As I will be traveling in Asia in the coming weeks, let me add to Mary’s oh-so-true remarks.
Ted was the heart of the Department, a committed Cornellian, an ice-hockey fan from the South, a poker player and oboist who loved his family and ideas with an irrepressible zest for life. To be in his presence was to be in the presence of a life force. I miss very deeply his warmth and ebullience.
At heart Ted, I felt, was a preacher. In seminar rooms, lecture halls and faculty meetings he was mesmerizing and instinctively contrarian, shouting truth to power. He was, of course, a brilliant scholar whose work will long outlast all of us. A giant in his field. Politically engaged (as in his support of Anderson’s candidacy in 1980), critical of the moneyed cartel of elites manufacturing Presidential and Senate candidates and he was a committed democrat.
Ted’s scholarship was prodigious, of course, and profoundly influential for my own work. He taught me the importance of institutions, rules and democratic values. We would, forever, spar over ways of studying politics, mostly when we met as members of graduate committees where we would mock-spar, forever, as the unending stand-ins for Yale vs Harvard, rich description vs powerful explanation. What I must remember is the fun of it all.
Some holes in life cannot get plugged. They stay and are filled with memories. Ted’s memory will be with me until the end. I am so sorry to miss the celebration of his life. I will be there in spirit.
Peter J. Katzenstein
Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies
Cornell
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