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.”
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.”
For Inlow, Flanagan’s conservative inclinations were no coincidence. He and his successors set out expressly to counter the prevailing leftist currents on the country’s campuses. “Canadian universities were almost the fiefdom of Karl Marx,” says Anthony Parel, a Jesuit-trained expert on Machiavelli, whom Inlow hired from Radio Vatican in Rome. “We wanted balance.” Balance is always in the eye of the beholder. Soon critics charged that the department had leaned too far to starboard. “They said we were all right-wing reactionaries,” Parel winces. “Very offensive epithets were used.” Radha Jhappan, now an associate professor at Carleton, remembers concluding it was pointless to apply for a more senior post in what she now refers to as the “department of redneckology.” At U of C, “I realized they’d rather hire a chimpanzee than me,” she says. “I was perceived as leftist, feminist – everything they can’t abide.”
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