Book Review

Canada and the United States

Hans J. Morgenthau came from that remarkable group of German Jews that anti-Semitism and then Adolf Hitler drove out of Germany and Europe. Many helped win World War II for the Allies, and others played key roles in planning for the postwar world and in American intellectual life during the early Cold War years. Morgenthau, popularly considered the "father" of the Realist school of international relations, at least for Americans, argued that power, effectively assessed and applied, governed the international scene. That argument created a wonderfully complex set of responses during the Cold War. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, his analysis validated American foreign policy. George F. Kennan, ever the intellectual and ever the Cold Warrior, arranged for Morgenthau what turned out to be meaningless consultations with the State Department Policy Planning Committee. His name appeared on a list of Defense Department advisors, but, with no little arrogance, he "frequently wondered why successive administrations did not make more use of my capabilities" (p. 77). By the time of the Vietnam War, Morgenthau had become a nonperson to those in the White House who were searching for intellectuals to justify their policies, reversing the role he had played in the Truman years. He was not, of course, the only early Cold Warrior to reject the Johnson-Nixon policies in Southeast Asia, but his reasons were certainly different from those of, say Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. What were those reasons? Idealism? Realism? Eurocentrism? Did his views change? Or was it American foreign policy that went in a new direction?	1
That was the book I hoped to read. But Cristoph Frei has given us two short monographs. The first eighty pages is a biographical (not intellectual) summary of Morgenthau's life, only twenty pages of which concern his life in the United States. Three phrases and names dominate: Weimar, anti-Semitism, and Friedrich Nietzsche—perhaps his father is a fourth. The father belittled his son's interest in intellectual matters and constantly berated him, putting "in my head that I really was no good, that I was with no gifts" (p. 14). Frei sees Morgenthau reacting by becoming obsessed with proving his father wrong. I am reminded of George Steiner's delightfully exaggerated argument that men can become great only if they combined a musical/mathematical mind with a childlike (childish?) and selfish preoccupation with self and success. (Women, he commented, could not be "great" because they were too mature and nurturing to be that selfish.)	2
Whatever the dubious value of historians approaching the psychoanalyst's couch, there is little question that Morgenthau was an intense and preoccupied "over-achiever," to use a popular oxymoron. He took academic arguments personally, resented criticism, and seemed destined for a generally unnoticed career as a German-Jewish academic, whatever his intelligence. He spent much of his intellectual and emotional energies attacking those who disagreed with him. His bitter cynicism foreshadowed the realism that would, during his American period, become associated with his name. "Are you praying for me, my dear friend?" a twenty-four-year-old Morgenthau queried his diary. "For me? You are quite mistaken: no one ever prays for anyone but himself" (p. 104).	3
Growing up in openly anti-Semitic Germany, he quickly rejected the assimilation his father embraced. (The most repulsive story is that of a German aristocrat, whose ancestor had founded the school Morgenthau attended, holding his nose when the young Jewish boy gave the equivalent of a valedictorian address.) But equally formative for his later views was the chaos and disruption of Weimar Germany, with the economy collapsing and politics increasingly degraded. It was no place for a young Jewish academic. Switzerland, Spain, and finally, in 1937, the United States beckoned. The beginnings in America were difficult, but in the early Cold War era when American academe expanded rapidly, his stream of publications and realist analysis brought him fame and advancement.	. . .