Memorial Service Remarks for Bill Maynes

Memorial Service Remarks for Bill Maynes

By Thomas L. Hughes, September 10, 2007

St. Albans Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C.

As Henry David Thoreau’s life was drawing to a premature end,

he was asked whether he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied that he was not aware that they had ever quarreled.

Bill Maynes was not a quarreler either, even with his fellow mortals. Time, of course, is out of joint this morning. Bill should have spoken at my memorial service, not I at his. In my old age at the German Historical Institute, I have learned that in certain circles the accepted ritual requires you to notify your memorial speakers in advance. If relationships later on become strained, you let the speaker know that he has been taken off your list. But Bill and I remained the closest of friends, so here I am without reprieve.

In my own career, the recruitment of Bill Maynes is one of the credentials that makes me most proud. Ideally, of course, when it comes to recruiting, I looked first to my home state of Minnesota where more people per thousand are absorbed with public policy than in any other place on earth. Bill was from Greater Minnesota, one of our near abroad, born just over the border in South Dakota. Actually, Gertrude Stein was probably thinking of South Dakota when she famously wrote: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.”

It probably helped make Bill Maynes what he was. Maybe something out there on the lingering frontier still fosters courage. Remembering Bill today, we naturally think of courage. I think especially of three kinds of courage this morning: the courage of beginning again after adversity, the courage of speaking truth to power, and the courage of holding fast to one’s own convictions.

The first is physical, the second is intellectual, and the third is moral. I need not say much about the first – the least volitional but the most dramatic. Bill endured outrageous bad luck physically. Other men his age, if cut down in the prime of life, would easily have succumbed to blasted hopes and ruined expectations. But Bill regularly rebounded from his awful struggles and near death experiences.

Bill’s final productive years as President of the Eurasia Foundation were a tribute to this resiliency. Only a few months ago I was among those who marveled at one of his last platform presentations. At a meeting of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, he was supposed to introduce a well known expert on Central Asia who, at the last minute, failed to show up. A hundred or more retired diplomats and generals were expectantly waiting. They clamored for Bill to substitute for the no-show with an impromptu speech on the same subject. Bill effortlessly complied and delivered a flawless, spectacular performance.

Over these last sixteen years when Bill lived on borrowed time, courage also became a family enterprise. I think of Gretchen’s devotion and self-sacrificing presence, the gift of a kidney from Charles, and Stacy’s unwavering encouragement. We celebrate Bill’s grace under pressure and his family’s steadfast support.

But physical courage is not how Bill himself would chiefly want to be remembered. Two other kinds of courage – intellectual and moral ones – would claim priority. The deteriorating policy environment of the last quarter century threw up new obstacles that demanded courage from anyone attempting to speak truth to power – that is to say, from anyone trying to facilitate linkages between serious knowledge and serious action. Bill’s professional life, both inside and outside government, was situated at that nexus where information and policy intersect.

His Carnegie years in New York, his stint as Assistant Secretary of State and his editorship of Foreign Policy all placed him in a brokerage position between scholars and decision makers. In all these posts Bill tried to get the knowledge community to produce policy relevant research and get the policy community to absorb it.

But Bill was also self-aware. He knew he lived in a world of journalists and politicians, academics and policymakers, which is to say the champion egoists of the day. And he labored here in Washington, a city so obsessed with the present that anyone who can remember last year’s news is viewed as understanding the full sweep of human history.

Bill typically took comfort in the obverse side of this coin. He rejected pessimism because he knew that a week is a long time in politics. He also enjoyed puncturing the pomposities of public life. Like the French philosopher La Bruyere, he often saw life as a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. So he thought with his feelings and missed nothing.

Much as Bill enjoyed being an assistant secretary in the Carter administration, he saw at first hand what happens when lack of knowledge can wreck the best of intentions. Inside the government, he bent every effort to assure that policymaking was based on real information rather than preconception. Yet sometimes he found himself caught between pressures to be a team player and his determination that all relevant views should be heard.

In contrast to some recent office holders, he had the courage not to enlist in dubious causes through misplaced loyalty. Bill came away from the Carter years feeling keenly that there was no historical necessity why the liberal hour had to be the amateur hour.

