I

Einstein (1877–1967) came from the city's German-Jewish gentry; his family's fortune was in newspapers and textiles. One sister married a Seligman and then the archaeologist Charles Waldstein; another married the Columbia scholar Joel Elias Spingarn. The family was known to Roosevelt and Elihu Root, who followed and aided Einstein's career.Footnote ³ He was ill-suited for business. His interests and vocation were literary, and he considered himself, above all, a humanist. Indeed, from 1906 to 1913 he edited The Humanist's Library.Footnote ⁴ Roosevelt later described him as “one of the men whose work has kept alive the fine tradition of the union between American diplomacy and American letters which is illustrated by such names as those of Lowell and Motley, of John Hay and Maurice Egan.”Footnote ⁵ Einstein would go on to write more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from Lewis Cass to Italian gardens to Napoleon III.Footnote ⁶

Einstein had been precocious. He was fluent in French, Italian and German and earned a master's degree from Columbia in history. At the age of twenty-five he published his first book, The Italian Renaissance in England (1902). Einstein's mother sent a copy to the president. After reading it, Roosevelt supposedly said, “I would particularly like to put in the public service a man of the tastes indicated by such a book as this.”Footnote ⁷

The career decision was well-timed. Whatever inclination Einstein may have had for business (or the capacity to simulate one), it was soon thwarted by scandal. He had fallen in love with Helen Ralli, an Anglo-Greek divorcée several years his senior. His family—especially his conservative father—reacted strongly in opposition. Einstein was more or less disinherited. If he sought honor and success, he would have to go elsewhere.

Appointed to the diplomatic corps in 1903, he was posted to Paris as a third secretary, then on to London and Constantinople. Three years later he had his career break when he was named the secretary of the delegation to the Algeciras conference, which had been called to settle a Franco-German clash over Morocco. Kaiser Wilhelm II had challenged French control over the protectorate and simultaneously tested the strength of the freshly signed Anglo-French entente. The crisis had become so acute by the end of 1905 that it appeared to some people that France and Germany would go to war. The conference was called instead. Germany had no allies among the major European powers, apart from Austria-Hungary. By invoking the language of the Open Door and appealing to the statesmanship of Roosevelt, the kaiser attempted to bring the United States in onto his side. He would be disappointed.

The experience, judging by Einstein's memoir, served him as a kind of crash course in what became known as the Old Diplomacy—a formal, largely secret form of international statecraft dominated by European princes, ministers and cabinets.Footnote ⁸ In fact, there turned out to be less of this than he expected. He must have arrived feeling intimidated, but any such sensation was soon to leave him. He was not impressed. Unlike other such gatherings, the most recent being the Congress of Berlin, there was no Disraeli or Bismarck present at Algeciras. To him it was like arriving after the party had gone and encountering only stragglers. One was the superannuated Italian delegate, the Marquis Visconti Venosta, whose own career had begun in the service of Metternich and who commented that he saw no ambassadors at the conference, only lawyers.Footnote ⁹ The head of the American delegation, Henry White, was not a lawyer, and this may have been one reason Einstein had kind things to say about him. Others, apart from the British delegate, Arthur Nicolson, did not measure up. “The world today,” Einstein later recalled, “when diplomacy is carried out often by threat and insult, has less and less use for intermediaries who understand each other's language and are personal friends.” Familiarity over the course of the three months at Algeciras tended to have a different effect, although it was not really clear what that was: “Frenchmen and Germans might be on the eve of war, but meanwhile they slept under the same roof and grumbled together over their fare in the same public rooms.”Footnote ¹⁰ Ultimately, he concluded, the conference “turned out to be little more than an elaborate bit of stagecraft partly used to register certain results that were obtained elsewhere, and still more as a useful expedient which had extricated France and Germany from a highly dangerous muddle” but had demonstrated, nonetheless, “the immense value of pompous and well-staged negativeness … [that] serves to allay political passion.”Footnote ¹¹

