The man on whom nothing was lost, part 2
In the eyes of his former student and current biographer Molly Worthen, Yale Professor Charles Hill is the man on whom nothing was lost. I can understand her point of view; I have seen Professor Hill draw on a seemingly comprehensive knowledge of literature, history and politics to address the issues of the day.
Moreover, having served at the right hand of Secretaries of State Kissinger and Shultz after a distinguished career as a diplomat, Professor Hill also brings the practical experience that lends judgment to his learning. Together with Professors John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, Professor Hill has revived the study of Grand Strategy at Yale. One can easily understand why a student would want to get to know him better and figure out what makes him tick.
Molly Worthen first wrote about Hill in Gaddis's course on biography. She chose Hill as the subject of her course paper. When Hill opened up to her, making himself and his papers available to her, she kept at the subject until she had written a full-scale biography. Earlier this month Worthen's The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill was published. Last week the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed Worthen's book in "The guru who taught how to rule the world." The Chronicle reviewer wrote:
As a Yale freshman in Charles Hill's class in history and politics, Molly Worthen had the chance to inspect a bust of Vespasian, a Roman emperor who founded an influential dynasty. Worthen came away thinking that her professor looked quite like the esteemed ruler. By the end of the semester she had upgraded her opinion. "Charles Hill is God," she wrote on the inside cover of her notebook. So began a five-year fascination that has culminated in this surprisingly stimulating biography about a man few people have ever heard of.Novelist Daniel Akst opens his review of Worthen's book in the Boston Globe (inaccessible to nonsubscribers) with condescending skepticism; he observes that "if ever a book arrived begging to have its block knocked off, this is surely it." Then Akst expresses his admiration for the book's transcendence of the pitfalls inherent in Worthen's project:Hill was not your run-of-the-mill Ivy League professor. In his 40 years as a professional diplomat, he advised men such as Henry Kissinger and Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz. A stint in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs won him a reputation as a staunch supporter of Israel and its right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Later he became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal.
At Yale, his conservative credentials made him a guru for students who begrudged what they saw as a liberal bias among the university's humanities faculty. His mystique reinforced their awe. Hill rode a Harley-Davidson and was rumored to have a secure line to Washington in his office. Students looking for clear answers to thorny problems quickly fell under his spell because his worldview admitted no uncertainty about anything. He was on a mission, and it found its highest expression in a seminar called Grand Strategy, which, as Worthen approvingly writes, "was not to be another class in a fun but impractical liberal arts education."
Grand Strategy was designed as vocational training for people who fancied themselves future chief executives, foreign-policy architects, diplomats or leaders of the free world. It was co-taught by left-leaning Paul Kennedy and centrist John Gaddis, but the underlying program was aimed at returning to an older idea of the academy. There would be no "digging claustrophobic holes in some untold corner of the human experience, perhaps the history of New York subway line number 9, or the changing role of laundresses in Jakarta," as Worthen dismissively describes her school's typical offerings.
Instead these precocious grand strategists would learn how to make sweeping judgments about the modern world by studying the lessons of the Peloponnesian War, Otto von Bismarck and the whole lineup of Dead White Men purportedly under attack by advocates of political correctness. When Hill occupied the center of attention, which in Worthen's telling seems like most of the time, the seminar became the very thing many academics have grown leery of: an exposition on "the righteousness of American power, properly wielded." (Unsurprisingly, Worthen notes that the students who criticized this philosophy most cogently were those from other countries.)
Shifting her focus back and forth between the classroom and her subject's life history, Worthen deftly pieces together the odyssey that led Hill to his ideological worldview. Aided by Hill's decision to grant her access to 25,000 pages of meticulous notes detailing everything from his time as Kissinger's speechwriter to the failure of his marriage, Worthen crafts an astute portrait of a person who shaped the thoughts of powerful men while always concealing himself in the margins.
