Thad Beyle
Thad Lewis Beyle, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, passed away on August 31, 2018. Thad was the Pearsall Professor of State and Local Government in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1967 to 2002. He was born May 11, 1934 in Syracuse, New York to Herman Carey Beyle and Madelon McCulloch Beyle. Thad graduated from Nottingham High School in 1952 and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Syracuse University. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Thad was one of the nation’s foremost experts on governors; he wrote numerous articles, books, review essays, and chapters on the politics of the 50 states and their executives. His scholarship was informed by having worked for NC governor Terry Sanford in the 1960s, his acute observations of other states’ governors gleaned from attending the annual meetings of the National Governors’ Association for years, and from the systematic data he gathered on the 50 states’ gubernatorial campaign expenditures, governors’ job approval ratings, and their institutional power rankings. Amazingly, Thad collected and widely disseminated data on governors via his website to other scholars and to journalists, decades before such data sharing became standard practice by younger scholars as a condition of publication or as a recipient of grants. The Gubernatorial Campaign Expenditures Database now covers from 1977 to 2017. This data series is nearly as long as that of the FEC, but remarkably the states’ data series was not maintained by a federal bureaucracy, but rather by Thad and his former graduate student Jennifer Jensen, now of Lehigh University. Information from this database has been used by many scholars and journalists.
A second data source Thad developed was public opinion data on governors’ job approval ratings. Along with Richard Niemi and Lee Sigelman, he received an NSF grant to systematize the Job Approval Ratings Database (JARS) for the 50 states’ governors from 1958 to 2010, along with ratings of presidents and US senators. Again Jennifer Jensen assisted in compiling the database. These job approval ratings have been utilized in many scholarly works.
The third data source Thad is famous for is the gubernatorial power index which originally included only institutional powers but later added party control. He updated this index regularly, and it appeared in his “Governors” chapter in various editions of Gray et al (ed.), Politics in the American States from 1983 into the 2000s (now maintained and authored by Margaret Ferguson). Thad was impressive in that he constructed not one but three important databases for his field and managed to find graduate students who have kept these databases updated over the years.
Surely part of his secret lay in his relationships with his graduate students. As Jennifer Jensen expressed it, “Thad was always one to look out for his students. He wanted to know how you were doing, he wanted to know if you were thriving as you were going through the program . . . One of the things I learned from Thad is that to be a really good political scientist, you should know a lot about the people, institutions, and events that comprise the observations in your database.” And Thad had a lifelong impact on how his graduate students viewed the world. As Nelson Dometrius, a graduate student from the early 1970s, put it, “In all that he observed Thad found ways to see the wonderful humanity in what and who he was studying. And that was probably the most marvelous thing about Thad. He was always open, friendly, helpful, with a ready quip, and seeing his object of study with a very human and forgiving eye. He was a friend who will be missed, and a scholar whose insight was uniquely valuable to students, scholars, and practitioners alike.”
Almost from the date of his arrival in Chapel Hill, Thad came to be recognized as an invaluable colleague in a large department with a normal number of contentious issues. For many of us, he defined the word “collegial.” While never shy about voicing his own professional preferences, he respected those who thought differently. He set an example for civility and mutual respect for 35 years, especially during the so-called “behavioral revolution” that tore so many social science departments apart. By doing so, Thad contributed significantly to today’s atmosphere at Carolina of vigorous but civil debate.
It is widely suspected that Thad advised more honors theses than anyone else in the history of the department. Students gravitated to him because of his natural good humor, but also because he talked politics with them as well as political science. When North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper addressed the audience during the 2017 University Day Ceremony in honor of Carolina’s 224th birthday, he singled out Thad Beyle as one of his most influential teachers, and credited Thad for helping him to become interested in politics. Thad had a passion for politics and for teaching politics, and his influence on our students was widely respected. Those of us who were lucky enough to work with him knew him as a generous friend and remarkable teacher with an infectious sense of humor. He was a wonderful office neighbor. He was warm and welcoming, and very down to earth. He brightened Hamilton Hall.
Thad is survived by his wife, Patricia Cain Beyle; his two sons, Jeffrey Lewis Beyle and wife Ramsay Ringo and Jonathan West Beyle and wife Elizabeth Blake Beyle; his two daughters, Carey Beyle Morgan and husband Zan Morgan and Aimée Beyle Jones and husband Jeremiah Jones; and eight grandchildren, Thomas Beyle, Lee Beyle and wife Joyner Yu, Margot Beyle, Taylor Beyle, Jordan Beyle, Jon Ward Beyle, Cole Jones, and Elise Jones.
If you have a fond memory of Thad, we encourage you to visit the Thad L. Beyle Memorial Page on Facebook and share it with his family and friends.
—Mark J.C. Crescenzi, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Virginia Gray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lars Schoultz, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
William (Ted) Bluhm
William (Ted) Bluhm, of Rochester, NY; November 16, 2018, at age 95 following a lengthy illness. Born in 1923 in Newark, NJ, Bluhm served in the US Army Signal Corps during WWII from 1943 to 1946 and was stationed in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria. He received the Bronze Star Medal for bravery under fire. Following his discharge from the Army, he resumed and completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University graduating in June 1948. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and in 1957 received a PhD from the University of Chicago after completing his dissertation on “Catholic Theories on the Corporate State.” As he was writing that dissertation, he returned to Brown as an instructor in political science between 1953 and 1957. There he taught an undergraduate seminar on “The Growth of the Modern State” that endeared him to many students as we read and discussed the works of Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Bacon, Hume, Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Marx. In 1958 Ted joined the faculty of the University of Rochester where he taught until his retirement on January 1, 1993.
Over the course of his distinguished career as a teacher and scholar, Ted Bluhm authored seven books: Theories of the Political System (Prentice-Hall, 1965), Building an Austrian Nation: The Political Integration of a Western State (Yale University Press, 1973), Ideologies and Attitudes: Modern Political Culture (Prentice-Hall, 1974), The Paradigm Problem in Political Science (Carolina Academic Press, 1982), Force or Freedom? The Paradox in Modern Political Thought (Yale University Press, 1984), The World of the Policy Analyst: Science, Values, and Rationality (coauthor) (Chatham House, 1990), and Ethics and Public Policy: Method and Cases (coauthor) (Prentice-Hall, 2007).
In addition to his wife Eleanor (Elly), to whom he was married for 68 years, Ted is survived by their three children, Catherine Dolan, Susanna Cullen, and Andrew Bluhm, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
Ted will be remembered by his students as a stimulating teacher and warm human being who always went the extra mile to nurture his students.
—Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., The University at Buffalo, SUNY
Randolph Louis Braham
Randolph Louis Braham, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City College of New York and founding director of the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, passed away on November 25, 2018 at his home in Forest Hills, Queens. He was 95.
Born Adolf Ábrahám on December 20, 1922, in Bucharest, Romania to Lajos and Eszter Ábrahám, he grew up poor in Dej, a small city in Transylvania. When Hungary took control of the region in 1940, he was prevented from attending public high school because he was Jewish. Unable to afford tuition at a religious school, his parents enrolled him at an independent school, which allowed him to study at home and complete his degree without attending classes.
