Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has died at age 81.

One of the nation’s preeminent political scientists, a longstanding professor at Harvard University, and founder of the influential journal Foreign Policy, Dr. Huntington died Wednesday at an Oak Bluffs nursing home. He was 81.

“He was a man of enormous influence,” said his longtime friend and colleague, Henry Rosovsky. “I think he was one of the really great figures in the field.”

The Globe has a nice piece on Huntington, linked to above. The Times’ rather less satisfying obit is here.

Neither obituary mentions the unfortunate end to an otherwise remarkable career, Huntington’s 2004 book, Who Are We?, in which Huntington argued for a resurgence of white Protestant culture in America and faulted the culture of Latino immigrants, criticizing them as lazy and anti-intellectual. (Writing in the New Yorker, Harvard’s Luke Menand described a “weird emptiness of heart” that permeated the book.)

Huntington was, of course, fundamentally wrong about Latino culture and immigration, which has been one of the great success stories and truly revitalizing forces in American life of the past quarter-century, and we are an enormously more diverse, interesting, and healthier country for it. But let me be fair: For seven-plus decades of his life, as far as the reader can tell, Who are We? was not who Samuel Huntington was. His contributions were many and significant, and we should remember these more than his late-life mistake.