The "science" of foreign policy analysis:

Kuklick's focus is on the weaknesses in the analytical methodology of the most influential foreign policy experts in the American intellectual community.

  This book has a very narrow focus. Although policy errors and policy failures are of course noted, Kuklick's focus is on the weaknesses in the analytical methodology of the most influential foreign policy experts in the American intellectual community. His focus is not on foreign policy scholarship generally, but on "policy intellectuals in the shadow of the White House."

  "I direct attention to the truth-value of the ideas but also to the culture of the scholars, and the demands that their training, ambition, sense of public service, and the state placed on them. I am interested in foreign policy itself, but more in what my intellectuals made of it. The emphasis is on words more than actions. - - - I study the decisions of the powerful, but more closely the ideas of the intellectuals among them and the concepts of scholars close to power."

  U.S. Cold War foreign policy was of course ultimately astoundingly successful. The U.S. successfully maintained a wide array of free world alliances, brought the conflict to a successful conclusion with the demise of the Soviet Union and the broad collapse of communist and socialist regimes world wide, while avoiding direct military engagement between the super powers and the resort to nuclear weapons.
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  The U.S., of course, was playing a very strong hand. It was supported by systems of economic and political freedom - capitalism and democracy. However, that would not have been enough if the U.S. government and its various foreign policy advisors weren't also doing something right. Right after the period covered by this book, during the administration of Jimmy Carter, it appeared that the Cold War effort of the U.S. was falling apart.
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  During the period covered by this book, there were indeed notable foreign policy victories. Besides the opening to China, there was the constant strengthening of Western Europe and NATO, the support for Tito in Yugoslavia, the establishment of friendly relations with Egypt after Nasser and with Indonesia after Sukarno, and numerous other lesser achievements.
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  Nevertheless, there were serious failures along the way. The study of weaknesses in analytical methodology and problems of self interestedness is a legitimate and useful subject. It is on that basis that FUTURECASTS reviews this book.

Some achieve positions of influence often at a very early age, display unquestioning confidence in their capabilities and often contempt for those that question their views as they grasp the foreign policy levers of the nation.

  Intellectual hubris and an incredible disdain for the historic context of particular conflicts are correctly highlighted by Kuklick as major methodological weaknesses among many U.S. foreign policy intellectuals. They rise brilliantly through the academic world. Some achieve positions of influence often at a very early age, display unquestioning confidence in their capabilities and often contempt for those that question their views as they grasp the foreign policy levers of the nation. However, they follow up with intellectual efforts to distance themselves from responsibility when the policies they have contributed to are mugged by reality.

  While Kuklick takes his analysis only as far as the mid-1970s, this has remained true even among present day influential foreign policy intellectuals.|
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  Whether Robert McNamara and the "Whiz Kids" of the Kennedy/Johnson administration or  Paul Wolfowitz and the "Neocons" of the Bush (II) administration, these clearly brilliant men preside like WW-I generals over modern conflicts - acting on the basis of plans drawn on maps many miles from the front lines while ignoring the realities of the battle field. Indeed, some are even worse than that - insouciantly disdaining even maps in favor of abstract intellectual plans based on the weakest of assumptions.

  Three major groups are identified by Kuklick.
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  The first group - frequently associated with the RAND Corporation, a "think-tank" that was run by the Air Force - stressed ideas of "scientific" management and economic analysis.

  "Influential economists and political scientists from the university world studied war at RAND or consulted for it, but of particular importance are the essays of Bernard Brodie in the late 1940s, the reports on strategic 'vulnerability' identified with Albert Wohlstetter in the 1950s, and the work of Thomas Schelling on deterrence in early 1960s."

  A second related group of foreign policy academics "were allies of the political scientist Richard Neustadt and the historian Ernest May" and his group of scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Their approach was less formal and more historically grounded. Other universities contributed to this milieu, but Harvard was dominant.
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  The third group is composed of academics who achieved the highest positions of influence between 1945 and 1975, including George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Henry Kissinger. While they interacted with the first two groups, they generally "eschewed much American policy science" in favor of more multifaceted analytical methods.

  "In looking at this third circle, defined by both position and intellect, I scrutinize how the assumptions of the more social scientific strategists affected the truly powerful who had ties to the academy. The question is: how does political practice, for intellectuals, modify theory? I am concerned not so much with the policies that they carried out, as with the fit of these policies to the mind-set of the policymakers."

"Dewey and his many adherents ritualistically invoked the scientific method as the means to obtain social knowledge [but] were fuzzy about the precise nature of scientific reasoning."

Positivists and pragmatists often united in disdain for soft, humanistic inquiry, and in their respect for methodological precision and statistics."

  The pertinent intellectual environment is traced by Kuklick to the pragmatism of John Dewey, who sought to marshal knowledge in the service of public policy. "The human sciences could provide us the wherewithal for making more adequate judgments." While political leaders would continue to make the ultimate decisions, those decisions should be informed by expert knowledge.
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  The level of proof required for the establishment of this "knowledge" varied widely among those who followed Dewey. "Dewey and his many adherents ritualistically invoked the scientific method as the means to obtain social knowledge [but] were fuzzy about the precise nature of scientific reasoning." But others, the "positivists," argued that legitimate investigations to obtain social knowledge had to employ the methods of the hard sciences. Moreover, real science was inherently a value-free activity. This clashed with the pragmatists who refused to distinguish between value and fact.

  "But the identical emphasis on the one experimental method that promised to give us a purchase over nature minimized these differences, - - -. Positivists and pragmatists often united in disdain for soft, humanistic inquiry, and in their respect for methodological precision and statistics."

  Here we have the modern fallacy of trying to apply the scientific method and mathematical forms of reasoning to fields where they are totally unsuitable. Often, this is just the "science propaganda ploy," where the forms of science are invoked to gain more acceptance than the state of knowledge warrants. See, Karl Marx, Capital (Das Kapital) (vol 1)(I), at segment "A) The 'Science' Propaganda Ploy." As Kuklick demonstrates, such efforts are far from benign in their outcomes.
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   Social "science," political "science," military "science" and economics simply do not produce statistics sufficiently reliable for "scientific" analysis except in niche circumstances. What can't be measured is often more important than what can. These fields are too complex to be reduced to mere "sciences." They are professions that at best produce knowledge-based professional opinions that may be very good, but do not provide scientific degrees of certitude.
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  The hard sciences themselves, of course, vary widely in the degrees of precision that they achieve, but pseudo scientific approaches actually restrict the knowledge available and frequently lead up blind alleys with wasteful - even disastrous - consequences. Everything must be simplified to fit into mathematical formulae. Everything that cannot be expressed as an equation is often just left out. The imprecision of the statistics become the plaything of propagandists. The statistics are easily  twisted for political and ideological purposes but nevertheless are cloaked in the mantle of "science."

  Other intellectual influences included efficiency expert Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" practices, and the "operations research" studies of WW-II tactics.
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  The post WW-II foreign policy analysts were "steeped in these writings," Kucklick points out. However, a few - like Kennan and Kissinger - disparaged this "scientism" and "social-science positivism." Hans Morganthau was a perceptive critic of these scientific pretensions. He denigrated the conception "that the social sciences, like the natural sciences, purveyed objective and universally applicable conclusions." He emphasized that interests - national and personal - not reason, had the greatest influence on international relations and social relations.

  "Thus, he wrote that the social world was more complex than the physical, and experimentation, predictions, and comprehension more difficult. Moreover, when experts  came close to power, their analyses might degenerate into justification of existing policy."

  Morganthau, too, was absolutist in his thinking, however. He viewed darkly the grip of his perceived "iron laws" of politics, and disparaged idealism in politics and international relations. Morganthau's "realist" terminology was readily adopted by foreign policy intellectuals, but his views were widely disregarded.

  "Realism brought to the field of security studies conceptual problems that scholars never solved. As a more-or-less factual thesis realism argued that in examining the interactions among states, the student should look to interests, power relations, and economics as independent variables. Scholars should downplay statements of principle or morality and their causal efficacy. A realist studying history might argue that an adequate narrative of the courses of international politics over a certain period would demonstrate that interest drove the interactions of states, no matter what individual diplomats said about the purity of their motives or the demands of principle."

  The study of these events was often circumscribed to support desired conclusions, Kuklick asserts. (This is a frequent occurrence in these pseudo sciences.) There was little concern among Wilson's critics with the broader international circumstances with which he struggled at Versailles, and little sympathy for the problems created for the Japanese by American efforts to constrain their ambitions prior to Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was just a "sneak attack" that the U.S. would henceforth always have to guard against. "In the postwar period scholars of strategic studies would assume that war came through malevolent surprise."
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  There was little effort at more nuanced examination. In its conflicts with the WW-II Axis nations and subsequently with the Cold War communist nations, "America was right and its enemies wrong."
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  Kuklick criticizes the lack of intellectual concern with the possibility that many of the actions taken by the Soviet Union may have been more a response to American Cold War actions than a pursuit of malign objectives. American influence in Western Europe was countered by Soviet expansion of its influence in East Europe, American worldwide influence was countered by Soviet worldwide ambitions, American possession of nuclear weapons was countered by the Soviet nuclear program.

