Yale’s significance in Nick Brady’s life as a student, from 1948 to 1952, was double sided. On the one hand, in the immediate postwar period in which Brady and Charlie Johnson (’54) attended, there was a clear moral ethos of what it meant to be a Yale man, with its emphasis on public service, graciousness, and gentlemanliness—qualities they took into adulthood and exhibited throughout their careers in business and government. On the flip side, there was the Yale that William F. Buckley Jr. criticized in his seminal 1951 God and Man at Yale for being anti-Christian and anti-capitalist. Buckley singles out a professor, Ralph E. Turner, whose wildly popular history course, Contemporary World—which Brady took as a junior, in 1951—was “emphatically and vigorously atheistic,” he writes. “An able scholar, he is nevertheless a professional debunker, a dedicated iconoclast who has little mercy either on God, or on those who believe in Him, and little respect for the values that most undergraduates have been brought up to respect.”
Buckley goes on: “Many Yale students laugh off the influence of Mr. Turner and ultimately classify him as a gifted and colorful fanatic. Others . . . are deeply disturbed by Mr. Turner’s bigoted atheism.”1
Brady fell into the latter category. It wasn’t so much Turner’s atheism that he found repellant. It was what Brady, looking back on his undergraduate years more than six decades later, called Turner’s “excessive moralizing.” As Brady writes in his memoir, A Way of Going: “One day [Turner] made the stark point in a lecture that the only difference between Communism and the Catholic Church was that Communist prison camps were here on earth. I can still remember being jarred by that view.”2
In the decades after graduation, Brady was only superficially involved with Yale. Captain of the championship 1952 squash team, he became engaged by the global potential of the sport, contributing generously to the new Brady Squash Center and, subsequently, to a leading researcher at Yale Medical School working to combat ovarian cancer. Johnson, a close Brady friend, gave a substantial donation to renovate the Yale Bowl (and, as mentioned earlier, would go on to underwrite the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, which supports research in the Kissinger papers, and to become among the largest single-gift donors in Yale’s history, for the construction of its two new colleges). In the early 2000s, when Rick Levin asked Brady to consider another gift, Brady told his friend Sam Chauncey, former assistant to Yale presidents Griswold and his successor, Kingman Brewster: “I would give more money to Yale if it had something to do with common sense.”3
The idea of sound judgment has always resonated with Brady. After his father (Yale ’29) died in 1971 he briefly considered creating a Yale professorship in his memory. When one of his father’s friends asked what department it would be in, Brady answered, “I’m not sure, but I know what he was long on—common sense.”4 During the younger Brady’s career at Dillon Read and Company, and as a US senator and treasury secretary, he’d repeatedly come into contact with people who had made all A’s in college but who couldn’t hold down a job; people, in short, lacking in common sense. He gravitated toward the opposite: grounded people such as Kissinger, George Shultz, and Johnson, who had kept Franklin Resources on an even keel for more than fifty years. “If an idea passes Charlie’s muster,” Brady often says, “you know you’re on the right track.”5
The relationship between common sense and the academic community isn’t an obvious one. By definition, a liberal arts education is about pursuing knowledge for its own sake, without a practical application.
But Chauncey got a two-thousand-watt idea.
“Having attended several GS classes, at some point common sense popped into my head,” he said. Chauncey got Gaddis’s permission to invite Brady and Johnson, who, coincidentally, had met Gaddis and Hill at various Yale events.6
While common sense had never been an explicit part of GS’s phraseology, Brady and Johnson found much in the program to like. The sparring among the professors from different points on the political spectrum, which forces GSers to reckon with their core values, leaves no room for a Ralph Turner. Yet while GS lacks the didacticism that Brady found so off-putting during his Yale years, the syllabus’s focus on the classics, the personal attention the professors give their students, and the course’s emphasis on public service were comfortably familiar—a throwback, even, to his time at Yale. “From the First World War through the Second into the ’60s, Yale had just an amazing record of producing extraordinary people who went into national service—the military, intelligence agencies, and other parts of government,” Rick Levin said in 2013. “And there had always been in . . . each generation from the First World War through the 1960s a number of faculty who had always believed this was part of their mission to educate people for those public service roles. And many, many outstanding men—they were all men until ’69—were attracted to those callings and inspired by the example of a number of these professors. We fast-forward to the 1990s, and we didn’t really have that . . . we still talk about service as part of the ethos of the place . . . but there weren’t those role models of faculty who were really explicitly hoping to educate their students for national leadership. Paul Kennedy and Charlie Hill and John Gaddis conceived this idea in that old tradition.”7
Brady and Johnson recognized another plus: in giving Hill, a practitioner professor, equal stature to the scholars, GS didn’t play by the rules. This unique set-up so impressed them that in 2006 they decided to endow the program, specifying in their gift papers that their support was predicated on maintaining parity between scholars and practitioners. “The scholar is immersed in the work of conducting research, and then relating his or her findings through teaching and writing. The practitioner learns to manage the interactions of people and resources to achieve goals and provide leadership in society,” the papers state.
They continue: “Students will benefit immensely from the interaction that can occur when the scholar and the practitioner teach together in the same classroom. As professors, practitioners and students examine problems and issues from the perspective of history and research, on the one hand, and actual experience, on the other, wisdom will be the result.”8 Part of the Brady-Johnson endowment has been used not just to retain Hill, the original practitioner professor, but also to bring in the others: Negroponte, Solman, Brooks, and previously Walter Russell Mead and Peggy Noonan.
Levin has since confirmed that GS’s innovative use of practitioners “inspired” him “to see that there was even more potential in this approach,” and it became his model for the teaching of contemporary global affairs when he set up the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs in 2009.9
So what about the connection between GS and common sense? “We never thought about it that way,” Gaddis conceded, “but it’s perfect. It really does come around to what we’re trying to do, which is to equip young people to deal with an unforeseen future . . . Common sense is like a foreign language. There are all kinds of ways that you can use it.”10 GS always comes back to foxes and hedgehogs, which is not unlike common sense. Speaking to a group of visitors in 2014, Gaddis melded the two ideas together: “You will see that the Yale campus is filled with young people walking. They all know where they’re going but they’re not looking out in front of them but at their hand . . . texting each other. It’s amazing that they can do this without running into each other. This skill while walking—I hope not while biking or driving—is an example of holding a hedgehog idea while being attentive, like a fox, to surroundings. Common sense—you know where you’re going when you’re crossing the street but jump out of the way of a bad driver—operates at the level of ordinary life, although not necessarily at the level of responsibility. That’s something we need to confront. How can we teach the agility these students show and transfer it to higher realms of policy making?”11
The answer: by looking to the past, at people like Augustus and Elizabeth I, who showed a lot of common sense, and people like Marc Antony and Philip II, who did not.