'Foreign Affairs' Finds Replacement, Finally, for Editor Who Quit in Dispute Over Kissinger's Role
01/27/2005
David Glenn,
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Eight months after Kenneth R. Maxwell angrily resigned from the editorial staff of Foreign Affairs in a dispute over articles about Henry A. Kissinger's dealings with Latin American despots, the magazine has appointed someone to take over Mr. Maxwell's former duties as book-review editor for the Western Hemisphere. Richard E. Feinberg, a professor of international political economy at the University of California at San Diego, has stepped into the role beginning with the March/April issue.
The hiring of Mr. Feinberg ends a difficult search. In June, Jeremy I. Adelman, of Princeton University, resigned three weeks after accepting the job, saying that the cloud surrounding Mr. Maxwell's departure would create too many distractions for a successor (The Chronicle, June 25).
Mr. Feinberg has had a long career as a scholar and government official -- and some of his early work placed him close to precisely the events that were the subject of the quarrel that led to Mr. Maxwell's exit.
Mr. Maxwell resigned from the magazine last May, after its top editors cut off publication of a series of letters between himself and William D. Rogers, who served as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs under Mr. Kissinger during the Ford administration. Mr. Maxwell says that the editors prematurely ended a fruitful discussion -- and that they did so wrongly, under pressure from Mr. Kissinger, who has a long association with the Council on Foreign Relations, the magazine's publisher.
James Hoge Jr., the magazine's editor, acknowledged to The Chronicle in June that he had been told of Mr. Kissinger's unhappiness with Mr. Maxwell's letters, but asserted that the complaints had nothing to do with his decision to end the exchange.
In the final published letter, Mr. Rogers disputed Mr. Maxwell's interpretation of a diplomatic cable sent on September 20, 1976 -- the day before Orlando Letelier, a Chilean dissident and former ambassador to the United States, was assassinated in a car bombing in Washington.
Mr. Maxwell had suggested that the U.S. government had extensive general knowledge of plans by the Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan regimes to kill their political opponents abroad, and he cited the internal State Department cable ("TAKE NO FURTHER ACTION") as evidence that the Ford administration had failed to aggressively dissuade the South American governments from carrying out their plots.
Mr. Rogers replied that Mr. Maxwell's analysis contained "absurdities that strike at the heart of character and reputation." When Mr. Hoge refused to publish Mr. Maxwell's rebuttal, Mr. Maxwell resigned.
In early December, Mr. Maxwell -- who is now a senior fellow at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies -- published a long account of the controversy on the center's Web site. Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Rogers, he wrote, have "only brought more attention to the very events they were seeking to bury." (The full text of Mr. Maxwell's account, "The Case of the Missing Letter in 'Foreign Affairs': Kissinger, Pinochet, and Operation Condor," is available here. This document can be viewed using Adobe Reader, available free.)
To some observers, the magazine has still not adequately responded to Mr. Maxwell's complaints. "There appears to be clear evidence that there are boundaries that one can't cross there," says Eric Hershberg, a program officer for Latin America at the Social Science Research Council, a nonpartisan group that awards grants and organizes conferences. "There are boundaries that touch on some of the very central issues in Latin American affairs and U.S.-Latin American relations."
Mr. Hoge declined to comment further for this article.
But any suggestion that Mr. Kissinger wields a veto pen over Foreign Affairs will be complicated by the hiring of Mr. Feinberg, whose history suggests that he is not timid about criticizing the former secretary of state. Mr. Feinberg, who also declined to comment for this article, began his career with The Triumph of Allende: Chile's Democratic Revolution (New American Library, 1972), a warm account of a leftist leader whom Mr. Kissinger despised.
As recently as 2002, Mr. Feinberg published an essay celebrating Mr. Kissinger's resignation as head of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks. By resigning rather than agreeing to disclose the names of the clients of his consulting firm, Mr. Feinberg wrote, Mr. Kissinger ("a grandee of the old school") revealed that he clings to an outmoded style of governance: "In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, the public has the right to know the connections -- with private firms and foreign governments -- of its public servants."
John Dinges, an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University who has written two books about Mr. Letelier's assassination, calls Mr. Feinberg's work "first class."
"He's one of the most respected members of his generation of Latin Americanists," Mr. Dinges says. "He's a good example of a policy intellectual."
Mr. Dinges also says, however, that he would have had grave doubts about accepting an offer to replace Mr. Maxwell. "I don't know, in the current climate, that I could have taken the job, although I understand that somebody has to take it," he says. "I think that Foreign Affairs has to come to grips with the fact that they stifled debate at the behest of one of the most powerful men in America."
The recent release of declassified documents from the 1970s, Mr. Dinges continues, should provide an opportunity for a full and honest discussion of U.S. foreign policy. And that discussion, he says, need not take the form of a one-sided excoriation of Mr. Kissinger and his associates: "If there's another point of view, if there's another set of facts that should be brought to bear by people who participated at the time, let's get it out on the table."
For that reason, Mr. Dinges says, he was excited by the exchange of letters between Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Rogers -- and disappointed that the process was, in his word, "squelched."
