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James Clarke Chace was an eminent historian, writing on American diplomacy and statecraft. His 12 books include the critically acclaimed Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, the definitive biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. In a debate during the 2000 presidential primary, George W. Bush referred to Chace's Acheson as one of the books he was reading at the time.
His writings, known for elegant and even literary prose, often influenced American thought in policymaking — his coining of the phrase "the indispensable nation" to describe America was widely used when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began including it in her speeches.
Chace was born and raised in Fall River, Massachusetts. His family, of the New England aristocracy, lost nearly everything during the Great Depression after the collapse of the Fall River cotton-mill economy. This experience he later described in his 1990 memoir What We Had.
Chace graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Classics. He went to France in 1954 to conduct graduate-study research on painter Eugène Delacroix and writer Charles Baudelaire, but soon found his interest drawn to the current intellectual arena of literature and politics, which led to an intense interest in French political writers including Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. He returned to France later the same year as a soldier and in 1955 and 1956 worked as an Army translator, which involved the translation of French newspapers for the Central Intelligence Agency. While in France he wrote a novel and was witness to the impact of that nation's withdrawal from Vietnam and its problems with a rebellion in colonialized Algeria.
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