Friedrich quashed Huntington’s prospects at tenure, prompting Huntington to return to New York City, where he was born in 1927, and teach at Columbia University.
“And then Harvard saw the error of its ways in 1962 and asked me to come back,” Huntington says.
In 1968, Huntington served as a top foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was then vying with Richard Nixon for the White House. That summer, he and longtime pal Henry A. Kissinger ’50 vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard. Kissinger—who had worked for Nelson Rockefeller in the New York governor’s primary bid against Nixon—casually offered to leak Huntington Rockefeller’s secret files on Nixon, Huntington says.
He adds that Kissinger soon retracted the offer and signed on as an aide to Nixon, who won the election.
A decade later, Huntington joined the Carter administration as a senior National Security Council official. But after serving on an advisory panel in the late years of the Reagan presidency, Huntington—who says he supports Sen. John F. Kerry’s 2004 candidacy—acknowledges that his days in the political world are almost certainly over.
“Kerry doesn’t need me...He knows what the issues are. He’s been much more deeply involved in foreign policy issues than I have. He ought to advise me on foreign policy,” Huntington says.
But even since he left the public sector, Huntington’s analysis has dominated foreign policy discussions.
In the summer of 1993, Huntington argued in the journal Foreign Affairs that “the fundamental source of conflict in this new [post-Cold War] world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”
This argument, crystallized in his 1996 book Clash of Civilizations, has drawn the attention of top Bush administration officials. Huntington says he shared his observations with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell over lunch in Washington last month.
—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.