The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill - Softcover

Worthen, Molly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618872671 ISBN 13: 9780618872671

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2007

Synopsis

Psychologically astute and passionately written, Molly Worthen’s remarkable debut charts the intricate relationship between student and teacher, biographer and subject. As a Yale freshman, Worthen found herself deeply fascinated by worldly-wise professor Charles Hill, a former diplomat who had shaped American foreign policy in his forty-year career as an adviser to Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, among others. Hill was never afraid to tell students how to think or what to do, and the Grand Strategy seminar he co-taught had developed a cult following.

The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is at once the biography of a political insider and the story of how its author evolved as she wrote it. In a moving, highly original work, Worthen conveys the joy and the heartache of uncovering the human being behind one’s idol.

About this title

About the Author:

MOLLY WORTHEN graduated from Yale University in 2003. She received the Ellsworth Prize for most distinguished senior essay in the humanities, the Schubart Prize for best original published work, the David C. DeForest/ Townsend Premium Prize for oration, and the Kingsley Fellowship for the study of Russian Orthodox Old Believers in Alberta. She has written for the Yale Daily News, the Toledo Blade, the Dallas Morning News, and Time. Her interests include cartoon illustration, fly fishing, and improvisational comedy. She is also a national championship debater. This is her first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

The genius of Charles Hill is his silence. In books and in school we had
encountered the far-off places and the Great Men whom he served: Hong
Kong, Vietnam, and Israel; Ellsworth Bunker and Henry Kissinger, George
Shultz and Boutros Boutros-Ghali. But he never mentioned them in class,
and as artless freshmen we had yet to pick up on the gossip that the
upperclassmen traded after his lectures. Most of us were too young to
remember the Iran-Contra affair, at the time preferring Saturday morning
cartoons to Oliver North. We did not know that our professor's notebooks
helped to break open the investigation. Our ignorance was for the best. His
presence, his hold on the class, was enough to make us freeze in our seats.
Filled at first with the happy murmur of weekend gossip, the room snapped
silent at nine o'clock when Professor Hill walked in. He wore a stone-colored
suit, and he did not speak or look at us until he had taken his seat at the
head of the table and pulled his yellow legal pad from his backpack. The
backpack, please note, was made of dignified brown leather and detracted
only slightly from the overall gravity of his image.
He sat leaning close to the table, his back straight and
motionless as a marble figure tipping imperceptibly from its column. During
the week we spent studying the Romans, Professor Hill passed around a
picture of the bust of Emperor Vespasian. He called it "The Roman Face."
There was a resemblance between my instructor and the emperor's ancient
countenance, rough-hewn and furrowed, with wide, sad eyes that laid bare a
life of hard decisions. Vespasian, too, had a strong mouth that rarely looked
to speak, and then only to rapt attention. The emperor even had the same
ears—medium-sized, protruding just a bit. Professor Hill claimed to have
never thought of the likeness.
He always began class with a quiet voice, his elbows resting upon
the table in perfect forty-five-degree angles. He held this position for the entire
hour, save an infrequent nod or a reach for the notepad. There was never a
pen or paper clip in his hand. Professor Hill did not fiddle. He called on us by
our last names—I had never been called Ms. Worthen before—and whenever
any of us spoke, he made a tiny mark on his notepad, as if he were an
Olympic figure-skating judge. None of us ever knew whether those marks
portended good or ill. Within minutes we did not trust ourselves to think or
speak. We had to, however, for Professor Hill assigned one of us to lead the
discussion each day. Over the course of the semester some of my
classmates came to class unprepared. When they turned red and stuttered
that they had forgotten it was their turn to lead, Professor Hill stared at them,
silent, waiting to see what they would do. Most composed themselves and
found something to say, eventually. The rest of the class took the lesson to
heart. Some of us learned to stay up late, crafting the following
day's "spontaneous" insights in our notebooks, to be referenced subversively
whenever we raised our hands.
Our other teachers were not like this. They were prone to wearing
blue jeans to class and were lenient with those who wanted to chew on a
granola bar or show up in sweatpants, but the discussions they led were
often fraught with droning and self-importance. No one brought snacks to
Professor Hill's class—especially after one girl, a well-meaning Californian
named Ellen, accidentally tipped her orange juice into Professor Hill's lap. He
stood, brushed the excess from his trousers, shook off his notebook, and
picked up where he had left off. He said nothing—he did not even warn her
never to bring a beverage to class again. But Ellen was never the same,
always shy and jittery after that, like a beaten cat. If the rest of us ever forgot
to grab breakfast beforehand, we chose to go hungry.
Almost no one in Professor Hill's class talked too much or
