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Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill, each in their seventies, are by far GS’s largest draw, and, according to students and alumni, often what they remember most about their years at Yale. Nicholas Shalek (GS ’05), who took GS as an undergrad, described the course as “an unparalleled opportunity to get exposure to three of Yale’s most accomplished professors.”¹ A student who enrolled in GS during law school said, “I had studied [with] Professor Gaddis in college and hoped to enjoy the privilege of learning from him.”² Jared Jonker (GS ’12), who took GS while working on a dual masters degree in international relations and a business degree at the Yale School of Management, commented that GS “was honestly part of what made me choose Yale over Harvard for my graduate work. The classroom promised a dynamism rarely found even at Yale.”³

John Gaddis, a Texan who favors tweed jackets and sensible shoes, is the world’s preeminent Cold War scholar, a 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient, and the author of ten books. His 1982 Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy is the seminal text on the post–World War II strategy formulated by George Kennan, the first director of policy planning in George Marshall’s State Department. On the April 2012 afternoon that Gaddis was scheduled to lead the GS class on the Cold War, he got word that he’d been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for George F. Kennan: An American Life, a biography three decades in the making. The students gave him a raucous standing ovation, applauding until Gaddis abruptly turned off the spotlight. “All right,” he said, “enough of that,” and got back to the day’s planned seminar.⁴

Excitable, slightly rumpled, and sounding like a don from Oxford, where he received his graduate education, Kennedy has an electric presence in the classroom. As one student said, “The silence . . . while Professor Paul Kennedy was speaking was the deepest I’ve ever (not) heard.”⁵ In 2014 he received the Hattendorf Prize for Distinguished Original Research in Maritime History, the most prestigious award in the field given to scholars by the US Naval War College. Kennedy is also the author or editor of nineteen books, including his best known, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, published in 2013.

Hill, who was posted to Hong Kong in the Foreign Service and then moved on to Vietnam and Israel, worked as a senior adviser to Kissinger and George Shultz at the State Department in Washington, and later for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the United Nations. Opinionated and confident, he no doubt delivered his ideas to the men he served with the same penetrating stare that fixes students to their seats during office hours. As a practitioner—an expert trained in a field outside academia—Hill is a pioneer at Yale. His background as a shaper of grand strategy does not qualify him for a tenured teaching position. But he has stretched the bounds of academia, teaching a full course load—and often a double load—and being accorded the stature of a professor. In addition to authoring two books, including Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, he has influenced the writing of many others. At a meeting with GS students in December 2014, Kissinger acknowledged that his bestseller World Order “grew out of a conversation I had with Professor Hill.” Hill is also the only GS professor who is the subject of a comprehensive biography.⁶

Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill, known affectionately around campus as the Big Three,⁷ the nickname given to the Allied leaders during World War II, present a united front. They’re frequently asked by the university administration to make presentations to alumni and others and often consulted by Washington think tanks and strategic planners. After the US military dropped its longtime “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring openly gay men and women from serving, the professors’ connections helped smooth the way for the return of the Air Force and the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC and NROTC, respectively) to Yale in 2012. One impetus was Kennedy’s willingness to teach Military History of the West, a course that meets an ROTC requirement for Yale’s cadets and midshipmen, but which has also proven to be popular with Yale’s nonmilitary undergraduates.

For all of their collaboration, however—and their close, off-campus friendship—each professor anchors a different spot on the ideological spectrum, with Kennedy liberal, Hill conservative, and Gaddis in the middle. It’s not unusual for one of them, usually Hill, to blurt out in class, “I couldn’t disagree more!” The fact that GS students are made to decide where they fit, intellectually and politically, is an experience that most students at elite universities miss out on today, according to Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale from 1998 to 2008. “The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think,” he writes. “That doesn’t simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.”⁸

