respect to how to bridge that gap.”23
It’s this broad sweep that GS draws on, introducing students to the field’s greatest thinkers and practitioners over two and a half millennia. Starting with Sun Tzu’s precepts on war, it moves briskly through Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, the life of Roman emperor Augustus; Niccolo Machiavelli’s recognition in The Prince of different kinds of morality; the contrasting leadership styles of Elizabeth I and Philip II; Carl von Clausewitz’s foundational text on grand strategy; eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of peace through international order; the American founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln; European power balancers Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck; and in the twentieth century Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kennan, Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. “The common thread is a search for timeless, transferrable principles,” Gaddis told the Ethiopians. These seminars “are not so much telling us what to do, but creating a checklist of things to think about.”24 Or, as Wong, the engineering student who took GS as an undergraduate in 2011, summed it up: “It’s like having a library of minds to apply to different situations. You can grab Clausewitz off the shelf and have him advising you.”25
Rather than focusing on specific knowledge, the course asks students to consider how knowledge is gained, pushing them to develop an agile, adaptable intellect. Each January Hill welcomes the new class by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”26 GS’s dominant metaphor, “the opposable mind,”27 as Brooks calls it, reaches back to nineteenth-century poet John Keats’s concept of “negative capability”: the idea that “Men of Achievement,” as Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817, have the ability to tolerate life’s mysteries.28
Two hundred years later the iPhone age celebrates the opposite sensibility: the idea that we have the answer to every question in our back pockets, or what Kennedy called “an explosion of data.”29 But one of GS’s underpinnings is that research alone can’t help us deal with pressing, complex questions: the president can’t ask Siri whether or not it’s in our country’s best interests to send military advisers to Ukraine. Decision making isn’t about looking up answers; it’s about balancing a large objective and at the same time being attentive to your surroundings. In GS terminology, you have to be both a hedgehog, a person who knows only one thing, and a fox, a person who knows many.30 Woven into the course is advice on the importance of taking first-rate notes (selectively and in longhand), of listening to hear the murmur beneath the main conversation; of seeing what others don’t. One mid-September class on distinguishing “noise” from “signals”—something FDR failed to do before the bombing of Pearl Harbor—began with Kennedy saying, “If you were walking to the library on Saturday morning and happened to look up instead of down you’d have seen a thousand broad wing hawks heading to the Carolinas.”31
It seemed like a benign opener; a random scrap of information—almost like a dust speck floating by. But it was enough to tee up Hill: “I looked out my office window about a year ago and there on a low limb in front of the provost’s house was perched a red-tailed hawk. Yale students were walking back and forth underneath this hawk, and no one knew it was there. They were looking at their texts and talking on the phone.” Hill continued, “This is not trivial. Consciousness is a modern thing. It’s the consciousness of what is around you. What you see is a version of the signals and noise of Pearl Harbor only [more] general. What do you perceive around you? How do you read it? And what is the range of your consciousness?”32 In a similar vein, Gaddis likened this awareness to squirrels. As he put it, “students need to be vigilant squirrels. Sure, squirrels run around, bury things, dig things up, and play with each other—but the ones that survive are aware, at all times, of the three dimensional environment in which they do these things.”33
No matter what the animal analogy, the message is the same: pay attention. Consider everything. Context matters.
What’s being taught is “effective forecasting,” Brooks said. “How do you ask questions of a situation? I think the course gives your mind more clarity. The big thing it does is scope. It takes [students] five feet off the ground and puts them at five hundred feet”34—like hawks.
The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, like many great endeavors, began over lunch. This one took place on a winter Sunday in 1998 at Kennedy’s house on Humphrey Street in New Haven. Then, as now, he was head of Yale’s International Security Studies Program. His guests were Gaddis, whom he’d recruited to Yale from Ohio University eighteen months earlier to fill the prestigious Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History vacated by historian Geoffrey Parker, and Hill, who’d become a full-time practitioner professor. On the conversational menu: “the state of the world.”1
As distinct as their personal politics are, the three men found common ground that day, agreeing that Bill Clinton, then midway through his second term, seemed to lack a foreign policy vision and that their students were missing a historical context of the world.
One Clinton initiative struck the three professors as particularly wrongheaded: the push to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to incorporate Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The wars in the Balkans, which had erupted at the end of George H. W. Bush’s presidency, raged on, and Russia’s transition to a democracy was not as automatic as US statesmen had predicted. Along with George Kennan, whose biography Gaddis was researching, the professors felt that expanding what had begun, in 1949, as a Cold War alliance would further hinder Russia’s progress.2 Only later did it become evident that there had been debate within the White House about the administration’s grand strategy—and even whether or not it needed one. According to former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, President Clinton argued that Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had been given credit for having grand strategies to combat Hitler and Stalin, but in reality they’d “just made it up as they went along.”3
After hashing over world affairs, the professors’ lunch conversation turned to a new, but related, topic: where ISS was headed. Kennedy presented two options: to continue the status quo, or to rethink what they were doing and become more active. Besides his concern over Clinton’s strategy gap, Gaddis was eager to find a new outlet for his scholarship. The Cold War, which he’d been studying and writing about for thirty years, was over. “I took the opportunity to suggest . . . the need to take ‘crude looks at the whole,’ a focus, even a program on ‘grand strategy’ as a way of pulling together . . . what ISS does.”4
Kennedy and Hill liked the idea. Even before the lunch, the three men, neighbors as well as colleagues, often chatted informally about the challenges they encountered in their classrooms. “It had become clear that we had three different angles on a common problem,” Hill