Worldmaking (71 page)

 

8

THE WORLDMAKER

PAUL WOLFOWITZ

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well that is the only way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.

—WOODROW WILSON

Paul Wolfowitz worked dutifully for the Nixon and Ford administrations, but with no real enthusiasm for their policies. When Fred Iklé, a hawkish RAND strategist, invited Wolfowitz to join the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973, the young scholar dropped his tenure-track job at Yale as if it were a paper route. Wolfowitz was not excited by the thought of making a university career as a political scientist, even at an institution as venerable as Yale. What he wanted was proximity to power and the opportunity to put theory to practice. And he had to start somewhere.

Unfortunately for Wolfowitz, Henry Kissinger had the final say on which theories became practice—and they were usually his own. While Wolfowitz enjoyed the process and detail of his work on missile launches, early-warning systems, and other cutting-edge technologies, he soon grew frustrated with the wider context in which he operated. Wolfowitz viewed the Nixon administration's strategy of détente as morally wrong and tactically deficient. Instead of taming America's principal adversary, détente legitimated and vitalized the Soviet Union—plus the accompanying SALT negotiations ceded Moscow significant tactical advantages. Kissinger was incapable of accepting this possibility, as it contradicted his Metternichian focus on dealing dispassionately and constructively with allies and enemies. Waylaid by specious historical analogies, Kissinger was a lost cause. But the CIA also appeared blasé about the Soviet threat, and this was a real worry.

At the end of every year, the CIA compiles a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which provides a comprehensive assessment of the most pressing threats facing the United States. During the Nixon and Ford administrations, a growing number of critics—including Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlstetter—began complaining that the CIA was underestimating Soviet military strength. Some wondered whether these sanguine NIEs had been so designed to bolster the administration's policies of engagement with Moscow. During his bruising primary battle with Ronald Reagan, Ford buckled under severe pressure from the right of his party and instructed George H. W. Bush, the president's recently appointed director of Central Intelligence, to launch an independent review into these allegations. Bush assembled an external team of experts—designated Team B—to review the CIA's classified data and determine whether the agency's view of Moscow was indeed complacent. Team B was led by the Sovietologist Richard Pipes, a professor of Russian history at Harvard University, who oversaw a team of sixteen analysts and defense intellectuals that included two Pauls: Messrs. Nitze and Wolfowitz.
1

After completing their deliberations, Team B launched a lacerating attack on the CIA. Their report criticized the agency for leaning too heavily on satellite imagery and signals intelligence. They alleged that the agency paid insufficient attention to the actual speeches made by members of the Politburo—much more than mere bluster—and to the increasingly aggressive manner in which the Soviet proxies across the world, whether in Angola, Afghanistan, or Vietnam, actually behaved.
2
As Nitze explained in a letter to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Soviet leaders are totally frank in saying that they believe the correlation of forces has moved dramatically in their favor over the last five to ten years. They attribute this to their growing military preponderance and to détente.”
3
The aggressiveness and certainty with which Pipes and Nitze made their case left the fresh-faced, undermanned CIA “Team A” reeling. “It was like putting Walt Whitman High versus the Redskins,” said one CIA analyst of the meeting between both “teams” in October 1976. Another recalled, “People like Nitze ate us for lunch.”
4

Participation in the Team B exercise was a formative experience for Wolfowitz. The group's conclusions appeared to show that the core component of Kissinger's diplomacy—that improved relations with Moscow increased America's range of diplomatic options—rested on a fallacy. The Soviet Union was as committed to extinguishing liberal capitalism as it had been under Josef Stalin. How does one interact with an entity subscribing to such a worldview? Team B's answer: one doesn't. Wolfowitz's assessment was that “the B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the analysts, and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior.”
5
He departed the exercise convinced that threats to the United States were often worse than they appeared, that Washington should plan on the basis of the worst-case scenario, that arms spending should be sharply increased, and that the CIA was essentially untrustworthy, conditioned by the same systemic biases—reliance on objectively verifiable evidence, moral relativism, an unwillingness to cite ideology as causative factor—that also blighted the State Department. It was all bracing stuff, although Team B's alarmist assessments turned out to be factually wrong.
6

Team B, and Wolfowitz's geopolitical awakening, was something of a hinge moment in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Kissingerian realism was soon to be eclipsed by moralism, stridency, and instinctual certainties about American virtue and its duty to combat evil. In the summer of 1976, as James Mann recounts in
Rise of the Vulcans
, Wolfowitz invited two graduate students—one of whom was Francis Fukuyama—to assist his work on Team B as unpaid interns. At dinner at his home, Wolfowitz ruminated on the strengths and limitations of Henry Kissinger's
A World Restored
. It was a well-researched and interesting book, Wolfowitz said, but Kissinger had identified the wrong exemplar. That craftsman of realpolitik, Metternich, projected a vision that was lacking in scruple and substance; the “peace” he helped secure was unsustainable in the long term. Tsar Alexander I, who had advocated fierce resistance to Napoleon Bonaparte on moral and religious grounds, was the true hero of the tale. Fukuyama recalled “him saying the thing that's wrong with Kissinger is that he does not understand the country he's living in, that this is a country that is dedicated to certain universalistic principles.”
7
On Kissinger's preference for amoral, balance-of-power diplomacy, Wolfowitz was fond of quoting a sardonic Polish phrase that emphasized its insidiousness: “the stability of the graveyard.”
8
Wolfowitz's values-led universalism marked a clear break with Kissinger, owed a large debt to Woodrow Wilson, and would dominate the foreign-policy debate for the next thirty years.

*   *   *

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz was born in Brooklyn on December 22, 1943, the second child of Lillian Dundes and Jacob Wolfowitz. Paul's paternal grandparents had fled Poland in 1920, fearing that their Judaism made them a target for discrimination and violence. Their instincts spared their lives. As was the case with the Kissingers, those family members who remained perished during the genocidal Nazi occupation.