The role of the American delegation at the conference was circumscribed tightly by the president, who dealt directly with the three principal European ambassadors in Washington: Cecil Spring-Rice, Baron Speck von Sternburg (whom Roosevelt, a long-time friend of both, nicknamed “Springy” and “Specky,” respectively) and Jules Jusserand (no recorded nickname). The delegation at Algeciras meanwhile was ordered to watch, wait and otherwise do what it could to resist being enlisted by Germany in driving a wedge between the British and the French. Roosevelt's “personal sympathies,” according to Einstein, “were entirely for France,” but “he proposed to keep an even keel.” White was uninformed of Roosevelt's conversations with von Sternburg and Jusserand; the only people in whom the president confided, again according to Einstein, were Secretary of State Root and Henry Cabot Lodge. “Alone, unaided, and unsuspected,” Einstein wrote, “Roosevelt in the Moroccan crisis gave the measure of his diplomatic skill. Congress knew nothing, the country knew nothing, his own agents knew nothing, the world knew nothing, of all he had done to preserve peace.”Footnote ¹² Root's modest instructions to White were to “keep friendly with all. Help France get what she ought to have but don't take the fight on your shoulders.” To Einstein, “This sybilline piece of advice from the pen of a great lawyer was almost too wisely unilluminating.”Footnote ¹³ The policy probably suited him just fine. He could hone his powers of observation without carrying great responsibility. As the youngest member of the delegation, moreover, he could just as easily proclaim the mission as having been educational.

In the event, he said, it ended with an “optimistic prognosis.”Footnote ¹⁴ There would be no war, not yet. Even so, it marked a “decisive moment” for the great powers, including the United States, which saw a hint of the future.Footnote ¹⁵ Einstein was quick to realize it. “The first thunderclap of the Great War exploded” there, he later wrote. “Germany made trouble … because she felt ill-tempered at her place in the world.”Footnote ¹⁶ Whatever his inclinations had been before the conference, serving there had further convinced him that his country had an important diplomatic role to play.

The president evidently was of a similar mind. “I know Springy thinks I am inclined to fall under the influence of the German Emperor,” he wrote, “but he is quite wrong. I like the Emperor very much in a way, but I don't trust him, and am not in the least affected by the ridiculous messages he makes Specky bring me.”Footnote ¹⁷ Specky was not the only one. Just a year earlier, Jusserand had written, “Mr. Roosevelt is not without sincere sympathy for France, but he knows her poorly. I shall apply myself to inform him better.”Footnote ¹⁸ Einstein credited Roosevelt with convincing the French to collaborate at the conference and with making the most of ambiguity vis-à-vis Germany. He did so quietly, shrewdly. This worked in good part, according to Einstein, because of the president's reputation. “Roosevelt was then at the height of his fame, with a prestige immensely enhanced by his recent success in having brought the Russo-Japanese war to an end,” he observed. “This may explain why the Kaiser tried to enlist the President's help, without stopping to realize that Roosevelt's private views about the Moroccan question had already been formed.” Indeed, Roosevelt, in Einstein's account, flipped the table on the kaiser and his attempt to borrow—or expropriate—an American slogan. By his invoking the principle of the Open Door, in effect the “Kaiser wanted Paris to know that in a real pinch England would be of no use to her, and he counted on finding some support in France for this idea.” He was wrong. The reason, Einstein concluded, was that Germany was “the only great nation never to feel quite certain of her position and therefore alternat[ed] with an uneasy violence between extremes of effacement and of dangerous arrogance…. The wish to grab and yet to defend the ‘Open Door,’ the desire to humiliate France and yet to separate her from England, were contradictory aims that were interwoven in a confused jumble.” In other words, “the Kaiser's previous attempt to win Roosevelt over to his side now became a boomerang.”Footnote ¹⁹ A. J. P. Taylor has made a similar claim:

