intellectual

The Maverick Scholar Theodore Draper spent some of his most prolific years writing, taking walks and collecting music in Princeton. by Temma Ehrenfeld

Theodore Draper belonged to a generation in the math department, he’d been arrested only once —in the town of “intellectuals at large”: men who, without asked a student group in he’d made his home, Princeton. advanced degrees or teaching positions, New York to help him establish a branch. spoke to contemporary issues in books and Twenty-one-year-old Ted Draper arrived Returning As a Scholar articles in journals such as The New York from Brooklyn. Without bothering to get a Draper would quickly abandon his Review of Books. He began his career permit, the young revolutionaries set up on Communist sympathies and turn to the writing for Communist publications and a soapbox on the street near the Princeton subject as a historian, while building a made his reputation writing the history of University campus and Draper stood on it to reputation as a political journalist. The the American . Princeton speak. He had attracted a small crowd when diplomat and historian George Kennan, a is hardly a community one associates with the police promptly picked him up. Turing fixture at the Institute for Advanced Study, the far Left. Yet it became Draper’s haven went looking for Albert Einstein for help. was an early admirer. Kennan twice asked for 38 years, a place where he was free to be Instead, he produced James Alexander, the the Institute to embrace Draper, succeeding a scholar who followed his conscience. He founder of the field of topology. Alexander in 1968, when he wangled him a five-year died in Princeton at the age of 93. arrived at the station at eleven in the post in its School of Historical Studies. evening and liked Draper enough to accept Draper stayed on in town after the post The Young Revolutionary him into his custody. The next day, Draper ended, writing on the most controversial The story of Theodore Draper and Princeton and Turing formed a Princeton University subjects of his day, taking daily morning began in 1934, when the computer language branch of the student front group. In his walks and haunting the Princeton Record genuis Alan Turing, then a graduate student later years Draper enjoyed the irony that Exchange, off Nassau Street. all, Theodore Draper learned the lesson of of “containment” and could hardly be to the States. to support him, and when he applied for point of view, delving into public records The Making of a Maverick Intellectual his youth—to do his own thinking, scorn accused of being soft on . Kennan entered the story again at this membership to the Council on Foreign and writing in a pithy, factual style. He He was born to a Jewish family from ideology, and distrust power. But Kennan’s request was turned down, point when, on a visit to Switzerland, Draper Relations in 1971, Kennan recommended usually stayed with a subject for five years. , with the name Theodore with the explanation that the Institute met a former staff member at the State himas “a thoroughly decent person. His In the New York Review of Books, where Dubinsky. His father died when he was The Institute Distances Itself needed to avoid “emotionally distorted Department under Kennan, Louis Halle, remote Communist past is to him an aid to he published many articles, he at times 12, and he worked hard in his widowed During the red-baiting years, Kennan and controversial” subjects like American and confessed he didn’t know what to do understanding, not a hindrance.” engaged in acidly-worded battles in the mother’s candy store. Neither parent was became a key supporter of Draper, and when Communism. next. Halle called Kennan at the Institute, letters section, most famously with then- ever a Communist. He came under the the Viking Press sent Kennan galleys of The and arranged for Draper to see him. The Making Princeton Home Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. party’s influence in 1929 at New York’s Roots of American Communism, the first of Stranger in a Strange Land appointment, when it came, was touch and When it was time to leave the Institute, The co-editor of the Review,Robert Silvers City College, where he joined the student Draper’s two books on the party’s history, he Over the next decade, Draper published go: Draper was told that the Institute would in 1973, the former New Yorker decided described Draper to the New York Times front group that sent him to Princeton. reviewed it favorably. When the book was his second volume, American Communism not give him an office, or a residence, or to stay in Princeton with his third wife, as “a man of extremely demanding moral Despite his talent as an organizer, Draper attacked in the New York Times, with the and Soviet Russia, while winning attention even a salary. His funding would come from Priscilla Barnum, who had become his first judgment. He was contemptuous of men always had intellectual ambitions. He implication that Draper was insufficiently as the foremost liberal critic of Castro’s external sources yet to be arranged. Still, editor. After some house shopping , they who made moral compromises in dealing hoped to teach philosophy; and when a anti-Communist, and the paper refused Cuba and an opponent of the Johnson he’d been promised a refuge for five years bought a home near Herrontown Woods with life-and-death matters, like the teacher told him that a Jew would never get to publish Draper’s letter in his defense, invasion of the Dominican Republican. In to address his big project, a third volume on where Draper maintained a strict writing Vietnam War.” a position teaching philosophy, his mother Kennan wrote his own supportive letter, 1968, much to his surprise, the California- American Communism, this time covering schedule until he had a stroke at the age Draper rarely gave lectures. “I doubt immediately changed the family name. which the Times did publish. (Publisher based made him the the 1930s. of 90. His days were full. He rose each he ever went on the Internet,” Roger But after only a year of graduate work at Arthur Ochs Sulzberger’s letter to Kennan offer of a lifetime: an office and salary to morning at 7:30, took a half-hour “morning Draper remarked. He did use a computer, Columbia, in history, he was bored and describes the whole incident as a “comedy write about Communism for as long as he Facing the Past constitutional,” worked in his study until however, which enabled him to create an dropped out to write for the Communist of errors.”) The next year, 1958, he made liked. Awarethat the Institution had a great As grateful as he was grateful to be in his regular nap from 1:30 to 2:30, returned index for 50,000 pages of published but

