Peter Rodman, R.I.P.(Obituary)

As Russia's invasion of Georgia swept down the Caucasus, the editors of NATIONAL REVIEW asked each other: "What advice would Peter Rodman be giving us about this?"

From 1991, when he arrived at NR as a senior editor, until he fell ill a few months ago, Peter was something of an oracle on international politics to his NR colleagues. He could analyze any crisis with matchless clarity and calmly propose a sensible response to it--sometimes: "There is no solution to this problem. We simply have to contain and outlast it." When Peter spoke or wrote on foreign policy, everyone else thought himself an expert afterward. Accordingly we consulted him whenever a crisis arose even long after he formally left the magazine.

It helped that Peter arrived at NATIONAL REVIEW to write and oversee our coverage of foreign policy with an already-established reputation. He had been Henry Kissinger's aide and literary amanuensis both in and out of government from the late-Sixties onward. He came to wider public notice when he wrote (in The American Spectator) an eloquent defense of the Nixon-Kissinger conduct of U.S. policy toward Cambodia and Vietnam. His loyalty to the famous statesman, personal and philosophical, never wavered.

That loyalty was repaid fully--and variously. Among Kissinger's more lasting diplomatic achievements was his playing Cupid between Peter and Veronique Boulad. They married, produced two clever and charming children, Nicholas and Theodora, and made a home in northwest Washington, D.C., where they presided over lively parties at which bureaucratic rivals and political opponents became friends.

Peter remained a Kissingerian realist all his life. But his realism was a conservative one that made him equally at home in the Reagan administration. Between 1984 and 1990 he held a series of very senior positions in the State Department and the National Security Council. Between 2001 and ...