December 1970 must have seemed an inauspicious moment to launch a new magazine on international affairs. The fighting in Vietnam ground on, even expanding into Cambodia and Laos, with little to show for U.S. President Richard Nixon’s policy of Vietnamization. Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s moves toward detente with the Soviet Union and the opening with China had not yet borne much fruit. Humanitarians had been shocked and disillusioned by the multiyear civil war over Nigeria’s Biafra region, which had resulted in half a million to 2 million civilian deaths by 1970. Amid anxiety over inflation, Washington was just months from suspending the dollar’s full link to the price of gold—a pillar of the Bretton Woods institutions that had sustained U.S. postwar economic primacy.
If it was an odd moment for the creation of Foreign Policy, it was just as strange a time for a young lawyer only just elected to county council in Delaware to begin telling colleagues he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate—to work on foreign policy and oppose the Vietnam War.
