Pipes Junior and Senior
The Rocket Prof called our attention to this surprisingly sympathetic portrait of one of our heroes, Daniel Pipes, in this month's Harvard magazine. The article begins by drawing an analogy between Pipes and his father, Richard Pipes, who was a professor at Harvard who was ostracized for his anti-Communist beliefs:
Daniel '71, Ph.D. '78 (early Islamic history), is what old-timers would call a chip off the old block. Both are essentially loners, non-belongers (the subtitle of Vixi [Richard Pipes' autobiography] is "Memoirs of a Non-Belonger"), and fighters. Pipes the elder, the fiercely anti-communist cold-warrior, head of President Ford's Team B (formed to evaluate the CIA's estimates of Soviet nuclear intentions) and Soviet policy adviser to President Reagan, was cursed as a "wretched anti-Sovietist" by Pravda—and pretty well marginalized at Harvard for his politics.
Notwithstanding his brilliant academic background, the younger Pipes now works entirely outside the academic world. He writes:
I have the simple politics of a truck driver, not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning.
Many of those who "marginalized" Richard Pipes for his anti-Communism are still around. It would be nice to think that a few of them, at least, learned a lesson from the collapse of the Russian Empire and the downfall of socialism generally. But most, I suspect, are just as anti-American today, when the enemy is militant Islam, as they were 25 years ago, when the enemy was Communism, and just as scornful of Daniel Pipes as they were of his father.
UPDATE: Reader Bob Ellison adds this personal insight:
You speak of the "marginalization" of Richard Pipes. Well, I took his famous course on Soviet history at Harvard in 1988. Harvard's faculty and students then, as now, were overwhelmingly leftist, but Pipes slogged through anyhow, getting us young and teaching us right. His lectures were scintillating, and as I recall, the course attracted a good 200 students per year. The course drove me and many like me to switch to the Government department and explore conservative and (then nearly heretical) anti-communist ideas.The marginalizers failed to put down Pipes Senior, as they are failing today to best his son.
