Policy Posting

Foreign Affairs' new editor

Like so many of the diplomats and internationalists who make up its prestigious audience, Foreign Affairs (circ. 85,000) is gray, influential and unobtrusive. The quarterly, founded in 1922, made a public splash last year, when four former top-ranking U.S. officials--McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Robert McNamara and Gerard Smith--published a joint article calling on the U.S. to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons. The piece was a high point in the eleven-year editorship of McGeorge Bundy's brother William, 65, who was a national security aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. William Bundy is retiring, and last week a successor in his image was named: William Hyland, 53, one of the nation's foremost Sovietologists and a national security adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter.

The editor of Foreign Affairs can and often does play an important role in shaping U.S. foreign policy debate. The magazine enables scholars and once-and-future officials to reach an elite readership, including the members of its parent organization, the New York City-based Council on Foreign Relations. Hyland, who played a key role in negotiating SALT I, was once known as a hardliner, but in recent years has become more confident about the potential for balanced arms control agreements, and the unlikelihood of nuclear war. Said one former colleague: "He is no ideologue." A State Department analyst agreed: "You will not find him frozen to a single line."

Hyland was a CIA analyst when he joined the Nixon Administration in 1969. For the next decade he was an aide to Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council, then at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and in private consulting. Now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hyland is known as a scholarly, literate writer of articles and one book, The Fall of Khrushchev (1968).

The Council on Foreign Relations considered 68 candidates, including Leslie Gelb, the national-security correspondent for the New York Times, and Stephen Rosenfeld, the Washington Post's deputy editorial-page editor. Both withdrew. The runner-up: James Chace, the magazine's managing editor since 1970. Said Winston Lord, president of the Council on Foreign Relations: "Hyland has outstanding experience, intellect and objectivity." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.