Sam’s Club: The Huntingdon Eulogies

Foreign Affairs:

A Powerful, Inductive Mind
Stephen Peter Rosen

It is impossible to think or talk about Sam without thinking about the power of his mind. He would ask the biggest questions he could think of: What are American politics all about? Where does democracy come from? As Americans, who are we? He would then proceed to devour and digest all of the literature on every aspect of the human activity relevant to the question and, by the pure force of his mind, weld an answer. It was a powerful, inductive mind. It was not a mind satisfied with giving perfect answers to petty questions. It was the mind of a Darwin.

It is also impossible to think about Sam without thinking about his self-discipline — over his own body and over his work. He was committed to the truth and ruthlessly disciplined in its pursuit. Woe to any academic, young or old, in whose work Sam found any intellectual sloppiness. Sam would not tolerate it, as he did not tolerate it in himself. I know of at least one 250-page manuscript that Sam wrote and never circulated because it was not up to his standards. He dropped another fascinating research project when, after a year or more or work, he judged that his arguments simply did not stand up to his own critical scrutiny. He took seriously the criticism that his book on civilizations did not have clearly specified independent and dependent variables, carefully developed an analytic schema of the book, and convened an academic seminar at which he presented it and invited criticism.

Because he was so committed to the hard work of finding the truth, he could be stern toward those less disciplined. One brilliant public intellectual was being considered for a university position on the strength of his written work. Sam was opposed. “Will he train graduate students?” he asked, throwing up his chin and raising his eyebrows, implying that the person in question would never do so in a million years and so should not be hired.

Sam was also ornery, fiercely loyal to his principles and his prejudices, in small things and in large. Sam liked ornery people, perhaps the only shared characteristic among the otherwise very different people who liked to work with him. He liked people who stood up for themselves and fought for the ideas they had worked out. But his orneriness was not bad temper, rather the tip of the massive iceberg that was his courage. And he was fiercely loyal to the people in his life and was a righteous friend.

The power of his mind, his discipline, and his orneriness did not make him easily approachable. To paraphrase Shakespeare: to those who liked him not, he could seem cold, aloof, and austere; but to those whom he loved, he was warm and as radiant as the sun.

The School of Sam
Eliot A. Cohen

The question that I would like to pose to the house is: Is there a school of Sam? After all, many famous professors leave behind them bands of perfumed acolytes, who parse the Great Man’s written word, elaborate on his esoteric teachings, and reinterpret his enduring message to an ill-informed world. The Huntingtonian answer to my question — I can hear it now — is, “Yup, yup, yup. … That’s ridiculous.”

Let me start with the second, more definitive part of that response. Sam’s students are not a coherent band. We include hard-headed idealists and dreamy realists; bellicose liberals and pacifically inclined conservatives, even — gasp! — some ambivalent neoconservatives. There are mild partisans and bitter independents; people whose faith in the formal methods of political science partake of a conviction, rigor and subtlety that the Jesuits might envy and those who are to the American Political Science Association what peasants with pitchforks and torches were to aristocratic chateaus.

We didn’t treat each other as initiates into the same cult. Rather, the mood at the Center for International Affairs at 1737 Cambridge Street resembled that of a not very well-organized or effective street gang. The slightest verbal provocation would produce a prolonged, heated, and inconclusive internal melee during which the ruffians were so preoccupied with fisticuffs that their intended victims escaped unscathed.

As for our attitude to Sam, it was what one might call reverential exceptionalism. By this I mean that a common attitude was, The Old Man is a genius, of course, but on my favorite topic he is out to lunch. I think he enjoyed our belligerence, and we certainly reveled in his. After all, who wants to study national security policy with a milksop? No, we delighted in a professor whose idea of a sound strategic proposal to the Carter administration was preparation to launch an immediate counteroffensive into Eastern Europe should the Soviets start something in Berlin, and there was nothing comparable to the joy we felt at learning that Sam, then a bit advanced in years, had decked the feckless mugger who made the mistake of picking on him one night on Brattle Street.

