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RIP Robert Leiken

Jack Hays

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The man who exposed the Sandinistas as the oppressors they were.




Robert Leiken, political scientist whose scholarship bucked party lines, dies at 78


His criticism of Nicaragua’s leftist regime shocked liberals and boosted Ronald Reagan.





Robert S. Leiken, a prominent political scientist whose scholarship shaped the national debate and policy decisions on the Nicaraguan contra war of the 1980s, died June 7 at a hospital in Boston. He was 78.
The cause was complications from neuro-Behçet’s disease, an inflammatory disorder, said his son Benjamin Leiken.
Mr. Leiken (pronounced LAY-kin) occupied an unusually fraught position in Washington’s think-tank firmament, where analysts, thought leaders and political provocateurs typically battle along strict ideological and party lines. His institutional affiliations were broad — including the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University; the Brookings Institution; and the Center for the National Interest — but his loyalty, as he saw it, was not to a party or prevailing wisdom but to facts.
Coming of age in the ferment of Vietnam and the 1960s counterculture movement, he organized teach-ins and antiwar demonstrations in Massachusetts; turned toward an anti-imperialist, Maoist strain of socialism as a labor organizer in Mexico in the 1970s; and emerged as one of the unlikeliest proponents of Nicaragua’s conservative-aligned contra revolutionaries in the 1980s. . . .


 
The most interesting political people around are those who grew up in one political tradition, and then moved to the other side, especially when they critique their former ideas -- assuming they're thoughtful, well-read people who have a deep knowledge of both their former and current political views.
 
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