In fact, Cooper didn’t come to U of C until 1981 — the last of the group to arrive — after ten years teaching at York University, where Jack Layton was one of his students. His friends from those days can’t recall him showing any interest in politics until he moved west. “Barry’s ideas were shaped by Alberta,” says Edward Andrew, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto, who dismisses his old pal as “a poseur. Partly he just likes to be a bad boy,” Andrew says. “The only influence on Cooper was that he didn’t get a job at U of T, despite my best efforts, so he became a Western chauvinist.”

Andrew is not so indulgent about Flanagan, whose flinty reserve and dry wit often earn him the label “chilly.” Unlike Cooper or Bercuson, Flanagan appears never to have strayed from a conservative path. As he likes to point out to startled Canadians, that path began in Ottawa — Ottawa, Illinois, a blue-collar town 130 kilometres southwest of Chicago. What he seldom mentions is Ottawa’s chief claim to fame: on August 21, 1858, ten thousand people gathered in the town square to hear the state’s young senatorial candidate, Abraham Lincoln, square off against his rival Stephen Douglas in the first of their legendary debates on slavery.

Flanagan shrugs off the Lincoln-Douglas debates as meaningless in shaping his political world view — just a plaque in the park. Shirley Hiland, a fellow student at Marquette High, is not surprised. Hiland recalls that the nuns on the Roman Catholic school’s teaching staff avoided such potentially charged chapters of history. Instead, they focused on the heroic feats of the French missionary who gave the school its name: Father Jacques Marquette who teamed up with the voyageur Louis Jolliet to become the first Europeans to discover and trace the Mississippi. “The emphasis was on Father Marquette,” Hiland says, “and how he brought Catholicism to the Indians.”

In a town where almost everybody worked for Libby Owens Ford, Flanagan’s father had a white- collar job, man¬aging the outlet of an auto-parts chain, that put the family a notch up the local social ladder. The defining influences on the household were the Roman Catholic Church and the Republican Party, two forces that did not always mix. Most U.S. Catholics then voted Democrat, but the only time Flanagan’s father made that radical gesture was in 1960 when a fellow Irish Catholic named John Kennedy ran for president.

Popular and known for taking on any teacher he thought had made a mistake, Flanagan graduated from Marquette in 1961 as class valedictorian, winning a $500 scholarship from the Retail Clerks of America — more than half his college tuition — a reward for his after-school labours at the town A & P. His father wanted him to go to Harvard, but he opted for the Catholic bastion of Indiana’s Notre Dame, where political science meant Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.

On every side, the social glue of America was coming unstuck: Kennedy was assassinated, Martin Luther King marched on Washington, and protests against the Vietnam War were breaking out like wildfires. But at Notre Dame, Flanagan found a haven of tradition and certainty. There he met his first wife and was captivated by another figure who would shape his career: Eric Voegelin, a German-born philosopher who had fled Hitler and blamed a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism. In Voegelin’s complex Weltanschauung, Flanagan found a philosophical framework that reconciled his Roman Catholic faith with his family’s conservative politics. He confided later that he felt he’d been drifting leftward. Suddenly, Voegelin pulled him back from that perilous course.

Flanagan went on to pursue his PhD at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where John Hallowell, one of Voegelin’s disciples, presided over the political science department. Among his fellow grad students was an ebullient Canadian with whom he found himself sharing real estate at the campus library. “I show up in the carrel I’ve been assigned,” Cooper recalls, “and Flanagan’s in it.”

They worked out shifts — Flanagan, by then married, got the cubicle by day, Cooper at night — laying the foundations for a forty-year friendship. In 1996, at the height of Flanagan’s notoriety for Riel-bashing, Cooper thumbed his nose at his pal’s critics by nominating him to the Royal Society of Canada. “I don’t think I disagree with Tom on anything,” Cooper says. “Political or intellectual.”

In Durham, a North Carolina radio host named Jesse Helms was constantly denouncing desegration on air, cloaking his rage in the mantra of federal decentralization: states rights. But classmates can’t recall Flanagan or his Duke pals ever debating lunch-counter sit-ins or other Sixties’ hot-button issues when they met for barbecue and hush puppies on Friday nights. “I don’t remember any discussion of the civil-rights movement or the draft,” says Elliot Tepper, a Carleton professor who was Cooper’s roommate. “We were not into sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. We were into witty exchanges of bons mots.”

The closest brush Flanagan had with the hurly burly of live politics was the friendship he struck up with one of Cooper’s professors, Allan Kornberg, Duke’s expert on decoding the statistical mysteries behind voting patterns — a science then still in its infancy. A native of Manitoba, Kornberg was celebrated on campus for financing his academic career not only as a lineman for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, but as a professional wrestler, the “Kosher Krusher.” He was a key influence on Duke’s Canadian studies program, and since 1964 has charted the political winds in Canada, including those that swept through the last election. Now, at 73, the self-confessed “registered Republican” applauds Flanagan and Cooper’s increasing clout. “Given the left-of-centre intellectual climate in Canada,” he says, “I’m delighted. It’s good for debate.”

Kornberg has been periodically seconded to ply his expertise on Canada for the U.S. government, probing the risk of a destabilizing crack-up on America’s northern flank. Before the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, he was on loan to Washington’s National Science Foundation, constantly measuring Lucien Bouchard’s péquiste troop strength. Later, he took the pulse of Reform Party voters. Beneath the yawn-inducing titles of his studies — A Polity on the Edge: Canada and the Politics of Fragmentation — his work has surveyed the national psyche through every tremor that might send U.S. bureaucrats scrambling for a foreign-policy Plan B. Those governmental gigs are listed on Kornberg’s curriculum vitae, along with consulting stints to the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. But in a phone interview, he adds one detail: during the Vietnam War he was “a consultant on psychological operations and counter-insurgency” — a rare intelligence assignment for a political numbers cruncher.

In 1967, Flanagan’s burgeoning friendship with Kornberg spawned his first scholarly paper: a joint study of the ultra-conservative voters who backed Barry Goldwater’s abortive 1964 bid for the White House. Even then, Kornberg regarded Flanagan as one of Duke’s most conservative students. “He believes many people want a risk-free society,” Kornberg says. “He is sort of like Goldwater: he believes people have to take care of themselves.”

What brought Flanagan to Alberta where that bootstrap ideology would find such fertile ground? He says only that he needed a job: he and his wife had already started a family (last year his oldest daughter, Melissa, retired from a twelve-year communications career with the U.S. Army). At the time, new Canadian universities were hatching across the country, prompting a hiring spree that outstripped the national crop of PhDs. But Flanagan didn’t apply for the post. In the spring of 1968, when he was offered an assistant professorship — just as Pierre Trudeau came to power — he was researching his thesis on an obscure German novelist in the turbulent com¬pound of the Free University of West Berlin, a U.S.- funded institution briefly shuttered by anti-American protests. When the offer arrived in the mail, Flanagan had to go to the library to look up Calgary on a map.

The invitation came from E. Burke Inlow, another American, and the first head of U of C’s political-science department. An expert on Iran and the Far East who died last year, Inlow himself had been recruited directly from an assignment with the Pentagon. There, according to his son, Brand, a Calgary lawyer, he was engaged in “cultural work — providing intelligence to people we (the U.S. government) were sending to the Middle East.”