Gray eminence.

The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen (Houghton Mifflin, 368 pp., $25)

THE average reader may know the names of the men for whom Charles Hill has worked--Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Boutros Boutros-Ghali--but, unless he travels in diplomatic circles or recently graduated from Yale, he probably doesn't know the name of Charles Hill himself. That may soon change, however, if Molly Worthen, former Hill student and now author of a Hill biography, gets her way. Carlyle contended that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men"--heroes who shape history. But every Great Man relies on many smaller men, who write his speeches, formulate his policies, and generally get things done. And that is what Charles Hill does.

It is hard to convey the magnitude of Hill's reputation at Yale. Students who have never met him show up in his office desperately seeking career advice. They listen as earnestly as ancient Greeks consulting the Delphic Oracle. But Hill's pronouncements--unlike those of the oracle--are hardly riddles; they are clear, firm directives. "[He] knows unswervingly what he stands for," writes Worthen. "He is like dry land to sailors too long at sea." College is different these days--a time for choosing models and authorities, not for rebelling against them. For a generation whose parents did their best to train in relativism, Charles Hill's certitude is bracing--and welcome.

Part of his mythic stature derives from his physical presence: His expression is stony, his bearing quiet. His tone is measured and exudes authority. On those reluctant or unable to scale the Olympian heights, Hill takes no pity. (He once told me, "Sarah, you display a great deal of ignorance.") And then there's the rumor of the secure phone in his office that is a direct line to ... somewhere important. He is the archetypical eminence grise, Yale's international man of mystery.

I remember once sitting in a philosophy lecture, listening to the anecdote of Socrates at his military encampment at the battle of Delium, walking barefoot on the frozen tundra outside his tent. Glancing to the back of the lecture hall, I saw Hill sitting with some other professors--and couldn't help reflecting that Hill's insouciance toward the elements was uncannily similar to that of Socrates. No matter the season, Hill always appeared in the same thin, grey wool suit; I never saw him in a coat. He did make one bow to convention: Occasionally he would drape a thin scarf loosely around his neck. But I was sure he did it to mock Mother Nature, not to mention those of us weak-souled individuals who noticed such inconsequential things as heat and cold.

Worthen's book lays out in great detail the ups and downs of Hill's personal and professional life. History buffs will delight in the long section on the part Hill--and his voluminous notes--played in the Iran-Contra investigation. And Charles Hill buffs will seek out whatever allows them a glimpse behind the mask.

After a quintessential American boyhood in a small town in South Jersey, Hill attended Brown University and law school at the University of Pennsylvania. He realized not long into law school that, as Worthen writes, "there was no greater mistake--if [one] had any yen for the life of the mind at all--than to go to law school." It was a lesson he learned the hard way, and one he imparts to every student who approaches him for career advice.

Partly to avoid the draft, Hill entered the Foreign Service. His assignments brought him to Hong Kong at the height of China's Cultural Revolution, to Saigon just as the Vietnamese were breaking the will of Americans on the home front, and to Tel Aviv following the 1978 Camp David Accords. He also was intimately involved, while working for George Shultz, with negotiations that led to the 1986 U.S.--Soviet Reykjavik summit. In the book, Hill describes Reykjavik as "a total, shocking collapse of the [Soviet] facade, as though a mask had dropped away. To me, that was the end of the Cold War."

Hill also did a tour of duty on Henry Kissinger's speechwriting staff. Worthen's colorful descriptions of the life of Kissinger's speechwriters are amusing and frightening. With the fortitude to survive Kissinger's rage and the mental acuity to meet his high standards, Hill lasted longer than most of his fellow speechwriters. Thereafter, he joined the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department. He was at the Israel desk, an office within a bureau run by Arabists who were contemptuous of their colleagues and eager to marginalize them.

This new assignment began a love affair with Israel that endures to this day. In what is perhaps the most interesting section of the book, Worthen describes Hill's deep kinship with Israel, one both intellectual and emotional. On his first trip to Tel Aviv, Hill was immediately attracted to the tough, hardscrabble character that was evident in every facet of national life. His admiration flowed from a realization that struck close to home: An Israel that still had to fight for its survival had what a decadent America seemed to have lost--discipline, intrepidity, courage, and, above all, manliness. But Hill's high regard for Israel was more than sentimental: "The geo-strategist in him admired Israel as the only good-faith participant in the international state system in a region of volatile autocratic regimes and antistate terrorist organizations. The American Studies student in him, not to mention the South Jersey conservative, admired it as a lonely outpost of Western civilization in a pre-modern, radicalized desert."

Worthen is an able writer, with a good sense for metaphor and a tangible zest for her subject. She strives mightily to convey the sense of her professor to the reader, and in many cases she succeeds.

The author is at her best when she plays Boswell to Hill's Johnson; when she deviates from this formula, the result can be embarrassing. For example, she challenges Hill on present-day Israel's departure from the socialism of its Labor Zionist roots: "'From the American point of view, the government should be searching not for greater equality but for greater opportunity and freedom,' Charlie said. It was the familiar conservative motto, the maxim that sounded so noble in theory but had such disturbing consequences for individual lives." What follows is a dressing-down of Hill for not realizing that behind the big ideas are wailing Palestinian mothers on CNN. Worthen wanted, she says, "a flicker of admission that we were talking about individuals, not ideas." Hill's sin is apparently that he thinks too much, and thinking is cruel.

Passages like this highlight the book's central flaw: Molly Worthen, for all her talents, just doesn't get it. Despite being exposed to Hill's shimmering intellect, she continuously reverts to the feeble bromides that Hill has made it his life's work at Yale to combat. Furthermore, Worthen shortchanges Hill's intellectual contributions by merely hinting at his ideas: She offers only superficial treatment of the theory of Grand Strategy for which he is best known.

And then there's the voyeurism, which Worthen admits is embarrassing but in which she indulges nonetheless. It's a strategic error. There are two Professor Hills: There's the man who has his first kiss, fails his first wife, and who--wonder of wonders--has serious personal weaknesses; and then there's Charles Hill, the persona, the myth. Of those two, it's actually the latter who makes an interesting subject for a book.

In her obsession to discover the entire essence of someone who was to her (and many others) larger than life, she may have rendered him unrealistically small; she may have tom, to borrow from Burke, the "well-wrought veil" that Hill has thrown over himself.

Hill refuses to read this book. He gave Worthen absolute access to his private and public notes and the figures, large and small, who have populated his life, but he has never so much as seen a page of the manuscript. Vanity is often the sin of the Great Man: He needs to know what is being said about him, and when it is less than rhapsodic, it stings him more than acid. Hill seems as untouched by vanity as he is by the cold New Haven winter. In the end, perhaps that is what separates him from the Great Men he served.

Sarah Bramwell is a freelance writer living in New York.