Editing Caleb Carr (section)

===Early career===
Carr first went to work for the [[Council on Foreign Relations]] after high school as a library assistant, and rose during his college year summers (and a semester off) to research assistant.<ref name=":8">{{Cite web|url=http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20108377,00.html|title=Time Traveler: People.com|website=www.people.com|access-date=April 10, 2016}}</ref> He also wrote freelance articles on global issues.<ref name=":2" /> During this period, he published his first nationally noticed broadside: a long indictment, published on the letters page of ''[[The New York Times]]'', of [[Henry Kissinger]]'s foreign policy.<ref name=":12">{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/15/archives/letters-to-the-editor-kissingers-19thcentury-diplomacy.html|title=Letters to the Editor; Kissinger's 19th-Century Diplomacy|last=Safire|first=William|date=October 15, 1974|newspaper=The New York Times|issn=0362-4331|access-date=April 10, 2016|archive-date=August 11, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170811073010/http://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/15/archives/letters-to-the-editor-kissingers-19thcentury-diplomacy.html|url-status=live}}</ref> This assisted noted historian and expert on U.S. foreign policy [[James Chace]] in helping Carr, after he left [[New York University]], to get a job as a researcher and editorial assistant for the ''Foreign Affairs Quarterly'',<ref name=":9">{{Cite web|url=http://publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19980803/38669-pw-james-chace-policy-with-panache.html|title=PW: James Chace: Policy With Panache|website=[[Publishers Weekly]]|access-date=April 10, 2016|archive-date=October 6, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161006035818/http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/19980803/38669-pw-james-chace-policy-with-panache.html|url-status=live}}</ref> where Chace was managing editor.

In 1980, Carr left ''Foreign Affairs'' to fine-tune and publish his first novel, ''[[Casing the Promised Land]]'', a coming of age story about three young men in New York City. It was dedicated to "Everyone who fed me and to: James Chace". Nearly 20 years after ''Casing the Promised Land'' was published, the extreme prices that book dealers were offering for the volume forced Carr to post this "self-criticism" on the book's Amazon.com page: "I am the author of this book. It has a few good scenes, but is essentially '[[roman à clef]]' nonsense that every writer has to get out of his system early on. Do yourself a favor and read ''anything'' else I've written (you'll be doing me a favor, too). Forgive the follies of youth" (emphasis in the original).<ref name=":13">{{Cite book|title=Casing the Promised Land|last=Carr|first=Caleb|date=June 1, 1980|publisher=Harpercollins|isbn=978-0-06-010707-9|edition=1st|location=New York |url=https://archive.org/details/casingpromisedla00carr}}</ref>

James Chace brought Carr on to organize and edit his acclaimed book, ''Endless War'',<ref>{{Cite book|title=Endless War|last=Chace|first=James|publisher=Vintage Books|year=1984|isbn=978-0-394-72779-0}}</ref> dealing with the crisis in Central America, which Carr then covered as a freelance journalist for the ''[[Berkshire Eagle]]'' and ''The New York Times''.<ref name=":2" /><ref name=":9" /> In 1988 Carr and Chace co-authored ''America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars'', an unprecedented and highly acclaimed study of United States of America's traditional and unequivocal approach to national security, beginning with the nation's founders. From the book: "For more than two centuries, the United States has aspired to a condition of perfect safety from foreign threats. Alarmed by even potential dangers to the nation's security, Americans have forcefully responded to both real and imagined assaults against our own borders as well as against those of foreign nations and provinces whose security we have seen as either strategically or politically linked to our own ... Yet the goal of absolute security has constantly eluded us."<ref name=":14">{{Cite book|title=America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars|publisher=Simon & Schuster, Inc|year=1988|isbn=978-0-671-61778-3|url=https://archive.org/details/americainvulnera00chac}}</ref>

In 1989 he became a contributing editor to ''MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History'',<ref name=":2" /> a position he still held in 1994.<ref name=":3" />

In 1991 Carr published ''The Devil Soldier: The Story of [[Frederick Townsend Ward]], the American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China'',<ref name=":30">{{Cite book|title=The Devil Soldier|last=Carr|first=Caleb|publisher=Random House|year=1992|isbn=978-0-679-41114-7|url=https://archive.org/details/devilsoldiers00carr}}</ref> a biography, and the first of his books to receive wide recognition.<ref name=":0" /> According to ''The New York Times'', "by marshaling his scholarship well and setting it out as an adventure story, Mr. Carr gives a good picture of the buccaneering milieu of the time, and makes a plausible case for the devil soldier being on the side of the angels."<ref name=":31">{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/19/books/a-yank-in-the-manchu-dynasty.html|title=A Yank in the Manchu Dynasty|last=Kobak|first=Annette|date=January 19, 1992|newspaper=The New York Times|issn=0362-4331|access-date=April 10, 2016|archive-date=April 22, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160422190728/http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/19/books/a-yank-in-the-manchu-dynasty.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

Carr was also active in [[Cinema of the United States|Hollywood]] in the 1980s and '90s as a screenwriter and producer. He wrote one movie for television, ''[[Bad Attitudes]]'' (1991), but the revision and execution of his script deeply disappointed him.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":38" /><ref name=":10">{{Cite web|url=https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139627/|title=Caleb Carr|website=IMDb|access-date=April 10, 2016|archive-date=April 15, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160415123845/http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139627/|url-status=live}}</ref>