Exploring the World: Adventures of a Global Traveler: Volume Iii: Latin America

By Howard J. Wiarda

Professor Howard J. Wiarda, a leading academic expert on foreign policy, comparative politics, and international affairs, is the author of more than eighty books. Wiarda has traveled to many of the worlds most troubled and exciting places. Now, in the more personal accounts of his global travels, he recalls his foreign research adventures, the countries visited, and the people he met and interviewed along the way.

Wiardas new four-volume set, Exploring the World: Adventures of a Global Traveler, details his travels and foreign adventures since 2006. In these travel books, he tells the stories that lie behind the research, offers his impressions of the countries and regions he has explored, and considers how and why some have been successful and others not.

Volume I in this new series tells the story of Wiardas 2010 circumnavigation of the globe. Volume II focuses on Europe and the continued importance of European regionalismdespite the bumper stickers advertising Europe Whole and Free. Volume III deals with Latin America and questions whether the region is really as democratic as we would like it to be. Volume IV provides Wiardas analysis of Asias economic miracles while also recounting his recent visits to the Persian Gulf and his assessment of modernization and development in the Islamic world.

Insightful and entertaining, Wiardas travel narratives offer commentary on important and interesting sites all over the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781475996968

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Howard J. Wiarda.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

iUniverse LLC

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9695-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-9696-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914331

iUniverse rev. date: 06/04/2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 Introduction: Traveling The World

Chapter 2 Brazil As A Bric: Land Of The Future—At Last!

Chapter 3 El Salvador And The Crisis In Central America: 2010

Chapter 4 Brazil Revisited In 2011: A Shaky Future Under Dilma

Chapter 5 Chile—2011 A Latin American Success Story

Chapter 6 Mexico: A Return To Corporatism?

Chapter 7 The Dominican Republic: The Long Road To Democracy

Chapter 8 Conclusion: Latin America’s Uncertain Future

PREFACE

T his is the sixth, seventh, and eighth travel book that I’ve written. The story behind the writing of these travel books has become something of a joke in my family and among close colleagues. For I am a university professor, a professor of political science, and a specialist in the subfields of international relations, foreign policy, and comparative politics. I teach courses in those areas as well, and my course evaluations show—all modesty aside—that I’m a pretty good and entertaining teacher. Over the years I’ve received numerous letters and emails from former students all essentially saying the same thing: Prof. Wiarda, I don’t remember much of the substance of your course but the stories were wonderful!

These same students have urged me to take all my stories and adventures of travel abroad and pull them together in book form. For in my fields of IR, foreign policy, and comparative politics, I’ve traveled a lot and lived abroad for many years. I’ve had adventures in my travels and living abroad that few people have had. I’ve also written many academic books on these subjects. In the process I’ve come to the realization that my students are correct, or at least half-way right. I take seriously the academic and scholarly writing that I’ve done. On the other hand, in a travel book you can tell all the stories that lie behind the academic studies.

These include the travel itself, the people met and interviewed, the challenges of living abroad in foreign countries and cultures, the revolutions and coups that I’ve lived through, the challenge of raising a family abroad, and the (often) ineptness of American foreign policy. The more I thought about it, the more I came to see that one could write a serious book about the Adventures in Research that lay behind the more scholarly works. Indeed, that these Adventures volumes might contain at least as much valuable information as do the academic volumes. That at any rate is the assumption on which these travel books were launched.

I used to think of my academic writing as representing serious scholarship and my travel books as spare-time activities—writing that I did in between other projects. But by now I’ve come around to the point of view that both these genres are equally serious and enlightening. Academic and scholarly works are one thing and I still do those; the travel books, on the other hand, telling the stories and adventures that lie behind the scholarship, may be equally enlightening—and certainly more entertaining. As those students who write to me attest.

