Jonathan Schell

Jonathan Edward Schell (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014) was an American reporter and writer whose work primarily dealt with American foreign policy from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, as well as the threat posed by nuclear weapons and support for nuclear disarmament.

Life and career

Early life and education

Schell was born in New York City on August 21, 1943, to Orville Hickock Schell Jr., a lawyer who chaired Americas Watch, and Marjorie Bertha. His siblings included a sister, Suzanne, and a brother, Orville Schell, a former Dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.–China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He studied at Dalton School in New York and graduated from The Putney School in Vermont. In 1965 he graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Far Eastern history. He then spent a year learning Japanese at the International Christian University in Tokyo.

Early career: Vietnam, ''The New Yorker''

After completing his studies in Tokyo, Schell flew to Saigon in January 1967, as American involvement in the Vietnam War continued to escalate. He managed to acquire a press pass by claiming to be a correspondent for ''The Harvard Crimson'', and would later recount how the correspondents reporting on the war "took imunder their wing". He was a witness to Operation Cedar Falls, writing particularly on the destruction of Bến Súc. His reportage was published first in ''The New Yorker'' and then as a book, ''The Village of Ben Suc'', with Alfred A. Knopf.

His second book, ''The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin'', published in 1968, also drew a graphic picture of the devastating effects of American bombings and ground operations on Quảng Ngãi Province and Quảng Tín Province in South Vietnam.

From 1967 until 1987, Schell was a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He wrote essays for the magazine on the presidency of Richard Nixon, including the Watergate scandal that led to the president's resignation in 1974, that formed the basis to his book, ''The Time of Illusion''. The Notes and Comments section was awarded the George Polk Award for Commentary in 1979.

In 1977, William Shawn, the longtime editor-in-chief of ''The New Yorker'', designated Schell as his chosen successor to replace him but he was forced to rescind that plan as it proved immediately unpopular with the magazine's staff. Shawn revisited the same plan in 1982 but again withdrew Schell's name from consideration in the face of a staff revolt. Ultimately, upon a change of ownership of the magazine in 1987, Shawn was removed and replaced as editor-in-chief with Robert Gottlieb.

In the early 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles in ''The New Yorker'', subsequently published in 1982 as '' The Fate of the Earth'', which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of the nuclear arms race and became an essential part of the Nuclear Freeze campaign. The book received the ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award

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