Samuel Phillips Huntington

HUNTINGTON, Samuel Phillips 81, a resident of Boston, was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, where he taught for fifty-eight years before his retirement in 2007. A gifted teacher and scholar, he was mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields. He was the author or co-author of seventeen books, on American government, democratization, national security and strategic issues, political and economic development, cultural factors in world politics, and American national identity. His most widely-known book, The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1997 is in print in thirty-nine languages. His first book, The Soldier and the State, published in 1957 is now in its fifteenth printing, and was the subject of a West Point symposium last year on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Political Order in Changing Societies, published in 1969, is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, and Yale University, '46, he served in the U.S. Army, then earned a master's degree in political science from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1949. He taught at Columbia University from 1958 to 1962, when he returned to Harvard. He served two terms as Chairman of the Harvard Government Department and for twelve years as Director of the Harvard Center for International Affairs. He founded and directed Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, and was Chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He served as president of the American Political Science Association in 1986-87 and received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order. A life-long Democrat, he was foreign policy advisor to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign and served in the Carter Administration on the National Security Council staff as Coordinator of Security Planning. He was a member of the Presidential Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy in the 1980s. In the wake of the 1968 campaign, he and Warren Manshel, political opponents in the campaign but close friends, co-founded and edited Foreign Policy magazine, which was dedicated to developing a new foreign policy consensus. Professor Huntington was the son of Richard Thomas Huntington, an editor and publisher, and Dorothy Sanborn Phillips, a writer. Devoted to his family, he is survived by his wife of fifty-one years, Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, two sons, Timothy Mayo Huntington and Nicholas Phillips Huntington, two daughters-in-law, Kelly Brown Huntington and Noelle Lalley Huntington, and four greatly beloved grandchildren, Candace, Max, Eliza and Anna. A private family burial service will be on Martha's Vineyard, where he summered for forty years. A memorial service at Harvard is planned for the spring.