Walter Laqueur enjoys a well-deserved reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. Through his carefully crafted books and essays, Laqueur has guided students through some of the most turbulent developments of the past century. For Walter Laqueur is not simply a scholar devoted to the painstaking process of collecting all that is relevant to explaining and analyzing the events that have shaped the modern world, he is also a writer who understands the power of words and how to weave them into a lucid and moving narrative. The Best of Times, The Worst of Times explains the sources of Laqueur’s interest in political affairs and how that interest has unfolded throughout his life. He begins with his early experiences in a Germany gripped by the delusion that Nazism would save the country from its post World War I trauma. But Laqueur’s lifetime of reflection, research, and writing has led him to acknowledge the many layers of influence shaping his understanding of politics. For one, the memory of his life as a young boy in Breslau is connected with the adventure stories he read during those years. For another, his birth in interwar Germany where his family resided gave Laqueur entry into a cultural world of classical music and literature. That cultural world stayed with him as an immigrant in Mandate Palestine and accompanied him on his intellectual odyssey in Great Britain and the United States.

For Laqueur, there seems to be a deep relationship not only between culture and politics, but also between culture and how to unpack the many elements in any political development. Thus, his recollections of the wisdom he gathered from texts expanded with the insight derived from the many friendships he forged with the political activists who wrote some of the articles he read as a student. He has a remarkable awareness of how reason and emotion, common sense and irrationality can conjure up recurring cycles of violence and tragedies that no politics has ever been able to eradicate. Thus, explaining the Cold War meant overcoming ideological blinders and fully possessing the knowledge of the historical mainsprings that shaped this confrontation. Hence, in trying to read the signs of what were to become increasingly dark and troubled times, Walter Laqueur had to work through all sorts of troubling inconsistencies.

There is no doubt that during the Cold War the West and above all the United States made mistakes, big and small. And I mean not only half-baked adventures like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 by U.S.-backed exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro. Vietnam, too, was a mistake; I never understood why America should be in Vietnam….But, on essentials, however, the West was right. Soviet aggression had to be resisted. [Pages 76-77]

At a time when the ideologies of Nazism and Communism not only shaped power struggles in Germany but also defined the fault lines of international relations, Laqueur was initially and some might say, quite naturally drawn to the study of the Soviet Union and its Russian historical context. He eventually came to understand the devotion to Marxism as a kind of religious zeal that could not be discounted as a factor instructing, energizing, and directing political action. For this reason, he believed that people as much as ideologies matter in actual politics. His histories, informed by thorough investigation of the archival records, are equally sensitive to the ideas and convictions that seemed to matter to the people as well as to their leaders. Laqueur’s depiction of the interplay of ideology and personality is one the most intriguing features of this remarkable memoire. Steeping himself in the Hebrew University’s collection of Marxist periodicals, Laqueur began to understand the attraction of these ideas to certain classes of people some of whom he met and some with whom he interacted. In his words,

Much writing about politics is tendentious. But there was something different in the Communist literature, a systematic disregard for truth that undermined the claims of the movement itself. But there was also much more. Reading the Russian émigré literature, I found that some was raving mad: I refer to the writings about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of giant conspiracy theories involving Jews, Freemasons, and what not. But I also found that some of the critics of Bolshevism were far more astute in their political analysis and prediction than others. [Page 70]

The end of the Cold War did not usher in an era of peace and tranquility. Read Laqueur’s collections on terrorism and you will discover the reasons for there is a literature celebrating violence as a strategy for liberation that reaches back to antiquity. Laqueur shows that poverty, wide gaps between rich and poor, between the powerful and powerless have led people in every age to think of state institutions as the problem rather than the solution to these difficulties. Even before the glorification of jihad and the creation of an Islamist discourse of war against infidels, there were writers furnishing activists with an intellectual and presumably moral architecture for violence that offered justification for attacks against the powers of the state. Ideas, as Laqueur would be quick to emphasize, have consequences long after their adherents are dead and buried.

Laqueur’s fearful anticipation of the future is very personal and deep when he writes about Israel, a country still subjected to repeated calls for its extinction. Recognizing that Israel has moved so fast that the experiences of past generations have little meaning for the next, he worries that even in this oldest and newest of nations, history is becoming less relevant. While earlier leaders met the challenges confronting the country from the Arab States, the current crop of politicians, he suggests, are not quite equal to the task of finding a way out of the problems generated from the great military victory of June 1967 which left Israel occupying the West Bank and without a clear vision for peace with the Palestinians or a pathway for managing the violence.

Finally, I must note that it is not without irony that a political scientist is writing a review that expresses such admiration for the work of Walter Laqueur since Laqueur, himself, has little regard for this academic discipline. But just as there are times when our knowledge of history provides the wrong lessons for actions in the present so there are occasions when political scientists are not so much concerned with predicting the future course of developments as simply understanding them.

Donna Robinson Divine
Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies
and Professor of Government
Smith College