Remembering Michael Krepon

In 1989, after six years at the Carnegie Endowment, Tom Hughes called me into his office and clearly suggested that it was time for me to think hard about my next step. Meanwhile, Barry was feeling way too confined working out of his home. We put our heads together. Was it a good time to try to launch a new think tank in 1989? The two big nongovernmental organizations situated on the center-left of the political spectrum – the Endowment and Brookings – were doing great work, but the turnover at the Endowment meant that it didn’t have signature issues or continuity, while Brookings was then focused on producing books that mattered rather than engaging on policy debates. There were small, activist NGOs that were very issue oriented and that played essential roles, but they were type cast and growth constrained. To the right of center, NGOs like the Heritage Foundation serviced and supported the Reagan administration. Their views were thoroughly predictable.

Barry Blechman and I were both born under auspicious signs. The world was changing radically in 1989. The Berlin wall was coming down. The Warsaw Pact was dissolving. The Soviet Union was, too. Cold War thinking no longer applied. It was an ideal time to think about old topics in new ways, and time to address new problems and opportunities. The Washington think tank landscape was fixed amidst all this change. NGO programming steeped in advocacy, pro and con, had become yesterday’s news. The orthodox belief systems of arms controllers and anti-arms controllers were also old hat.

It was a perfect time to start up a new think tank – if Barry and I could raise the money.

I had been working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for six years. Barry was working from his home. It was time for us to reach out to funders that were already supporting us to see if they would continue to support our work if we teamed up and started a new think tank. By this time, I was a known commodity from my writing and my programming at the Endowment. Ken Thompson, my old benefactor at the Rockefeller Foundation, was now situated at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. He gave me another lift by publishing a collection of my opinion pieces, Arms Control in the Reagan Administration. Would funders at the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and Ploughshares continue to support Barry and me if we created a new think tank for policy entrepreneurship?

The answer was yes, so we took the leap. In 1989, the timing was right to set up a new think tank, and a bare minimum of start-up funds were in hand. But success was far from assured. Foundation grants offered minimal support for overhead, which would be OK at the outset because we would be small, but not OK if we grew. There would be no endowment, not at the outset, not as we grew, and not now. And both Barry and I had health issues, although neither of us shared this information. He was recovering from one of several encounters with cancer, and I had been hospitalized with sarcoidosis, a disease that causes inflammation of the cells. I woke up one morning and collapsed in our bedroom. Exploratory surgery discovered sarcoid as the reason why some of my organs were shutting down. Steroids provided a miracle cure.

Like all very hard things in life, from raising a family to moss gardening, creating a think tank takes more work than is apparent at the outset. Barry projected confidence, and I drafted behind him like a NASCAR driver. One crucial insurance policy was that our non-profit think tank would have a for-profit partner – Barry’s defense consulting business, Defense Forecasts, Inc. If our non-profit faltered and Barry’s business grew, we could still get by.

Our think tank needed a name. The constellation of think tanks in Washington is crowded with forgettable and interchangeable names, like the Center for International and Strategic Studies of Hugely Important Matters. Barry and I gravitated toward something more distinctive and therefore memorable. The regrettably defunct Roosevelt Center offered a better model: Find a person’s name that signifies a set of issues and an approach to their betterment. But what names were not already taken and still available?

We began with a concept of what our new think tank would be about. We would work on hard issues of national and international security. We would avoid partisanship. We would play both an outside and an inside game. We would seek to frame terms of public debate on important issues. We would also seek to offer suggestions to the executive and legislative branches, as well as to other target audiences, domestic and foreign, on how best to proceed.

What name would suggest all this? I came up with the name of Henry L. Stimson. Stimson was a trust-busting internationalist in the Teddy Roosevelt mode, fighting for the soul of the Republican Party against America Firsters and isolationists. He embodied nonpartisanship, serving every president but one from Taft to Truman, twice as Secretary of War and once as Secretary of State. After his first stint as Secretary of War, he enlisted to serve in World War I. As Secretary of State, he negotiated naval arms control and introduced the concept of nonrecognition of territorial gains won through aggressive war. As Secretary of War the second time around, he oversaw the Manhattan Project and supported the use of nuclear weapons as “the least abhorrent choice” to end the war in the Pacific as soon as possible. Stimson tried to make amends after the war by seeking abolition so that no other U.S. official would have face his choice ever again.

