Donald Kagan, the father of neoconservative writers Robert and Frederick Kagan, is a historian and classics scholar at Yale University. Kagan, along with Victor Davis Hanson, serves as a sort of in-house classicist of the neocon faction. As a scholar he is best known for his multivolume history of the Peloponnesian War and for his insistence on the primacy of Western Civilization for higher education. But he has become equally known in recent years for his commentary on contemporary politics, pressing for a more militaristic U.S. foreign policy and famously arguing that America must learn from the mistakes of the British Empire by aggressively confronting a supposed new crop of Hitlers.
Born in Lithuania in 1932, Kagan moved at age 2 to Brooklyn, where his view of the importance of violence in human relations was shaped at an early age. "When I walked to school, I had to worry over whether I'd be attacked," he later reminisced. "And I sometimes was" (Yale Alumni Magazine, April 2002).
After receiving a bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College and a master's from Brown University, Kagan attended graduate school, studying ancient history at Ohio State University. Like other figures associated with neoconservatism, including Leo Strauss, Kagan had a tendency to apply the lessons of ancient history, as spelled out by the likes of Thucydides, to current affairs. During the Cold War, for example, he saw the war between Athens and Sparta as a key to understanding the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the ultimate defeat of democratic Athens as a warning to America about the stakes of the conflict.
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1958, Kagan began teaching at Cornell University in 1960. At Cornell, he considered himself a liberal Democrat, albeit one with no patience for pacifists or left-wing fellow travelers. He credits his move to the right to the 1969 takeovers of university buildings by black student activists. In a typical analogy, he states that university administrators reacted with "all the courage of Neville Chamberlain," although he does not say whether the student protesters were themselves comparable to Hitler. Kagan left Cornell for Yale that same year, and has been teaching there ever since (Yale Alumni Magazine, April 2002).
Kagan's reputation as a noted historian rests in part on his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, which consists of The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (1969), The Archidamian War (1974), The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1981), and The Fall of the Athenian Empire (1987). His analysis drew heavily on Thucydides, and generally reinforced the master's account, but Kagan did offer some revealing disagreements with his idol. One such divergence concerned the Sicilian Expedition, the disastrous Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415 B.C.E. that has been compared in recent decades to the U.S. fiascos in Vietnam and Iraq. Mackubin T. Owens, a right-wing military analyst who used to write for the National Review Online, noted in a review that Kagan argues, against Thucydides, that the invasion of Sicily was not doomed to failure, and that instead the blame must be laid on the "failure of strategy and will" of the Athenian general Nicias (Ashbrook Center, August 2003). Kagan's contrarian view that the Sicilian Expedition was not an inherently bad idea might explain how he has been able to use the Peloponnesian War to argue for U.S. military adventurism in Vietnam and Iraq.
At Yale, Kagan has been popular as a teacher and active in the university administration. But he has not shied away from controversy, acting as a conservative leader in a number of contentious "culture war" debates on campus. He has been notably vocal about his dislike of multiculturalism and his insistence that Western Civilization must form the core of undergraduate education. (He is a coauthor of the widely used Western Civ textbook The Western Heritage, which has gone through six printings since its initial publication in 1979.) Among the disputes Kagan has gotten into at Yale include his 1992 resignation from his post as Dean of Yale College over an administration plan to restructure the faculty, and his involvement in the 1995 Bass scandal, in which the university was forced to return a $20 million gift from right-wing billionaire alumnus Lee Bass that was to be used to set up a Western Civ program (Yale Alumni Magazine, April 2002).
In the last two decades, however, Kagan has become arguably more notable in his role as a neoconservative foreign policy hawk than as an academic historian. His sons are both major neoconservative figures: Robert cofounded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) along with William Kristol, while Frederick is a military historian best known for formulating President George W. Bush's "surge" plan for Iraq. Donald Kagan signed PNAC's 1997 Statement of Principles, along with a litany of rightwing hawks that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, and I. Lewis Libby, among many others.
Donald Kagan also gained renown at the turn of the 21st century for his contributions to two books that laid the foreign policy groundwork for the Bush administration. In 2000, he wrote a chapter for Present Dangers, an anthology edited by his son Robert and William Kristol that advocated a hawkish response to a variety of threats, ranging from China and Russia to Iraq, Serbia, and North Korea.
Also in 2000, he and son Frederick published While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today. As Kagan became more vocal as a foreign policy hawk, World War II gradually replaced the Peloponnesian War as the dominant analogy of his work. While America Sleeps made the analogy explicit, arguing that the post-Cold War United States was in the same position as the post-World War I British Empire, and that the lessons of Britain in the 1920s and 1930s must inform contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Chief among these lessons, the Kagans argued, was the need for greater military spending in preparation for the emergence of another totalitarian adversary. Terrorism was scarcely mentioned as a possible threat, and the Kagans were vague about what the next successor to the Nazis might be, but Iraq was clearly on their mind; one chapter even declared that the settlement of the 1991 Gulf War was "another [Treaty of] Versailles" (While America Sleeps, p. 367).
In a review of the book, University of Chicago scholar Bruce Cumings wrote: "The storm has been gathering for a decade, according to the Kagans, but in 1991 we failed to comprehend that we were at a critical turning point. ... It would indeed be one of the great ironies of modern times if 1991—the year the United States emerged from the Cold War as the only remaining superpower, outspending all conceivable adversaries combined on defense and launching an information revolution that would sweep the globe—was really the beginning of the end of American dominance. But the United States can still save itself, say the authors, if it spends more on defense and acquires loads of new weapons. This last message, which dominates the latter third of the book, seems to have been perfectly timed for the 2000 presidential campaign. ... There is one good thing about While America Sleeps: No one who reads it is going to run out and buy a flak jacket, teach kindergartners to 'duck and cover,' or restock a backyard bomb shelter. This is a book to assign to students who want to know what professors mean when they say 'a little history is a bad thing.'"
It was not the first time that Donald Kagan had fixated on the need to finish off Saddam Hussein; in 1995, he mourned in an article attacking Colin Powell that "though we fought and won in the Persian Gulf, our foreign policy is still bedeviled by the attitudes of the general [Powell] who first opposed the war and helped end it too soon" (Commentary, June 1995).
Now in his seventies, Kagan's output has slowed. In 2003, he published a single-volume history of the Peloponnesian War intended for a popular audience, and that same year he received the National Humanities Medal. (Under George W. Bush, the prize has also been awarded to such conservative and neoconservative luminaries as Gertrude Himmelfarb, Midge Decter, Harvey Mansfield, Hilton Kramer, Thomas Sowell, Bernard Lewis, and Fouad Ajami—many of whom do not even work in the humanities.) His influence on the neoconservative movement remains large, however, both through the continued importance of his sons and through his adaptation of ancient history to the service of contemporary militarism.
|
Affiliations
Project for a New American Century: Signatory to PNAC's 1997 Founding Statement of Principles
Hudson Institute: Trustee Emeritus
Yale University: Professor of History and Classics, 1969-present
Cornell University: Professor of History, 1960-1969
Education
Brooklyn College: A.B., History, 1954
Brown University: M.A., Classics, 1955
Ohio State University: Ph.D., History, 1958
|
