Painful Memories Amid a Time of Joy : Ann Kerr Remembers Her Husband, Malcolm, and Others Who Never Made It Home From Beirut

For Ann Kerr, these have been days of joy and of pain.

Last week, the last American hostage in Lebanon was released. On Thanksgiving, she had a telephone call from close friend Thomas Sutherland, who was home in Berkeley after 6 1/2 years in captivity.

They talked about what had happened to their families during those years, about how the world had changed since 1982, when they had embarked on a “great adventure” together--Sutherland as a dean and Kerr’s husband, Malcolm, as president at the American University of Beirut.

Eighteen months later, Malcolm Kerr was dead, gunned down by terrorists as he walked to his campus office.

Now, Ann Kerr shares the joy of the hostages being freed. But, she says, it’s been “sort of turning the knife in the wound” to see them return to their families.

After his death in 1984, Kerr dreamed for a while that her husband would be coming home. And the youngest of their four children used to fantasize that their father was a hostage.

But she is not a woman to dwell on the past, not a professional widow. And she is not interested in self-pity. She does think, though, that “it would be good to have a reminder of the people who didn’t make it.”

After her husband’s death, Kerr taught English at the American University in Cairo. In 1989, she moved home to California, to the hilltop Pacific Palisades home the Kerrs had bought 20 years earlier.

Kerr has moved on with her life. But recent events have tugged powerfully at her emotions.

There was the birth in October of her first grandchildren, twin boys. In November, there was a car bombing that destroyed College Hall, the administration building on the Beirut campus. In this hall in 1955, Ann Zwicker, an Occidental College junior studying abroad, met Malcolm Kerr, a graduate student. And, she adds, “That’s also the building where he was killed.”

Between College Hall and the campus chapel, an oval garden with a Roman column from the university museum honors his memory. Ann Kerr wonders whether that garden survived the bombing.

At the time Kerr was killed--Jan. 18, 1984--only Andrew, the Kerrs’ youngest child, was living with his parents in Beirut.

The family understood the dangers. “There were a lot of people in Lebanon who did not like (the university),” Kerr says. “It stood for Western freedom of thought.”

She has gone beyond the what-ifs and has tried to put into perspective her husband’s legacy, “this exchange of intellectual ideas between East and West.”

Working out of an office at UCLA, she is coordinator of educational and cultural programs for 70 Fulbright scholars on a dozen Southern California campuses. She is also editing a book that is a personal and political memoir of the Kerrs’ time together in the Middle East.

“It’s a way of relieving the burden,” she says. But it is more than that: It is “a record of an era, and of a man.”

Malcolm Kerr’s roots in Lebanon were deep and lifelong. He was born at the university hospital, and it was there, at age 52, that he was pronounced dead. He had been both a student and a professor at the university, and both of his American-born parents had been on the faculty.

The university, founded in 1866 by Presbyterian missionaries, had evolved into a nonsectarian institution known as the “Harvard of the Middle East.”

Ann Kerr, born in Santa Monica, began her love affair with the Middle East in her student year at the American University of Beruit. She’d had to look up Beirut on a map. Soon, she was captivated.

The Kerrs were married in 1956, only months after her graduation from Occidental. Although he taught for 20 years at UCLA, grants and sabbaticals had made it possible for them to live throughout the world. They lived in Beruit two other times, and three of their children were born there.

“I don’t think Malcolm would have gone back to be president if he wasn’t married to someone interested in the Middle East,” she says.

They accepted the risk. Lebanon had been devastated by civil war and by fighting between Arabs and Israelis. Terrorist bombings were becoming a way of life.

“I can’t let myself regret.

“That doesn’t mean that sorrow isn’t always with me. Grief never leaves, and it’s always ready to pounce. And it’s moments like this month that it comes back.”

Some people just “put their head in a hole” as they go through life, she says. “I wouldn’t want to live that way. I don’t want my children to live that way.

“Malcolm got caught. He was the right person at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In the nearly eight years since Kerr’s death, his children have scattered across the globe. Ann Kerr laughs and says, “When I complained about this one day, my son Andrew said, ‘Mom, you have no one to blame but yourself.’ ”

This was always a family that thrived on adventure.

Daughter Susan van de Ven, 33, lives with her husband in England. They are the parents of infant twins. John, 30, a former Fulbright scholar in Egypt, is an agricultural economist in India.

Steve, 26, plays basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Andrew, 23, a senior at the University of Arizona, wants to work in international affairs.

At 57, Ann Kerr is an outgoing woman who laughs easily.

In the summers, she accompanies American high school students studying in the Middle East on Malcolm H. Kerr scholarships awarded by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. She is on the board of governors of Occidental College and is a trustee of the American University of Beirut--her “big commitment.”

The university, she says, is “really thriving” despite the violence in the region. Today, there are 5,000 students.

She has not been able to return to Beirut since 1985, when there was a memorial service for her husband.

“I think the Middle East is so misunderstood. For most Americans, the Middle East is the terrorists, the airplane hijackers, the hostage takers.”

She has not soured on the region or its people. “It was specific people, or parties, that were responsible for Malcolm’s death. That’s not the whole Middle East.” She speaks of the richness of the culture, the “human-ness” of the people.

Yes, she adds, terrorists, too, are human. “To be human doesn’t necessarily mean to be kind.”

Her thoughts turn again to the hostages coming home. She shares their joy. But, she says, “I wish Malcolm were among them. I can admit that it does hurt. At times like this, it’s very hard.”