Harry V Jaffa

He graduated from Yale University with a degree in English in 1939. After teaching at Queens College and City College in New York and the University of Chicago in the 1940s, he earned a doctorate in 1951 at the New School for Social Research in New York. Dr. Jaffa taught at Ohio State University from 1951-64, and over the next 25 years was on the faculties of Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, Calif. He was the Henry Salvatori research professor of political philosophy from 1971-89, when he became professor emeritus and a distinguished fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. Jaffa, who explored America’s founding in many books, but shifted modern politics with two speech lines that cast Senator Barry M. Goldwater as an extremist, abetting his landslide defeat in the 1964 presidential race and the birth of a zealous new conservatism, In 1942, he married Marjorie Butler. They had three children: Donald, Philip and Karen. Mrs. Jaffa died in 2010.