PLAYERS ONLY:
Where Media and Foreign Policy Elites Talk Geopolitics

BY CAMILLE FINEFROCK

Almost every student of the liberal arts has seen, at one time or another, a reproduction of Raphael's great painting, the School of Athens. Depicted there are the profound thinkers of ancient Greece. Aristotle and Plato stroll arm in arm through a crowd of learned guests, including Socrates and Hereclitus, Euclid, and Ptolemy. Men of consequence mill about, engaged in the scholarly debate of things both eternal and immediate.

And from Athens, the tide of time carries the center of civilization westward, alighting for a century or two in Rome, then Paris, followed by London, until it comes to rest, in the American Century, in Manhattan . . . the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Eighth Street to be exact. Or so it seems from some perspectives.

For here stands The Council on Foreign Relations, a private think tank founded in 1921 by the grandfathers of the Eastern Establishment to foster discussion about international affairs. The council's 3,800 members are people of influence. Diplomats, academics, and politicians gather together here in off-the-record meetings to discuss and develop the economic and social policies that shape the world. The council is also the intersection of the foreign policy and media elite. Its current president, Leslie Gelb, is a former journalist, and journalists make up a part of the membership.

Housed within its walls are the offices of Foreign Affairs, the official though autonomous publication of the council. As the century turns, the magazine's imposing facade is crumbling a bit, under the heavy weather of competition, and as the council itself deals with the end of the cold war and the rise of globalism.

The backdrop is notable. Here Henry Kissinger, while a young professor at Harvard, took his first steps into the world of foreign policy with his article "Reflections on American Diplomacy" and later wrote about Vietnam as secretary of state. Here George Kennan, writing in 1947 under the mysterious pseudonym "X," espoused the theory of Soviet containment that would be practiced by U.S. administrations until the end of the cold war. The January issue maintains the grand tradition with the publication of "The Tiananmen Papers," an excerpt of the book by the same name, which is a compilation of internal Chinese government memos that document the decision to quash the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

The names of the published read like a Who's Who of twentieth century foreign policy: Vladimir Lenin, Victor Chernov, Walter Lippmann, Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William F. Buckley, Jr., Richard Holbrooke, and now Zhang Liang, the pseudonym of the compiler of "The Tiananmen Papers."

Foreign Affairs reached its zenith of power during the early years of the cold war when the communist/capitalist dichotomy created a world in which it was easier for one popular national view of foreign policy to dominate. Foreign Affairs was, without question, the voice of the elite Ivy League ruling class in those years. Government officials used it as a big megaphone to disseminate ideas to the public. But there are more megaphones now, and a more diverse set of voices competing to be heard. "Nothing is as important as it was in the forties and fifties because there are so many more outlets," says Fareed Zakaria, the thirty-six-year-old former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, now managing editor of Newsweek International. "There is much more competition at every level -- that is the real change." Given its history, it comes as no surprise that publishing in Foreign Affairs is still the best way to be baptized as a foreign policy player, but its power to set the international affairs agenda is less certain.

James Hoge, formerly a publisher of the New York Daily News and editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, took over the editorship of the journal in 1992. Early on, to ease tensions about his tabloid background, he presented the council with a phony prototype. "It was pink," he says, "and instead of the little horse" -- the magazine's horse-and-rider emblem -- "I had Cindy Crawford's picture. Then I had a table of contents that was really quite scandalous, including a gossip column by Liz Smith on international affairs, and it helped ease things a bit." Liz Smith didn't make it, but Hoge is credited with adding younger voices and going beyond geopolitics, running articles on such topics as world economics and culture.

He has had to deal with a lot of journals that have populated the foreign policy landscape over the last thirty years: World Policy Journal, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, not to mention the annual publications distributed by think tanks and institutes. Foreign Affairs still has the largest circulation of all of these, weighing in at 110,000, plus non-English editions. Foreign Policy, which relaunched in August 2000, hopes to get close to that in circulation, but has a way to go in terms of influence. World Policy Journal, considered to be the real intellectual competition for Foreign Affairs, has a circulation of just 4,000.

But though Foreign Affairs has a bigger footprint than its competitors, the trails that those competitors blazed have influenced its evolution, World Policy Journal perhaps most of all. A recent study by the Congressional Research Service, commissioned by Congress, found that of the forty-three most influential foreign policy articles published since the end of the cold war, nine were published in World Policy Journal, followed by Foreign Affairs with seven. World Policy Journal managed this feat with considerably fewer resources than Foreign Affairs.

