Kenneth W. Thompson, The Prophet of Norms

Thought and Practice

F. Rajaee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349453672, 9781137301789
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301796
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The aim of this book is to capture, the international thought and practice of Kenneth W. Thompson. His career embodied three roles in which he revealed his thoughts and practice: as a facilitator of space for encouraging debates, scholarship and practice; as an educator; and most importantly as a theorist of international relations.

CHAPTER 1

A Profile

Nothing is clearer than the distinction between those who claim to be and those who are righteous.

—KWT (B1959a: 100)

No description better grasps the essence of the man who is the focus of this book than the quotation above. KWT had in mind the parable of the Pharisee from Luke 18: 9–14 when he authored this proclamation. In two senses, the sentence describes KWT himself: at one level, he reveals his conviction that, individually and collectively, humanity has the potential to improve on its righteousness. At another level, and due to his keen awareness of this potential, he embodies this quality himself. He was truly a “righteous man” in all settings, both in his personal and his public capacities. As an individual, an educator, a public commentator, and a practitioner, KWT behaved with imagination, realism, and consciousness. He was a voracious reader, a prolific writer, a versatile thinker, a proactive educator, and a giant facilitator of practice. He worked in various capacities including practitioner, educator, teacher, scholar, and theorist, but the one category that embraces all his roles is that he was an advocate of what he himself has called “public philosophy.”

The volume, the breadth, and the depth of his works intimidated me for a long time. But once I had reviewed them, grasped their insights, and experienced the wisdom that lies therein, I felt they needed to be recaptured in one book for the benefit of posterity. The range of his works includes books, essays, book chapters, edited volumes, articles, book reviews, prefaces, conclusions, symposia, notes, diaries, and special reports. His public philosophy includes his theories of politics, international relations, education, universities, and a wealth of insights about practical issues, policies, and dilemmas related to the public realm. He never sought or held an elected public office and in fact consciously avoided any participation in partisan politics. He was a public figure, nevertheless, and held offices in various institutions that contributed in major ways to the public sphere. The closest he came to a public office, and an appointed one at that, was when he became a member and later the president of the Board of Education in the city of Scarsdale in state of New York in the 1960s.

KWT worked for twenty years as an officer in the Rockefeller Foundation, whose main mandate is declared as “the well-being of mankind.” During his tenure there he reoriented the work of the foundation to consider what he thought to be the major issues of our time—politics and education. He then worked for the next two decades at the University of Virginia as a professor and simultaneously as the director of the Miller Center for Public Affairs, again focusing on the same two areas mentioned above. In the midst of this, there were opportunities, particularly when Dean Rusk and later Henry Kissinger were in office respectively as the secretary of state, for him to get involved directly in politics, but he preferred to be a kingmaker than a king; indeed, he has trained many students who have become kings in their respective domains. He was as committed to the world of practice as he was to that of ideas, and had enormous faith in the power of education and educational institutions for enhancing the human condition. His practices manifest themselves in the realm of education, where he fostered spaces for people of ideas and practice to interact and help the formation and growth of institutions that make spaces and possibilities a reality.

This chapter aims to offer a broad portrait of KWT as a public figure. It has four parts: his life and career—his general disposition, approach, and aptitudes; the intellectual influences that had a profound and a pronounced impact on the shaping of his views; the way he lived, worked, and expressed those views and ideas; and, finally, an abstract of his public philosophy.

