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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
James Chace: A Lost Voice for Sanity James Chace, editor of this journal from 1993 to 2000, and during the past decade a deservedly popular professor of international relations at Bard College, was best known to the wider reading public as a prolific writer on a wide range of topics dealing with American politics and, more particularly, with the history of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. But Chace knew Europe— certainly Western Europe—almost as well as his own country, and much of his writing invariably dealt with issues relating to transatlantic affairs. In fact, when he died suddenly in Paris in early October at the age of 72, he had just embarked on a major research project that was to lead to a fresh reexamination of the life and times of the Marquis de Lafayette. Those of us who were his long-time friends and sometime colleagues admired Chace—not least during the past 15 years, when he did his best writing—as much for the sophistication of his thinking on Ameri-ca’s foreign relations as for a writing style that, while reflecting his familiarity with the classics of Western literature, was unencumbered by orotundity or misplaced ideological fervor. There was no excess “fat” in any of his recent published work, least of all in his shorter pieces. A perfect example being the very last, and quite stunning, essay he wrote for the October 7, 2004, New York Review of Books, “Empire, Anyone?” which addressed with clarity and verve the ongoing debate over “preemption,” “prevention,” and the issue of unilateral U.S. military intervention. Perhaps, too, because he had been for many years a superb magazine editor—most notably at Foreign Affairs and the New York Times Book Review, as well as of World Policy Journal—Chace was an unusually good listener when it came to soliciting criticism about his own writing-in-progress. In that respect, he was the least thin-skinned writer I ever met, accepting even the most onerous suggestions not only with good grace but with genuine appreciation. Indeed, he was just a good listener, period, however much he himself loved to talk. Not surprisingly, then, some of the fondest memories I have of this most intelligent and thoughtful friend are associated with conversations the two of us had over the course of more than 30 years. I first met James—through my old Yale friend (and, already by this time, professor of European studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies) David Calleo’s good offices—late in 1972. During the previous three months, Calleo and I had been feeding ideas to Lewis Lehrman (another Yale College friend from a dozen years earlier, and now suddenly quite wealthy as the co-founder of the RiteAid drugstore chain) regarding the setting up of a foreign and economic policy research institute in New York City. In early December, an organizational meeting was held in the private dining room of a predictably stuffy New York men’s club, where a motley mix of 20 or so academic and business types—some friends of Lehrman’s, the others chosen by Calleo and myself—were supposed to launch officially the Lehrman Institute and appoint a couple of steering committees. Chace—invited to the dinner by Calleo, and at that time the fairly new managing editor of Foreign Affairs—was thus about to be anointed (somewhat reluctantly at first) as a charter member of the institute’s academic advisory board. And so I found myself sitting next to James at dinner. It proved to be a tiring evening because Lehrman spoke at length and not very coherently about the institute’s “mandate” and the ineffable virtues of the gold standard, his pet policy project. The evening’s special guest speaker was the Yale economist Robert Triffin, well known for his advocacy of a fixed-exchange-rate international monetary regime. When the formal speechmaking was over and the evening’s real “business” discussion began, Chace asked some good and difficult questions—accompanied by funny and politically incorrect asides to me. At first, I wasn’t sure exactly what to make of him; but by the end of the evening I knew that I had made a new, and very amusing, friend. Ten months later, the Lehrman Institute’s first series of seminars were launched in its elegant townhouse on East 71st Street. During the dozen or so years of its existence Chace was an integral part of the institute’s intellectual activities and instrumental in choosing many of its research fellows— mostly younger scholars whom we supported in the completion of their books-in-progress through small grants and “editorial” seminars over the course of a year. Early on, the fellows’ list included the likes of Ronald Steel, Robert Gilpin, Robert Skidelsky, Fouad Ajami, Charles Maier, Neil Sheehan, Alfred Stepan, and Tony Smith—who were not, shall we say, household names at the time of their fellowship appointments. Chace dutifully attended most of their seminars: which is to say, dozens upon dozens of sessions, year in and year out. He also helped me put together a monthly series of meetings specially geared to the needs of the editorial-cum-journalistic community, the Foreign Policy Roundtable, still going strong—though at a different venue—30 years later. All in all, because of his job at Foreign Affairs, and his many other useful connections