Jonathan Schell

Schell giving a reading at theOccupy Wall Streetevent Occupy Town Square, inTompkins Square Parkin New York, February 2012

Jonathan Edward Schell(August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014)was an American author and visiting fellow atYale University,whose work primarily dealt with campaigning againstnuclear weapons.

Personal

Schell was born inNew York Cityon August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chairedHuman Rights Watch,and Marjorie Bertha. He studied atDalton Schoolin New York and graduated fromThe Putney Schoolin Vermont. In 1965 he graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Far Eastern history.He then spent a year learning Japanese at theInternational Christian Universityin Tokyo.

He was the brother of Suzanne Schell Pearce, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, andOrville Schell,former Dean of theUniversity of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.and current Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations atAsia Societyin New York.

Jonathan Schell died at age 70, on March 25, 2014, at his home inBrooklyn,with a cancer caused by an underlying blood condition that may have been caused byAgent Orange.His last years were spent in research on climate change for an unwritten book he titledThe Human Shadow.

Career

Schell wroteThe Village of Ben Sucwhen he stopped atVietnamin 1966, en route back to the United States from Tokyo. The book started as a series of articles in theNew Yorker.At just 24, he managed a press pass toSaigonfromThe Harvard Crimson,whose correspondents helped him to cover the war. He wrote: "Faithful to the initial design, Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins, scorching again the burned foundations of the houses and pulverizing for a second time the heaps of rubble, in the hope of collapsing tunnels too deep and well hidden for the bulldozers to crush—as though, having decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed."

His next 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 onQuảng Ngãi ProvinceandQuảng Tín Provincein South Vietnam, as he was a witness toOperation Cedar Falls,writing particularly on the destruction of Ben Suc.

His work appeared inThe Nation,The New Yorker,andTomDispatch.The Fate of the Earthreceived theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize, among other awards, and was nominated for thePulitzer Prize,theNational Book Award,and the National Critics Award. In his words: "Never has a nation unleashed so much violence with so little risk to itself. It is the government's way of waging war without the support of its own people, and involves us all in the dishonor of killing in a cause we are no longer willing to die for."

From 1967 until 1987, he was a staff writer atThe New Yorker,where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He was a columnist forNewsdayfrom 1990 until 1996. He taught at many universities, including Princeton, Emory, New York University, the New School, Wesleyan University and the Yale Law School. At the time of his death he was a visiting lecturer at Yale College.

In the early 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles inThe New Yorker(subsequently published in 1982 asThe Fate of the Earth), which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of thenuclear arms race.He became a persistent advocate for disarmament and a world free of nuclear weapons.

In 1987, he was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at theJohn F. Kennedy School of Governmentand in 2002, a fellow at the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. In 2003, he was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, and in 2005, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Yale's Center for the Study of Globalization.

From 1998 to his death in 2014 he was a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and the Peace and Disarmament Correspondent forThe Nationmagazine.

In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of theinvasion of Iraq.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."

He wonGeorge Polk Awardsin 1976 and also published essays on thePresidency of Richard Nixon,as well as the aftermath to theWatergate scandal,which led to the president's resignation in 1974, forming the basis to his book,The Time of Illusion.

Reviews, response, and criticism

In 1967, John Mecklin wrote inThe New York TimesthatThe 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."

ReviewingThe Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin,journalist and historian Jonathan Mirskywrote inThe Nation:"I know no book which has made me angrier and more ashamed."

On its publication in 1982,The Fate of the Earthwas described by Kai Erikson inThe New York Timesas "a work of enormous force" and "an event of profound historical moment.... [I]n the end, it accomplishes what no other work has managed to do in the 37 years of the nuclear age. It compels us - and compel is the right word - to confront head on the nuclear peril in which we all find ourselves."The book also reflected on the end of love, politics and art, and annihilation of humans as a species. CBS newsman Walter Cronkite called the book "one of the most important works of recent years", which made this book on nuclear disarmament, a commercial success.

In his 'Author's Note' to his collection of five short stories entitledEinstein's Monsters(1987) meaning nuclear weapons, the Anglo-American writerMartin Amissaid this about Schell's writings: "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."

Writing inForeign Affairsmagazine, however, David Greenberg calledThe Fate of the Earthan "overwrought doomsday polemic."Two decades later, inSlate.com,Michael Kinsleycharacterized it as "an overheated stew of the obvious and the idiotic" and suggested it was "the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people."TheLos Angeles Timesnoted that "some reviewers found Schell's book shrill and overstated."

ReviewingThe Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear DangerinThe New York Timesin 2007, Martin Walker characterized it as "a passionate and cogently argued case for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.... 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."

In 2019, philosopherAkeel Bilgramidescribed Schell as "one of the great public intellectuals of our time,"and describedThe Fate of the Earthas a "rightly celebrated classic".

The New Yorkereditorship succession controversy

In 1977,William Shawn,the longtime editor-in-chief ofThe New Yorkermagazine, 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.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 withRobert Gottlieb.

Bibliography

• "The village of Ben Suc: a tragedy in Vietnam".A Reporter at Large.The New Yorker.July 15, 1967.
• The village of Ben Suc.New York: Knopf. 1967.
• The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin(1968)
• Comment on the Pentagon Papers(June 26, 1971)
• "Notes and comment". The Talk of the Town.The New Yorker.49(46): 21. January 7, 1974.
• Comment on America's growing cynicism(January 21, 1974)
• The Time of Illusion(1976)
• Comment on the A.C.L.U.'s defense of a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois(August 21, 1978)
• The Fate of the Earth(February 1, 1982)
• Comment on the role of "obsession" in American foreign policy(May 14, 1984)
• The Abolition(1984)
• Comment on Iran-Contra(January 26, 1987)
• History in Sherman Park(1987)
• The Real War(1988)
• Observing the Nixon Years(1989)
• "The uncertain Leviathan".The Atlantic Monthly.278(2): 70–78. August 1996.
• The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now(1998)
• The Unfinished Twentieth Century(2001)
• The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People(2003),
• A Hole in the World(2004)
• The Jonathan Schell Reader: On the United States at War, the Long Crisis of the American Republic, and the Fate of the Earth(2006)
• The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger(2007)

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Notes

See also

• Michio Kaku
• Helen Caldicott
• List of peace activists

External links

• Jonathan SchellatIMDb
• Biographyfrom theYale Center for the Study of Globalization
• BiographyfromThe Globalist
• Smoking Guns and Mushroom Clouds
• AppearancesonC-SPAN
• Works by or about Jonathan Schellat theInternet Archive