Life and Career

The following account does not constitute an exhaustive biography of KWT and certainly does not cover all events of his life. Instead, it points to those episodes that helped his self-understanding, his career as a public or institutional intellectual, an educator, and a theorist. I have focused exclusively on his public persona capturing his public philosophy. To construct such a profile with reasonable accuracy, I realized the most reliable source for clues and signifiers to be his own writings, which are replete with references to actual events in his life and the way they have influenced him. To verify the details, I have cross-checked them against my interviews with him, and against the interviews I have conducted with a select number of his former colleagues who knew him well, a select number of his former students, particularly those who worked at the Miller Center as an assistant or as staff, some members of his family, and against the bits and pieces printed in the official records of the various institutions where KWT worked. For example, The Staff Newsletter of the Rockefeller Foundation proved a great resource, since every issue contains details of the activities of the officers in the foundation, particularly those of KWT; given that he was such an active person, each issue contains numerous references to him. The same is true of The Bulletin of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, which details many of his activities. In the end, I discovered the biographical items in KWT’s own works proved the most authentic, accurate, and useful source for grasping the nuances that helped me construct the profile.

KWT was born on August 29, 1921, in Des Moines, Iowa, the only offspring of a Danish mother, Agnes Rohrbeck, and a Norwegian father, Reverent Thor Carlyle Thompson. His father was a Lutheran minister and his mother a devout person who taught piano for many years, until she was physically unable to continue, as a way of financially helping first her parental and later her marital families.

KWT grew up as a pious Christian, but did not follow the family’s tradition; he considered himself a member of the mainstream Protestant church. He did attend Lutheran educational institutions, though. He finished high school in La Crosse, Wisconsin (1939). He then registered at St. Olaf College, Minnesota, for a time, before finishing his undergraduate studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He considers St. Olaf his Alma Mater, however, for a few reasons. First, this was the place where he made his first major decision in life, that is, to join the military. He was attending St. Olaf when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This was a decisive event. He considered whether he should stay in school or join the army; he decided on the latter (author’s interview, KWT’s son Paul Thompson, April 7, 2012, Charlottesville, VA). KWT served with both the infantry and the air force. He said he wanted to fly and stay in the Air Force, but in his own words, “I got grounded because I had exophoria” (author’s interview, November 30, 2009, Charlottesville, VA). According to his son, he experienced double vision at very high altitudes so he could not continue active duty with the Air Force (author’s interview, K. C. Thompson, April 6, 2012, Washington, DC).

Regardless of the specifics, a problem with his eyes deprived him of his early dream of becoming a pilot. As a result, he was commissioned as an Infantry Officer at Fort Benning, Georgia, for two years before he was transferred to military intelligence for three years (1943–46). In this capacity, he moved around and served as Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon Leader, European Order of Battle Officer, and Far East Counter-Intelligence Officer. This period in his life is shrouded in mystery; he would never reveal anything of what he had done during this time. His family believes strongly that he may have worked for three years with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and that upon his release he made a promise not to reveal anything about his involvement. If this is the case, then true to his reputation as an absolutely upright person, he kept his promise; even members of his family are in the dark about these three years.

The second reason to consider St. Olaf his Alma Mater was that he met his second wife there; third, his son taught there for a while; and fourth, his granddaughter attended this college for her studies. He did not come back to St. Olaf after his military service, however, because he had finished his undergraduate studies by correspondence from Augustana in history (1943). For graduate studies, he attended the University of Chicago where he first obtained his MA in 1948 and later his PhD in political science and international relations in 1950.

Before coming to the University of Chicago to study, he had met the international lawyer and the author of the classic work A Study of War, Philip Quincy Wright (1890–1970), and was encouraged by him to attend the university. As he told me, “Quincy Right recommended me for a doctorate degree in political science at Chicago and that’s how I got the degree” (author’s interview, November 30, 2009, Charlottesville, VA). KWT did not make the decision to pursue his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago solely based on Wright’s recommendation, however. He considered other options, and thought about law school in particular: “I had applied to Harvard Law School and the Graduate School at the University of Chicago. Since it was late in the day, I made up my mind that whichever reply came first I would accept. The acceptance from Chicago came first. I didn’t hesitate a minute” (B1996: 18).¹ Upon arriving at Chicago, KWT worked closely with Wright and even became his “graduate student assistant.” He helped not only with classes but also “with some research materials for his articles and books.” What he liked about Wright and his wife Louise was that they “were not only people of the library,” but also they “were people of action, and this made them stand out among ivory-tower scholars at Chicago” (17). On another occasion, KWT writes: “In personal recollection of Quincy Wright, I am stuck by the extent to which he combined broad theoretical interests and concern for policies and problem-oriented studies” (B1980b: 183).