He was working as a cabinet-maker’s apprentice when, in 1943, he was forced to serve in a Hungarian army slave labor battalion in Ukraine. In 1945, after having been captured by the Soviets, he and four other Jews escaped into the Hungarian forest and found shelter with a Hungarian Christian farmer named Istvan Novak, who was later honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust remembrance center, which bestows the award on non-Jews who risked their lives to aid Jews during World War II.
After the war, he returned to Dej to discover that his parents and sister had been among the first Jews deported to Auschwitz from Northern Transylvania in 1944 after Germany invaded Hungary, which had long persecuted Jews but did not begin deporting them until after the German occupation began. His parents were killed in Auschwitz, but his sister survived. After learning of the fate of his family, he made his way to American-occupied Berlin and served as a translator for the US Army. In 1948 he emigrated to the US, became a citizen in 1953, and changed his name to Randolph Louis Braham.
Soon after arriving in the US, Professor Braham received a bachelor’s degree in economics and government and in 1949 received a master of science in education from City College. In 1952 he earned a doctorate in political science from the New School for Social Research. He was hired by City College in 1962, where he later became chairman of the political science department and spent three decades teaching comparative politics and Soviet studies. In 1979 he founded the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he continued as director until the end of his life.
Introducing him as the keynote speaker at an event in Hungary in 2017, Professor Mária M. Kovács of Central European University described Professor Braham as a “moral compass for our profession.” Political developments in Europe over the preceding decade provided ample opportunities for him to demonstrate his moral compass.
In 2011, he was honored with Hungary’s highest prize, the Cross of the Order of Merit, but he publicly returned the award in 2014 in protest against what he saw as the nationalist government’s downplaying of the government’s involvement in the murder of nearly 600,000 Hungarian Jews in World War II. When, in 2014, the current Hungarian government equated the wartime murder of two-thirds of Hungary’s Jewish population with the suffering of other Hungarians under German occupation, Professor Braham expressed outrage because the historical record, which he helped produce, clearly showed that the Hungarian wartime regime had significantly aided the efforts of the German occupation. He not only returned the Order of Merit, but he also had his name removed from the library of the Holokauszt Emlékközpont, the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest, which had been dedicated in his honor. While recognizing that the “leaders responsible for the operation of the Holokauszt Emlékközpont would or could not speak out against the brazen drive to falsify history,” he, as a survivor whose family members were among the 600,000 murdered Jews, could not remain silent.
Professor Braham was best known for his 1,600-page, two-volume book The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, which was described by New York Times reviewer Elenore Lester as among the most important works of Holocaust history. Published in 1981 and now in its third edition, the book framed the Holocaust in Hungary against the background of Hungarian politics in the post-World War I period, when Jews were being scapegoated for the country’s substantial loss of territory and severe economic condition. Professor Braham’s work showed how deportations occurred with shocking efficiency after the Germans, fearing that Hungary would break away from the Axis powers and side with the Allies as the war turned against them, invaded and occupied Hungary in March 1944.
Professor Braham’s research described in detail the work of Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the Nazi extermination process, and the actions of Hungarian leader and Nazi ally Miklós Horthy. Braham also focused on how lower-level leaders worked to round up the Jews and drew attention to those who stood against such efforts.
In addition to his magisterial volumes on the Hungarian Holocaust, Professor Braham produced and edited countless studies of the Holocaust in Romania and Ukraine, and testified at war-crimes tribunals against Holocaust perpetrators. Seeing it as his “destiny” to chronicle the historical truth of the Holocaust, he told a jury in the war-crimes trial of Imre Finta, a Hungarian commander who was acquitted in 1990, that his scholarship is an attempt to “comprehend the incomprehensible.”
Professor Braham provided the historical narrative in “The Last Days,” James Moll’s Oscar-winning 1998 documentary on the Holocaust in Hungary. In 2013, Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize-winning writer and fellow Holocaust survivor, responded to Braham’s publication of a three-volume Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary by proclaiming that to “recommend this work to teachers, their students, and researchers” is a “duty of remembrance that belongs to the realm of the sacred.”
Just a few months before his passing, Professor Braham participated in an international conference on “The Future of Holocaust Research” organized by the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He delivered without notes a compelling and detailed analysis of the distortions of Holocaust history in contemporary Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Several Hungarian scholars were in attendance and they all clearly regarded Professor Braham as their mentor and inspiration. Throughout his scholarly career and until the very end, he remained sharp, witty, and cheerful. He will be remembered fondly by his colleagues and students for his hard-won worldly wisdom, his voluminous and insightful scholarly output, and for being “a moral compass to the profession.”
Professor Braham was married for 59 years to Elizabeth Sommer, a German-born Holocaust survivor. She died in 2014. Professor Braham is survived by his sons Robert and Steven, two grandsons, and his partner Mary Maudsley.
—Eli Karetny, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY
John C. Torpey, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, The Graduate Center, CUNY
John Gist
Dr. John Gist, a political scientist with a long-standing interest in the intersection of politics and the economy, died January 2, 2019 in Washington, DC. Dr. Gist received his PhD in political science in 1973 from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He retired as Research Professor of Public Policy at The George Washington Institute of Public Policy (GWIPP).
During the early years of his career (1973–1987), he was a professor of political science, public affairs, and urban studies at the University of Illinois-Springfield, the University of Georgia, and most recently at Virginia Tech. He was twice a visiting scholar at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (1976–78 and 1985–86) as well as visiting professor at the University of Maryland, the Naval Postgraduate School, and George Mason University.
In 1987, he joined AARP’s Public Policy Institute (PPI), where he conducted and managed policy research in the economics of aging, first as a senior analyst in tax and budget policy (1987–90) and later as the associate director of PPI for economic policy research (1990–2006).
In his last three years at AARP-PPI (2006–09) he was Senior Advisor for Economic and Fiscal Affairs. The bridge between his early and later career was his long-term interest in government finance at all levels. In 2009, he joined GWIPP as a research professor specializing in fiscal and economic policies affecting aging populations and retirement behavior.
Dr. Gist published articles in the American Political Science Review, PS, Midwest Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Public Choice, The Milbank Quarterly, The Gerontologist, the Journal of Aging and Social Policy, the Journal of Urban Economics, the Journal of Retirement, Environment and Planning, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Government and Policy, the Policy Studies Journal, and Tax Notes, as well as numerous policy research papers for the AARP Public Policy Institute.
Dr. Gist’s research focused on the fiscal consequences of an aging society, the economic well-being of baby boomers, the consequences of the Great Recession for different birth cohorts, and wealth accumulation and wealth inequality among different age groups.