The first volume in the initial travel series that I did dealt mainly with Latin America, reflecting my research interests at that time, and covered the decade 1962-72.¹ In the second volume, covering the decade 1972-82, I had become mainly a European politics scholar, although I continued to do research in Latin America.² By the third volume, with generous funds available from the think tanks and academic institutions with which I was affiliated, I’d become a global traveler (coincidentally, the title of the third book in the series): Asia, Africa, the Middle East, as well as Europe and Latin America.³ The fourth book I entitled Return Visits, because there were by now numerous countries that I’d gone back to year after year and decade after decade, and I wanted to convey from repeated travel there how they’d changed, developed, and modernized, or else stagnated and fragmented.⁴

Inspired by the energy and excitement of the travel volumes and by the ability to use the more immediate first-person narrative, I’ve experimented in the last decade with books that combine the two genres. That combine serious scholarship with sometimes first-person impressions. These include my book on The Dutch Diaspora, which is both a study of Wiarda family history and a comparative study of current or past Dutch communities around the world: Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, New York, South Africa, Surinam, Western Michigan, and the Netherlands itself.⁵ In a shorter monograph written that same year, I described the former Portuguese empire in Asia—Japan, Formosa, Macao, Goa, East Timor—as well as my own adventures in exploring these research terrains.⁶ In still another book from this period dealing with the hot and exciting topic of civil society, I reported on my comparative research in Latin America, Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa, and again sought to enrich the book with personal stories and impressions gathered along the way.⁷

The present set of books follows that same orientation. It is first and foremost a series of travel books, a set of volumes that recounts my most recent adventures in traveling the world. But I am by now such a long-time (fifty years) scholar of comparative politics and foreign policy that I no longer hesitate at all to introduce scholarly themes into my travel writings or, the reverse, to infuse my scholarly work with occasional personal reflections and impressions. Not everyone, especially some of my academic colleagues, will appreciate this combination of scholarship with more informal travel writing. But I’m comfortable in that genre; in addition, I’m so old and established in my profession by this time that I can probably get away with it. Or maybe I just prefer to write what I want to write.

The present four-volume series is organized in the following way. The first volume is a colorful, swashbuckling account of a trip around the world that I undertook in 2011. It is entitled, with all due apologies to Jules Verne who pioneered with this theme, Around the World in Twenty Days. It treats of Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Malaysia, Abu Dhabi, Great Britain, and, not least, my home country, the United States. Volume II is the Europe volume. By the 1970s and thereafter, my research work had focused on Western Europe as much as Latin America. In 2001 I lived in Eastern Europe and traveled all over the area. I’ve now lived/traveled extensively in Southern Europe, Core or Central Europe, Eastern Europe (including Russia), and Scandinavia; and recently, in the Greek debt crisis, we’ve seen all those regional, historic, and cultural divides between Northern and Southern Europe come back—with a vengeance! Hence, my idea in this volume was to combine all my travels throughout the continent with some serious reflections on Europe, not whole and free as the EU hopefully proclaimed, but still divided by vast regional differences.

The third volume, on Latin America, covers my travels in the last few years to that continent, the first area on which I worked as a scholar. It has chapters on Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, as well as some provocative comments about the hemisphere as a whole. Volume IV in this series deals with the Near and Far East. I use those old-fashioned designations as a convenient way of incorporating both East Asia and the Middle East into a single volume. In the Middle East I focus on Abu Dhabi and Dubai; in East Asia I treat Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore, the countries or, in the cases of Hong Kong and Macao, political entities, I know best.

Over the course of my career I’ve been particularly fortunate in being associated with major think tanks and academic institutions, receiving sabbatical leaves and leaves without pay, and being awarded fellowship grants that were especially generous and enabled me to travel extensively and live abroad on several continents. In the last thirty years particularly, I’ve enjoyed almost unlimited (yes, that’s right) travel funds from the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University; the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) in Washington, D.C.; the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); the National War College and National Defense University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the University of Massachusetts; and presently the University of Georgia.

These institutions over the last three decades have been remarkably generous with both their leave policy and their funds, enabling us to do foreign travel abroad three or four times per year on average, and to live for extended periods of time in such exotic locales as Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Rome, Italy; Vienna, Austria; and Budapest, Hungary. Many other trips were for briefer periods.

