The Foreign Service Journal, May 2013

14 MAY 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL was named to Games magazine’s Hall of Fame, alongside Monopoly, Clue and Scrabble. Players representing seven European powers at the beginning of the 20th century forge and break alliances in their bid to achieve world domination in as many hours (or days, or years) as it takes. Unlike most board games, there are no elements of chance: no dice to roll, no pointers to spin, no cards to shuffle. The game relies solely on the players’ strategy, cunning and verbal prowess. The death of its creator, Allan Cal- hamer, on Feb. 28 presents an opportu- nity to review Diplomacy and its impact over the years. Calhamer developed what was originally called “Realpolitik” as a Harvard law student in 1954. Not surprisingly, as The Foreign Ser- vice Journal pointed out in a November 2000 report (“When Diplomacy is Fun and Games”), several generations of FSOs have also been fans of the game. During the late 1960s, it was even played as part of some A-100 courses. FSO William Armbruster used the game at Embassy Kuwait during the 1991 Persian Gulf War to demonstrate to less-experienced colleagues how size and geography can affect a nation’s choices. There are “few tools better for issues that approximate zero-sum situ- ations,” Armbruster told the Journal in 2000. More than 300,000 copies of the game have been sold, and it is also played on the Internet. It has inspired international tournaments and online competition. The game is now published by Wizards of the Coast, which also makes Dungeons & Dragons. For its creator, Diplomacy was a labor of love, inspired by a childhood fascina- tion with a book of old maps of bygone empires, a college class on 19th-century Europe and an interest in world politics and international affairs. Born in Hinsdale, Ill., in 1935, Mr. Calhamer attended Harvard University on a scholarship. He majored in his- tory, graduated cum laude in 1953 and went on to Harvard Law School, but left RENEE MONTAGNE: There’s no question you were a great proponent of going into Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Ten years later, nearly 5,000 Americans troops dead, thousands more with wounds, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded; when you think about this, was it worth it? RICHARD PERLE: I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that. — From a March 20 National Public Radio interview, “Perle Looks Back on the Start of the IraqWar.” before graduating. He lived for some time at Walden Pond in veneration of his hero, Henry David Thoreau, and then joined the U.S. Foreign Service, serving briefly in Africa. Mr. Calhamer left the Service after his first tour to join Sylvania’s Applied Research Laboratory in Waltham, Mass., where he did operations research. Uncomfortable in corporate culture, he left Sylvania after six years and took a job as a park ranger at the Statue of Liberty. In 1967, he married Hilda Morales, and the couple settled in LaGrange, Ill., Calhamer’s hometown, where he worked as a postman for the next 21 years. On the side, he continued to develop board games, like one described by his daughter Tatiana Calhamer in which players move through dimensions of the space-time continuum, but those were never brought to market. “He was brilliant and iconoclastic, and designed this game that’s played around the world,” another daughter, Selenne Calhamer-Boling, told the Asso- ciated Press on March 2. Since Calham- er’s death, e-mails had been pouring in from fans around the world wanting to convey how much the game meant to them. But the messages were not at all what she expected. “I always think of it as such an intel- lectual game because it’s so strategic,” Calhamer-Boling said. “But what I’m seeing over and over again in these e-mails is: ‘I was a really nerdy, awkward kid who had trouble relating to people, but because Diplomacy required inter- personal skills and required you to get people to do what you wanted them to do, that’s how I built my social skills.’” Mr. Calhamer is survived by his wife and two daughters. n —Susan Brady Maitra, Senior Editor