at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chace was arguably the most valuable outside member of our studies committee. Yet, sadly, he was—it appeared to me— appreciated far less at his own institution, where some years later, and to his great chagrin, he was denied promotion to editor of Foreign Affairs. This for reasons that had next to nothing to do with his professional skills but very much to do with his refusal to massage the egos of certain members of the council’s self-important poohbahdom. At the emotionally charged and affecting memorial service held at the Century Club in mid-November, at least two of the speakers—both close personal friends of Chace’s—suggested that one of James’s most attractive traits was his unwillingness to linger over old slights or unhappy episodes from the past, allegedly dismissing, in conversation, all mention of such incidents with a disdainful wave of his hand. Actually, that’s not how I remember things; not that this made James any less endearing a person in my estimation. Quite the contrary: it simply showed him to be all the more human. Because time and time again, in our private conversations, he railed against those involved with Foreign Affairs who had both belittled him and egregiously misjudged him. Later on, I tried to make some sense out of the goings-on at the council, but all I ever came up with was that James’s legendary playfulness, his gossipy chattiness in social gatherings, and his inordinate fondness for sprinkling his conversation with French phrases made certain people uncomfortable. In the event, he had the last laugh on his detractors since—certainly as a writer—he was to do his best work only after leaving Foreign Affairs. In an eloquent and affectionate tribute to his close friend, published in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Ronald Steel rightly pointed out that “in dozens of articles...and in nine books...[Chace] offered uncommonly sensible insights into the way the world worked and why the U.S. so often managed to confound it own interests.” Steel was also correct in saying that Chace was never a slave to “models” of political behavior or to academic jargon, and that “for him there was no such thing as political ‘science.’” In truth, Chace was at heart more of an old-fashioned political economist, and traditional diplomatic historian, than any sort of theoretician. Yet I believe that Steel was mistaken in arguing that James “had little respect for chilly abstractions that professionals use to quantify conflict and ambition—abstractions like ‘national interest’ and ‘balance of power’ and ‘spheres of influence.’” To be sure, memorial tributes often say as much, if not more, about their authors than about the person actually being memorialized. That said, I know for a fact that James cared a great deal about some of these allegedly “chilly abstractions”: he and I spent many hours talking about them; and we even co-authored a couple of essays (published in this journal) dealing with these very subjects. Moreover, in our very last extended conversation, over lunch on the day before he left for Paris, James returned to a topic— dear to me, as he well knew—that had always fascinated him: what made someone like Lord Palmerston, the renowned, largely successful, but often vilified mid-nineteenth-century British foreign minister, “tick”? (I find it ironical that, in his published eulogy of Chace, Steel described his friend as one who had “always [been] a patriot and a realist”—which is exactly how I would describe Palmerston as well.) James now asked me to remind him of the particular historical setting that had led Palmerston to make his famous pronouncement (in 1848, in the course of a House of Commons debate, in which he was responding to his “Russophobe” critics who were accusing him of being “too soft” on the tsar’s government) with words to the effect that England had no eternal allies or perpetual enemies but only permanent interests. An inspired—and subsequently much-quoted— pronouncement, to be sure; yet one that can also sound utterly banal, except when recognized for what it really was: a not-so-subtle scolding of all those single- (and simple-) minded zealots forever stuck in ideological ruts—in this instance, shouting “love France, hate Russia,” and pretending that this was useful foreign policy advice for Palmerston to follow.1 In his most recent published work dealing with America’s foreign relations, Chace—a classical liberal in his politics if ever there was one—essentially propounded a “realist” vision, but one closer to the earlier, and highly nuanced, George Kennan (of the 1947 “X” article) than to the fundamentally amoral Henry Kissinger or the dogmatic “Straussians” populating the current Bush administration. There was, too, a strong ethical dimension to Chace’s thinking about U.S. foreign policy, though it was most certainly not “faith-based.” Chace was so sensitive to human foibles (including inertia, mental laziness, not to speak of outright intellectual cowardice) as to be unfailingly suspicious of all national leaders (Gladstone, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter) claiming to know how to do away with the world’s evil ways by pursuing a “virtuous diplomacy.” In articulating his own “credo,” Chace borrowed most often, it seemed to me, from two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Theodore Roosevelt; from