Most biographies focus on public figures; this is a rare and insightful look at the way intellectual influence can be wielded by the clever people in their shadows. Worthen's navigation through Hill's childhood and early career ably plumbs the man's psychological depths, but historians will value this book most for its section on Iran-Contra. Hill's position as Shultz's adviser -- and one insider who nimbly avoided indictment -- gave him a unique vantage point to witness the marginalization of the State Department under President Reagan, which laid some of the groundwork for the scandal. Poring over thousands of Hill's exhaustive notes, Worthen illustrates the unprecedented power shift that allowed a cadre of low-level National Security Council staffers like Oliver North to carry off a "bureaucratic coup d'etat" inside of the "most powerful government in the world."
Yet the people behind those "black ops" weren't necessarily that different from Hill. They were conservative loyalists with grand ideas, too, and were just as inclined to view the globe as a strategic board game -- sometimes with tragic consequences for the ordinary people serving as pawns. Although Worthen's sympathy toward her subject's politics colors some sections of the book, she is rightly apprehensive about where his beloved grand strategies can lead. After all, several of Hill's intellectual allies and colleagues figure prominently in America's current neoconservative program. Men such as Paul Wolfowitz -- also a longtime dweller in the margins -- have finally brought their big ideas to bear upon the world, with the backing of heavy artillery and combat troops.
"The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost" is about how one person became so certain about everything that ideas could end up mattering to him more than people. That Worthen is able to trace that course while revealing the rich humanness within him is a laudable and illuminating achievement.
It is thus all the more astonishing when the realization dawns, before very long, that there is something special going on here. The man who comes across at first as faintly ridiculous begins to gather to himself the power of tragedy. The callow author and her sophomoric outlook begin to seem--well, practically magisterial. And the book, by the time it's over, turns out to be wonderful: a subtle, penetrating, and completely absorbing portrait not just of a difficult and brilliant man, but of his troubled family, the larger-than-life figures with whom he associated, and the enormous events he lived through. It's also the engaging record of a young woman's intellectual journey, and an oblique account of her perhaps not-altogether-conscious infatuation with her influential teacher...Suffice it to say that I think Worthen's book will be of interest to many of our readers.Deeply conservative, marinated in Herodotus, and a witness to the ugliness and glory of diplomacy from the inside, Hill has devoted himself to a single mission in life: defending the cause of Western civilization against enemies without and within.
But he chose to accomplish this by wielding power invisibly; working behind the scenes first at the State Department, for which he labored in Vietnam, Israel, and Washington, and later at Yale, where he turned his attention to the young.
A great many on campus disapproved. Rather than learning how to wield power, students were supposed to learn how to empower the downtrodden--not "reading the Western canon and practicing the art of sweeping judgment, but rather digging claustrophobic holes in some untold corner of the human experience, perhaps the history of New York subway line number 9, or the changing role of laundresses in Jakarta."
Worthen is with Hill at least this far, but in the course of her research comes to see firsthand what she must always have known, which is that there is much more to a teacher's life than the distillate on offer in a classroom. Judging Hill's professional life isn't easy, and Worthen is appropriately judicious in doing so. His insistence on remaining behind the scenes makes the extent of his influence difficult to judge, though he left behind an almost unbelievably detailed record of his doings. Even his compulsive note-taking left an ambiguous legacy.
Not only did it get him in trouble with the Iran-contra special prosecutor (Hill left the State Department soon after that fiasco), but it also serves as a lesson to future Grand Strategists not to put anything in writing unless carefully premeditated.
With cooperation from Hill, access to his family, and a mountain of documentary evidence, Worthen crosses the border between Professor Hill and Charlie with the customary escort of anxiety and guilt, and when she gets there discovers a self-described "occluded person." The professor has few friends, was as much a workaholic as his wife is portrayed an alcoholic, and ignored problems at home until his marriage of more than 30 years fell to a heartbreaking collapse. The man who emphasized the importance of observing everything seems to have missed the forest for the twigs.
Worthen is a clearly brilliant student who overcomes a certain lack of perspective with a remarkable combination of youth, wisdom, confidence, and learning, all of them manifest thanks to literary skills advanced far beyond her years. By the end of the book I'm not at all sure what Charlie Hill and his Grand Strategy can tell us about the world. But I can't wait to find out, in the years ahead, what Molly Worthen will have to say.
