From the issue dated June 25, 2004
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'Foreign Affairs' Loses a Longtime Editor and His Replacement in Row Over Editorial Independence
CHILE RECEPTION: A bitter public row over history, Henry A. Kissinger, and editorial independence at Foreign Affairs magazine led to one prominent editor's resignation last month and claimed his replacement last week. On June 11, Jeremy I. Adelman, a Princeton University historian hired to succeed Kenneth R. Maxwell as the magazine's book-review editor for the Western Hemisphere, resigned after only three weeks. Mr. Maxwell, a prominent historian of Brazil, had held that editing job at Foreign Affairs -- and a senior fellowship at its parent organization, the Council on Foreign Relations -- for 15 years. He quit in May, charging that the journal had bowed to pressure from Mr. Kissinger and cut short an exchange of letters about U.S.-Chile relations and the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat and prominent critic of the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Kissinger was secretary of state at the time of Mr. Letelier's death, in a car-bomb attack in Washington, and he is a former member of the council's Board of Directors. "The Council's current relationship with Mr. Kissinger evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about his actions as a public figure," Mr. Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter. The editor of Foreign Affairs, James Hoge Jr., denies those charges. He insists that the Chile debate went on longer than the magazine's typical letters-page skirmishes. Mr. Hoge does acknowledge that Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the council's board, called him at least once to convey Mr. Kissinger's displeasure with Mr. Maxwell's essays. (Among other things, Mr. Maxwell wrote that the State Department "knew much more about the atrocities committed in Chile than was admitted to at the time.") But Mr. Hoge says that Mr. Kissinger's unhappiness had no impact whatsoever on his editorial decisions. Mr. Adelman, who is a friend of Mr. Maxwell's, says that he had no initial qualms about filling the position, despite Mr. Maxwell's difficulties. But when news of the imbroglio broke on The Nation's Web site on June 3, he had second thoughts. "This position was, as a result of everything that was coming out, too stigmatized for me to do without spending a lot more time explaining why I was doing it at this juncture, in the wake of all the revelations," Mr. Adelman says. "And that's time that I just don't have." Unless the journal's editors take aggressive steps to clear the air about Mr. Maxwell's allegations and apologize for cutting the Chile debate short, he says, they are unlikely to recruit anyone "truly independent" to replace Mr. Maxwell. "My sense is that if someone of Jeremy Adelman's stature and breadth feels unable to do the job, Foreign Affairs will have difficulty attracting anyone of his stature," says John H. Coatsworth, a professor of history at Harvard University. Mr. Coatsworth and 10 other members of the council have written a letter, to be published in the magazine's September/October issue, arguing that the termination of the Chile debate "denied readers an opportunity to weigh competing views, contrary to the journal's policies and traditions." *** The controversy began when Mr. Maxwell's largely positive review of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New Press, 2003), by Peter Kornbluh, a senior researcher at George Washington University's National Security Archive, appeared in the magazine's November/December 2003 issue. Mr. Kornbluh's book is highly critical of Mr. Kissinger's role in U.S.-Chilean relations, which he calls "the ultimate case study of morality -- or the lack of it -- in the making of U.S. foreign policy." The following issue included a reply by William D. Rogers, who was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1974 to 1976. Mr. Rogers argued that Mr. Maxwell had failed to consider the shortcomings of Salvador Allende, the leftist president who was overthrown by General Pinochet in 1973, and omitted mention of Mr. Kissinger's private warning to Mr. Pinochet, in a 1976 meeting, about human-rights violations. Mr. Rogers's letter was accompanied by a riposte from Mr. Maxwell, which charged, among other things, that the State Department may have been negligent in heeding its own staff's warnings about potential international assassinations during the month before Mr. Letelier's killing. The March/April 2004 issue included a new missive from Mr. Rogers -- but this time, Mr. Maxwell was not invited to reply. Mr. Hoge says that he had promised Mr. Rogers the last word. In any case, he says, Mr. Maxwell's unpublished reply did not "advance matters much." Mr. Maxwell believes that pressure from Mr. Kissinger influenced that decision. At the council's holiday party in December, he says, both Mr. Hoge and Mr. Peterson told him directly that they had repeatedly heard from Mr. Kissinger. Mr. Hoge acknowledges that exchange, but he says that the decision to cut off debate was made in February. "During that time, I didn't talk to Pete Peterson, I didn't talk to Henry Kissinger, I didn't talk to anybody," he says. "These are editor's decisions, which I made. Period." Mr. Peterson, who is also chairman of the Blackstone Group, a capital-investment firm, says he called Mr. Hoge in December merely to convey Mr. Kissinger's unhappiness. "I didn't ask him to do anything," he says. "I'm the chairman of the organization. If a member calls, and he's unhappy about something, I don't think it's unnatural for me to say, 'Jim, this is your area. You deal with it however you see fit.' ... But that I would interfere with anything specifically like that is really an outrageous suggestion. I have great respect for Hoge and for the independence of that magazine." In July Mr. Maxwell will become a senior fellow at Harvard University's Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He sees the Foreign Affairs dispute as far from settled. "They could clear the air by simply publishing my reply," he says. Mr. Maxwell says that he departed with some reluctance: "Clearly I would not have left an extremely comfortable position at this stage of my life unless there were a serious question of principle." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 42, Page A25 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education