Wolfgang Ischinger’s life-long bond with America began at 16, when he arrived in Watseka, a small town in Illinois’s Iroquois County.
Now 79, the German chair of the Munich Security Conference, a major annual gathering of US and European security policymakers beginning on February 13, spent his final year of high school there on a programme funded by the American Field Service, a foreign exchange association.
Ischinger was treated “like a son” by his host family and spent “days glued to the house’s black and white television” following the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963. “It was my first exposure to America, global politics and drama — a life-shaping experience,” he recalls.
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