H. Bradford Westerfield

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H. Bradford Westerfield
Born
Holt Bradford Westerfield

(1928-03-07)March 7, 1928
U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materChoate Rosemary Hall
Yale University
Harvard University
Scientific career
FieldsPolitical Science
InstitutionsYale University

Holt Bradford Westerfield (March 7, 1928 – January 19, 2008) was a Damon Wells Professor of

International Studies and professor of political science at Yale University.[1]

Biography

He was educated at

Harvard, where he earned his graduate degrees and taught from 1952 to 1956. After a year at the University of Chicago he joined the Yale faculty in 1957, and remained there for 40 years. Westerfield was a legendary teacher at Yale, where one of his popular courses was nicknamed by students "Lies and Spies." In 1993 he received the inaugural Byrnes-Sewall Award for undergraduate teaching, and in 2003 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Devane Medal. Among his students were George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and several future senators.[2]

In 1953, as one of the first in Congressional Fellowship Program of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Westerfield worked in the office of Congressman

D-Arkansas) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.[3]

In 1970, Westerfield was elected as chair of the Political Science Department. At this point in his development, he was a self-styled "hawk" in terms of the ongoing Vietnam War; but he considered himself a moderate consensus builder in matters relating to the Yale faculty and his own department.[4] Westerfield considered Yale a comparatively quiet place compared with the tensions which were wrenching apart other faculties in the leading American universities of that period;[5] and his strategy for building consensus encompassed an emphasis on scholarship, academic competition, and professional prestige of the department.[6]

Influential teacher

Westerfield was credited by

Bush administration's foreign policy as "precisely the wrong approach."[8]

Westerfield's legacy as a teacher was more subtly confirmed in a Yale course description prepared for the Spring 2009 semester. Yale's Political Science department offered a seminar on American foreign policy modeled on Westerfield's graduate course.[9]

Publications

  • 1955 -- Foreign Policy and Party Politics: Pearl Harbor to Korea. New Haven: Yale University Press.[10]
  • 1963 -- The Instruments of America’s Foreign Policy, Boston: Crowell Press.
  • 1972 -- The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Princeton.
  • 1975 -- What Use Are Three Versions of the Pentagon Papers?, American Political Science Review, Vol. 69(2), pp. 685–96.
  • 1981 -- English Prisons and Local Government, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • 1995 -- Inside the CIA’s Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency’s Internal Journal, 1955-92. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Honors and awards

Notes

  1. ^ a b Martin, Douglas. "H. Bradford Westerfield, 79, Influential Yale Professor," New York Times, January 27, 2008.
  2. ^ "In Memoriam: Holt Bradford Westerfield," Choate Rosemary Hall Bulletin (Spring, 2008), p. 47
  3. ^ Cikins, Warren I. (2005). In Search of Middle Ground: Memoirs of a Washington Insider, p. 52.
  4. ^ Merelman, Richard M. (2003). Pluralism at Yale: the culture of political science in America, pp. 46-47.
  5. ^ Merelman, p. 94.
  6. ^ Merelman, p. 145.
  7. ^ Carney, James et al. "7 Clues To Understanding Dick Cheney," Time. December 30, 2002.
  8. ^ Nichols, John. "A Little Education Can Be a Dangerous Thing," The Nation. August 26, 2004.
  9. ^ Yale University, Political Science Department: Roy Licklider. March 2, 2009.
  10. ^ Steiner, H. Arthur. "Foreign Policy and Party Politics: Pearl Harbor to Korea by H. Bradford Westerfield" (Book review), The Pacific Historical Review, 24:4, 427-428, November 1955.
  11. ^ Mansfield, Edward D. et al. (2004). The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and inquiry in American politics, p. 165.
  12. ^ "Westerfield and Gaddis awarded DeVane Medals by Phi Beta Kappa," Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine Yale Bulletin and Calendar, 31:29. May 9, 2003.

References

New York: Devora Publishing.

OCLC 79428957

External links