In addition to the institutions above, many persons have also contributed to this research and travel itinerary. Above all is my wife Dr. Iȇda Siqueira Wiarda, who on these many travels has seen us through thick and thin and often saved her husband from his excesses of energy and curiosity. Particularly in the earlier years, our children Kristy, Howard, and Jonathan accompanied us abroad and were also leavening influences. Doris Holden has been my long-time typist, editor, and wise counsel. Julie Meransky serves as our departmental receptionist and secretary and is always pleasant and helpful. Annie Kryzanek, Katie Griffin, and Leah Langford Carmichael have been my three most recent research assistants—bright, cheerful, and helpful in so many ways that I cannot begin to enumerate them all.

A new book, in this case a sequence of books, is the product of many willing hands and minds, but ultimately it is the author who is accountable. I’m happy to claim full responsibility for the analysis that follows.

Howard J. Wiarda

2013

Notes

¹   Howard J. Wiarda, Adventures in Research: Volume I. Latin America (Lincoln, NE: Random House/iUniverse, 2006).

²   Howard J. Wiarda, Adventures in Research: Volume II. Europe (Lincoln, NE: Random House/iUniverse, 2006).

³   Howard J. Wiarda, Adventures in Research: Volume III. A Global Traveler (Lincoln, NE: Random House/iUniverse, 2006).

⁴   Howard J. Wiarda, Adventures in Research: Volume IV. Return Visits (Lincoln, NE: Random House/iUniverse, 2007).

⁵   Howard J. Wiarda, The Dutch Diaspora: Fragments of the World the Netherlands Created in America, Asia, Latin America and Europe East and West (New York: Lexington Press, 2007).

⁶   Howard J. Wiarda, The Portuguese Legacy in Asia: Politics, Ideas, Institutions (Lisbon: Oriente Foundation and the Center for the Study of Southeast Asia, 2007).

⁷   Howard J. Wiarda, Civil Society: The American Model and Third World Development (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION:

TRAVELING THE WORLD

LATIN AMERICA

I started my academic career as a scholar of Latin America and am still probably best known for my research and writings on that area. I’ve discovered over the years that you can never escape your own earlier writings and reputation; you’re forever a prisoner of the footnotes or reviews in which people cite your work. Try as I might, I can’t escape my reputation as an area studies guy, a Latin Americanist. Nor do I really want to.

For me, the decade of the 1960s was my main Latin America decade (see Volume I of this series), but as early as 1969-1970, when I started to fashion what I called the Iberic-Latin Model and then developed a major research project that would take me to Spain and Portugal for a year, I began to expand my horizons to include Southern or Mediterranean Europe. The 1970s became my Decade of Europe while in the 1980s and 1990s I spent long periods of time in Asia and Russia. More recently I’ve done research on and in Africa and the Middle East while continuing to spend a lot of time in Asia and Europe, West and East.

But it would be foolish of me to abandon the area where my research originated and on which I spent so much time building up knowledge, contacts, and language skills. I continue to do original research on Latin America and to write about it—but no longer exclusively so. I now consider myself a global traveler and, as a scholar, a comparative politics generalist with research, travel, and writing knowledge and experience in all major areas. When I write my books, they now usually have a global rather than a regional focus.

But I still pay serious attention to Latin America and I go there periodically. I first went to Latin America in 1962 so that means (by the time this book comes out) fifty years of travel to and study of Latin America. I’m able, therefore, to bring both a comparative perspective of the different countries and a considerable historical perspective over this long time period. I’m interested, from first-hand knowledge, in how Latin America has changed, modernized, and developed, and how much it remains the same in the half-century since I’ve been studying it.

This book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 2 deals with Brazil, just as Brazil was beginning its takeoff and drive to global-power status as a BRIC. Chapter 3 focuses on El Salvador and more broadly the entire Central American region, just as that area was becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, violence, and narco-traffickers. And I thought we had largely solved Central America’s fundamental problems back in the 1980s and 1990s when the civil wars ended, the guerrillas gave up their arms, more centrist regimes came to power, and Central America became part of the so-called Washington Consensus. Apparently not! I was frankly stunned by the level of violence, crime, and overall citizen insecurity that I saw in Central America in 2010.