What did this say about the state of European diplomacy? Had the United States at last come to recognize its place in it, play by its rules and quickly come to master it? Or had the European diplomatic system grown stale, even broken, in the hands of German power? Put differently, while Roosevelt was busy reconstructing the viability of balance-of-power diplomacy in Asia, it was on the verge of disintegration in Europe at the hands of a revisionist state that appeared to care little for the stability of the European system. The language of the Open Door is just one indication that the kaiser entertained seriously the idea that what had appeared to work for the United States in Asia could work for Germany in Europe and that together the two rising powers could overtake and eclipse the reigning empires of the day, Britain and France. This could begin at Morocco and extend, as leverage, toward a deal with Russia over Korea and Manchuria.Footnote ²¹

Einstein had been right about the kaiser. The Germans who hinted at this strategy had not thought it through and had misread Roosevelt and his instinct for “forceful and impartial righteousness.”Footnote ²² Nor did they understand the American concept of the Open Door: in spite of the anticolonial implications of its language, it was meant primarily to ensure American access to Asian markets—namely, the China market, by upholding the balance of power there, not by overturning and replacing it with another. It was basically a conservative policy. So the United States adapted itself to the state of the European system, not the reverse, and helped to underwrite its extension to Asia in the name of peace, not rivalry. The Open Door, in other words, was the means by which the system could be sustained in emphasizing “balance” over “power” and in terminating the competitive logic that had hitherto governed world politics.Footnote ²³ It was no longer possible or useful to draw a dialectic between European peace and extra-European conflict. The world by now was too small, and the United States as the leading extra-European power had confronted its responsibilities in both realms, as Roosevelt would have it.

The German kaiser did not imagine the world in this way, evidently. Einstein would go on to witness the longer-term implications of that failure. The nineteenth-century European system in the end would be overturned and replaced, and the European empires themselves would disappear. The chief beneficiaries eventually would be the United States, which had sought to reform and extend the system, and the Soviet Union, which had turned its back upon it, at least temporarily.

II

What explains the evident talent Roosevelt had for this diplomacy? Contemporaries were perplexed. Some chose to write it off as exhibitionism. “There was no reason why Roosevelt should have interfered,” an editorial in Blackwood's Magazine declared. “The interests of America were not imperiled…. The President, however, did not wait to be asked…. There are certain temperaments which find the temptation to interfere in other people's affairs irresistible.”Footnote ²⁴ So, too, were students of his presidency. The adolescent image of Roosevelt propagated by his biographer, Henry Pringle, however, mostly gave way by the 1960s to a more complex and favorable picture.Footnote ²⁵ Einstein earlier had adhered to one. Roosevelt's “character, so forceful, direct, and seemingly impulsive,” he wrote, “was far more complicated and intricate than is commonly supposed.”Footnote ²⁶ Sympathetic depictions of TR have tended to emphasize the progressive Roosevelt in domestic affairs: his mastery of national politics as well as the power of the executive branch of government that he more or less reinvented for the twentieth century. It has been applied less frequently to his statecraft. Most accounts emphasize the assertive form over the substance of Roosevelt's thought and action, but in truth it is difficult to disaggregate so many strains of turn-of-the-century progressivism.Footnote ²⁷ Roosevelt was a keen student and practitioner of politics beyond his nation's borders, certainly according to Einstein: “The Presidency gave Roosevelt the opportunity, in handling foreign policy, to reveal the only side of his talents which he himself may previously not have suspected. His success as a diplomatist came from combining the skill of a politician and the learning of a historian with the principle of a cowboy never to draw his gun unless prepared to shoot. The impression of resolution which by these means he attached to foreign policy raised the prestige of the United States to a height it had never before attained.”Footnote ²⁸

An important guide for him was the naval theorist, Alfred Thayer Mahan; the influence of the latter upon Roosevelt and other would-be imperialists is well known to historians.Footnote ²⁹ Underlying nearly all Mahanian dogma was the logic of Machtpolitik. Power had to be wielded, or lost. Its sources were natural, geographical and human—and finite. Leadership constituted the wise extraction of a country's sources of power and their management and maximization vis-à-vis other powers. That this was all more or less axiomatic for someone like Roosevelt goes without saying. Less obvious was the hierarchy of power in which he found his country after the Spanish-American War. That, by contrast, remained open to interpretation and invention. The United States had acquired additional territory in the Caribbean and across the Pacific; such territory—and a wider scope of national prestige—had to be defended. Hence the commitment to building a Panama Canal, new coaling stations, a bigger navy and so on, not to mention a more proactive, or what some might call progressive, diplomacy.

