Robert S. Leiken, a prominent political scientist whose scholarship shaped the national debate and policy decisions on the Nicaraguan Contra war of the 1980s, died June 7 at a hospital in Boston. He was 78.
The cause was complications from neuro-Behcet’s disease, an inflammatory disorder, said his son, Benjamin Leiken.
Leiken occupied an unusually fraught position in Washington’s think-tank firmament, where analysts and political provocateurs typically battle along strict ideological and party lines. His institutional affiliations were broad — from the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University to the Brookings Institution and the Center for the National Interest — but his loyalty, as he saw it, was not to party or prevailing wisdom but to the facts on the ground.
Coming of age in the ferment of Vietnam and the ’60s counterculture, he organized teach-ins and antiwar demonstrations in Massachusetts; turned toward an anti-imperialist, Maoist strain of socialism as a labor organizer in Mexico in the 1970s; and emerged as one of the unlikeliest proponents of Nicaragua’s conservative-aligned Contra revolutionaries in the 1980s.
“I don’t get invited to weddings any more,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1985, amid a national debate over funding the Contras’ war against the left-wing Sandinista government. “Some people on the left, from my days in the antiwar movement, have never forgiven me.”
Leiken broke with many of his friends and allies in October 1984, when he published “Nicaragua’s Untold Stories,” a cover story in the traditionally liberal New Republic magazine. A recent visit to Latin America, he wrote, “convinced me that the situation is far worse than I had thought.” The ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front was decadent and corrupt, he said, and Nicaragua’s peasants were oppressed and starving.
The story came as a bombshell in Washington, where Leiken was known as a liberal member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and where the Ronald Reagan administration was pressing Congress to approve funding for the Contras. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, had the article entered into the Congressional Record, and Reagan referred to Leiken by name in an address.
Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, who went on to orchestrate the secret sale of weapons to Iran in an effort to support the Contras, also began cultivating a friendship with Leiken and three other longtime liberals. The group, which included speechwriter Bernard Aronson, lobbyist Bruce Cameron and activist Penn Kemble, became known as the Gang of Four for their role in persuading moderate Democrats to support the Contras.
Leiken continued traveling to Nicaragua, where he developed close relationships with some Contra leaders, alienated others (a sign bearing the words “Robert Leiken es non grato” was spotted at one camp), and joined Les Aspin, D-Wisconsin, on a tour of the country.
While some questioned Leiken’s motives and accuracy, at times accusing him of inflating the extent of wrongdoing by the Sandinistas, the effect of his and his colleagues’ efforts was indisputable: Congress granted $27 million in nonmilitary aid for the Contras in 1985 and one year later approved an additional $100 million.
By the time the conflict ended in 1990, both the Contras and the Sandinistas were accused of widespread human-rights violations, and by some estimates more than 30,000 Nicaraguans had been killed.
“When the history of the American debates over Nicaragua is written,” the New Republic proclaimed in a 1986 editorial, Leiken and the Gang of Four “will be found to have transformed both public discussion and public policy.”
In a post last week for the website PJ Media, historian Ronald Radosh went further. Leiken, he said, “was undoubtedly the single most important person outside of the administration to make Americans aware of the Sandinista government’s agenda to institute a Cuban-type repressive communist state in Nicaragua.”
Robert Solin Leiken was born in Manhattan on March 19, 1939. His father owned a company that manufactured sport coats, and his mother was a homemaker.
Leiken grew up in Great Neck, New York, and graduated from the private Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts before attending Harvard University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1961 and a master’s degree in history three years later.
Leiken received a doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford in 2000. Three years later, he published his thesis as a book, “Why Nicaragua Vanished.”
The work chastised journalists for effectively missing the story in Nicaragua and for working under a liberal, “post-Vietnam paradigm” that caused them to ignore abuses occurring under the Sandinista government. Leiken was also among the few observers who correctly predicted an electoral defeat for the Sandinistas in 1990.
He later turned to the subjects of immigration and radical Islam, notably in a 2007 Foreign Affairs article that angered the conservative establishment with its description of the Muslim Brotherhood as moderate. His 2011 book “Europe’s Angry Muslims,” which criticized Britain, France and Germany for failing to properly integrate Muslim immigrants, was praised by the Economist as “a trenchant indictment of European policies.”
His marriage to Katherine Robbins ended in divorce. Survivors include their sons Benjamin Leiken and Samuel Leiken, both of San Francisco; and a brother, Samuel Leiken of Washington.
At the time of his death, Leiken was working on a memoir at his home in Dracut, Massachusetts. Promising a tongue-in-cheek summation of his career, the book was tentatively titled, “How I Lost All My Friends.”