during my own long career in international journalism, and he was a man of unquestioned integrity. But I would also have liked to go to New York to pay my private tribute because Ted Sorensen was one of the most enduring friends that Dubai and the UAE had.

It was a friendship that was reciprocated by UAE leaders such as the late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, and Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, UAE Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, who invited him to his biennial Festival of Thinkers in Abu Dhabi, and by several top Emirati businessmen who occasionally asked him to fly over from New York to offer counsel.

As far as I know, there was no one from Dubai at Ted's memorial service. Ted was an unreconstructed admirer of the vision and courage of Shaikh Mohammad. With each visit to Dubai, Ted would gasp at the velocity of growth that Shaikh Mohammad had engendered, and he would particularly be entranced by the Dubai Ruler's sheer willpower and boundless stamina. Ted would say that Shaikh Mohammad was certainly one of the most charismatic leaders of contemporary times, a man of great acuity and supernatural intelligence.

Coming from Ted, these observations weren't to be taken lightly. He had, after all, dealt closely with world leaders since the 1950s, when he first worked with Kennedy when the latter was a senator from Massachusetts. (There are those who insist that Ted was the real author behind Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Profiles in Courage, but Ted was shrewd enough never to lay claims to the book's sparkling prose. His response: "The writer wrote the book."

Ted had the gift of sizing up a man almost instantly — and in his estimate, Shaikh Mohammad was a superlative figure. High praise this, and one that was heartfelt and consistent.

Ted's admiration of Shaikh Mohammad, of course, predated Shaikh Mohammad's accession to this high position. He divined as far back as the early 1970s that Shaikh Rashid's son would turn out to be a world-class leader. He was prescient because that is exactly what happened.

Ted was never one to be put off by occasionally snide remarks from his high-flying set that perhaps he was too enamoured of Shaikh Mohammad. He would say, "So what? When a leader has the vision and guts to build an entire civilisation from the desert in barely two decades, you cannot but marvel."

If there was a scintilla of disappointment with Dubai that Ted harboured — and he wasn't a man who held grudges — it was that Dubai sometimes did not make enough outreaches to potential allies around the world. He was convinced that there was a cohort of well-placed people internationally who would be long-term allies for Dubai.

They would be people who would speak out positively about the diverse and tolerant society that Shaikh Mohammad was trying to create. They would be people who understood that all sovereign entities — like most business organisations — undergo periodical ups and downs in their financial fortunes. But they would be people who intuitively trusted Shaikh Mohammad's instincts to address problems, to redress them, and to move on to building a more viable and vibrant Dubai.

Work in progress

Ted and his friends recognised that Dubai was still a work in progress, but that it has already made an imprint on the global conscience. I recall several conversations with Ted during the global financial crisis when Ted expressed unflinching belief in Dubai's resilience, and in its ability to successfully move past the economic downturn.

Dubai, in Ted's belief, had a spectacular future, not the least because of the determination and guts that one man — Shaikh Mohammad — injected into its youthful system. Ted was always confident of that prospect.

And so while the world pauses to remember Ted's full and accomplished life in the service of his native US, it behooves those of us who believe in the UAE and Dubai to pause and honour the memory of a longtime but unheralded friend of the federation. Friends such as Ted always spoke with fairness and support about Dubai in particular — and they will be vindicated.

Pranay Gupte's book on India and the Middle East will be published in Spring 2011. He is currently working on his next book, a memoir of nearly five decades in international journalism.