William Pfaff, long-time contributor to and two-time editor at Commonweal, has died. He was eighty-six. The New York Times obituary will tell you the important facts of Bill's life. He wrote prodigously for over sixty years--first for Commonweal, then for publications with a wider readership: the New Yorker, the International Herald Tribune (work that was syndicated to two dozen newspapers), the New York Review of Books. He wrote his own books, eight of them, one of which was a finalist for the National Book Award (Barbarian Sentiments, 1989).

Bill was unswervingly skeptical of the projection of U.S. power, and had no qualms about criticizing American interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. For this, the Times expains, he was sometimes called anti-American. But he always considered himself a patriot. “He lashed out at America because he loved it," his wife Carolyn told the Times. "But he became sadder and sadder about the nation that was so great, yet was belittling itself. He wanted America to stay home and fix its own country.”

“He rejected the messianic illusions of successive American administrations,” said a longtime friend, John Rielly, president emeritus of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Although many American pundits consider him a liberal, he was in many respects a classic Christian conservative — one who was skeptical about liberal notions of inevitable progress and always aware of the limitations of human activity.”

Giving Bill an award in 2006, the Times reports, the American Academy of Diplomacy called him the "dean" of American columnists, lauding “his moral vision of the proper uses of power and limits on its abuse.”

Bill and I exchanged e-mails over the years, a correspondence that began after I was fortunate enough to be tasked with asking him to write something for us. I can't locate my initial request, but I recall putting a foot wrong in my note, perhaps misidentifying a country or a capital, and Bill correcting me in the most diplomatic way possible. I was so green, and he was so kind.

In his correspondence with the magazine, he always showed an editor's anxiety over factual errors. When the New York Review of Books asked him to review a book by Garry Wills, Bill initially begged off, sure he lacked the expertise. After finally accepting the assignment, he asked whether we might read a draft to make sure he hadn't "made some enormous gaffe concerning the church." He planned to identify himself as a former editor at Commonweal. "If I make a fool of myself," he wrote, "there could be an effect on Commonweal's reputation (and mine!)." His concern was unfounded.

Bill reflected on his career in a lovely article for Commonweal's ninetieth-anniversary issue (a piece he was reluctant to write because he didn't think he could be as funny as Wilfrid Sheed was in his eightieth-anniversary remembrance). He took an entry-level editorial position with the magazine right out of college, against his father's wishes (he thought his son should embark on a career in the Foreign Service, rather than work for some periodical he'd never heard of). One of Bill's early duties was to travel down to the printers to "read the stone"--to make sure the magazine was free from errors after the type had been set and proofs pressed. Over the next sixty-five years, as he watched the United States repeatedly advance foreign-policy aims premised on an often misguided understanding of its own destiny, Bill caught more errors than most. He never stopped reading the stone.

Requiescat in pace.