Those Crazy Kagans, America's Most War-Lovingest Family

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Those Crazy Kagans, America's Most War-Lovingest Family
by Gregg Gordon | April 6, 2008 - 7:42pm


If you're a devoted C-Span viewer like me, you've witnessed a blurrying parade of people named Kagan stomp across your screens the past few years. They show up at endless forums sponsored by neocon front groups like the American Enterprise Institute. Their Wall Street Journal op-eds are read on the Washington Journal morning call-in show. And at this point, network founder Brian Lamb has hosted the entire brood on his Sunday night Q&A interview show.

And since I started learning about them, I have to confess to the guilty pleasure of never missing an appearance. I see the name Kagan on the schedule, and I set aside the time. I like horror movies, and I like the Kagans. Besides, how can you not be fascinated by a Jewish family whose theme song seems to be Onward, Christian Soldiers?

Donald is the scion of the family. If the Kagans were the model for the old family sit-comFather Knows Best, Donald would be Robert Young. An immigrant from Lithuania, Donald is a professor of history at Yale and has a distinguished academic pedigree. Among the books he has authored over the past 40 years are The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, The Archimadean War, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, and The Peloponnesian War (not enough bloodshed in the outbreak, I guess). Books that don't have the word "war" in the title include The Fall of the Athenian Empire (I think there was a war involved in that), and While America Sleeps, a clarion call to increase spending for war, co-written with son Frederick.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Donald's "Origins of War" course is one of the most popular at Yale (spiced up now, no doubt, by personal family stories), and his seminars focus on topics like Thucydides (war) and Spartan Hegemony (more war).

Oh yes -- he was also a member of the justly notorious Project for a New American Century, the geniuses who first decided it would be a good idea to send our army charging into Iraq. But for the most part, Donald restricts his fascination with slaughter to events of 2,000 years ago. Unfortunately, he reproduced.

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