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THE MAN ON WHOM NOTHING WAS LOST: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill,
by Molly Worthen. Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp.
On university campuses there is very often a professor who is also
a legend. He (it is usually a man) is learned, but also worldly; he projects an aura of authority suggesting some deeper intimacy
with real life. His courses are listed in history, literature or political science, but his real subject is himself. Each
lecture feels like a rite of initiation. The bureaucracy must find a way of coping with students who want to take all of their
electives with him.
Charles Hill -- a former Foreign Service officer who served in important positions under Henry
Kissinger and George Schultz - has for a few years now taught a class at Yale University called Grand Strategy. Young aspirants
to the diplomatic corps flock to it. His disciples are transfigured by the experience and copy down his blackboard diagrams
as keys to the secrets of world power. Molly Worthen, a recent Yale graduate, was one of Hill's junior illuminati, and her
book The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is an authorized biography of the great man.
But it is also a quest
for the source of his greatness -- not to mention a meditation on the inner meaning (to her) of that quest. It is, in other
words, both the reconstruction of an academic cult of personality and the most lasting of its symptoms. The author has some
literary gifts, but they have not ripened; her prose is garrulous and repetitive, and she tends to mistake sententious comments
(Hill's and her own) for profound thought. The result is not a book so much as it is an alumni-magazine profile gone horribly,
horribly wrong.
Hill himself does not seem to be at fault. The word "modest" might not apply, but he does seem to understand
that his career, while distinguished in its way, is of decidedly minor interest. His place in the history books will be as
the source of raw material used in a footnote: Throughout his term as executive assistant to Schultz, Hill kept handwritten
notebooks running to more than 20,000 pages, some of which ended up as evidence in the Iran-Contra investigations.
Hill
managed not to reveal some pertinent notes to investigators. (Worthen puts on a pro-forma display of brow-furrowing over his
ethics in this matter. But she dutifully parrots the conservative line that executive privilege is now menaced by a "liberal
media elite.")
The case of the missing notebooks is, perhaps, the most exciting moment in the entire book. Hill's
life was that of a functionary who moved behind the scenes -- analyzing Chinese newspapers from the mainland during the 1960s,
for example, or writing the speeches through which Kissinger sought to convey to the world that he possessed a moral center.
Such work was challenging, no doubt, and amply rewarded with inside-the-Beltway status. It did not make for a happy
home life. Hill comes across as a single-minded careerist who did not notice his wife's alcoholism until she mentioned it
during the final days of their marriage. If not for the element of hero worship pervading the book, one might suspect an element
of sarcasm in Worthen's title, which is borrowed from Henry James' injunction to be "one of the people on whom nothing was
lost."
There is, in all of this, the substance of a good novella; but as a biography, it reads like the story of a
Machiavelli who never got around to writing The Prince. Worthen insists (in the rapt tones of a true believer) that
Hill's career has fitted him to be an excellent and life-transforming professor. In his lectures, she says, Hill transcends
the limits of normal university teaching, where students are dissuaded from "reading the Western canon and practicing the
art of sweeping judgment, but rather digging claustrophobic holes in some untold corner of the human experience, perhaps the
history of the New York subway line number 9, or the changing role of laundresses in Jakarta."
Be that as it may,
something is missing from Worthen's gale-force proclamations of wonder at the capacity of "Charlie" to bestride the world
like a colossus. There is nothing resembling a substantial idea in the entire book. Worthen presents Hill as a neoconservative
guru. But her portrait is that of a mind bearing less resemblance to the political philosopher Leo Strauss than a walking
edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
Banalities pass as insights. "This is not to say," she writes
at one point, "that Charlie does not fear for the fate of human character." (Gosh, big guy, we do appreciate your concern
and will all try to do better.)
Even with such depths to plunge, the author never forgets herself entirely. Or at all,
really. The narrative flow is regularly interrupted by her musings on the difficulties of biographical research, the changing
estimate of Charlie's character, and invocations of how awesome Grand Strategy is (so awesome, in fact, that it need never
be defined). She also indulges in a considerable amount of "my generation" babble: "We sit in coffee shops and complain about
the doldrums of 'real jobs,' the stress of having to commit to a career that won't ever let out for the summer," etc.
This
is not a biography, but a study in self-absorption by proxy. The publisher ought to be ashamed. The manuscript should have
been left in a drawer, where it might embarrass the author 10 years from now, and in private.
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