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Walter LaFeber, Historian Who Dissected Diplomacy, Dies at 87
Challenging convention from all political perspectives, he mesmerized
his students at Cornell, many of whom went on to hold foreign policy
posts or professorships.
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The Cornell University historian Walter LaFeber with a student in 1973.
He became a full professor in 1967 and, unlike many colleagues,
continued to teach undergraduates regularly.
The Cornell University historian Walter LaFeber with a student in 1973.
He became a full professor in 1967 and, unlike many colleagues,
continued to teach undergraduates regularly.Credit...Russell
Hamilton/Cornell University
Sam Roberts <https://www.nytimes.com/by/sam-roberts>
BySam Roberts <https://www.nytimes.com/by/sam-roberts>
* PublishedMarch 10, 2021UpdatedMarch 11, 2021,9:26 a.m. ET
Walter LaFeber, a Cornell University history professor and author whose
unvarnished version of American diplomacy drew hundreds of students and
spectators to his Saturday morning lectures, and whose acolytes went on
to influence the nation’s foreign policy, died on Tuesday in Ithaca,
N.Y. He was 87.
His daughter, Suzanne Kahl, confirmed the death, at an assisted living
facility.
Professor LaFeber (pronounced la-FEE-ber) did not like to label himself
or others, but he was widely considered to be a “moderate revisionist.”
He was a disciple of the so-called Wisconsin School of diplomatic
history inspired by William Appelman Williams, which challenged
conventional accounts of American exceptionalism by suggesting that
United States foreign policy was also motivated by imperialism.
Professor LaFeber valued the roles that institutions played in shaping
history, but he never underestimated the influence of individuals. He
enlivened his books and lectures by fleshing out characters from Aaron
Burr and John Quincy Adams to George W. Bush and even Michael Jordan.
His book “Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism” (1999) was about
basketball as a metaphor for globalization.
While he could condemn without demonizing, he had no compunctions about
exposing hypocrisy. Just before Independence Day in 1983, in response to
Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s declaration that the United States
would not tolerate Central American revolutionaries “shooting their way
into the government,” Professor LaFeber wrote in aNew York
Times<https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/03/opinion/marking-revolution-opposing-revolution.html>Op-Ed
article, “Given George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s dependence on
American riflemen, it is well for Fourth of July celebrations that Mr.
Shultz’s law cannot be applied retroactively.”(Mr. Shultz died last
month.)
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/obituaries/george-p-shultz-dead.html>
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His scholarly career “indicates that he had imbibed the Wisconsin
lessons of empiricism, criticism, and a suspicion of power,” Andrew J.
Rotter and Frank Costigliola wrote in 2004 in the journal Diplomatic
History.
“In his nearly half-century of writing,” they concluded, “LaFeber has
won deep respect among scholars and students of U.S. foreign relations
for his ability to analyze a complex historical topic with clarity and
brilliance.”
ImageProfessor LaFeber in 1973. His students were known to give him
standing ovations.
Professor LaFeber in 1973. His students were known to give him standing
ovations.Credit...Cornell University
Professor LaFeber thought the war in Vietnam was a mistake, resulting
from contradictory policy objectives. He was also a champion of racial
justice. But he argued in 1969 that Black students armed with rifles who
seized the student union building at Cornell had gone too far. He
resigned as chairman of the history department to protest attempts by
the university’s president to placate the demonstrators.
“What a university is all about is rational discourse,” he was quoted as
saying in “Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American
University” (1999), by Donald Alexander Downs. “What these people were
doing was essentially raping the major principle of the university. Once
you introduce any kind of element of force into the university, you
compromise the institution. To me, that is totally unforgivable.”
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He continued: “I’m a relativist in terms of object and conclusion. I
don’t think I am necessarily right. What I am absolutist about is the
procedure you use to get there. Which means the university always has to
be open and it cannot be compromised.”
His students included the future foreign policy expertsSamuel R. Berger
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/samuel-berger-dies.html>, who
served as national security adviser under President Bill Clinton, and
Stephen J. Hadley, who held the same position under George W. Bush; Eric
S. Edelman, who was under secretary of defense for policy in the Bush
administration; William Brownfield, who served as assistant secretary of
state under Barack Obama; former Representative Thomas Downey, a Long
Island Democrat; and the history professors Susan A. Brewer of the
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Lorena Oropeza of the University
of California, Davis, and Nancy F. Cott of Harvard.
