Francis A. Boyle: “NYT Obit on Dick Pipes”

From: Francis A Boyle <fboyle@illinois.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2018
Subject: NYT Obit on Dick Pipes
[Francis Anthony Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law]

I took Imperial Russian History with Dick Pipes at Harvard and got an A, which I was grateful for and deserved. So this is not a case of sour grapes. Indeed, I spent ten years at the University of Chicago and Harvard studying everything about Russia and the Soviet Union. This culminated in my passing my Harvard PHD Oral/General Examinations in Russian History with Ned Keenan and Soviet Politics with Adam Ulam, thus qualifying me to teach those two subjects to Harvard undergrads. I did not learn the language because that is not what I intended to do with my academic career. The University of Chicago and Harvard are two of the world’s leading centers for the training of Soviet/Russian Experts. Pipes was the very worst teacher I ever had in those two fields. He was an expatriate Pole who hated the Russians/Soviets with a passion. It was so bad that during his course on Imperial Russian History, when he began to lecture on Catherine the Great or Peter the Great etc he would get so worked up that he would begin to sweat and had to take his handkerchief out of his breast pocket to wipe his brow. This is the type of anti-Russian/Soviet paranoid propagandist Harvard had teaching their students for an entire generation. If you are wondering why there is so much paranoia these days against Russia, credit it to Dick Pipes, his students, his acolytes, and his bootlickers throughout the academic world, working for the US government, and in the US media. And there were several others like him at Harvard and Chicago, though not as bad as Pipes.

While interviewing for a job as an Ass.Prof at Yale Law School in early January 1977, Gene Rostow asked me to join the Committee on Present Danger. So I began to get all of the propaganda generated by the Committee and in particular by Rostow, Paul Nitze and Dick Pipes. There was Pipes once again holding forth for the COPD with his typical anti-Russian/Soviet propaganda and diatribe. Pure paranoia. And then Pipes went to work for Reagan at the White House as his expert on Russia/Soviet Union. We were lucky we did not get into a war with the Soviet Union during those first two years of the Reagan administration. I breathed a great sigh of relief when Pipes went back to Harvard after two years in order to continue his campaign to poison the minds of Harvard Students against Russia/Soviet Union. That is Pipes Lasting Legacy. Continuing American Paranoia, Bitterness, Spite, Malice and Hatred against Russia and the Russians and all things Russian.