Calhamer never finished law school, but he kept working on Diplomacy. In 1958, he joined Sylvania's Applied Research Laboratory, in nearby Waltham, Mass., where he was engaged in operations research, a scientific approach to military problem-solving that's akin to designing a game. "He was hired because of the game," says Richard Turyn, a mathematician who worked at Sylvania.
In 1959, Calhamer printed 500 copies of Diplomacy; through word of mouth, it sold out in six months, he says. He licensed the game to a publishing firm; Diplomacy was mentioned in Time, Life and the New Yorker, and became a feature of some introductory Foreign Service courses. Over the years it has surfaced as a diversion in professional diplomatic circles.
(Ian Pollack)
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Gideon Rose, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, learned the game as a teenager from Martin Indyk, a Middle East specialist and former ambassador now at the Brookings Institution. "Last time I played with Martin, he conquered the world by playing with France," Rose says. "I don't know that he'd cop to it, with the transatlantic alliance where it is now."
At Harvard, Rose taught the game to his fellow graduate students, and he sees it as valuable practice for the real thing. While Diplomacy is not a perfect model of today's world -- it doesn't anticipate a nuclear North Korea or a decentralized terrorist network such as al Qaeda -- there is a parallel dynamic in mid-game, when one player takes a commanding lead. "The challenge to the United States today is how to be a liberal hegemon, how to maintain its dominance without provoking a balancing coalition, without pissing people off," Rose says.
Diplomacy isn't every diplomat's favorite. "It rewards bad behavior and furthermore gives people the impression that that's the way it's supposed to be, that people achieve their objectives by deceiving people," says Larry Lesser, who encountered the game while in the Foreign Service in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1978. Frank Crigler, then the U.S. ambassador, proposed a game of Diplomacy, with a turn each day at cocktail hour. Lesser signed up and got stabbed on the first move; he's still smarting. Last year, Lesser wrote in Foreign Service Journal that the ambassador, when faced with resistance in the game, threatened to shut down an aid project run by one player, banish another from the Peace Corps and blackball him from the Foreign Service. "The ambassador's wrath ended the game prematurely," wrote Lesser.
"Larry and I have never been the same," says Crigler. He says he doesn't remember making any such threats, but if he did, they weren't meant to be taken seriously. "Winners in the game of Diplomacy may forget they have to face these people in the office tomorrow."
The game's greatest devotees have been armchair diplomats. John Boardman, a retired physicist formerly at Brooklyn College, devised a postal version for players who couldn't find enough time or people to play in person. Today, the action has moved to the Internet. The different media emphasize different skills -- the persuasive essay versus the sales pitch -- and the best online players can founder in face-to-face tournament play. Besides, as Bad Tom says, "one of the coolest things in Diplomacy is seeing the person's expression when you screw them."
This activity has never added up to enough sales for Calhamer to live off royalties, nor did inventing Diplomacy help him find work in the foreign policy field after leaving Sylvania in 1965. Calhamer eventually moved back to La Grange Park, where he took a job as a letter carrier for the Postal Service; he is now retired. When he writes in to the Harvard alumni magazine, "he always mentions the game," says his old friend Gordon Leavitt. "It's the one thing that he could always be proud of."
At the Hunt Valley Inn in 2000, Diplomacy fans asked the creator of their universe to autograph their game boards, but they didn't cut him any slack in the tournament. "I had two good games and two lousy games, I guess," he recalls.
"He got creamed," says Satan.
"Calhamer was pretty well crunched up," says Jim Yerkey. "He has the ultimate target on his back."
