Robert Kagan ‘80 founded the Yale Political Monthly in 1979 and served as its Editor-in-Chief until he graduated. Kagan went on to work for the State Department under the Reagan administration. He advised John McCain on foreign policy during his 2008 presidential campaign and has been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute since 2010.
What inspired you to start the Yale Political Monthly?
I felt that there was no publication where people were dealing with current issues in a serious way that had a bipartisan and open approach. I wanted to get a dialogue going on that didn’t exist and I think that sets the YPM apart from other publications of the time, like the Dartmouth Review. Most universities then, and even more now, are predominantly liberal, so there wasn’t a lot of tolerance for alternative opinions in the early 80s, and there’s even less now I would say. Those of us who got the thing started, we didn’t want to respond to the one-sided discussion by, you know, yelling and screaming from the other side. We just wanted to have a place where people were actually engaging each other. That was the goal.
Were there any particular issues at that time that made it especially apparent how one sided things were?
I’m really trying to remember what people were arguing about 40 years ago; it all seems very quaint, but it wasn’t. A lot of the issues that people talk about now were not necessarily the front and center issues of the time. I mean, in those days, it was arms control and concern about the nuclear build-up on all sides. We were at sort of the height of the Cold War, so there was a lot of discussion about that, but there were also issues of education and whatnot. The YPM was a place to write thoughtful things about anything. I think that we covered a lot of different topics, and not all of them were necessarily political.
Did you feel like other publications were focused too much on a specific area?
No, it wasn’t that so much. For one thing, I don’t think there were that many publications on campus in those days. I mean, there was the Yale Daily News, obviously. There was the Yale Literary Review and those sorts of things that have been established forever, but there was nothing that was in that political and cultural realm, at least that I remember. You have to take into account my fading memory of these things.
It seems like you took on a project that was bringing something really new to campus. Was that something that was an individual project? Were you working with other students? With mentors? With people even outside of Yale?
No, it was very much a Yale student operation. We didn’t have professors involved. We didn’t have mentors. Back in the day, Yale was less in loco parentis; students were allowed to do what they wanted to for the most part, without any particular university involvement or guidance, so we were pretty much on our own. And it was really just me and a couple of my buddies, David Bechhofer and Peter Schultz. These were both freshmen roommates of mine, who were not particularly political, but they did a great job on design, distribution, editing, copy editing and all those things. It was a very small group of students with no real assistance, you know, selling ads to Yorkside Pizza to pay for it.
After your time as editor and graduation, what was your relationship to the publication?
As long as I still knew people, I was sort of involved. But it’s a matter of how much involvement the people who are running it want from other people. I mean, the answer is not much, right? So whoever is running it, it’s their show, right? We certainly haven’t been heavy handed about institutionalizing things as a publication, and I think it’s still true. I mean, it’s really about what the people who are at Yale at the time want. But I was always very satisfied with the direction it was heading.
I notice that the Dread Pirate Roberts appears in the masthead maybe 10 years after you started the YPM, around the late 80s when Kimberly Kessler and your brother Frederick Kagan were editing. Do you know the story behind that?
So they are now married and I think my sister-in-law and brother were just very big Princess Bride fans. You’d have to ask him.
Respectable. It’s a great movie. Moving forward to today: Do you feel like this issue you identified with publications on campus — or in our political culture in general — is still present? Is there not a space for bipartisanship, open discussion?
Well, look, there’s obviously debate on campus. I just don’t feel like the two sides are that interested in engaging each other in actual arguments. Do you know what I mean? There’s a lot of yelling and protesting on both sides. And there’s a lot of, I would say, mutual intolerance, but obviously, it’s still a predominantly liberal world. I’m sure conservatives on campus feel somewhat beleaguered. It seems that our society hasn’t accomplished what the Yale Political Monthly was, in its very, very, very small way, designed to accomplish. Civil discourse on difficult topics is just not the trend of the world today.
Do you think that the way to work toward that civil discourse is through publications like [the YPM]? Is there a need for something bigger? Is the answer both?
Sure. I don’t know what “something bigger” would be. But I do think that the YPM is a worthy activity insofar as anybody on campus is trying to create a civil discourse among competing points of view. In the present cacophony I’m sure it feels like it’s getting drowned out. But I still think it’s worth keeping the flame alive. For all we know, current events are gonna drive people toward a greater seriousness about civil discourse. In that case, it’ll be a good thing to have publications and institutions that are there and ready to hash things out in a serious way.