Walter Lippmann, the legendary sage and newspaper columnist whose advice was sought by presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson; and from Dean Acheson, the secretary of state he most admired. James was fond of citing Adams’s admonition, contained in his July 4, 1821, address to the House of Representatives—at a time when private pressure was building up on the U.S. government to “do something” to assist the courageous but beleaguered Greek rebels who had recently raised the flag of independence against their Ottoman overlords— that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Chace appreciated Adams’s lack of misplaced sentimentality: for not only was there—at that point—no clearly discernible U.S. national interest (security or otherwise)in the Balkans or the Near East, there was very little America could have done to help the Greeks even if purely humanitarian considerations had captured the public’s fancy. Which is not to say that Chace was an unreconstructed anti-interventionist; far from it. He knew perfectly well that what may have been true in 1821 was no longer necessarily so 170 years later. And so both he and I took exception to our good friend Michael Mandelbaum’s exaggeratedly “agnostic” views regarding American involvement in the post-1991 Yugoslav civil wars (“foreign policy as social work”), arguing instead not only that a destabilized Balkan peninsula run by thugs was inimical to U.S. (and NATO) interests but also that an early and forceful American (or NATO) intervention would have probably stopped the criminally irresponsible Serb and Croat leaders, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman, dead in their tracks and denied them the chance to pursue their genocidal expansionist dreams. Chace simply insisted that the United States should be careful in choosing its “causes”— and in identifying the threats to its well-being, making sure that adequate means were always at hand to achieve the desired ends, insolvency and overextension being the two traps always to be avoided. This, of course, was the principal message he also drew from a close reading of Lippmann’s writings— along with the need for American diplomacy to aim at all times for a judicious balance between prudence, firmness, and restraint. Chace admired Theodore Roosevelt’s “muscular diplomacy” in large part because it was grounded in a pragmatist’s appreciation of the dynamics of great-power politics and of the benefits, invariably accruing to the United States as well, of a smoothly functioning (and, ideally, self-correcting) balance-of-power system. James also respected TR because he saw in him “certainly a moralist, but not a self-righteous one.” My own sense is that James wished that the United States would continue playing the role of benevolent hegemon within the larger community of democratic states while resisting the “imperial temptation” of imposing some sort of American “model” upon the rest of the world, worst of all by a too-frequent recourse to the use of military force. The received wisdom among Chace’s friends holds that his biography of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, published in 1998, was his magnum opus. I believe—and had told James as much—that Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World had turned out to be a very good but not a great book, though through no fault of the author’s. The problem lay with his publisher, or at least with the bean counters in the business office who early on decided that the book should not run to more than 500 printed pages, including endnotes; otherwise, it was felt, it would not sell. This was sheer nonsense, and although James knew it he could do nothing about it because of the particulars of his contractual agreement. What was truly exasperating was the fact that James was forced to delete passage after passage containing important biographical information as well as detailed reconsiderations of Acheson’s policies, based on his unlimited access (thanks to his friendship with the Acheson-Bundy family) to Acheson’s private papers. We are talking about an additional 75–100 pages of text (at most) that would have allowed James to really dot the i’s and cross the t’s in ways he was eminently capable of doing. Instead, time and again, he had to race through complicated topics and issues, both personal and public, simply to meet an artificial space limit.2 We did speak, briefly, of Acheson during our last luncheon conversation. Naturally, James still thought very highly of him, not least because he saw in Acheson “a pragmatic realist...always distrustful of universal solutions.” Not surprisingly, we also talked at some length about the upcoming presidential election. James did not get to see the New Yorker’s scathing editorial on George W. Bush’s foreign policy record (“one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence”), but to me he himself characterized it as having been both inept and woefully wrongheaded. I’m sure he would have been thoroughly disappointed by the election results but energized afresh by the challenges lying ahead. Notes
*Nicholas X. Rizopoulos is academic director of the Honors College at Adelphi University and a consulting editor of World Policy Journal. He also chairs the Foreign Policy Roundtable at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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