Ronald Steel, Critic of American Cold War Policies, Dies at 92

In essays and books. he saw the U.S. postwar era as a series of misadventures spawning unwise wars. He also wrote the definitive biography of the journalist Walter Lippmann.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/us/ronald-steel-dead.html

By Robert D. McFadden

May 8, 2023

Ronald Steel, a historian who derided America’s Cold War foreign policies as a succession of misguided adventures and wrote a definitive biography of Walter Lippmann, the dean of 20th-century foreign policy realism, died on Sunday in Washington. He was 92.

The death, at a nursing home, was caused by complications of dementia, said his longtime physician and friend, Michael Newman.

A bookish, small-town boy from Illinois who became a soldier, wanderer, translator, diplomat, journalist, author and professor, Mr. Steel since the early 1960s had been one of the nation’s most prolific critics of America’s master plans for navigating a perilous, changing world. He often examined his subjects through prisms of biography and magazine profiles of those who shaped foreign policies.

In the high-stakes game of global chess, Mr. Steel infuriated presidents, secretaries of state and other national leaders with astringent yet sparkling essays that filled seven books and hundreds of commentaries in The New Republic, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. He also taught at Yale, Princeton, the University of Southern California and other colleges.

His best-known book, “Walter Lippmann and the American Century” (1980), was the story of the most influential journalist of his age, who founded The New Republic, was a confidant of presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson and reached millions with syndicated columns that argued for a foreign policy of pragmatism rather than a global crusade against Communism.

One of the most discussed political biographies of its time and a best seller, the Lippmann biography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Its critical reception was divided, largely along political lines.

Basically, Mr. Steel insisted that Washington’s strategy for dealing with Moscow — the postwar “containment doctrine” that defined American policy toward the Soviet Union for four decades — had been wasteful and deluded, spawning costly wars in Korea and Vietnam and obsessions with national security that left Americans no more secure, prosperous or free than the rest of the world.

The American diplomat in Moscow George F. Kennan articulated that doctrine in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947, proposing “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” President Harry S. Truman made it official as “the Truman Doctrine.”

“The watershed event of the Truman presidency was certainly the Korean War,” Mr. Steel wrote in a retrospective commentary in The New Republic in 1992. “It transformed the vague rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine into a blueprint for interventions against communism that set the precedent in Vietnam and the proxy wars of the Reagan era.”

In his first book, “The End of the Alliance” (1964), Mr. Steel argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was already obsolete five years after its birth in 1949 and that it should be dissolved as a way of stepping back from what he regarded as the growing prospect of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In “Pax Americana” (1967), he warned of an obsession with “the Communist menace.” The title came from a 1963 speech by President John F. Kennedy urging Americans to reflect on their Cold War attitudes, asking: “What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” The historian Henry Steele Commager called the book “the most persuasive critique of American foreign policy over the last 20 years.”

As many Americans debated and eventually soured on the Vietnam War, some scholars began to question whether the United States had become a counterrevolutionary power committed to the defense of a global status quo. Mr. Steel extrapolated on that point in his review, in The New York Times, of Neil Sheehan’s book “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam” (198

“Vietnam is the graveyard of an image we held of ourselves: America as the defender of the oppressed,” Mr. Steel wrote. “In Vietnam we were confronted with ourselves as an imperial power, fighting not for democracy but to demonstrate that Communist-led ‘wars of national liberation’ were not the wave of the future.”

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mr. Steel contended, in “Temptations of a Superpower” (1995), that American foreign policy remained incoherent because, he wrote, it was based on activism by presidents promoting their own political interests and causes, and because America still viewed itself as a global policeman, determined to guarantee stability around the world.

Lauding the book, Alan Tonelson, a fellow of the Economic Policy Institute at the time, wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “In a political climate where the labeling of all dissenting foreign policy voices as ‘isolationist’ is praised in the news media as responsible leadership, Mr. Steel’s essay is a rare example of clarity, wisdom and intellectual integrity.”

