WHEN HE RETURNED to West Point in July 1953, Captain Scowcroft was pleasantly surprised to find he didn’t have to teach economics. Thanks to another teacher’s departure, he’d be teaching Russian history instead, one of the few electives the cadets could take and one of the subjects Scowcroft had studied at Columbia.
Scowcroft threw himself into his role as a member of the social sciences faculty with intelligence, dedication, and good humor. He was passionate about Russian history and cared for the cadets in his twelve-to-twenty-person sections. He used a combination of lecture and the Socratic question-and-answer method in his classes, methods that were similar to those he’d experienced as a cadet. He also participated in a new experimental language program for learning how to speak Russian, and voluntarily wrote a report that analyzed how the Russian history course could be further improved.
He taught two other electives, Modern European History and America and Contemporary Foreign Governments, in subsequent semesters. His supervising officer commented that Scowcroft was “a most skillful instructor” who obtained “a willing and enthusiastic response from the cadets he teaches.” And a colleague noted that he was known to be “exceptionally hard working, bright,” and a “great teacher.”103
Scowcroft contributed outside the classroom in other ways. In March 1954 he took the Cadet Debating Team to Brooklyn College, and he joined a national group of academics to judge debates at the National Invitational Debate Tournament in April 1954.104 He spent the summer of 1954 reviewing and selecting book chapters and journal articles for inclusion in Readings in the History of Russia, a reader for the sixty students in the advanced Russian history classes. Then, in his second year at West Point, he worked as assistant officer in charge of the Rhodes Scholar committee, encouraging interested cadets to apply, helping them though the application process, and conducting numerous personal interviews. Three cadets were selected as Rhodes Scholars in 1954–1955, the most ever selected from West Point in a single year and a high number for any college or university.
Scowcroft also served as a roundtable chairman for West Point’s annual Student Conference on United States Affairs (SCUSA) in his second, third, and fourth years at the USMA. SCUSA, which began at West Point in 1949, was a “very big deal,” a three-day conference that drew hundreds of students from colleges and universities around the United States to discuss contemporary issues and attend panels led by dozens of leading civilian and military experts. SCUSA was where Scowcroft first met the slightly younger Harvard PhD Zbigniew Brzezinski.105
Scowcroft’s investment in the Russian language program, his work with Rhodes Scholar candidates, and his help with SCUSA reflected his keen sense of duty as well as his ability to work efficiently with minimal supervision.
Brent and Jackie lived in the so-called Gray Ghost faculty housing at West Point—recently constructed two-and three-bedroom duplex wood-frame townhomes. Jackie, a devout Catholic, ran a Catholic Sunday school program together with Ruth Gorman, the wife of Brent’s officemate Paul Gorman. “Very capable, outgoing, and pleasant,” Jackie was “a pillar of the Catholic parish,” Paul Gorman said. Joe Jordan’s wife, Polly, was also “fast friends” with Jackie, and Joe described her as “very warm, outgoing,” someone who “never shirked at pitching in with help.” (Scowcroft credited Joe for taking “my eastern wife under his wing and [telling] her about being a western wife.”) Not only did Jackie help other Catholic wives, but she assisted Mormon spouses with their religious services as well. She also continued to practice her nursing, often making trips down to New York City to work as a visiting nurse. Fridays were movie nights for Jackie and Brent.106
Scowcroft shared an office with three other young instructors on the second floor of the West Academic Building, overlooking the Plain. He was popular with his fellow faculty members, personable, and respected. When he had something to say, his colleagues paid attention—no doubt because of what one of his contemporaries described as the “uncommon ease, fluency, and confidence” with which he spoke, in combination with his seriousness. “His speeches always got a great deal of attention,” Gorman said.107 Indicatively, he was chosen to be West Point’s representative at the annual meeting in New York City of the Academy of Political Science in the fall of 1953 and at a conference on academic freedom in the USSR in the spring of 1954, also in New York City.108
Yet Scowcroft didn’t fully participate in the office jokes and banter. Despite his friendly and collegial personality, he wasn’t one of the boys. He was slightly older than his colleagues and also outranked them, since he’d been promoted to captain in April 1953; his officemates were all lieutenants. He’d also been accepted into the PhD program at Columbia University, so in the 1954, 1955, and 1956 winter semesters, he drove down once a week to Columbia, a ninety-mile round trip, for his course work; none of his officemates were then in graduate school. Scowcroft was Air Force, too, whereas almost all of his department colleagues were Army. And the flying imposed extra demands on his time, since he had to drive up to Stewart Field to fly the trainers and log the hours needed for him to maintain his pilot’s rating.109
Scowcroft’s most distinguishing quality was his reserve. More inclined to listen than to speak, he kept his own counsel—a quality reinforced by his crash, the two years he had spent in military hospitals, and his father’s death, sobering events that imparted a gravitas uncommon among young men. So if he was in some ways younger than his twenty-eight years, in other ways he was older. To some, he came across as aloof.110
Scowcroft’s superior officers, Lt. Col. Charles Cannon and Colonel Beukema, remarked on Scowcroft’s unusual qualities, particularly his exceptional sense of duty and moral integrity.111 “Captain Scowcroft is a quiet, serious-minded, and ambitious young officer,” Colonel Cannon wrote after Scowcroft’s first two semesters teaching at West Point. “Habitually neat, orderly, and courteous, he maintains a dignified and superior military bearing.” He showed “a maturity of thought and grasp of academic problems uncommon in officers of his grade and service.”112 Cannon and Beukema both remarked on Scowcroft’s ability to work confidently, highly efficiently, and enthusiastically. With the exception of ambition, though, these aren’t qualities typical of men still in their twenties.
