STRAUSZ-HUPÉ, Robert 1903-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born March 25, 1903, in Vienna, Austria; died of a stroke and cardiovascular disease February 24, 2002, in Newtown Square, PA. Diplomat, political scientist, educator, and author. During the years of the cold war, Strausz-Hupé was a strong critic of Soviet communism and a firm believer that the United States should support European efforts to unite against Soviet encroachments into Eastern Europe. From that perspective, he served as a foreign policy advisor to Republican presidential candidates in the 1960s. Strausz-Hupé also believed in the power of diplomacy; he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the Maldives in 1970; assignments to Belgium, Sweden, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Turkey followed until his retirement in the late 1980s. Despite his hard line against communism, he was described as an effective representative of American attempts at compromise and conciliation. Strausz-Hupé had begun teaching political science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1940; he founded and directed the Foreign Policy Research Institute there from 1955 to 1969 and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1992 he was named a distinguished fellow of the United States Institute for Peace. Strausz-Hupé shared his conservative political views in several books, including Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power, published in 1942 and one of the first volumes to treat the new concept of "geopolitics". Other books include Power and Community, The Estrangement of Western Man, and The Zone of Indifference, all published in the 1950s, as well as a memoir, In My Time, published in 1965, and Democracy and American Foreign Policy: Reflections on the Legacy of Alexis de Tocqueville, published in 1995.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Strausz-Hupé, Robert, In My Time, Norton (New York, NY), 1965.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2002, p. B11.

New York Times, February 26, 2002, obituary by Paul Lewis, p. A25.

Times (London, England), March 13, 2002.

Washington Post, February 25, 2002, obituary by Louie Estrada, p. B6.