He coauthored a 2012 study (with Carlos Figueiredo and Satyendra Verma) of the effects of housing wealth accumulation during the 2005–06 housing boom on housing refinancing, equity withdrawal, and their effects on household wealth and household debt. That study found that the highest rates of refinancing and cashing out of equity occurred among older (but not necessarily the oldest) households and that appreciation in home values, high household income, and inclusion in the “baby boomer” cohort were the factors that most increased the probability of refinancing and withdrawing equity. His study for Pew Charitable Trusts on the effects of the Great Recession on wealth mobility and retirement preparedness revealed, among other things, that retirement income (at age 65) relative to pre-retirement income (ages 60–64) declined across birth cohorts; it was lower among both early boomers (born 1946–55) and late boomers (born 1956–65) than among war babies (1936–45) and lower still among Generation-Xers.
John Gist was born in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of seven children. His favorite pastimes included listening to jazz music, watching tennis, and traveling. With his companion of 35 years, Cynthia Harrison, he visited countries in Europe, Central America, Africa, and Asia during some two dozen trips abroad. He is survived by Ms. Harrison, three older sisters, and countless nieces and nephews.
—Cynthia Harrison, George Washington University
Fred I. Greenstein
Fred I. Greenstein, a distinguished scholar of political psychology, the presidency, and American politics, died at his Princeton home on December 3, 2018, surrounded by his family. He was 88. The cause was a form of Parkinson’s disease.
Professor of Politics, Emeritus at Princeton University, Fred was a world-class scholar. He wrote books that will long be remembered, from his path-breaking examination of how young children first learn about politics, to his penetrating works on the leadership styles of American presidents. His enduring accomplishment was to think about presidential leadership systematically, working to pinpoint the characteristics that made an effective leader. He eventually used his framework to analyze the leadership styles of 30 of the 44 individual presidents.
Fred—and he was Fred to students, colleagues, reporters, and political notables—was born in New York City on September 1, 1930. His father, Arthur, was a buyer for a department store; his mother, Rose, a homemaker. In his teenage years, the family moved to the Chicago area and he graduated from high school in Highland Park, Illinois.
He pursued his undergraduate degree at Antioch College. As was customary at Antioch, he did a work-study assignment, in his case at the Chicago Sun Times, in the fall of 1948. The paper was one of the few to endorse Truman. Fred later recounted election night with copies of the rival Chicago Tribune (infamously declaring Dewey the victor) stacked in a corner of the city room. “Despite the Tribune’s political obituary, Truman held his lead,” Fred recalled. “By morning Dewey had conceded, and I was emotionally bonded to ‘Give ‘Em Hell, Harry.’” After graduation from Antioch in 1953, Fred served two years in the Army, stationed in West Germany.
Although initially attracted to journalism as a career, his fascination with the role of personality and politics, an interest heightened by the seemingly irrational politics of World War II, the Cold War, and the McCarthy years, inspired him to pursue a doctorate in political science.
Yale became his new home. It was there, under the direction of Robert Lane, that he began his scholarly career, studying how young children first learned about politics. Other Yale mentors included Harold Lasswell, Nathan Leites, and Robert Dahl. It was during these years that he met and married another Yale graduate student, Barbara Elferink, his beloved wife for 61 years.
A story he later recounted in 2000 for the Antioch Review involved Fred’s encounter with Harry Truman during the former president’s week-long visit to Yale in 1958. Just before taking him to a meeting with graduate students, Truman broke in, “Never mind that, young feller. I’m an old man with an old man’s kidneys. Where can I take a leak?” Sweeping the young student into the men’s room with him, Truman “stood at the urinal, telling me about . . . FDR’s vice-president, John Nance Garner.” It was Fred’s first presidential interview, and surely the most unusual.
Fred’s dissertation, a pioneering effort in the field of political socialization, was the foundation for his book, Children and Politics (1965). Based on over 650 in-depth interviews with fourth through eighth graders, he found that children acquired largely benevolent views of political leaders, especially the president, despite the fact that adults were often ambivalent or distrustful of those same leaders. He replicated the study in the late 1960s, and again during Watergate, and found that young children’s idealistic views of presidents persisted even as adults became more cynical. With Sidney Tarrow, he also undertook a comparative study of political socialization in Britain, France, and the United States.
Before joining the faculty at Wesleyan in 1962, he spent a postdoctoral year at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, where he deepened his interest and knowledge of personality. Soon he was writing articles on “The Impact of Personality on Politics” and “Personality and Political Socialization,” before writing an important book on Personality and Politics (1969), which set out conceptual and methodological standards for studying the relationship between personality and politics.
Fred served on the Government faculty at Wesleyan University from 1962 to 1973, rising quickly through the ranks to full professor. He also maintained his association with Yale as a recurring visiting professor. Quickly making his professional mark, he spent a year as fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a year as visiting professor at the just-founded University of Essex in England. Among his colleagues at Wesleyan during his first six years was Nelson Polsby, a friend from graduate school. The two eventually collaborated to edit the eight-volume Handbook of Political Science (1975), a sweeping examination of modern political science.
In 1973, just as his intellectual interests were turning to American presidents, he joined the Princeton University faculty as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Politics, Law, and Society, a term chair honoring the founder of Time magazine. He served as Professor of Politics at Princeton for 28 years, until his retirement in 2001. During these years, he also taught regularly in the Woodrow Wilson School, where he directed the Research Program in Leadership Studies.
His 1982 book The Hidden-Hand Presidency transformed our view of Eisenhower’s governing style. Profiting from access to just-opened archival evidence, including transcripts of phone calls, meeting notes, and early drafts of memos (often with editing and commentary in Ike’s own handwriting), Fred showed that behind the amiable public persona was a shrewd political operator who often used indirect means to advance his goals. As he confessed in the introduction to the book, “I could never have imagined in the 1950s that years later I would immerse myself in the study of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s leadership.” He had voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and again in 1956. By the end of the decade, “I had my own students and was teaching them to view Eisenhower in the same fashion that most of my colleagues and all of the journalists I respected viewed him—as a good-natured bumbler, who lacked the leadership qualities to be an effective president.” However, “events, speculations, and hard evidence changed my view.”
His next book, How Presidents Test Reality (1989), coauthored with his student, John P. Burke (with Larry Berman and Richard Immerman), explored why President Eisenhower had chosen not to intervene in Vietnam in 1954, while President Johnson made the opposite choice in 1965. The aim was to sort out how much the individual presidents mattered and how much their very different advisory systems affected their decisions. In 1990, it won APSA’s Richard E. Neustadt Award for the best book on the American presidency.
Fred’s magnum opus, The Presidential Difference (2000), moved beyond discussions of individual presidents to develop a system for evaluating the sources of presidential leadership. He proposed examining presidents in terms of their strengths and weaknesses in six areas relating to their individual capacities as presidents: political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, organizational capacity, public communication, and emotional intelligence. The first edition applied this framework to presidents from FDR to Clinton. In later editions, he included George W. Bush and then Obama. He demonstrated that presidents’ varying possession and mastery of these six skills largely determined how successful they were in achieving their goals.