Scowcroft’s Officer Effectiveness Reports soon became “firewalled,” or close to it, meaning that all of the marks on his reports were lined up on the far right side of the form. This superior performance put Scowcroft in a special group sometimes referred to as the “5 percenters”—officers in the top 5 percent of their cohort, selected for their potential as Army and Air Force officers. As one Army officer said a bit blasphemously, these “water walkers” were men who “could breeze right by Jesus Christ like he was in a rowboat and they had hydroplanes for shoes.”113
The fact that the young social sciences faculty was full of 5 percenters was the result of design. Both Beukema, who was department head until 1954, and Col. George “Abe” Lincoln, Beukema’s immediate successor, were strongly committed to reforming how Army officers were being trained. They wanted to make the social sciences curriculum more rigorous, more personalized, and better suited to motivating officers to think for themselves.114
By cultivating the brightest faculty possible at West Point and undertaking additional reforms, Beukema and Lincoln sought to inculcate what David Cloud and Greg Jaffe in their book The Fourth Star refer to as a well-spring of unconventional thinking and a culture of unabashed elitism.115 And once a member of the elite social sciences faculty corps, an officer always remained a member.116 Army generals Wesley Clark, Barry McCaffrey, and Daniel Christman, among others, had studied under Lincoln and then gone back to teach. Army generals John Abizaid, George Casey, Peter Chiarelli, and David Petraeus—the subjects of Cloud and Jaffe’s The Fourth Star—had also returned to the Department of Social Sciences to teach. To this day, the department continues to try to “identify future Scowcrofts,” in the words of department head Col. Michael Meese.117
Colonel Lincoln, like Beukema, exemplified the soldier-scholar. An owlish-looking man with a long, rectangular face, a large nose, fleshy jowls, and horn-rimmed glasses, he had been a Rhodes Scholar, had served as one of General Marshall’s star aides, had been an adviser and confidant to General Eisenhower, and had been promoted to a general officer at the young age of thirty-eight. Lincoln had also been the Army’s representative on the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee—the predecessor of the National Security Council—and participated in the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan.118
Yet soon after helping to decide the fate of Germany and Japan, establish NATO, and create the Department of Defense, he made an “extraordinary” decision, as Gen. Andrew Goodpaster described it: Lincoln calculated “he could contribute more to the national security of the United States not by progressing to the rank of four star general, but instead by abandoning his first star and returning to West Point to teach as a colonel.” Lincoln’s scholarly stature within the community of foreign-policy experts was such that he corresponded with and commented on papers by Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, Frank Barnett, and other prominent academics and public intellectuals. It was when Kissinger came down from Harvard to lecture at West Point that he and Scowcroft first met, in fact.119
Lincoln followed Beukema in wanting to make the Department of Social Sciences the “institutional engine” of the reform of Army education.120 He realized that future Army leaders needed to understand the full scope of the challenges that the United States would face when mobilizing for total war. He saw that US Army officers would have to be capable of working in alliances with foreign military and civilian leaders, and that they had to be able to appreciate the difficulties accompanying the occupation of foreign countries and the challenges of dealing with peoples who espoused contrasting ideologies and differing faiths. In other words, the cadets needed to learn a lot more than physics, applied math, and engineering if they were going to be prepared for the world that awaited them; they needed to learn comparative politics, international relations, economics, and foreign languages.121
Lincoln and Beukema sought to encourage their students to study a few selected subjects and specific regions of the world. The Department of Social Sciences accordingly began to offer more electives and to require each cadet to write a short thesis. When Scowcroft returned to the USMA in the fall of 1953, he observed there was “not nearly so much rote memory” required as when he had been in a cadet.122
