[1][2] His writings, known for elegant and even literary prose, often influenced American thought in policymaking—his coining of the phrase "the indispensable nation" with Sidney Blumenthal[3] to describe America was widely used when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began including it in her speeches.

His family, of the New England aristocracy, lost nearly everything during the Great Depression after the collapse of the Fall River cotton-mill economy.

He went to France in 1954 to conduct graduate-study research on painter Eugène Delacroix and writer Charles Baudelaire, but soon found his interest drawn to the current intellectual arena of literature and politics, which led to an intense interest in French political writers including Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

While in France he wrote a novel and was witness to the impact of that nation's withdrawal from Vietnam and its problems with a rebellion in colonialized Algeria.

[4] Chace died from a heart attack in Paris while doing research for a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, which would have been his tenth book.