I understood why Stimson made this decision: over 400,000 U.S. soldiers died in World War II. I have a copy of one of his condolence letters, sent to my Uncle Mickey’s mother after he was killed. Stimson’s signature is in ink at the bottom, probably signed by robo-pen. Fifty million or more died in that war. Revisionist histories contend that the war was “effectively” over when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted, and that atomic bombs were used to send a message to Josef Stalin. Revisionists neglect the fierceness of Japanese soldiers fighting in a losing cause. Not to end the carnage as quickly as possible because Japan was bound to lose — and the signing many more letters of condolence — would have been indefensible for Truman and Stimson.

Even so, naming our think tank after Stimson wasn’t an easy choice for Barry and me. While I never second-guessed Stimson’s decision to use the atomic bomb to end World War II, I couldn’t endorse it, either. One of the many essential construction projects after the war ended was to erect humanitarian laws of warfare. Cities were fair game during World War II, whether by “iron bombs,” firebombs, and then by atom bombs. The fatalities from the destruction of Dresden and Tokyo far exceeded the loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For me, the enduring meaning of Hiroshima is never again. The meaning of Nagasaki is how hard it is to stop the machinery of nuclear warfare after first use.

Back to Stimson: Like many others of his station in life, he was an anti-Semite and held racist views. He and his wife wouldn’t socialize with divorcées, either. As Secretary of War the second time around, he didn’t bomb the train tracks leading to the concentration camps. Barry and I are both Jewish. Our lineage is Lithuanian on one side, Ukrainian on the other. We considered the dark aspects of Stimson’s character, considered the time in which he lived, and chose to focus on what he tried to accomplish that was positive and instructive. Some of Stimson’s pursuits would be core issues for our start-up, and he was right about a good many issues. We also saw the irony of the two of us borrowing Stimson’s name – if we could get permission to do so.

The Stimsons were childless, so we had to figure out how to go about asking for permission. We decided to approach McGeorge Bundy, who was then teaching at New York University, having previously stepped down as President of the Ford Foundation. Before that, he served as the national security advisor for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. McGeorge’s brother was William Bundy, the man chosen to edit Foreign Affairs (and to publish me) who caused such a ruckus because of his involvement in decisions on the Vietnam War. Both Bundys couldn’t cleanse their hands of Vietnam, but if you could see past Vietnam, the entire body of their work was impressive.

Their father, Harvey Bundy, was Stimson’s right-hand man at the State Department and later at the War Department during World War II. Young McGeorge helped Stimson write his autobiography, On Active Service in Peace and War. Nuclear arms control would be a core issue for the think tank we were going to create, and Bundy had just published an important book about nuclear weapons, Danger and Survival, part history and part reflection of his years in government. McGeorge Bundy was the obvious person to ask permission to use Stimson’s name for our think tank.

Barry and I met him in his book-laden office at NYU. One of our talking points was that it was important to keep Stimson’s name in public view, and to call attention to his record of public service and his nonpartisan approach. The idea intrigued Bundy, but he didn’t know us from Adam. He said he’d be back in touch, no doubt after some reconnaissance and due diligence. When Bundy did get in touch, he suggested a meeting with Peter Kaminer, a German émigré who worked with Stimson as a young lawyer and rose through the ranks to become the managing partner at Winthrop & Stimson, a white shoe law firm on Wall Street. 

I met with Kaminer over lunch at his private club in Manhattan. Long retired, he spoke with a German accent and was scrupulously dressed. He must have liked what he heard, because after a few days, Bundy got back to us: The Henry L. Stimson Center received their seal of approval. Later, we became the Stimson Center, and still later, just Stimson.

My circles were unbroken: I kept reconnecting with people and institutions. Bundy and I met from time to time to talk about the Stimson Center and our work on nuclear arms control. By then, Bundy had an office at the Carnegie Corporation, which had become our biggest and longest foundation benefactor. Before he died, Bundy gave me books from his library, books I treasured. They had his microscopic notes in the margins. He also gave Stimson some of his father’s memorabilia, the most important of which was the briefing that General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, gave to his father. (Groves gave the same briefing to Truman, Stimson and a few others.)

Back then, briefings were presented on easels, consisting of 2X3 foot slabs of cardboard. On these cardboard slabs were mounted ‘before and after’ images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken from observation planes. The ‘before’ pictures outlined in black ink military targets in both cities; the ‘after’ pictures showed jaw-dropping damage.