The pursuit of a Mahanian strategy suggested three major principles: hegemony in the Western hemisphere, a balance of power in Asia and the maintenance of the United States' customary isolation from European power politics. Einstein, Roosevelt and like-minded compatriots thought and wrote about these principles at length.Footnote ³⁰ With regard to the first, Roosevelt eventually articulated his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine; for the second, the Portsmouth Treaty and the Great White Fleet. But what of the third?

Einstein also was known to be a “disciple” of Mahan, and this made him unpopular among some of his diplomatic colleagues.Footnote ³¹ In fact one could argue that he was more than a disciple; had his writings been read more widely, he may have become known as Mahan's diplomatic counterpart, yet one who emphasized the importance of the transatlantic economy, and who took seriously the new implications of the United States' stake in Europe as the foundation, or at least the sine qua non, of its world power. At one point he urged nothing less than moving the boundary of the Monroe Doctrine all the way to England (as would be done, in effect, by mid-century, coinciding, as his biographer has put it, with the final demise of Prussianism).Footnote ³² “Isolation,” in American parlance, had been more an art than a science and had more to do with insulation and neutrality than with physical, economic, or even diplomatic isolation per se. With regard to Europe, it meant, since the days of George Washington, resisting the contagion of European problems, specifically wars, but did not necessarily prescribe a stance of immunity or passivity.Footnote ³³ Einstein drew a distinction between actual isolation and an isolationist state of mind brought about either by ignorance or by the supposed luxury of free security. In his view, the “European balance of power has been such a permanent factor since the birth of the republic that Americans have never realized how its absence would have affected their political status.”Footnote ³⁴ Both he and Roosevelt insisted that the conditions that had underwritten isolation, or what the diplomat called “the self-deceptive plea of a disinterested aloofness,” had changed with the accumulation of so much power.Footnote ³⁵ Still, the basic principle remained the same. The United States had to act more assertively “as the natural arbiter of nations,” in Jusserand's words, now more by direct involvement in European affairs than by masterly, or simply ignorant, inactivity.Footnote ³⁶

What did this mean in practice?

Starting with Algeciras, it meant principally three things. The first was to firm up the Anglo-American relationship on the basis of shared interests and methods, which had begun to include backing for a nascent global system of international laws, customs, norms and, later in the Woodrow Wilson years, institutions. The second was to use this as leverage, along with the American economy, to position the United States as the broker between France and Germany, however much it may have favored one or the other. As Taylor has put it, “The United States had emerged from isolation; she had discovered that she had no quarrel with England and France but that Germany threatened her future prosperity.”Footnote ³⁷ And the third was to cast American interests in Europe globally. That is, the two sets of relationships were inseparable and mutually dependent, and no longer merely a projection through a particular Eurocentric lens: what the United States did in Europe and with the European powers was by then connected to U.S global interests; what it did in Asia had a direct impact in and on Europe. This latter principle would hold for the rest of the twentieth century—as when, for example, the Korean War became the cause of both U.S. and German rearmament, and the institutionalizing of the North Atlantic Treaty as NATO.

As to Europe itself, Einstein argued that the United States had to play a heavier role in balancing or offsetting what may have appeared to other powers as incompatible interests and, ideally, to help transform them into complementary ones. American detachment need not preclude a sophisticated recognition of the wider factors at play in the European system or the occasional intervention. For example, Einstein later remarked that the United States had erred in not recognizing Bulgarian independence. This recognition could have become the basis for American underwriting of a railroad linking the Russian and Ottoman empires, which would have reduced the two empires' incentives to clash with each other and with Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. (For his part, Roosevelt was said to be pro-Austrian; Einstein less so.)Footnote ³⁸

