I MOVED TO Ithaca, New York, in the fall of 1992 to enter Cornell’s PhD program in government. I had wanted to be a political science professor ever since Swarthmore. I hoped that getting away from Washington would help ease the political tensions with my mother, but the fact that I had chosen academia as my career path created new heartache because I was not, and would never be, the kind of radical activist academic she had hoped. A few months before I began my graduate studies, my mother wrote in her diary:
Part of me thinks that when he [Peter] studies more theory, becomes a student again, he will become “enlightened,” take a revolutionary point of view, but that’s not logical, because it’s just as likely he will take the “practical” approach to graduate school (i.e. become an opportunist, go with the flow, please his professors, and get published). Exactly where are the students studying Mao and Lenin, for instance? Never mind that they led the most successful struggles against capitalism and imperialism.
By my second year in grad school, my mother’s worst worries were confirmed. An August 1993 diary entry read: “Peter is not merely misinformed. He is consciously misinformed and I have to accept that he is no revolutionary. I do need to deal with my grief over this.” Another entry a month later: “He [Peter] says I’m simply grounded in faith and conviction, incapable of carrying on rational discourse. I said I would like to read the papers he’s writing, but I’m not sure he will send them to me.”
I didn’t realize then the extent to which my mother felt personally wounded by my mainstream academic career. In early August 1993, as she waited for me at the airport, she wrote: “I am nervous about our meeting. Maybe he is, too. I feel as if he’s hostile to me because of his own career trajectory, that he feels he has to either change me or disown me in order to be accepted by his peers. This is immensely painful.”
Although I would certainly never disown her, and had long given up trying to change her, I was tired of always feeling politically judged that I was never radical enough. As I gained more political self-confidence in graduate school, I pushed back more and more. I wanted a lot more security, comfort, and stability than she had ever provided for me when I was a child—in that sense, I was more like my father than my mother. But it’s hard to have your own mother consider you a sellout.
My mother became even more alarmed when my dissertation research took me back to Washington for a year to be based at the Brookings Institution, the quintessential establishment “think tank” inside the beltway. I had hoped my mother would be impressed that I had been offered a fellowship to facilitate the D.C.-based part of my research, but on the phone she said, “Brookings? Really? Isn’t that right wing?”
“They define themselves as centrist,” I replied. “And it’s probably more liberal leaning.”
My mother quickly shot back, “Centrist in Washington means right wing. You know that, Peter. And the so-called center has been moving to the right for years now. Do you really want to even be affiliated with such a reactionary place?” I would have settled for a simple “Congratulations.”
Every once in a while, though, I could still make her proud. When my first book, Drug War Politics, which I wrote with my Swarthmore thesis advisor and two others, came out in 1996, she ordered copies to send to all of her closest relatives and friends. In 1998, after reading a draft of my dissertation, she confessed to her diary that “I am burning up inside with pride.” She also eagerly told her friends when I was awarded a fellowship at Harvard to turn my dissertation into a book, and again later when I was offered a faculty position at Brown. Even so, she couldn’t help wishing that I were following more closely in her footsteps:
I am realizing that he [Peter] has avoided using Marxism (not to mention Lenin and Mao) in his thesis. He will eventually pay a price for that. Most likely he is beginning to realize that already and knows he’s under-educated but is fighting doing anything about it. I have warned him all the way along that he should be prepared to be blacklisted if he becomes a conscientious scholar. He did not want to hear it. So he took a safe path and now he’s stumped and has to trash the whole Marxist thesis to save face.
In retrospect, for as important as our political differences seemed at the time, it came at too high a price. During my childhood, I had hated my mother’s endless, intense battles with Raul, Joel, and others, but now we were doing exactly the same thing, and it prevented us from being able to enjoy each other at the end of her life.