After Truman heard Groves’s briefing and saw these images, he intervened to order a halt to preparations to drop a third atomic bomb on a Japanese city. This briefing was instrumental in disabusing Truman of his false comfort in thinking that ‘only’ military targets were destroyed by atomic bombs. I like to think that this briefing was also instrumental in convincing Truman not to use atomic bombs to break the stalemated Korean War, setting the foundation for a nuclear taboo – no more use in warfare – that extends to this day. In public, Truman professed to have had no qualms about using atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In private, Truman – like Stimson – became a charter member of the “never again” club. After receiving Bundy’s gift, I took steps to preserve and protect the briefing, which was placed in one of Stimson’s conference rooms. Very few visitors saw it, so the Stimson Center regifted it to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 2016, where it now resides.

With initial funding and a name in hand, Barry and I went looking for office space. I swallowed hard when co-signing a three-year lease to rent Suite 304 — five rooms and around 11,000 square feet of office space — at 1350 Connecticut Ave, NW, adjacent to Dupont Circle. The American Institute of Architects likened it to the Flatiron building in New York. To me it was a knock-off of the Daily Planet Building in the opening credits of the TV show where Superman would fly off the rooftop to rescue Lois Lane and commit justice against evildoers.

Barry and I put out our shingle in August 1989. Stimson’s founding motto was “Pragmatic Steps Toward Ideal Objectives.” I was President and CEO of Stimson; Barry was Chairman of the Board. Barry had his Stimson projects and I had mine. That worked until the growth of Barry’s for-profit business, Defense Forecasts, Inc., precluded his being a project manager at Stimson. We initially talked about my working on projects at DFI and sitting on its Board, but I decided to focus exclusively on the non-profit side. Our first two hires, Brett Lambert and John Parachini, now sit on Stimson’s Board.

Stimson grew and DFI grew more. After three years, we bid adieu to the Daily Planet Building and signed a lease to rent the top floor at 21 Dupont Circle, a sleek glass and brick building across the street from our original offices. My office overlooked the spot where I was arrested during the huge ‘May Day’ demonstrations in 1971. When we outgrew that space, Stimson and DFI moved into the Carnegie Endowment’s old offices on the top two floors of 11 Dupont Circle. The space became available because the Endowment had moved into a new building on Massachusetts Avenue. Barry and I split Tom Hughes’s old office in half. Our twin vistas looked south past the Circle, toward Lafayette Park and the White House.

The first decade of Stimson’s existence was a hopeful time, a time of great opportunities and accomplishments. It was a time to think big. Our business plan was simple: Work on hard security problems in creative ways. Be policy entrepreneurs. Identify target audiences, then provide analysis and practical recommendations on how to get from “here to there.” Convene meetings with stakeholders. Publish deliverables. Establish comparative advantage on an issue area, maintain it, and look for adjacent or related problems on which to make our mark. Stimson grew one foundation grant, one project, and one policy entrepreneur at a time.

Starting out, arms control was a core issue. Barry worked on taking nuclear weapons off U.S. Navy surface ships and attack submarines – weapons that weren’t useful in war and that diminished conventional military capabilities. I worked on cooperative aerial overflights and promoted an Open Skies Treaty. Both ideas were adopted by the George H.W. Bush administration. Bill Durch came on board and established comparative advantage on reforming the United Nations and strengthening peacekeeping operations, to be followed by Tori Holt, who developed the theme of the UN’s “responsibility to protect.” UN-related programming remains central to Stimson. Amy Smithson joined us to conduct field research and to write about chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet Union.

Barry mastered the art of convening bipartisan panels of heavyweights before co-founding Stimson, having set up a working group led by Senators John Warner and Sam Nunn that led to the creation of Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers in Washington and Moscow during the Reagan administration. (I helped draft the report.) At Stimson, Barry convened two impactful panels. One focused on upgrading the State Department’s way of communicating with the world and with its own employees. Working group members included Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice (who became a Board member), and Frank Carlucci. Many of their recommendations were implemented. The second panel, in which I participated, brought together heavy hitters like Paul Nitze and General Andrew Goodpaster to endorse a phased approach to eliminate nuclear weapons.