In subsequent books, he applied the framework to different eras. Inventing the Job of President (2009) explored the leadership style of the first seven presidents, George Washington to Andrew Jackson. Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union (2013) did the same for the six pre-Civil War presidents, Polk to Lincoln. Nearing completion when he died (coauthored with Dale Anderson) was Presidential Performance in the Progressive Era, focusing on four presidents, McKinley to Wilson.
His complete opus consists of nine books, 12 edited volumes, and more than 60 articles and essays.
Fred was a devoted teacher who was best known for working individually with students, especially juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Indeed, he was a mentor to all, not just his students, but to colleagues at Princeton and around the world. If you gave him a paper, he often returned it the same day, covered with constructive and supportive comments and references to books and papers you should read next.
His association with the Woodrow Wilson School, where he taught a graduate course on the American presidency while directing the Research Program in Leadership Studies, allowed him to invite political notables to Princeton who enriched both his teaching and research. For example, a 1987 conference on the Reagan presidency, with Vice President Bush delivering the keynote address, included Attorney General Edwin Meese, former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former White House Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, and Representative Dick Cheney. In 1977, he brought his students to Washington to interview President Ford, shortly after he left office. In early 1981, President Carter’s first public appearance after leaving the White House was a visit to Princeton and a meeting with Fred’s presidency class.
He was a superb departmental citizen, known especially for his excellent judgment in personnel matters. As a reward, he was asked to chair the Department of Politics, just after a series of devastating losses in both junior and senior ranks. In his four years at the helm, the Department added nine tenured faculty and 13 assistant professors. Fred’s leadership and hard work put the department on the road to greatness.
He was also a wonderful human being. His colleague George Kateb—one of Fred’s first recruits as department chair—observed, “Fred was a truly kind man, unostentatiously possessed of good will and the capacity for intelligent and benign action. He was also a quietly subtle man, on whom nothing was ever lost.”
Fred was recognized many times for his work. He was an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1976) and a Guggenheim fellow. In addition to the Neustadt Award, he received two awards from the International Society for Political Psychology (the Nevitt Sanford Award and the Harold D. Lasswell Award), where he was also a founding member, vice president, and president. The National Academy of Public Administration honored him with the Louis Brownlow Award for his Eisenhower book. He served first on the council and later as secretary of APSA, where he was also a founding member of the Presidential Research Group. That group awarded him its second ever career service award.
In addition to his wife, Barbara, Fred is survived by his son Michael Greenstein and wife Nettie Kurtz Greenstein, and their children Emma and Nathan; his daughter Amy Greenstein Dahn and husband William O. Dahn, and their children, Ryan and Cory; his daughter Jessica Greenstein and husband Eric Hollman, and their children, Benjamin and Sam; and his sister, Betty Greene.
He also leaves behind a worldwide community of scholars who benefitted from his scholarship, his wise counsel, and his exemplary character.
—R. Douglas Arnold, Princeton University
John P. Burke, University of Vermont
Allan Kornberg
Cigar smoking, scotch drinking, and body building. Cuss-word fluent (in several languages) and Shakespeare quoting (of entire passages). Sometimes gruff, often gregarious, and always generous. Strongly opinionated and remarkably erudite.
Allan Kornberg was born, as one of five children, to Celia and Nathan Kornberg in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada on April 6, 1931. He died, in the care of his adult children and stepchildren, in Annapolis, Maryland on August 7, 2018. His 87 years were a life much lived and many days well employed. Al and Linda Kornberg raised their four children in a home full of natural beauty, big dogs, inexhaustible energy, and much love in Durham, North Carolina. He was an athlete and a football player in high school, at the University of Manitoba, and as nose guard with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers of the Canadian Football League. He also was a professional wrestler known as “Crusher Kornberg” and a teacher and football coach at Sisler High School in Winnipeg, where his team won a province-wide championship, before turning his attention to political science during the height of the behavioral revolution. He completed his doctoral dissertation with Philip Converse and graduated with a doctoral degree in political science from the University of Michigan. He then joined the faculty of Hiram College for one year, before accepting an appointment to the faculty in political science at Duke University, where he arrived in 1965 and remained until he retired as the Norb F. Schaefer Professor of International Studies, to live with Patricia Kornberg in Annapolis in 2008. During his 43 Duke years, Allan Kornberg unleashed his formidable energy, intellect, and talents in multiple ways.
As an administrator-leader, Al was actively engaged in departmental, university, and professional governance. As department chair from 1983 to 1992, he advanced the trajectory of the department from a well-regarded regional program to a top-ten nationally ranked program by, among other things, investing heavily in accomplished colleagues in formal theory, political behavior, political economy, political theory, and other areas of inquiry. Further to being editor of The Journal of Politics, president of the Southern Political Science Association, and vice president of the American Political Science Association, he was Director of the Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research at the National Science Foundation from 1993 to 1995. Among other achievements, he developed and implemented the Democratization Initiative which put NSF research projects into the real-world in close-to-current time when cultural and social shifts, market transitions, and regime change were underway in post-Soviet states, Russia, and elsewhere.
As an educator-mentor, he taught introductory and advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, supervised multiple dissertations, and mentored many students and colleagues. In doing so, he emphasized the importance of research design, starting with what constitutes an interesting and important (and researchable) research question, through the use of theory and the collection and analysis of data, to the development of conclusions that are commensurate with the results of the data and the clear and coherent communication of these results. And, armed with his intellect, his coffee, and his yellow writing pads, he spent much effort and time, including many weekends and during hot Durham summers, moving research projects to completion and papers to publishable articles. In recognition of his efforts and time, he received, among other tributes, a Women’s Caucus Mentoring Award.
Allan’s research program addressed important and interesting questions about the attitudinal, behavioral, institutional, and policy causes and consequences of democratic performance and regime viability. His answers led to innovative research on electoral choice, legislative behavior, legislatures and development, party activism, and party organizations. At the end of the day, he singly or with colleagues and students at Duke, the universities of Hawaii, Kentucky, Iowa, and North Texas, and elsewhere, had received more than $10 million in research awards, including those from USAID and NSF, and had published more than 70 articles in major journals, numerous chapters in edited volumes, and 13 books. The publication of his doctoral dissertation on Canadian Legislative Behavior established him as one of Canada’s few leading behavioral researchers. And this book, together with Citizen Politicians, Citizens and Community: Political Support in a Representative Democracy Influence in Parliament, Making Political Choices: Canada and the United States, and other works, brought further research acclaim. He received the Samuel Eldersveld Career Achievement Award and the Mildred A. Schwartz Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on political parties and on Canadian politics, respectively, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Windsor in Canada.
Disliked by few, disliked and loved at the same time by some, and loved and respected by many, Allan Kornberg was, in many of the best ways, Duke University’s “Other Coach K.”
