Constantine C. Menges (September 1, 1939 – July 11, 2004) was an American scholar, author, professor, and Latin American specialist for the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, D.C., NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. preside ...

US National Security Council The United States National Security Council (NSC) is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for consideration of national security, military, and Foreign relations of the United States, foreign policy matters. Based in t ...

and the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

. Menges was born in Turkey on September 1, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland to start World War II. His parents sent him to the United States in 1943. Menges attended college in Prague. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics and a doctorate in political science from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manha ...

. He helped German refugees escape over the Berlin Wall and organized civil resistance after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 during the

Prague Spring The Prague Spring ( cs, Pražské jaro, sk, Pražská jar) was a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Se ...

Menges worked to ensure equal voting rights in Mississippi and During the Nixon and Ford administrations, he was deputy assistant for civil rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. From 1981 until 1983, he worked for the director of the CIA as the national intelligence officer for Latin America. From 1983 until 1986, he served as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He helped plan

Operation Urgent Fury The United States invasion of Grenada began at dawn on 25 October 1983. The United States and a coalition of six Caribbean nations invaded the island nation of Grenada, north of Venezuela. Codenamed Operation Urgent Fury by the U.S. militar ...

in Grenada and supported the Nicaraguan Contras and the Salvadoran rebels. Friends and foes gave him the nickname "Constant Menace". He wrote a critical account of his experiences as a government official in his 1988 book, Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan's Foreign Policy In September 2002, Constantine Menges sent a letter to

Olavo de Carvalho Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho (29 April 1947 – 24 January 2022) was a Brazilian polemicist, self-proclaimed philosopher, political pundit, former astrologer, journalist, and far-right conspiracy theorist. From 2005 until his death, he live ...

in which he agreed with the Brazilian philosopher’s analysis of the current political situation in

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. He died of cancer on July 11, 2004, in Washington, D.C., where he had been a senior fellow at the

Hudson Institute The Hudson Institute is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1961 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Co ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Menges, Constantine 1939 births 2004 deaths Turkish refugees Turkish expatriates in the United States Turkish human rights activists American political scientists Turkish political scientists Deaths from cancer in Washington, D.C. Columbia College (New York) alumni Turkish anti-communists New Right (United States) United States National Security Council staffers 20th-century political scientists