In the early 1990s, I began traveling to India and Pakistan to have conversations about confidence and security building measures – creating hotlines, providing advanced notice of military exercises and missile flight tests, and the like –- suggesting that they might also have applicability in southern Asia. These measures helped keep the Cold War from becoming hot and laid the groundwork for major accords when political conditions permitted. After initial skepticism and after experiencing serious nuclear-tinged crises, India and Pakistan eventually agreed to negotiate them. But there was no real investment in these measures on the subcontinent, and even less in peacemaking.

In the mid-1990s, three treaties faced important deadlines. The Nonproliferation Treaty was in its twenty-fifth year in 1995; it could either be extended indefinitely or be extended for a time-limited duration, to be followed by another conference to determine its fate. A treaty to end the testing of nuclear weapon was entering a negotiating endgame after decades of effort. And a convention banning the production and use of chemical weapons needed the Senate’s consent for ratification. Because this was an unusual time, and because these opportunities were fleeting, Stimson departed somewhat from our “how do we get from here to there” approach. The need of the hour was to secure gains that were within reach. Joe Cirincione, John Parachini, and Amy Smithson took an active role in working with the executive branch, informing Capitol Hill, and coordinating NGOs to push for the indefinite extension of the Nonproliferation Treaty, the negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. We succeeded on all three counts. Success in arms control is never permanent, however. All three agreements have dedicated opponents at home and abroad.

I never expected Stimson to become a place of meaningful work for so many people. At the outset, my objectives were more selfish than selfless. I was looking for a meaningful place to do my own work and to speak in my own voice. To be sure, Stimson had to grow; there is no steady state when it comes to institution building, and expansion is way better than contraction. So, I set out to grow Stimson at a modest pace. When I stepped down in 2000, our budget was around three million dollars. My successor, Ellen Laipson, grew Stimson by actively seeking funding from government sources. Barry was way ahead of me on this, but I conceded the point because foundation grantmaking in our core competencies was shrinking. Then Brian Finlay took Stimson to new heights with strategic mergers and by moving smartly into new programming areas, especially in Asia and on environmental issues. Stimson’s budget is now thirteen million dollars strong, with a staff of over sixty.

The University of Pennsylvania has a ranking system for think tanks. All ranking systems are suspect, but in this case, I agree with its findings. Stimson punches way above its weight class. The think tanks with endowments and huge budgets that work on international security, like the Carnegie Endowment and Brookings, top the list. In the current ranking, Stimson ranks tenth in the United States and eighteenth globally. Stimson also gets special recognition for creative, impactful, paradigm-shifting work. Not bad for nongovernmental work, or for our modest start-up in 1989.

As Stimson grew, there were growing pains between me and Barry. Barry’s preferred rate of growth was faster than mine. To do so, we needed funding from the U.S. and foreign governments. A necessary precondition for seeking government funds was to create formal lines of separation between Stimson’s non-profit work and Barry’s business, which thrived on government finding. This was accomplished with the help of Board members in the mid-1990s. Before I stepped down as President and CEO, Stimson’s Board approved criteria for accepting government money. Growth also helped with separation, as DFI outgrew its space-sharing arrangements with Stimson. We each rented separate space in 2006, when Stimson moved to 1211 19th Street. 

Barry knew that I wasn’t enthusiastic about fundraising, especially from individuals, corporations, and governments – areas where success was essential to institutional growth. Plus, I was clearly worn down by running Stimson. I stayed too long as President and CEO – eleven years — but I wanted to choose the time of my leaving.  Barry wanted change sooner rather than later, and he was right: my stepping down helped Stimson grow and did me a world of good. I could work autonomously on projects of my own design, and I stopped worrying about personnel decisions and fundraising for others. In 2000, Stimson was still my baby, but I ceased being a doting parent.

This change coincided with another big move: Alessandra and I decided to sell our house in North Arlington and to move to the woods outside of Charlottesville. We raised our children in that house, living in it for twenty-five years. But Alessandra never liked the DC merry-go-round, where too many people are more intent to know where you work than who you are, looking over your shoulder to seek out someone more useful to talk to.

In 1999, Alessandra stopped wishing we lived somewhere else and made a supremely wise decision. Her friend was leaving a little rental cottage situated on forty acres of woods just outside Batesville, Virginia. My spouse decided to assume the rent and use the cottage for weekend getaways. She advised me of these facts, then added, “You’re welcome to join me, but only if you don’t work.”