In Chapter 4 we return to Brazil (2011) to see the changes since the earlier visit.

Chapter 5 focuses on Latin America’s greatest success story, Chile, the only Latin American country so far to reach developed-country status. Chapter 6 deals with Mexico which, with appropriate qualifications, I see as providing, for good or ill—mostly the latter—the path to the future of much of Latin America. And Chapter 7 returns to where we began fifty years ago, the Dominican Republic—my country, in spades. In the Conclusion, Chapter 8, I offer some assessments both about the future of these individual countries and Latin America as a whole.

The contrasts between these trips to Latin America, sandwiched between two trips to Asia and the Middle East, led to some additional, more general ideas about countries that are making it in today’s globalized world, and those that are not. In Asia, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore are among the countries that are making it, while Indonesia, the Philippines, and East Timor are not. The former get it—what it takes to be a modern, developed nation—while the latter do not.

Similarly in Latin America: Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Brazil, and maybe now Colombia get it, while almost all the others do not. The former are forging ahead; the latter, lagging behind. The former have essentially made the decision that they want to move ahead into the modern, globalized world, while the latter are still hung up by ideology, internal struggles, and national inferiority complexes. These differences are like day and night. For purposes of this book, Chile may be seen as a paragon case, one of the countries making it in the modern world, while El Salvador is a paradigm for those countries—in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America—which are being left behind. In today’s world, that is the fundamental division. Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic are mixed cases.

On Foreign Travel

I started traveling to foreign countries when I was a young graduate student. My first trip abroad was in 1962 when I did research in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The next year, still a grad student, I visited Mexico and traveled overland up and down the Isthmus of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. I lived for most of 1964 and part of 1965 again in the Dominican Republic doing research for my doctoral dissertation which was the basis for my first published book on the Dominican revolution and U.S. military intervention of 1965.¹

While my first several trips abroad were all on two- or four-engine, propeller planes, the early 1960s was the period when modern jet travel was coming into widespread use for the first time. Jet aircraft certainly facilitated the foreign travel that I and other scholars in the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and foreign policy wanted and needed to do. With jet travel now becoming widespread, it soon became possible to be (almost) anywhere in the world in one day or one overnight.

In 1966 and 1968, as a (still) young assistant and then associate professor, I received grants from my university (the University of Massachusetts) to travel all around Latin America. We (my wife and I) went back to the Dominican Republic, then visited Venezuela (where she had written her doctoral dissertation), Brazil (my wife’s home country), then Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Panama. In 1972 and then again 1974, we retraced this route, focused particularly on the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Brazil, to complete a research project sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH) on The Politics of Population Policy in Latin America.²

My own research and travel interests, meantime, had increasingly focused on Europe. We spent the 1972-73 academic year on sabbatical leave in Portugal and Spain, and traveled extensively throughout Western Europe as well as North Africa. In 1974 and 1975 I was back in Portugal as a policy adviser to the State Department on the Portuguese revolution. In 1977 I went to Israel to help train a new generation of young Israeli scholars, diplomats, and journalists on Latin America; on the way back, I did preliminary research in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal on Southern European labor relations. In 1979, on another year-long sabbatical, I completed the Southern European project and published a monograph on the subject.³

Up to this point, my foreign travel itinerary was still quite conventional for a young (still under forty) academic scholar. Between 1962 and 1979, I’d gone on student junkets to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America; made several trips abroad mainly to my areas of research specialization (Latin America and Southern Europe); enjoyed two research sabbaticals as a young professor; and lived abroad for three out of those seventeen years. During this period I averaged one trip abroad per year—but only if you count Puerto Rico as being abroad.

