Earlier this week, Andrew Breitbart paid tribute to the late Ron Silver at the Center for Security Policy’s Keeper of the Flame dinner.  Attendees included Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Despite the fact I’m an actor, she loves me. She thinks I’m the most talented guy on the planet, even as work continues to dry up.  The eternal optimist to my ever lovin’ pessimist. I’m a Flintstone while she’s a beauty with a heart of gold.  I make her laugh.  She loves my bits. (A particular favorite is, my DeNiro, as Jake LaMotta, performing Kenny Loggins, “House at Pooh Corner”). FAHGETAHBOUT IT! My wife’s a peach.

Lately, however, there’ve been some clouds brewing on the horizon and it’s possible I may have had a slight hand in creating the situation.  I’ve been listening to her as she’s watching the tube, talking about how Hannity is so cute.  On other occasions, how the humble founder of Big Hollywood, Andrew Breitbart, has such a quick wit.  I mean, I can handle her getting jazzed about Dennis Prager but this is new stuff for me. For the longest time, she was just so liberal.  To this day, she’s a registered Democrat.  I asked myself, how did this happen?  How did she go from being a liberal woman from Buffalo to being charmed by the likes of O’Reilly?  As I mentioned, I may be somewhat to blame because truth be told, at one time I was a liberal guy from Beantown.  A man who voted for both Carter and Clinton.  There, I said it. 

Somewhere along the line, I began slowly waking up.  I started to look at things a little differently. Events were happening in our country that began getting my attention, coincidentally right around the time my wife and I met in 1991. First up were the hearings for Clarence Thomas followed by The World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Needless to say, I didn’t vote for Clinton in ‘96. I chose to sit it out.  I was frustrated. In retrospect, I believe the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in the summer of 2000, was the last straw. I was angry and didn’t like the way our country seemed to be blamed when we were the ones who were attacked.  Our sailors were murdered yet we were at fault?  No way.

9/11 happened and like millions of other Americans, I was never quite the same.  I found myself asking questions, looking for answers.  It was difficult.  We were a country at war.  A nation divided.  I began to notice the way certain stories were reported in the MSM and would look for alternative sources to get information.  The Internet was a good place to plug into.  I discovered Oriana Fallaci, David Horowitz and Thomas Sowell.  I would listen to talk radio, in particular, Dennis Prager, who seemed so clear.  He made sense. The fact that he had been a Democrat for so many years and was now a Republican interested me.

Hearing Ron Silver speak at the RNC in 2004 was a big one.  I remember thinking, wasn’t this actor a Democrat? A liberal?  How could this be?  Yet there he stood, speaking with such passion.  Ron Silver made it cool for me to call myself conservative.  As a result, I began looking once again at Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan. These men were the real deal.  Men of courage, conviction and I related to their values. I was ashamed of myself for having bad mouthed them years before.  I began to ask, how could I have been so blind?  The answer was easy.  I was growing up.

One other small incident happened during the election of 2004.  My wife and I were visiting with family (I’ll keep it loose as not to upset anyone).  I remember watching a program on CNN with a relative.  Something about President Bush and then I heard those words, “Republicans are evil.” It just hit me. I kept my mouth shut. For some reason, in that moment, all I thought of was my Republican brother-in-law, Johnny, one of the most decent men I know. A man of integrity and someone I respect.  Yet, I was silent knowing full well, if I opened my mouth, there was a good chance all hell would break loose. I kept quiet and didn’t like the feeling. It was personal. From that moment on I was pretty much done with liberals. (I wish to add, not all liberals, just the ones who pretend to be liberals but in truth are leftists. I despise leftists).

As a result, I began finding myself being drawn more and more to conservatives. During the 2008 election, I literally was coming home.  I tried to educate myself best as I could on the candidates and the issues.  My wife and I talked a lot.  We were united as a couple.  What became clear was the fact that many of our family members and friends didn’t seem to quite share our points of view.  On one occasion, I was actually accused, by a liberal friend, of brainwashing my wife.  There was a great deal of tension in the air. People were angry, still raging about the “stolen” elections of 2000.

Our country was divided and the historic election seemed to bring out the best and worst in people. The stakes were high. When my wife and I let it be known we were supporting McCain/Palin, it wasn’t good. We were drinking the kool-aid (so we were told). A particular challenge for me, as an actor, was to stay on the high road whenever the subject of politics came up with liberal friends. Man, it was rough.

