Word: visser
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the war started, Visser 't Hooft discovered that the smuggling of refugees to freedom combined naturally with the smuggling of information in and out of Holland for the Dutch government-in-exile in London. The apparatus' agents were equipped with microfilm in pens and with clandestine short-wave radio. His two sons remember with displeasure the furtive characters who were constantly turning up at the house, in Geneva; when one arrived, the children were always sent out of the living room-which during the war was the only heated room in the house. In those days...
...Visser 't Hooft's pet projects after the war was the creation of an Ecumenical Institute in Switzerland for the training of leaders in the church unity movement. In the U.S. one evening, at dinner with Financiers Thomas W. Lamont and John D. Rockefeller Jr., he described the plan to Rockefeller, who replied: "You must ask for more money." Rockefeller later contributed about $1,000,000 to set up the Ecumenical Institute at Boissy, which last year graduated 36 students of 23 nationalities from its 20-week course...
...Taut Ship. In Geneva, Visser 't Hooft runs a staff of about 179, housed in a rambling cluster of chalets and barracks (until 1963. when the Council's new headquarters will be finished). Here he chain smokes his way efficiently through the day in a combination of informality (staffers phone or barge in on him directly, without going through his secretary) and protocol (he is acutely aware of any breach of seniority in seating at a conference or dinner table...
...Visser 't Hooft's stern Dutch face reflects warmth and good fellowship over a drink or at the staff's daily 15-minute tea party, but the ship he runs at Geneva is taut. He is capable of festive foolery: at an office party each St. Nicholaas Eve (Dec. 5), he sings a song consisting of good-natured personal gibes at the staff. He travels plenty. "If I hold any kind of a record," he says, "it is for attending international conferences. I wonder...
...Visser 't Hooft's chief hobby is Rembrandt. He first grew interested simply because Rembrandt, a fellow countryman, was one of history's greatest painters and had contributed so much to the world of art. But as he learned more about him, he realized that Rembrandt had done an extraordinary number of Biblical paintings. "He had a certain conception of the Bible," says Wim. "I became interested in what he was trying to say." But he found no books that told him, so the World Council's Visser 't Hooft wrote one himself: Rembrandt...