The scholar-diplomats: American foreign policy scholars in power, 1948--1970

Philip Jessup, George Frost Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walt Whitman Rostow, Henry Kissinger and Morton Halperin, six prominent scholar-diplomats, provide insight into the interaction between theory and practice in American Cold War diplomacy. All of these men were credentialed scholars who achieved a position where they could shape the making of American foreign policy; they were, or became members of the foreign policy elite. As individuals and as a group, their careers are illustrative of the growing interaction between the academy and those who made foreign policy in the wake of World War Two and during the Cold War.; The results of these scholars' efforts in the policy realm were often tragic in a classical sense. Though occasionally showing flashes of brilliance, their efforts were often marked by hubris, with the results that often differed from those hoped for or expected. Not least, they are exemplars and significant agents of an ironic intertwinement of the American state and the American academy, a collaboration that provided only modest benefit to the state while at the same time distorting their scholarship. The institutional structures that empowered them tended to compromise their independence and critical faculties -- the very elements of scholarship that would make them seem useful as diplomats. Further, their rise to power as academics with no professional background as diplomats was concurrent with what George Kennan would lament as the decline of the professional diplomat and the failure to build coherent, professional state institutions for the Cold War era.