[2] Pye graduated in 1943 from Carleton College, where he met Mary Toombs Waddill, of Greenville, South Carolina; they married in 1945, and she would co-write and help edit many of his books and writings over the years.
[3] Pye returned to China at the end of World War II to become an intelligence officer with the U.S. Marines Corps, achieving the rank of second lieutenant.
"[3] During his time at Yale, Pye worked with other notable political scientists like Almond, Harold Lasswell and Nathan Leites in exploring the psychological, sociological, and anthropological elements of international affairs, rather than applying the orthodox "realism" approach.
[2] Early in his career, Pye worked with other political scientists to free the field from academic constraints placed upon them by the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
officials said he was one of only a few scholars who studied Asian politics from a comparative standpoint, and he served as a mentor to several generations of students who went on to prominent positions in academia and government.
[3] Unlike most political scientists of his day who sought universal and overarching theories, Pye focused on specific cultures, countries and people in order to create more individualized interpretations.
"[2] His daughter later recalled that he once said, "only half in jest," that "political scientists are all failed novelists," meaning that "academics shared with artists the impulse to tell a story, but that statistics, studies and even firsthand fact-finding alone made an incomplete picture."
[5] Pye's approach was so novel that it often drew opposite reactions and criticism, but he nevertheless came to be considered a peer of the Chinese experts of his generation, like John K. Fairbank of Harvard.
He also served as an advisor to Democratic presidential candidates, Senators John F. Kennedy and Henry M. Jackson, and urged both men to pursue a muscular foreign policy.
Pye served as a leader, and eventually acting chairman, with the National Committee on United States-China Relations, where he helped lay the groundwork for the American table tennis team visit to China in 1971.
[6] He emphasised the "need to create more effective, more adaptive, more complex, and more rationalised organisations" and saw the "heart" of the nation-building "problem" centered on the "interrelationships among personality, culture, and the polity".
[7][8] ARPA counterinsurgency research programs, such as the one done by Simulmatics Corporation, part of Project Agile, relied heavily on Pye's work.