  "This judgment is not meant to deny the superiority of Western values over those of the communists in the long competition, or to imply that the Russians had a less distorted view of American diplomacy. Rather, it highlights a lasting aspect of the American approach -- the lack of complication in the imagination of men who could make complex appraisals in other spheres."

  Even this tentative bow to moral relativism with respect to Stalin's Russia is not just untenable, it's disgusting. Well before the end of WW-II and the start of the Cold War, Stalin adamantly intended to extend the Soviet totalitarian grip as far as the Red Army marched. He never had the slightest intention of living up to his treaty obligations in Eastern Europe. He crushed  independence in Eastern Europe while the U.S. was rapidly withdrawing from Western Europe. He began his hydrogen bomb program before the U.S. did. His ambitions were never driven by a mere desire to balance U.S. influence and power.
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  The effort to place some of the blame on the United States for the beginnings of the Cold War is ludicrous. ( For one such effort, see, Kennedy, "Freedom From Fear," Part II, "World War II," at segment on "The delay of the second front.") The documentary evidence from behind the Iron Curtain reveals that Stalin's ambitions were totally independent - and on behalf of a totally malign system of totalitarian government. See, Gaddis, "We Now Know," at segment on "Stalin and the Cold War," and Gaddis, "The Cold War," at segment on "Development of the containment policy."
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  The post WW-II foreign policy intellectuals were totally accurate in their evaluation of the malign character of the Soviet challenge. There was no way the U.S. could avoid the conflict with Stalin's Soviet Russia without surrendering to his ambitions.  

  One result, Kuklick asserts, was that the "civilian strategists regularly overestimated the power and malignity of their Soviet adversary." It was unrealistic to expect the U.S. to maintain the economic and military power advantage that it held at the close of the WW-II, and they should not have looked with such alarm as the Soviet Union closed the gap.

  If Stalin's Russia was not a "malign" factor, then the word has no meaning. Domestic communists and left wing sympathizers were extraordinarily successful prior to, during and immediately after WW-II in putting a favorable gloss on "Good Old Uncle Joe Stalin." Soviet power may have been overestimated, but not its malignity. If anything, that was underestimated for several years after the war. It was periodically demonstrated in such places as Berlin, Korea, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. As a nation with a socialist economic system, Russia could never achieve economic parity with the U.S., but given its demonstrated malignity, alarm over military parity was quite reasonable.

Rather than directing foreign policy in more intelligent directions, they were frequently employed in providing intellectual rationalization for the policies adopted without them. Ultimately, their efforts were frequently directed at exculpating policymakers -- or themselves -- from their failures.

  The author correctly finds that skepticism is in order about the knowledge asserted by our foreign policy scholars.

  "While they professed deep understanding, they actually groped in the dark. Much of the time fashion was more important than validity."

  In most cases, they had little causal impact. Rather than directing foreign policy in more intelligent directions, they were frequently employed in providing intellectual rationalization for the policies adopted without them. Ultimately, their efforts were frequently directed at exculpating policymakers -- or themselves -- from their failures. Rather than constraining government policy, government service "required constraints on their thinking." Often, they exhibited a deplorable ignorance of political imperatives.

  Close association of academic and professional intellectuals - in sociology, political science, economics, law - with government policy has frequently prostituted the professions and academic studies instead of improving governance. The politicians hire the professionals who support their policies, and government service provides both professional and academic prestige and influence that distorts professional attitudes and academic curricula.
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  In recent years, for example, the accounting profession and the rating agencies have suffered serious lapses of integrity as the government has increased their influence to achieve government purposes. Keynesian concepts that are clearly invalid continue to dominate economics because they provide an intellectual justification for the irresponsible government budgetary and monetary policies that the politicians favor. See, Keynes, "The General Theory," Part I, and Keynes, "The General Theory," Part II.. Government statistics have increasingly become the plaything of political propaganda, rendering them increasingly suspect. See, "Economic Statistics: The Figures Lie." Kuklick's examples with respect to foreign policy intellectuals are hardly unique. 

  It is not Kuklick's purpose to remove such intellectuals from influence. Even though many of their efforts in this period fell short - often tragically short - there is no substitution for intellectual efforts to increase the understanding on which policy is based.
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RAND I:

From the start, intellectual hubris was a prominent characteristic of RAND personnel. They entertained grandiose evaluations of their own contributions, and denigrated the intellectual capacity of the Air Force brass.

  At first, its analytical efforts favored reliance on air power and U.S. superiority in nuclear weapons. Air Force prestige and budgets increased and RAND received Air Force funding. In turn, Rand's influence and prestige soared in the community of foreign policy intellectuals. With the advent of advanced missile technology, however, its evaluations were no longer so favorable to the Air Force. The two parted ways, as Rand's focus spread to broader questions of strategy.

  "Three connected strands contributed early on to the mind-set of the self-described RAND 'philosophers:' a reliance on a certain style of mathematical-economic reasoning, an interest in organizational theory, and a commitment to what came to be known in political science as rational choice."

  From the start, intellectual hubris was a prominent characteristic of RAND personnel. They entertained grandiose evaluations of their own contributions, and denigrated the intellectual capacity of the Air Force brass. There were various theoretical strands prominent among the RAND policy intellectuals.
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Its view was that the constant compromise and accommodation of conflicting interests in a democratic society blocked rational decision making.

  "The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior" by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, published in 1944, set forth a theory of action and reaction of those with conflicting interests. Game theory "applied the mathematics formerly limited to economics to social activities." Over time, scholars built systems of great complexity that applied not just to military weapons and tactics but to broader "social scientific consideration of strategy."
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  "Administrative Behavior," by Herbert A. Simon, published in 1945, set forth a theory of organizational behavior. It blended pragmatism with positivism, providing a systematic method of developing means to achieve desired ends. The actual value to society of any particular set of goals, however, is outside the scope of the theory.

  "Neither Wohlstetter nor Simon spent much time worrying about the ultimate ends. For Simon they were not an object of reasonable concern. For Wohlstetter process validated the ends. Both men were enamored of the process, and to the extent the goal was definable, it was in terms of the process."

  "Social Choice and Individual Values," by Kenneth Arrow, published in 1951, set forth rational choice theory. It was concerned with the difficulty of reaching rational decisions in a democratic social order. Its view was that the constant compromise and accommodation of conflicting interests in a democratic society blocked rational decision making. It concluded that a certain level of cultural homogeneity was essential to limit conflicting interests sufficiently to permit a certain level of rationality in social decision making.
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Inevitably, there was criticism of the absence of values. More to the point, critics correctly pointed out that the effort required gross oversimplification of complex factors.

  These pseudo scientific amoral approaches were subjected to much criticism. Inevitably, there was criticism of the absence of values. More to the point, critics correctly pointed out that the effort required gross oversimplification of complex factors. The theories were tested only at the level of games, not with respect to real world events. The RAND theorists "knew their theories could not act as predictors and were often simplified prescriptions." But it did give them an arcane vocabulary often indecipherable outside their foreign policy intellectual clerisy. (Mathematical economics serves the same purpose for economists.)

  "RAND investigators rarely postulated anything more than an impoverished, predictable, and cramped psyche in inventing the goals that generated rational self-interest. People wanted money; they would squeal to stay out of jail. They didn't often have, say, moral scruples in favor of truth-telling no matter what the costs, or feelings of guilt or honor that might motivate them. Nor did a network of social obligations and cultural norms complicate what they wanted or encumber them."

  To apply mathematical and pseudo scientific forms of reasoning to complex issues in these non-scientific practical arts requires simplification to a degree that clearly crosses beyond the boundaries of validity. As stated above, these are fields that require professional understanding, not application of simplistic mathematical models or analyses limited to that which can - frequently with dubious accuracy - be quantified. For a perceptive Bank of England study of weaknesses in macroeconomic econometric models used at the Bank, see, Hendry & Ericsson, "Understanding Economic Forecasts."

Rand interdisciplinary teams of economists, engineers, and sociologists were especially useful in countering the traditional military tendency to concentrate plans on fighting the last war over again.

  "Systems analysis" is the name given to the analytical methods favored by RAND. These methods are also broadly applicable to complex questions of choice outside defense. "[The] systems analyst examined holistically the development of weapons, disarmament, and deterrence, and sought intelligence about American allies and adversaries -- mainly the Soviet Union." They evaluated military and economic resources and the most effective strategic approaches, what was required for the defense of the U.S., and the most effective defense given the limited resources available.
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  Rand interdisciplinary teams of economists, engineers, and sociologists were especially useful in countering the traditional military tendency to concentrate plans on fighting the last war over again. RAND marshaled the methods of science. They were "objective and quantitative." They stressed and prided themselves on their mathematical results.
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    The material - especially about armaments - could be quantified. This was supplemented by expert estimations, some of which was little more than guess work about such things as the actual skills of adversary soldiers and the reaction of the American people to an actual attack. They ritually acknowledged that much could not be quantified, "but adamantly supported quantifying what was possible."
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Cold War strategy:

The immediate military threat was exaggerated to jar the U.S. public out of its isolationist tendencies.