The attacks on Sarah Palin made it even more difficult for me as I resented the hypocrisy of so called progressives, feminists and other like minded souls, who stood by while many in the MSM viciously went after her. Screw politics, I thought, enough is enough. I wanted to fight back, tear the faces off these miserable mutts. My Italian Irish American blood was boiling. Through it all my wife was there to help me stay focused. Keep my cool. Although, I must say to this day, I still get a little pissed off when I hear someone go after Governor Palin. She’s a decent woman, who I believe will come back wiser and stronger to lead this country on another day.

Ultimately we got through the election. The waters calmed briefly and on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as our 44th President of the United States. History was made and a new day in America had begun.

What will happen now? God only knows. I believe, as Americans, we will persevere and find our way back home. Time will tell.

As for those clouds on the horizon, I’m really just fine with my wife.  It’s cool.  Hannity, Breitbart, Prager, O’Reilly and all the rest of those guys are good men.  As I said, I’m somewhat (proudly) responsible for her taking a different look at how she views politics, although it was always her call. Alice to my Ralph Kramden. It’s been an interesting journey along the way and I look forward to better days.

My wife loves me.

Despite the fact I’m an actor and a conservative, she loves me.

Oh, and one more thing…Kath, I love you too.

Over the phone from his New York apartment, Ron rallied me to the cause. He told me that as a kid, as a native New Yorker, how proud he was of the United Nations. He loved all the flags out in front, and reminded me that this was the world’s institution for peace when it was created out of the ashes of World War II. We both fondly remembered the work that Audrey Hepburn and Danny Kaye did for UNICEF. And we both knew that that UN no longer existed.

Ron would send me books and articles and late night emails. We finally met at the iconic UN headquarters on First Avenue and 46th Street in May. We had obtained a rare invitation to film inside the UN, and guess what? Ron charmed everyone, while pointing out oh-so-diplomatically the institution’s many failings – in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in the Congo, and, in Israel. They never knew what hit them.

We filmed through the summer of 2005. I went to Israel to film the security fence and interview Natan Sharansky about the UN partition that helped create Israel. Ron later went to the memorial for the dead at Potocari, near Srebrenica in Bosnia, where UN peacekeepers sent over 8,000 men and boys out of the ‘UN safe zone’ to their eventual death at the hands of Serbian forces.

Ron would call me often and talk about my script. One night we had dinner at this favorite Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were martinis, lots of them, and wine with dinner. The next morning I dragged myself to his apartment on Park Avenue and there he was, making coffee, and bursting with ideas and energy and outrage over some particular UN scandal that I absolutely had to include in the script.

He kept it up right into the voice-over booth, long after the film, and script, had been locked. He wanted to make sure we’d given it our all – that this documentary was fair, and yet brutally honest.

That’s the Ron Silver I remember. He never quit.

Until I met him, he was just another Hollywood liberal loud mouth.

Yes, he was an award-winning actor and prolific film star. And, yes, he had strong political opinions. (The net sum of his positions added up to no partisan’s delight.)

But Ron Silver was also astoundingly intelligent. Ask anyone who knew him. He spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese and Spanish to go with having a Master’s Degree in Chinese History.

These facets combined to make Silver a most compelling public person, a natural leader and the type of man who automatically commanded respect and admiration no matter the social or vocational circumstance.

I understand why the left is so angry that he changed teams in the last years of his life.

How would you feel if someone you loved — he created the hip and powerful Creative Coalition, for crying out loud — left you in a very public way?

And even though Ron fell into the arms of so-called neo-cons and assorted right wingers, a conversation with him always conveyed that his principles were steadfast and that he was not in lock-step with his current suitors. He even proudly stood by the term “liberal” until the very end.

Ron Silver was always an individualist and a patriot.

By going against the Hollywood left in the thralls of its opposition to the Iraq War, and by supporting the always unpopular Republican Party and its demonized standard bearer, George W. Bush, Silver understood perfectly well that lifelong friends and job opportunities would be lost. Peers even walked away from him on the red carpet at film premieres.

Before New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote Silver off as another D-List celebrity supporting Bush, the former art critic praised his 1988 best actor Tony Award for David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” as “the performance of his career.”

“Mr. Silver’s frightening eruptions of snarling anger and crumpled demeanor in the face of defeat make what could be another Beverly Hills caricature into a figure of pathos,” Mr. Rich wrote.

