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{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen Government professor Joseph S. Nye Sr. left Harvard in 1994 to serve in Bill Clinton’s Department of Defense, he said he was eager to bring lessons from Washington back to his classroom. But in the meantime, he left behind a disappointed campus.

“I am delighted for the country, I am pleased for Professor Nye,” then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles told The Crimson, “but I am miserable for Harvard.”

After two years that took him from D.C. to Beijing and Moscow, Nye returned to lead the Harvard Kennedy School as dean. In the decades he spent teaching at Harvard, Nye weighed in on the normalization of U.S.-China relations in the 1970s and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. He backed the Iraq War and then reckoned, uneasily, with its erosion of American credibility. And in the last months of his life, he watched with dismay — and words of warning — as President Donald Trump dismantled America’s diplomatic institutions.

His colleagues described him, over the years, as a “superb teacher” and a leader who “put electricity into the air.” In 1993, one student referred to Nye as the “possessor of the most dedicated cult of personality since Mao.”

Nye, a towering scholar and policymaker who spent the last 60 years at the center of international security debates in Washington and Cambridge, died Tuesday. He was 88.

Nye is survived by his three sons Ben, John, and Dan, and his nine grandchildren. Nye was married to his wife, Molly Harding Nye, for 63 years. She died late last year.

“He was a mentor to all of us,” his son J. Ben Harding Nye ’87 said. “He was one who put the mission of public service, the importance of the community ahead of himself. And those values were a beacon, not just to the three brothers and our respective wives, but to so many students.”

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An Academic and ‘Agenda-Setter’

Remembered by colleagues, students, and dearest friends as the rare intellectual who was successful as a scholar, mentor, administrator, and policymaker, Nye was a “living legend,” his former colleague Robert C. Orr said.

“There’s no one important in making foreign policy in the world who has not met with Joe Nye or read Joe Nye’s books, or been in colloquy with Joe Nye’s students or engaged with Joe Nye’s ideas,” said former University President Lawrence H. Summers. “He’s been an agenda-setter in looking for comity between nations for decades.”

Nye’s work rate was prodigious: he shaped nuclear policy for two presidents, authored 14 books, re-wrote the textbook on international relations, and led the most prestigious school of government in the nation.

And at dinner six weeks ago, Nye was still hatching plans for a 15th book about the geopolitical consequences of artificial intelligence, New York Times national security correspondent David E. Sanger ’82 said.

“Just think about that,” said Sanger, a Kennedy School adjunct lecturer and former Crimson News editor. “Here’s a guy who was born in 1937 who cut his teeth on early nuclear issues and who was constantly updating himself and not sitting around.”

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Nye introduced two landscape-shifting concepts to international relations theory: the idea of “soft power” — used to describe a country’s non-military influence — and a framework that, over Nye’s objections, would come to be known as neoliberalism.

Countries exist in a state of anarchy, Nye and his fellow neoliberals argued, but the advantages of international institutions and the ties of economic interdependence shape their behavior and create possibilities for cooperation.

Robert O. Keohane — who co-authored with Nye their seminal book, “Power and Interdependence” — said Nye had the “intellectual self-confidence” to push boundaries, and it paid off.

“We were quite willing to put ourselves way ahead of the crowd and expect and hope at least that people would find the work worthwhile,” Keohane said.

Twenty years later, Nye did it again, coining “soft power” to describe the forces other than military strength that make a country attractive and persuasive on the international stage. The term was not without its critics — his student Andrew M. Moravcsik, now a Princeton professor, described it as “useful” but “slippery” — but it became inescapable.

“The vocabulary that we use now in talking about American foreign policy in 2025 — that was all Joe’s framing,” said Nicholas D. Kristof ’81, a former Crimson News editor. “And so Joe may not be with us, but he supplied the agenda and the framework that we’re using.”

Nye’s scholarship, which emphasized the importance of building international goodwill, is just as relevant today, Kristof said.

“I wish the White House would learn from him the importance of soft power,” Kristof said. “I think he was quite distressed that the Trump administration was burning through American soft power in ways that were not only contradicting our values, but also contrary to our interests.”

‘That Kind of Professor’

Nye was born in New Jersey in 1937. He had a swift and formidable start to his academic career — graduating summa cum laude with a history degree from Princeton University, attending Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and receiving his doctorate in 1964 from Harvard’s Government department.

Immediately after earning his Ph.D., Nye joined the faculty at Harvard. And although Nye taught occasionally at other universities throughout his life, he always returned to Cambridge. It was where he saw an opportunity to “build something truly special,” his son Ben said.

While at the Kennedy School, Nye led the Belfer Center and Weatherhead Center — then under different names — and founded the Avoiding Nuclear War Project.

He also taught a renowned introductory international relations course — a class packed full of future intellectual and political heavyweights.

“It was legendary,” Moravcsik said. “He could make big, broad, complicated topics approachable to 400 people in a room, and they would hang on every word. He was that kind of professor.”

Mary Louise Kelly ’93, the host of NPR’s All Things Considered, took Nye’s introductory international relations course in 1989 — in the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall — and said Nye helped her and her classmates understand the world as it transformed before their eyes.

“I was so grateful to have his voice on that,” said Kelly, a former Crimson News editor. “And I think it is something I still draw on as I do the job I do today.”

“I’m about to go out and host a national news broadcast that makes sense of the week’s news,” she added. “And Joe Nye was one of the first people I saw — in an academic role, not a journalistic one, but helping people, helping his students, make sense of it.”