The weakening of Foreign Affairs's monopoly on international affairs commentary can be traced back to the volatile Vietnam years. "The foreign policy establishment, which had been in agreement over containment, split over Vietnam," says James Chace, managing editor of Foreign Affairs from 1969 to 1983 and, until recently, the editor of World Policy Journal. "The magazine had been slow to entertain any serious criticism of the war. It was perceived as missing the boat." David Halberstam, the author and journalist, agrees with Chace's assessment. He and others, disgruntled with the hesitance on the part of the editors of Foreign Affairs to publish any criticism of U.S. involvement in the war, founded Foreign Policy as a journal for alternative views.

The current editors tout Foreign Policy as a home for "jargon-free writing" that is informative enough to shrink the pile of "guilt reading" that burdens the concerned internationalist. Especially the pile of what Chace calls "statesman" articles -- pieces by government officials, which were both the strength and the weakness of Foreign Affairs. They were a strength, according to Chace, because the "quasi-authoritative statements" of secretaries of state and foreign dignitaries lent the journal its authority. And a weakness because they could be rather dull. When he went over to World Policy Journal, Chace says he printed more journalists and scholars.

An analysis of Foreign Affairs and World Policy Journal from the year 2000 shows that World Policy Journal does run a higher percentage of articles by journalists, and Foreign Affairs does run more "statesman" articles. But it runs fewer than it did in the cold war years. According to Zakaria, he and Hoge spent part of their first years at the magazine delicately telling current government officials that, no, their articles were not accepted for the next issue.

Zakaria makes a distinction between those articles that come from former government officials and those that come from current government officials. Those authored by the latter, he says, tend to be dry because an official government position usually prevents them from saying anything interesting. But of former officials, he said, "You'd be a fool not to want such articles. People are in government for good reason -- they are very intelligent. Government gives you a unique perspective on international affairs."

"The Tiananmen Papers" certainly provide such a unique perspective. Why did Foreign Affairs get the Tiananmen scoop instead of other journals? It has something to do with the magazine's readers. According to a survey conducted biannually by Erdos and Morgan -- which surveys 354,000 "opinion leaders" about what publications they read -- about 14 percent of those polled said that Foreign Affairs influences what they think about international affairs, about the same percentage that listed The New Republic.

Foreign Affairs does not have the resources to compete with the likes of The New Yorker or The New York Times (cited as influential by 60 percent of those polled by Erdos and Morgan) for the ground reportage that would make the journal newsier. Zakaria concedes that Foreign Affairs cannot compete with the "magazination of the daily newspaper." Hoge sees Foreign Affairs as more of a "trickle-down mechanism." Trickling where? In large measure to The New York Times and overseas newspapers.

The excerpts of the Tiananmen books, for example, were released to both the Times and Foreign Affairs, according to the book's publisher, Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs. The Times published a front-page story and a portion of the excerpts the day before Foreign Affairs was published and The Tiananmen Papers book was released. Foreign Affairs did not scoop the Times, as it might have thirty years ago. Both publications served as public relations extensions of PublicAffairs.

Perhaps the realm in which Foreign Affairs is most clearly influential is overseas. The journal has launched a number of foreign-language editions, and non-U.S. readership has doubled since the early '90s, according to publisher David Kellogg. In China, Hoge says, students are accessing "The Tiananmen Papers" through the Web.

Did the clout that Foreign Affairs carries attract the publisher of The Tiananmen Papers? Gene Taft of PublicAffairs says the company approached Hoge because publishing the "Papers" in Foreign Affairs would lend credibility, as there had been some debate about the authenticity of the Tiananmen papers. And Osnos adds, "The major fact of life is that there are so many sources of information. But to the extent that any journal can be the main voice, Foreign Affairs is it. It is the most established."

But there was another factor. When first asked why he chose Foreign Affairs over other journals, Osnos said "Jim Hoge and I are good friends." Which gives a backstage glimpse of why Foreign Affairs stays "the most influential periodical in print," as it calls itself -- the journal is still a main arm of what we might still call the Eastern Establishment.

Hoge fidgets when asked about the term. It's not the right term, he says. Establishment smacks of success bestowed by the happy coincidence of lineage, rather than merit. He prefers "elite." "There's a class almost, a political class that people coming into the field want to be recognized by. If you have the credentials, you can be there.

"There are still coagulations of power," he says, after a pause, "and there always will be."

Camille Finefrock, a former public school teacher, is a student at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.