“His brilliant lectures on American foreign relations at Cornell
persuaded me to specialize in diplomatic history as a graduate student,”
Professor Brewer said by email. “Along with the Monroe Doctrine and the
Yalta Conference, there was room for Herman Melville, Jane Addams and
John Wayne.”
Professor Cott recalled: “Since I was only a student in his large
lecture class, I assumed he did not know who I was. But when I published
a book about Mary Ritter Beard in 1991, LaFeber, who was a great admirer
of Charles Beard, Mary Beard’s husband and sometime co-author, wrote me
a fan letter about the book! I was stunned and felt extremely honored by
his awareness as much as his praise.”
Image
Professor LaFeber in 2012, six years after he delivered what was billed
as his farewell lecture.
Professor LaFeber in 2012, six years after he delivered what was billed
as his farewell lecture.Credit...Lindsay France/Cornell University
Walter Frederick LaFeber was born on Aug. 30, 1933, in Walkerton, Ind.,
a small town near South Bend. His father, Ralph Nichols LaFeber, owned a
grocery store, where Walt started working when he was 8. His mother,
Helen (Liedecker) LaFeber, was a homemaker.
After a stellar basketball career in high school (he was 6-foot-2), he
graduated from Hanover, a Presbyterian liberal arts college in southern
Indiana, where a professor whetted his appetite for history. He went on
to earn a master’s from Stanford University in 1956.
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As an undergraduate, he had been relatively comfortable with the foreign
policies of Republicans like Senator Robert A. Taft and President Dwight
D. Eisenhower. He became more critical after he entered the University
of Wisconsin, where he studied under Professor Fred Harvey Harrington
and where he and two other future professors, Lloyd C. Gardner and
Thomas J. McCormick, were recruited to be William Appleman Williams’s
teaching assistants.
In 1955, Professor LaFeber married Sandra Gould, whom he had met at
Hanover. She and their daughter survive him, along with a son, Scott;
two grandsons; and a granddaughter.
After he earned his doctorate in 1959, he was hired as an assistant
professor at Cornell, joining a star-studded roster of political
scientists that would include Allan Bloom, Andrew Hacker and Theodore J.
Lowi. He became a full professor in the history department in 1967 and,
unlike many colleagues, continued to teach undergraduates regularly. The
students in his class “History of American Foreign Relations” gave him
standing ovations.
His formal dress gave him gravitas in an era of growing turmoil on campus.
“Wearing a tie to teach, for example, might signify a belief that
teaching is a different and more serious enterprise than anything else
he does,” Professors Rotter and Costigliola wrote in 2004. “Certainly
the decision to look very different from how he sounded, to create and
then confound expectation in this way, gave LaFeber a special authority
of the sort often lacking in radicals in the 1960s-’70s. It was in part
because of the contrast in form and substance that students paid attention.”
In 1976, Professor LaFeber was the first faculty member invited to
deliver Cornell’s commencement address, and in 2002 he was named the
first Andrew H. and James S. Tisch distinguished professor. In 2006,
some 3,000 Cornellians filled the Beacon Theater in Manhattan to hear
him deliver what was billed as his farewell lecture, titled “A
Half-Century of Friends, Foreign Policy and Great Losers.”
His books include “The New Empire: An Interpretation of American
Expansion, 1860-1898” (1963); “Creation of the American Empire: U.S.
Diplomatic History” (1973); “The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical
Perspective” (1978), which was credited with nudging the Senate into
ratifying the treaty relinquishing the canal (National Review called its
support of the treaty “predictable”); “The American Age: U.S. Foreign
Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750” (1989); “America, Russia and the
Cold War” (the most recent edition of which was published in 2006); and
“The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election” (2005).
Professor LaFeber’s books won praise for placing American foreign policy
in the context of domestic politics and the sometimes neglected agendas
of other nations. He also took the long view of history, which was a
prudent perspective for a fan of the Chicago Cubs, a team that before
2016 had not won a World Series since 1908.
“As someone once said,” Professor LaFeber noted, “‘Anybody can have a
bad century.’”
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