Just Curious

So strange

Dr. Constantine Menges died last October, and I was not aware of that till yesterday. Menges is an interesting character and a man of many hats: Cold Warrior, scholar on Soviet and Eastern European politics, major culprit behind U.S. invasion of Grenada, tireless promoter of the 'China threat' theory.

At the time of his death he was Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute and (I think) professor of international relations at George Washington University. When he was a young man, he used to help smuggling East Germans to the West. At the same time he was also a civil rights worker back in the early 60s, working on equal voting rights in Mississippi. It is fair to say that in a tumultuous time Menges fought communism with one hand and home-grown racist terrorism with the other.

I have talked to him only once, and that was an interview. At that time I was interviewing for a position at Hudson, and he was working on a book to "expose" the "coming Chinese threat." Being a Russian scholar, he knew very little Chinese and so he extended an offer to me to be his research assistant. That was a very strange exchange, since I was a bleeding-heart liberal back then; Hudson was an ultraconservative think tank; and lo and behold this gentleman in front of me was a Cold Warmonger. What really struck me though was his candor. He told me how working for him might alienate me in certain Chinese circles and might even cause trouble for me should I visit mainland China. (Though not well known outside the national security circle, Menges was an important character: he was special assistant to President Reagan on national security and had authored many articles on the Soviet Union.) And I'm glad that he told me that. I'd already decided to turn down his offer since after all I was a bleeding-heart liberal at that time, but I was impressed by how considerate he was.

And now he's dead. And I'm really feelin' strange.

posted by James Chang @ 10:53 AM