Deresiewicz goes on to say that the real job of college is to help young people build “a self. It is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul.”⁹ Responding, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker admits: “I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul.”¹⁰ But these are facets of their GS students’ educations to which Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill have given a lot of thought. “Setting aside the content and structure of the Grand Strategy program, it was the professors . . . who each individually made a profound investment and gave us an incredible gift,” Eleanore Douglas (GS ’02) recalls. “It was their evident and serious interest in our opinions that gave us the courage to speak. Their willingness to question their own prejudices and beliefs enabled us to begin to question ours. The valuable time that they spent correcting our mistakes and errors motivated us to seek to make fewer of them. Their unshakable belief in our abilities gave us the courage to go out and to try to make a difference.”¹¹

Where the professoriate is often censured for focusing too much attention on research and not enough on teaching, GS is a student-centric exception. Mentoring is a vital but mostly invisible component of the program, and the professors continue to dispense advice to former students years after they’ve earned their Yale degree. Talking in a Washington coffee shop between State Department posts twelve years after he took the class, Ewan MacDougall (GS ’02) said, “I have pretty much never had another set of professors who took an interest in their students as much as Charlie Hill and John Gaddis. A decade out these professors respond to my email the same day. They help me think things out on a personal level. They have people over to their houses for dinner.”¹²

Hill, in particular, is known for his unvarnished counsel. He’ll say, ‘You should do this,’” April Lawson (GS ’08) said. “I don’t think he means ‘I have seen the future and know this is best for you.’ But it’s a better conversation starter than ‘Well, what are you interested in?’”

Lawson checked in with him a couple of years ago after she left a prestigious management-consulting job for one in journalism. “He helped me understand how to put words to the way my career has been shaped,” she said. “Hill said it’s good to go from application to theory to application to theory and that this was a good next step.”¹³

Hill later explained, “There’s the assumption that when you leave Yale there are only four or five things you can do and only four or five places you can live. I’m trying to get students to realize that’s not so. Every year I succeed in getting a student to reveal to herself what she actually wants to do. That’s not something families allow. Their sons and daughters are dutiful. Then, three weeks before graduation they panic.”

He told the story of a senior economics major who had applied to banking firms and law school as her parents expected. But late at night she indulged her own interests, surfing the web to learn about looted art. “She didn’t know that there’s an established field of cultural heritage preservation that combines law, economics, and politics until I told her about the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology [Penn Museum] and UNESCO,” Hill said.

He added: “It’s necessary to be an equal and opposite force to parents, which is new in the last twenty years. There used to be more open-minded parents. Now they’re all over the students. They grind the student down.”¹⁴

The attention doesn’t always have to be elaborate, nor the advice profound. Part of what the professors offer is accessibility. Hill holds bull sessions for students on Friday afternoons. Once when Gaddis called on a student in class to comment on the Korean War, she faked her way through, confessing only later that she didn’t know much about it. He gave her a copy of his book Strategies of Containment. “I read it, wrote down questions and reflections, and returned to his office hours for a discussion on the text,” she wrote in the GS alumni survey. “I had initially felt nervous to admit to him that I had a major gap in my knowledge on his favorite time period. Yet I then felt relieved by his receptiveness and helpfulness.”¹⁵

The reason the professors invest so much in students and alumni, especially when they could influence hundreds more students in a lecture class or thousands by teaching online, has to do with their reasons for establishing the course. “We’re not the army, we’re the marine corps,” a former administrator explained. “Marines are made, not trained. If you want to [turn out] the best, you can’t just lecture them. You have to mentor them. We can’t do that if we admitted everyone who applied . . . We couldn’t keep up with people years afterward and go to their weddings.”¹⁶

One former student related the GS model back to Carl von Clausewitz’s idea of “leverage”—applying a small amount of force to make a difference. “You invest all this, and this group of people will then go off and change the world. The teaching is not the end in itself. In order to do that well, you can’t take people who don’t have a natural inclination to leadership. It’s not making leaders out of nothing. It’s accelerating that. The idea is that we’ll have a community within ourselves and develop each other.”¹⁷