E-Notes

Michael Radu: In Memoriam

by Harvey Sicherman

 

March 2009

Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of FPRI and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state.

Michael Radu died suddenly on March 25, 2009, a month short of his sixty-second birthday. He had a book about to be published, another in manuscript, and a third in proposal. His February 2009 E-Note on Sri Lanka had been highly acclaimed for its incisive conclusions about terrorism, human rights, and morality. He went out on a high note, albeit a tragic one. Had Michael a choice, I am sure he would have preferred this theme.

I got to know him well after assuming the presidency of FPRI in 1993. What struck me, and surely others, was indeed Michael’s unusual combination of high intellect and lingering sense of tragedy. Some mistook this for pessimism. It was not. It was something that others have noticed to be rare in Americans, namely, the knowledge that things could go very wrong. He knew all about things going wrong.

Michael was born in Romania but his mother had been born in Rockford, Illinois. His grandparents were Romanian emigrants but his parents saw no future in the United States and returned to their home country. Michael’s privilege, as he remarked sardonically, was to grow up in a place—Transylvania—that Americans associated with the vampire Dracula. Then he would add: Romania did have a vampire but his name was Ceausescu.

Being an American citizen by birth, Michael managed, as he wrote, “to emigrate from Ceausescu’s Romania, leaving behind a thick Securitate (secret police) file.” This should not have surprised anyone. He had majored in history and philosophy, had a side interest in medieval thinkers and gothic art, and mastered several languages. All of this knowledge, incidentally, he wore very lightly: That is, unless you ventured an erroneous opinion on one of those subjects.

This background, no doubt, gave him his keen nose for the ideas and intellectual traps that, in his view, led straight to a totalitarian ideology. Living as he did in the twilight of Eastern European communism, he knew too how the vaporings of intellectuals often covered personal and political corruption.

You can imagine, of course, the new immigrant making his way in Columbia University, of all places, among the votaries of the New Left. Michael found that many professors saw anti-communism as the enemy. This did not stop his condemnation of communism or his interest in the political pathologies particularly of the Third World. In May 1981, he was hired part-time at FPRI because the then director, Nils Wessell, was looking for a man of his background. He soon became full-time.

By Michael’s own account, he never really left the field of his youth, namely, Marxist-Leninist studies. He focused, however, not on the theories which he derided as simplistic but rather the practice. And the essence of the practice was political violence.

Michael was not an armchair intellectual. He loved to travel but he traveled with a purpose. Over his years at FPRI, he managed to visit over forty countries including a stint as an election monitor in Cambodia for, of all organizations, the UN! This last excursion offered a wonderful store of anecdotes, each with the triple themes of incompetence, corruption, and inefficiency.

I could describe Michael’s intellectual curiosity this way: if he saw a suspicious rock, then he hastened to see what was beneath it. This made him a walking encyclopedia of the politically violent, beginning with Latin America but in recent years covering Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. He looked less at political science and more at sociology and history for his understanding of people and events. Michael established a far-flung network of experts in the field and he was the indispensable co-chairman of our Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Empirical evidence told him that, like the Leninist vanguard, middle- and upper-class types made the violence and the revolutions even in less developed countries. It did not surprise him to find that the Osama bin Ladens of this world were of similar backgrounds, their Islamism notwithstanding. It did not surprise him either that most Western analysts busied themselves with “structural violence” and “root causes.” The American Left, he observed, knows the reality of the third world but refuses to understand it while the American conservatives confused desire—as in, all people want democracy—with the facts on the ground.

That brings us to a well-known facet of Michael’s personality. He enjoyed arguments! He liked to dispute, sometimes inch by inch, not just line by line. His writings—at least in draft—were full of what I call “drive by shootings” as his prose moved gradually toward the main engagement. And many of those he shot richly deserved it.

We had a little riff together, Michael and I, on his tendency to argue. I would greet him: “Michael, good morning! The sun is shining outside.” He would reply with a little, skeptical smile: “Are you sure?”

Fourteen books bear his name, the most recent forthcoming Europe’s Ghost: Islamism and Jihad in West Europe (Encounter). His articles take up four pages in the extended biography in our files. All of it is indispensable reading for an understanding of our times. And all of it testifies to his love of America and defense of free societies.

Michael leaves us now. He was agnostic about religion so you might say he has embarked on the ultimate research project, the results of which each of us will have to discover for ourselves. But there was nothing uncertain about Michael the man, the devoted son of Anna, and loving husband of Patricia, our colleague and our friend. In our mind’s eye, there will always be Michael with his smile, and the question we must always ask of our scholarship: Are you sure?

Rest in Peace. And May Your Memory Be Our Blessing.

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