Walt and Mearsheimer’s book tour comes to New York next week. Maybe some publications will finally do the feature story, Who are Walt and Mearsheimer and why did they do it? Here are my impressions.
At almost 60, Mearsheimer is the older of the two, and the more forceful personality. People who don’t like him describe him as "contentious." Even friends say he is a "contrarian." My own sense of the University of Chicago professor is that he is passionate and independent. In this interview with Berkeley realist Harry Kreisler, Mearsheimer says that his parents were oldfashioned and told him that God had put him on the planet to work hard and tell the truth. The son of a leading engineer for a railroad company, he grew up in suburban New York and enlisted in the Army in 1965 and after a year chose Vietnam over West Point. His father told his son he’d be crazy to become an infantryman instead of going to the Academy. Mearsheimer went to West Point. Later he became an Air Force officer. He has said that he left the military because he didn’t like to shave or sleep in tents, and he saw the military bureaucracy as corrupt.
The larger reason he left was that he was called to intellectual activity. He began studying ideas as an officer, and taking graduate school courses. Mearsheimer has a little bit of the autodidact and maverick thinker about him. Though always an admirer of Israel–I believe he has been there several times–he was moved intellectually when he discovered the new historians in the 1980s and saw the true story of Israel’s foundation, which wasn’t that different from a lot of other nations’ formation.
I’ve always warmed to Mearsheimer because he has a sharp sense of humor, passion, and toughness. There is fire in his belly. He told one friend that he could take the charges of antisemitism around the London Review of Books article last year because the army taught him to be tough. He is at his best when he’s stirred. His eloquent speech to the Naval War College last year about how the Vietnam War and the Iraq War are like plagues that visit a society was delivered off the cuff.
Mearsheimer threw in with his old friend Walt on the Israel lobby because the idea of doing the article (let alone book) was incomprehensible to him without a partner.
To me, Walt is the more perplexing character. A former Harvard dean, he is a courtly, polished man of 52 who knows how to handle himself in a room. The one occasion I met him he was gracious and humorous and capable of small talk. (Mearsheimer has a more intense presence; one academic told me that "Mearsheimer is not a polite person.") Though a colleague says that Walt can be combative and doesn’t shy away from a fight. "In the divide between WASPy and Jewish styles," one prof said to me, "Walt is Jewishy." I.e., he engages.
"I don’t think Israel had emotional resonance for him," says that prof. Where it did for Mearsheimer. That is the conventional theory: Walt was dragged into it by the more passionate Mearsheimer. I doubt this. Walt is a big, comfortable guy. He published a book called Taming American Power in 2005 that contained many of the arguments later repeated in The Israel Lobby. He obviously believes what he wrote. And one former student says that Walt–the son of a one-time physicist at Los Alamos– is more devout than Mearsheimer in his application of realist theory.
The other day I was driving through my boyhood neighborhood of Brookline, where Walt lives, and saw Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue with the banner outside it, "We Stand With Israel In Her Quest For Peace." Walt has lived a life in a Jewish milieu. When he was smeared by the Washington Post a year ago as a blue-eyed Teuton, Walt responded to my email question and told me something about his own background. "As you might imagine, I find this whole type of discussion
disheartening. Our country shouldn’t be debating important issues by
focusing on people’s individual characteristics and backgrounds. That
is what racists and anti-semites do: they look at someone’s heritage
and claim to know what they think…" He is of Danish extraction. He is married to a half-Jewish-woman from a sophisticated New York family. His wife’s maternal grandmother escaped the Holocaust. His wife’s family were involved in the arts and letters in New York, Jewish culture.
One colleague says, "30 percent of Walt’s friends are Jewish." Another colleague said he had seen a menorah in Walt’s house. More to the point, with his Stanford-Princeton-Harvard-dean pedigree, Walt has been doing fine all his life in a world with tons of Jews in it. I imagine some of that life is now affected. One colleague said a dean couldn’t very well invite Walt to a meeting of a visiting committee because a lot of the donors are Jewish and they might be angry. Then there’s Robert Belfer, whose name is on Walt’s chair at the Kennedy School. A big Jew, as we say, he gives a lot of money to Jewish causes and the Sun reported that he was angered at Walt’s paper last year. It is impressive that with Belfer’s name on his professorship, Walt went where he did…
Why did he do it? I think that Walt is a cool cucumber, a little detached; and so in the end, Ideas came first. A hard scientist’s son, he saw this as an important intellectual undertaking.
In my one long interview with Mearsheimer, he said the following about realists: "It’s
commonplace to say that realists don’t
care about morality. This is not true. Just look at E.H. Carr
and Hans Morgenthau, both of them talk about morality in foreign policy
at great length. Foreign policy based purely on power would be a
bankrupt foriegn policy. But the point
they make, that all realists make, is that when power/political
considerations
and moral considerations come into conflict, power political
considerations win."
Of course, moral/human/emotional elements play a role in this book. Its
most stirring words are about the Palestinian experience. I believe Mearsheimer initiated this project because of his own anger post-9/11–one that
he shared with many other opponents of the Iraq war–that
that was happening, he was reading Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest with
hunger. It is one of his formative books; it explained how the leaders of society could sign off on
a tragedy. I have to think Mearsheimer has that aim now.
