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James Chace

By James Chace 5/10/04 12:00am

A Quintessential New Yorker, And a Consummate Realist

Alexander Hamilton , by Ron Chernow. The Penguin Press, 818 pages, $35.

“I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.” This sentiment, which Ron Chernow borrows as an epigraph for his engrossing biography of the most brilliant and charismatic of the Founders, reveals Alexander Read More

By James Chace 3/01/99 12:00am

Kissinger in China: Realpolitik Takes a Powder

The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks With Beijing and Moscow , edited by William Burr. New Press, 515 pages, $30.

Surely, Henry Kissinger considers himself the supreme practitioner of Realpolitik , rivaled only by Richelieu, who defined raison d’état as the interest of the state transcending all other considerations. But a funny thing happened when Read More