—Harold Clarke, University of Texas at Dallas
William Mishler, University of Arizona
Thomas Scotto, University of Strathclyde
Marianne Stewart, University of Texas at Dallas
Jim Laxer
Jim Laxer, one of Canada’s best known political economists and one of the founders of the socialist Waffle movement within the New Democratic Party died unexpectedly from a heart attack while vising Paris, France in February 2018 at the age of 76. A prolific writer on Canadian nationalism, foreign ownership, the liberal idea of Canada, and Canadian independence, he was part of a radical generation of political scientists, economists, sociologists, and historians who in the 1960s rediscovered the Canadian political economy tradition of research and scholarship pioneered by such magisterial figures as Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and W.A. Macintosh. With their energy and modern scholarship, they transformed the Canadian political economy approach into a unique interdisciplinary mix of Marxism, public policy, and elite theory to better explain the complex dynamics of Canadian sovereignty and continental integration to Canadian audiences, all while faced with the intense Americanization of Canada from powerful forces south of the border.
Trained as a historian, he completed his graduate studies in history at Queen’s University, Kingston in the ‘60s. Subsequently, Laxer was appointed as a full-time faculty member at York University, Toronto, where he was a highly regarded teacher and taught political science and political economy courses for more than 30 years.
He was a farsighted political economist, a man for his times. Laxer was a gifted writer and a talented synthesizer of his own original research and the research of a new generation of researchers and scholars profoundly informed by the war in Vietnam and the US civil rights movement. His most influential book, coauthored with his father Robert Laxer, The Liberal Idea of Canada (1977), explored Canada’s continual integration into a web of powerful continental forces triggered by foreign investment as well as Canada’s elites’ promotion of short-term, export-led growth of Canada’s resource-rich economy with easy access to the American market just across the border from Canada’s manufacturing belt located in southern Ontario. Canada’s Liberal governments had legitimized the postwar ‘branch plant’ economy as being in Canada’s national interest, playing down the risks to Canadian sovereignty and overselling the continental agenda as both “natural” and “inevitable,” a conclusion that the Laxers rejected on political and economic grounds.
Canadian governments had created a number of high-level commissions in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s to report on the impact of US multinationals in key sectors of the economy, particularly resources, manufacturing, and broadcasting and film. Canadian enterprises were being bought by US multinationals at an alarming rate in the eyes of many Canadians. The timing was right for a major course correction for the Canadian left. Laxer’s fresh perspective on Canadian-American relations in his books, such as False God: How the Globalization Myth Has Impoverished Canada (1993) which diagnosed both the illness and the cure for Canada’s slide into dependency, reached a wide audience in public policy circles, the media, and political parties.
What made him into a national figure was the organization of the radical Waffle movement, often described as a ginger group, inside Canada’s Social Democratic Party. Its goal was to transform the NDP into a modern socialist party premised on the twin ideas of economic independence and building a new relationship with Quebecers. His idea for reforming Canadian federalism was a courageous departure from Canada’s highly centralized federal system of governance. It challenged one of the foundational beliefs of the Federalist NDP: that it was not possible to make constitutional peace with the powerful emerging force of the Québec independence movement, led by its iconic leader René Lévesque at the time.
His idea of a binational Canada effectively called for the birth of the nation based on a new partnership between Anglophones and Francophones. Looking back on these events 40 years later, reveals that they are marked by a certain positive utopianism. Canada has had a long tradition of critical left thinking and radical activism. Québec had been rocked by general strikes in the early ‘70s and unions in different parts of Canada were on the move, buoyed by a newfound militancy. The originality of the Waffle movement—linking constitutional reform, economic independence, and socialism—reflected the radical environment of the age and the rediscovery of participator-based politics in Canada’s political parties.
Laxer, Mel Watkins, and others, incorporated their ideas about the economy, Quebec, and expansion of Canada’s welfare state to write a controversial manifesto that would challenge the official NDP policy at the 1969 national convention held the same year. Laxer became the de facto leader of the Waffle movement with his skills as a dynamic public speaker and a talented organizer.
At the time, the NDP occupied the high ground in Canadian politics, previously supporting a minority Liberal government, and hence was able to extract progressive legislation from the governing party. Many experts predicted that a renewed NDP party with a new leader could have formed the next government because its popularity was on the rise. Laxer is best known for his tumultuous leadership challenge to David Lewis, the establishment’s candidate and a national figure in his own right. Laxer came within a hair of winning at the national party convention. He was only defeated on the fourth ballot by the unstoppable power of the NDP establishment and trade union brass who delivered a majority of delegate votes to Lewis. Nonetheless, Laxer received 37% support among delegates, an impressive showing of support for a socialist movement scarcely a year old. Despite its base inside the party, the Waffle movement disbanded a few years later. The emergence of the Waffle movement, with its original rethinking about Canada’s resource dependency and a new model of Canadian federalism to accommodate Québec’s constitutional drive for fundamental change, constitutes a watershed moment in English Canadian political history and the fortunes of the New Democratic Party.
Laxer’s commitment to public life and critical scholarship deepened when he left formal politics. He reconciled with Canada’s social democratic party and served as the NDP research director in Ottawa. He was offered repeated opportunities to run for the federal NDP but declined.
Laxer then entered the most productive period of his life, when he taught, wrote, and published on a range of political and social issues chronicling the impact of globalization on Canada’s institutions and values. His interests were wide and varied, and he published on a range of subjects including on the environment and Canada’s energy crisis (2008), the Canada-US border (2003), the perils of the US empire (2008), and a memoir on growing up in a communist household during the McCarthy era as a red diaper baby (2004). In addition, as a public intellectual he wrote frequently for Canada’s national newspapers and produced a highly successful, award-winning TV series on Canadian political economy. His contribution to modern Canadian political economy, with its focus on Canada in the global economy, was prolific, his mix of activism and scholarship strategic, and he had a major influence on Canadian critical thought in Canada’s universities and beyond. His garrulous, kind, and creative presence will be sorely missed. He leaves his wife Sandy Price, their two children and two children from a previous marriage.
—Daniel Drache, Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University
Ian Marsh
The distinguished Australian political scientist Ian Marsh died in Sydney on June 8, 2017. Professor Marsh’s research and publications dealt with the challenge of rebuilding national policy making capacities in a pluralized and globalized society that had grown, as he put it, “beyond the two-party system.” His work combined a wide reading of the theoretical literature with an energetic and persistent engagement with the institutional and political problems of contemporary policy making, along with a speculative search for new possibilities for organising the national political infrastructure. He is remembered as an exemplary scholar and public intellectual, a devoted husband, and a generous and exuberant friend.
Malcolm Ian Marsh—always known as Ian—was born in Sydney on August 5, 1943 and attended schools in Sydney and Newcastle. In those days when access to higher education was much more limited, Ian’s excellent results set him on the path to scholarly achievement, but characteristically he went his own way. He enrolled at Newcastle University College on a part-time basis while also working as an industrial officer in a Newcastle steel works. He graduated with his BA in 1965 and immediately enrolled in a master’s degree in economics. But then politics intervened. A local federal member of Parliament, Allen Fairhall, recently appointed Minister for Defence, hired Ian as his private secretary in 1967; upon Fairhall’s retirement his replacement, Malcolm Fraser, later prime minister, persuaded him to remain in the same role. Ian was thus directly involved for four years, at the height of Australia’s military commitment to the Vietnam War, with the administration of a senior ministerial office and portfolio. He then worked as a management consultant with McKinsey and Co (1971–74), before joining the Federal Secretariat of the Liberal Party of Australia as research director (1974–77) during Fraser’s leadership of the party.
