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Jonathan Edward Schell (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014) was an American reporter and writer whose work primarily dealt with American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, as well as the threat posed by nuclear weapons and support for nuclear disarmament.
Life and careerEdit
Early life and educationEdit
Schell was born in New York City on August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chaired Americas Watch, and Marjorie Bertha.<ref name="Bernstein2014">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Fox2014">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His siblings included a sister, Suzanne, and a brother, Orville Schell, a former Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and, Template:As of the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.–China Relations at Asia Society in New York.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He studied at Dalton School in New York and graduated from The Putney School in Vermont.<ref name="Fox2014" /> In 1965 he graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Far Eastern history. He then spent a year learning Japanese at the International Christian University in Tokyo.<ref name="Bernstein2014" />
Early career: Vietnam, The New YorkerEdit
After completing his studies in Tokyo, Schell flew to Saigon in January 1967, as American involvement in the Vietnam War continued to escalate.<ref name="LAT2014">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He managed to acquire a press pass by claiming to be a correspondent for The Harvard Crimson, and would later recount how the correspondents reporting on the war "took [him] under their wing".<ref name="Remnick2014">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was a witness to Operation Cedar Falls, writing particularly on the destruction of Bến Súc.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> His reportage was published first in The New Yorker and then as a book, The Village of Ben Suc, with Alfred A. Knopf.<ref name="Remnick2014" />
His second book, The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin, published in 1968, also drew a graphic picture of the devastating effects of American bombings and ground operations on Quảng Ngãi Province and Quảng Tín Province in South Vietnam.<ref name="Fox2014" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Template:Quote box From 1967 until 1987, Schell was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He wrote essays for the magazine on the presidency of Richard Nixon, including the Watergate scandal that led to the president's resignation in 1974, that formed the basis to his book, The Time of Illusion. The Notes and Comments section was awarded the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1979.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 1977, William Shawn, the longtime editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, designated Schell as his chosen successor to replace him but he was forced to rescind that plan as it proved immediately unpopular with the magazine's staff.<ref name="Botsford2003">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp Shawn revisited the same plan in 1982 but again withdrew Schell's name from consideration in the face of a staff revolt. Ultimately, upon a change of ownership of the magazine in 1987, Shawn was removed and replaced as editor-in-chief with Robert Gottlieb.<ref name="Botsford2003" />Template:Rp
In the early 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles in The New Yorker, subsequently published in 1982 as The Fate of the Earth, which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of the nuclear arms race and became an essential part of the Nuclear Freeze campaign.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The book received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.<ref name="LAT2014" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}; {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}; {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He became an advocate for disarmament and a world free of nuclear weapons.<ref name="LAT2014" />
Later career: The Nation, teachingEdit
In 1987, Schell was a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and in 2002 he served as a fellow at the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.<ref name="ShorensteinBio">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School in 2003, and a fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization in 2005.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He taught at several other universities, including Princeton, Emory, New York University, The New School, and Wesleyan University.<ref name="SchellMemorialLecture">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> At the time of his death he was a visiting lecturer at Yale College.<ref name="Bernstein2014" />
He was a columnist for Newsday from 1990 until 1996.<ref name="ShorensteinBio" /> From 1998 to his death in 2014, he was a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the peace and disarmament correspondent for The Nation magazine.<ref name="SchellMemorialLecture" /> In addition, he wrote for TomDispatch, Harper's Magazine, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic.<ref name="ShorensteinBio" /><ref name="Queally2014">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of the invasion of Iraq.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He later commented, "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Jonathan Schell died at age 70, on March 25, 2014, at his home in Brooklyn, with a cancer caused by an underlying blood condition that may have been caused by Agent Orange. His last years were spent in research on climate change for an unwritten book he titled The Human Shadow.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Reception and legacyEdit
In 1967, John Mecklin wrote in The New York Times Book Review that The Village of Ben Suc, Jonathan Schell's first book, was "written with a skill that many a veteran war reporter will envy, eloquently sensitive, subtly clothed in an aura of detachment, understated, extraordinarily persuasive."<ref>Template:Cite news; quoted in Template:Cite news</ref>
Reviewing The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin, journalist and historian Jonathan Mirsky wrote in The Nation: "I know no book which has made me angrier and more ashamed."<ref name="Fox2014" />
On its publication in 1982, The Fate of the Earth was described by Kai Erikson in The New York Times Book Review as "a work of enormous force" and "an event of profound historical momentTemplate:Nbsp... [I]n the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels usTemplate:Em dashand compel is the right wordTemplate:Em dashto confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The book also reflected on the end of love, politics and art, and the annihilation of humans as a species. CBS News journalist Walter Cronkite called the book "one of the most important works of recent years", praise that helped to solidify the book's commercial success.<ref name="Bernstein2014" />
In an 'Author's Note' to his collection of five short stories entitled Einstein's Monsters (1987), the Anglo-American writer Martin Amis said this about Schell's writings regarding nuclear weapons: "And throughout I am grateful to Jonathan Schell, for ideas and imagery. I don't know why he is our best writer on this subject. He is not the most stylish, perhaps, nor the most knowledgeable. But he is the most decorous and, I think, the most pertinent. He has moral accuracy; he is unerring."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, however, David Greenberg called The Fate of the Earth an "overwrought doomsday polemic."<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Two decades later, in Slate, Michael Kinsley characterized it as "an overheated stew of the obvious and the idiotic" and suggested it was "the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The Los Angeles Times noted that "some reviewers found Schell's book shrill and overstated."<ref name="LAT2014" />
Reviewing The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger in The New York Times Book Review in 2007, Martin Walker characterized it as "a passionate and cogently argued case for the complete abolition of nuclear weaponsTemplate:Nbsp... There is little in Schell's book that is new, but his careful assembly of the available evidence will scare the pants off most readers. And so it should."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In 2019, philosopher Akeel Bilgrami described Schell as "one of the great public intellectuals of our time,"<ref name=bilgrami2019>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp and described The Fate of the Earth as a "rightly celebrated classic".<ref name=bilgrami2019/>Template:Rp
BibliographyEdit
BooksEdit
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- Template:Cite book (Collects The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half with a new essay)
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JournalismEdit
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- Comment on the Pentagon Papers (June 26, 1971)
- Comment on the interdependence of the United States and the Soviet Union, displayed in latest Middle East peace talks (January 7, 1974)
- Comment on America's growing cynicism (January 21, 1974)
- Comment on the A.C.L.U.'s defense of a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois (August 21, 1978)
- Comment on the role of "obsession" in American foreign policy (May 14, 1984)
- Comment on Iran-Contra (January 26, 1987)
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ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
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