Nye inspired legions of students like Kelly. His disciples include former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and former deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.

Peter D. Feaver, now a political science professor at Duke University, recalls meeting Nye in his office 42 years ago and thinking, “Man, I want to work with him. But I’d also love to be him one day.”

“If you looked around the Biden administration, it was just full of Joe’s students,” Sanger said.

“I felt as if Joe was fundamentally a second father figure,” Sanger added. “And truly, there are 1,500 people between Washington and Cambridge who felt the exact same way.”

When Nye was promoted to HKS dean in 1995, he oversaw a period of rapid expansion at the school, broadening its faculty and the scope of its research. He also established five new research centers, balanced the school’s budget, and steered graduates into public service.

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In a Tuesday email announcing Nye’s death, current HKS dean Jeremy M. Weinstein commended Nye’s contributions to creating a school that is “far more international and inclusive.”

“Today’s Kennedy School — a vibrant, engaged, and inclusive institution with aspirations to understand and better the world — reflects Joe’s vision decades ago,” Weinstein wrote.

Orr, now dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, said he “learned how to be a dean by watching Joe Nye.”

“It’s not true that all great scholars make great leaders,” Orr said. “Joe was a consummate scholar and teacher, but he was also a consummate leader.”

Nye in Washington

But students and colleagues said Nye was never satisfied with staying in the ivory tower.

He served two stints in Washington, as a deputy undersecretary in the State Department during the Jimmy Carter administration and later as assistant secretary of defense for international affairs for President Bill Clinton.

In the Carter administration, he chaired the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation and worked closely with then-undersecretary of the Department of Energy John M. Deutch to orchestrate a non-proliferation policy.

In that role, Nye focused on regulation in the nuclear era, slowing the spread of uranium enrichment facilities and nuclear reactors without cutting off access to nuclear energy.

Deutch recalled that Nye’s ability to effect policy change set him apart from other academics who serve in government.

“He went down there with a substantive goal, to put in a proliferation policy for the world, and he managed to do that,” Deutch said. “Most of the other people who go from Harvard or MIT are going there for the experience, rather than for commitment to a specific, substantive goal for the country.”

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Working under President Clinton, Nye returned to the White House, where he pushed back against proposals to distance the U.S. from Japan. In 1995, Nye produced the “Nye Initiative,” which instead called on the U.S. to strengthen its bilateral relationship with Japan and maintain 100,000 U.S. troops in East Asia in the face of a rising China.

He also co-founded the Aspen Strategy Group — a forum for nonpartisan foreign policy debate and helped lead the Trilateral Commision, a nongovernmental organization that brings together experts and policymakers from around the world.

“His life and career has been intertwined in so many arenas,” former HKS dean Graham T. Allison ’62 said in an interview. “Both about conceptual things and about policy things and about life.”

An Avid Outdoorsman

Despite his professional vigor, friends and colleagues said Nye was calm and unflappable.

“My greatest memory of him is his calm, consistent way of being, of which I aspire to,” said Kiron K. Skinner, one of Nye’s dissertation advisees, who served as director of policy planning during the first Trump administration.

Nye devoted much of his free time to the outdoors — he owned a substantial plot of land in New Hampshire and took annual fishing trips to Alaska with a small group of friends.

Many friends recalled going fly fishing with Nye for hours, for days on end — willing to entertain what they described as an odd hobby for the pleasure of his company.

“I can’t tell you how many hours I spent walking behind Joe in a cold river stream in Colorado or New Hampshire. I never caught one fish,” Deutch said. It would get dark. I said, ‘Joe, we’ve got to go back.’ I was freezing. He said, ‘Just one more. Just a few more tries.’”

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On one fly fishing excursion, Moravcsik asked Nye why he would spend seven hours a day sitting in rubber boots in a mountain river. “I think it’s being in the river and trying to outthink a fish,” Nye replied.

Sanger said that Nye’s methodical approach to fishing corresponded to an attentiveness to the incentives and vulnerabilities of states.

“He would think strategically about where the fish — in the flows of that river and the eddies and behind the rocks — would be hanging out to feed,” Sanger said. “And he did the same when he was looking at government, people, bureaucracies.”

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And Keohane, Nye’s coauthor, recalled that on snowy walks on Nye’s New Hampshire property, Nye would surprise him with subtle observations of life in the woods.

“You saw lots of things, like where the owl had caught the squirrel, which you wouldn’t have known just walking yourself,” Keohane said.

There was no escaping Nye’s lust for physical activity. As dean, he hosted HKS faculty at annual nature retreats, with lectures in the morning and recreational activity in the afternoon.

Nye, by then well into his 60s, led the afternoon hikes himself, according to colleague Richard J. Zeckhauser ’62.

“When it was led by Joe Nye, the argument was ‘you better be in good shape, or you’re not going to keep up,’” Zeckhauser said.

Nye remained physically and intellectually sharp until his death, his students and colleagues said.

“You sort of felt like he was always going to be just like he is,” Moravcsik said. “It’s hard to imagine that somebody like that disappeared.”

“He was bald and oldish looking when he was 30. And he was bald and oldish looking when he was 80. Physically, he didn’t change at all. It was remarkable,” said Peter J. Katzenstein, one of Nye’s dissertation advisees.

“The constancy of him — I think that’s what shocked the Harvard community and everybody,” Katzenstein added. “You really couldn’t imagine a world without Joe Nye.”

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.

—Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun can be reached at tanya.vidhun@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tanyavidhun.