by David Milne
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.
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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.9 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.”14 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 rejec
tion 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.”18 Like George Kennan, Strauss was conservative in the most literal sense.
Drawn in by the clarity of his worldview and seductiveness of his classroom technique, and of course by Bloom’s endorsement, Wolfowitz took two classes with Strauss at Chicago—on Plato and Montesquieu. Wolfowitz gained much insight from both courses and found that Strauss lived up to his laudatory advance billing. Yet Wolfowitz was later dismissive of those scholars who drew linkages between Strauss and his subsequent foreign-policy views: “It’s a product of fevered minds … I mean I took two terrific courses from Leo Strauss as a graduate student. One was on Montesquieu’s spirit of the laws, which did help me understand our Constitution better. And one was on Plato’s laws. The idea that this has anything to do with U.S. foreign policy is just laughable.”19 Of course Strauss did not have to write on U.S. foreign policy—and, indeed, he wrote nothing on this subject—to exert an influence on its makers. Strauss’s idealization of the strong leader—Churchill was a hero of his—and firm moral convictions were certainly present in Wolfowitz’s subsequent career. But the professor at Chicago whom Wolfowitz cited as his true mentor was his Ph.D. supervisor, Albert Wohlstetter.
The urbane, whip-smart Wohlstetter worked at the RAND Corporation throughout the 1950s, where he developed a global reputation in the field of nuclear strategy.20 He and Paul Nitze were close; both were alarmed by U.S. vulnerability to the Soviet Union’s fast-improving nuclear capabilities and believed that the Eisenhower administration was recklessly sanguine on this point. Wohlstetter moved to the University of Chicago in the 1960s, where he taught political science. Here he developed a strong focus, which remained throughout his career, on the best means to forestall the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A visit to Israel in the late 1960s left him fearful that its hostile neighbors were hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear capability, and that America’s duty to Israel (and the world) was to use whatever means necessary to prevent this from happening.21 Wohlstetter’s influence was clearly evident in Wolfowitz’s doctoral dissertation, which examined and critiqued Israel’s desire to develop nuclear-powered desalination stations near its borders with Egypt and Jordan.
Desalination served a laudable function, Wolfowitz conceded, but he also feared that the plutonium by-product of such plants could find its way into the wrong hands and eventually pose an existential threat to Israel itself. The dissertation warned of these dire consequences and emphasized the difficulties of instituting an international nuclear inspection regime truly capable of assuring the technology remained devoted to peaceful purposes. While Woodrow Wilson’s idealism inspired Wolfowitz, he found the former president’s views on the peacemaking potential and capabilities of multilateral institutions and international law far less persuasive.
Wolfowitz’s thesis criticized not only the wisdom of building these desalination plants but also the very notion of Israel acquiring a nuclear weapons capability:
The fundamental point is that any Israeli nuclear force would have to depend on relatively simple delivery systems, which would be vulnerable even to conventional attack … An Israeli nuclear threat against Arab cities would weaken Israel’s conventional military position by cutting her off from friendly countries in the West, and by encouraging, if not forcing, the Soviet Union to intervene more actively on behalf of the Arabs … 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.22
We know that Wolfowitz’s nuclear-free Middle East did not come to pass. Israel developed an atomic weapon capability during the 1970s, while adhering to a stance of so-called nuclear ambiguity—also known as keeping schtum.23 Just as Wolfowitz predicted, other regional powers, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, laid plans to counterbalance Israel’s advantage and develop a nuclear insurance policy. Whether declared or not, the new reality of a nuclear-armed Israel was never likely to go unchallenged by its hostile neighbors. Wolfowitz could scarcely have realized this at the time, but issues of nuclear proliferation—and “weapons of mass destruction” more broadly—in the Middle East would dominate much of his subsequent career. Whether events would have turned out differently if Israel had followed Wolfowitz’s cautionary advice is impossible to know. What we do know is that Wolfowitz produced a fine dissertation that was grounded in multiple Hebrew-language sources and propelled by nuanced and sharp analysis.24
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Wolfowitz cut a fascinating figure during his time at Cornell and Chicago, alternating between civil rights–inspired liberalism and hawkish iconoclasm through the upheavals of the 1960s. In August 1963, Wolfowitz hitched a ride with some Ithaca church congregations that had chartered buses to Washington to attend a major civil rights demonstration. Wolfowitz thus became one of a quarter of a million people on the National Mall who witnessed Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This road trip was no one-time progressive aberration. Wolfowitz was a strong supporter of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and of the civil rights movement more generally. Indeed, throughout his career, he shared little with the Republican Party on domestic politics. “The most surprising thing about Wolfowitz,” Christopher Hitchens said of his frequent dinner companion, “is that he’s a bleeding heart. His instincts are those of a liberal democrat, apart from on national security.”25
But Wolfowitz also supported Kennedy and Johnson’s foreign policies, and this is where he departed company with the civil rights movement and indeed the mainstream left. During his final year at Cornell, for example, Wolfowitz was one member of a three-person demonstration (if this designation can be applied to a trio) supporting U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War. A founder member of Cornell’s Committee for Critical Support of the United States in Vietnam, Wolfowitz fully agreed with President Johnson’s logic for escalating the conflict. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, Wolfowitz was not dispirited, believing that America’s military effort had served an important function, even when the immediate objective had not been met. He agreed with Singapore’s president Lee Kuan Yew and Walt Rostow that fighting communism in Vietnam ultimately saved its neighbors from Marxist-Leninist revolutions.26
Wolfowitz was clearly an atypical college student in that volatile and socially experimental era when political differences burned with uncommon intensity. Yet in the midst of this tumult, Wolfowitz was incapable of making enemies; he was as gracious to his ideological opponents as he was to his (fewer) like-minded allies. As George Packer observes in The Assassins’ Gate, Wolfowitz was “always a good boy, the kind on whom adults fasten their dreams, with a yeshiva student’s purity about him, though his education was entirely secular.” One of Wolfowitz’s fellow students at Telluride observed that there was “a certain public-spirited prudery about him. Paul is sort of the good
citizen.”27 Wolfowitz may have chosen the wrong subject, in his father’s estimation, but any parent would have been proud of the dedication with which he pursued those studies, his active political life, and the easy way he interacted with others.
In 1969, as Wolfowitz was working on his dissertation in Chicago, Wohlstetter invited him to set it aside for a while and take a job with him in Washington, D.C., conducting research for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a pressure group established by Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson to protect the development of an antiballistic missile system from congressional sequestration. Wolfowitz was more than willing to put his dissertation on ice. Indeed, he soon found himself hooked on real-world politics. Nitze and Acheson were inspirational figures, and both warmed to the idealistic and energetic Wolfowitz. The Safeguard ABM program was saved by a vote of 51 to 50 in the Senate (as the vote was tied, the extra vote came from Vice President Spiro Agnew). Wolfowitz’s return to Chicago and his doctoral research was something of a comedown. After Wolfowitz accepted the lottery win that was a tenure-track position at Yale in 1970, his default career focus tended toward job opportunities in Washington rather than journal articles, promising doctoral students, and grant applications. In 1973, he joined the Nixon administration and remained there through Nixon’s protracted waltz with oblivion, Gerald Ford’s ascension to the Oval Office, and Ford’s defeat in 1976 to Jimmy Carter. At that point Wolfowitz faced a stark choice: Leave with Ford, or remain in post and work for Carter?