Attending the Sydney Film Festival in 1974, Ian was introduced by a mutual friend to Lorine Ligtvoet. A whirlwind romance led to marriage three months later. Ian told friends this was his most important achievement in life. At the age of 34, he resumed his interrupted master’s studies, but this time as a participant, one of Australia’s first, in the public administration course at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Completing his MPA in 1979, he subsequently graduated AM and PhD (1985) from Harvard’s Department of Government. Returning to Australia in 1984, Ian took up an appointment to the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales, first as senior lecturer and from 1991 as associate professor. He proved an energetic teacher of the school’s management graduate students and a prolific contributor to its highly regarded series of working papers.
In twelve papers at AGSM Ian set out the key aspects of the scholarly quest that he pursued for the rest of his life in his books and his many articles for Australian, British, and other academic journals, his collaborative research projects, and his public commentaries. Their subjects ranged from case studies in Australian economic and financial policy making, to the committee system of the British House of Commons, and to the political realignments of late colonial and early Federation Australia. Their common theme reflected the approach and analytical framework of his doctoral supervisor Samuel Beer, in particular his Britain Against Itself (1982); Ian diagnosed in Australia a comparable “pluralistic stagnation.” Government, he observed, “seems to lack the political foundations for strategic action,” and its capacity to determine policy is thwarted by its inability to mobilize the necessary consent to carry any proposal to successful execution. The real task of government, in Ian’s view, was leadership: setting national strategic directions and agendas, and building coalitions of interest groups and issues movements in the development of relevant policy towards those goals. These groups and movements represented the producer and consumer functions of the contemporary welfare state while also providing differentiated representation of citizens’ political identities. While they had proliferated, the political parties had lost much of their interest-integrating and representative functions.
These arguments were fully elaborated in Ian’s breakthrough book, Beyond the Two Party System: Political representation, economic competitiveness and Australian politics (Cambridge University Press, 1995). The book worked on a big canvas, aiming to “sketch a possible future for politics” that met the new economic challenge of competitiveness while strengthening political participation; that is, to retain distributional equity while reflecting increased social diversity. The twin challenges of “opportunity-focused competitiveness as an economic challenge and ad hoc coalition building as a policy-making strategy” were linked into a virtuous circle by the renewed prospect of collaborative action. This prognosis of a future “beyond” parties was informed by his economic and business-managerial analysis. Just as important was his study of Australia’s late colonial and early Federation politics when parliaments, operating in a ‘pre’-party era, managed consensually to negotiate and resolve the nation’s key policy settings. This historic survey revealed Ian’s profound attachment to Federation father Alfred Deakin, whom he described as the principal architect of Australia’s enduring program of liberal-egalitarianism.
In setting these ambitious goals for policy makers, Ian explicitly opposed the public choice or neoliberal theorists and rejected what he regarded as their impoverished view of atomized self-interested individuals and of inherently incompetent government. He had a richer, more benevolent, and more optimistic view of his fellow citizens and the empowered community they formed. It followed that Ian also eschewed the deductive quantitative research method and distrusted its generalized certainties. For him, political research must be contextualized in observation of each country’s particular practices, institutions, and historical circumstances.
Professionally, Ian’s star continued to rise. In 2000 he was appointed Senior Fellow of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU); in 2005, ANZSOG Professor of Government at the Graduate School of Government, University of Sydney; and in 2008 professor in the Australian Innovation Research Centre at the University of Tasmania. In 2011 he returned to Canberra as visiting professor in the ANU public policy program and from 2015, was visiting professor at the University of Technology Sydney. Through this period, he continued an active program of collaborative research and publication. He described the changing nature of political parties with the edited volume, Political Parties in Transition? The Australian party system in an era of globalisation (Federation Press 2006). In collaboration with Takashi Inoguchi, Jean Blondel, and others, he explored the distinctive governance features of the economically dynamic democracies of the Asia-Pacific region in Democratisation, Governance and Regionalism in East and Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study (Routledge 2006), and citizen responses to the new global order in Globalisation, public opinion and the state: Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia (Routledge 2008).
Meanwhile, as part of a lifelong engagement with issues and stakeholders beyond the academy, Ian developed a long association with the business-funded research forum the Committee for Economic Development in Australia (CEDA). After publishing An Australian Think Tank? (1980), he directed a project on the internationalization of the Australian economy that led to his edited publication Australia Can Compete (1988). Other CEDA collaborations followed, addressing a linked series of policy concerns of which Ian was the disciplined and collaborative editor: The Environmental Challenge (1991), Governing in the Nineties (1993) and Australian Business in the Asia/Pacific Region: The case for strategic industry policy (1994). He published consultancy research on the economic impact of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (1993 and 1998). For the Australian Business Foundation, he explored Australia’s wine industry as a case study of collaboration and learning (2000), and, with Lindy Edwards, the development of a national innovation strategy. For Australian Collaboration, a network of community organizations, he published Into the Future: The neglect of the long term in Australian politics, with David Yencken (Black Inc 2004).
Ian may have lost confidence in political parties, but he never lost faith in the prospect of new structures and forums for democratic engagement and deliberation. A parliament freed of two-party dominance was one in which serious inquiry can be undertaken, especially through the committee system—this was always part of Ian’s prescription. So, in one sense Ian was a pessimist. Much of his diagnostic language was of decline, demise, dysfunction, deficiency, gridlock, contraction, loss of competence—aspects of a full-blown, slow-burn crisis of democratic legitimacy. But his analysis did not lead to despair, cynicism, or rejectionism but, on the contrary, to an engaged and energetic quest for solutions. Having provided his diagnosis of decline, he did not fail to set out his prescription for renewal. Here his language was of revival, reimagination, learning, innovation, re-formation, and engagement.
This duality was the theme of his last major work, Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal: Political change in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge University Press, 2012) coauthored with Raymond Miller of the University of Auckland. This work evaluated the patterns of decline and prospects for renewal in the democratic governance of three mature parliamentary democracies. Each country offered institutional variations—Britain’s strong committee system, Australia’s strong Senate and New Zealand’s multi-party politics—which constituted a repertoire of change that could shift the structure of politics beyond the two-party regime.
Lorine accompanied Ian to Boston, London, Florence, Hobart, and on all his travels in between, and for more than 40 years their homes were the center of generous hospitality, great cooking, plentiful gin and tonics, and lively conversation with a wide network of friends. Ian read deeply the novels of Proust and Iris Murdoch and the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and admired the work of painter Jeffrey Smart, whose “The Arrow Carriers” adorns the front cover of Beyond the Two Party System. He luxuriated in the beauty and light of inner Sydney and its harbor, sailing an elderly Hood sailboat with some competence and more joy.
