William Pfaff (December 29, 1928 – April 30, 2015) was an American author, op-ed columnist for the International Herald Tribune and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Early life Pfaff was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and was of German, English, and Irish origin. He grew up in Iowa and Georgia and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1949, having majored in literary and political studies. Early career Thanks to a letter of recommendation from Frank O'Malley, an English professor at Notre Dame, Pfaff obtained a job working for the lay-Catholic Commonweal magazine in 1949. Pfaff served in infantry and Special Forces units of the United States Army during and after the Korean War. The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed while Pfaff was on a cruise ship and so he never saw action. He was honorably discharged with the rank of staff sergeant. He returned to Commonweal as an assistant editor and in 1955 for extensive travel in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. After a brief passage at ABC News in New York (1955–1957), he was invited to join Free Europe Committee. In 1961, he was hired by Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute and became one of its first members. Antiwar author His first book, The New Politics: America and the End of the Postwar World (with Edmund Stillman) was published in 1961. Seven others followed. Robert Heilbroner wrote in 1964:"I suspect that in the future it will no longer be possible to qualify as a wholly serious thinker if one has not, to whatever small degree, made one's peace or accommodation with [his] harsh message." During the 1960s, Pfaff co-wrote three books with Ed Stillman: The New Politics: America and the End of the Postwar World (1961), The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of Twentieth-Century Conflict (1964), and Power and Impotence: The Failure of America's Foreign Policy (1966). In 1971, Pfaff added a fourth book, this time without Stillman's co-authorship, entitled Condemned to Freedom. In his role at the Hudson Institute, Pfaff provided the counterpoint to Kahn's more bellicose views at official events and debates. Fed up with the debate over the Vietnam War, Pfaff moved to Paris in 1971 to become Deputy Director of the Hudson Institute Europe, founded by Stillman but eventually becoming independent of Kahn's Hudson Institute. In 1978, he resigned from the Hudson Institute Europe to continue his