Leon Fuerth Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Leon, welcome to Berkeley.
Thanks very much.
Tell us a little about your background. Where were you born and raised?
In New York City, in the borough of Queens, in a neighborhood that looked like the first footage of Archie Bunker.
I see. And looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?
My father died when I was eight, so he wasn't around to shape very much of my thinking. But as a consequence of his death, my mother took me out of the public school system and put me into a parochial school, where many things happened that did shape my thinking. In the morning, we conducted our classes in Hebrew; in the afternoon, in English. It was the kind of school where the English and the Hebrew faculties would have fights on the stairwells about Darwin. So there was culture clash right under the roof. In the morning, one learned Talmudic reasoning and in the afternoon one was exposed to scientific logic. For a little eight-grade school, it was pretty good.
What about the world, your perspective on the world? Did it help make you an internationalist, or did that concern about international affairs come later?
It sort of came along naturally. One of my earliest memories is that in my first class in that school, there was a woman I fell in love with right away -- my teacher. But I didn't understand what was this number on her wrist, until I learned a little bit later that she had been in the concentration camps, and that was her serial number. So in that system, you begin to get a grounding rather early on in some of the realities of the world as it had been, and you were led to think about it. Anyway, spontaneously, I began to think about these things. The same way some other kid might have picked up the saxophone, I seemed to be picking up the editorial columns in the newspapers.
Any books, either as a high school student or later in college, that shaped your thinking?
Oddly enough, the one book that had the deepest impact on my thinking was Herman Kahn on thermonuclear war. You will recall that Kahn's book on thermonuclear war was the first of its kind to lay out in detail what that would look like. Up until that time, the public was led to believe that what you do in a thermonuclear war is duck and cover. Right? After that book, you had in your mind chapter headings like, "Will the Living Envy the Dead?" When my wife and I were talking about starting a family, I was reluctant, because I didn't think that we were going to get out of the century in one piece. I didn't want to bring children into the world to face what I thought was probable devastation. My wife prevailed on this matter.
To both of your benefit, I'm sure.
Well, there've been occasions when we have had some discussions about that! But we did get out of the century in one piece, so I'm certainly glad that in the end that her logic worked and mine didn't. But since you asked what book had a deep impact, that graphic confrontation with what nuclear war would mean for the world had a very strong impact on my choices.
What about the sixties? How were you affected by that period of time in our history?
In a strange sort of way. I finished my masters degree at the university, and I went into the Air Force for three years or so. During that time, public disquiet over Vietnam was growing, because our level of involvement in Vietnam was growing. I returned from the Air Force to New York and went back to school, and was involved with my studies and seeing these things going on, but not swept up in them. On the other hand, my closest friends came out to San Francisco. I got a letter one day when I was in the Air Force, and the letter said, "We're going out to some place called Haight Ashbury." And I thought, "Why is he doing that?"
Where did you do your college education and then your graduate work, and what was your main emphasis?
I went to New York University at the Liberal Arts School in Washington Square. I had two things that I was interested in, and one was literature and the other one was history. I knew when I entered the school that I was interested in foreign affairs and, specifically, I was going to join the Foreign Service, assuming I could pass the exam. So I picked literature because I thought it was a shortcut to learning about human motivations, which was not exactly what my instructors had in mind. But it seemed to me that the writers, as opposed to literary critics, were interested in the human heart. I picked history because I wanted to understand what, specifically, had caused nations to do the things to one another that they have been doing throughout history. I wasn't attracted to social science because somehow to me it didn't seem to penetrate to the core of the matter. And, basically, what I wanted to know was, "Why war, not peace?"
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