Michael Krepon’s passing in July has elicited many deserved tributes. Those who didn’t know Michael well before will now have learned that he started his post-higher-education career as a leader of a nongovernmental organization protesting against the Vietnam War and advocating reform of US foreign policy, then became a congressional staffer, and then served in the Carter administration as a relatively young office director in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. From there, his Washington career took not-uncommon steps through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship to a senior research position at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That is when I first encountered and admired Michael’s writing on arms-control verification.
My first vivid memory of Michael in person was in March 1990 in a bar/restaurant near Dupont Circle where, as I recall, a party was being held for Jamie Rubin’s 30th birthday. (At the time, Jamie and I both worked for Senator Joe Biden; Jamie would go on to be the State Department spokesman under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.) Jamie was an arms-control buff and, like many of the younger cohort of such people, regarded Michael as a thought leader in the field. Michael was then 43; I don’t know why he chose to spend an evening at this scene, but, in some ways, it presaged decades of mentoring he would provide to several generations. What I recall most from the evening was Michael’s explaining that he had left the Carnegie Endowment to start a new think tank with Barry Blechman.
This was pretty audacious. In 1989, it was not obvious that the United States and the world needed (or would financially support) a new think tank on international security and arms control. The Carnegie Endowment was a fine institution—smaller then and more reliant on its endowment than on fundraising. There was the Brookings Institution, with the legendary John Steinbruner, Janne Nolan, and Bruce Blair (all, sadly, no longer with us). The Arms Control Association was working on all the issues Michael cared about. The Center for Strategic and International Studies was doing solid work, albeit more conservatively than would suit Michael. I could list others.
But Michael wanted to be his own boss, to lead and build something new. And so, with Barry’s help, he launched the Stimson Center. (Barry was at the same time running his consulting business, DFI). This is when Michael and I began building a friendship and professional partnership. Six months after our chat at Jamie’s birthday party, unforeseen family circumstances led me to take a job directing the Secure World Program of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, in Charlottesville, Virginia. The foundation funded several Stimson Center projects, some of which Michael and I developed in a too-atypical partnership between funder and policy entrepreneur. This work focused on the promotion of confidence-building measures as a tool of international security and on extending the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1995 and promoting disarmament thereafter. Much of our partnership centered on South Asian security, with a heavy emphasis on nuclear matters.
Michael, Barry, and their colleagues beat the odds. It turned out that their blend of pragmatism and idealism, and their drive for policy relevance and direct engagement with officials, were undersupplied by the existing market. Thirty-three years later, the Stimson Center is going strong, doing first-rate work across a range of global security issues.
As others have rightly highlighted, Michael developed a great affinity for India and Pakistan and the officials, scholars, and journalists who were struggling to manage the turbulent relationship between the two countries under the shadow of nuclear competition. He especially enjoyed and focused on building relations in Pakistan. I think he found it more difficult to stay positive with Indian counterparts who, if it may be said, often delighted in telling visiting Americans in this field why they were wrongheaded. One of his lasting achievements in this area was his creation and leadership of a visiting-scholars program that brought a range of Pakistani and Indian experts to Washington to conduct research and develop innovative ideas to temper the security competition between the two countries. Whatever changes in the real world Michael and the visiting scholars (along with the rest of us) wrought, I think this program created lasting friendships and lasting goodwill among its participants.
Michael wrote many short articles, long essays, and books, and edited many as well. He was a clear writer from the beginning. That is rare enough in the international-security field. Later, his writing was often eloquent, as in many posts on the Arms Control Wonk blog and his last book, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise and Revival of Arms Control (2021). He was deeply moved by the importance of preventing war—especially nuclear war—and making something like peace. His sometimes oracular prose communicated the imperatives and possible steps toward achieving these aims. The last years of his life, spent cultivating a meandering moss and shade-flower garden in the beautiful surroundings of his and Sandra’s home in the rolling hills south of Charlottesville, clearly inspired him.
But something more than peace making and appreciation of beauty must have driven him too. I regret now that I never probed him on this. He lost his father when he was 13 to a cancer Michael attributed to work in a munitions factory, and he was named after his father’s brother, who had been killed in World War II. He was very sensitive to the underdog. … I don’t know. When Josh Pollack asked me to write this tribute, we had a lovely conversation about Michael in which Josh cited a line from the Hebrew text, Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Fathers): “It is not for you to finish the work, but neither may you desist from it.” I think that captured some of Michael’s spirit. He was called to do what he did.
One does not accomplish all that Michael did without a considerable ego. Michael struggled at times with his. In March, during one of our last conversations, he exclaimed a one-word sentence, as he sometimes did for emphasis: “Recognition!” Tears were in his eyes. “The drive for it can be a curse.” He struggled with this drive. He was conscious of it. It wasn’t why he did what he did, but the desire for recognition could have positive motivating effects, as well as cause personal and political harm. I was moved by his torment and candor. He had just told me that cancer had caught him once again and this would be the last time. There was no treatment. I think he was trying to assess his life—what he had accomplished, what difference he had made to the world, to his organizations, to individuals. In my reading, he was feeling deeply gratified about his family and good about his career if he could let his own scoring be unbothered by what public recognition he did or did not receive. Our conversation was interrupted, and I regret that I never told him how rare and laudable I found it that he had a big enough ego to build institutions, press for policy change, publish and lecture to countless audiences, and, at the same time, struggle with the all-too-human complexity of his motives for doing it.
Whatever drove Michael Krepon, he never gave up and he always stayed positive, looking for some way to help us see a way around societal danger. No doubt Sandra, his wife of 47 years, made Michael a better man. It was she who led him to the serene beauty of North Garden and taught him to pause from work and the tribulations of the world and to seek a grounding as a human being and father. He deeply appreciated her spiritual wisdom and craved her respect. He always spoke of her with veneration. In their love—in all that they created singly and together—Michael and Sandra and their daughter Misha and son Josh were blessed. This was a life!