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newspaper, The . deal of source material on Communism, Princeton, Draper couldn’t write the book. to his study until 5 p.m., and then had a unindexed congressional hearings, in order He soon moved on to other Communist his first attempt to bring Draper to the Draper accepted, not realizing that it was There was no lack of material: , traditional tea—cookies and Assam tea to write A Very Thin Line: The Iran Contra publications. Draper never actually joined Institute. a “bastion of old-time conservatism,” as a rejected Party leader, was then living in from McNulty’s in New York, prepared Affairs (1991). Later, he would warn that the Party, however, and over time grew At the time, the Institute had reason to he put it. He might not have seemed out Princeton and provided hours of interviews. in a proper teapot. After tea he read before another “usurpation of power by a small, dissatisfied with editors toeing the Party distance itself from politics, as its then- of place there, having kept apart from the The trouble was facing his past. “I found dining at home. In the evenings he listened strategically placed group within the line. He twice left jobs when he felt his director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had liberal counterculture of the 1960s. He the story unbearably sad,” he admits in to classical music and occasionally played government may well recur before we are integrity was at stake— either because his headed the project to build the first atom never owned a pair of jeans, according to unpublished papers, “and sometimes sat at the recorder, the piano or the clavichord. A prepared to recognize what is happening.” reporting was disregarded or an editor’s bomb, was under suspicion for opposing the his son, Roger, copy chief at the McKinsey the typewriter thinking mainly of my own habitué of the Princeton Record Exchange, As part of his determination to avoid opinions overrode his own. He eventually development of the H-bomb. Oppenheimer Quarterly in New York, and although he spent youth.” he accumulated some 300 CDs. In the distractions, Theodore Draper was rejected the movement, not because of had filled the Institute’s School of Historical opposed the Vietnam War, he had little Abandoning the struggle with his third summers, the couple escaped the New Jersey adamantly private—so much so that when revelations about Stalin, but from a desire Studies with scholars in fields that were sympathy for the student unrest, which must volume on American Communism, Draper heat in the remotest part of Vermont. the New York Times asked to interview for intellectual freedom. “I either had to unlikely to attract controversy. An expert on have reminded him of his own youth. Still, instead wrote The Rediscovery of Black him for the purpose of a future obituary, he make up my mind to agree with the party Soviet history who had served in given the fiery politics of 1968, he found Nationalism (1970), in which he argued A Private and Productive Life declined and instead wrote a statement that line at all times or get out,” he later wrote as a diplomat and eventually ambassador, the Hoover Institution unbearable. He fled that blacks and white had no choice but to In his long writing career, Draper addressed he sent in a sealed envelope, to be opened in a letter to The New York Times. Above Kennan was was the father of the policy to London, with little interest in returning cooperate. Meanwhile Kennan continued contemporary problems with a historian’s only after his death, which came in 2006.

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