The East-West Accommodation

Abstract

By the second half of the 1950s Bull was already reflecting on the questions of international political order which were to populate so much of his subsequent work. But this was not the main arena in which he was to initially establish his reputation. A peculiar accident of history (to use a phrase Bull himself would come to favour) was to make its effects felt within the first five years of his academic career. It had seemed for a while in 1956 that, as a British subject, Bull might have to resign from his LSE position for a period of military service. Early the next year, the same unwelcome visitor came knocking on Bull’s door, but this time which much greater force. To avoid losing Bull to time spent in khaki clothing, Manning helped arrange for the young scholar to be sent to the United States for a year of research leave from October 1957. Duly dispatched on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Hedley and Mary Bull headed for two of the most obvious locations for the study of international relations across the Atlantic. The first destination was Harvard University where Henry Kissinger and Robert Bowie (who had been the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning) were about to open a new Center for International Affairs. The second was the University of Chicago1 where America’s leading international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau, was still in residence.