Volume 51, Number 19 · December 2, 2004
James Chace (1931–2004)
By Ronald Steel
James Chace, who died of a heart attack in Paris in October just a week shy of his seventy-third birthday, examined the foreign affairs of the nation with sharp insights and finely chiseled words. Newspaper obituaries referred to him as a 'foreign policy thinker,' a description that sounds both vague and ponderous. In fact, he was neither. Rather he moved with a light touch and a flashing saber through the slough of muddy dissimulation in which public officials bury their actions and their purposes. In dozens of articles for magazines and newspapers—eighteen in this journal since 1981—and in nine books (not to mention a novel and a memoir) he offered uncommonly sensible insights into the way the world worked, and why the United States so often managed to confound its own interests.
Feature, 1205 words
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