Reprinted from The Realist Review.
Five years ago this September, the scholar Sherle R. Schwenninger, perhaps the most lucid thinker on U.S. foreign policy this country has ever produced, died alone in his apartment in Manhattan.
To my embarrassment, I had only a vague idea of who he was when The Nation’s longtime editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, suggested I call Sherle – a friend and advisor she respected. I suspect Katrina had an inkling that I might see eye-to-eye with Sherle on a number of issues (the absurdity of the Left’s overreaction of “Russiagate” chief among them), and, she also knew, there were increasingly few people who fit that bill (given my propensity for feuds). So I did as she suggested, and after that initial call, Sherle and I spoke to each other daily – by email or phone or during the lamentably few times we saw each other in person.
I soon found out that when Sherle Schwenninger talked, you never stopped learning.
He was not a prolific writer. He co-founded New America, a Washington think tank (which now bears zero resemblance to what he had envisioned, having prostituted itself to Google). I did however get a sense that there was a self-assigned role Sherle carved out for himself over the years, as a teacher and mentor.
Thinking about Sherle, I recall a short exchange from Robert Bolt’s Man for All Seasons:
Sir Thomas More : Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.
Richard Rich : If I was, who would know it?
Sir Thomas More : You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that.
The difference between Bolt’s fictional Rich and the very real-life Sherle was that Sherle wouldn’t have needed convincing. His public will never forget him: Sherle was unfailingly encouraging and generous with his time. He challenged the way you thought about the world and about our country’s place in it. He was disgusted by the complacency, and in some cases, opportunism and outright fraudulence of a number of those who passed themselves off as the so-called “leading foreign policy thinkers” of our day.
The last time I saw Sherle it was by pure chance. I had a meeting scheduled at the old Nation magazine offices off Irving Place and had some time to kill. As I was walking just south of Madison Square Park, about a half-block ahead of me, say, on Broadway around 20th, I thought I caught sight of him.
So I sped up, and sure enough.
Upon reaching him, he turned, arched an eyebrow and with that kind of permanent imperturbability that was so familiar to those who knew him, said, as though he couldn’t be less surprised: “So, James, I see you’ve decided to escape D.C. for a day or so?”
I got him to join me at the Old Town, and we had a couple of beers and a few laughs.
Though you wouldn’t now know it, before the proliferation of YouTube celebrity scholars and podcasts – and the concomitant rise of insta-experts at the Koch Brothers-funded “realist” think tanks, there were only a few of us who were publicly dissenting from the standard line with regard to what was unfolding in Ukraine. Calling out the fraudulence of the Maidan revolution came with a heavy personal and professional price in 2014 – I was even attacked in the pages of The American Conservative by a now forgotten hack from Reason magazine (is that outfit still around?). That was hardly the end of the attacks. But no one – and I mean no one – was smeared more for their forthright and principled opposition to the Maidan coup than Stephen F. Cohen, who was, by then, an emeritus professor at Princeton.
The dominant media narrative with regard to Ukraine was and remains one of Black Hats vs. White Hats, Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. But things were not that simple. At the time of Maidan, I had begun writing for two small magazines, and to my surprise (and consternation) was invited to speak at the U.S.-Russia Forum on Capitol Hill. Also on the bill was Stephen Cohen and President Reagan’s Ambassador to the USSR, Jack F. Matlock.
There was a post-event gathering at the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Ave. A similar gathering today is unthinkable. As I was leaving, I thanked the U.S.-Russia Forum’s impresario, the late Ed Lozansky, for the invite, when Ed said to me: “Stephen Cohen wants to speak to you.” I replied, “Why?”
“You are the only person in the country to have publicly defended me,” Cohen told me. Maybe so. In a piece prior to the conference I called out the journalist and inveterate attention seeker Julia Ioffe for her rather immature hit piece on Cohen and vanden Heuvel in The New Republic. (Shortly thereafter, Ioffe had one of her minions, some Ukrainian now feted for her alleged brilliance, attack me as a “Stephen Cohen disciple” in the pages of the New Republic. Oh wow. Got me.)
I had not known them then, but I had read Steve’s work in graduate school and thought Ioffe’s piece was a hysterical overreaction (typical of her work) to some sensible ideas Steve and Katrina published in the Nation. I had no expectation that either Steve or Katrina read The American Conservative where my piece was published.
In any event, a friendship ensued which was then strengthened thanks to the endless attacks and smears that were endured during the Russiagate period, when accusations of unpatriotic disloyalty were being thrown around with abandon, especially by liberals and by a number of staffers at The Nation. (An aside: those who condemn Trump as a demagogue may have a case, but they might recall the way Mother Jones, The New Republic, Jonathan Chait Timothy Snyder, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon and David Corn behaved in those years. Another aside: The great and brave journalist Mark Ames once told me the staff was in an uproar over what apparently was referred to around the office as the “Cohen-Carden line” regarding Russia. Note the word “line.” Some lefties still talk like Lenin even if most of them have never read him.) Oh, well. I let it get to me. Stupid.
The last time I saw Steve was about a month or so before the world changed (again) for the worse. In late January 2020, Steve was the featured speaker at the Metropolitan Club in Washington.
It is a rare and lucky thing to think the last time you saw someone it may have been one of the very best times. I think in this case it might be so. Steve was at the top of his game, as was Katrina, who gave a lovely toast at the post-event dinner. After that Steve insisted, we must get a drink at the Trump Hotel! Ever the maverick.
Happy evenings like that are all too rare. It’s a good memory.
The distinguished journalist Patrick Lawrence (formerly of the New Yorker, Bloomberg, Salon and The Nation) Steve, Sherle, the brilliant economist Marshall Auerback and I spent years corresponding via email multiple times a day. We would try and meet a couple of times a year for dinners in Manhattan. The camaraderie and sense of community engendered through our correspondence had long been a source of ideas, inspiration, and fortitude.
Steve and Sherle were American originals. Steve was a proud son of Kentucky, Sherle of Nebraska. They each did things in their own way. They were the best this country has to offer. And, as I look back, I am by turns surprised and honored to have known them at all.
