Things I've Learned, with Michael Lind

By: Leah Mainiero

Posted: 5/1/08

As an academic, author, children's writer and poet, Michael Lind is a foreign affairs specialist with diverse interests. His writings have influenced the world of international relations for several decades. He has also worked as a journalist or editor for publications including Harpers Magazine, The New Yorker and The National Interest, and is currently the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.
The News-Letter caught up with Professor Lind, a guest professor in the political science department, before his American Grand Strategy course on Thursday to chat about his remarkable career and his most recent book of poems.

News-Letter (N-L): In the past you've written for and edited Harpers Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and many others. Now you're a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. What made you decide to come and teach a course at Hopkins?
Michael Lind (ML): Well my background is in foreign policy, and I've taught courses before at Harvard and Virginia Tech. When I heard that Dr. Deudney was taking a sabbatical this semester, we discussed the possibility of my teaching a course on grand strategy.

N-L: Why specifically grand strategy, as opposed to one of your other specialties?
ML: I thought the [grand strategy] would be of the most interest to both undergraduate and graduate students, and it's a good way to organize the various debates over American foreign policy that have taken place today in newspapers and journalism.

N-L: Working as a journalist for so many years must have put you in contact with all sorts of fascinating people. Who would you say had the most impact on you personally?
ML: Well in my twenties I got to know Jeanne Kirkpatrick, spent time him. The individual with the most lasting impression on me was the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former senator of New York. He was a dear friend and mentor, and he's influenced my views from matters ranging from domestic policy to foreign policy. He was one of the greatest philosopher-statesmen in American history. Not a week goes by without my thinking about what Pat Moynihan would say about a particular issue.

N-L: Who was the most interesting person you've had a chance to interview and talk to for an article?
ML: Oh, it was interesting when I was in graduate school. I had an opportunity to ask some questions of Helmut Schmidt, who was a former Chancellor of Germany, and he was giving some lectures at Yale at the time. The question was who was the most impressive statesman he'd ever dealt with in his career as statesman.
And his immediate reply was, well, does he have to be good, or can he or she be evil? His answer was, Andrey Gromyko, a former Soviet foreign minister. Schmidt explained that that was because Gromyko was the only Russian in the leadership who did not drink. So when all the others were drunk and spilling their secrets, he was sober and listening to what they said. And as a result he was the only one of Stalin's entourage who lived to a ripe old age.

N-L: You mentioned in class one day that you had a chance to ask Henry Kissinger certain questions. How did you meet him? Did you collaborate on a project?
ML: I don't know Kissinger closely, but several times I attended an annual dinner that he gave at his apartment to discuss foreign policy for the most part, so that was an interesting annual exercise. You had a lot of bright people and it was off the record that he shared his views. This was the late 1980s the early 1990s.

N-L: What many students might not know about you is that you are the author of a children's book, Bluebonnet Girl. What made you move from writing for an adult academic audience to writing for children?
ML: Well it's a children's book in verse, and I've published several books in verse. My latest book in fact is called Parallel Lives, and it's a collection of poems. It's come out from the Etruscan Press. I did a longer verse narrative called The Alamo, which came out in 1997. [Verse narrative] is a genre that has been neglected by the end of the twentieth century, because most of the poetry written was fairly brief, even though narrative poetry was the major form of verse for most of history. [Bluebonnet Girl] is a folktale for children that I had heard earlier versions of growing up in Texas about the origin of the bluebonnet.
It's set among the American Indians. It's just a sweet little story, and I thought it would be interesting to recast it in verse, because children in particular enjoy rhyme. It's the secret of Dr. Seuss's success. Kate Kiesler was the illustrator; she's a very well-known illustrator of children's books. Most of the credit for the book's success goes to her, because in illustrated children's books, the pictures are more important than the words.

N-L: Can you tell me a little more about Parallel Lives?
ML: They are poems I've published over the last couple decades.

N-L: Do they have a specific theme?
ML: Oh, they're various subjects, personal, ranging from love lyrics, nature poems, poems about grief or loss or death. The initial poem in the collection was commissioned by Parnassus magazine, a journal of poetry, which commissioned a number writers to write poems in response to the September 11 attacks. It happened mine was the only one that was eventually published. It's my take on 9/11, very indirectly; the form is modeled on the Epistles of the Roman poet Horus, who would comment very obliquely over what was going on in the Roman Empire.
He was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Cicero and others. And so if you read between the lines, there's a lot going on in Horus - there's a lot of foreign policy, but it's kind of glimpsed through peripheral vision. That kind of peripheral, indirect approach to 9/11 appealed to me.

N-L: Wikipedia describes your work as moving "ideologically from liberal, to neoconservative, to radically centrist, and back to liberal." Would you say that is an accurate description?
ML: Well my Wikipedia entry is messed up, I need to correct that. But I view myself as a Rooseveltian liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal liberals. They were not all Democrats, some of them were Republicans. What you want is a strong industrial capitalist economy with generous economic security. What you want is a liberal internationalist system policed by some sort of collective security system.
That was good enough for the middle of the twentieth century. It's fallen out of favor during most of my lifetime, so I found myself a minority; either the left or the right had rejected some element of it.
But I think at the end of the day if you look around at American politics, socially something like New Deal liberalism has prevailed, domestic programs like Social Security and Medicare are popular with the American public, and they can't be destroyed as President Bush found out when he tried to partially privatize Social Security.
At the same time, we tried a very aggressive hegemonic foreign strategy, and now practically everyone admits that it was the wrong direction to take. So we're back to trying to collaborate with other major powers, which was the original vision of early twentieth century liberal internationalists.
So I hope that I live long enough to view the return to the place where I've been trying to stand all along.