Like so many talented, cash-poor Jewish immigrants, Jacob Wolfowitz attended City College, where he received a first-class education. He then moved to New York University for his graduate work, where he completed his doctoral dissertation in mathematics. Jacob's interests were myriad. He was highly cultured, a steadfast supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a dedicated Zionist, and an organizer of protests against the Soviet Union's brutal treatment of minorities and dissidents. In 1951, Jacob moved the family from New York City to Ithaca, where he took a professorship at Cornell in mathematics and statistics.

Paul's childhood in Ithaca—an attractive if isolated college town in upstate New York—was idyllic and directed by his father toward serious purposes. The family library was well stocked, and Paul consumed his father's histories of the Second World War and the Holocaust—of which he confessed he read “probably too many”—George Orwell's oeuvre, and John Hersey's
Hiroshima
, a visceral account of the atomic bombing of that city.
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Paul was a precocious student at Ithaca High School. During his senior year, the school gave him dispensation to attend a calculus class at Cornell in the morning before completing his school lessons in the afternoon.
10
Cornell recognized Paul as a student of uncommon ability and offered him a university place with a full scholarship, too good an opportunity for him or his family to decline. He majored in mathematics and chemistry and appeared poised to follow in his father's disciplinary footsteps.

Paul's exemplary scholastic record qualified him for membership in the Telluride Association, a select group of Cornell and University of Michigan undergraduates from various disciplines united only by their smarts. Telluride was a self-governing entity founded in 1910 with seed money from an unorthodox Colorado businessman named Lucien Lucius Nunn. Telluride encouraged the free exchange of ideas and compelled a large degree of self-reliance and responsibility. It was the students, not administrators, who hired kitchen and cleaning staff, organized basic maintenance, invited guest speakers, and oversaw admissions. And it was at Telluride in 1963 that Wolfowitz first encountered Professor Allan Bloom, a charismatic classicist and political theorist who had moved to Telluride as a faculty adviser.
11
Bloom's tutoring style was Socratic, the classical philosophers were his lodestars, and his pleasures tended toward the bacchanalian—he lived a full and joyful life. Bloom was close to Alexandre Kojève, Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss, Susan Sontag, and the great novelist Saul Bellow, a fellow graduate of the University of Chicago, who later wrote a novel around him,
Ravelstein
, in which a thinly disguised Wolfowitz (named Philip Gorman) also makes a cameo appearance. Telluride was not a cult—much as it might have appeared that way—but the magnetic Bloom attracted a cult following.
12

Wolfowitz changed direction at Cornell, moving away from natural science and toward political science. By Wolfowitz's own admission, Bloom had a role in inspiring this shift: “He had a lot to do with my coming to appreciate that the study of politics could be a serious business, even though it wasn't science in the sense that I understood science to be. That was an important eye-opener.” Sensing the appearance on the scene of a dangerous influence, Jacob Wolfowitz took a rather dim view of Bloom's grandiose philosophizing; indeed, both were suspicious of the other's subject areas. Wolfowitz remembered that “Bloom was somewhat disdainful of hard science in general because it left out the philosophical dimension.”
13
His father viewed the social sciences as inferior disciplines; their presumption to deliver verifiable truth was unconvincing.

Jacob was fighting a losing battle with his son. It was not just Bloom's charisma and passion for political theory he had to counteract but also momentous world events that drew Wolfowitz closer to those disciplines that promised to make sense of them. “I was a Cuban Missile Crisis kid,” Wolfowitz said. “I was a sophomore in college when all that happened. There were other things in it as well. It was kind of a passion for history and politics even though I was good in math and science.”
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The combination of Bloom and the Cold War conspired to frustrate the father's hopes for his son. Paul was accepted to the prestigious Ph.D. program in biophysical chemistry at MIT. Unbeknownst to his father, however, he had also applied to doctoral programs in political science at Harvard and the University of Chicago. When both offered him places, Wolfowitz chose Chicago largely because Leo Strauss, a major thinker with close links to Bloom, was on the faculty. “I told my father I had to try political science for a year,” Wolfowitz said. “He thought I was throwing my life away.”
15

Strauss was a major figure in twentieth-century political philosophy. He was devoted to Plato and Aristotle and taught classes through meticulous reading of their major works. Strauss (and indeed Bloom) believed that twentieth-century philosophy was blighted by two failings: moral relativism and ahistorical liberalism. The first philosopher Strauss designated (and damned) as “modern” was Niccolò Machiavelli, whose callous worldview fitted neatly in the former category. That seminal rejection of classical and biblical morality,
The Prince
, represented all that Strauss abhorred. On the failings of modern liberalism, Strauss came down hard on Karl Popper, whose 1945 work
The Open Society and Its Enemies
was a strong attack on Plato's
Republic
, which Popper condemned as “totalitarian.” As the intellectual historian Melissa Lane observes, Strauss viewed the
Republic
very differently: as “secretively and ironically an anti-totalitarian text, a text which warns against the danger of being sanitized by exegetes as a utopian ideal.”
16
Or as Strauss said of one of Popper's lectures in 1950: It “was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out, lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think ‘rationally,' although it passed itself off as ‘rationalism'—it was very bad.”
17
Plato was a hero to Strauss because he asked fundamental questions about justice and order; the issues and dilemmas he confronted were timeless. Popper had distorted Plato's prescriptions to pursue his own agenda, and this was dishonest. Strauss spoke frequently of the “crisis of liberalism … a crisis due to the fact that liberalism has abandoned its absolutist basis and is trying to become entirely relativistic.”
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Like George Kennan, Strauss was conservative in the most literal sense.