We loved the courage that caused him to ignore all pieties or orthodoxies: I still recall my innocent gasp of horror when, upon learning that I was going on a research trip overseas, he growled, “Well, you’ll need a document that will impress foreigners.” Except he didn’t call it “a document that will impress foreigners.” He used a more pungent phrase that still brings a blush to my cheek.

But all this said, there is a school of Sam — a school not of doctrine but of example. He taught us that you can subject your students to the rigors of an intellectual inquisition, then wine and dine them at your home, and then go back to the inquisition the next day — and all without demeaning or bullying young people or compromising your own standards. He taught us that it’s fine — admirable, actually — to be a patriot, although I still haven’t quite figured out the point of making the celebration of Flag Day the centerpiece of the American civic religion. And he showed us how to remain scholars yet speak sensibly and usefully in the public square.

He taught us that if you are a real teacher, you are in the business of giving lifetime warrantees, which is serious business, and that if you are a great scholar, the answers “I don’t know,” “I hadn’t thought of that,” and even “I’ve changed my mind” are signs of strength, not weakness. He taught us that if you belong to an institution, the default answer when the dean asks you to take on an unpleasant task is, very simply, yes.

Above all, he taught us that the academic life can be a rewarding life, a joyous life, a noble life. In that sense, is there a school of Sam? You bet there is, and I’m deeply grateful for having had the chance to attend it.

The Boyish Contrarian
Henry Rosovsky

I first met Samuel Huntington in 1953. I had just become a resident tutor in Kirkland House and had been given strict instructions by the master to sit with students during meals. Feeling very important, I entered the dining hall and spotted a lonely undergraduate. I introduced myself as a new economics teaching fellow, someone prepared to offer advice about all manner of problems: academic, personal, and anything in between. The youngster looked up, said his name was Samuel Huntington, and added that he was an assistant professor of government. I was slightly shocked, but that was 56 years ago, and we were both 26 years old. Sam kept his boyish demeanor almost to the end. I can see him now, sitting at the regular Saturday lunches in Kirkland, wearing a seersucker jacket, surrounded by students and colleagues. (I remember Zbig there as well.) This was house life before the disruptions and divisions of the 1960s. At the time, we didn’t think of it. Now we understand that it was glorious to be young.

In current usage, you might say that Sam was a contrarian and politically incorrect. When it came to his own ideas, he was absolutely fearless, and every decade or so, he became some group or person’s target — and there were costs. (He was, for example, blackballed by the National Academy, and that was a travesty.)

In 1958, the government department denied him tenure, allegedly because a very senior professor particularly disliked Sam’s admiration for West Point, as expressed in The Soldier and the State. It should be said that the list of Harvard’s “mistakes” is long and — to our considerable embarrassment — very distinguished. In Sam’s case, we were luckier than we deserved: he accepted an invitation to return in 1962.

In the 1960s, Sam became the principal target for a variety of antiwar groups. The SDS, the Spartacus Youth League, and others presented him as a leading pro-war adviser to the government, sometimes calling him a “war criminal.” These charges were unfair, and more important, they were untrue: Sam was a Humphrey Democrat who wanted the United States out of Vietnam. However, truth and subtlety were not plentiful at that time: his lectures were disrupted, and there was a lot of negative press, not least in the Crimson. (Even Hustler magazine disapproved of Sam!) But — and this is an extremely important but — graduate students voluntarily patrolled his classes to maintain decorum, and undergraduates, always Sam’s great love, voted to throw out demonstrators. Quite a few colleagues also came to his defense.

Most of the time Sam maintained external calm and equanimity. Occasionally, however, a certain irritation came through, as in this letter written to the Crimson in 1972: “While you obviously do not care about your reputation for veracity, I think you might still value whatever reputation you have left for originality. Isn’t it about time that you gave up perpetuation [of an] old falsehood about me, and thought up a new one? I’m surely getting tired of rewriting this letter.”

