Eulogies

Eulogies in memory of Charles William "Bill" Maynes, given Monday September 10, 2007 at a celebration of his life and work, held at St. Alban's Church in Washington, DC.

Ambassador Bob Barry's Eulogy
Dr. Alton Frye's Eulogy
Mr. Thomas Hughes' Eulogy 

Bill Maynes and I arrived at the embassy in Moscow at about the same time, just before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. All of us took ourselves and our jobs pretty seriously. After all, we were front line soldiers in what we had not yet thought to describe as the global war on communism. Bill, as usual, stood out amidst an exceptional group.

But what endeared him to me was that he did not take himself too seriously. He loved to tell the story of the month long trip he took with Senator Ellender, the long time chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, looking into the state of agriculture across the USSR. On his return Bill hastened to write up all the insights gained from this unique look inside the USSR. He sent the report up for the Ambassador’s review and waited for what I am sure should have been a commendation.

Ambassador Llwellyn Thompson was a distant figure to those on his staff. He was on his second time around as Ambassador, and did not feel much need for advice. Thus, when he called down to the economic section Bill’s chief’s ears perked up. The Ambassador wanted to speak to Maynes. An expectant hush permeated the office.

As it turned out, the Ambassador did not want to discuss Soviet agriculture, or Bill’s report, but his boots which he had lent to Senator Ellender. Had they been returned?

Bill and I and Peggy and Gretchen had a lot of fun together, not least when we worked together on UN affairs during the Carter Administration. Together, we created a number of lasting things – even when we did not mean to.

In the middle of the night in 1978, thermoses of strong coffee provided by our long-suffering wives, we rushed in to the Department to deal with the crisis in Lebanon. Working with the US Mission in New York we pieced together UNIFIL  - the UN Interim Force in Lebanon. Thirty years later the stopgap still exists – and is still inadequate to the problem.

Another triumph we collaborated on was the independence of Rhodesia, which led to the election of its first, and so far only, leader, Robert Mugabe.  Oh, well...

And then there were things we worked on together that look even better today than they did then. The 1978 special session of the UN General Assembly on Disarmament produced a program which included constraints on the use of nuclear weapons which even most Democratic candidates do not accept today.

One of the many things Bill and I agreed about was that terrorism was not an existential threat to this country or any other. Nuclear proliferation is such a threat, and unless we tackle the issue head on, nuclear weapons will be used in the lifetime of our children – perhaps against them.     

Bill had a way with words, as you well know. Those who weren’t readers of his Foreign Policy essays will probably remember his toast at Stacy’s wedding, in which he provided Chris, his new son-in-law, with a classic list of the charms – and wiles – he should prepare for in his bride.  He took such pride in the young couple as they started their life together, and rejoiced in the grandfatherhood which they brought him.   I remembered Bill’s wedding toast, and I tried to duplicate it at my daughter’s wedding. He did it better.

The essence of liberal internationalism is the need to share power as well as responsibility. This was central to Bill’s thinking, and key to what he did with the Eurasia Foundation. By creating new partnerships involving the EU and domestic foundations in Russia and Central Asia, Bill made a major change in the way civil society programs are run in the former Soviet Union. Similar devolutions are planned for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. As the Eurasia Foundation was one of my few original thoughts during my State Department career, I took particular pride in what Bill made of it. The fund established in his memory, the Bill Maynes Future Leaders of Eurasia Fund, is a fitting memorial to his accomplishments.

We miss Bill all the time, but particularly when something comes up we would like to discuss with him. The publication of the new book on the Israel lobby and US foreign policy is such an event. I know Bill would have given a balanced view of the controversy – and also that he would have read it before doing so, which is more than many critics could say.

Bill and Charles shared more than a kidney. Charles’ continued devotion to liberal reform in Russia and the new independent states of the former USSR was deeply flattering to Bill, even though he sometimes wished that he were closer, or more practical. That is another thing we have in common – our children, John and Ellen, also caught the Russia bug.

We were close to Bill and Gretchen in their more trying periods, both in the last few months and fifteen years ago, when it seemed the human spirit could tolerate no more suffering.  In their low-key way, they had not even told us of the impending removal of his cancerous kidney.  Within a day, things started to go seriously wrong.    But Bill was always a fighter and an optimist, and no one could have provided more support than Gretchen, then and through the many crises since then.   

At this point in a memorial service, one usually prays for the departed. I see no need for this, for God is certainly a liberal internationalist, and so Bill is in good company. It is we who are left behind who need God’s blessing – especially Gretchen, Stacy and Charles.

