William Pfaff died almost six months ago, on April 30, 2015. His death is nothing less than a serious loss to the shrinking number of American daily newspaper columnists who question and contest American “exceptionalism” and its “unnecessary and unwinnable” wars. Pfaff was the singular heir of American writers who preceded him in condemning our historic addiction to war.
The more he criticized the US for shooting first and thinking later, the fewer America dailies printed his columns. The New York Times, which owns the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) where his work regularly appeared, rarely if ever published his piercing anti-interventionist columns. He was, after all, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq invasion when the paper went overboard in favor of the war.
His few daily newspaper outlets were limited essentially to Newsday and the Chicago Tribune, though liberal journals like The New York Review of Books, William Shawn’s New Yorker (which printed some seventy of his pieces), and Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, always welcomed him.
Pfaff was no outsider, despite his dissenting opinions. Reared in Iowa and Georgia, educated at Notre Dame, he served as an infantry officer and Special Forces member during and after the Korean War, unlike the many hawks who had never worn a military uniform. He never denied that he had worked for the CIA-funded Free Europe Committee, a Cold War group that sent broadcasts and literature behind the Iron Curtain.