Eugene R. Wittkopf, professor emeritus of political science at Louisiana State University, passed away suddenly on September 18, 2006. He was 63 years old. Gene was a native of Algona, Iowa and received his B.A. from Valparaiso University in 1965, and his M.P.A and his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 1966 and 1971, respectively. He started his academic career at the University of Florida, where he taught for 17 years. In 1987, he moved to Louisiana State University, where he taught until his retirement in 2005. Gene Wittkopf was an extraordinary scholar and teacher and a wonderful colleague and mentor.
As a scholar and teacher, he leaves an important legacy for generations of students and teachers in the study of international politics and foreign policy. His seminal textbooks on foreign policy and international politics filled important pedagogical gaps, and their widespread adoptions attest to their quality and timelessness. Along with Charles W. Kegley, Jr., he authored numerous editions of World Politics, a text that remains a standard in the field to this day. His co-authored American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process, now in its seventh edition, is a standard text as well. Indeed, when American Foreign Policy first appeared, it was considered a real treasure-trove of information and insight for students and instructors. Importantly, too, this text reminded us of the importance of domestic factors in explaining American foreign policy. Further, Gene was the inspiration for, and the editor of, what has now become a standard foreign policy reader, The Domestic Sources of American Foreign Policy: Insights and Evidence. That reader filled a real need for a generation of foreign policy analysts and instructors, and, it turns out, foreign policy practitioners—who made ready use of this volume to keep tabs on the public pulse! The fifth edition of that volume is in the works, and it will be a fitting tribute to Gene's memory. In addition, his co-edited Global Agenda and The Future of American Foreign Policy (with a fourth edition forthcoming) also left important imprints on the profession.
Gene also made important, indeed seminal, contributions to our understanding of public opinion and foreign policy. Through his careful and sophisticated analyses of the quadrennial Chicago Council on Foreign Relations surveys over the years, he unambiguously demonstrated both the structure and stability of American public opinion on foreign policy issues. His discovery that the American public is divided along two continua, cooperative internationalism and militant internationalism, and that the intersection of these two continua produce a fourfold classification of belief systems among the American public challenged conventional wisdom at the time. Although Gene developed the classification with public opinion data from the Cold War era, it has stood up well through the turbulent years since. While these analyses appeared in the key journals of the profession over the years, they are perhaps best summarized in his highly influential book, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy. That volume remains required reading for all students of public opinion and foreign policy to this day.
For all these scholarly achievements, Gene was rightly recognized by his department, his university, and the profession. In 1994, he was awarded the R. Downs Poindexter Endowed Professor of Political Science. In 1997, he was named the 1996 Distinguished Research Master of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences by Louisiana State University. In 2002, he was recognized with the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the International Studies Association. Furthermore, at the time of Gene's retirement from LSU in 2005, the Louisiana House and Senate passed a joint resolution honoring him for his service to the university, profession, and state.
As a colleague, Gene was always active and involved in assisting other scholars, serving his home institutions, and supporting the wider profession. For the profession, he was appointed to the editorial boards of seven leading journals in political science, served as president of the International Studies Association-South, and regularly participated in numerous professional societies, including the Academy of Political Science, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, and the Southern Political Science Association, among others. For his home institutions, he chaired or served on committees for numerous graduate students at both Florida and LSU, and his students continue to contribute to this day. In addition, he found time to be actively involved in campus governance at LSU and made important contributions right up to the time of his retirement.
On an interpersonal level, Gene was a generous mentor and friend. Indeed, I found him a real pleasure to work with. My fondest memory is the question that he often posed to me as I struggled to summarize an argument that I was trying to make: “What's the punch line, Jim?” That question turned out to be a wonderful learning experience for me, and I am certain that others have had similar experiences. Beyond the personal and professional support that Gene provided to those with whom he interacted, he loved to debate politics and often acknowledged that his best friends were those with whom he disagreed politically. Further, he grew up in Iowa listening to the St. Louis Cardinals, and no one could diminish his attachment to his beloved Cardinals! As such, it was appropriate that he was able to watch a couple of Cardinals games in St. Louis with his son last summer, proudly wearing, I hope, the authentic Cardinals cap that I gave him upon his retirement. He would have been so proud of his Cardinals' World Series success this past October.
Eugene R. Wittkopf will be dearly missed, but he will never be forgotten because of his spirit, his determination, and the human decency that he brought to everything he did and to everyone that he met. He leaves behind his loving wife, Barbara, his mother, Edna, his daughter, Debra and her husband, Jason, his son, Jonathan and wife, Randee, his new granddaughter, Katie—and a grateful profession for his seminal contributions to our knowledge of foreign policy and international politics.
P.S.
I am grateful to my friend Jim McCormick for taking the lead in writing this tribute in memoriam for my treasured friend Gene Wittkopf. As the co-author of 27 books, three scholarly articles, and many chapters in anthologies, I would like to add a postscript. Throughout our 35 years of collaboration, Gene continually insisted that I keep my drafts of our publications brief, and he always found ways to cut the manuscripts I submitted for his critical review. In the past, I never managed to meet his goals. This is my last chance, so here in this statement is my best effort to write for our profession a brief and concise tribute.
I first met Gene Wittkopf in 1969 when we were doctoral students together in the international relations program in the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He stood out immediately, and this is a considerable compliment inasmuch as our small graduate program included such successful scholars as John Clark, Alan Gitelson, David Hopkins, Lew Howell, George Lopez, John Outland, Ken Oye, Martin Rochester, Steven Rosen, Donna Shalala, John Vasquez, and Ron Weber. I then sensed that Gene was destined to become a star, and that certainly has proven to be the case. Gene was then ambitious, intellectually gifted, and dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Moreover, he came (like me) from a strong Lutheran background, and was thoroughly inculcated with the Protestant work ethic. This temperament led to a career that was fraught with productive scholarship at the highest levels of American political science. Gene's first publication as a graduate student in the APSR on the correlates of the allocation of U.S. foreign aid set a new path-breaking model for others to emulate, showing that evidence could be brought to bear on a subject that was heretofore reliant on subjective belief and impressionism. That faith in empiricism and rigor was to remain the signature of Gene's research throughout his career, and guided his innovative investigations of public opinion and foreign policy and other areas of inquiry where his publications often pushed the frontiers of knowledge.
But there is another side of Gene's record that needs to be highlighted. He was rare in his ability to bridge the gap between methodological rigor and policy relevance, in sophisticated ways that drew on theory and expanded it. His books on American foreign policy, nuclear weapons, world politics, the domestic sources of foreign policy, and the comparative study of foreign policy—those on which we collaborated—were all inspired by the quest to understand international politics and foreign policy informed by hard empirical data (social science at its best) and to use the generated findings to reinterpret conventional wisdoms in ways that would make for a better world. This was always Gene's mission. Gene Wittkopf's contributions in publications have exceeded these ambitious and noble objectives.
I am proud to have known Gene as both a friend and a prolific, professional, and perfectionist scholar, and will forever be appreciative of his contributions and friendship. Gene will be missed beyond words by me (and many others), and for this reason I am dedicating the 11th revised edition of World Politics to his loving memory.
Charles W. Kegley, Jr.
University of South Carolina