You mentioned earlier that when you started this publication, it was at the height of the Cold War, and today we’re faced with a similar situation. What do you think the role of a campus publication in Connecticut and in the United States plays in the discourse on an issue like the war in Ukraine and whatever the broader consequences of that for the entire world will be? Because I think it’s certainly going to have a lasting impact on just about everybody.
I was recently on a college campus talking to students about this stuff. And it’s obvious that there’s a great deal of interest in what’s going on. People come at things from a certain set of assumptions. And, now, I think a lot of people’s assumptions have been upset by what’s happened. My sense is that people are kind of grappling for a new paradigm, or a new way of understanding what this all means. It would be great if students had a chance to put down thoughts on paper because there’s no better way to try to understand what you think. It’s a great exercise to write in such a way that others will understand what you’re saying, take your arguments, and decide what they think about them.
I think a lot of assumptions and paradigms have been shattered on a lot of issues over the past five or six years, so it’s a very good time for people to be thinking out loud. And rather than assuming that you have nothing to say, what’s better than starting to try to do that while you’re still in college? After all, you’re in, as we were, a heavy learning environment. You’ve got incredible resources; you’ve got professors to talk to about all these things. It’s a very dangerous and in many ways, horrible moment, but it’s also a very exciting moment. So I do think it’s a good time to be writing the Yale Political Monthly or whatever you guys call it.
And that speaks to something I think about a lot as a writer and an editor, which is that what is the role in general of a campus publication? Because we’re not breaking news, And we’re students. We’re not full-time journalists, and we have no money. We’re not flying out to the border of Poland to speak to people fleeing war and crossing the border. So what is the purpose of what we’re saying? How do we contribute something new?
The university is a place where you can examine ideas and compare them to others. You read one point of view, whether it’s in political philosophy or in the sciences, and you’re going to be confronted with alternative points of view. You’re learning how to evaluate these differences. And it seems to me that this is an opportunity to apply that learning — as well as the substantive learning in U.S. history courses or international relations theory courses — to the real world and to what’s happening now. To me, that’s an exciting prospect and when you get out of college it’ll be harder to do in some ways. So this is a unique opportunity, in a way.
I think that’s a really good perspective on it. And definitely encouraging because I think sometimes it feels, not purposeless, but just difficult to contribute something new to the conversation, as…
…As a young person who only knows what they know. I know, I get that. But, you know, the people who do talk about it don’t know as much about it as you may think they do. Just having the sort of courage to just put yourself out there is great and what’s the downside? Somebody calls you a dummy. That’s okay. And I think it’s good to learn that. My personal prejudice, because I’m an old dinosaur, is that there’s too much focus on Twitter, on short commentary and these little blasts of opinion. People feel like if they’re not out there on the internet, in some format, that nobody’s going to be paying attention to them. So it’s hard for you to write a piece for a print publication. It feels like “Oh, my God, what is that? How many clicks am I gonna get on this?” But that kind of stuff, really, it matters more than we think it does. I mean, I still write long essays and books. That’s basically all I do. And I think sometimes they penetrate through everything else. So I would encourage people to keep that particular aspect of writing alive.
How did founding this publication and thinking through these issues shape your path after you left Yale?
My path after that was basically, with a brief detour in the government, writing essays about international relations and to some degree about politics. I didn’t think I was going to necessarily be a writer when I grew up. But it certainly turned out to be an actual career path. I certainly didn’t set out with that in mind in any real fashion. So I do think that I benefited. And I have to say it was a fun thing to be doing in college. It was a lot of work and you’re up until four in the morning, but we had fun. And by the way we started printing stuff at the Pierson printing press. I mean, typesetting every single page by hand.
How many issues did that last for?
I think that lasted until we found a company that could print for us but I, I’m sure we put out a number of issues where David Bechhofer and Peter Shultz were running the prints at the Pierson printing press and stapling them together. It was like a kids show.
How long did that take the two of them?
I don’t know. But it was definitely a crash for, you know, four days with very little sleep basically. But I mean, again, that’s what college is for. Right? It’s my second most important contribution to Yale.
What’s the first?
My first most important contribution was the now late and lamented Pierson Inferno. I think the university in its ultimate wisdom canceled it. But it lived for 40 years. And that was also started by me and my two buddies, David and Peter. So that was a more significant contribution. But I’m still proud of the Yale Political Monthly.