'Foreign Affairs' Loses a Longtime Editor and His Replacement in Row Over Editorial Independence
David Glenn
A bitter row at Foreign Affairs magazine over history, power, and the alleged conduct of Henry A. Kissinger led to the departure of a longtime book-review editor in May and now has claimed that editor's replacement.
Jeremy I. Adelman, a professor of history at Princeton University who was hired to succeed Kenneth R. Maxwell as the magazine's book-review editor for the Western Hemisphere, resigned on Friday after only three weeks.
Mr. Maxwell, a prominent scholar of the history of Brazil, had held that editing job at Foreign Affairs and a senior fellowship at its parent organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, for 15 years. He quit in May, claiming that the journal had bowed to pressure from Mr. Kissinger and cut short an exchange of letters about U.S.-Chile relations and the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat. Mr. Kissinger was U.S. secretary of state at the time of Mr. Letelier's killing, and he is a former member of the council's board of directors.
"The Council's current relationship with Mr. Kissinger evidently comes at the cost of suppressing debate about his actions as a public figure," Mr. Maxwell wrote in his resignation letter.
The editor of Foreign Affairs, James F. Hoge Jr., denies those charges. In an interview on Tuesday, he insisted that the Chile debate ran longer than the magazine's typical letters-page skirmishes. Mr. Hoge did acknowledge that Peter G. Peterson, the chairman of the council's board of directors, called him at least once to convey Mr. Kissinger's displeasure with Mr. Maxwell's essays. (Among other things, Mr. Maxwell wrote that the State Department "knew much more about the atrocities committed in Chile than was admitted to at the time.") But Mr. Hoge said that Mr. Kissinger's unhappiness had no impact whatsoever on his editorial decisions.
Mr. Adelman, who is a friend of Mr. Maxwell's, said on Monday that he had no initial qualms about filling the position, despite Mr. Maxwell's difficulties. But when news of the imbroglio broke on The Nation's Web site on June 3, he had second thoughts.
"This position was, as a result of everything that was coming out, too stigmatized for me to do without spending a lot more time explaining why I was doing it at this juncture, in the wake of all the revelations," Mr. Adelman said. "And that's time that I just don't have."...
by HNN on June 16, 2004 at 5:30 AM