He grew up in Iowa and Georgia and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1949, having majored in literary and political studies.

He served in infantry and Special Forces units of the United States Army during and after the Korean War.

He became an editor of the lay-Catholic Commonweal magazine, leaving in 1955 for extensive travel in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

After a brief passage at ABC News in New York, he was invited to join Free Europe.

In 1961 he became one of the earliest members of the Hudson Institute.

His first book, THE NEW POLITICS: America and the End of the Postwar World (with Edmund Stillman) was published in 1961. Seven others have followed.

Robert Heilbroner wrote in 1964:

“I suspect that in the future it will no longer be possible to qualify as a wholly serious thinker if one has not, to whatever small degree, made one’s peace or accommodation with [his] harsh message.”

Between 1971 and 1992 he published more than seventy “Reflections” (“a political-literary form of your own invention,” his editor, William Shawn, wrote to him), on international politics and society in The New Yorker magazine.

He’s written a newspaper column since 1978, currently published in more than 20 countries.

His magazine articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, The National Interest, and other publications in the United States, and elsewhere in Commentaire (Paris), Neue Zürcher Zeitung and DU magazine (both Zurich), Politica Exterior (Madrid), Europäische Rundschau (Vienna), Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (Berlin), and other journals.

The American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called him “Walter Lippmann’s authentic heir.”