Les Gelb, a brilliant public servant greatly impacted US foreign policy on a multitude of levels. A former American diplomat, journalist, and prodigious commentator on world affairs, over the years I learned from him, and was the beneficiary of his support (at times unknown to me), unsparing advice, and counsel, as many of my students — now alumni — have benefitted as well.
He did not “suffer fools gladly.” He was at times gruff, always provocative, and certainly iconoclastic. We argued and disagreed often, especially about soft power and idealism in foreign policy, but he honed my thinking, kept my feet to the fire, supported me, and intervened at critical points in my career at Tufts, when there were advocates for curtailing my program, even dismissing me.
He was director of Policy Planning and Arms Control for International Security Affairs at the Department of Defense from 1967 to 1969, winning the Pentagon's highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara appointed Gelb as director of the secret project that produced the controversial Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War.
From 1969 to 1973, Gelb was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A perceptive and unsparing journalist, he was diplomatic correspondent at The New York Times from 1973 to 1977.
He served as an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration from 1977 to 1979, serving as director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs and winning the Distinguished Honor Award, the highest award of the US State Department. In 1980 he co-authored The Irony of Vietnam which won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award in 1981. From 1980 to 1981, he was also a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He returned to the Times in 1981 until 1993, where he was in turn its national security correspondent, deputy editorial page editor, editor of the op-ed page, and a columnist. In 1983, he worked as a producer on the ABC documentary The Crisis Game, which received an Emmy award in 1984.
Gelb became President of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1993 and as of 2003, and until his death in 2019, was its President Emeritus. Gelb was also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He served as the chairman of the advisory board for the National Security Network and served on the boards of directors of several non-profit organizations including Carnegie Endowment, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, the James Baker Institute at Rice University, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy.
He served on the board of directors of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and was a member of the board of advisors of the Truman Project and America Abroad Media. Gelb served on the board of directors of the Center for the National Interest and of the Diplomacy Center Foundation. He also sat on the editorial advisory committee of Democracy magazine, on the advisory council of The National Interest magazine, and on the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He was a contributor to The Daily Beast.
Winston Lord, another former diplomat and one of his predecessors at the CFR who advised my Institute’s TILIP program, said of him, “Les Gelb was a unique star in American foreign policy. He was a patriot in its noblest definition who devoted his senior years to helping veterans and mentoring coming generations of policymakers.”
George Packer, one of my favorite journalists, understood him (as I experienced him) “Politically … as a centrist and a realist. Growing up against the background of the corner store where his parents worked 14 hours a day never left him. It gave him a kind of immunity to the temptations and deceptions of power.”
He wrote a powerful, controversial book Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, which I often assigned as text. Michael Bechloss’ review in The New York Times is an excellent precis.
Gelb’s opinion of the quagmires the US entered was pithy — “These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, what the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.” He originally endorsed the Iraq War, but ruefully admitted that his initial support for the war “was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives of supporting wars to retain political and professional credibility.” He argued that “we ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common–often wrong–wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”
Les received a bachelor’s degree in government from Tufts University in 1959 after working his way through school as a valet parking attendant and dishwasher. He was Trustee Emeritus of Tufts University. In the New York Times’s obituary, Mr. Gelb was understood by one of his best friends as “a giant of mentors.” That is how I surely experienced him.
I first met Les when I sought him out in 1979 to interview him about his views on the deployment of the MX missile for a WBUR/NPR radio series I was writing as their international relations analyst. He had been the Times’s national security correspondent and led the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1986 for a six-part series on the Reagan administration’s Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative.
Our paths crossed again a few years later when I returned to Tufts in 1984, and after a few weeks of teaching, I became embroiled in a controversy. I was confronted with the following The Tufts Daily newspaper article headline of 1984, “Students Protest PS 131 Workload," and the demand by some officers of the Tufts Council on International Relations that I be fired.
The course, “International Relations: Theory and Practice,” was the department’s mandatory capstone class. I took it seriously and prepared a challenging curriculum. After the Department reviewed my syllabus, it offered an extra half-credit for all of the students enrolled. It was the first, and last time, to my knowledge, that has happened.
I ran the course, despite its 130 students, as a rigorous seminar with TA sessions, and frequent questions asked and answered even during plenary lectures. I personally met several times with each of the students to review their work during the semester, and made friends of many of them — some relationships endure to this day. The students were proud of their efforts and created an edited journal of their final research papers.
At my suggestion they asked me to invite Les Gelb, then chair of Tufts’ Social Sciences Overseers Board, to write a preface for their journal.
Almost two decades later, Les received the Institute’s Dr. Mayer Award in 2003. I asked Amb. John Niland, one of the student editors of the 1985 journal, to help present the Award to Les at the Sovereignty and Intervention EPIIC symposium.
I maintained a wonderful relationship with Les. Years later in 2013, Les, then as president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke on behalf of the Institute at a development gathering and entered into a wonderful conversation with two of our distinguished alumni and now my very close friends, Lauren Lovelace and Matan Chorev, both exceptional members of the U.S. State Department. I actually officiated, as the Justice of the Peace, the marriage of Matan to another of my great students, the wonderful Claire Putzeys.
That afternoon he termed the Institute a “unique, premier international relations program.” When I referenced the origins of our 1984 controversy, he joked that little did I know it then, but that there were faculty and students preparing “to burn me at the stake.” He told me he told the faculty and advised President Jean Mayer to encourage me and to “leave me alone,” and that not having a PhD was hardly the metric by which to judge me.
The session was hosted by Ed Merrin, a wonderfully thoughtful man and another great ally who I miss greatly. It was organized by my wonderful alumna, Maria Figueroa, now the co-chair of the Institute’s External Advisory Board, together with another one of my superb students, Jennifer Hooper Selendy, now the Secretary of The Trebuchet.
I had named Maria and “Hoops” to the Institute’s Board years earlier and ultimately envisaged my students would lead it. Community and continuity — the essence of Convisero. Maria and Jennifer are now leading an effort to preserve the integrity of the Institute and to support Heather Barry, its long-term Associate Director who was my student in 1988 and who is as the letters linked here indicate what was considered appropriately, by so many, the heart and soul of the Institute.
Les is missed. He never failed to care, to listen, to critique, in the most positive, preceptive, and prescriptive ways. He encouraged me to stay beyond my 25th Anniversary, and laughingly told me to teach and encourage my students to learn to write one-pager policy briefs, something I was never capable of doing. And despite declining health, he somehow always had time for the students and alumni I sent him for advice, successfully sponsoring several of our alumni as Fellows of the CFR. He would have been yet another wonderful Convisero mentor.