In Chicago he discovered Hans J. Morgenthau, who had been teaching there since 1943. KWT found in Morgenthau not just another giant with a different approach or view, but what was for him a rather unique treasure. It was a mutual discovery, because Morgenthau has famously said that KWT was “the best student he ever had.” This perception was formed in the early days of their acquaintance, as one can see from Morgenthau’s acknowledgment of KWT’s help in the preparation of his classic work, Politics among Nations, as stated in the preface to the first edition in 1948: “The main burden of assistance, however, fell upon Mr. Kenneth W. Thompson, who brought to his task an extraordinary measure of ability and devotion.” Another indicator is Morgenthau’s willingness to cooperate with KWT as a colleague from early on; KWT’s first published work is a reading anthology of major texts in international relations entitled Principles and Problems of International Politics: Selected Readings (1951), coedited with Morgenthau.

The dept and breadth of Morgenthau’s knowledge proved very significant for KWT, bearing a great influence on shaping his way of thinking. As he said in my interview with him, “Even though I was intellectually much more dedicated to Quincy Wright, I was also much devoted to Morgenthau in a different sense of the word. So I had two prongs; but the depth of the Morgenthau thing was much more [and] ran much more deeply” (author’s interview, November 30, 2009, Charlottesville, VA). When I pushed him for clarification about what this “depth” constituted, he pointed to Morgenthau’s knowledge of history and political philosophy as well as his particular understanding of power as a notion related to human internal insecurity, something that he might have found lacking in Wright’s legal approach to politics. Luckily for KWT, though, the two thinkers complemented each other, especially because the two respected one another and referenced each other’s works appreciatively. KWT considers the two as the major figures of what he calls “the Chicago School of International Thought.” In reference to them, he writes:

The two men were the pivotal and dominant figures at Chicago. They made the University of Chicago what it was in the forties and fifties—the leading center of international studies. They drew closer together in the last years of their lives. Neither was afraid to acknowledge the truth of the other’s viewpoint. (Emphasis in the original, B1996: 21)

He studied with and worked for both of them. He learned from both, but the impact of Morgenthau, as is explained below, was especially distinctive.

Morgenthau’s calling KWT his best student was a telling description because after finishing his MA and while still working on his dissertation, KWT secured teaching jobs as a lecturer at the University of Chicago and as an instructor at Northwestern University. Later, following his graduate studies, he joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor for two years (1951–53) and was an associate professor at Northwestern University for the following two years (1953–55), before joining the Rockefeller Foundation for two decades, starting in 1955 as a full-time administrator. He had already worked with the foundation as a consultant in international relations since 1953 when one of the people he admired from distance, Dean Rusk, had become the president of the foundation.

As a full-time administrator, his first official position was assistant director for the Social Sciences (April 1955–57). He then rose through the ranks to associate director for the Social Sciences (1957–60), and finally served as director for the Social Sciences (1960–61). He assumed the position of the vice president of the foundation in 1961 and remained in that position until 1973. For a while, and even before J. George Harrar officially retired, he acted as the president, possibly hoping to replace Harrar. His son told me that he was treated as though he was the president for a period whenever they appeared in public (author’s interview, Ken C. Thompson, April 6, 2012, Washington, DC). But the presidency did not materialize. I have more to say about this in chapter 3. When the leadership changed at the RF in 1973, KWT first slowed down his work by serving as a part-time consultant for almost a year, but then left the foundation and became the director of a major study of higher education in Asian and African countries for a couple of years. Twelve American and international major assistance agencies requested the International Council for Educational Development in New York to undertake the study and KWT became the director of the project that had become known as the “Twelve Donor Agency Review of Higher Education.”