Once again, the timing was right. Misha was in her second year of college in California, Josh was working in Washington, and I was stepping away from the day-to-day responsibilities of running Stimson. We spent close to two years in that cottage getting away from the DC grind. We had no TV, and the iPhone was still eight years into the future. We enjoyed the low-key-ness of Charlottesville and walking in the woods. And driving country roads. Our favorite was Edge Valley Road in North Garden. The name seemed perfect, as one side of the road was mostly pasture and the other side was mostly woods. One morning in 2000 I took a solo drive on Edge Valley Road and saw a for sale sign. We moved into that house in February 2001.

With the proceeds of the sale of our nondescript, but ideally located house near the Potomac River across from Georgetown, we bought a stunning wood frame home on eight acres, with a pool and a toolshed, which became my office. As well as a co-op efficiency apartment near Dupont Circle. For six years, I commuted weekly from North Garden to DC, driving north on Tuesday mornings after rush hour and returning Thursday evenings after rush hour. This was crazy, but that was where my head was at. I wasn’t ready to cut ties with Stimson and with Washington. Working remotely wasn’t done back then, so I did a split week between home and DC. After we moved, I scratched the itch to teach at the college level. The University of Virginia offered me a professorship of practice, where I taught one senior seminar a semester for nine years. That was plenty.

Stimson was everything I wanted and yet couldn’t imagine, at least not at the outset. I loved what I did; it was exhausting, but it didn’t feel like work. It felt like a gift — the gift of meaningful work, a gift I could pass along to others. I experienced occasional successes to go along with the frustrations of working on hard issues. The visiting fellowships at the center I set up in India, Pakistan, and China brought rising talent into the field. The workshops on nuclear issues on the subcontinent helped to create a common language of confidence-building measures, risk reduction, and an appreciation for the perils of nuclear deterrence. A stream of publications generated echoes in the region. However, hard issues are, by definition, resistant to positive change. They’re entrenched because powerful interests resist changes that diminish their power.

I learned coping mechanisms. One was to work on two hard issues at a time; that way, when I got tired of banging my head against a brick wall, I would move to the second issue, and my headache would be gone. Temporarily. When I was peddling confidence- and security-building measures and learning about the dynamics of crisis management on the subcontinent, I was also working on a code of conduct for responsible space-faring nations. Stimson prepared the first drafts of these rules of the road. Twenty years later, negotiations over a space code of conduct might actually begin. That was the nature of my business: look for opportunities before they arise and wait for a long game if necessary.

The two aspects of my work life that enriched me the most were travel and mentoring. Places and people nourished my soul. Stimson worked on world problems, so part of my job description was to introduce Stimson to foreign audiences. I qualified for million-miler treatment on United Airlines alone. Alessandra bore the brunt of my travel. She was forgiving. We worked out a ten-day rule: no matter how many countries I visited or how distant the trip, I needed to return home on the tenth day.

I was living the dream of a school kid who was fascinated by maps and the names of capital cities. I revisited Cairo to convene a workshop on confidence-building measures. And Istanbul, the Constantinople of my imagination. Jerusalem. Buenos Aires. Brasilia. Stockholm. Helsinki. Moscow. St. Petersburg. Kiev. Beijing. Shanghai. All over India and Pakistan. The world historic cities of Europe, and many more. I was curious, and my curiosity was rewarded with real conversations and feasts for the eyes. After every trip, something inside me changed. Then I came home to my sweet loves, and I took root again.

I owed so much to my mentors, so how could I not repay it forward? Mine wasn’t a selfless mentoring; it was quite purposeful. The issues I cared about were going to survive me. After I was gone, my mentees would be hard at work, looking for opportunities to take a bite out of a big problem. And it gave me great nachas – there’s that Yiddish word again – to see my mentees grow into their powers after leaving Stimson. I loved mentoring, and not just for these reasons. It was one area of my chosen profession where there was receptivity rather than resistance. And I was good at it.

I retired from Stimson in 2020. The timing was once again clear. I had lost interest in fundraising, and the foundation supporting my book project on the history of nuclear arms control lost interest in the topic. My last initiatives on South Asia programming – two massive, free on-line courses on nuclear issues and a platform for rising talent to express themselves called South Asian Voices – were well underway. I had already handed the reigns of South Asia programming to Sameer Lalwani and Elizabeth Threlkeld, who continued to grow the program. I stopped going into the office regularly and had periodic health crises. My retirement party was postponed multiple times due to COVID. It morphed into a “Tribute” on May 18, 2022. Another circle was completed. I gave much to Stimson; Stimson gave back more to me.