Foreign policy required professional analysis as well as "an affective and aesthetic element" that could not be quantified.

  George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in Foreign Affairs in June, 1947,  is "the  most famous essay in America on issues of war and peace." The disastrous policy failures of the democratic nations between the wars left Kennan without confidence in the sustainability of democratic systems, and his previous writings favored a return to limited white male suffrage. In 1946, he feared that the U.S. and the West would not be up to the challenge of countering Soviet ambitions. Neither he nor the analysts at RAND had any patience with "democratic dialog" for the development of foreign policy.
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  Kennan disdained efforts to reduce foreign policy to a "science." Foreign policy required professional analysis as well as "an affective and aesthetic element" that could not be quantified. He collaborated with select professionals whose experience, knowledge and wisdom he came to value. "They were more valuable than the most elaborate synthesis of demonstrable fact and syllogistic deduction."
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  Kennan blended a "no-nonsense program for political action with moralistic denunciation of a dangerous but beatable enemy." He argued that the U.S. could "contain" the Soviets, who would eventually self-destruct if opposed with "unalterable counter force" wherever they intruded on the interests of the free world. He thus contributed the predominant strategic concept for the Cold War: "a formula for action applicable to a range of cases in pursuit of a long-term goal that recognizes the contingency in the experience to which the concept is meant to apply."
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  Kennan's contemporary and subsequent writings emphasized the balance of power principles that he recognized as predominant in Soviet foreign policy. However, his essay contributed to the propaganda designed to gain public support for the Cold War effort by exaggerating the influence of malign Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Soviet leadership was "neurotic," even "paranoid in its suspicion and hatred of the West," and "pathologically absorbed in its rigid Communist belief system."
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  Kuklick points out that Kennan later came to regret his contribution to this ploy, but Kuklick concedes that, even without such exaggeration, Kennan viewed the Soviet challenge as a sufficient threat to put the future of the West in real jeopardy.

  Even though pragmatic balance of power considerations predominated in the Kremlin, the documentary evidence now leaves no doubt that Communist ideology was in fact an important influence in Soviet foreign policy.

  Strategic brilliance however was not accompanied by tactical competence. His further contributions were generally otherworldly. Sec. of State Dean Acheson found him "abstract" and pacifist, concentrating on utopian impractical total solutions in lieu of dealing with hard immediate realities.
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  Kennan soon left the State Department for Princeton University. Crises in Berlin and Czechoslovakia, the advent of the Soviet nuclear bomb and the fall of China soon lent substance to suspicions of the Soviet military threat.
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  Kennan was succeeded by Paul Nitze who continued to emphasize the sinister qualities of Soviet Russia and its military threat, and believed in a muscular response. As he achieved a position of influence and responsibility, however, he shifted somewhat, viewing the Cold War contest as manageable and negotiable. He established connections with RAND and supported their systems analysis methods.
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  Nitze and Acheson began in 1949 and 1950 to shift the Cold War emphasis from its political and economic orientation to a military one. For Truman's National Security Council, Nitze drafted NSC-68 that emphasized the Soviet threat and called for a vast expansion of the defense budget. The attack on South Korea by North Korea raised NSC-68 to prominence. The U.S. responded with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to secure Europe as the primary theater of the Cold War conflict. The Korean War also raised awareness that the U.S. might indeed have to fight numerous small wars that were not worth major conflicts and the use of nuclear weapons.
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  Kuklick questions the wisdom of U.S. engagement in the long, costly and ambiguous conflict in Korea on behalf of "a weak ally in Asia on the borders of the great Communist states." The difficulties of the conflict when China intervened on behalf of the routed North Koreans came as an unpleasant surprise. But the specter of Munich haunted early Cold War foreign policy, and the U.S. feared permitting aggression to be rewarded. (South Korea is no longer weak and remains a stout ally in a dangerous region.)
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Eisenhower:

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Eisenhower understood that tactics and strategy could not be reduced to mere scientific calculations. They required practical experience and profound professional understanding.

  The analysts at RAND, however, worked for the Air Force at that time, and reflected Air Force desires for expanded budgets. Lacking Eisenhower's strategic acumen, they wanted the nation to prepare to fight limited wars. (Like so many other intellectuals after WW-II - especially among economists, sociologists and political scientists - they were totally ignorant of the actual limits of the vast financial and economic resources of the nation.) Yet filled with intellectual hubris, they viewed Eisenhower's strategic plans and his intellectual capabilities with disdain.
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  Eisenhower was of course familiar with the thinking of the foreign policy experts at RAND and the university community, and had met many of them. However, he understood that tactics and strategy could not be reduced to mere scientific calculations. They required practical experience and profound professional understanding. He did not need validation from RAND or the university community for his policies.
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  He "tired of 'abstractions' and disliked the 'idea of - - - generalized definitions' of which intellectuals were so fond." "What the hell do they know" about nuclear policy, he declared. His foreign policy team shared his deep disdain for the scientific pretensions of the intellectual foreign policy community.
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  As Eisenhower successfully steered the nation through the first years of the Cold War, the foreign policy intellectuals had to wait for the next administration to have a real impact. Their criticism of Eisenhower was intense, but in the event they were far less successful than he.
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American soldiers should not be expended merely to "send a message."

  Eisenhower sought to avoid indeterminate limited wars, conflict on the mainland of Asia, and concepts that favored the gradual application of force. American soldiers should not be expended merely to "send a message."

  "Military doctrine demanded clarity in the definition of a mission and the resources to prevail. - - - [The] United States must not involve itself in costly, ambiguous conflicts. America should not intervene unless it was certain that the United States would overcome the enemy, and irresistible power should be designed to bring about quick victory." (Sounds similar to the "Powell Doctrine" of Gen. Colin Powell.)

  The clear nuclear advantage then enjoyed by the U.S. gave Eisenhower the means to successfully implement his strategic vision. It would not be long before his successors would no longer have that advantage. The threat of "massive retaliation" would enable Eisenhower to limit defense expenditure enough to assure a sound economy and a reasonably balanced budget. "Liberation" notions for the "rollback" of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe were quickly rejected by Eisenhower as they had been by Truman..
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  At this stage, nobody believed a major war would be fought without nuclear weapons. The difference was about the extent that conventional forces should be built up and the willingness to engage American ground forces in limited war conflicts. Thoughts of launching a preventive war before the Soviets could build up their nuclear capabilities were rejected by Eisenhower, but he did not take the possibility of a first strike off the table in the event of a clear indication of Soviet malign intent.
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RAND II:

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The best way to avoid nuclear war was to deter it, and that required a robust second-strike capability.

  The emphasis on analytical technique deepened at RAND under the influence of men like Bernard Brodie and Alain Enthoven. Brodie applied the analytical methods of economics in his work, but denigrated mathematically oriented policy scientists as exhibiting "an astonishing lack of political sense." At least for major conflicts, nuclear weapons made the experience of soldiers during previous wars irrelevant. New "scientific" methods of analysis were needed to weigh costs and benefits and to weigh various strategies against each other. 

  "Thinking in terms of costs and benefits, the strategist trained in economics could provide a 'genuine analytical method' that would enable more effective thinking about war than the military afforded." (emphasis in original)

  The RAND men thus denigrated the military brass, and the military leadership in turn thus developed a "visceral dislike" for the civilian strategists - for their "hauteur, abstraction, and lack of experience."
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  Real world complexities of political rivalry and antagonism that filled diplomatic history and the history of the origins of wars were generally disregarded, Kuklick asserts. The RAND analysts emphasized malign surprise attacks such as they believed had occurred at Pearl Harbor, and the blundering into conflict such as they believed had occurred in WW-I. Everything had to be simplified to fit into their "scientific" analytical methods.
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  Brodie emphasized "second-strike capability." Nuclear force had to be designed to survive a surprise attack and retain the ability to deliver a devastating blow in response. The best way to avoid nuclear war was to deter it, and that required a robust second-strike capability.
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  The development of the awesome thermonuclear H-bomb quickly scrambled these calculations. Even a "winning" second  strike would expose the U.S. to unthinkable devastation. RAND quickly spun off into theories of restrained use of nuclear weapons, tactical or theater weapons, the avoidance of cities as targets, and methods of limiting escalations so diplomats could have a chance to regulate or retard escalation.

  Eisenhower knew that such hopes were a mirage. The realities of actual military conflict were such that escalation would be instantaneous once nuclear weapons were deployed. Only the threat of overwhelming consequences could rationally deter the use of nuclear weapons during a major conflict..

  However, the "quantifying emphasis" dominated RAND by the mid 1950s. Although his ideas were retained, Brodie's analytical methods were considered insufficiently scientific and outmoded. Albert Wohlstetter "embraced the quantifiable" at RAND. Examining the survivability of the Air Force nuclear deterrent, he produced a basing study in 1954 and a second strike study in 1956 that was received positively by the Air Force and made his reputation.
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  Wohstetter's "Basing Study" emphasized the vulnerability of Air Force bomber forces. He determined that basing strategic strike forces around the U.S. rather than abroad offered the best survivability characteristics even though it would require midair refueling to strike back. His second strike study brought nuclear-tipped rockets into focus and shifted the focus from bombers to missiles.
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  The Air Force had initially ignored rocketry and the earlier RAND studies that emphasized them. John von Neumann had been a prominent contributor to those studies. The Wohlstetter studies were not ignored, yet were not actually that influential. Kuklilck points out that by this time, Eisenhower and Dulles were already worried about the political and tactical practicality of foreign bases and were moving towards domestic basing and the development of a missile deterrent.
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"Again and again the civilian strategists evinced their distrust of democratic polity and their commitment to a select management that would lead by exaggeration."

