Picked up for research purposes, and immediately became totally absorbed in, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, by CSIS writer in residence James Mann. It is the Rosetta stone for intellectual and psychological insight into the education and development of the worldviews of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell and Armitage. And, even just fifty pages in, it's full of both big and little surprises, particularly on Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, including: Rumsfeld's pushing Nixon and Kissinger to get out of Vietnam faster, an irritation that caused Nixon to consider firing Rumsfeld. ["Nixon was thinking of getting rid of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former congressman then serving on the White House staff. 'I think Rumsfeld may not be too long for this world,' he said, adding a few minutes later, 'Let's dump him.'"] The fact that Rumsfeld and Cheney got on so badly at their first meeting when Rumsfeld interviewed Cheney for a job, Cheney said "it was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life...the truth is, I flunked the interview. After half an hour, it was clear to both of us that there was no possibility I could work for him." And the well known fact, but richly described here, that the unlikely first place Cheney did in fact work for Rumsfeld was at the war on poverty program created by Lyndon Johnson, the Office of Economic Opportunity, which the Nixon administration had promised Republican governors like Ronald Reagan to gutt, but which Rumsfeld, ever conscious of how much turf he controlled, took an odd possessive championship of.

Vulcans is also just fascinating about the education of Paul Wolfowitz, in particular its portrayal that Wolfowitz's true "Straussian" conversion was second hand, via his Cornell house tutor Allan Bloom, "Professor Ravelstein" from Saul Bellow's eponymous novel. [Was also interesting to learn that Abe Shulsky, the director of the infamous Office of Special Plans, was also, with Wolfowitz, a member of the elite Cornell "Telluride" house under Bloom's tutelage in 1963]. Wolfowitz's father, Jacob Wolfowitz, was a respected professor of statistics at Cornell while Paul studied there, and relations between the elder Wolfowitz and Bloom, who had captured the imagination of his son, were tense, in part because the father wanted the son to stay in mathematics and away from the liberal arts. When Wolfowitz ultimately defied his father's wishes to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago with Bloom's mentor Leo Strauss, Wolfowitz and Strauss never became very close.

The professor was near the end of his career at the university, and left before Wolfowitz completed graduate school. Wolfowitz took two of Strauss's courses on political theory, one on Plato and the other on Montesquieu...Yet, Wolfowitz didn't talk much about Strauss in those days...As his own career progressed, Wolfowitz came to distance himself from any identification with Strauss.

In fact, from his earliest days in graduate school, Wolfowitz began gravitating toward a new field, nuclear strategy, and a new mentor, another University of Chicago professor named Albert Wohlstetter.

At the first faculty tea for new graduate students in the fall of 1965, Wohlstetter had asked him whether he knew someone named "Jack Wolfowitz." That's my father, Paul Wolfowitz replied. "I studied math with him at Columbia," said Wohlstetter. After his brief rebellion at Cornell, Paul Wolfowitz was on his way back into the fold.

And it is with Wohlstetter that Wolfowitz wrote a doctoral dissertation that argued against Israel getting US nuclear desalination technology, fearing it would lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

At one point in the late 1960s, Wohlstetter returned from a trip to Israel in a state of agitation about what he believed was the danger of nuclear programs' spreading into the Middle East...By the mid-1960s an Americanfirm, Kaiser Engineeers, Inc., was specifically proposing a major project for nuclear desalination in Isarel. Wohlstetter had brought back a collection of written material on the subject. He asked Wolfowitz if he could read Hebrew. Wolfowitz said he could. Those materials became the start of Wolfowitz's doctoral disseration.

Wolfowitz's doctoral thesis amounted to an extended argument against the idea of the nuclear-powered desalting stations, on grounds that the benefits were exaggerated and the risks of nuclear proliferation were too great. He wrote about the difficulties of conducting effective international nuclear inspections, the risk of clandestine diversion of nuclear materials and the dangers of helping a nation to improve its technological and scientific capability in the nuclear sciences...

What seems especially noteworthy, in retrospect, is that Wolfowitz's warnings about nuclear proliferation applied at the time to Israel as much as to the Arab states. Wolfowitz specifically argued against an Israeli nuclear waepons..."Israeli nuclear weapons would push the Arabs into a desperate attempt to acquire nuclear weapons, if not from the Soviet Union, then at a later date from China or on their own." Of course, in the early 1970s, after Wolfowitz's dissertation was written, Israel did develop nuclear weapons. Its Arab neighbors began to think of following suit, and one Arab government, Iraq, began a concerted drive to develop its own nuclear program, much as Wolfowitz had predicted. In public, at least, Wolfowitz in later years rarely, if ever, acknowledged his opposition to the Israeli nuclear program or the role it had played in spurring on other countries in the Middle East to match it.

His doctoral dissertation became another important step in the evolution of Wolfowitz's thinking. At the earliest stage in his professional career he had focused upon the dangers of nuclear weapons programs in the Middle East. At the time this was a relatively obscure subject, but was one that was to bedevil American foreign policy and to consume much of Wolfowitz's own time and energy for the next three decades.

I highly recommend the book, less for "oppositional research" purposes than for what Mann says is the book's aim: "...To try to understand how and why America came to deal with the rest of the world in the ways it did during the George W. Bush administration. Where did the ideas of the Vulcans come from? Why did these six Vulcans, in particular, rise to the top of the Republican foreign policy apparatus? What was it in their backgrounds and experiences that caused them to make the choices they made after taking office in 2001 and after the terrorist attacks of September 11?"

An obsessive line of inquiry I am sure I share with most of my readers.

Post Script: More revelations from the book: Richard Armitage was allegedly a member of the Phoenix program, the controversial CIA counterguerrilla program that assassinated thousands of Viet cong. [For his part, Armitage denies in an interview with Mann that he was a direct member of Phoenix, but several others cited in the book, including Fred Ikle say they understand that he was]. Vulcans paints a picture of a highly interesting and complex Armitage, one who learned fluent Vietnamese, volunteered for three one-year tours (and when he volunteered to stay on after the end of the US withdrawal and the Navy told him it was time to move onwards and upwards, he quit on the spot and became a civilian official for the US defense attache), brought his wife and children to Saigon, and two years after the US withdrawal, as Saigon fell to the North in late April 1975, personally saved the lives of some 20,000 South Vietnamese military officers and their families by leading them in a flotilla of unseaworthy vessels to the Philippines.

Armitage decided to try to sail the ships and the refugees to the Philippines, a distance of about a thousand miles. Most of the ships weren't seaworthy enough to make the voyage. At least sixty of the vessels were scuttled, in some cases with the help of gunfire. The 20,000 Vietnamese were packed into thirty-two boats...Armitage sent urgent cables to the Defense Department, which succeeded in getting food and water brought to the boats. From May 2 to May 7 [1975] Armitage's Vietnamese convoy...sailed to Subic Bay in the Philippines...When the ships reached [it], President Ferdinand Marcos and his Philippine government tried to stop the vessels, still carrying South Vietnamese flags....Once again Armitage played intermediary and translator...Finally, on May 8, a solution was reached: In formal ceremonies that Armitage helped arrange, the ships took down their Vietnamese flags and hoisted American ones. They then sailed into Subic Bay. For Armitage, after more than seven years, the Vietnam War was finally over.

Posted by Laura at April 25, 2004 10:58 AM