wandered off the subject. This was a result of the self-discipline that comes
when your instructor is stiff and serious-voiced, when every clearing of his
throat sounds like the strike of the hour. A classmate named Sky Schouten
remembered that "Every class with him felt like a political summit meeting.
You had to come prepared—every seminar I knew I'd see him, I tucked in my
shirt and shaved. That was how he made you feel, that this was a serious
enterprise . . . and you owed it to the founding fathers who wrote these
books."
Professor Hill has always taught like a diplomat, not an academic.
He is not loquacious. On a university campus noisy with undergraduate
chatter and self-important faculty pontification, he is different. He is a magpie
of words and forms, relentlessly clipping newspaper articles, photocopying
the legends of seventeenth-century maps, van Gogh sketches, or passages
of Nathaniel Hawthorne to demonstrate an instance of symbol, word craft, or
precise expression. His students never write long-winded seminar papers. He
assigns Herculean tasks of distillation, essay prompts that require them to
sweep and analyze Virgil or Machiavelli in a paper the length of an office
memo. He is known for striding over to the chalkboard to scratch out three
words and a triangle and pronounce, "That is Thomas Hobbes," or reduce The
Peloponnesian War to a six-part logic chain. Everything to its category,
teaches Professor Hill, and in due course the world and its history are bound
according to War, Empire, Culture, Language, Revolution, and other
hopelessly broad slices of human experience. The view is captivating.
Students slide forward in their seats and trace the diagrams in their
notebooks. For many in that freshman seminar, these were the only
notebooks we did not throw out at semester's end.
Other Yale professors are more famous than Hill, have longer
bibliographies, and receive more requests to appear in PBS documentaries.
A half dozen command enthusiastic fan clubs among undergraduates. Even
in such company, Hill has been unusual from the start. While his colleagues
prefer to teach packed lecture halls and graduate seminars, when he began
teaching at Yale full-time in 1997 Hill found a place in the Directed Studies
first-year humanities program, among roomsful of impressionable freshmen.
The freshmen are the core of his following. They are awed by Yale,
intimidated by their professors, and thrilled that one would take an interest in
them. A student named Al Jiwa recalled that after finishing his final Directed
Studies exam, he staggered up to Hill to turn in his essays, haggard from
having pulled an all-nighter. "He shook my hand, and it was firm—but not too
firm," Al said. "I went home and told my suitemates, 'I just shook Charles
Hill's hand.' I will spend the rest of my life trying to re-create that handshake."
Upperclassmen too are susceptible to the influence of charismatic authority,
but nothing compares to the guileless wonder of an eighteen-year-old still
finding his way around Yale's Gothic spires and windowless secret society
tombs.
By the time the term is over, many of his freshmen are composing
tentative e-mails to ask Hill to be their academic adviser. When he writes
back saying "it would be an honor to work with you"—for he never turns
anyone down—they are giddy. Over the next three years they trade elaborate
theories about how he signs his e-mails—always "==CH" directly after his
last sentence, without hitting the space bar or enter key to separate his
message from the body of the letter and the trail of earlier correspondence
below. Some are convinced that this must be a CIA practice (for rumors are
always floating around that Hill is an undercover agent). Others suggest that
the appearance of his cursory sign-off is part of his studied plan to appear as
a highflier with barely time to squeeze in correspondence between all of his
secret meetings with diplomats and heads of state. Finally, with the benefit of
several years' distance from my own freshman year, I asked Hill about it
myself. "I never really thought about it," he answered. "It just seemed good to
do something a little distinctive." He had succumbed to electronic
communication only two years earlier, when the university library insisted
that he have an e-mail account to check out books. Hill is a relic of a lost
age. His conservatism is less easily caricatured than the liberals on campus
would like to believe.
To break through their professor's stone-faced mystery, even for
only a moment, is always a great victory for students. It becomes a game—
one that begins in the classroom, where "if Hill said something to you, or said
your name in class, you'll tell ten of your friends," said a student named
Bryan Cory. "He's so studied, he weighs his words so carefully, that it's
difficult not to analyze every move he makes. If you get a smile, that's huge."
The game continues when students spot him striding gruffly down the street
and try to embarrass him into saying hello. Bryan recalled an afternoon when
he was walking with his girlfriend, also Hill's student. As they approached
Hill, he lowered his head and covered his face with his hat. "Only after I said
a big hi and smiled did he shyly smile and say hello." That smile is
uncommon and coveted. "All you get when you walk into his office is one
quarter of a smile," said Eliana Johnson. "Then he stops—as if he's
thinking, 'wait, I don't do that.'" It took me four ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0618872671
• ISBN 13: 9780618872671
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384