Eisenhower expressed his fears "that soldiers would enfeeble the political freedoms of civil society, and that scientists and social scientists would replace democracy with the rule of the expert."

  In Eisenhower's second term, his critics - some of whom were included in scientific study  panels appointed by Eisenhower - argued for increased expenditures on the nuclear deterrent and the need for a "flexible response" that included larger conventional forces and tactical nuclear weapons. Paul Nitze was influential in writing the final reports for the study panels and stressed the themes he had presented in NSC-68.
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  The launch of the "Sputnik" satellite (which was not a surprise to Eisenhower) created public alarm and forced Eisenhower's hand. RAND contributed to the fears of a "missile gap" that proved totally fallacious, but that helped elect Kennedy in 1960. The Defense Department was reorganized on lines recommended in the reports. The Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 sought to damp down service rivalry and permit rational allocation of resources. Defense spending was increased. Soon, the U.S. had an overwhelming lead in missile hardware.
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  Nevertheless, RAND and Wohlstetter continued to write alarming pieces about the vulnerability of the U.S. and the need for the U.S. public to accept sacrifice and the dedication of additional resources to defense.

  "Wohlstetter limned a world of ever-present threat in which the United States might not measure up. Again and again the civilian strategists evinced their distrust of democratic polity and their commitment to a select management that would lead by exaggeration."

  Towards the end of his second term, Kuklick asserts, Eisenhower lost some of his grip on events, and attempted a series of peace initiatives that proved ineffective. The civilian strategists supported Kennedy, whose speeches began to reflect their concepts. His victory gave them hope for real influence in shaping the nation's foreign policy along scientific analytical lines.
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  Eisenhower's farewell address emphasized a second concern other than his famous warning about the military-industrial complex. He expressed his fears "that soldiers would enfeeble the political freedoms of civil society, and that scientists and social scientists would replace democracy with the rule of the expert."
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"Voicing a scientific politics, the schools indulged in increasingly politicized scholarship that shrank the acceptable range of scholarly opinion."

  The prominence of RAND led to a flowering of academic and intellectual institutions modeled on RAND and dedicated to the analysis of foreign policy and strategy. Students read the works of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clauswitz, Mahan, Mackinder and Morganthau.. Experts and consultants flowed back and forth from these institutions into government, diplomacy, major corporations, and RAND.
 &
  These organizations - at such universities as Columbia, MIT, Univ. of Chicago, Yale, and Johns Hopkins - "put viewpoints at odds with realism on the defensive." Kuklick asserts that these institutions confirmed Morganthau's criticism. "Voicing a scientific politics, the schools indulged in increasingly politicized scholarship that shrank the acceptable range of scholarly opinion."

  "Explicit Wilsonian sentiment was downgraded, and all ideas outside of the political mainstream were discounted. The rhetoric of social science was used to legitimate requests for the ear of policymakers, but after the 'scientific revolution' in post-World War II political science, scholarship was less detached and more partisan that it had been. The nonempirical basis of RAND's ideas often came to connote realism, and over time RAND's students flavored realism with their reformism."

Impulses to moral decision making were ignored.

Realist studies of foreign affairs history suffered from confirmation bias - emphasizing those events confirming their views and disparaging contradictory views.

  However, this "realist" approach had major problems.

  ""[Realism] defined foreign affairs as the realm of the balance of powers, raison d'état, and realpolitik. Such a vision had the virtues and vices that characterized most such positions in the human sciences, in which the notion of theory has more the force of my belief, sense of things, or viewpoint, and not the force of Newtonian paradigm, quantum physics, or evolutionary biology. Realists were programmed to look for certain things and to overlook others." (emphasis in original)

  Impulses to moral decision making were ignored. Kuklick mentions Theodore Roosevelt and Stalin as two statesmen whose statements of moral obligation and peaceful intent were routinely discounted.

  The Communist definition of "peace" is a very aggressive and slippery concept. Anything that advances the cause of communism advances the cause of "peace" according to standard communist propaganda. Squelching opposition in Poland and Czechoslovakia and supporting the North Korean invasion of South Korea just after WW-II were thus evidence of Stalin's "peaceful" intents. Surely, Kuklick is not an apologist for Stalin's bloody rule and imperialist ambitions.
 &
  But Kuklick is surely right about the modern trend to label economics, sociology, military matters, and politics and government studies as "sciences" and then attempt to restrict study to that which can be quantified for mathematical analysis. He mentions the criticism of Richard Neustadt that quantification for mathematical analysis in these phony sciences might ignore "the complexities of the real world." The "science" propaganda ploy is particularly noxious. Kuklick's book is about one field where the people fooled by such propaganda were primarily the propagandists themselves.
 &
  To repeat, these are non-scientific practical arts requiring professional intellectual approaches. They do not have substantial access to the techniques of scientific inquiry, and the effort to apply such techniques frequently renders their analytical results ludicrous.

  More to the point, Kuklick emphasizes realist inconsistencies. They readily analyzed and criticized - and thus recognized - some non-realist factors that had been influential in foreign policy failures. The failures of "Wilson's legalism about the settlement of World War I" was a prominent feature in realist studies. Clearly, moral concepts and honor and other non-realist factors do count in foreign policy. Realist studies of foreign affairs history suffered from confirmation bias - emphasizing those events confirming their views and disparaging contradictory views.
 &
  However, Kuklick questions one of the primary achievements of realism - the widespread acknowledgement after WW-II that the U.S. could not retreat into isolationism but had a duty to shoulder the obligations of leadership in opposition to the aggressive tyrannies of the day. He (unconvincingly) disparages this view as "the old American Calvinist idea of self-abnegation and assertiveness translated into twentieth-century diplomacy."

  America has actually been served very well by its "Protestant Ethic." Despite occasional blunders, the world has benefited immensely from U.S. involvement in international affairs.

Neustadt and May:

&

Was Korea more like Munich before WW-II or the Balkans before WW-I?

  But historical analysis, too, has its problems. It depends on analogical thinking. Was Korea more like Munich before WW-II or the Balkans before WW-I? These events had their notorious characteristics "only because embodied in the events that made up each crisis was a constellation of structural features in which we could see the connection between these events, certain human action, and further events." It was impossible to definitively evaluate whether actions such as the defense of S. Korea avoided even worse outcomes than the conflict. (The ultimate outcome in S. Korea is far from a "worse" outcome.)
 &
  Henry Kissinger recognized these ambiguities. "[He] wrote that history taught the consequences of certain actions in certain situations, but left to each generation to determine the character of the situation itself."
 &

Kennedy:

  With the development of practical nuclear missiles, the civilian analysts - much to the discomfort of the Air Force - shifted their strategic attentions from bombers to missiles. Missiles could be operated by the Army, and the effective Polaris missile submarine was a Navy weapon.
 &
  The reorganization of the military and the rationalization of defense spending among the squabbling services began in the later years of the Eisenhower administration but remained far from completed when Kennedy took office. In the competition over the reallocation of roles and spending, RAND emphasized its objectivity by abandoning its Air Force patron. It favored missiles as the primary nuclear deterrent - especially the Polaris.
 &
  Kennedy surrounded himself with academic experts. Assistant for National Security McGeorge Bundy was from Harvard, Sec. of State Dean Rusk was a Rhodes Scholar, Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara studied at Berkeley and Harvard.
 &

Uncritical loyalty to quantifying techniques brought several disasters.

Intellectuals were hired as advocates by each service to put their case for larger budget shares in the language of the pseudo scientists. 

  McNamara thought like the RAND analysts and pulled many of them into the Department of Defense - his "Whiz Kids." They would no longer be ignored by men like Eisenhower and Dulles. Now they would have an impact. They applied systems analysis to national security, military strategy, and weapons systems. They got off to a good start, rationalizing defense procurement, closing unneeded bases, and disbanding military reserve units that were composed of Congressmen and their employees. The Planning - Programming - Budgeting System was designed to rationalize defense budgeting, but in practice still left much to be desired.
 &
  But uncritical loyalty to quantifying techniques brought several disasters. The F-111 tactical fighter for both the Air Force and the Navy was less than satisfactory for both of them. Kuklick provides details.

  There was also the C5A heavy cargo aircraft project that uncritically applied fixed price contracting to a project that ultimately required considerable research and development and thus experienced massive overruns. The effort to apply fixed price contracting to research and development projects in general was soon littered with failed projects and massive overruns. The attempt to concurrently develop a submarine and its new torpedoes resulted in torpedoes that did not fit the submarine.
 &
  Lesser examples soon littered the DOD's R&D efforts. They provided numerous examples of the weaknesses of "scientific" management as McNamara blindly applied techniques without professional understanding of particular projects.
 &
  McNamara the business manager left the Defense Department procurement system a mess that took a decade to straighten out. He had an even worse impact on the Vietnam war. He was ultimately kicked up stairs to the World Bank where he presided over the bankruptcy of most of the third world pursuant to the ridiculous Keynesian notion that economic development could be advanced by lending financial resources to third world governments. Wherever he went in government, he was a disaster - by far, the most disastrously inept official ever to be appointed to an important policy making position during a time of crisis in American history.

