Jun 02 2008
William Odom, 1932-2008
William Odom has just died.
He was a giant of our field, but he was more than that to me. I did my Ph.D in Soviet military history at a school (Yale) that didn’t have anything you could describe as a program in Soviet military history. As a result, I was enormously fortunate in my fellow graduate students, and particularly in more senior scholars who were willing to form an advising kollektiv of wonderful helpfulness and flexibility–Jeff Burds, Paul Bushkovitch, Paul Kennedy, and . . . William Odom.
Though Odom was a political scientist, and a career military man, he was tremendously giving of his time and support to me and to a number of other graduate students headed through Yale. What struck me most, particularly in comparison to other academics, was Odom’s fearlessness. It’s always seemed to me that the professoriate as a group has startlingly little to fear. Once we’re tenured, provided we manage to keep our hands off the undergrads, we are cursed with a living wage, near complete control over how we apply our time and energy, and the privilege of reading and talking and writing about subjects we love, not to mention job security unheard of in other walks of life.
What I always marvel at, though, is how many academics seem to be pathologically afraid of what people might think of them if they were to say the wrong thing, hold the wrong view, offend the wrong scholar. What’s the worst that could happen? We keep the great deal we’ve already got?
Odom never cared. He was always willing to say precisely what he thought, blunt but never vindictive, and I found (and find) that inspiring. My fondest memories of him are sitting in his borrowed office at Yale and hearing his precisely expressed conclusions, accompanied by a cheshire-cat grin, a hyena-like laugh, and a well-chewed cigar.
I’ll have more to say on a couple of issues that have particularly stayed with me: his model of Soviet civil-military relations, his interpretation of the eternal problems of Russian history, and his magnus opus on the collapse of the Soviet military. But that’s for another day. For now, I’m sorry he’s gone, and I miss him.