Ray Garthoff

Raymond Leonard Garthoff, 95, passed away on December 7, 2024 at his retirement community in Mitchellville, MD. A diplomat and scholar, he was a prolific author who wrote definitive studies of Soviet military power and of American-Soviet relations during the Cold War.

Ray was born in 1929 in Cairo, Egypt, where his father was serving as bursar of the American University of Cairo. He grew up in Alexandria, VA, developing a strong interest in foreign and military affairs while attending George Washington High School during World War II. He graduated cum laude from Princeton University and received his PhD in international relations from Yale University in 1951. In 1950, he married Vera Alexandrovna Vasilieva, the daughter of a former Russian military officer then teaching Russian at Yale who had fought against the Bolsheviks. 

Ray worked from 1950 to 1957 at the RAND Corporation as an analyst of Soviet political and military affairs. His first book, published in 1953, was a pathfinding study of Soviet military doctrine, and he wrote other books and numerous articles that examined the role of Soviet military power as nuclear weapons became central to Soviet and American military strategy.

Following a visit to the USSR in 1957, where he observed evidence of the post-Stalin “thaw,” he analyzed Soviet affairs from 1957 to 1961 at the Central Intelligence Agency, writing national intelligence estimates on Soviet foreign policy. In 1959, he served as an adviser on Vice President Richard Nixon’s delegation to the USSR, and Vera was a guide at the American national exhibition in Moscow where Nixon held his “kitchen debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. 

In 1961 he joined the Foreign Service and became Soviet affairs adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, where he supported U.S. diplomacy during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and helped develop arms control policy that led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which curtailed nuclear weapons testing, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which banned deployment in space of weapons of mass destruction. He served as executive secretary of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks from 1969 to 1972, negotiating key portions of major American-Soviet agreements signed in Moscow in 1972 at a summit meeting of President Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. He was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria, where he served from 1977 to 1979 before retiring from government service.

In 1980, Dr. Garthoff became a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where he devoted himself for the next 15 years to chronicling the final phase of the Cold War. He augmented exhaustive research with visits to the USSR and contacts with Soviet officials and military officers with whom he had developed relationships over the decades thanks to his fluency in Russian. He wrote many articles on current issues of Soviet policy and on Cold War history, with his two volumes on American-Soviet relations from 1969 to 1991 garnering praise for their comprehensiveness. 

He also wrote a personal memoir, Journey through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence, which presents perspectives he developed as student, analyst, policymaker, ambassador, and scholar. His last book, published in 2015, examined how Soviet leaders used or failed to use intelligence, stressing how perceptions affect the actions of national leaders. 

In 1966, Dr. Garthoff received the Arthur S. Flemming Award as one of ten outstanding federal service officers. In 1973, the State Department presented him with its Distinguished Honor Award with gold medal. In 1992, Yale University awarded him the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal. 

Dr. Garthoff was predeceased by his brother, Stanley David. A loving husband and father, he is survived by his wife, Vera; his son, Alexander, of Bali, Indonesia; three grandsons; and his brother, Douglas, of Alexandria, VA. 

The family suggests that memorial contributions be made to charities of the donor’s choice.