RIP

i took his classes too... and he was a Stone trustee...


H. Bradford Westerfield, Influential Yale Professor, Is Dead at 79

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 27, 2008

H. Bradford Westerfield, a Yale political scientist whose courses attracted 10,000 students, mostly undergraduates, among them President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, died on Jan. 19 in Watch Hill, R.I. He was 79.
Skip to next paragraph
Michael Marsland/Yale University

H. Bradford Westerfield about 1995.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Leland Avery Westerfield, said. H. Bradford Westerfield lived in Watch Hill and Hamden, Conn.

Dr. Westerfield’s former students in four decades of teaching, who also included Senators John Kerry and Joseph I. Lieberman and assorted cabinet officers, White House advisers and intelligence officials, often cited his influence in framing their approach to public policy.

Mr. Cheney repeatedly said Dr. Westerfield helped shape his hard-line approach to foreign policy. But an article in The Nation in 2004 reported that Dr. Westerfield came to regret the hard-nosed lessons Mr. Cheney said he had learned. Dr. Westerfield explained that his own politics had become much more dovish since advocating uncompromising anticommunism in classes Mr. Cheney attended, transformed in large part by America’s troubles in the Vietnam War.

Dr. Westerfield characterized the current Bush administration as overly confrontational, calling that “precisely the wrong approach.”

He was known for writing and teaching about foreign policy with a particular emphasis on espionage, offering one of the first courses at any American university on intelligence and covert operations, which students playfully christened “Spies and Lies.”

At his death, Dr. Westerfield was the Damon Wells Professor of International Studies. He appreciated the fact that Mr. Wells had been his student, his family said.

Holt Bradford Westerfield, a descendant of William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth colony, was born on March 7, 1928, in Rome, where his father, Ray Bert Westerfield, an economics professor at Yale, was on sabbatical.

The younger Dr. Westerfield graduated at 16 from the Choate School and at 19 from Yale, where he was president of the political union and the debate association.

He earned his doctorate from Harvard, where he studied intelligence services. His thesis became his first book, “Foreign Policy and Party Politics: Pearl Harbor to Korea” (1955). He taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago and spent a year studying Congress as a fellow of the American Political Science Association.

In 1957, he joined Yale as an assistant professor of international relations, and stayed there until his retirement in 2001. He later held college teaching and research positions in England, Australia and the United States.

His books included “The Instruments of America’s Foreign Policy” (1963), and selections from an internal publication of the Central Intelligence Agency, which he edited as “Inside C.I.A.’s Private World: Declassified Articles From the Agency’s Internal Journal, 1955-92” (1995). The C.I.A. chose him to edit the book partly because he was independent of the agency.

Dr. Westerfield held several Yale administrative positions, including director of undergraduate studies and director of graduate studies.

In 1960, he married the former Carolyn Elizabeth Hess, and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., then the Yale chaplain, officiated at a communion service held in conjunction with the marriage ceremony. Dr. Westerfield and Dr. Coffin later engaged in lively debates on Vietnam, with Dr. Westerfield the hawk and Dr. Coffin the dove. At the time, Dr. Westerfield said he was worried about a communist takeover of the United States.

When he later rejected his more bellicose views, he said he had no regrets for the earlier militancy. “I don’t blame myself any longer for having misled those students,” he said in The Hartford Courant in 2003.

In addition to his wife and his son, Leland, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., Dr. Westerfield is survived by his daughter, Pamela Westerfield Bingham, of Manhattan; his brother, Putney, of Hillsborough, Calif., and four granddaughters.