Bruce Mazlish Papers

Emeritus Bruce Mazlish

Bruce Mazlish was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923. His father, Louis Mazlish, had immigrated as a teenager from what was then Russia. A largely self-taught engineer and entrepreneur, Louis Mazlish started a laundry service for which he developed much of the equipment. He married Lee Reuben in 1919, and had three children, of whom Bruce was the middle, with an older brother Robert and a younger sister, Elaine.

Bruce Mazlish attended local public primary schools in Brooklyn, and then elected to go to Boys High School, which drew its students on a city-wide basis. Upon graduation he entered Columbia University in 1940. Having enlisted in the Officer's Reserve Corps, Mazlish was called up in 1943, and underwent basic training in the US infantry. Subsequently he served in the Office of Strategic Services, assigned to the Far East arena, in Morale Operations. When the war ended, Columbia granted him a catch-up BA dated 1944.

Mazlish worked as a journalist at The Washington Daily News (now defunct) for half of a year, spent a year with his wife in Mexico working on a novel, and then worked at a third-rate prep school, teaching English (for which he was qualified) and History (which he learned by reading one chapter ahead of his students). Teaching the latter gave him an original view of the discipline, and the G.I. Bill drove educational expansion and demand for teachers in the post-WWII years.

In this way, Mazlish stumbled onto the path of the academic world, teaching history for two years at the University of Maine, Brunswick campus, and then completing advanced degrees at Columbia University in literature (MA thesis: “Defoe: Criminologist,” 1947) and then a Ph.D in Modern European History, where he worked mainly under Professors Shepherd Clough and Jacques Barzun (thesis on “Burke, Bonald and De Maistre: A Study in Conservative Thought”, 1955)."

Professor Mazlish was best known for putting Nixon on the couch in “In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry” (1972). The book, by his reckoning, was an attempt to fuse science, or at least psychoanalytical insight, with the study of contemporary history. “Nixon is a man torn between his mother’s dislike of warfare and his father’s sharp competitiveness,” Professor Mazlish wrote. “He is extremely ambivalent about his aggressive impulses and tends to deal with them by projection onto others.”

He passed on November 27, 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.