  Kuklick provides a several page summary of all the criticism that McNamara has drawn.
 &
  While the defense budget increased, that did not end the squabbling between the services. Intellectuals were hired as advocates by each service to put their case for larger budget shares in the language of the pseudo scientists. The need for this type of budgetary conflict was much resented by the services. Their resentment of the civilian analysts greatly increased. 
 &

  The possibility of sharing nuclear weapons with major European allies, including Western Germany, was entertained by the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower wanted to reduce U.S. forces in Europe and leave a strong Europe able to take care of itself, but a nuclear Germany was totally unacceptable to Russia. Kuklich attributes the several Berlin crises initiated by Russia to its fears of an increasingly strong Western Germany.
 &
  The Kennedy administration wanted to restrain nuclear proliferation and restrict control of nuclear weapons to the super powers. Negotiations with Russia shifted along these lines, but that did not deter Russia from initiating another Berlin crisis and ultimately resolving the Berlin conundrum with a wall. "Although there was not much that Kennedy could do, the lack of an American response may also have emboldened the Soviets."
 &

  The strategic notions of flexible response and gradual escalation were entertained by the Kennedy administration. They wanted "an array of options deployed to insure the least destructive military hardware for the job at hand but with a threat of using greater and different sorts of atomic force if necessary."
 &
  The ability of political leaders in Washington to control the levels of force and the use of nuclear weapons during a major conflict - something Eisenhower had recognized as impossible - was accepted within the Kennedy administration. William Kaufman was a leading analyst identified with notions of graduated escalation, selective urban nuclear targeting, and U.S. control of nuclear weapons. McNamara became an ardent supporter of this concept, implementation of which required a significant strengthening of European conventional forces and substantial increases in U.S. defense spending to maintain a strategic advantage.
 &
  The concept was called "counterforce - no cities," because use of atomic weapons at first was to be restricted to military targets. More realistically, it hoped to make Western Europe an uninvitingly hard target with sufficient conventional strength so that nuclear weapons would not be needed to defend it against a conventional assault. But McNamara also promoted a survivable second strike capability, ultimately named "assured destruction."
 &
  However, all these theories survived for only about a year, before they were mugged by Cold War realities. The main application of theory was as a rationale for denying nuclear weapons to the Germans. 
 &

  The Cuban Missile Crisis is attributed by Kuklich mainly to Khrushchev bluster and perceptions of Kennedy weakness. The U.S. had missiles in Turkey and Italy, so why shouldn't Russia have some in Cuba, Khrushchev reasoned. Russia wanted to protect Cuba against any further U.S. invasion plans. The dispute was all about brute power, but the Kennedy administration sought to provide a high moral tone to the U.S. stand.
 &
  Kennedy consistently opted for the least provocative options. To induce Russian withdrawal of the missiles, he quickly offered assurances that the U.S. would not invade Cuba. Later, he offered to dismantle the missiles in Italy and Turkey. These were outmoded and due in any event to be replaced by Polaris missiles.
 &
  In the event, Khrushchev withdrew his missiles not because of these inducements or Robert Kennedy's negotiating efforts but because of his recognition of continuing U.S. superiority in nuclear weaponry. To Kennedy's advisers, the outcome was proof of the quality of their leadership. To Kennedy, it was a sobering event.
 &
  Kennedy quickly ended any consideration of sharing nuclear weapons with West Germany or his other allies. This decision resulted in the cancellation of the Skybolt aircraft-launched missile project with Great Britain and for a short time caused a rift with Great Britain. The diplomacy was  sensitive and botched on the American side, but the rift was ultimately closed with the offer of Polaris to Great Britain.
 &
  Moving quickly, Kennedy brought in Averell Harriman to successfully negotiate a nuclear Test Ban Treaty. "The treaty ordered an arms race that neither side could end but also finished the efforts to shape a common European policy on nonconventional armaments." Germany "unhappily signed on" to the treaty, and the division of Europe was complete.

  "Germany was kept down -- it would not have nuclear bombs. The United States stayed in -- American troops would remain in Europe and Germany to protect the Germans and the Russians from one another. And the USSR was kept out -- the Russians would accept the status quo in [West Berlin]."

  U.S. troops in Europe were also still needed to assure the other European allies that they could live with a rapidly strengthening West Germany.

Flexible response and graduated escalation seemed to have won the day. They could stage-manage risk in the nuclear age.

The Ex-Comm advisory board documents that came available in 1997 told a different story.

  These events confirmed the civilian analysts in their analytical approach. Surprise and stealth were the big danger, and international politics could be successfully analyzed as individual quantifiable problems largely separate from historic context. Flexible response and graduated escalation seemed to have won the day. They could stage-manage risk in the nuclear age.
 &
  A rosy gloss was quickly put over the decision-making process by the Kennedy claque of intellectuals, epitomized by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in "A Thousand Days: JFK in the White House" (1965). William Kaufmann glowingly supported McNamara's leadership. The employment of multiple options could indeed avoid nuclear war. But the Ex-Comm advisory board documents that came available in 1997 told a different story.
 &
  The meetings of the civilian advisors "were extraordinary, but what one might expect when a group of individuals was forced to consider their role in the destruction of the planet." Their talk was "confused, halting, sometimes unintelligible, at times not rational." "Half-formulated ideas, fragmented thoughts, mutual fears, and bravado" characterized their sessions. Dean Acheson dismissed their efforts as "repetitive, leaderless, and a waste of time," reflective of the lack of actual military or diplomatic experience of the advisers.
 &

"Students of strategy and policymakers with intellectual proclivities believed that they had an unusually adequate grasp of how the world worked, and how they might shape events in their favor. But their learning had engendered a distorted if glorified view of the recent past and dubious if assertive lessons for the immediate future."

  Ultimately Kennedy offered trade-offs to resolve the crisis. This was something many of his advisors had rejected. The historical proof now seems to indicate that force alone was sufficient, and the Kennedy offer of trade-offs were unnecessary. (That would not mean that they were necessarily unwise.)

  "It is difficult to see why students of strategy found a textbook example of rationality in this messy story. What went on was not crazy, or even irrational, but it bore little resemblance to the 'rationality' that many scholars had been debating for fifteen years."

  But the intellectual advisors and their supporters did dominate domestic intellectual thought, and succeeded in establishing a triumphal view of their contributions and the Kennedy handling of the crisis. The crisis was, after all, successfully concluded. However, the major factor was not intellectual brilliance. It was brute U.S. strength.

  "The evidence suggests that while Kennedy had been enamored of counterforce ideas when he came into office, experience had cured him of the infatuation -- one could not manipulate nuclear war. In some ways the crisis corroborated counterforce ideas. Yet in its aftermath the president rejected them as too scary." (Eisenhower's view had been confirmed.)

  Kuklick provides a perceptive evaluation of the limitations and weaknesses of the scholarly studies of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Skybolt cancellation. Ultimately, the partisan nature of the studies and the many considerations that went unexamined rendered them shallow.

  "No treatment of the missile crisis warranted the view that doing the minimum was causally efficacious, or that the resolution based on the minimum was good. The reasoning exemplified the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Dean Acheson made this point, though not many listened. No one, he wrote, could show that astute and knowledgeable management contributed to the outcome; it was a matter of 'plain dumb luck.'"

  This criticism is too harsh even though largely appropriate. There was at least a commendable avoidance by Kennedy of possible blunders. Many of the missiles already in Cuba were armed and would undoubtedly have been fired if the island came under attack. Kruklich's speculations about the benefits of possibly achieving and early end to the Cold War by a more robust military response are unreal when weighed against the catastrophe of multiple nuclear explosions.

  "The missile crisis and the Skybolt affair, finally, set in stone the scholarly examination of separate events and weakened effort to locate them in a historical continuum. RAND promoted Cuba as just what an effective leader could do with properly chosen intellectuals."
 &
  "In reflection on the experience of 1962, students of strategy and policymakers with intellectual proclivities believed that they had an unusually adequate grasp of how the world worked, and how they might shape events in their favor. But their learning had engendered a distorted if glorified view of the recent past and dubious if assertive lessons for the immediate future."

Graduated escalation in Vietnam:

The "insouciance" with which the Kennedy administration approved the coup "when they had no alternatives" to Diem, "intimated, at least, loose thinking."