And so it went from decade to decade. Excess democracy, the clash of civilizations, who are we, etc. — always provocative ideas that created controversy extending beyond the academy and, most significantly, led to new research and new thought. Sometimes early critics became converts. The changing literature about the Clash of Civilizations is a good example.

Ken Galbraith used to divide Harvard professors into two groups: those who were out in the wide world of ideas and influence and those whom he labeled “pastoral.” The pastoral types, presumably after teaching and time in the library or laboratory, returned every night to Belmont to fight crabgrass. (Galbraith’s own preferences were obvious.) I never saw much crabgrass on Brimmer Street — only a warm home created by Nancy and Sam, a home always open to students and many, many friends. Nancy’s open arms and welcoming smile effectively neutralized whatever Yankee reserve Sam possessed.

Sam was that rarity among us who was both an external and internal star. Sam was a major institution builder. He chaired the government department twice, he led the Center for International Affairs for over a decade, he transformed the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He also created the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and raised funds for at least two chairs. He said yes to deans when they were in need — in my view, not a small thing. Not bad for someone whom many regarded as the most influential political scientist of the second half of the twentieth century.

Sam’s legacy at Harvard is easy to describe. In a university, there are two things that matter the most: the quality of the students, and scholars who know how to ask new questions that inspire other scholars and students. By that measure, Sam left us a large treasure.

Noble Sam
Zbigniew Brzezinski

Sam had been a part of my life for some 55 years. I knew him before he was married. As a fellow tutor in Kirkland House, I would frequently observe with envious admiration his exquisite taste in the female company he would bring to dinner in the common dining room. The then sexually segregated Harvard undergraduates were visibly envious! On one occasion, a young lady whom Sam escorted — I noted with some anxiety — was someone I was actually dating (she later became my wife). But soon thereafter it was a charming and vivacious brunette who started appearing regularly. Sam and Nancy were married before long, and they were long married. Sam was someone whose commitments were deep and true and caring.

Our life paths were at times joined and then separated. He left Harvard for Columbia one year ahead of me, and it was he who enticed me to go to Columbia rather than to Berkeley. Two years later, at the next crossroads, if he had had his way, I would have followed him back to Harvard, but by then I was pointing toward Washington. Some years later, it was my turn to entice him to Washington.

Before Sam’s return to Harvard, he and Nancy as well as Muska and I undertook a half-year-long trip around the world — during which Sam and I were trying to write a book together. I thought that writing a book with a close friend would be easy. Was I wrong! I never expected that we would literally spend hours arguing ferociously — for Sam was as unyielding as he was calmly convinced that even my portion of the book should reflect his deeper insights.

Sam was a scholar’s scholar and yet also a major shaper of policy. When serving in the White House during the Carter years — as the National Security Council’s strategic planning coordinator — he organized and directed an interagency exercise on a par in its historical importance with the famous NSC-68 that defined U.S. policy in the early phase of the Cold War. Sam’s undertaking, called Presidential Review Memorandum 10, involved a comprehensive assessment of U.S. and Soviet capacities to conduct and eventually prevail in the increasingly ominous rivalry. Its conclusions prompted key political and military decisions by President Carter that, in fact, were continued and expanded in scope under President Reagan.

Years ago in Cambridge, my wife once captured in two words the essence of Sam: Speaking of him, she simply said, “Noble Sam.” And these two words stuck in my mind as the essential summary of what he was professionally and personally. His serious physical handicap — diabetes — never threw him off stride, and he bravely rose above that condition to lead a full and rich life. That could not have been so without Nancy’s support and love. His modesty was part of his decency, while his shyness did not prevent him from excelling in intellectual boldness. He was gentlemanly in manner, elegant without pretense, simply a gentleman with class. He was kind and decent in character — truly a good human being. He was self-confident in his creativity but without arrogance, never a show-off and yet always a natural star. And that bright star, called Noble Sam, for us will not dim.