Remembering Joseph LaPalombara: Yale Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, and Friend

Rick Harrison
Joseph LaPalombara on a boat on a lake

In his 101 years, Joseph LaPalombara earned academic accolades and made influential friends on multiple continents. His friend Douglas Rae remembers one he made under a table.

When Rae’s daughter Katie was about 3 or 4 years old, LaPalombara and his wife came to dinner. Katie retreated from the invading adults to a safe space surrounded by wooden legs. LaPalombara got down on the floor, reclined, and chatted with her for half an hour. 

The two became lifelong friends.

“There was a human touch in Joe that is wonderful, actually,” said Rae, Richard S. Ely Professor Emeritus of Organization and Management. “I first liked and respected him and then came to love him over decades.”

LaPalombara, the Arnold Wolfers Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Management, died on June 12 at Whitney Center in Hamden, Conn.

Raised by Italian immigrants in a poor section of Chicago during the Great Depression, LaPalombara worked at a steel plant in Indiana during World War II. Despite never finishing high school, his extraordinary intelligence drew notice and earned him entry into the University of Illinois, where he graduated as senior class president. 

Rae shared a story about how as a student, LaPalombara figured out how to import fresh corsages from Chicago florists before social weekends and organized a distribution network of students to sell them.

LaPalombara earned a Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University in 1954 before eventually joining the faculty at Yale in 1964.

“He was plain spoken in a way that is pretty rare at elite universities,” Rae said, noting how he rejected technical jargon and felt comfortable with people of all types. “Joe could debate with the best of us and better than the rest of us.”

He served two terms as chair of the Department of Political Science and one as director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS). Alan Gerber, current ISPS director and Sterling Professor of Political Science, called this a “glory era for the Yale Political Science Department,” featuring legendary scholars Robert Dahl, Robert Lane, and Karl Deutsch.

“Joseph LaPalombara was a distinguished scholar and led the department during a time when it was the premier political science department in the world,” Gerber said. “He was an amazing person who will be long remembered and greatly missed.”

Joseph Lapalombara

Robert Putnam, the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, received an honorary degree from Yale in May for his widely influential work on social capital, community, and democracy. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1970 with LaPalombara’s mentorship, crediting LaPalombara for helping to lead a transformation in comparative politics away from the study of formal institutions and toward understanding how governments and societies actually function.

“He was one of the leaders of the field of comparative politics,” Putnam said. “He was the dean of the study of Italian politics in America.”

Putnam recalls year-end gatherings at LaPalombara’s house, where they would roll up the rugs so dozens of students could dance.

“It was very un-Yale,” Putnam said.

He saw LaPalombara as someone who brought together scholars, ideas, friends, and nations.

Putnam recalled that when he was preparing his dissertation research in Italy and struggling to learn the language, LaPalombara personally arranged an Italian tutor, connected him with a key local scholar, helped develop his research strategy, introduced him to political figures, and spent substantial time guiding the project. 

“He was a specialist in connections,” Putnam said. “He was a specialist in connecting Italy and America.”

Andrew McLaren, a former headmaster and teacher at several private schools, befriended LaPalombara and his wife, Constance, later in life as tennis-playing members of The Lawn Club in New Haven. 

“He was a great storyteller,” McLaren said. “But also generous in listening, in paying attention to you, in giving you the feeling when you were with him that you were the most interesting thing in his life at that moment.”

McLaren spoke of how LaPalombara knew “the good and the great” among major political and business figures but never acted dazzled by them.

“He had the kind of self-confidence that allowed him to live in that world,” McLaren said. “And a quality of becoming an old friend instantly.”

When McLaren and his wife traveled to Italy, LaPalombara casually arranged introductions to several influential people, including former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, who organized a private hospitality suite with food and drinks.

“We talked mostly about Joseph, of whom he was extremely fond,” McLaren said. 

McLaren recalled visits to the LaPalombaras’ home in Maine, which they designed. Rae said Joseph would strip off his shirt and dive into the frigid water well into his 90s, noting that he was a weightlifter in college and “built like a bull.”

And yet, Rae said, LaPalombara combined toughness with warmth. Deeply humane, unsentimental, dependable, and someone who delivered difficult truths without cruelty.

“He was capable of saying things that are hard to say,” Rae said. “I often relied on him to talk about things where I was bothered about something. And he was solid.”

Putnam recalled visiting LaPalombara in Maine sometime in the last decade of his long life. After a lengthy discussion of American politics, Putnam and other scholars left impressed by how LaPalombara seemed more current and informed then they were.

McLaren and Rae said they would miss their friend, though they felt relief that he was no longer suffering as his health deteriorated. Constance LaPalombara died in 2023.

“Joe’s was a full, earnestly and honestly lived life with a lot of intellectual horsepower and a lot of goodwill,” Rae said. “He was always good company.”