To sum up, the United States was by now a power with global responsibilities and vulnerabilities. These centered on Europe. But they were neither confined to it nor entirely dependent on the actions of European powers. And so, somewhat against a strict construction of Mahanism, the United States had to merge the three strategic imperatives. American policy had to tie the balance of power in Asia more explicitly to that in Europe, which would most likely demand the end to any semblance of isolation from the politics of the other great powers. The United States would also need to preserve its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. In other words, the Monroe Doctrine had been reformulated, according to historian Max Edling, for “a world where the United States was an empire among empires, rather than a republic among monarchies, and where the promotion of civilization rather than republicanism was the primary foreign policy goal, [in which] a Monroe Doctrine stipulating a longitudinal divide between fundamentally different and inherently antagonistic political regimes in the Old and the New World no longer made sense.”Footnote ³⁹

Einstein was not the only person to have foreseen this necessity. Archibald Cary Coolidge published his book, United States as a World Power, in 1908; Walter Lippmann promoted the concept of the Atlantic Community less than a decade later.Footnote ⁴⁰ But Einstein gave them an important focus in diplomacy. He was, in Taylor's not entirely uncharitable description, “among the first to formulate it clearly in print. He is therefore entitled to the credit for having involved the United States in two World Wars.”Footnote ⁴¹ His view's clearest expression came in an article he wrote in mid-1912, a remarkable work that “suffered a strange obscurity.”Footnote ⁴² He had trouble placing the essay in the United States. After having been rejected by both The Atlantic and the North American Review, it was published in the British magazine National Review.Footnote ⁴³ This may have been more appropriate, in fact, because Einstein argued for a stronger commitment to the survival of Britain and British power. Anglo-German rivalry, if settled in favor of the latter, would almost surely threaten the United States “and every other nation in the world.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He predicted that the looming war would begin in Belgium and that it would be long. Only in 1918 did the essay gain some notoriety in Einstein's own country. That year Columbia University Press published it in a volume for which Roosevelt wrote the foreword, noting there that the ideas were “proof of a prescience in world politics very rare among American statesmen. He foresaw the war. He foresaw our entry into the war.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This was no exaggeration, according to George Kennan, who added, “One could search long in the American political literature of the period for anything equal to those documents in maturity of judgment, mastery of material, analytical power, and brilliance of insight.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Einstein described British and German aims and ambitions as the natural result of each nation's place in the world with language that would become common among the self-described realists of Kennan's generation. “Paradoxical as it may seem, the grave danger of the present relations between Great Britain and Germany lies in the fact that there is no real difficulty between the two Powers,” Einstein asserted. “Both Powers are logical and right in their attitude.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Each power had reasons to hesitate; each had ambitions vis-à-vis the other. Either one could win, but most likely only after a long and very costly conflict. “Whatever the future of this situation,” he concluded, “a farsighted statesmanship compels the United States … to take cognizance of the possibility of a conflict breaking out in the near future between Great Britain and Germany, and to consider in what manner we would be affected by it…. A struggle between the two nations … cannot leave America indifferent. In too many regions of the world would our interests be affected by its reality.”Footnote ⁴⁸

What might Roosevelt have done with this knowledge had he still been in office? According to Einstein, he would have intervened to forestall a declaration of war by Britain, which may have succeeded in mobilizing “all neutral nations” to defend Belgium, thereby preventing a wider war.Footnote ⁴⁹ TR probably agreed but, at the time, did not speak out as loudly as he might have done.Footnote ⁵⁰

III

Einstein's career before and after the war proceeded through fits and starts. Respected but at a distance, he was not a natural member of the club. One of its mandarins, William Castle, later described him as being “a little too cordial, altogether too pompous—but in an amusing way—probably conceited, but with real intelligence and a good deal of charm. I can well understand … that people would like him very much. I certainly should, especially if I did not have to see him all the time.” He conceded, moreover, that he could “recognize Einstein's ability.” However, “I could never be found of him because his racial characteristics are too strong—not in looks but in his over-unctuous manner. He also is inclined to be a little too complimentary to sound sincere.”Footnote ⁵¹

