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Fred Greene

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I don’t know how long Bob was in. But the only thing he ever talked about in any extended degree was his capacity as a navigator in the Air Force. He was a lieutenant. He said he was among the worst in his class and they put together a plane of all the worst people […]
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The department has four basic categories: American politics, which has a lot of subdivisions; international relations; comparative government; and political theory and philosophy. And Bob was one of two or three people in political theory and philosophy. They weren’t outriders, but we didn’t have as much interchanging of slots as we do with say comparative […]
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We were on a trip somewhere, me, my wife and the two younger kids and we were coming back to the Albany airport and Bob was going to pick us up. So he picks us up, yeah, but it was heavy snow. And eight-tenths of the way home, he said, “We have bald tires.” He […]
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He was a little kooky but it was within the realm of operationally OK. I had to run a department. Bob was a fine member. Bob was teaching things within political theory I considered semi-fringy at that time. A lot of students who took his courses and became like devotees of it would somehow look […]
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We took a poll of the department on McGovern versus Nixon [in 1972] as to who was going to win and he was just, along with everyone else, just a big McGovern fan. To me they were all off their rocker. And one of the people in the department who was not a regular political […]
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My job in the State Department in effect was to be the director of intelligence for East Asia. So I was totally immersed in Vietnam and the Chinese Cultural Revolution and it really wracked me up for two years. It was a very trying experience to work there. Personally my experience was we shouldn’t have […]
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If I had to label him anything I would make him an ideological conservative but an operational reformer and almost radical, certainly a liberal. Funny combination but it’s like a lot of British conservatives in the 18th century, like Edmund Burke, very conservative but also would say, “What are we doing in this war with […]
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He certainly wasn’t a radical revolutionary or troublemaker inside the department. He just was a very, the old word, “proper” kind of person. He believed what we were all taught a gentleman is supposed to be like. He never used harsh words. He never insulted people. He never raised his voice and screamed at anybody. […]
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I’m not a great believer in educational experiments. On the other hand, Bob seemed to get results no matter what he did. I thought whatever he did was gonna to work out not because of the way he was doing it but because he was the one doing it. My reaction would be if Bob […]
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I remember them also saying that Bob had told them whatever he had wouldn’t kill him.
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CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note
credits