Fareed Zakaria: Remembering Samuel Huntington
[Fareed Zakaria is editor-at-large of Time magazine. This November 2010 speech at Harvard University was adapted for FP with permission from the author.]
The first time I met Sam Huntington, I was not yet his student; I was an intern for the New Republic. I was still an undergraduate at Yale, and there was a peculiar campaign being waged by a Yale math professor named Serge Lang to deny Sam Huntington a seat in the National Academy of Sciences. I was intrigued by the whole thing, so I went to interview Huntington.
He was more troubled by the campaign than I would have ever imagined. The basic premise was this: Sam was a hawk in general, and during the Vietnam War, he had written a number of pieces, including a long report for the government and a couple of articles in Foreign Affairs, on the matter. Lang believed that this made him effectively a war criminal and argued that Sam should therefore not be part of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, while he was a hawk on this particular issue, Sam was actually on the dovish side of the debate. He was arguing that the United States needed a much more political, rather than military, strategy in Vietnam. But Lang was fixated on one page of Sam's work.
What I remember most, however, isn't the details of the case, but how transfixed I was just sitting there talking to Huntington, thinking to myself, "this is so fascinating." He was able to take policy debates and frame them in a much broader theoretical context. Sam was able to explain to you what confirms and what falsifies your argument.
A couple of years later, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I started working for Sam myself.
Today, in commemoration of Huntington's work at Harvard, I imagine the question for most of you is why you should care about Sam Huntington and why you should read his books...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
The first time I met Sam Huntington, I was not yet his student; I was an intern for the New Republic. I was still an undergraduate at Yale, and there was a peculiar campaign being waged by a Yale math professor named Serge Lang to deny Sam Huntington a seat in the National Academy of Sciences. I was intrigued by the whole thing, so I went to interview Huntington.
He was more troubled by the campaign than I would have ever imagined. The basic premise was this: Sam was a hawk in general, and during the Vietnam War, he had written a number of pieces, including a long report for the government and a couple of articles in Foreign Affairs, on the matter. Lang believed that this made him effectively a war criminal and argued that Sam should therefore not be part of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, while he was a hawk on this particular issue, Sam was actually on the dovish side of the debate. He was arguing that the United States needed a much more political, rather than military, strategy in Vietnam. But Lang was fixated on one page of Sam's work.
What I remember most, however, isn't the details of the case, but how transfixed I was just sitting there talking to Huntington, thinking to myself, "this is so fascinating." He was able to take policy debates and frame them in a much broader theoretical context. Sam was able to explain to you what confirms and what falsifies your argument.
A couple of years later, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, I started working for Sam myself.
Today, in commemoration of Huntington's work at Harvard, I imagine the question for most of you is why you should care about Sam Huntington and why you should read his books...