Einstein was no WASP, but to suggest, as Castle did, that this was the main reason for his difficulties with the diplomatic establishment is too facile. There were two other reasons: one was his direct tie to Roosevelt and his intellectual compatibility with the president—which partly went against the grain of the establishment and its prevailing biases toward Europe. The other was that no such diplomatic club existed in name. It may have looked and sounded like one, but it more resembled an informal network of associates and cliques than a professional grouping or organization with precise criteria for membership. Strictly speaking, Einstein was a member of it but he did not meld with it, at least in Washington; and the memory of that would linger across the remainder of his career.

From Costa Rica, where he had a brief tenure as minister, Einstein in 1912 left again for England, after which he was, in Kennan's apt synopsis, “packed off, during the war he had so brilliantly forecast, to handle the dreary details of prisoner-of-war protection in Turkey and Bulgaria.” These chapters in his memoir are the most crowded and interesting. Written so many decades later, they convey a proper sense of diplomatic detachment but also suggest the force of emotions that Einstein must have confronted in the thick of so many damaged human lives, including his beloved wife, who suffered “a serious nervous breakdown … caused by the anxieties of the war.”Footnote ⁵² In 1921, President Harding repaid his sacrifice by naming him minister at Prague. By most accounts Einstein relished it: “In no other capital were diplomats lodged with a greater architectural splendour.”Footnote ⁵³ But like the country he represented and the country where he was envoy, Einstein's tranquil days were numbered. Almost nine years later, as Kennan has described,

Einstein was only fifty-three. During the rest of his life he wrote articles, books and poetry and offered the occasional service to his government, which was usually rejected. He spent most of World War II tending his pigs in Scotland. After his London house was destroyed in the Blitz, he moved to Paris, where he lived in fair obscurity with his beloved Helen for another three and a half decades. His career, like Roosevelt's, was cut short. Had the latter returned to power in 1920, as Einstein expected he would have done (and “he wanted me with him”), the careers and legacies of the two men might have been greater.Footnote ⁵⁵

He and Roosevelt differed in temperament and in cultural inclination. Roosevelt understood much about Europeans and Europe, but he did not appear to be any more drawn to them than to other parts of the world; in fact, the opposite was probably the case. Einstein, by contrast, was a Europhile or, more accurately, an Anglophile.Footnote ⁵⁶ His grasp of politics was hard to disentangle from his literary mind and its predilections. His profession was diplomacy. His vocation was literature. Is it possible to separate the tastes and affinities from the capacity for judgment? Einstein's short, remarkable career raises this basic question more than it supplies any clear and general answer to it.

One person who may have wondered was Einstein's friend and correspondent of many decades, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who urged him to write a biography of Roosevelt.Footnote ⁵⁷ Einstein took up the challenge, which he regarded as a “labour of love” about a leader for whom he

In Roosevelt: His Mind in Action, Einstein drew a portrait of a conscientious nationalist whose principal contribution was “bringing America into the world” with skill and impressive “restraint.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The latter quality did not come merely from habit or disposition (and is hard to imagine them in Roosevelt, given the usual stereotypes), but instead from an appreciation, even devotion, to the power of democratic public opinion in American life and the ever-present need to persuade the American people to support the actions of their leaders. The portrait that emerges is of a willful, proud, energetic but chastened man—one of Einstein's chapters is entitled “struggle” followed by another, “adversity”—whose life and legacy were preconditioned by a well-developed, sensitive intellectual appreciation for the realities of the world they confront and by an equally formidable belief in the power of individuals and societies to shape them. In Lippmann's familiar title, this was the moment that the United States and its president faced a choice between drift and mastery. If the former was not predetermined, the latter was not complete.

It may be trite to say that Roosevelt epitomized his age. It is less superficial to note a parallel between Einstein's portrait of his character with a combination of patriotism, opportunism, ambition and self-awareness and the position of the United States vis-à-vis Europe. The syllogism that European distresses equaled American successes no longer held. It was not yet sufficient to recognize a shared fate between the two continents, however. Something more—a new political idea, perhaps—was needed. It was a rare thing for a rising world power to approach the existing international system with a mixture of delicacy, distance, empathy, humility and strength. To say that this stance was distinctly American would be going too far; but to say it coincided well with Roosevelt's complex character would not.

