Theodore Draper, 93; Wrote About Iran-Contra Affair, Abuses of Power

Theodore Draper, an independent scholar and social critic who wrote skillfully about the history of American communism, racism and abuses of executive power, died Feb. 20 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 93.

Draper spent years immersed in libraries and public records. He could plumb official documents for revealing details and transform them into a meaningful explanation of world history and its consequences for American democracy.

As a regular contributor to the New Leader, Encounter, Commentary and the New York Review of Books, he scolded government officials of all political persuasions for what became his overriding concern: the lack of accountability among leaders.

He enhanced his reputation with a definitive study of the mid-1980s Iran-Contra matter, in which U.S. officials covertly sold arms to Iran to win the release of U.S. hostages in the Middle East and used some of the profits to support Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras.

Called “A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs” (1991), his book delved into 50,000 pages of private hearings released through official investigations of the matter. He probed presidential authority and its conflicts with other branches of government. He made cutting observations about the principal players in the scandal, noting of President Reagan that although the chief executive “complained that he had not been told ‘everything,’ it hardly meant that he had been told nothing.”

“The Iran-Contra affairs are not a warning for our days alone,” he later wrote. “If the story of the affairs is not fully known and understood, a similar usurpation of power by a small, strategically placed group within the government may well recur before we are prepared to recognize what is happening.”

Peter Kornbluh, a director of the Iran-Contra project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., said: “At the time, a number of people were writing on Iran-Contra, but no one was writing with the cogency and sharpness of the critique he offered.”

Draper was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Sept. 11, 1912. He was the second of four children of immigrants from what is now Ukraine.

A philosophy graduate of Brooklyn College, he abandoned his Columbia University history studies to join communist publications, including the Daily Worker and the New Masses.

After Army service in World War II, during which he wrote a history of the 84th Infantry Division, he wrote prolifically for magazines and gained his first wide notice with the books “The Roots of American Communism” (1957) and “American Communism and Soviet Russia” (1960).

A Princeton resident since 1968, he spent five years with the Institute for Advanced Study. During that period, he wrote “The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism” (1970), which used the past to illuminate contemporaneous discussion.

He scolded the “back-to-Africa” movement as “a white fantasy to get rid of blacks, and a black fantasy to get rid of whites.”

Survivors include his third wife, Priscilla Barnum, a medieval scholar, of Princeton; a son from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; four stepchildren; a brother; a sister; and a grandson.