Frank Rich later lobbied to get the life-long New Yorker to oversee a campaign to help revitalize Broadway.

Maybe the D in D-list stood for defector.

Last year in New York I had the privilege to hear Ron give an informal, impromptu speech to a group of his peers. Many knew he was fighting an unwinnable battle against cancer, so his words were packed and delivered like an Oscar winning performance. Ron stated eloquently that he had no regrets and had no choice but to stand for what he believed.

In an industry full of many flakes and followers, Hollywood benefitted greatly from having an actor as principled and committed as Ron Silver.

We first met many years ago in a Chinese restaurant whose name was known only to him, deep in the regions of downtown Manhattan.  He ordered off-menu in what was clearly imperfect Cantonese, but done with such conviction and commitment the waiter succumbed and willed himself to understand Ron’s every word (we later discovered he was a new hire from Taiwan who spoke only Mandarin but Ron was irresistible in any language)  In those early days our politics were antipodal (Ron would want that word in his appreciation and would not want its use marred by an in-text definition)  He still burned with the revolutionary zeal of the 60s, a fever that had drawn him to travel across the world in pursuit of an original ambition to become a diplomat — only to discover his kismet lay elsewhere (Kismet? He liked this kind of talk).  But even as an actor, the calling of public service was always close at hand.  It was perfectly logical that he became President of Actor’s Equity and equally predictable that, in that job, he would become the strong heroic voice of much needed change in the way that artists and management related and also lead Equity into the new era of collective bargaining and job definition – perhaps the first union leader to really understand what the 21st century would mean.  Almost obsessed with the millennium it made sense that his e-mail address would be NYC2K.  I looked forward to the Davos Conference each year, not for the pompous speeches of the world leaders but for Ron’s amusing pin-pricking of their hot-air balloons. 

And then came 9/11.  Ron had always been a “radical centrist” – someone who clung to the belief that the radical solutions could be found by driving the issues to a consensus that satisfied no one yet benefited all.  By the early hours of 9/12 he concluded that despite all the goodwill in the world there were forces loose with whom there could never be compromise….that the human imperfections which have given us the horrors of World War II were again alive and well in other garments.  It was never a matter of party or political allegiance.  It was only about love of country – indeed of western civilization, whose classics and aspirations he knew so well.  Having grasped this truth, he followed its logic with uncommon courage leading to the stage of the Republican convention, a place where the people of our profession rarely wish to be seen.  But he was never one to shirk from the battle; he was the good soldier always ready to shoulder his share of the burden no matter how onerous.  He was a truth-seeker. 

I have yet to address the major portion of his greatness: his extraordinary gift as an actor.  In this role, above all, was where we saw Ron the truth seeker.  Ron and I had long hoped to work together but problems of timing and scheduling had made that a very elusive dream.  But finally, in the early 90s, there came the perfect storm, and we were able to collaborate on Kissinger and Nixon.  In a long and durable career I have had the good fortune to work with some of the greatest talents of my day; but never have I encountered an actor as committed to his role as Ron was to Kissinger.  He did not imitate; on the contrary, as all good actors do, he found his own central truth about the man he was playing and internalized it.  But then in some strange alchemy that happens so very rarely, that internalization disappeared, the mantle of Henry Kissinger fell across the actor’s shoulders, and he became the man.  He did not portray him; he channeled him.  It was as powerful an illusion as any magic I had ever seen.  We would gather on the set to watch him go mano-a-mano with Beau Bridges, see how every inflection, every gesture was part of a perfect whole.  In his work as an actor, he infused each moment and line with the DNA of the whole creature.  There would be no false notes, no inconsistencies.  His work was seamless.  True art. 

But watch any Ron Silver film and you will see the mark of that genius is not limited to playing Kissinger.  You will see it in every performance to which he ever lent his craft.  He was as great as any of his day and much more. 

I will miss him dreadfully.  I will miss his cleverness, his biting sarcasm, his warmth and friendly concern, I will miss his love, I will miss the excitement of waiting for the revelation of his next performance.  And all Hollywood is impoverished by the passing of Ron Silver, a man of great courage, clear vision, a true artist who is a model for all who seek to balance career with integrity and plain human decency. 

Death enjoyed a rich harvest Saturday night; I shall remember this truly great man.  Ron Silver, Alla v’shalom.