This rounds out this essay's interlocking portrait of profession, personality and history. Einstein's and Roosevelt's perceptions of and approach to European relations also had as much to do with culture—and cultural self-perception—as with the realities of world power. The United States embraced, albeit half-heartedly, a direct role in European affairs. Roosevelt in effect was his own man in Europe, but this was beside the point. In Einstein's rendition, TR acted with the understanding that the bureaucratic apparatus (not to mention the Congress) could undercut him, if not directly, than by failing to appreciate and execute what he was trying to accomplish. In this respect Roosevelt's achievements were procedural as well as political. This achievement extended to his cultivation of allies and champions, notably Einstein, in the new bureaucracy.

IV

The abbreviated career of Lewis Einstein illustrates the United States' conflicted attitude toward Europe during the Roosevelt years. Einstein of course was not the president's only man in Europe, but he was possibly the one whose thinking was closest to Roosevelt's own. Theirs was, in some ways, an administration ahead of its time—certainly it was ahead of most of the country—in its acceptance, even embrace, of what would later be called realism, that is, Realpolitik, with regard to Europe. This was overdue in some respects. For one, such a shift in approach coincided logically with the country's size, wealth and place on the world map but still not yet with its political and institutional culture.Footnote ⁶⁰ For another, TR's rethinking of the U.S. role in Europe grasped the extent to which American security had long depended on other powers, particularly Britain, a situation that could not last nor be taken for granted. The need for a rethinking seemed obvious to Einstein; to Roosevelt, probably, there was another need for a different language to speak about the country's place in the world. Washington's farewell address no longer held, or at least it needed to be redefined without “using a megaphone,” as Einstein once wrote to Walter Lippmann, in a different context, “when a microphone is required.”Footnote ⁶¹ In his 1909 book, American Foreign Policy, Einstein put it this way: “Alliances can be entangling only when they are disadvantageous. To guard against their being so is the duty of a wise statesmanship.”Footnote ⁶² First, however, the country needed statesmen.

It bears recalling that neither statesmen nor professional diplomats have carried great weight in American history. Few have gained a place in popular accounts of the country. Those with household names are anomalies. Ben Franklin is remembered mainly for reasons other than his diplomacy; Henry Kissinger is known by many people as a displaced European, down to the exaggerated accent. Indeed, throughout much of American history, diplomacy carried an un-American, pro-European stigma as a residue of the aristocratic, corrupt, devious Old World in whose affairs Americans nonetheless had occasionally and half-heartedly to partake. Einstein regarded that distinction as false: “Age and youth in a nation are relative expressions and chronologically often topsy-turvy. The Pilgrims, and the Dutch settlers on Manhattan, were far from being either young or primitive in their somber view of life. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, America, conscious of the Old-World ties, was more sophisticated and aged than is the United States of to-day.”Footnote ⁶³ By the second half of the twentieth century, especially, Americans came to prefer to rely on another, perhaps more confident, profession to stand at the head of their country's foreign policy: the military.

The correlation in American political culture between statecraft, diplomacy and Europe was direct and durable. Woodrow Wilson's celebrated New Diplomacy notwithstanding, the correlation persisted. This underscored the point Einstein made over and again. The country's self-conscious assumption of great power status was accompanied by a paradox: American leaders sought to make the country's power self-evident, yet at the same time it had begun to exhibit a character, like Roosevelt's, “on its surface … rugged, forceful, and impulsive,” but “underneath subtle, intricate, and elusive.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Its defenders insisted that it did not need the trappings of a European empire—proconsuls, diplomats, alliances and the rest. In Asia and Latin America and to some extent in the Middle East, it was fine to call them by different names: administrators, governors, trusteeships. The more they echoed the familiar language of altruism, the better. But to Einstein, there was little doubt that the country's material power had, or ought to, come into its own.

