Diplomatic service

As part of the Foreign Service, Hill was posted to Switzerland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Vietnam.^[5] In the last capacity, he was a speechwriter for ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Hill became a speechwriter for Henry Kissinger starting in 1974, with Kissinger later recounting how Hill "reviewed almost everything I wrote".^[2] He worked again with Bunker during the negotiations of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties.^[2]

Hill became political counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in 1979, before being appointed director of Arab–Israeli affairs two years later and deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in 1982.^[2][3] He subsequently acted as executive aide to George Shultz, the secretary of state, from 1985 to 1989. During this time, Hill was involved in nuclear arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, as well as reaching out to Yasser Arafat.^[2][6] He was recognized for his thorough note-taking, penning approximately 20,000 pages that influenced policy discussions. These came under national scrutiny during the Iran–Contra affair.^[2] His notes and personal analyses not only assisted Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel, to uncover more notes from Caspar Weinberger,^[2][7] it also helped Shultz become one of the few senior members of the Reagan administration not to be implicated in the scandal.^[2]

Hill quit the Foreign Service after George H. W. Bush took office in 1989. He assisted Shultz in writing his memoir Turmoil and Triumph (1993).^[2] He also served as a policy consultant to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the United Nations, from 1992 until 1996.^[2][3]

Academics

Hill taught at Harvard University and Cornell University throughout his diplomatic service.^[3] He joined Yale University in 1992, together with his wife who was a professor of political science.^[5] He became a full-time faculty member four years later.^[2] He notably created the Brady–Johnson Program in Grand Strategy in 2000, together with Paul Kennedy and John Gaddis.^[2][5] The three of them taught a year-long course titled "Studies in Grand Strategy", which looked at wide-ranging issues in statecraft and social change, while employing classical writings of history and literature.^[2] He also taught for over two decades on the university's Program in Directed Studies, an interdisciplinary examination of texts from Western classical tradition.^[3][5]

Hill later became a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.^[2][3] Beginning in 2006, he offered a new course called "Oratory in Statecraft".^[8] Not since Rollin G. Osterweis, who taught "The History and Practice of American Oratory" until the late 1970s, had oratory been taught at Yale.^[9][10] He was listed as a signatory of a letter by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) to George W. Bush, but disputed his signing of that letter.^[11] Hill worked as chief foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani during his 2008 presidential campaign.^[2]