Bismarck once defined the first task of a policymaker as “foreseeing as accurately as possible the way in which other people are going to react.” Among his many talents, Bill had this gift of thinking sideways. His mind worked easily from association to association, instinctively making connections and grasping relationships. He rarely missed those peripheral angles of vision that reflect overall reality. Today, if we ask ourselves how to handle complexity, paradox and ambiguity, how to minimize the contradictions and arrest the polarizations, and how to secure and hold the vital center, we come back again and again to the gift of thinking sideways.

Unfortunately, in the years of Bill’s professional eminence, thinking sideways paid fewer and fewer policy dividends. Despite his magazine’s awards for excellence, it became ever more difficult to speak truth to power when power refused to listen. Bill became editor in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan became President. This may have been morning in America for many, but it ushered in years of twilight for the bipartisan political culture that had typified the two decades after World War II.

In those earlier bygone days, two cultures, more or less with mutual respect, struggled for influence on US foreign policy – the security culture and the equity culture. As editor, Bill became increasingly alarmed at their growing imbalance – at the security culture’s triumphalism and the equity culture’s walking wounded. The truculent swagger of today’s officialdom appalled him. He was equally appalled at the impotence of the equity culture and the faintheartedness of many associated with it.

Domestically, Bill watched the steep decline in political civility and the mushrooming of incompatible views of the world. The habit of thinking sideways, once taken for granted, was squandered in favor of the vertical stove-piping of belligerent attitudes.

Consequently, as editor, Bill faced in increasingly tough task. He published scores of articles chosen for their relevance to official discussions, but often those discussions themselves never occurred. We ended up with very little knowledge propelling very little statecraft. In recent years, policy itself has been driven by the new wisdom from Texas that all you will find in the middle of the road is a dead jack rabbit. Bill courageously fought against these trends. He persisted, against all the odds, in speaking truth to power.

Finally, in addition to the courage of beginning again after adversity and the courage of speaking truth to power, Bill had a third kind of courage: the courage of holding fast to his own convictions. For all his broadmindedness as a knowledge purveyor, facilitator and conciliator, he was not a compromiser when it came to his own steadfast beliefs. He remained an unrepentant, liberal internationalist, convinced of the indispensability of that perspective to American foreign policy. Indeed, its retrieval was central to his moral outlook.

It is a sad commentary that the championing of liberal convictions in America should have required courage. But as Bill watched the center of our politics move farther and farther away from the center of world politics, he felt that precious historic American ideals were in genuine jeopardy. He also lamented that so many of his contemporary fellow citizens had neither knowledge of, nor curiosity about, the inhabitants of the increasingly anti-American world outside.

Bill persisted in trying to bridge those worlds constructively. But nothing shook his liberal convictions – not even our new paradoxes of liberal hawks versus realist disengagers, or jihadist majorities versus authoritarian secularists. In speaking out, he remained a symbol of liberal forthrightness at a time of political intimidation when many of his liberal contemporaries were busy developing equivocation as a preferred art form.

At a time when the nation’s leaders made liberalism a dirty word and dismissed internationalism with contempt, Bill embraced his liberal international convictions fervently in articles, on television, at professional conferences. and in public forums. This too took courage and occasionally it brought penalties. But Bill remained unequivocal. The integrity of his moral compass was always there, and it was always accompanied by his unfailing personal decency and his good humor about the human condition.

“A great empire and little minds go ill together.” So said Edmund Burke more than two centuries ago. In a precautionary testament written two years ago, Bill wrote: “Do I have regrets? One principal one. I depart amidst our collapsing dreams of empire. I regret that I and some of my friends could not advance arguments sufficiently persuasive to spare the country from this imperial folly. I leave not unhopeful, however. America’s brief bid for world hegemony has been so botched that it seems only a matter of time before the country returns to its senses.”

It is not easy to combine these last two kinds of courage – speaking truth to power and holding fast to one’s own convictions. They require a double commitment – to mental breadth and moral depth, to intellectual outreach and inner certitude. But when that rare combination does occur, it sets one apart from the crowd. As Isaiah Berlin concluded in one of his greatest essays: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man.”

Bill Maynes unflinchingly showed us what being civilized is all about.

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