An amazing American life: Raymond Garthoff

Like the great George Kennan, another legendary American diplomat and author, Raymond Garthoff lived a long and illustrious life, in Ray’s case until the age of 95. Born in Egypt, he worked in think tanks, worked for the CIA, became a foreign service officer, and then returned to scholarly pursuits after his retirement from the U.S. State Department. I overlapped with him slightly at Brookings at the beginning of my career there—but I knew of him long before.

Born in 1929, Ray had written his first book already by 1953, a study of Soviet military power published by the RAND Corporation. That study examined the legacy of World War II as well as Josef Stalin’s efforts to drop the Iron Curtain on Europe and pursue a global Communist expansionist agenda, getting the nuclear bomb along the way, helping along the Chinese Communists as they took power in the 1940s, and condoning the North Korean invasion of South Korea as well. For Ray, at the time, this was living history, all so very fresh and new—even though it now seems so long ago.

Of course, with that book, Ray was just getting warmed up. His Ph.D. from Yale in Soviet studies developed in him a deep expertise that he would exploit and expand upon throughout his multifaceted career. His tenure with the foreign service made him an eyewitness to, and participant in, much of Cold War history. He wound up as U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria during what was still the heart of the Cold War period, the late 1970s, before any indications of Gorbachev or glasnost or perestroika.

I first encountered Ray through his magisterial book, “Détente and Confrontation,” published in the mid-1980s not only as a work of history but as a rock-solid analysis of how U.S.-Soviet relations had evolved over the second half of the Cold War—and of how they could perhaps be made less dangerous going forward. The original version topped 1,000 pages; the revised and expanded edition reached biblical proportions. Yet it was worth every page. Without claiming to have read the entirety, I would say after reading many chapters (thanks to Professor Richard Ullman at Princeton, who assigned it for his graduate course there around 1986) that there is never a dull passage and rarely a wasted or excessive word. I remember Ullman joking in class that we students would probably want to throw the book at him—to which my friend Dave Clark retorted that we all would have thrown it at him if we had been able to lift it up! But all kidding aside, it is probably the most comprehensive and one of the most readable histories of a large chunk of the Cold War ever written.

Garthoff’s other books were shorter but hardly less scholarly or rigorous. They included his analysis of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as well as his reflective memoir, “A Journey through the Cold War.”

I did not have the privilege of interacting very much with Ray at Brookings, given that he was headed for his long retirement at about the time I arrived. But he was classic old school in the best sense of the word—courteous, unpretentious, gracious, hard-working, and very sweet. I hope his family takes pride and solace in all that he, and they with him, accomplished over the course of his long and amazing life.