I owe Manfred a lot

It has been a pleasure to see so many gracious tributes to Manfred Pagel on The Baron website. All of them so richly deserved. 

I can join the many who credit him with launching their journalistic careers. In my case, he propelled me from a trainee assignment in Vienna to running the East Berlin bureau at a time when Cold War tensions generated front page news almost every day. After that he sent me on to Moscow, where I had the chance to cover that utterly gripping period from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. So I owe him an awful lot.

I succeeded Manfred as European Editor in 1987 and I recall that he went out of his way to make the transition as easy and efficient as he possibly could. That was just typical of him. He remained a source of friendly advice and remarkable wisdom for many years after. ■