In 1975, despite other prestigious possibilities and offers, including the presidency of a university, he accepted a teaching position in the University of Virginia where he stayed until his retirement. I feel that he was looking for a place of refuge, one that was, however, still close enough to the center of decisions to allow him to pursue what he did subsequently, acting as a public educator and intellectual. He was already known as a national and an international figure by the time he joined Virginia. Professor Inis Claude, Jr., who was a member of the recruiting committee that hired KWT, recounts that when the University of Virginia discovered that KWT had made up his mind to leave the foundation world and join a university, the decision was made to attract him to Virginia. As Claude puts it, “we found that he wanted to leave. He had already made up his mind to go into some university, and we were lucky to hit him at just the right moment” (author’s interview, December 4, 2009, Charlottesville, VA). KWT became a very loyal and effective member of the department and remained so until his formal retirement on May 24, 2006. While a professor of political science, in 1978 he became the director of White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs, a position he held until 1998, and still remained officially associated with the center as the director of Public Forums until 2007. KWT continued teaching until it was not possible for him to do so anymore; he even conducted his graduate courses in the Morningside, an assisted living establishment for the elderly, where he moved after he lost his wife. Later he moved to Martha Jefferson House, an assisted senior living community, where he lived until he passed away on February 2, 2013.

He was at least as loyal and devoted to the Miller Center as he was to his department. During his time as director, he did not like to travel much and was happy to remain in Charlottesville. For example, in 1984, when Baruch College in New York City held a major conference on Toynbee, attended by many giants of various fields, KWT mailed his paper for me to read on his behalf because he did not want to travel and I happened to be in New York at the time for observing the workings of the thirty-ninth General Assembly Session of the United Nations. It was not that he was not interested in doing the work: his paper was well-written and well-received. I think he refused to travel partly because of his devotion to his duties in Charlottesville and partly because he had done more than his share of travel during his more than two decades of work in and with various foundations. I noted the same reluctance to travel when I tried many times to invite him to deliver a lecture in Canada after I settled there in 1996; he just was too busy with his work at the Miller Center.

In addition to his full-time positions, particularly in the first phase of his career at the Rockefeller Foundation he served as an official or a semiofficial member of many other institutions, including membership of the boards of various foundations for the advancement of the cause of higher education at both national and international levels. The organizations that he participated in as a member of the board or advisory councils are too innumerous to mention, but they range from local schools to such global organizations as the Carnegie Foundation. I should point out, however, that his righteousness once again showed itself. Even though he felt one could and should work with rich and responsible people in order to do good, he was very selective about which board he would serve.

At the same time, he was also a loyal and contributing citizen of the academy, serving as a member of the board of editors for professional journals such as Christianity and Crisis, International Organization, and the Review of Politics; as a reviewer of manuscripts for various publishers; and even as a member of the board of governors of universities such as Dillard University, Grinnell College, and University of Kentucky. He delivered nationally and internationally named lecture series such as the Lilly Endowment Lectures, Duke University, 1959; the Rockwell Lectures, Rice University, 1965; the Geneva Bicentennial Lectures, Geneva, Switzerland, 1976; and the Andrew Cecil Lectures, University of Texas, 1982. He has been recognized and honored on numerous occasions for his work and contributions. I give a partial list only, focusing on academic recognition in the form of honorary doctorates: the University of Notre Dame (1964); West Virginia Wesleyan University (1970); Nebraska Wesleyan University (1971); Bowdoin College, Maine (1972); Saint Michael’s College, Vermont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Major Events in the Life of Kenneth W. Thompson
• 1   A Profile
• Part I   Entrepreneur of Praxis
• 2   Theory and Practice
• 3   Exercising Practice
• Part II   Promoter of Education
• 4   Pillars of Education
• 5   Practicing Education
• Part III   Expounder of Theory
• 6   Politics and International Relations
• 7   Practicing Statecraft
• 8   Summation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index