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.

[1][2] 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, since 2006,[update] the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.–China Relations at Asia Society in New York.

[1] After completing his studies in Tokyo, Schell flew to Saigon in January 1967, as American involvement in the Vietnam War continued to escalate.

[5] 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.

It is the government's way of waging war without the support of its own people, and involves us all in the dishonor of killing in a cause we are no longer willing to die for.

[9] 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.

[20] In 1967, John Mecklin wrote in The New York Times Book Review that The Village of Ben Suc, Jonathan Schell's first book, was "written with a skill that many a veteran war reporter will envy, eloquently sensitive, subtly clothed in an aura of detachment, understated, extraordinarily persuasive.

"[23] Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, however, David Greenberg called The Fate of the Earth an "overwrought doomsday polemic.

"[24] Two decades later, in Slate, Michael Kinsley characterized it as "an overheated stew of the obvious and the idiotic" and suggested it was "the silliest book ever taken seriously by serious people.

"[26] In 2019, philosopher Akeel Bilgrami described Schell as "one of the great public intellectuals of our time,"[27]: x  and described The Fate of the Earth as a "rightly celebrated classic".