Desch, Michael. "A Scholar and a Gentleman," American Conservative 8:2 (Jan. 26, 2009): 25-26.

Samuel Huntington died on Christmas Eve at age 81 after a long and slow decline. We have lost not only an astute public intellectual but a fine man. Fortunately, he left a rich legacy: pathbreaking scholarship in all four subfields of political science and a community of scholars whose careers he generously nurtured.

A graduate of Yale at 18 who began a 58-year Harvard teaching career at just 23, he went on to write, co-write, or edit 17 books – the last of which was translated into 39 languages. Considering the peaks he reached, it is hard to believe that Sam ever suffered professional setbacks. But the controversy surrounding his first book, The Soldier and the State, now in its 15th printing, initially cost him tenure at Harvard.

When that work came out in 1957, the first notices were negative, largely because of the final few pages in which Huntington unflatteringly contrasted the ramshackle town of Highland Falls, New York with its scrubbed and orderly neighbor, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point His admiration for the latter did not escape Uberai reviewers, who thought they detected the odor of fascism. The young professor was convicted of one of the few capital offenses in Cambridge-being conservative-and temporarily exiled to Columbia This pattern would characterize the rest of his career initial rejection followed by grudging acceptance as the power of his ideas prevailed.

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