How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, April 5, 2003
How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
 
President Bush has never been known as a bookworm. An
instinctive politician who goes with his gut, he has
usually left the heavy reading in the family to his
wife, Laura, a former librarian. He is "often
uncurious and as a result ill informed," his former
speechwriter, David Frum, wrote in a memoir this year,
adding that "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively
unwelcome in the Bush White House."

It is curious then that books by historians,
philosophers and policy analysts have played a
significant role in shaping and promulgating the
administration's thinking about foreign policy,
America's place in the world and the war against Iraq.

Michael Harrington's book "The Other America" is
widely credited with helping catalyze the
Kennedy-Johnson war on poverty in the 1960's and the
creation of Great Society programs. George Gilder's
book "Wealth and Poverty" was publicly endorsed by
President Ronald Reagan, who embraced its message of
tax cuts. George H. W. Bush's comparison of Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait to Hitler's annexation of
the Sudetenland was informed by his reading of Martin
Gilbert's book "The Second World War." And Robert D.
Kaplan's book "Balkan Ghosts," which emphasized the
ancient hatreds of the region, is said to have
contributed to the initial reservations of President
Bill Clinton about becoming more boldly involved
there.

In this White House, no single book is pivotal, but an
array of writings — many by neoconservative authors
closely affiliated with administration officials or
their intellectual mentors — have provided a fertile
philosophical matrix for policy decisions as various
as the doctrine of pre-emption and civilian oversight
of military affairs.

Indeed Mr. Bush, whose father was accused of lacking
the "vision thing," presides over an administration
that is driven in high degree by big and often
abstract theories: theories that promote a "moral"
(some might say moralistic) approach to foreign
policy; an unembarrassed embrace of power; a
detestation of relativistic thinking; and an often
Manichaean view of the world that, like the
president's language, manages to be darkly Hobbesian
and willfully optimistic at the same time.

It is less a matter of outside scholars and experts
preaching to members of the administration than an
incestuous world of policy making, policy analysis and
historical commentary in which like-minded colleagues
and friends trade ideas, egg one another on and
sometimes provide spin on one another's behalf....
Most of them have a distinctively instructive or
prescriptive tone: this is what is wrong (with
America, with the military, with the world); this is
what needs to be done to fix it.

Last summer President Bush — whose favorite book had
been Marquis James's 1929 biography of Sam Houston,
who evolved from being the man the Cherokees called
Big Drunk to the father of Texas — made it known that
he was reading "Supreme Command" by Eliot A. Cohen
....

On March 21, as the war was beginning, Mr. Kristol
said at the American Enterprise Institute that Mr.
Bush "seems to understand, better than many
presidents, I would say, the lesson of our friend
Eliot Cohen's book of about a year ago, `Supreme
Command,' that political strategy should drive
military strategy." ...

As for the Cohen book, its central thesis, in
Clemenceau's famous words, is that "war is too
important to be left to the generals." ...

"Supreme Command" charges that the president's father
abdicated responsibility in favor of the military in
the first Persian Gulf war, ending it too early and
allowing Saddam Hussein to stay in power....
 
[...]

... the Project for the New American Century, a group
that calls for the United States to adopt a muscular
military posture and "challenge regimes hostile to our
interests and values."

Supporters of the Project group like Mr. Fukuyama, Mr.
Wolfowitz and William J. Bennett (former secretary of
education) — along with other neocons like Justice
Clarence Thomas and Alan Keyes (the conservative
presidential candidate) — are followers of the late
Leo Strauss, who was a political philosopher at the
University of Chicago and a godfather of sorts to the
neocon movement. "Straussians," the conservative
author Dinesh D'Souza has written, like to use the
philosophy of "natural right" — which for the ancients
was a basis for differentiating between right and
wrong — "to defend liberal democracy and moral values
against their adversaries both foreign and
indigenous." Many of Strauss's ideas were popularized
by Allan Bloom ....

Both Strauss and Bloom reviled moral relativism,
invoked the teaching of the classics and took an
elitist view of education. As teachers in the Socratic
tradition, they also ardently believed in mentors, a
role that Mr. Kristol, an avowed Straussian, filled so
energetically as Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of
staff that he became known as "Dan Quayle's brain."

... In 1992 Mr. D'Souza put it this way: "Straussians
have an intellectual rigor that is very attractive.
They have extolled the idea of the statesman and the
notion of advising the great, the prince, like
Machiavelli or Aristotle. This is necessary because
the prince is not always the smartest guy in the
world."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/arts/05WARB.html

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