Recalling early years, Diamond talks about what matters to him
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is often tapped on campus, as well as by national news media and global governmental bodies alike for his perspective on Iraq, the spread of democracy and the rule of law, gave a more personal talk last Wednesday in the "What Matters to Me and Why?" series of the Office for Religious Life.
Diamond also is a professor, by courtesy, of political science and of sociology, as well as the author of several books, including Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq and the just-released The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World.
Yet, whatever personal insights Diamond's students, readers and peers may have gleaned from his works, Wednesday marked one of the few occasions to hear Diamond reveal the roots of his political and spiritual views.
It was a tale of a freshman entering Stanford during the 1969-70 academic year and soon after filing for conscientious-objector status because he didn't want to be drafted into a war he didn't support and that would likely snuff out his young life. Fast forward to 2004: That same man was standing in Baghdad, serving as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government installed soon after the invasion of Iraq.
Since then, Diamond has remained a strong denouncer of the Bush administration's efforts in Iraq while devoting himself here to the intellectual growth of tomorrow's leaders. Last year, Diamond was rewarded for that commitment by the university with the Dinkelspiel Award, and by the Associated Students, which named him Teacher of the Year.
"One of my students, a philosophy major, asked me this summer if I could change just one thing in the world, what would it be," Diamond recalled. "And I said—it didn't actually take me long to reply—that I would find the human gene for selfishness and see if I could correct it."
Although he was being somewhat facetious, Diamond used that incident to set the stage for his talk on what values he holds dear and how his beliefs were formed. Born six years after the end of World War II and coming of age during the Cold War, Diamond said he grew up hating Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union and communism, and loving democracy—and writing about all this in his diary before he was 10.
"I loved politics and ran for every office I could find, beginning in about the fifth grade," Diamond said. "My earliest political memories are of these visceral sentiments of an ongoing life-or-death struggle between democracy and tyranny."
Shortly before the Russian Revolution, Diamond's maternal grandparents fled the region and immigrated to America for a better and freer life, where they developed a Jewish "accent and mentality that blended two worlds."
Although raised in a Jewish household, Diamond said it wasn't intensely religious. He said his faith grew in Hebrew school and in the shadow of his grandfather, a deeply religious man whose own father had been a rabbi. Diamond's grandfather had throat cancer and was expected to die before his bar mitzvah.
Instead, the elderly figure he so admired held on and died shortly after. It was Diamond's first close experience with death, and tiny cracks in his faith began to form. As he grew older and his understanding of the world widened, so did the cracks: "I will tell you frankly, I was never satisfied with the answers religion gave me, and I am still not."
Diamond said the uncertainty used to trouble him, but no longer. He said his faith is guided by a moral compass that is calibrated according to the core values of the world's great religions; namely, truth, justice, freedom, equality, nonviolence, tolerance and mutual respect.
But Diamond also made the distinction that he isn't a pacifist, that he believes violence is justified in extreme instances when people must defend their "right to live by the core ethical values of any decent human society." He added, however, that "the burden of proof is heavily upon those who would ever propose to use violence to defend or secure those values."
With that, his talk returned to his freshman year at Stanford. Diamond said he was Republican then and had supported Richard Nixon the year before—"We're in true confession here!" Diamond quipped in response to chuckles in the crowd—in part because he thought Nixon would end the Vietnam War.
Then, as now, Diamond did not oppose all wars, and he was unsuccessful in exempting himself from the draft. But he drew a high number and was never picked. He also recalled spending nights and mornings in the office of the Associated Students to plan demonstrations and writing about them for the Stanford Daily, while "struggling to keep up with classes that I was often skipping for the cause."
Diamond vividly described being a part of a protest against Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. It was in the spring quarter of 1970, and violence broke out when a resident assistant in Diamond's freshman dorm hurled a large piece of red-tile roof at county sheriffs in riot gear who were arrayed in front of Old Union to stop a sit-in.
Witnessing that first salvo by the RA, Diamond—anguished but faithful to the law—testified before campus judicial authorities so as to hold the instigator accountable. "It was the worst moment of my freshman year, having to face him in that way," Diamond said. "I believe he did receive some punishment. He later became a United States congressman."
Diamond also watched as other friends were wrecked by drugs and said what got him through the overall turmoil of those years was "the hope and exhilaration in political action and struggle"—as a student and a citizen. He worked passionately on George McGovern's presidential campaign and was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic Convention.
Diamond said he was recruited by the Hoover Institution 22 years ago because of his scholarship and research projects on comparative democracy that he had been working on with other Hoover scholars. But even as he delved deeper into academia, Diamond said he retained "a love of politics and a belief that there is something profoundly validating and ennobling in working to realize, politically, the basic moral values I've spoken about here."
That sentiment summed up a constant subtext of a tale that took several twists and turns along the way to Diamond's present-day convictions, political and otherwise: the underlying theme of a man bent on making a difference.
Hence, in closing, Diamond said there is no higher calling than politics and public service, and he praised those who have gotten involved in the current presidential election, as well as students who have worked through the Haas Center, Stanford in Government or some other means "to serve the community, to engage the policy process and to learn about how government works."
He ended by quoting Bobby Kennedy, whom he despised when he was alive. But after Kennedy's assassination, Diamond said he began to read ravenously about the former U.S. attorney general and senator—and in doing so, developed a deep admiration for the man. The passage Diamond read was from Kennedy's speech to students at the University of Cape Town on June 6, 1966, two years before his assassination:
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he—"I'm sorry for the pronoun, it's a feature of the times," Diamond interjected—sends forth a tiny ripple of hope that, crossing each other, from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
