New Book by Alumni Explores Walter LaFeber’s Life and Work

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Thinking Otherwise is a companion piece to the 2023 conference honoring the beloved professor and influential historian

Editor's note: While the book is available electronically at no cost, for those wanting a hard copy, the publisher is offering a 33% discount to Cornellians readers—scroll down for details!

By Joe Wilensky

A year after former students held a conference in NYC that paid tribute to a giant in the field of U.S. history, Cornell University Press has published a companion volume to the event.

Several of his students went on to become noted figures in U.S. foreign policy, including the late Sandy Berger ’67 (national security adviser to President Bill Clinton), Stephen Hadley ’69 (national security adviser to President George W. Bush), Eric Edelman ’72 (former ambassador to Turkey and undersecretary of defense), and Tom Downey ’70 (a former longtime member of Congress).

Although LaFeber retired in 2004—and gave a memorable farewell lecture at a packed Beacon Theatre in New York City in 2006—he continued to write about and discuss foreign policy into his later years. He passed away in 2021 at age 87.

Cornell University

Seventeen writers—nearly all of them his former students, spanning almost four decades—contributed to Thinking Otherwise.

The chapters cover LaFeber’s life, influence, and legacy (as did the three-day conference).

They explore his scholarship, his mentors, and the shaping of his worldview during his formative years as an undergrad and graduate student, as well as his research, teaching, books, and perspectives on the Cold War, democracy, globalization, and U.S. foreign relations.

Seventeen writers—nearly all of them LaFeber’s former students, spanning almost four decades—contributed to Thinking Otherwise.

"Thinking Otherwise sets out the intellectual development and political significance not only of Walter LaFeber but of the entire subfield he towered over," says a blurb from Durham University historian Barbara Keys.

"This superb collection makes readers think anew about U.S. foreign relations and about the role of scholarship, teaching, ideology, and political commitments."

In the introduction, the editors describe how the idea for the book and conference came about in 2021 when a dedicated group of his former students (the self-described “LaFeber posse”) gathered shortly after his death to reminisce, share stories, and celebrate his life.

“He was the greatest teacher and wisest mentor that anyone present had ever encountered,” they write. “His days must have lasted more than 24 hours for him to have written so many iconic books and articles while still managing to stay in touch with students, friends, and colleagues.”

His days must have lasted more than 24 hours for him to have written so many iconic books and articles while still managing to stay in touch with students, friends, and colleagues.

In addition to the festschrift, an oral history project about LaFeber’s impact on U.S. diplomacy and on generations of policymakers is available online.

It was spearheaded by Jeffrey Engel ’95, a professor at Southern Methodist University and director of its Center for Presidential History.

‘An All-Star Cast’

An excerpt recalls LaFeber’s path to the Hill—where he joined a U.S. history faculty that would become a national powerhouse

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By David Green ’62, PhD ’67 & Douglas Little, PhD ’78

The vibe inside Broadway’s Beacon Theatre on April 25, 2006, felt like an opening night, but the evening actually marked the curtain call for Walter LaFeber’s remarkable 47-year run teaching U.S. diplomatic history far above Cayuga’s waters.

The setting was familiar to anyone who had heard Walt lecture over the years—a table, a podium, and a blackboard with a brief outline chalked in his distinctive scrawl. More than 2,500 friends, colleagues, and former students had gathered in the Beacon (which looked like a jumbo version of Bailey Hall, the largest auditorium on the Cornell campus) to hear their favorite teacher’s long goodbye, delivered as always without notes.

Walt did not disappoint. Calling his valedictory lecture “Half a Century of Friends, Foreign Policy, and Great Losers,” he provided a primer on the perils facing U.S. policymakers early in the new millennium while prompting his listeners to reminisce about the moment when they first crossed paths with the man who changed their lives.

Walter LaFeber arrived on Cornell’s Arts Quad with little fanfare in the autumn of 1959. He was a Midwesterner, unfailingly polite, unassuming, and a little aloof, a grocer’s son who hailed from Walkerton, IN, a small town not far from South Bend.

Walter LaFeber arrived on Cornell’s Arts Quad with little fanfare in the autumn of 1959.

After graduating from tiny Hanover College, 35 miles upstream from Louisville, KY, on the Hoosier side of the Ohio River, Walt headed west to Stanford for his MA before returning home to the heartland to complete his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He joined a Cornell history department in transition, a junior replacement for Dexter Perkins, a former president of the American Historical Association and the country’s leading expert on the Monroe Doctrine.

Before long Walt held the Marie Underhill Noll endowed chair and was the leader of an all-star cast of U.S. historians—including Michael Kammen, Joel Silbey, Richard Polenberg, Mary Beth Norton, R. Laurence Moore, and Stuart Blumin—that by the early 1970s would make Cornell a top-10 place to undertake graduate study in U.S. history.

Rare and Manuscript Collections

Although Walt was fond of Dexter Perkins, he regarded himself as the intellectual heir of Carl Becker, an equally distinguished historian who taught at Cornell from 1917–41.

Like Walt, Becker was a Midwesterner, born in Waterloo, IA; and, also like Walt, Becker earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with Frederick Jackson Turner, whose “frontier thesis” would be repurposed and applied to foreign policy by what came to be known as “the Wisconsin School” of diplomatic history.

Walt regarded himself as the intellectual heir of Carl Becker, an equally distinguished historian who taught at Cornell from 1917–41.

Becker’s most gifted student at Cornell was Fred Harvey Harrington ’33, who subsequently spent half a century at Wisconsin as history department chair, university president, and Walt’s teacher, mentor, and role model.

Becker had taught Harrington to question conventional wisdom and to explore the synergy between political and economic power, and Harrington passed these lessons along to Walt. When Walt arrived in Ithaca fresh out of graduate school, he was completing an arc that Becker had begun to lay out on the Arts Quad a generation earlier.

Through Harrington, Walt absorbed and enthusiastically embraced Becker’s most important message about academic life: “A professor is someone who thinks otherwise.”

From Thinking Otherwise: How Walter LaFeber Explained the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, edited by Susan A. Brewer, Richard H. Immerman, and Douglas Little, published by Cornell University Press. Copyright © 2024 by Cornell University. Included by permission of the publisher. Note: For Cornellians readers, CU Press is offering a 33% discount with the code 09SAVE.

Top: LaFeber in his office with a grad student in 1973. (Rare and Manuscript Collections)

Published October 25, 2024

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