Stephen Graubard, 96, Journal Editor and Provocative Historian, Dies

The longtime editor of the intellectual journal Daedalus, he introduced numerous themed issues on matters like AIDS, libraries and Minnesota.

Image from article: Stephen R. Graubard in 2007. Credit...via Graubard family 

By Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, June 24, 2021 [original article contains additional links and an additional illustration.]

Stephen R. Graubard [jb see], the editor of the journal Daedalus for almost 40 years and a scholar best known for books on the presidency, died on May 27 at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.

His stepson William Georgiades announced his death.

Dr. Graubard, who taught for many years at Harvard University and then at Brown, could be provocative in his writings about the White House, which included the 2004 book “Command of Office: How War, Secrecy and Deception Transformed the Presidency, From Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush.” In that book, he argued that the presidency at the end of the 20th century was not at all what the Founders had imagined.

“An America that rebelled against the mother country,” he wrote in the preface, “imagining it would have no further truck with kings, courtiers or warriors, has since the beginning of the twentieth century known all, rarely so identified, but unmistakably recognizable as such.”

World events played a part in the expansion of the office, but so did complacency.

“The American democracy,” he wrote, “transformed in the course of the long twentieth century, takes its form today in very considerable measure because of what these presidents elected to do but also what public opinion allowed them to  do.”

As for the men who held the office, most left him unimpressed. John F. Kennedy, he wrote in World Affairs in 2009, “was perhaps the most overrated of the postwar presidents.” Bill Clinton’s legacy “proved insubstantial, made to appear considerable only by comparison with that of his successor.”

And that successor, George W. Bush? “The year 2001 began an eight-year presidential hiatus,” Dr. Graubard wrote, “a time of war and intellectual stagnation.”

In this 2004 book, Dr. Graubard argued that the presidency at the end of the 20th century was not at all what the Founders had imagined.

He gave Mr. Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, his own treatment in an unflattering 1992 book, “Mr. Bush’s War: Adventures in the Politics of Illusion.” But presidencies weren’t his only passion.

As editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he oversaw theme issues on a wide range of subjects, many of which were expanded into books edited or coedited by him.

“Books, Bricks and Bytes: Libraries in the 21st Century” (1998, coedited with Paul LeClerc), was inspired by the fact that, as Dr. Graubard wrote in the preface, “Libraries are today experiencing a technological revolution that goes well beyond anything that has existed since the invention of printing.” Its essayists, who included James H. Billington, [jb personal note: one of my dissertation advisers while he was still at Princeton] the librarian of Congress, examined the transformations underway at libraries both in the United States and abroad.

“Minnesota, Real & Imagined: Essays on the State and Its Culture” (2000) was inspired by conversations he had with European acquaintances who told him that they knew a lot about the East and West Coasts of the United States but not much else.

Dr. Graubard was a frequent essayist himself, weighing in with strong opinions in journals and newspapers, and he was not shy about whom he took on. In a 1988 opinion essay in The New York Times, he challenged remarks made by William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan and a prominent conservative voice, who had attacked Stanford University over curriculum changes that Mr. Bennett thought slighted classic texts and traditional courses on Western civilization.

“The glory of our university system is that curriculum reformations occur regularly,” Dr. Graubard wrote, “that many have taken place in the last half century, that different institutions — all self-governing — have selected different curriculum paths, and that all this has happened without the stentorian interventions of Federal appointees.

“The supreme irony of today’s so-called debate is that if Western civilization can be characterized by a single attribute, it is its historic refusal to remain static, to accept tradition as inviolable.”

Stephen Richards Graubard was born on Dec. 5, 1924, in Brooklyn to Harry and Rose (Opolsky) Graubard. He served in the Army during World War II, then earned a bachelor’s degree at George Washington University in 1945 and a master’s degree the next year at Harvard. While earning his Ph.D. there in 1951, his fellow graduate students included Henry A. Kissinger; in 1973 he would make him the subject of a book, “Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind.”

Dr. Graubard began teaching at Harvard while still a graduate student and remained there until the mid-1960s, when he moved to Brown. He took emeritus status there in 1994.

He became editor of Daedalus in 1961. The theme issues he oversaw, featuring articles by leading scholars in a wide range of fields, might be as relatively timeless as “America’s Childhood” (1993), which featured essays on schools, the influence of television on children and other subjects. Or they might have the urgency of the headlines of the moment, as with a two-part exploration of “Living With AIDS” published in 1989 (whose writers included Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the architect of the nation’s AIDS relief program).

Dr. Graubard remained editor until 1999. In 1972 he married Margaret Cavendish-Bentinck Georgiades.

She died in 2010. In addition to William Georgiades, he is survived by another stepson, David Georgiades. 

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. @genznyt • Facebook 

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Image (not from article) of Daedalus and Icarus from;

 below text from Wikipedia

In Greek mythology, Icarus (/ˈɪkərəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἴκαρος, romanized: Íkaros, pronounced [ǐːkaros]) was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and Daedalus attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that Daedalus constructed from feathers and wax. Daedalus warns Icarus first of complacency and then of hubris, instructing him to fly neither too low nor too high, lest the sea's dampness clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignores Daedalus’s instructions not to fly too close to the sun. The wax in Icarus’s wings melts. He tumbles out of the sky, falls into the sea, and drowns. Thus sparking the idiom, "don't fly too close to the sun".