Remembering Joe Nye: A Letter from Tarek Masoud

Dear Friends of the Middle East Initiative,

By now you have all heard the sad news that Joe Nye, former dean of the Kennedy School, former State and Defense department official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and originator of the concept of "soft power," has left us. I am proud to have been Joe’s colleague on the Kennedy School faculty for 17 years, but I cannot claim to have been personally close to him. In fact, if you told me that the sum total of my one-on-one conversations with him did not exceed 17 minutes, you would not be that far off. I’m not sure why that was—likely because I was too in awe of him to invite him to lunch. But when I was at my lowest, Joe did me a kindness that I will never forget, which was eloquent of his remarkable quality as a human being, and which is why I count myself among the countless people who are genuinely mourning this great man today. I hope you will permit me to pay homage to his memory by sharing the story with you.

Last February, Harvard was (as it is now) under attack for how our students, faculty, and leadership were responding to the tragedies of October 7th. Former President Claudine Gay had just been grilled before a congressional committee for what Congresswoman Elise Stefanik argued was a failure to confront anti-Semitism on campus, and social media was aflame with recriminations against the institution for either being too anti-Israeli (as evidenced by student demands for divestment from the Jewish state) or too pro-Israeli (as evidenced by our refusal to comply with those demands). I became a minor part of the controversy when I invited to our Middle East Dialogues series a Palestinian scholar who it was later discovered had tweeted some unconscionable things about Hamas' atrocities. Though I deplored what she had said, I opted not to disinvite her, and the opprobrium to which I was subjected—within Harvard and without—made my life rather lonely and unpleasant for a couple of weeks. 

It just so happened that, around this time, Joe was being feted at the Council on Foreign Relations on the occasion of the publication of his memoir, A Life in the American Century. The celebration included a fireside chat with former Harvard Corporation member David Rubenstein. In the Q&A period, Joe was asked to comment on the controversies then roiling our university. In his typically judicious and measured fashion, Joe said that he worried that some of the attacks against the University were being made cynically by those who wished principally to silence views with which they disagreed. "The danger I see," he said, "is that we lose … the characteristic [of the University] which is most important, which is freedom of speech and independent analysis." He continued in this vein for a bit, and then said he wanted to make one final point:

"We have a Egyptian-origin, an Egyptian American professor at the Kennedy School, Tarek Masoud, who has organized a series of speakers, Palestinian and Israeli. And he’s been widely criticized for having some Palestinians who are radical. But I attended a meeting two weeks ago that he had, which had Israelis, Palestinians, Saudis in the same room. And while they didn’t agree with each other, they had what you could call a reasonable discourse. That’s what a university should be about."

You can watch the intervention here. Like I said, I did not have much of a personal relationship with Joe, so I was profoundly moved that he would take a moment during his victory lap to express solidarity with me at a time when others whom I considered close friends were studiously (and understandably) maintaining a prudent distance. When I found out about what Joe had said, I dashed off a hasty but sincere note of appreciation that only dimly reflected the bottomless well of gratitude I felt—and still feel—toward him for that extraordinary, but extraordinarily characteristic, act of gentlemanliness. 

After that episode, I was lucky enough to have a few actual conversations with Joe, including one about marriage, after he lost his wife of 63 years, Molly Harding Nye, last December. I never fully made up for lost time, but I at least had a chance to experience directly some of his warmth, wisdom, and profound humanity.

What turned out to be my final encounter with Joe took place just last week, when we both attended a talk on Saudi Arabia by the wonderful Karen Elliot House. At one point, Karen was reminiscing on the genesis of her long and fruitful association with the Kennedy School, which came, she said, "back when Joe Nye was the boss." 

"He's still the boss," I quipped. 

Everyone, including Joe, laughed. 

I cannot exaggerate the extraordinary sense of contentment bordering on joy that I feel at knowing that that was the last thing I said within earshot of the magnificent and heroic Joseph Samuel Nye, Jr. 

Rest in peace, Joe. You’ll always be the boss.

Tarek Masoud