I have had a conversation with Eliot A. Cohen, the eminent scholar of international relations (who has worked in government as well). We have recorded a podcast, a Q&A, here. He spent 42 years in academic life. He has just written a piece for The Atlantic: “Farewell to Academe.” That piece is subtitled, “I leave with doubts and foreboding that I would not have anticipated when I completed my formal education in 1982.”
For years, Professor Cohen was on National Review’s masthead. He admired Bill Buckley, and the admiration was mutual. Buckley included a letter from Cohen in his 1992 book, In Search of Anti-Semitism.
Cohen works at CSIS — the Center for Strategic and International Studies — where he holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair. I say to him, “I associate Arleigh Burke with destroyers.” Yes, indeed. Burke has a class of them named after him.
As Cohen says, Burke was chief of naval operations in the ’50s and ’60s. “He was the last one,” says Cohen, “to really exercise direct control over the movement of ships.” Moreover, he was a World War II hero.
Among Eliot Cohen’s books is Supreme Command, published in 2002. His latest book is about Shakespeare: The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. We talked about this in a podcast last October.
In our new podcast, he tells me that, when he was in high school, he was fascinated by Henry Kissinger. Kissinger had mixed academia with policy. Cohen came to know Kissinger, of course.
Let me paraphrase some of what Cohen says:
He was a very charming man. He was an extraordinarily complicated man. There was both light and dark. I think there are two things that people miss about Kissinger.
First, he was a deeply patriotic man — patriotic in a way that only an immigrant can be. Especially someone who came to this country as a teenage refugee from Hitler. Though he often felt that Americans were terribly naïve about foreign policy, his love of our country was deep.
Second, he was very sensitive.
Professor Cohen, of course, elaborates.
Cohen studied at Harvard, though well after Professor Kissinger had left for government work. Who were his best teachers? Cohen names several. First, there was a grad student, Joseph Kruzel, who would meet a tragic end. In 1995, while serving as a Pentagon official, he was killed in Bosnia.
“My mentor was Sam Huntington, Samuel P. Huntington,” Cohen says, “who was probably the greatest political scientist of his generation, and who was unstintingly generous and helpful — though, I think, often perplexed at the directions I went in.”
Cohen further names James Q. Wilson, Harvey Mansfield, and Judith Shklar — and Stanley Hoffmann. This last “didn’t agree with me on anything,” being a man of the Left, “but, because I knew French and loved Balzac, he decided I was okay.” (Hoffmann was a formidable scholar of French culture and politics.)
As we talk, I ask Eliot Cohen an unfair question — a question that probably takes time to reflect on. And a question that can be interpreted in a number of ways. I ask him, “Who are the really impressive people you have met in Washington?” Cohen indulges me, mentioning several men and women — some of them well-known, others much less so.
At the end of his answer, he says this (and, again, I paraphrase, but closely):
Here’s one I got to know quite well and who bowled me over: John McCain. I wrote two pieces about him after he passed. He was a man with deep personal flaws, which he was the first to acknowledge, but he was also a hero, who was superlatively brave: the kind of man who inspired you to do your best for the country. Terrific sense of humor about himself, and about others.
When he passed, I quoted the poem that Rudyard Kipling wrote when he heard that Theodore Roosevelt had died. He called it “Great-Heart.”
(Kipling borrowed this word, this moniker, from John Bunyan.)
In his Atlantic essay, Cohen writes, “As a politically conservative young professor, I was in a minority — but a large one. More important, I never felt that my views would be held against me by my colleagues. Now I would not be so sure.” We pursue this matter in our Q&A. In the student body, there has been a marked change, he says. And faculty may cower, or accommodate, or both.
I relate to Cohen something that Gene Genovese told me. (Eugene D. Genovese was an important historian of the United States, especially of the South.) Genovese said something like this: My graduate students are as bright as ever. How could they not be? The human material never changes, generation to generation. But the thing is, they arrive at grad school not knowing anything. They have been failed by their prior education. I have to do a lot of remedial ed.
Cohen knows exactly what he meant. “You cannot assume that the students know basic 20th-century history,” he says. “You cannot assume that they know how to write effectively. That, to me, is one of the most troubling things.” Cohen says that students, bright as they are, don’t know how to put sentences together. “They have been failed by the system.” (I have noticed the same thing, in my corner of the world.)
There’s something else, says Cohen — “a more general societal thing.” It is this: “The stock of literary allusions and even just words has gone way down.” Yes.
We talk about world affairs: Israel and Ukraine, chiefly. Professor Cohen says any number of interesting, even bracing, things. I will cite just a few (though their context is important, and the context will be plain to podcast-listeners).
“The Israelis think about the population of Gaza the way a Londoner would have thought about the population of Hamburg in 1943, or of Berlin in 1944. Which means that the well of pity has been dried up.” (October 7 has had a convulsive effect, as how could it not?)
Conservatives are used to admiring, praising, and defending Benjamin Netanyahu. We have been doing it for decades. American conservatives still do it. “Muscle memory” is in place. But Israeli conservatives are another matter (to say nothing of Israelis at large). I think that Americans would be shocked at the contempt many Israeli conservatives feel for the prime minister. They can barely mention his name without spitting. In view of our “muscle memory,” I think Americans would be shocked.
Eliot Cohen, of course, follows these things intimately, and I will paraphrase a bit of him:
I think Netanyahu is a disaster. He is a liar. He’s a very smart guy. Earlier in his career, he did some things that are quite commendable, including helping to clear the way for a lot of the economic growth that Israel has experienced. But he has been a complete and total disgrace as a wartime political leader. He hasn’t taken responsibility for anything. He has tried to shift the blame to others. He is truly the worst prime minister in Israeli history. He bears some responsibility for this catastrophe. It has been a top-to-bottom failure.
On Monday, Putin’s forces struck several targets in Ukraine, including a children’s hospital. The death toll is something like 50, so far. Rescuers are still sifting through rubble. Putin’s evil is so raw, it is almost comical (though never for his victims). Still, he has any number of supporters and excusers in free and democratic countries. I ask Cohen, almost plaintively, “Was it ever thus?”
“Oh, certainly,” he says. “I can dig up pictures for you of Nazi parades in Boston before World War II.” (Cohen grew up in Massachusetts.) “The Hakenkreuz dangling from buildings.” Also, “think of the excuses that people made for the Soviets. Think of the excuses they made for Mao. There’s something in human nature . . .”
We further talk about the flaming hatred that many in America have for Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Cohen says, among other things, something like this:
There are people who have never undertaken difficult, hazardous things. And to see somebody who is a comic actor rise to the occasion — it may call into question their own manhood.
“Hold their manhoods cheap,” Cohen’s man — and everyone’s man — Shakespeare says.
To talk with Professor Eliot A. Cohen is a pleasure and an education. He has been a boon to students, for these four decades. Again, our new Q&A is here.