ROBERT W. TUCKER

ROBERT W. TUCKER
August 25, 1924 - February 07, 2025
Robert Warren Tucker, the distinguished scholar of American foreign policy and international relations, died of natural causes on February 7, 2025. He was 100 years old.
Tucker, called Bob or Robertus by his friends, was born in Inspiration, Arizona on August 25, 1924 and grew up in Hemet, California. He was the son of Louis Harold Tucker and Jeannette Garbarsky; his father left Ukraine just before the Russian mobilization in 1914 and sailed to America on the last complete voyage of the Lusitania. Bob was a member of the class of 1946 at the United States Naval Academy and was known to sing the Navy Fight Song when he showered. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949. He taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1954 until 1990, holding positions at both the Homewood campus in Baltimore, Maryland, and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.
Tucker was the author of a dozen books and many essays. In The Just War (1960), he criticized the unjustifiable threats of massive retaliation made on behalf of deterrence. Subsequent books explored the debate over American foreign policy occasioned by the Vietnam War: Nation or Empire? (1968), The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (1971), and A New Isolationism (1972).
Tucker collaborated with many other scholars. These included his professor at Berkeley, Hans Kelsen, whose Principles of International Law. He brought out in a new edition in 1966, and Robert E. Osgood, with whom he wrote the classic study Force, Order, and Justice (1967).
He also co-authored three books with David C. Hendrickson, including The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence (1982) and Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (1990). His last book was Woodrow Wilson and the Great War (2007).
Tucker wrote numerous essays for Commentary, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. He was president from 1982 to 1987 of The Lehrman Institute, a think tank devoted to foreign policy, and was a founding editor, with Owen Harries, of The National Interest, a leading foreign policy journal which began publication in 1985. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.
He considered himself a foreign policy realist, not a neoconservative. He was both a scholar of great intellectual integrity and an iconoclast; more than once he took a view that struck at the heart of some prevailing consensus. His work was distinguished by philosophic depth and a dogged determination to get at the truth of things. As his colleague George Liska recalled, he wrote with a "stylistic elegance in the great classical tradition."
Tucker moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, after his retirement from Johns Hopkins in 1990. He was, or rather became, a man of austere habits, confining himself to one Bloody Mary and one smoke per day. He loved tennis. One secret to Bob's longevity was walking three miles on Atalaya Mountain in back of his home in Santa Fe, which he did daily until a few years before his death. His ashes are to be scattered there.
He is survived by his wife Judith R. Seltzer, their daughter Katherine R. Tucker, and her husband Blake Jensen; by two sons from a previous marriage to Joan Jordan, who died in 1983-Peter A. Tucker, his wife Sabine H. Tucker and their children Sylvere, Anne-Laure and Jordan, and Robert J. Tucker and his wife Bonnie B. Binder.