Ian died from the effects of a brain tumor at the age of 74. Before his illness he had embarked on a major summative project—nothing less than a history of politics in Australia, from 1850 to the present day, that would have put our current malaise in a longer historical context, showing the critical turns in the political agenda and the changing frameworks of political institutions. Ian was, perhaps uniquely, qualified to conceive of and execute such an ambitious project. He was also working with former Fraser government minister Fred Chaney on improving the federal administration of indigenous affairs.
A memorial service was held at Christ Church St Laurence, Sydney, whose sacred music and high church ritual had made him a frequent if irregular member of the congregation. He was remembered as a vibrant and open friend who enriched the lives of those around him, a prolific researcher and passionate advocate for his ideas, a supporter of the underdog, a good man with a “questioning and questing intelligence,” as Fred Chaney put it. Deborah Hope read “Burnt Norton” from Eliot’s “Four Quartets:” “What might have been is an abstraction/ remaining a perpetual possibility/ only in a world of speculation.”
—Stephen Mills, University of Sydney
Carl F. Pinkele
Professor Carl F. Pinkele passed away unexpectedly in May 2018, at the age of 77. Carl arrived at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1976 and retired after 34 years in 2010 as the Honorable Charles W. Fairbanks professor of Politics and Government. He earned his BA and MA at the University of Iowa and his PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Before coming to OWU, Carl taught at Grambling College, the University of Wisconsin, Lake Forest College, and Dillard University.
Those who knew Carl remember a passionate man who relished every opportunity to debate the issues of the day and inject humor into serious events, including OWU’s Mock Convention.
Carl had a knack for seeing the hidden potential in students, helping countless numbers to achieve more than they imagined possible. He helped find internships for them that allowed them to put their talents and interests to use. These internships became stepping stones into careers for many, and Carl also directly assisted numerous students in finding jobs in various areas of practical politics.
He was known as a demanding professor but his sense of humor was legendary with students and faculty alike. In fact, students created a Facebook page dedicated to his witty comments and retorts from their classes. He also enlivened Mock Convention debates with his pointed challenges to the proposals and authority of other speakers.
Carl came to Ohio Wesleyan to teach mainly in the subfield of American Politics, including courses on the presidency, Congress, and American political theory. Over his three and a half decades at OWU, he also exhibited impressive breadth of learning while teaching courses in the areas of comparative politics, minority politics, environmental politics, and democratic theory. His research, likewise, explored an impressively wide range of topics. His number of professional panel papers and lectures exceeds 40 and includes topics as diverse as regime change in Eastern Europe to the impact of black judges on judicial decisions in the United States. Grant support for his work came both from small and local sources, such as the Kettering Foundation and the Columbus Foundation, and larger national sources, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Department of Education, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His most noteworthy and celebrated books are: The Contemporary Mediterranean World (1983 with Adamantia Pollis), Europe at the Crossroads (1985 with Stefan Musto), and Discretion, Justice and Democracy (1985 with William Louthan).
Professor Pinkele’s commitment to service at OWU is similarly remarkable. He served as chair of the Politics and Government Department from 1990 to 1998. He served as director of the Arneson Institute for Practical Politics and Public Affairs from 1983 to 2010. And, perhaps most importantly, Carl was the originator and director of the now-iconic Wesleyan in Washington Program. Carl also directed the National Colloquium twice (in 1985 and 1991), served as coordinator of the Black World Studies Program from 1985–1989, and served two terms on the University Governance Committee.
Carl is survived by his beloved wife Barbara and devoted daughter Abigail, both living in the greater Washington, DC area.
—William C. Louthan, Ohio Wesleyan University
Jeffrey Record
Jeffrey Record, Professor Emeritus of the Air War College, Air University, died on August 24, 2018, in Sandy Springs, Georgia. Jeff was born in California on October 31, 1943, and did his undergraduate work at Occidental College, where he earned his BA in political science in 1965. Following graduation, Jeff served through the Civil Operations and Rural Support (CORDS) program as assistant province adviser to the US military–civilian advisory teams in Soc Trang and Bac Lieu provinces in South Vietnam. Following that 15-month tour, Jeff earned his MA and PhD in international relations from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. From 1973 to 1976, he served on the Brookings Defense Analysis Staff, authoring or coauthoring four monographs. He then joined Senator Sam Nunn’s staff for four years, before becoming a member of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. He joined the Hudson Institute to conduct research on nuclear studies, and began authoring columns for the Baltimore Sun, a practice he continued for some years. Jeff then joined the staff at BDM International before becoming a legislative assistant to Senators Lloyd Benson and Robert Krueger, and then was appointed as a staff member to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In this position, Jeff worked on treaty negotiations, arms control, and nuclear policy issues, often traveling the world with Senators Benson, McCain, and Nunn, and absorbing lessons that he would later incorporate into his scholarly writing and teaching.
Jeff left the policy world to become a member of the Georgia Tech faculty for two years before his appointment as an Air War College faculty member, from where he retired in 2015. “Retirement” only brought an additional appointment as the Keogh Chair, Australian Army in 2016, where he participated in conferences and authored several papers.
Jeff’s scholarly work reflected both his long policy experiences and his curiosity as a scholar. His ten books include A War It Was Always Going to Lose: Why Japan Attacked the United States in 1941 (Potomac Books 2011), Wanting War: Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq (Potomac Books 2010), Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win (Potomac Books 2007), Dark Victory: America’s Second War with Iraq (Naval Institute Press 2004), and Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War (Brassey’s 1993), among others. He also published numerous monographs, and articles in leading journals like Survival, Comparative Strategy, and International Security. He was not only a prolific author, but also one whose works were widely cited by both scholars and policy makers.
At the Air War College, Jeff taught in the Department of Strategy, serving as course director for the Foundations of Strategy course. He taught a course on regional and cultural studies, focusing on Northeast Asia, and taught a number of electives, including courses on counterinsurgency, on the Gulf Wars, and on the Vietnam War. His courses were extremely popular with students, who consistently praised his knowledge, his analytical skills, and his eagerness to question conventional wisdom. He also spent a year at the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College, a stint that produced a number of carefully-reasoned critical monographs.
Jeff was more than a scholar and a teacher, he was also a valuable colleague who was always eager to read and comment on manuscripts. A number of the Air War College faculty cite Jeff’s input to their books and articles as being particularly valuable. He served as a mentor to junior faculty, offering advice on everything from publications to career choices. One could always stick their head into Jeff’s book-lined office and ask, “What do you think about…?” and Jeff would always have a thoughtful and provocative answer. His Vietnam experience and his scholarship led him to become professionally critical of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, and his monograph “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism” criticizing that decision came to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s attention. In criticizing a decision that had Rumsfeld’s clear imprint, Jeff tested the principle of academic freedom, and in the end, Rumsfeld stated that while he disagreed with Jeff’s arguments, he respected academic freedom, even in the educational institutions of the Defense Department. Jeff believed that principle outweighed politics, and his actions allowed the Defense Department to validate his belief. That was fortunate, as Jeff’s monograph got wide circulation. After the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound, the raiders found a copy of “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism” on his bookshelf.
