Faris Russell Kirkland ’53

Soldier and military scholar, Faris Kirkland, died at home in Bryn Mawr, Pa., on Feb. 22 after a three-year battle with cancer.

"T" came to us from the Haverford School. He was a member of Colonial Club. He graduated cum laude in psychology and was elected to Sigma Xi.

He married his childhood sweetheart, "Moppet" (Emelyn Ewer, Bryn Mawr '54), in 1953 and began a 20-year career in the Army, serving as an artillery officer in both Korea and Vietnam. In the late 1960s he joined the U. of Pennsylvania's military science department and instituted broadranging interdisciplinary courses that legitimized military science as an academic discipline and kept ROTC in place. He retired in 1973 a lt.-col.

He earned a PhD in history at Penn and launched a distinguished second career in military history. He published widely, and, in 1986, was appointed research military social historian at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, division of neuropsychiatry. He was regarded as one of the country's leading historians of US Army leadership doctrine and practice and was considered an authority on the French Air Force in WWII.

He came from a family with many Princeton connections, among them: his cousin, William A. Kirkland '19, a trustee of the university; his uncle, Peter P. Blanchard Jr. '35; cousins Maco ('52) and Wells ('54) Stewart, and several nieces and nephews.

He is survived by his wife, Moppet, their three children, F. Russell Jr., Story K. Biddle, and Victoria K. Carchidi, and two much-loved grandsons, Benjamin and Jacob Biddle.

The Class of 1953