Mark Garrison passed away on January 1, 2026, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, at the age of 95. A central figure in the history of the Watson School and the study of international affairs at Brown University, Garrison was also an accomplished diplomat and celebrated expert on U.S.-Soviet relations.
In 1981, after a 25-year career in the foreign service, Thomas J. Watson Jr. brought Garrison to Brown University to serve as the first appointed fellow of the Council for International Studies and the founding director of the Center for Foreign Policy Development (CFPD), a precursor to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
Watson and Garrison first met when Watson was appointed U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1978, where Garrison served as his deputy chief of mission and charge d’affaires until 1980. Prior to that, Garrison served as the State Department’s director of Soviet affairs from 1974 to 1978.
During his career as a diplomat, Garrison was directly involved in some of the most consequential events of the 20th century. He was working in Moscow during the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He was in Prague during the 1968 "Prague Spring” and subsequent Soviet invasion and crackdown. In the early 1960s, he helped reestablish long-dormant diplomatic relations between the United States and Bulgaria. His extensive experience made him a highly respected and much sought-after expert on U.S.-Soviet relations long after he retired from the State Department.
After the 1980 defeat of President Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan, Garrison left the foreign service to begin his second career as a “think-tank” director at Brown University.
With funding from Watson, the CFPD was established to promote research and discussion on arms control and U.S.-Soviet relations, and to “promote a just, peaceful and prosperous world through teaching and research” — a mission that still informs the Watson School’s operating principles today.
While at the CFPD, Garrison brought together scholars from various disciplines as well as former and current practitioners from the executive and legislative branches of government to develop “policy ideas for the future which are well founded in scholarship and experience and are at the same time easily accessible to citizens and politicians.”
Garrison served as the CFPD’s director until 1993.
While at Brown, among many accomplishments, Garrison worked with Soviet partners to identify ways to prevent nuclear war and co-edited a book with Abbott Gleason titled “Shared Destiny: Fifty Years of Soviet-American Relations.” Published in 1985, the book collected reflections from leading U.S. scholars on Russia on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of U.S.-Soviet diplomatic relations.
Garrison also brought many distinguished academics and policy practitioners to campus — including Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita Khrushchev, former leader of the Soviet Union) — a practice that remains central to the Watson School’s model today.
Garrison made Brown a pioneer in the method of “critical oral history,” bringing together former enemies to retrace past crises and explore what could have been. The conferences that reexamined the Cuban Missile Crisis, in particular, led by Brown professor James Blight, unearthed shocking details about operational Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba.
“These conferences revealed just how close the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war in October 1962,” noted Reid Pauly, “American policymakers were surprised to discover how many Soviet nuclear warheads (not just missiles) had already arrived in Cuba before the crisis and how many tactical nuclear weapons were ready for use against US forces if Kennedy had given the order to invade.”
Garrison was also intimately involved in the landmark Carter-Brezhnev Project, a joint policy-scholar initiative organized by the Watson Institute in cooperation with the National Security Archive and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Aimed at understanding why détente between the United States and the Soviet Union collapsed during the Carter administration, the project brought together many former high-ranking U.S. and Soviet diplomats and politicians for five conferences between 1992 and 1995.
The proceedings of these conferences remain an important resource for academics studying international relations today. Tyler Jost, who is drawing upon this work for a current book project, noted, “The transcripts of these conferences have become a hallmark reference point for scholars, offering insight into the mistakes, misperceptions, and missed opportunities that so often characterized major power politics during the Cold War.”
The Watson School will host a panel in Fall 2026 to honor Garrison's legacy in international affairs at the Watson School and beyond.