Draper, Theodore 1912–2006

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born September 11, 1912, in New York, NY; died February 20, 2006, in Princeton, NJ. Historian, journalist, and author. Though he wrote on a wide range of subjects that interested him, Draper was often best known for his books and opinions on Communism in both the Soviet Union and America. Originally born in Brooklyn with the surname of Dubinsky, his family changed their name to Draper in the hope of avoiding anti-Semitic prejudices. Though his parents were never Communists themselves, Draper began associating with leftists in college. He joined the National Student League while attending Brooklyn College, but was not aware at the time of that organization's association with the Young Communists League. However, he did not stringently object when he did learn about it, and became the editor of the Young Communist's journal. After graduating with a degree in philosophy, he studied history at Columbia University. In his second year of graduate school, he was hired to the staff of the Communist Daily Worker. Without completing his graduate degree, in 1937 Draper next found work at the New Masses, a magazine also run by American Communists. His prediction that the Soviet Union would be invaded by Nazi Germany did not sit well with his Communist employers, so he left New Masses even though his warning would prove terribly correct. The result of this dispute was his finally breaking his long association with the Communists. Although he worked for the Soviet news agency Tass for six months, Draper then found work in New York City with a French weekly publication. When America entered World War II, Draper enlisted in the Army, serving as a historian for the 84th Infantry Division. With the war over, he returned to journalism and continued researching and writing books, a vocation that had begun in 1944 with the publication of his first work, The Six Weeks' War: France, May 10-June 25, 1940. Draper was a contributor to such journals as Commentary and The Reporter during the postwar years, then found steady employment as a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He remained there from 1963 to 1968, moving on to become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until 1973. Because he was never a faculty member at a university or college, Draper was considered to be a freelance historian whose early reputation was built on his knowledge of the Communist Party. He published two authoritative books on the subject, including The Roots of American Communism (1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960, reprinted as American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative Period, 1977). Once incorrectly asserting that Cuba's Fidel Castro was not a communist, he would go on to write about Cuba in such works as Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities (1962). Draper commented that he would generally address a topic that interested him for about five years before moving on to the next subject, and so he published books on such areas as the Dominican Republic, Israel, NATO, and the Iran-Contra affair. His last book was A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (1996).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2006, p. B9.

New York Times, February 22, 2006, p. A17.

Washington Post, February 23, 2006, p. B6.