  The Chinese actually wanted a weak Vietnam on their southern border. Vietnam was an ancient enemy. It was Russia that was most supportive of N. Vietnam because of growing friction with China. American foreign policy experts had a widespread lack of appreciation for these balances.
 &
  The Kennedy administration became increasingly engaged in Vietnam, including involvement with the overthrow and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy was still resisting his most militant advisors, however, at the time of Kennedy's death. Lyndon Johnson, too, hesitated, but ultimately chose increased military involvement.
 &
  Kennedy did not expressly authorize the coup, and Kuklick asserts that it never had his "full, attentive approval." However, some of his most senior and dovish advisors were involved. Averell Harriman, Michael Forrestal and Roger Hilsman at the State Department are mentioned by Kuklick. They hoped a more competent Vietnamese leader could remove any need for greater U.S. military involvement.
 &
  Kennedy was actively involved in consideration of the dilemmas posed by Vietnam and Diem, and could hardly have been ignorant of the coup plans. The "insouciance" with which the Kennedy administration approved the coup "when they had no alternatives" to Diem, "intimated, at least, loose thinking."

  "Kennedy presided over these events. That Vietnam 'doves' led the Americans to overthrow Diem does not speak well for those who believe JFK would have avoided an American commitment, even if one believes that avoidance reasonable."

  Fearing the outbreak of numerous small wars in third world nations if they appeared weak, Kennedy and his advisors gave little thought to the realities of Vietnam and saw it just as a venue in which to make a stand against Communist expansion.
 &

  The role that the foreign policy intellectuals played in leading the nation into the morass of Vietnam is the main concern of this book.
 &
  Sec. of State Dean Rusk was not a foreign policy scholar. The historic events leading up to and through WW-II provided his frame of reference. He thus favored collective security and American interventionism in foreign affairs. He was not highly regarded by Kennedy or Kennedy's intellectual entourage.
 &
  National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was more intellectually inclined, but similarly "rejected theory in politics."  He was similarly internationalist in outlook and guided by the experience leading up to WW-II. World stability depended on an interventionist U.S. The Munich analogy colored his view. "Tactics and not philosophy were paramount" in foreign policy. Guidance by abstract concepts would cause trouble.
 &
  Kuklick notes that in 1964, Bundy took part in a war game that indicated that mutual escalation in Vietnam would ultimately result in a stalemate at a much higher level of violence. However, the realism of the war game scenario was suspect and it made no impression at the time.
 &

  Harvard economist Tom Schelling, who had influence among McNamara's staff, was very theory oriented. Civilian strategists would have to provide a cogent theory of deterrence, he believed, since the military lacked the requisite "intellectual skills."
 &
  No matter how complex his theorizing, his views were ultimately simplistic in the extreme. He compared management of the Cold War conflict with ordinary bargaining - even jockeying in traffic jams or child rearing. He "literally patronized the Russians," in writing how "to teach the Soviets " to "behave" and how to punish their "misbehavior." (emphasis in original) More to the point, he viewed limited war as a form of signaling. A graduated escalation with additional violence kept in reserve was a basic tactic for managing crises. These views were "too metaphysical for me," according to Gen. Maxwell Taylor (Ret.).
 &

  McNamara and his staff came to view themselves as "crisis managers" involved in bargaining by means of the application of force. The Tonkin Gulf reprisal air raids were viewed by Schelling as a prominent example of rational signaling. It was a brilliant way of showing how the U.S. punished an opponent's misconduct. Kuklick provides almost a page of examples of the otherworldly prose with which Schelling wrote of the incident. Like many others, Schelling had his facts wrong about the Tonkin Gulf incident. As Kuklick cogently points out:

  "Schelling postulated a purity about war that it does not have. He tended to regard personal rivalries, conflicting priorities, bureaucratic conflicts, dispersed efforts, and various snafus as unnecessary and extraneous conditions. But they do not intrude on war. They are intrinsic to war, just as they are intrinsic to human life in general." (emphasis in original)

  Gen. Taylor and several others noted that the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis convinced McNamara and the civilian strategists of their ability to deal with Vietnam. Their approach was a simplified version of Schilling's views called "graduated escalation." Nevertheless, Taylor was a supporter of the effort in Vietnam and was viewed with disdain by the active military generals. Clark Clifford, who became Sec. of Defense in 1968, warned against this view in 1965.
 &
  Policy makers were not unaware of the "slippery slope" risk - of slowly escalating the expenditure in terms of blood and treasure for a minor objective. Kuklich reviews many of the reasons for nevertheless adopting a policy of slow graduation of force in Vietnam.
 &

"Flexible response, sustained reprisal or pressure, measured or proportionate response, controlled escalation, war-fighting, counterforce, and even covert operations or quasi-guerilla action" were all repeatedly invoked by Bundy to rationalize Johnson's Vietnam policy.

The military had no idea how such efforts could succeed, and it viewed them with disdain.

  Johnson's top priorities were his upcoming election and his Great Society programs, not Vietnam. From the beginning, Johnson feared Chinese and Russian intervention if the U.S. struck forcefully against North Vietnam. (This, alone, should have been a convincing argument against deepening involvement in Vietnam.) The fragility of the South Vietnamese government and the logistics difficulties in a difficult theater across the Pacific were also important factors limiting the initial response.

  "Graduated escalation promised at its start no great expenditures, only power held majestically in reserve. Cuba showed that the United States need not move up 'the ladder of escalation.' The policy was finally, at its low end, continuous with what had gone before -- temporizing."

  Indeed, all the varying theories of the civilian foreign policy strategists ultimately came to the same conclusion - to go slow - to avoid either withdrawal or full military commitment. "Flexible response, sustained reprisal or pressure, measured or proportionate response, controlled escalation, war-fighting, counterforce, and even covert operations or quasi-guerilla action" were all repeatedly invoked by Bundy to rationalize Johnson's Vietnam policy.
 &
  However, in none of them was there the slightest hint how the effort could be brought to a successful conclusion. The military had no idea how such efforts could succeed, either, and viewed these notions with disdain. Their inability to come up with a way such temporizing could be successful did not deter the civilian Vietnam War strategists, it merely undermined the military's influence with their civilian superiors.
 &

"The generals thought RAND ideas undefined and confused, and advocated a military campaign to destroy the North."

  To McNamara, the initial escalation of bombing North Vietnam in 1965 - "Rolling Thunder" - was not so much about war as about signaling - about "communication." "According to the civilians in the Department of Defense, Rolling Thunder was a complicated game of signals with the North, as much psychological as military." (Hadn't they ever heard of Western Union?) This strategy was never accepted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet they were the ones who had to actually conduct the military effort.

  "The generals thought RAND ideas undefined and confused, and advocated a military campaign to destroy the North."

  As the escalation proceeded, the generals got more of what they wanted. As he became more involved in actual warfare and less in psychological games, McNamara lost his appetite for the experiment. By that time, however, "the United States engaged upwards of four hundred thousand troops and conducted a full bombing campaign over Vietnam."

  The truly strategic targets in North Vietnam were still off limits. Dumping vast quantities of bombs into the jungles was no substitute for effective military strategy.

  Walt Rostow was thought of as a wooly-minded idealist by Kennedy and Bundy and as a "fool" by Kissinger. He was quickly  moved out of Bundy's office in the White House and into the State Department where he exercised little influence.
 &
  Rostow supported a strenuous military effort in Vietnam as part of a program of economic development. This made him attractive to the Johnson Administration in 1966 as a successor to Bundy as national security advisor - a very influential post. Although he had fully supported the policy in place, he was much too late to exercise any influence on its direction. His chief contribution was as providing intellectual rationalizations and fictitious historical parallels in support of the ongoing military effort.

  "In Vietnam the ideas of intellectuals were notable neither for their perspicuity nor for their causal efficacy. Theories were often wrongheaded, but theorists qua theorists were not usually relevant to running policy. To the extent that intellectuals themselves were influential, it is hard to make the case that the conceptions they took from the world of thought were crucial. Rusk and Bundy had the greatest power, but their interest in academic debate minimal. The most striking effect that thinkers had on officials -- RAND strategists with McNamara, or Bundy or Rostow with Johnson -- was to characterize policy in such a way that its nature was disguised and matters positively explained if there was a perception that they had gone awry." (In other words, their primary use was as spin doctors.)

 The RAND intellectual style was discredited by Vietnam, but didn't die. It was too entrenched throughout the government and intellectual community to disappear.
 &
  Instead, systems analysis gave way to "net assessment," identified with the group around Albert Wohlstetter. There was a net assessment office in the DOD. This was a much broader mode of analysis, with more subjectivity and appraisal. It included evaluation of intelligence data with operational military analysis, the interactions of various military confrontations that might occur, and the economic, political and social context of military mobilization. History, cultural patterns of strategy, and shifting geopolitical aims were brought into the mix.
 &

The Kennedy School of Government:

"In promotion of the importance of oral history over documents, Neustadt displayed a lack of interest in the written record that policymakers did not share. They are far more comfortable talking about their views of what has happened in the recent past than they are with the release of documents."