Mr. Steel, in “New Perspectives Quarterly” in 1997, sounded yet another warning.

“The disappearance of the rival superpower, which was also the ideological challenger, has not resulted in any contraction of American global goals,” he wrote. “The ‘free world’ has now been extended to virtually the entire world as anti-communism, in American geopolitical strategy, has been replaced by the amorphous concept of global order.”

Ronald Lewis Sklut was born on March 25, 1931, in Morris, Ill., the older of two sons of Abe and Beatrice (Mink) Sklut. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, owned a clothing store. Ronald and his brother, Bruce, attended public schools in Morris, 30 miles southwest of Chicago.

“I did a lot of reading, but mostly in secret so that I wouldn’t be considered bookish by the regular guys,” Mr. Steel wrote in an autobiographical sketch for the reference book World Authors after adopting the nom de plume Ronald Steel in about 1960. “I was also aware, as one of the few Jews in a very small farm town, that this was considered an extremely odd and exotic thing to be.”

He graduated from Northwestern University in 1953 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and English and earned a master’s degree in political economy from Harvard in 1955. Fluent in French when drafted by the Army, he was posted to a general’s staff in Paris. After his discharge, he joined the Foreign Service and was a vice consul in Hamburg in 1957-58. Returning to New York, he became the editor of Scholastic Magazines from 1959 to 1962.

Later in the 1960s he lived in Paris and London, translated French books on European politics and business affairs, and wrote his first two books. He also wrote articles on American foreign policy for The New York Review of Books, many of them collected in an ironically titled volume, “Imperialists and Other Heroes: A Chronicle of the American Empire” (1971).

Mr. Steel began working on his biography of Mr. Lippmann in the early 1970s. It took nearly a decade, a task complicated, he said, by Mr. Lippmann’s reluctance to reveal “personal” aspects of his life.

Anthony Lewis, in The Times, called the Lippmann book “candid and balanced,” adding, “Steel does not flinch from unpleasant facts or critical judgments.”

But Joseph Epstein, the former editor of The American Scholar, called it “a catalog of revisionist presuppositions, assumptions and notions” and “scarcely more than a checklist of Walter Lippmann’s opinions.”

In “Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives” (1989), Mr. Epstein took Mr. Steel to task as a writer and historian. “In foreign policy, Steel’s point of view is that of a revisionist, which means he believes that the past 40 years or so in American foreign policy have been a period of imperialist intention,” with the United States seeking “world hegemony.”

He added: “Steel views the Cold War as more the fault of the United States than of the Soviet Union, and in his own journalism he has shown a great impatience with what he construes to be the screen of moral babble, paranoia and simple hypocrisy behind which American policy has operated.”

Mr. Steel’s last book, “In Love With Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy” (2000), attacked what he called myths about the senator that arose after his assassination in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential primaries — that “had he lived and become president, he would have quickly ended the war in Vietnam, brought Black and white Americans together, alleviated poverty and discrimination, and achieved a more just and humane society.” Mr. Steel said “there is little, beyond hope and need, to lead us to believe” that R.F.K. would have achieved such goals.

Starting in the early 1970s, Mr. Steel taught at Yale, the University of Texas, Wellesley College, Rutgers University, U.C.L.A., Dartmouth, George Washington University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, the University of Paris, the American Academy in Berlin and Princeton. He taught at U.S.C. from 1986 until he retired in 2008.

He is survived by his brother, Bruce Sklut. Mr. Steel’s cognitive impairment progressed in 2016, and since then he had lived at the Sunrise nursing home Sunrise on Connecticut Avenue in Washi

 

He had kept an apartment in Washington for years, and rarely visited his hometown in Illinois.

“I lived in New York and Paris and London, and in a dozen other places across the globe that for a time I called home,” Mr. Steel told World Authors. “All those places shaped me in one way or another. But somewhere along the way I also stopped trying to escape from the small town. Confinement, I’ve come to think, lies more in the head than in the place.”