As head of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1998 - 2001, Ambassador Barry oversaw three separate elections as well as the implementation of the election results. Before Mr. Barry began his work at the OSCE, he spent 30 years with the U.S. Foreign Service working both overseas and in the State Department.

As Henry David Thoreau’s life was drawing to a premature end, he was asked whether he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied that he was not aware that they had ever quarreled.

Bill Maynes was not a quarreler either, even with his fellow mortals. Time, of course, is out of joint this morning. Bill should have spoken at my memorial service, not I at his. In my old age at the German Historical Institute, I have learned that in certain circles the accepted ritual requires you to notify your memorial speakers in advance. If relationships later on become strained, you let the speaker know that he has been taken off your list. But Bill and I remained the closest of friends, so here I am without reprieve.

In my own career, the recruitment of Bill Maynes is one of the credentials that makes me most proud. Ideally, of course, when it comes to recruiting, I looked first to my home state of Minnesota where more people per thousand are absorbed with public policy than in any other place on earth. Bill was from Greater Minnesota, one of our near abroad, born just over the border in South Dakota. Actually, Gertrude Stein was probably thinking of South Dakota when she famously wrote: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.”

It probably helped make Bill Maynes what he was. Maybe something out there on the lingering frontier still fosters courage. Remembering Bill today, we naturally think of courage. I think especially of three kinds of courage this morning: the courage of beginning again after adversity, the courage of speaking truth to power, and the courage of holding fast to one’s own convictions.

The first is physical, the second is intellectual, and the third is moral. I need not say much about the first – the least volitional but the most dramatic. Bill endured outrageous bad luck physically. Other men his age, if cut down in the prime of life, would easily have succumbed to blasted hopes and ruined expectations. But Bill regularly rebounded from his awful struggles and near death experiences.

Bill’s final productive years as President of the Eurasia Foundation were a tribute to this resiliency. Only a few months ago I was among those who marveled at one of his last platform presentations. At a meeting of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, he was supposed to introduce a well known expert on Central Asia who, at the last minute, failed to show up. A hundred or more retired diplomats and generals were expectantly waiting. They clamored for Bill to substitute for the no-show with an impromptu speech on the same subject. Bill effortlessly complied and delivered a flawless, spectacular performance.

Over these last sixteen years when Bill lived on borrowed time, courage also became a family enterprise. I think of Gretchen’s devotion and self-sacrificing presence, the gift of a kidney from Charles, and Stacy’s unwavering encouragement. We celebrate Bill’s grace under pressure and his family’s steadfast support.

But physical courage is not how Bill himself would chiefly want to be remembered. Two other kinds of courage – intellectual and moral ones – would claim priority. The deteriorating policy environment of the last quarter century threw up new obstacles that demanded courage from anyone attempting to speak truth to power – that is to say, from anyone trying to facilitate linkages between serious knowledge and serious action. Bill’s professional life, both inside and outside government, was situated at that nexus where information and policy intersect.

His Carnegie years in New York, his stint as Assistant Secretary of State and his editorship of Foreign Policy all placed him in a brokerage position between scholars and decision makers. In all these posts Bill tried to get the knowledge community to produce policy relevant research and get the policy community to absorb it.

But Bill was also self-aware. He knew he lived in a world of journalists and politicians, academics and policymakers, which is to say the champion egoists of the day. And he labored here in Washington, a city so obsessed with the present that anyone who can remember last year’s news is viewed as understanding the full sweep of human history.

Bill typically took comfort in the obverse side of this coin. He rejected pessimism because he knew that a week is a long time in politics. He also enjoyed puncturing the pomposities of public life. Like the French philosopher La Bruyere, he often saw life as a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think. So he thought with his feelings and missed nothing.

Much as Bill enjoyed being an assistant secretary in the Carter administration, he saw at first hand what happens when lack of knowledge can wreck the best of intentions. Inside the government, he bent every effort to assure that policymaking was based on real information rather than preconception. Yet sometimes he found himself caught between pressures to be a team player and his determination that all relevant views should be heard.

In contrast to some recent office holders, he had the courage not to enlist in dubious causes through misplaced loyalty. Bill came away from the Carter years feeling keenly that there was no historical necessity why the liberal hour had to be the amateur hour.