  Like RAND, Harvard would promote the careers of scholars who would go back and forth between government on one side and law, business and the university on the other. Being Harvard, the Kennedy School immediately became a leading player in the public policy field.
 &
  Under Neustadt, the workings of the bureaucracy were studied through the case study method to reveal the institutional obstacles to policy making and execution. To train scholars for policy making roles in government, historical perspective was less important than a pragmatic understanding of how policy is made and executed.
 &
  Kuklick examines the weaknesses of the Neustadt approach. Neustadt relied heavily on interviews with current and recent government officials and was skeptical of the written record which may have been composed in a less than candid manner. Since Neustadt and his leading scholars would be government insiders, he assumed those who were interviewed for Kennedy School studies would be candid.
 &
  Kuklick correctly casts considerable doubt on this assumption. Policymakers generally intentionally deny access to their papers until after their deaths precisely because the contemporary documents may reveal unpleasant or inconvenient truths no matter how carefully drafted. Unpleasant and inconvenient truths can always be spun or omitted from subsequent conversations and interviews. The perspective of time gives historical inquiry an arms length view of policymaking and many ways of evaluating both documents and statements that may not be available to an interviewer. Kennan, Morganthau and Kissinger dismissed this pseudo science and relied on history and experience.

  "There is a deep tension here. Historical knowledge, which gives insight into the meaning of policy, can conflict with what I shall call the actor-knowledge generated at RAND and Harvard. On the one hand, in its inability to obtain historical perspective -- the meaning of events studied historically -- actor knowledge will have wrongly understood what is going on. On the other hand, - - - historical knowledge may make the bearer of  that knowledge - - - unable to do work in the world. Such knowledge tends to undermine a sense of the efficacious and desirable nature of outcomes persons can will. The point of view of the actor is necessary to agency. Historical knowledge is more spectatorial." (Kissinger was hardly a mere spectator.)
 &
  "In promotion of the importance of oral history over documents, Neustadt displayed a lack of interest in the written record that policymakers did not share. They are far more comfortable talking about their views of what has happened in the recent past than they are with the release of documents."

  The release of documents may also embarrass current diplomatic activities and military plans if not sufficiently delayed.

"The politicians who took the United States into the war and who had been celebrated as 'can-do' decision makers suddenly became victims of institutional mismanagement."

Clearly, scientific impartiality and investigative objectivity had immediately become a subsidiary consideration to the maintenance of good relations with government policymakers and status as pundits. To remain government insiders and maintain status as authoritative voices, Harvard scholars became constrained in the views they could seriously consider.

  The antiwar turmoil on the Harvard campus had an immediate impact on the Kennedy School. Through this period, Neustadt resisted interference from the antiwar elements, maintained mutual support with McNamara, Bundy, Michael Forrestal and Averell Harriman, and fought to maintain the financial support of the Kennedy family that was essential to the school's success.
 &
  The Kennedy School focused on Vietnam policy with a Study Group on Bureaucracy, Politics, and Policy under Ernest May. This concentration on "bureaucratic politics" enabled May and his scholars to transform the failure in Vietnam from one of leadership failure - involving leaders with whom they maintained close relations - to one of bureaucratic implementation. The Kennedy/Johnson administration, after all, had had the best of intentions. They had also had the advice of the best and the brightest of the public policy scientists.

  "The civilians in high places were victims of poor administration, bad communications, competitive organizational interests, and inadequate deliberation that resulted from the pace of everyday business. The problem was 'the machinery of government.' Large enterprises were 'a major barrier between human aspiration and human achievement.'"
 &
  "One cannot help asking what could be more wide of the mark, as if Lyndon Johnson and the men around him, rightly or wrongly, could have subdued Asian Communism on their own. If we look at the achievement of any collective aim, bureaucracy is the means of achievement. - - - Bureaucracies are imperfect bearers of large purposes, but they are the only instruments we have to will it."

    However, the May group depended critically on the financial support and goodwill of the policymaking elite they were investigating. Although they disliked the American involvement in Vietnam, they simply could not be deeply critical of the policymakers.

  "Bureaucratic politics resolved this problem. The politicians who took the United States into the war and who had been celebrated as 'can-do' decision makers suddenly became victims of institutional mismanagement."

  Clearly, scientific impartiality and investigative objectivity had immediately become a subsidiary consideration to the maintenance of good relations with government policymakers and status as pundits. To remain government insiders and maintain status as authoritative voices, Harvard scholars became constrained in the views they could seriously consider. This was uniquely the case at Harvard. "Nowhere else was scholarship so clearly subservient to the outlook of a specific group of policymakers."
 &

  The study of the Cuban Missile Crisis was a far more satisfying activity. Here was an example of successful decisionmaking. Graham Allison's "Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis," published in 1971, "exemplified the historical and social scientific analysis associated with the May Group." It became highly influential. Unfortunately, it missed the essential factor of the question of a nuclear Germany until that omission was corrected in a revised edition thirty years later.
 &
  Also unfortunately for scientific policymaking, the study emphasized that policy had to be made on the basis of incomplete information, and its attention to factors of bureaucratic politics emphasized the limits inherent in government decisionmaking processes.
 &

"Suddenly the experts who had previously claimed that foreign policy under their guidance would epitomize rational control changed their minds and argued that decision makers were impotent in Vietnam."

  The "can-do" self-image of the civilian policy scientists was readily abandoned outside the Kennedy School, as well. Paul Warnke asserted that "good intentions" should shield the policymakers from criticism for their tactical and conceptual "miscalculations." Townsend Hoopes blamed John Foster Dulles for creating such a powerful anti-communist psychology that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and their people simply were helpless to chart their own course.
 &
  Even worse, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., absolved all the policy makers from blame. They were simply slowly engulfed in a "quagmire" as if by accident. It was both idle and unfair "to seek out guilty men." Vietnam was "a tragedy without villains." Richard Smoke asserted that the true villains were "historical inevitability and tragedy." As Kuklick points out, these are "two variables new to policy scholars of the postwar period."

  "Suddenly the experts who had previously claimed that foreign policy under their guidance would epitomize rational control changed their minds and argued that decision makers were impotent in Vietnam." 

  This is common liberal propaganda technique. The periodic financial collapse of major cities like New York and Los Angeles while under liberal administrations is proof that they are "ungovernable," until more conservative successors - Democrat or Republican - inconveniently demonstrate how readily governable these inherently wealthy cities are. The stagflation of the Carter administration was "unavoidable," and thus not his fault. Unfortunately, chronic inflation is always the result of government policies. It can never be a natural aspect of capitalist markets or the business cycle. The Vietnam apologists merely applied this propaganda ploy to the foreign policy sphere.

"The [47] volumes reduced the action-oriented decision makers who had come to Washington confident about impressing their wills on the world to impotent witnesses to forces that they could not control."

  An extensive criticism of the Pentagon Papers is provided by Kuklick. The papers emanated from a major effort of the DOD bureaucracy initiated by McNamara in 1967 and suffered from all the weaknesses inherent in such efforts. Nevertheless, they were useful in their accumulation of information pertinent to the war. The Pentagon Papers were disclosed in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, a young civilian foreign policy expert disillusioned by the war.
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  Kuklick summarizes the Pentagon Papers' many weaknesses of omission and commission. "Overall," he concludes, "the volumes describe the origins of the war and its course that put the best face possible on the activity of McNamara and his assistants."
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  Here, too, bureaucratic imperatives and snafus were viewed as playing such a major role that better strategy was impossible. The policy was not unjust. Bureaucratic infighting and failures of intelligence and communication had undermined the policy.

  "Bureaucratic politics enabled the authors to distance themselves -- and their political superiors -- from liability for Vietnam. - - - The [47] volumes reduced the action-oriented decision makers who had come to Washington confident about impressing their wills on the world to impotent witnesses to forces that they could not control."

  Kuklick notes that all of the reasons he gives for his skepticism about the policy-oriented certainties of the civilian strategists also appear in the Pentagon Papers.

  "The requirements of historical understanding in part inflict this skepticism on the fledgling historians. They embraced it to distance themselves from blame. Bureaucratic politics helped in the process. The reversal in mental outlook was remarkable."

  Daniel Ellsberg, too, had to find blame elsewhere. Influenced by the revisionist historians of the 1960s, Ellsberg accepted the view that it was the Republicans who were the chief adversaries of the Kennedy/Johnson administration, not the communists in Vietnam.
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  There were indeed policy advisors who had not been optimistic and had told the policymakers the truth about the dismal prospects in Vietnam, but the policymakers had not been guided by such advice. The increasing involvement and expenditure of blood and treasure was essential to keep the Democratic administrations from looking weak on communism. Putting off defeat in Vietnam at ever increasing cost was essential to defeat the Republicans in each next election. The fight against Republican "reactionaries" was the real battle. "Political liberals in the 1960s have acknowledged that they supported the war to prevent a right-wing backlash."
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Nixon appeared on the scene most opportunely to become the ultimate liberal scapegoat for the disastrous policy failures of Vietnam. He epitomized the Republican alternative that they had feared.

  Leslie Gelb, who had overseen the compilation of the Pentagon Papers, adopted the revisionist view in "The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked," published in 1979. The nation's anti-Communist containment foreign policy was to blame. It had created an institutional environment that made avoidance of Vietnam impossible. "Policymakers were prisoners of the larger political system that fed on itself, trapping all participants." For historians as well as policy analysts, truth was illusive. "Certainties for making effective decisions had been easily available from the late 1940s to the early 1960s for the civilian strategists. Suddenly they vanished."
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  Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers led to Nixon and the plumbers and the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down. Nixon appeared on the scene most opportunely to become the ultimate liberal scapegoat for the disastrous policy failures of Vietnam. He epitomized the Republican alternative that they had feared.
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Henry Kissinger:

"'Political scientists,' wrote Kissinger, 'should cease condemning their profession for not living up to their misnomer.'"

