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This history is based on reporting and research that I conducted intermittently over four years. From 2011 to 2015 I had an all-access pass to Grand Strategy seminars, crisis simulations, and class dinners, and the extraordinary cooperation of the professors and students, many of whom I spoke with more than once. I was also fortunate to interview Nicholas Brady, Charles Johnson, Henry Kissinger, Richard Levin, Peter Salovey, George Shultz, and Yale professors Scott Boorman, David Brooks, John Negroponte, Douglas Rae, Gaddis Smith, and Norma Thompson. Among the former program administrators with whom I spoke were Ted Bromund, Jeremy Friedman, and Caroline Lombardo.

Since the grand strategy of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy is not to shape current policy but to train future decision makers, this history presents the results of a groundbreaking survey of 385 alumni enrolled in the class between 2000 and 2014, with the aim of seeing the program’s long-term impact. Comments from former students make it clear that the professors achieved their goals, and I’d like to thank all of the participants for sharing their views.

I’m particularly grateful to the program’s three founding professors, John Gaddis, Charlie Hill, and Paul Kennedy, for entrusting me with this project, to Elizabeth Bradley for her inclusiveness and for enabling me to view Grand Strategy as a set of leadership principles, and to Sam Chauncey and Paul Solman for their insights and friendship. The help I received from Igor Biryukov, Kathleen Galo, and Elizabeth Vastakis was invaluable, with deepest thanks to Sara Rutkowski. Among former students, I’d like to single out Conor Crawford, Campbell Schnebly- Swanson, Justin Schuster, Isaac Wasserman, and Haibo Zhao, who were as generous as they are impressive. Chris Howell lent moral support to this project from day one, and later, his senior thesis on the intellectual history of grand strategy. Colonel Craig Wonson, the first Marine Corps fellow assigned to International Security Studies to provide a military perspective on grand strategy, graciously did the same for me.

Soon after I began reconstructing the program’s history, I met with Paul Kennedy at Yorkside Pizza, a basic but venerable restaurant down the block from the university’s Hall of Graduate Studies, where the Grand Strategy seminar usually meets. I popped open my laptop on the table between us as he began to describe what led the three professors to create the program. “Bring a tape recorder the next time we meet,” Kennedy said. “While you’re typing, you might miss a point I’m making.”

As a journalist I had long ago concluded that taping interviews hindered rather than helped me in my reporting. I didn’t pay as much attention to what was being said in the moment in the belief that I could go back and listen again. But too often the recorder malfunctioned, and even when it worked, I found most of what I didn’t catch the first time of marginal value.

I did, however, tape my next conversation with Kennedy. Several months passed before I had an epiphany about why he’d insisted upon it. It happened one fall evening on the train from New Haven to Washington. Earlier that day Gaddis had moderated the Surprise and Intelligence class, a fall staple that focused on the decade-plus period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, two unforeseen events that altered the world. The message had been to pay attention to everything. Kennedy, at Yorkside, had been giving me a subtle lesson on how the human mind works—actually a primer on Grand Strategy. He was telling me how difficult it is to process all of the information that comes at us.

When Nick Brady and Charlie Johnson, who endowed the Grand Strategy program and after whom it is now named, commissioned me to write this intellectual history in 2011, the question at the heart of my reporting was, how is critical thinking taught? The plan was for me to attend the Monday-afternoon seminar for a full year to capture the spontaneity, drama, and learning that occur in the GS classrooms and as many extracurricular presentations and dinners as practicable. I would also conduct interviews with the professors and current and former students. The final product, as Gaddis described it, was to be a narrative “rendered with a novelist’s eye.” I’ve used pseudonyms when I quote students in class unless permission was otherwise given, but the people are real and the other details about them have not been changed. If they agreed to be interviewed, I used their real names, except where specified, and quotations from these conversations and the classes that I attended are from my notes.

When I began this project the Arab Spring was a work in progress, Osama bin Laden was alive and hiding in a safe house in Pakistan, Muammar Gaddafi was the leader of Libya, the Crimean Peninsula was part of Ukraine, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had not yet become a horrifying household name. I was fortunate to witness each of these history-making changes through the lens of the class. I’m indebted to Nick and Charlie, above all, for my box seat and for their great generosity over the years.