However, in 1979-80-81 all this changed; my life was altered forever. In 1979 I was asked to join Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs (CFIA) as a Research Associate and Research Scholar. At Harvard I worked closely with Samuel Huntington, Stanley Hoffmann, Joseph Nye, Schmuel Eisenstadt, Daniel Bell, Sidney Verba, Gabriel Almond, and other academic luminaries. I also taught at MIT in the spring of 1980. Being at Harvard, I soon discovered, enormously increases your prestige level and, therefore, also your opportunities to lecture, to contribute to anthologies, and to travel to far-off places.⁴

Then in 1981, in part because of that Harvard connection, I was invited to join the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) as a Senior Scholar and foreign policy program director. Wow; Harvard, MIT, and AEI all within a two-year period. In those years, early-to-mid-1980s, of the Reagan Revolution, AEI was flush with cash from its big donors; it was also viewed on the idea factory of the Reagan Administration. I had no teaching and precious little administrative responsibilities at AEI, leaving abundant time for research, writing, and foreign travel, mainly to Europe and Latin America. While at AEI in the 1980s, I also undertook my first trips to Asia: initially Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore; later China, South Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, Macao, India, and Singapore as well. My travel budget was virtually unlimited and it was not difficult to find a reason to go abroad. Instead of one trip a year from my early academic years, I now started to average three or four foreign trips a year.⁵

My itinerary broadened as well. I went to places, and often at five-star levels, that I never would have gone to as an academic. Since I still had research interests in Mexico, Central America (then a hot issue), the Caribbean, and South America, one or another of my research projects would bring us there every year, usually in the winter when Washington was snowy and cold. And since I now also had serious research interests in Europe, we’d find our way there a couple of times a year as well, usually in the late spring or early fall when the weather was nice but the restaurants, streets, and galleries were not overrun with tourists, students, and backpackers. I should say that all these trips also involved legitimate research interests or else were done at the behest of AEI—for example, our work on behalf of the Kissinger Commission on Central America or our efforts to establish ties with like-minded think tanks abroad. But what a life it was, involving numerous opportunities for travel. It could not last, and it didn’t; AEI went belly-up in 1987-88 and I returned to my comfortable, tenured professorship at UMass and my research position at Harvard.

In 1991 lightning struck again; I received an appointment as Professor of National Security Policy at the National War College, enabling me to return to Washington for an extended period. At NWC in the 1990s, I discovered, there were always surplus travel funds (this is the Department of Defense, after all, with gigantic budgets, the Cold War over, and no enemies on the horizon) that had to be spent (use it or lose it) before the end of the fiscal year. So every year, with impeccable timing right after the student spring trips which were NWC’s big travel item, I’d approach the NWC Executive Officer (XO) with a request for travel funds. Of course, the purpose had to be defense—or security-related but that was no problem; as a global superpower every area of the globe is related to U.S. defense and security interests. On this basis, using DOD funds, I visited Russia twice, China, South Korea, South America, Mexico, Central America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the Middle East. My years at the War College, 1991-96, even more so than at AEI, turned me into a global traveler instead of just a regional one.⁶

I left the War College mainly because UMass, my home institution for all those earlier years and where I still had a tenured full professorship, had created a chaired and named professorship for me: the Leonard J. Horwitz Chair. Horwitz was a UMass alumnus and Latin America policy official who had generously endowed the chair. The chair carried with it a considerable travel fund that enabled me to continue the extensive travel schedule begun when I was at Harvard and continued at AEI and the War College. With these funds I went back to Russia again and began making yearly trips to Eastern Europe. The high point of this period came in 2001 when, during a year-long sabbatical leave and aided also by grants from the Aspen Institute, the Fulbright Program, the Eckard Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Oriente Foundation, I spent the first six months living in Vienna and Budapest, the next two months in Brazil and South Africa, and two more months touring Asia: Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Indonesia, and East Timor.⁷

In 2003 I took an early retirement offer from UMass and accepted another chair, the Dean Rusk Professorship at the University of Georgia, as well as serving as founding head of the newly created Department of International Affairs at UGA. The Rusk Professorship, which I still hold, although after two three-year terms I recently stepped down as department head, also carried with it a $10,000 yearly fund for research and travel. By carefully husbanding that resource and drawing on other travel funds, I’ve been able to keep up the extensive travel begun before. And that means three or four foreign trips per year, mainly to Europe but also more-or-less regularly to Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Just this past year, for example, I spent part of the spring in Central Europe (the Imperial Splendors tour of Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria), May-June in Asia (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Malaysia) and part of July in Central America.