Utopia was an impossible delusion and a dangerous infatuation. "Perfection and permanence were denied to humanity, and to think that one could get them was overweening, an attempt to escape history."

To sustain its strength, the existing order had to remain true to the ideals of its revolutionary period.

There is a certain degree of inconsistency between this realism and the recognition of the imperatives of power politics on the one hand and on the other the recognition of ethical considerations in the policy of nations.

  Kissinger rejected the analytical view of the RAND policy experts and Kennedy School scholars, although he was a part of their world.

  "There were no 'merely technical' solutions to political problems, 'the dilemmas of the soul.' 'Political scientists,' wrote Kissinger, 'should cease condemning their profession for not living up to their misnomer.'"

  History, ethics, and context - factors avoided by the logical positivists - were vital to Kissinger. Well aware of the uncertainties of the human condition and the course of civilization, he rejected the various philosophies of helplessness popular in left wing intellectual circles. History provided examples of how men had imposed their values on the world.

  "Our handiwork was in doubt, but authentic human beings were called upon to make choices that did not just reflect convention. Ethics resided in an inward personal state where an individual uniquely recognized responsibility. Kissenger made explicit the premises of the countertradition of Kennan and Morganthau and brought their views to fruition in American foreign policy circles."

  Kissinger developed and expressed his philosophical views in brilliant academic papers. In an inherently flawed world of inherently flawed states and men, stability was forever under threat and its maintenance thus the primary task of the diplomat. Utopia was an impossible delusion and a dangerous infatuation. "Perfection and permanence were denied to humanity, and to think that one could get them was overweening, an attempt to escape history."
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  There were always revolutionary states and leaders determined to upset the existing order. While this had to be resisted, to sustain its strength, the existing order had to remain true to the ideals of its revolutionary period.
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  Metternich was the ideal statesman whose "brilliant manipulation" after the Napoleonic Wars created the framework for a century of European stability, peace and growth. Realpolitic "was always wed to a conception of moral order," but that was always subordinated to interests because "the realist was a legitimist and not a revolutionary."

  "Realism was required of any sane statesman, but without ideology it could never sustain a nation. Yet ideology inevitably undermined realism."

  Thus, attempts to reach permanent agreements with the Soviet Union was foolish, and the U.S. would always have to actively thwart Soviet ambitions. Kuklick notes a certain degree of inconsistency between this realism and the recognition of the imperatives of power politics on the one hand and on the other the recognition of ethical considerations in the policy of nations.
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Atomic weapons did not change the realities of international relations.

  Atomic weapons were obviously an important new factor, and Kissinger shifted his position on them as did others. As the Soviet Union approached parity, he shifted from graduated use to second-strike deterrence. However, atomic weapons did not change the realities of international relations.
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  In this regard, he differed from the "policy scientists," while agreeing with them on the chronic hostility of the Soviet Union. Rather than accentuating bureaucratic politics as did the Kennedy School scholars, he scorned the mediocrity and policymaking activities of the bureaucracy and believed the statesman had to prevail over the bureaucracy by will, guile and vision. No "technocracy" could successfully carry out foreign policy. He and Pres. Nixon were on common grounds in these respects. Nixon shifted foreign policy decisionmaking to the National Security Council staff that Kissinger led.

  "Diplomacy was misconceived as a game, and was rather an activity adjudicating forces that, for Kissinger in his more metaphysical moments, represented the tragic immersion of human beings in time and history."

  Vietnam got in the way of establishing some system of order in the Cold War world and had to be wound up. Domestic politics made the U.S. military position in Vietnam completely untenable. A nuclear armed Soviet Union was a permanent factor in world affairs, and some modus vivendi had to be established to avoid the crises that could lead to war.
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  Kissinger and Nixon began a process of involving Russia in cooperative ventures designed to establish confidence between the adversaries that would hopefully gradually lead the Soviet Union to play a more acceptable role in world affairs. Ideological concerns over human liberty remained important but clearly secondary.

  "For realpolitik to achieve an equilibrium, rather than to degenerate into crises and war, Kissinger wanted some consensus on the rules of engagement for a U.S.-USSR system."

The split between the Communist giants reduced Vietnam from a frontline state to strategic insignificance.

  The growing hostility between the Soviet Union and Communist China was a convenient tool for pressuring the Soviet Union into a more cooperative frame of mind.  The split between the Communist giants reduced Vietnam from a frontline state to strategic insignificance. But whatever the strategic situation, the collapse in Vietnam and Southeast Asia was clearly a moral disaster. Strenuous efforts to avoid collapse in Vietnam were doomed by the collapse of domestic support. The efforts thus only made matters much worse, for which Nixon and Kissinger received increasingly harsh criticism.
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  North Vietnam had no interest in providing the U.S. with an easy withdrawal from Vietnam, and Russia continued to support North Vietnam as a powerful ally on China's southern flank. Kissinger's efforts at détente were thus assailed as not only morally bankrupt but ineffective in moderating Russian conduct.  The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty designed to establish acceptable rules for managing the nuclear standoff was one achievement of détente.

  "Kissinger had the same flaws as he imputed to Metternich, and they in part accounted for the criticism. The Austrian was a brilliant tactician but lacked a moral imperative that could have guided his diplomacy. Kissinger gave even the educated elite in the United States a poor substitute for the global war for freedom that they had found in the Truman Doctrine and Kennan's containment."

  In Kissinger, the foreign policy experts got what they always claimed that they wanted. He was an intellectual expert in a position of power, "a rational-actor model" that RAND strategists valued, with a disregard for the foreign policy bureaucracies similar to that of men like Neustadt. Bureaucratic politics was not accepted as an excuse by the foreign policy experts for the foreign policy failures during Kissinger's watch.

  "Despite Kissinger's contempt for Harvard, and its for him, he and Nixon embodied the theories of RAND. The two men also recognized the power of bureaucracies to upset policy by circumventing them. But these facts underscored a truth about historical irony that Kissinger himself often noted. People often do not like it when they get what they wish for."

  Kuklick classifies Kissinger with Kennan and Morganthau as realists opposed to the "scientific" pretensions of the RAND experts. But both Kennan and Morganthau opposed Johnson and Nixon policies. Similar theoretical views do not guarantee similar conclusions.
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Babes in the woods:

Their memoirs and histories have to be read with a great deal of skepticism.

The field is incredibly complex, there is at best imperfect knowledge, a discordant mass of other considerations cloud judgment, and the ultimate results of major decisions are inherently unknowable. Intellectual hubris and pretensions to scientific certitude are exactly what is not needed.

"Politics trumps knowledge." "Politicians outranked academics; politics seduced scholarship."

  Kuklck correctly emphasizes the inherent limitations of foreign policy decisionmaking. The field is incredibly complex, there is at best imperfect knowledge, a discordant mass of other considerations cloud judgment, and the ultimate results of major decisions are inherently unknowable. Intellectual hubris and pretensions to scientific certitude are exactly what is not needed.
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  Kuklick emphasizes the limited influence that the foreign policy scientists had on foreign policy decisions during this period. Mostly, he asserts, they were used to rationalize decisions made for established national interest and political reasons. RAND views were used when they supported policy, and ignored when they did not. "Politics trumps knowledge." "Politicians outranked academics; politics seduced scholarship."

  "The prestige structure of the academy and the ease with which many policy-minded intellectuals could publish and disseminate their thoughts made them believe they were giants whose ideas could decisively influence the world. They were wrong. Rather, expertise often became a pawn in the power struggles that it was supposed to circumvent."

  Thus, foreign policy scholars from the academic community and RAND remained of value to political leaders and high officials even after their methods had contributed to the disasters of Vietnam. They continued to be rewarded with high offices in a much-despised bureaucracy and in business, and with consultancies and advisory roles and lucrative research professorships. McNamara was rewarded with leadership of the World Bank.
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All of the various intellectual approaches have had their tragic failures. It is thus intellectual "hubris" that is most unjustified.

  From Kennan to the RAND "scientists," the foreign policy experts were "babes in the woods" towards the realities of power, politics and international affairs. Kuklick emphasizes that all of the various intellectual approaches have had their tragic failures. It is thus intellectual "hubris" that is most unjustified.

  "The defense intellectuals did not know very much. They frequently delivered obtuse judgments when required to be matter-of-fact, or merely offered up self-justifying talk for politicians. Yet there is little alternative to urging that scholars should do it better and with less pride and dogmatism. One could argue that, under these circumstances, a cultural lesson to be learned is that the best traits to be inculcated into specialists are humility and prudence, just the traits that vanish with their education and growth in expertise."

  Kuklick is indubitably correct in this overall conclusion. Yet, somehow, the West did ultimately triumph in the Cold War, the world is far better off for this triumph, and victory was accomplished without nuclear or major conventional conflict between the major powers. These accomplishments were never a slam dunk.