Robert G. L. Waite

Robert George Leeson Waite (February 18, 1919 – October 4, 1999) was a historian, psychohistorian, and the Brown Professor of History (1949–1988) at Williams College who specialized in the Nazi movement—particularly Adolf Hitler.

Waite was born in Cartwright, Manitoba, on February 18, 1919. His father was a minister of the United Church of Canada. He grew up as a “preacher’s kid,” in the prairie towns of Manitoba and Minnesota. When describing his life, he captured the flavor of these small towns, adopting the cadence, regional expressions, and accents of the Scandinavian farmers and the families with whom he grew up.

In the fall of 1937, Waite entered Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the midst of the Great Depression. To supplement his scholarship and to earn whatever spending money he could, Waite held a variety of jobs, from working in the open pit mines of the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota to guarding the supposed corpse of John Wilkes Booth in a traveling carnival.

Upon graduating from Macalester in 1941, he entered military service from which he was discharged three years later as a corporal—a distinction he insisted be included in his curriculum vitae. With weak eyes and a deaf ear, he was assigned to limited duties, one of which was guarding the Mendota Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Paul. In later years, he jokingly suggested that no enemy plane had ever dared to bomb the Mendota Bridge because he guarded it so well. Robert Waite never served overseas.

Following World War II, Waite completed graduate studies in history at the University of Minnesota, where he received his master's degree. He then entered Harvard University and began researching German history with particular emphasis on the Nazi period. His dissertation on the Freikorps movement in post-World War I Germany, written under the supervision of H. Stuart Hughes, was published under the title, Vanguard of Nazism (1952). Upon receiving his PhD in 1949, Waite was appointed to the faculty at Williams College in Massachusetts where he began his pioneering psychohistorical work on Adolf Hitler.

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