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Those of us who were Stanley’s students, as I was 53 years ago, then his teaching assistant a year later, then his colleague and friend, and even a successor of sorts at CES, have tried to nail down what made him extraordinary. Yes, the intelligence, the brilliant lecturing with its capacity to organize the furthest ranges of political ideas, the probing dialogues with his seminar guests, but also the generosity and encouragement. When the History Department was releasing me from service in the early 1970s, Stanley sought without my asking to nominate me for a professorship at SAIS; when I was finishing a book on empire a decade ago, he stopped in my office to say he’d heard that I was writing a great book. He wasn’t being merely ironic; it was an over-statement designed to acknowledge that earlier confidence had been justified. Beyond generosity, irony, and intellect, what I believe distinguished Stanley was the wisdom to live with the contradictions in people and situations. He was against the Vietnam War, but could discipline students whose frustrations he shared but whose protests violated the sanctuary of the University. He accommodated disagreement — we had a wonderful debate when I co-lectured with him perhaps twenty years ago; he thought my interpretation of 1968 was fundamentally wrong and told me so before the class, but he expected me to stand my ground. His world was one of ideas in constant contention, but the integrity of individuals persisted unless they sold out to power. That was why history had to be taken seriously, and why we all needed intellectual space to develop. When I think of him I am reminded of Georges Brassens’ “petit joueur de flûte, qui n’a pas trahi.” Of course he was no simple flute player but a great intellectual. All the more merit.
Charles Maier
everal years ago, while he still had all his wonderful qualities of intelligence and wry humor, Stanley told me a story about de Gaulle. The General, well into his term as president but before ’68, was confronting speculation about when he might retire. On a visit to the Jardin des Plantes, surrounded by a retinue of reporters, he was shown one of the huge lumbering Galapagos tortoises that tread through the garden and he pointedly asked how old the creature was. “Maybe 150 years, maybe 200.” “Just like a pet,” commented de Gaulle. “You become attached to them and they die.” Stanley fiercely admired de Gaulle, as de Gaulle admired Joan of Arc – as the exemplar of a France he loved. But there was never any doubt that Stanley was at home in the American republic: If American politics revealed intellectual limits, French inclusion, he taught us, ran up against social limits. The working class had not really been brought within the republican synthesis at the time I was a student. I cannot say how he would have reacted to the even harsher challenges today, but he would certainly have sought to combine realism about responses with precision about the problem.