Robert Scalapino, 1919-2011

Berkeley Political Scientist Robert Scalapino has died.

An obituary is at New York Times, "Robert A. Scalapino, a Scholar of Asian Politics, Dies at 92":

Robert A. Scalapino, an eminent scholar of Asian politics who achieved prominence during the Vietnam War for his strong defense of American policy as opposition to it was growing, died Nov. 1 in Oakland, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was complications of a respiratory infection, the University of California, Berkeley, said. Professor Scalapino taught there from 1949 to 1990 and founded its Institute of East Asian Studies in 1978.

The author of 39 books on Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, Professor Scalapino was also editor of Asian Survey, a scholarly publication, from 1962 to 1996 and advised the State Department and other government agencies.

In 1965, he wound up arguing the Johnson administration’s case for escalating the war at what was billed as a national teach-in on Vietnam policy. The event was a debate by a panel before an audience of 5,000 in Washington and more than 100,000 people at more than 100 campuses who had gathered to hear the debate by radio hookups.

McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, had been scheduled to attend, and many participants had hoped to hear his pro-war views and confront him. When he canceled at the last minute, it fell to Professor Scalapino, who had also been invited to join the panel, to take the lead in defending the White House’s policy. He argued that the United States was fighting communism, not Asian nationalism, and that China would regard the United States as a “paper tiger” if it abandoned the war.

He continued to make that argument the following year in a long article in The New York Times Magazine. He wrote that the war tested “the American capacity to respond to a threat that is important but not terminal.

RTWT.