I’ve thus had thirty years of travel, since 1980, averaging three or four foreign trips per year, coming on top of an earlier seventeen years as an academic averaging one trip per year. It’s an extensive, nearly five-decades-long, travel schedule: I’ve traveled, lived in, or done research in over eighty countries and five continents.

I’ve also been fortunate to have the funding to do this travel. Over these decades I’ve enjoyed four year-long, fully-paid, no-strings-attached, research leaves or sabbaticals from the universities with which I’ve been associated, and three half-year paid leaves. I’ve also been remarkably lucky over the years in winning outside grants and fellowships to supplement this sabbatical support. Then, when I was at AEI for all those years, I had virtually unlimited freedom (no classes, no students!) to travel whenever I wanted, and the almost unlimited funds to go with it. At the War College in the 1990s, I was similarly able to tap into the extensive travel funds available. Finally, over the last fifteen years, at both UMass and UFA, I’ve held endowed chairs that carry with them not large but sufficient travel funds.

What a charmed life! How nice to be able to engage in all that time. My travel books are a product of the generosity of all these institutions and I’m grateful to them for it.

The Writing Life

I now consider myself a writer. Going back to junior high and high school, even elementary school, I’ve always loved to write. I wanted to become a professional writer. For about one semester each, I majored, respectively, in English and journalism in college. Until a college mentor pulled me aside one day and gave me some wonderful advice. First, after meeting writer John Bartlow Martin and interviewing him when he served as John F. Kennedy’s ambassador in the 1960s era, troubled Dominican Republic, I was told there were only about two hundred persons in the United States (Martin was one of them) who made their living entirely from their writing—not good odds. Second, I was advised, sagely as it turned out, that I should not major in English or journalism but should get my degree in something substantive—history, political science, economics, or sociology—and study and do my writing on the side, which I did as a reporter-editor for a really good campus newspaper at the University of Michigan, The Michigan Daily.

So that’s how I became a political scientist and, eventually, a professor of political science. I wouldn’t say that political science was for me a fallback position or even a consolation prize, for I’ve loved (almost) every minute of the life I’ve led in that profession. But political science back when I was nineteen years old would not have been my first choice.

I’m the author/editor of one hundred and twenty books. The number sounds awfully impressive but actually it’s quite a bit short of that. To break that number down (I have compiled the figures because my wife recently inquired), the list includes thirty-five edited volumes and probably fifteen short (under a hundred pages) monographs. The one hundred and twenty number also includes foreign language editions of earlier books, multiple editions of some of my books, and collections of previously published shorter articles and writings. When you subtract all these exceptions from the list, it leaves thirty-five books for which I am the sole, individual, original author. It’s still a goodly list but nowhere near the total of one hundred and twenty which at first blush sounds so impressive.

Somewhere in my political science career, I think about five or six years ago, I recrossed that frontier mentioned earlier. I now consider myself a writer as well as a political scientist. I’m not a great writer but I do work hard at it. I love the single, solitary work of being a scholar and writer. I don’t always need people around. Some of the best times of my life are spent in my home office, all alone, manipulating words, images, sentences, and paragraphs. I enjoy that singular and solitary existence.

In recent years I’ve become a student of good writing. I read Joyce, Carol Oates, and John Updike. Right now on my coffee table I have an eclectic pile of books: Anthony Trollope (who wrote a thousand words per hour), Donna Leon (mysteries set in Venice), Elmore Leonard (quirky novels often with foreign policy themes), and Hunter Thompson—he of the gonzo journalism style. I both study and read good writers. I also read books on writing or written on writing. I’ve become a student of the writing profession. I seldom read political science anymore because the writing is, generally, so bad.

My skills are not up to those of these great writers. When I read Updike, for example, whom I like