Jeff’s health suffered in his last years at the Air War College, and ultimately he underwent knee-replacement surgery to repair damage from his competitive swimming days at Occidental. His long Vietnam service also took its toll on his health. He did not really want to retire, but finally we persuaded him that it was time. He moved to the Atlanta area to be with his wife, Leigh, who was a special education teacher there. He kept as active as his health would permit, writing and traveling, always keeping in touch with friends and colleagues. His mind and his pen never lost their sharpness.
We remember Jeff as a fine scholar and colleague who loved Thai food and good conversation. He was an enduring member of the Air War College’s “Liar’s Club” which met over coffee every morning to analyze the days’ news and complain about whatever administration was in power. After Jeff left, we disbanded the Liar’s Club, but hoped that we could reform it for a day if Jeff returned for a visit. Sadly, we realize now that visit will never take place.
—David S. Sorenson, Air War College
Christopher Hemmer, Air War College
Kurt L. Shell
Professor Kurt L. Shell died at the age of 97 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany on October 12, 2018. He was a professor emeritus at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt where he taught political science. His passing marks the end of a long and productive academic career that spanned the United States and Germany, and included teaching, research, and publication in English and German. He was predeceased by his wife, Ingrid, in 2014, and is survived by a son, Andreas, and a daughter, Karin.
Professor Shell was born in Vienna, Austria on November 17, 1920. After the occupation of Austria by the Nazis, his father, a prominent Jewish lawyer, was incarcerated for several months. After his release, the Shell family was able to emigrate to England. Residing in London for a few years, they then came to the United States. After joining the US Army in 1942, Shell was sent to Italy and served at the front as an infantryman in the autumn/winter of 1944. Following a prolonged stay in the hospital, he joined a headquarters unit with which he returned to Vienna in the summer of 1945. He was honorably discharged from the army in March 1946.
As with many returning veterans, Dr. Shell used the GI Bill to continue his education. Attending Columbia University, he received his BSc from the School of General Studies in 1948, his MA in 1949, and his PhD in 1955. He served for five years as an instructor at Columbia College. His thesis adviser was Professor Franz L. Neumann, whose untimely death in 1954 deprived him of a keen and challenging critic.
In the next dozen years, Dr. Shell alternated in his teaching and research between the United States and Germany. From 1956 to 1958, 1959 to 1961, and 1964 to 1967, he taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton and went from assistant to full professor. From 1958 to 1959, he was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Berlin. From 1961 to 1964 he was a research professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin. In 1967 he accepted an offer of a professorship at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. He served in the Department of Political Education, and subsequently in the Department of Social Sciences and Political Science until 1985, when he became professor emeritus.
In addition to his teaching duties, Dr. Shell initiated and directed a Summer School on American politics for five years and organized a yearly meeting of German political scientists working on American politics that continues to exist. He organized and chaired the German Selection Committee for Fulbright Scholarships for many years. Dr. Shell also directed the “link” between the University of Southampton and Johann Wolfgang University. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Southampton. The Hessian Ministry of Culture awarded him the Goethe Medal for his scholarship and his services in the cause of German–American–British linkages. He also became an honorary member of the German Society for American Studies.
Dr. Shell’s scholarship illuminates the interplay of ideas and institutions, the latter including the modern industrial system, political parties, and government. In his first article, “Industrial Democracy and the British Labor Movement,” published in Political Science Quarterly in December 1957, he explored the quest for “worker’s control,” or “industrial democracy” among some British socialists in the first 11 years after World War II. He demonstrated convincingly how structural imperatives of the Labor Party, and the efficient running of recently nationalized industries, both worked against the goal of worker participation in the control of industry.
In his book, The Transformation of Austrian Socialism (1962), Shell traced the development of Austrian “social democracy” from its beginnings in 1889 to the time of the publication of his book. In an email to me in 2015, he summarized the transformation as follows:
Until the end of World War II, the Marxist inheritance prevented a clear commitment to representative democracy; without some form of “revolution” capitalism, so the belief held by the party’s powerful radical wing, could not be replaced by a socialist system. Only after 1945, with the Stalinist type of communism totally discredited, and Western forms of social democracy, be it in the British Labor Party, be it in Roosevelt’s New Deal proving their superiority, could the adherents of a gradual, peaceful evolution of socialism under conditions of parliamentary democracy win out over the radical forces in their own ranks. The identification of “socialism” with the nationalization of the means of production—and, indeed, the Austrian coalition government proceeded with the nationalization of all heavy industries as well as the banking sector—proved disillusioning to all those who had expected that socialism would usher in a new age of freedom from restraints and hierarchy.
Dr. Shell’s book on Austrian socialism was based on his doctoral thesis completed in 1955. In a final chapter entitled “Socialism in the Age of Fulfillment,” Shell observed how socialist theory, including the concept of “scientific socialism” once was a source of confident action, a kind of lodestar, for both leaders and masses in the socialist movement. But he noted that this has largely given way to vague and generalized assertions of humane sentiments. He believed that in this work he anticipated the “end of ideology” thesis later found in the work of Daniel Bell.
Dr. Shell’s main competencies in political science were comparative government and political theory. Living in Berlin he had the opportunity to observe the East–West standoff there, as well as the politics of East Germany. His volume, Bedrohung und Bewährung: Führung und Bevölkerung in der Berlin-Krise (1965) tells the story of how West Berliners reacted to the erecting of the Wall in 1961, and how the Allied Powers and the city’s leadership handled the crisis. In a book review article in World Politics, from October 1965 entitled “Totalitarianism in Retreat: The Example of the DDR,” he noted the tension between the functional requirements of an industrial system that set limits to arbitrary rule, and the ideological considerations that prompt efforts at the radical transformation of society. Writing of the government of East Germany in comparison to the governments of Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary, he observed that the political system in which the distance between the Marxist fiction and social reality is the greatest, the willingness on the part of the leadership to abandon the fiction in theory or practice is smallest.
Much of Dr. Shell’s work embodied themes of enhancing human freedom and dignity through democratic governance and humanizing the workplace. Other publications include book review articles in World Politics from January 1957 and October 1963; “Extraparliamentary Opposition in Postwar Germany,” in Comparative Politics from July 1970; the coedited book, with Frederic Burin, Politics, Law, and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (1969); and the edited book Democratic Political Process: A Cross National Reader (1975). Others in German are Das politische System der USA (1975); Der Amerikanische Konservatismus (1986); and Harry S. Truman: Politiker, Populist, Präsident (1998).
As a student of Dr. Shell at what was then Harpur College of the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1960 to 1961, I experienced the excitement he transmitted about politics and learning in his classes. I was then fortunate to be able to keep in touch with him through letters, emails, phone calls, and occasional visits for another 57 years. His mind was sharp until the end. He was outstanding as a scholar and teacher, and as a person. He will be greatly missed.
—Michael C. Stratford, Central Michigan University
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