Bismarck once defined the first task of a policymaker as “foreseeing as accurately as possible the way in which other people are going to react.” Among his many talents, Bill had this gift of thinking sideways. His mind worked easily from association to association, instinctively making connections and grasping relationships. He rarely missed those peripheral angles of vision that reflect overall reality. Today, if we ask ourselves how to handle complexity, paradox and ambiguity, how to minimize the contradictions and arrest the polarizations, and how to secure and hold the vital center, we come back again and again to the gift of thinking sideways.

Unfortunately, in the years of Bill’s professional eminence, thinking sideways paid fewer and fewer policy dividends. Despite his magazine’s awards for excellence, it became ever more difficult to speak truth to power when power refused to listen. Bill became editor in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan became President. This may have been morning in America for many, but it ushered in years of twilight for the bipartisan political culture that had typified the two decades after World War II.

In those earlier bygone days, two cultures, more or less with mutual respect, struggled for influence on US foreign policy – the security culture and the equity culture. As editor, Bill became increasingly alarmed at their growing imbalance – at the security culture’s triumphalism and the equity culture’s walking wounded. The truculent swagger of today’s officialdom appalled him. He was equally appalled at the impotence of the equity culture and the faintheartedness of many associated with it.

Domestically, Bill watched the steep decline in political civility and the mushrooming of incompatible views of the world. The habit of thinking sideways, once taken for granted, was squandered in favor of the vertical stove-piping of belligerent attitudes.

Consequently, as editor, Bill faced an increasingly tough task. He published scores of articles chosen for their relevance to official discussions, but often those discussions themselves never occurred. We ended up with very little knowledge propelling very little statecraft. In recent years, policy itself has been driven by the new wisdom from Texas that all you will find in the middle of the road is a dead jack rabbit. Bill courageously fought against these trends. He persisted, against all the odds, in speaking truth to power.

Finally, in addition to the courage of beginning again after adversity and the courage of speaking truth to power, Bill had a third kind of courage: the courage of holding fast to his own convictions. For all his broadmindedness as a knowledge purveyor, facilitator and conciliator, he was not a compromiser when it came to his own steadfast beliefs. He remained an unrepentant, liberal internationalist, convinced of the indispensability of that perspective to American foreign policy. Indeed, its retrieval was central to his moral outlook.

It is a sad commentary that the championing of liberal convictions in America should have required courage. But as Bill watched the center of our politics move farther and farther away from the center of world politics, he felt that precious historic American ideals were in genuine jeopardy. He also lamented that so many of his contemporary fellow citizens had neither knowledge of, nor curiosity about, the inhabitants of the increasingly anti-American world outside.

Bill persisted in trying to bridge those worlds constructively. But nothing shook his liberal convictions – not even our new paradoxes of liberal hawks versus realist disengagers, or jihadist majorities versus authoritarian secularists. In speaking out, he remained a symbol of liberal forthrightness at a time of political intimidation when many of his liberal contemporaries were busy developing equivocation as a preferred art form.

At a time when the nation’s leaders made liberalism a dirty word and dismissed internationalism with contempt, Bill embraced his liberal international convictions fervently in articles, on television, at professional conferences. and in public forums. This too took courage and occasionally it brought penalties. But Bill remained unequivocal. The integrity of his moral compass was always there, and it was always accompanied by his unfailing personal decency and his good humor about the human condition.

“A great empire and little minds go ill together.” So said Edmund Burke more than two centuries ago. In a precautionary testament written two years ago, Bill wrote: “Do I have regrets? One principal one. I depart amidst our collapsing dreams of empire. I regret that I and some of my friends could not advance arguments sufficiently persuasive to spare the country from this imperial folly. I leave not unhopeful, however. America’s brief bid for world hegemony has been so botched that it seems only a matter of time before the country returns to its senses.”

It is not easy to combine these last two kinds of courage – speaking truth to power and holding fast to one’s own convictions. They require a double commitment – to mental breadth and moral depth, to intellectual outreach and inner certitude. But when that rare combination does occur, it sets one apart from the crowd. As Isaiah Berlin concluded in one of his greatest essays: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man.”

Bill Maynes unflinchingly showed us what being civilized is all about.

Mr. Hughes served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for the International Peace from 1971–1991. Prior to joining the Endowment, he worked for the U.S. State Department as the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence from 1963–1969.

The eloquent remembrances by Tom and Bob touch the mystic chord that binds all of us here to the memory of Bill Maynes.  The Bill we loved and admired is with us through the friendship that has brought us together.  Not all of us know each other, but we know that we cared about Bill and he cared about us.  We are connected through a magnificent human being, a person remarkable in many dimensions.

