Denis McLean

Denis Bazeley Gordon McLean (18 August 1930 – 30 March 2011) was a New Zealand diplomat, academic, author and civil servant.

Early life, family and education McLean was born in Napier. He was the eldest son of Gordon McLean, a newspaper editor, and Ruahine Smith. His family later lived in Auckland and Wellington.

McLean attended Nelson College from 1944 to 1948, earned a Master of Science with first-class honours in geology at Victoria University College, and won a Senior Scholarship in 1953 and a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford in 1954. At University College, Oxford, he studied politics, philosophy and economics. He played rugby union at both Victoria and Oxford Universities, and was a member of the Victoria team that won the Jubilee Cup three times in the early 1950s.

In early 1958, McLean married Anne Davidson in Oxford, and the couple went on to have three children.

After he retired from government service in 1995, McLean was appointed the Joan and James Warburg Chair of International Relations at Simmons College in Boston. His distinguished career as a public servant, writer, historian and commentator on international relations also led him to be a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He also served for several years on the New Zealand Press Council.

Works McLean wrote three books: The Long Pathway, Te Araroa (1986), about walking the east coast of the North Island with his family; The Prickly Pair (2003), on Australia-New Zealand relations; and Howard Kippenberger: Dauntless Spirit (2008), a biography of the military commander Sir Howard Kippenberger. The common theme underlying the apparent diversity of McLean's writing was a fascination with New Zealand's evolving national identity.

Death McLean died on 30 March 2011 at his home in Wellington.