Harries was born in Wales in 1930 and educated at Oxford University, where his tutor was political theorist John Plamenatz and his lecturers included philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin.
He was co-founder with Irving Kristol and co-editor with Robert W. Tucker of The National Interest, a Washington, D.C.–based foreign policy magazine, which they turned into one of America’s most influential political publications.
Over the years, they published essays by Francis Fukuyama, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry Kissinger, Fareed Zakaria, Irving Kristol, and others.
[2] Harries was a member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, a group that produced Quadrant magazine, on whose editorial board he sat.
Harries met with Australian federal treasurer William McMahon in June 1967 to request that Quadrant receive the same amount of support from the Commonwealth Literary Fund as literary journal Meanjin, a request McMahon passed, with his own recommendation, to prime minister Harold Holt.