The flip side of John Mearsheimer’s blacklisting at the New York Times is the Sacrifice of Steve Walt. What do I mean by that?
As I’ve said on this blog, Walt is a very different character from Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer is hot, Walt is cool. Mearsheimer’s a real freethinker. The way I’ve always thought of Mearsheimer is as General Billy Mitchell, an aristocrat and intellectual radical who in the 1930s was courtmartialled for a relentless campaign he led inside the military establishment/West Point over the need for air power. Today there are innumerable institutions named after Mitchell in honor of his vision. I think they made a Jimmy Stewart movie about him, too. A true profile in courage. Some day Mearsheimer will be hailed in the same way.
Steve Walt’s much more of an insider. I’ve only met him briefly, so I’m talking a little out of my hat, but he’s polished and courtly–you have to be to become a Harvard dean–and has an impeccable meritocrat’s resume from Stanford to Princeton to living in affluent Brookline (birthplace of the affluent Mondoweiss). His wife is partly-Jewish and as I recall is an intellectual too, a good-government type.
A year or so back, Walt said to me that when he took the Israel lobby project on, he forswore high government service; he realized it would be out of reach for him if he attacked this issue. And he’s right. If you look at all the names that are being bandied about for foreign policy positions in the next administration(s), you don’t ever see Walt’s name. "Almost by definition anybody in the foreign policy field who wants to get a job in government and not just be an academic will not be a profile in courage," Leon Hadar of the Cato Institute, who worked for Ron Paul’s campaign, tells me. A lot of those folks work at the Kennedy School, where Walt was/is a star.
Also, Walt was biting the hand
that feeds him, literally. His chair at Harvard is funded by Robert and Renee Belfer, who according to guidestar.org
are trustees of the rightwing Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, a thinktank Walt attacked in his paper. Could you do that? When the paper appeared, there were calls on Harvard to defund Walt; and the Kennedy School logo was stripped off of the paper on the Kennedy School’s website, at the insistence of the censors. He surely also suffered some degree of social ostracism in Cambridge.
Critics regularly say Walt is a privileged guy who made a lot of money. Maybe; that’s not the point. What interests me is the sacrifice of an ambition. Steve Walt has leadership abilities. He’s tall and goodlooking and can handle any room; but he chose to kiss prestige government service goodbye. I know how elite ambition operates; I was entangled in its snares for 30 years. I watched brilliant young friends nurse great ambitions at Harvard, and then prosecute them with success and satisfaction. I’ve seen a million frogs–people who kiss up and kick down. I’ve almost never seen someone bred to top leadership sacrifice an ambition. Walt did it for larger reasons, for love of ideas, for love of country. I imagine that he and his wife accept his choice by invoking those values when they are demoralized.
(Not than any journalist has told this story. I tried to get the
assignment, and argued it didn’t matter whether you agreed with him or not, it was interesting; my MSM feemasters yawned.)
