President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden attended a private memorial service in New York on Monday for the late Ambassador Donald Blinken, the father of Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to the White House.
The elder Blinken served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary during the Clinton administration and died in late September at the age of 96. His father, Maurice Blinken, was reportedly a key lawyer in lobbying the U.S. government to back the creation of Israel.
DONALD BLINKEN, FATHER OF SECRETARY ANTONY BLINKEN, DEAD AT 96
The Biden’s traveled to the memorial Monday morning, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, after spending the weekend away from the White House. Biden had traveled to Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday after campaigning in Pennsylvania, and the first lady also campaigned in New Hampshire and New York on Saturday.
Secretary Blinken told the New York Times in September that his father “was of a generation and of a temperament where you didn’t necessarily communicate everything or share everything — you just did.”
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In 2020, he cited his father as a “role model and hero” and the driving force behind his own diplomatic career, which he reiterated in a statement on his father’s passing.
“Dad inspired me to public service. He lived with decency, dignity, and modesty,” Blinken wrote on Twitter. “He loved his wife Vera and his family. He built a wonderful life and gave me a wonderful life. I love you dad.”
