Jonathan Schell to discuss presidential impeachment

Noted writer Jonathan Schell, author of a series of commentaries on the impeachment of President Clinton for The Nation magazine, will discuss Why Impeachment? Why Not? at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 27, in Chase Hall Lounge. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

“The essential mechanism of the impeachment crisis has been the elevation of the trifling (sex and lies about sex) to the earth-shaking (impeachment of a President and shame to the constitutional system), and the question that most urgently needs answering is how and why it happened,” Schell wrote in the Jan. 11 issue of The Nation, where he referred to the impeachment process as “the dirty snowball that is pushing toward us into a thousand pieces.”

Schell, who followed the Watergate crisis and the Vietnam war for The New Yorker magazine, wrote The Time of Illusion (Knopf, 1976), an account of the constitutional crisis of the Nixon presidency. He also is the author of two major books about nuclear disarmament, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (Metropolitan Books, 1998) and The Fate of the Earth (Knopf, 1982).

Currently a visiting writer at Wesleyan University and The New School, Schell was a Media Studies Center fellow in 1996-97. From 1990 through 1996, he was a columnist for Newsday. He served as a writer and editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1967 through 1987.

The author of many articles and books, the New York-based writer has received a variety of awards and honors, including the 1998 Cranbrook Peace Award, the MacCarthur Foundation Grant for writing on peace and security from 1989 through 1990, the American Academy and Institute for Arts Award for Literature and Letters in 1973, the George Polk Award in 1973 for commentary in The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Melcher Book Award for The Fate of the Earth in 1982. Schell also received Pulitzer Prize, National Book and National Critic awards nominations for The Fate of the Earth. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1989.

Schell received his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard and pursued graduate studies in Far Eastern studies at Harvard and International Christian University. He provides occasional commentary for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and appears as a guest on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.