The war was nearing its end, and Brodie was weary of ghostwriting. As early as September 1943, he wrote Earle: “So far as my own preferences are concerned, I couldn’t get back to the academic life too soon to suit me.” Two months later he wrote, regarding his ghostwriting for King, “My voice is getting more and more sepulchral, and I expect soon to be able to walk through closed doors without opening them.”
In August 1944, Brodie spent an afternoon leading the weekly round table of the prestigious Institute of International Studies at Yale University, speaking on military technology and peace planning. Brodie impressed his audience. A few months later, William T. R. Fox, a professor on the Institute’s staff and also a former student of Quincy Wright’s and Jacob Viner’s at Chicago, recruited Brodie to join him at Yale the following summer. In mid-March the official letter of reception from Frederick Sherwood Dunn, director of the Yale Institute, arrived: “We have an urgent need for you both for researching and teaching.”
In the 1940s, there was no more exciting and stimulating place in the academic world for an international relations scholar to reside than at the Institute of International Studies at Yale. It began life in 1935, the brainchild of the three Yale professors who were then teaching international relations—Nicholas Spykman, Arnold Wolfers and Frederick (“Ted”) Dunn. “It was not by accident that Yale embarked on a program of this kind when it did,” wrote Dunn in an annual report some years later. “The early thirties were a time when storm clouds were gathering on the international political horizon and when the impact of foreign conflicts on the security of the United States was becoming more manifest every day.”
Arnold Wolfers was a Swiss lawyer who emigrated to Germany after World War I, eventually assumed the directorship of Berlin’s finest institute of political studies, managed to get a visiting professorship at Yale in 1933 and, rather than go back to living under the new Nazi regime that was elected to power while Wolfers was away, simply stayed on. Wolfers wrote books on international economics and politics with a decidedly Realpolitik view. For a man who grew up in the neighborhood of one world war and barely escaped before another was about to begin, the turbulences of global power politics were as natural to Wolfers as they were unseemly and avoidable to most political scientists in America.
Nicholas Spykman was a Dutch sociologist who came to Yale via California. At one time a Wilsonian idealist in his thinking, Spykman received a private lecture on the role of power and force in international relations from his friend Wolfers, and promptly underwent a dramatic conversion—frequently going too far in the other direction even for Wolfers’s taste. In a 1942 book called America’s Strategy in World Politics, Spykman assumed an almost brutal view of the world: “The international community is a world in which war is an instrument of national policy and the national domain is the military base from which the state fights and prepares for war during the temporary armistice called peace.”
Ted Dunn had been a lawyer in the State Department who gradually realized that legal considerations rarely played any role in the way nations behave. Legal norms were shaped by dominant ideas of capitalist Europe and so could not be separated from—in fact, must be considered subordinate to—political and economic factors. Dunn thought that international treaties played a vital role, but only so long as all parties to them had incentives to carry out their provisions. He found chimerical and counterproductive the ideas of most liberal intellectuals of the day, with their proposals for peace treaties or world- order blueprints that had no foundation in the independent interests of sovereign nations in the real world. Dunn came to Yale in the mid-1930s, switched from international law to politics and diplomacy, and fell under the spell of Spykman and Wolfers.
In one fundamental respect, the aim of the Yale Institute bore similarities to that of Quincy Wright’s at Chicago: “to supplement the traditional legal and institutional description of international events with a broader approach that included the best of the political, historical, geographical and economic skills.” But whereas Wright attempted to improve the future by studying the past, the Yale group went about its mission by studying and attempting to influence the decisions of the present. The Yale group sent hundreds of copies of its various studies to well-placed government officials, who frequently read them.
The Institute had the strong support of Yale president Charles Seymour and was initially fueled with a $100,000 grant dispensed over a five-year period by the Rockefeller Foundation. By the mid-1940s, the Institute had clearly taken off. The number of international relations majors at Yale had jumped more than fivefold since 1937—up from seventeen to eighty-eight. This meant more faculty slots and more power for the Institute within the political science department.
Nicholas Spykman fell ill from cancer in 1940 and died three years later, but the Institute lived on in good health for another decade under the directorship of Ted Dunn. One booster was the creation of an Advisory Council in the mid-1940s consisting of Yale alumni high up in the corporate world—Henry Luce, Prescott Bush, Frank Altschul, Stanley Resor and others. With the influence and prestige of those names, the Institute could replenish its coffers with money from not only Rockefeller but also J. P. Morgan, Union Carbide, Shell Oil, Pan Am, J. Walter Thompson, IBM, Socony, U.S. Steel and many more.
Another source of health in the early 1940s was the influx of several students of Quincy Wright’s and Jacob Viner’s from Chicago. William T. R. Fox came in 1943, mainly on the recommendation of Wright. Fox recruited Brodie. Brodie recruited his friend Klaus Knorr a few months later. Jacob Viner himself came every few years as well, taking a leave of absence from Chicago to come take part in whatever was going on at the Institute of International Studies.
There was a heady feeling at the Institute in those heydays, an esprit de corps bordering on elitism, a shared conviction that its members were pioneers of a new age, riding on a crest that most others of their profession—including many of their non-Institute colleagues down the hall—chose not even to paddle through. Their offices were all close to one another, crammed along one segment of a wing on the second floor of the Hall of Graduate Studies.
Every Wednesday afternoon, the Institute staff held a formal round-table discussion on a particular topic, sometimes with an outsider as the main speaker (as Bernard Brodie had been that day in August 1944). Every day, they were constantly in touch with each other, batting around ideas, reading each other’s manuscripts, commenting and criticizing in a completely collegial manner.
As one political scientist from down the hall described the Institute’s atmosphere, “they work under the influence of a group pressure to produce and with the stimulation that comes from give-and-take within the group about their individual undertakings. They have created something of an Island’ within Yale in which a tighter group discipline prevails and a sharper drive to produce exists than I sense in the university community as a whole.”
Indeed, a small community of power-conscious international relations scholars had emerged from a few universities around this time. And it was not without influence. As a result of a conference held in Rye, Westchester County, in the spring of 1945, Dunn, Fox, Wolfers and a Yale China specialist named David Rowe—together with Ed Earle and Harold Sprout of Princeton and Grayson Kirk of Columbia—wrote a twenty-three-page paper called “A Security Policy for Postwar America,” which declared: “The day when the United States can take ‘a free ride’ in security is over.” Referring to the emerging domination by the United States and the Soviet Union, they dubbed the new era “the age of the Big Two.” (Bill Fox had, just before, written a book called The Super-Powers, the first usage of that phrase.) They urged that the good relations of the World War II alliance be maintained, but cautioned that conflict between the two great powers over the political destiny of Germany could spark renewed conflict. Two generals and an admiral on the Joint Strategic Survey Committee of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff read the paper, promptly classified it, and distributed it as an official JCS document. One of the generals told Earle, “There is a desperate need for civilian contribution to this type of thinking and strategic planning.”