CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On Foreign Travel

I started traveling to foreign countries when I was a young graduatestudent. My first trip abroad was in 1962 when I did research inJamaica, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The next year, stilla grad student, I visited Mexico and traveled overland up and downthe Isthmus of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,Belize, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. I lived for most of 1964 andpart of 1965 again in the Dominican Republic doing research formy doctoral dissertation which was the basis for my first publishedbooks on the Dominican revolution and U.S. military intervention of1965.

While my first several trips abroad were all on two- andfour-engine propeller planes, the early 1960s was the period whenmodern jet travel was coming into widespread use for the firsttime. Jet aircraft certainly facilitated the foreign travel that I andother scholars in the fields of international relations, comparativepolitics, and foreign policy wanted and needed to do. With jet travelnow becoming widespread, it soon became possible to be (almost)anywhere in the world in one day or one overnight.

In 1966 and 1968, as a (still) young assistant and then associateprofessor, I received grants from my university (the University ofMassachusetts) to travel all around Latin America. We (my wife andI) went back to the Dominican Republic, then visited Venezuela(where she had written her doctoral dissertation), Brazil (my wife'shome country), then Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, andPanama. In 1972 and then again in 1974, we retraced this route,focused particularly on the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, andBrazil, to complete a research project sponsored by the NationalInstitute of Health (NIH) on "The Politics of Population Policy inLatin America."

My own research and travel interests, meantime, had increasinglyfocused on Europe. We spent the 1972-73 academic year on sabbaticalleave in Portugal and Spain, and traveled extensively throughoutWestern Europe as well as North Africa. In 1974 and 1975 I wasback in Portugal as a policy adviser to the State Department on thePortuguese revolution. In 1977 I went to Israel to help train a newgeneration of young Israeli scholars, diplomats, and journalists onLatin America; on the way back, I did preliminary research in Greece,Italy, Spain, and Portugal on Southern European labor relations. In1979, on another year-long sabbatical, I completed the SouthernEuropean project and published a monograph on the subject.

Up to this point, my foreign travel itinerary was still quiteconventional for a young (still under forty) academic scholar. Between1962 and 1979, I'd gone on student junkets to the Caribbean,Mexico, and Central America; made several trips abroad as a youngfaculty member mainly to my areas of research specialization (LatinAmerica and Southern Europe); enjoyed two research sabbaticals asa young professor; and lived abroad for three out of those seventeenyears. During this period I arranged one trip abroad per year—butonly if you count Puerto Rico as being "abroad."

However, in 1979-80-81 all this changed; my life was alteredforever. In 1979 I was asked to join Harvard University's Center forInternational Affairs (CFIA) as a Research Associate and ResearchScholar. At Harvard I worked closely with Samuel Huntington,Stanley Hoffmann, Joseph Nye, Schmuel Eisenstadt, Daniel Bell,Sidney Verba, Gabriel Almond, and other academic luminaries. Ialso taught at MIT in the spring of 1980. Being at Harvard, I soondiscovered, enormously increases your prestige level and, therefore,also your opportunities to lecture, to contribute to anthologies, andto travel to far-off places.

Then in 1981, in part because of that Harvard connection, I wasinvited to join the American Enterprise Institute for Public PolicyResearch (AEI) as a Senior Scholar and foreign policy programdirector. Wow; Harvard, MIT, and AEI all within a two-year period.In those years, early-to-mid-1980s, of the Reagan Revolution, AEIwas flush with cash from its big donors; it was also viewed as the"idea factory" of the Reagan Administration. I had no teaching andprecious little administrative responsibilities at AEI, leaving abundanttime for research, writing, and foreign travel, mainly to Europe andLatin America. While at AEI in the 1980s, I also undertook my firsttrips to Asia: initially Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, andSingapore; later China, South Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, Macao,and India as well. My travel budget was virtually unlimited and it wasnot difficult to find a reason to go abroad. Instead of one trip a yearfrom my early academic years, I now started to average three or fourforeign trips a year.

My itinerary broadened as well. I went to places, and oftenat five-star levels, that I never would have gone to as an academic.Since I still had research interests in Mexico, Central America (thena hot issue), the Caribbean, and South America, one or another ofmy research projects would bring me there every year, usually in thewinter when Washington was snowy and cold. And since I now alsohad serious research interests in Europe as well, we'd find our waythere a couple of times a year, usually in the late spring or early fallwhen the weather was nice but the restaurants, streets, and gallerieswere not overrun with tourists, students, and backpackers. I shouldsay that all these trips also involved legitimate research interests orelse were done at the behest of AEI—for example, our work on behalfof the Kissinger Commission on Central America or our efforts toestablish ties with like-minded think tanks abroad. But what a lifeit was, involving numerous opportunities for travel. It could notlast, and it didn't; AEI went belly-up in 1987-88. And I returned tomy comfortable, tenured professorship at UMass and my researchposition at Harvard.

In 1991 lightning struck again; I received an appointment asProfessor of National Security Policy at the National War College,enabling me to return to Washington...