With Europe this did not appear obvious at the start of the twentieth century. Europe remained the center of world power, which included being the arbiter of diplomacy. The great powers of recent memory—with the partial exceptions of Japan, Russia and the Ottoman Empire—were all European, as were nearly all the world's leading diplomats. If they had not been born there, they were almost surely educated in Europe, or at least familiar with European life, customs and views. The later, sometimes pejorative term, “Eurocentric,” described an orientation more or less taken for granted, except, to some degree, in the United States. Einstein's generation faced the dilemma of wanting, even needing, to adjust to a world in which their country's interests rated alongside those of the leading European powers. But its culture disallowed admitting, let alone embracing, the style of European power politics.

Kennan, who has written admirably but not admiringly of the early twentieth-century American diplomatic mind, achieved greater fame in addressing this problem than did Einstein, whom he has depicted as a lodestar or precursor to the persona Kennan created for himself: the wise, judicious, old-worldly, far-sighted and under-appreciated analyst, the un-American American. If a diplomat was ever to fulfill the American model of the self-made man, this had to be the way to do it. Kennan made a convincing case for the peak of Einstein's career to having been the moment when he was his president's chosen servant in Europe. He savored European connections and environments. The writer Ray Stannard Baker has described him in 1916 during a visit to Vallombrosa, near Florence:

He was certainly drawn to Europe yet, like Roosevelt, regarded himself as being immune to the narrow-minded tribalism, pessimism and cynicism he encountered there, traits which so disappointed him since Algeciras. Again, like the archetypical American, he was of two minds about Europe, eager to master its ways and appreciate its virtues and pleasures, but also careful to retain at least some capacity for detachment—to be in Europe, in other words, but never to be of it. So, too, with Roosevelt; but whereas Roosevelt was essentially a man of the present who spoke often of the future, Einstein lived in the past and probably idolized it—especially his beloved Renaissance. Yet Roosevelt, Einstein wrote, “too felt the ambition to attain an all-round accomplishment and proved by his career that the Renaissance ideal was large enough, and still vital enough, to find fulfillment in the broad sphere of American industrial democracy even better than in the narrow atmosphere of a petty Italian court.”Footnote ⁶⁶

For all that Einstein was drawn to Europe, however, he had no special complex about it; and neither, evidently, did Roosevelt. Unlike others of their class, they did not make a fetish of Europe or seek to become European through expatriation or marriage. (Einstein's daughter did, however, marry a marquess.) Their view of the Old World, in their terms, was a practical one, demanded by circumstances. They realized that the present situation gave opportunities to the United States but also confronted it with dangers. The demise of the European order was a prospect both men had perceived and feared. To them—especially Einstein—only the United States, through skillful diplomacy with the big three—Britain, France and Germany—could prevent a major clash among them, one almost certain to entangle the United States sooner or later. To many people this appeared all too clear in retrospect, but, as noted, Einstein was one of the few Americans to grasp and articulate it on the eve of crisis. His was a “political insight of a very rare and superior order,” Kennan concluded, “insight which, if heeded and respected, could well have altered our relationship to the coming European war in a manner greatly beneficial to ourselves and to the future peace of Europe…. And this insight, it should be noted, was forthcoming from a man already in government service, whose experience and intellectual distinction were wholly at Washington's disposal, had Washington wished to avail itself of them…. Washington, only too obviously, had no such wish.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Einstein's legacy may have resulted more from who he was than from what he nominally did. The elite members of his generation of diplomats were more self-conscious of their status as pioneer statesmen and professional public servants, particularly with reference to their counterparts in Europe, but they only had so much influence. Even Einstein once said their profession “lies on the borderland between history and gossip.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Einstein's chosen (and dictated) path shows that mastering the two was rare. Yet, Benjamin Franklin's familiar advice—“If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing”—was well heeded in this case. Like Roosevelt, Lewis Einstein found success in both, despite the obscure fate commonly suffered by diplomats—American diplomats, especially.