The death at age 78 of our oldest friend, coming as it does in a season when so many are thinking of generational change, is a moment to tell the story of what we like to call the world’s most powerful man. That’s how, during the early 1980s, we described Jim Rosenstein. If he were alive today, he would dispute this story — and so would anyone else who knew him. They’d insist that we have too lively an imagination. 

Then, again, too, Jim and we had been in the same grade in the  six-room elementary school in Mill River, Massachusetts. In those years we were constant cronies. One spring, we canoeed the swollen Konkapot River, starting at its headwaters behind our father’s house and taking us five miles downstream to the banks it passed on the farm owned by Jim’s father. We taught each other to paint, play the guitar, fish, and hit a tennis ball. We studied Hebrew together.

Our families celebrated Passover together in a welcoming town where we were the only Jews. We went to the same summer camp. Come ninth grade, Jim went off to prep school. Yet we both landed  in the same class at Harvard, by which time Jim had become serious about music. He was opposed to the war in Vietnam. Eventually Jim quit college and moved to France to study classical guitar under Nadia Boulanger.

To support himself, Jim worked as a simultaneous interpreter of French and English. So unerring was he, with his musical ear, that he was soon retained by France’s minister of finance. France was a member of what, in those days, was called the Group of Five, which also included America, Britain, Germany, and Japan. When the five ministers met, all agreed to speak English — save for France. Which is why when the G-5 gathered there were six persons in the room.

The ministers were powerful overseers of the world economy, no doubt, but they only served for a year or so. So the retained knowledge among the five wasn’t particularly high — except, we imagine, for their faithful interpreter, who, after working this stint for a while, became something of an institutional memory. When the ministers were stuck on what to do, we speculate, all eyes swiveled to the interpreter, the smartest person in the room.

We can’t prove that. No one ever told us that was the case.  Jim always denied it. Yet we detected — or imagined — a note of modesty in Jim. He denied that, too. For a newspaper editor who lived for the scoop, this was maddening. It came to a head in 1988 at Berlin, where we ran into him at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. We were among hundreds of scriveners trying to learn what the top finance ministers were up to.

One evening, Jim agreed to meet us for dinner. It would have to be late, he said, as the ministers were dining and he needed to interpret. Every reporter in town wanted to know what was being said by the ministers in private. Jim showed up for our repast. Just the two of us. We pressed him from every angle. We couldn’t get a single fact out of him — not one micron. “Was the word ‘gold’ uttered even once?” we asked. It was like talking to a black hole.  

That is, it was journalistic torture. Yet with each passing question it became clearer that Jim Rosenstein was not going to betray the interpreter’s obligation of confidentiality. We began to glimpse a new depth to his character. We joked about it years later. The astounding fact is that we never got a single electron of a single atom of a single molecule of information out of Jim. And how we admired our friend for it.

After some years, Jim left his freelance gig at the Finance Ministry and went to work for the new European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He then became spokesman for Toyota in Europe, then for Bentley at London. He and his Brazilian wife, Carolina, raised a son, Philip, whom we’d held on our lap during his bris at Paris. After Europe, they settled back in the Berkshires, where Carolina and Philip were with him when he died.

So was Jim, however briefly, really the most powerful man in the world? Everyone we know insists it couldn’t be true. Yet we’ll always imagine that when the stewards of the five leading economies were stumped, it was to their interpreter, our pal Jim, that they turned. We took to calling him the G-6. Jim, himself, denied it to the end. It’s our story, though, and we’re sticking to it — even if he never told us a thing. What, after all, are friends for?