Each of us knows different things about different aspects of Bill’s extraordinary life of service.  But all of us know that he was more than smart; he was brilliant.  He was more than brilliant; he was wise.  He was both gifted and dedicated.

Bill’s zest for life inspired many of us whose will to live may not be quite as exuberant as his always was.  His son, Charles, reminded me of a story from the time Bill was a young Foreign Service officer in Russia.  Once when Bill was travelling away from Moscow, he got an urgent message to return to the embassy.  He rushed to the airport but had trouble getting a flight.  The airline assured him they would find him a seat but while he waited he was afraid of losing his place by going to the bathroom.  Finally, a very uncomfortable Bill was allowed on the plane and placed in the single open seat.  As soon as they took off, Bill unbuckled and rushed to the lavatory.   When he opened the door he was astonished to find an angry fellow sitting on the toilet with briefcase in hand and complaining, “They made me give up my seat to some fancy diplomat.”  Amid the serious business of life, Bill also reveled in the lighter moments.

Bill’s combination of intensity and serenity was unique in my experience.  Recalling his wonderful mother, I think the inner calm owed much to her, but the discipline and focus were qualities all his own.  It is a mystery how the Midwest sends us leaders of such superior stuff – Hubert Humphrey, Fritz Mondale, Walter Judd, Mel Laird, both Adlai Stevensons   -- but Bill Maynes stands in that company.

Some here knew Bill even longer than the 3 ½ decades during which he and I were colleagues.  I first became aware of Bill when he was a congressional fellow with Fred Harris.  We became close when he joined Tom Hughes at the Carnegie Endowment at about the time I was developing the Council on Foreign Relations program in Washington.

Co-locating the Council with the Endowment was a happy synergism, not least because it meant that for many years Bill and I had offices only a few feet apart from each other.  That proximity gave us countless encounters in the hallway and at the coffee machine.  Our doors were always open to each other and for a long time at the building on N Street our office windows were angled so that we could even wave or see each other as we chatted on the phone.

Our politics were not identical, but we always leaned toward each other across the center line.  Once, when we were paired for television commentary on George Shultz's farewell address as Secretary of State, we found ourselves smiling at how hard it was to disagree.  But then it was probably the best speech Shultz ever gave.

We fed off each other intellectually, and there is no doubt that he provided the better banquet.  Especially after he became editor of Foreign Policy we often reviewed each other’s drafts … and he even published some of mine.  Those collaborations remain precious to me.  My only regret from those years is that when the New York Times syndicate invited us to do a weekly column together, I was too overwhelmed with Council duties to accept and Bill was too swamped to do it by himself.  When he did write, his work was invariably lucid, trenchant and insightful.  He was so good that even the OQ – the “Other Quarterly” as Foreign Policy upstarts called Foreign Affairs in those days – published him.

Bill’s modesty disguised how much he had to be proud of.  His charming remarks at the Cosmos Club celebrating their long and happy marriage made clear that nothing gave him so much pride as the fact that Gretchen had become his wife.  Their love was the supreme joy of his life.  And what a stalwart partner she has been.  Their devotion testified that they meant the vow to be true to each other, “in sickness and in health.”

As fathers we shared concerns and joys about our children.  Parents are probably always a bit surprised at the paths their children take but Stacy and Charles gave Bill and Gretchen the kinds of pleasant surprises for which we all yearn.  I won’t embarrass them by relating the ways he reported on their progress; they already know how much he loved them and admired their growth into mature, caring adults.  I will express the deepest gratitude and respect for the gift Charles made to all of us by the transplant that added splendid, productive years to his father’s life.  And I will always remember sitting in Bill’s office sharing smiles at a slide show of Caleb, Stacy’s first child.  Stacy is not only a lovely and accomplished mother, she is a far better student than I ever was of her father’s fine art of tying bow ties.

Bill was godfather to our youngest daughter, Sarah-Faith, and his counsel of patience helped us cope with the tribulations of yet another adolescent passage.  In moments of exasperation I have been inclined to quote Bill and tell her that “we are compelled to love you.”  During his brief interval at the Ingleside medical center, I brought in a video of Sarah-Faith’s recent performances and he brightened at the knowledge that she is beginning college as a music major.

The wonderful man we knew as Bill was an exemplar.  He was a humane patriot who knew that love of country demanded respect for the wider world of other nations and different cultures.  He saw far and served long.  And his steadfast friendship was an inspiration and an honor to be treasured forever.

Dr. Frye is the first presidential senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has published many books on national security policy, and was awarded the 1993 Olive Branch Award of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media.