Someone in the audience asks about people's careers being "truncated" for talking about the Israel lobby, and asks whether the fact that he was "closer to the end than the beginning of his career" and had tenure played a part in his deciding to write the book. Mearsheimer grins and says, "This is a great question, I honestly love the question."
A great question deserves a great answer. So here we go.
Mearsheimer says of course tenure was important to him. He was not nearly as brave as Norman Finkelstein, "a very fine man" who did his work without having tenure. "The fact that he didn't get tenure is a tragedy." And now Finkelstein is jobless in New York: "a disgraceful situation… Norman would have been much smarter to have waited till he had tenure."
The Atlantic magazine called Mearsheimer in October 2002. "They'd gotten wind I was doing something on the lobby." They wanted an article on the subject, "The Israel lobby and U.S. foreign policy," which was the title of the eventual article in the LRB, where the piece ran after the Atlantic killed it, and of the book. The Atlantic was calling Mearsheimer because he had "an impeccable, established reputation," a frequent contributor to the Times Op-Ed page, and was a chaired prof at the University of Chicago.
"I said to them, I won't do it alone… I have to ask Steve Walt if he's willing to do it with me." Walt was his realist "buddy." They'd talked about the lobby a lot. And Walt was getting ready to unload on the lobby in a judicious manner in Taming American Power, a 2005 book that you will see was excerpted in Foreign Affairs.
Walt was then 47, a Harvard dean, and as I have always said here, a polished courtly man, tall, goodlooking, and very comfortable in a Jewish milieu. Stanford/Princeton; his physicist dad worked at Los Alamos. Married to a half-Jewish woman, living in Brookline hard by the birthplace of Mondoweiss, and sitting in the Belfer chair at the Kennedy School. Robert Belfer being a big Jew, big donor, associated with WINEP.
Mearsheimer was then 54, and more of an outsider, a West Point grad, an autodidact as a young man. He knew he'd be called an antisemite and knew that he needed a friend alongside to go into this. You go in alone and you end up with "psychological damage." (I know who he's talking about…) But he didn't think Walt would tumble for it.
"I was actually surprised that he did it. He was the academic dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard. Many people thought that he had the capabilities to become the university provost or university president and there was no question that if he wrote the piece, that would never happen.
"Many people also thought that he would be a National Security Adviser for someone like Barack Obama. I believe if we hadn't written the lobby article or lobby book, Steve would have been one of Barack Obama's principal advisers. He's a very smart man, he has very good judgment, he's a brilliant bureaucrat, and he would have risen far."
Before the article finally came out in the London Review of Books in mid-March 2006, Mearsheimer gave the piece to the "high command" at the University of Chicago so they wouldn't feel blindsided. Because he anticipated, correctly, that the firestorm would not be confined to the authors. The President, the Provost, the deans got the paper. And Steve Walt did the same at Harvard. The president of Harvard was then Lawrence Summers.
"Larry Summers had seen the piece before it came out, and he saw Steve a day or two later, before the piece was on the internet…And he was very supportive of Steve, very supportive. But he said to Steve, in this one conversation he had with him… 'I just don't understand why you did this.' He said, 'you could have been a high level academic administrator. You could have been National Security Adviser. And now it's all over.' And of course he was right." Mearsheimer later clarified that Walt did have a conversation with Summers but the president's comments about Walt's career prospects were made in a conversation with David Elwood, dean of the Kennedy School, who passed them along to Walt.
"And I anticipated that Steve would not be willing to do it because he would be unwilling to give those things up. Also by the way, my wife and his wife were adamantly opposed to us doing this. But anyway, he agreed to do it, and I agreed to do it, and we marched ahead."
Two comments. The first is to marvel at the considerable power of Walt and Mearsheimer's choice. The other day I said that taking on the lobby was a Jewish fight and activist Anna Baltzer was wrong to say that the battle must involve all Americans. Jeff Blankfort, another anti-Zionist Jew, agrees with Baltzer: "[S]olving this issue, if it is solvable, is a job
for all Americans and leaving it to the Jews not only absolves non-Jews
from their responsibilities but leaves the Palestinians ultimately at
the mercy of those supporting their oppression and who strongly believe
that they have a vested interest in doing so. Not a formula for
success. It is worthy to note that it was not until three non-Jews,
Mearsheimer, Walt and Carter wrote their books that the issue reached a
higher level, since the lobby's attacks on Chomsky never rose to that
level. It is when non-Jews who have no vested interest in supporting
Israel pick up the cudgels that the Jewish establishment gets
worried and starts freaking out. Hence, the concern when a Protestant
church group starts talking about sanctions… It is our
job to encourage all Americans to speak out."
Also: Steve Walt has said that he has no regrets.
