Huntington biography

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His service as President of Congress during the war years helped maintain governmental continuity during the nation’s most challenging period.

Samuel Huntington was born in the town of Scotland, Windham County, Connecticut on July 5, 1731, the 4th of ten children, and second son of Nathaniel Huntington and Mehetable Thurston.

He then served in the U.S. Army before enrolling at the University of Chicago, where he earned his master's degree. Not an alarmist, nor a defeatist, Huntington was a steady, faithful, calm patriot, well respected and admired by his colleagues.

In 1970 he co-founded Foreign Policy magazine. Before his death, he expressed the hope that he would be remembered for his patriotism and faith. Maryland then agreed, and ratified the Articles on March 1, 1781.

On March 2, Huntington wrote to each of the 13 states as follows: “By the Act of Congress herewith enclosed your Excellency will be informed that the Articles of Confederation & perpetual Union between the thirteen United States are formally & finally ratified by all the states.

The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most.”

His 1991 book, “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century” – another highly influential work – won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and “looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime – democracy or dictatorship – did matter,” said Dominguez.

He helped transform thirteen squabbling colonies into a functioning confederation, presided over Congress when the survival of the revolution hung in the balance, and later championed the Constitution that would create a more perfect union. The State Department report anticipated Huntington’s second major work, also published in 1968, Political Order in Changing Societies.

He did, however, accept election and a return to the Congress in the July 1783 session in time to see the success of the revolution, when the definitive Treaty of Peace was concluded in Paris on September 3 of that year.

In 1785, Samuel Huntington was selected as Lieutenant Governor of the State of Connecticut, serving under Governor Matthew Griswold, and the following year he was elected Governor.

It questioned the U.S. policy of promoting rural development in Vietnam, instead blaming “the absence of an effective structure of authority” for Viet Cong gains. “Over the years, he mentored a large share of America’s leading strategic thinkers, and he built enduring institutions of intellectual excellence.”

And Putnam added a personal note.

It was the subject of a West Point symposium last year, on the 50th anniversary of its publication.

In part, “Soldier and the State” was inspired by President Harry Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur – and at the same time praised corps of officers that in history remained stable, professional, and politically neutral.

In 1964, he co-authored, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Political Power: USA-USSR,” which was a major study of Cold War dynamics – and how the world could be shaped by two political philosophies locked in opposition to one another.

Brzezinski, a doctoral student at Harvard in the early 1950s who was befriended by both Huntington and Rosovsky, was U.S.

National Security Adviser in the Carter White House from 1977 to 1981. However, it was his book "Clash of Civilizations," published in 1996, that brought him global recognition. From 1977 to 1978, he served as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. He argued that in a post-Cold War world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nation states, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.

Huntington, who was the Albert J.

Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, identified these major civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese, and “Sinic” (including China, Korea, and Vietnam).

“My argument remains,” he said in a 2007 interview with Islamica Magazine, “that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states.”

Huntington first advanced his argument in an oft-cited 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs.

All the states had ratified this document at the time of Huntington’s Presidency, except Maryland. and Timothy Mayo Huntington of Boston; by his daughters-in-law Kelly Brown Huntington and Noelle Lally Huntington; and by his four grandchildren.

There will be a private family burial service on Martha’s Vineyard, where Huntington summered for 40 years.

In the spring, there will be a memorial service at Harvard.

He then moved to Harvard University, where, at age 23, a year before submitting his doctorate, he was appointed a junior member of the faculty in the Department of Government.