U.S. News & World Report     May 22, 1989   Vol. 106, No. 20; Pg. 63

From atom bombs to Fred Astaire

By Alvin P. Sanoff

Political scientist John Mueller defies the first rule of academic survival: Thou shalt specialize

Surrounded by political-science texts and canisters of film, John Mueller sits in his office at the University of Rochester and fantasizes about transforming the biting antiwar film "Dr. Strangelove" into a Broadway musical. He's not joking. It would be the perfect bridge between the divergent forks of his highly unusual academic career.

In the world of scholarship, where reputations are so often built on detailed study of the esoteric, Mueller, 51, has managed to defy narrow specialization by becoming a respected authority on both war and American dance. He has written an encyclopedic analysis of the dances of Fred Astaire and a provocative work of history, the recently published Retreat From Doomsday, in which Mueller argues that war between the major powers has become as obsolete as dueling.

With Astaire-like ease, Mueller teaches a course on the legendary dancer on Mondays and Thursdays while leading a seminar on the Vietnam War on Tuesday afternoons. He has a knack for getting fully absorbed in whichever subject is his passion of the moment. "When I was doing the Astaire book," he recalls, "I had almost no interest whatsoever when a political-science journal came in. And when I started working on the war book, I became almost obsessed with trying to figure things out and irritated by anything that took me away from my work. I'd get a dance journal and hardly look at the table of contents."

War is a cabaret. Still, close readers of his book on war can catch glimpses of his musical side. He cites cabaret performer Michael Feinstein to make a point about society's shifting attitudes toward war. Two years ago, while performing "Alexander's Ragtime Band" at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, Mueller says, Feinstein came to the line that describes the way the band plays a bugle call as "so natural that you want to go to war." Struck by the lyric's odd sentiment, the singer felt compelled to offer an explanation to his audience: "It's an old song."

What sets Mueller apart from most academics is a willingness to take risks and move in whatever direction his intellect beckons. He fell in love with dance after attending a 1967 performance of the New York City Ballet choreographed by George Balanchine. When he sought to devote some of his scholarly energies to the art, Rochester colleagues looked askance. After all, this was no way for a young political scientist, especially one with expertise in quantitative methods, to build a career. "People at other schools were amazed," he recalls. "They said they could never do such a thing in a million years, what with academic bureaucracy" and interdepartmental conflicts. At Rochester, however, dance was not being taught, so turf fights were a nonissue. Mueller developed a course on dance history, got published in journals, started an internationally known dance-film archive now run by his wife, all the while teaching international relations.

His infatuation with Astaire began just as suddenly, when he happened to flip on the TV and flipped out over one of the dancer's old movies. "What captured me was the sense of inventiveness and the wit and the musicality," he recalls. Mueller watched Astaire over and over in film after film, wearing out several videotapes in the process. The fruit of this intense scrutiny was the prize-winning Astaire Dancing, which dissects every musical number in every Astaire movie.

With the book completed, Mueller doffed his top hat and returned to a question that had long intrigued him: What role have nuclear weapons played in keeping peace between the major powers? Conventional wisdom among political scientists holds that the Bomb is the key. But after doing research that took him as far back as Biblical wars, Mueller concluded that there has been a long, gradual movement away from war as an instrument of policy and that the major powers have now "dropped out of the war system," at least as direct participants, because they find it "repulsive, immoral and uncivilized." Not everyone concurs; Oxford scholar Sir Michael Howard said in a review that "the prudent reader will check that his air-raid shelter is in good repair."

While Mueller's political-science interests are now ascendant, the arts still have a strong hold. In 1987, he crafted a musical comedy from P.G. Wodehouse's "Damsel in Distress" using songs by George and Ira Gershwin. It ran briefly in Rochester, and there have been nibbles from producers. He also adapted a 1943 Astaire film, "The Sky's the Limit," adding songs by Johnny Mercer. He's worried about finding the right songs for "Dr. Strangelove," though, and he adds plaintively, "I'm not a songwriter." It seems that even the intellectually ambidextrous John Mueller comes up short sometimes.

LENGTH: 795 words

GRAPHIC: Picture, Two-step. Mueller's works include a history of war and an analysis of Astaire's dancing, BILL BALLENBERG FOR USN&WR