Scowcroft’s very presence at West Point testified to Beukema’s and Lincoln’s efforts to foster a broad-minded and cerebral environment, since one of their initiatives for reducing the intellectual gap between West Point and the best civilian colleges and universities was to appoint more faculty who were either working on their doctorate or already had their PhD in hand.123 They wanted their top students to have theoretical knowledge so that they wouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens or “knuckle-draggers” at academic conferences. Interestingly, of those whom Beukema and Lincoln invited back, “relatively few . . . came from the top of the class.” Rather, they were “very much picked for personality”—for their ability to serve as officer role models.124
As a result of these reforms, numerous officers recruited by Beukema and Lincoln began to flow through the academic pipeline, studying politics, economics, geography, or international relations. In 1956, for instance, a total of eighteen Army officers were enrolled in graduate programs at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.125 Beukema and Lincoln supervised their handpicked officer corps by keeping in touch with their academic colleagues at the institutions training their officers. They corresponded with several of Scowcroft’s Columbia professors, including Fox, Tannenbaum, and John Wuorinen in the Department of History. They were likewise acquainted with many of the faculty at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.126
Beukema and Lincoln’s reforms had their disadvantages. Because of the high proportion of young instructors and assistant professors rotating through the Department of Social Sciences, the few permanent members of the department’s faculty had to become, in effect, full-time administrators. They had to evaluate cadets whom the department might want to bring back to teach and correspond with graduate school administrators to ensure that their selected officers would be admitted and then make satisfactory progress. The department head and his deputy also had to coordinate the curriculum with the constantly rotating officer faculty as well as supervise their junior colleagues, and then see to their officers’ placement in the Army (and in the Air Force until 1959, when the Air Force Academy was completed). The administrative load was a heavy one.
Lincoln served as a role model, a mentor, and almost a father figure for Scowcroft, encouraging him and advising him on curricular matters and other issues. Scowcroft was “a particularly brilliant and dedicated officer,” Lincoln wrote in his Officer Efficiency Report, “a stabilizing and leadership influence in an officer group, poised, cheerful, considerate, and farsighted.” And when Lincoln asked Scowcroft during his third year if he’d stay a fourth—a request to which Scowcroft replied he wasn’t sure, because he feared that another year at West Point would hurt his career—Lincoln assured him he’d take care of things. Scowcroft stayed on.127
Scowcroft credited Lincoln with furthering his intellectual and professional development and inspiring by example. In Scowcroft’s eyes, Lincoln behaved the way someone who held an important administrative position should behave: he was thoroughly competent, he was curious and broad-minded, and he was in control of his ego.128 (Lincoln was also the mentor for another of Scowcroft’s heroes, Andrew Goodpaster.129) Later, when Lincoln was head of President Nixon’s Office of Emergency Preparedness (the predecessor to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA) and Scowcroft was deputy national security advisor, they talked to each other regularly.130
For Scowcroft’s next assignment, the Army personnel office offered him a Japan-based billet as a pilot for troop transport aircraft, part of the Military Air Transport Service (now the Air Mobility Command). Flying Army personnel around the world held little appeal for Scowcroft, though, so he asked the personnel office for a position that would match his interests in strategic issues and Russian history and use his Russian-language skills. His dream job was a position at the US embassy in Moscow. The Army couldn’t find an opening for him in the Soviet Union, but it was able to offer him a position as assistant air attaché to the US embassy in Belgrade—the senior US Air Force officer in Yugoslavia. The job involved collecting air intelligence of strategic or tactical value, advising the US ambassador on aviation issues, and representing and establishing goodwill for the US Air Force in Yugoslavia.131
To prepare for the job, the Army assigned Scowcroft to the USAF Special Activities Squadron at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia. So in August 1957 Brent and Jackie moved to a small rented apartment in Washington, DC, where he began taking classes at the Strategic Intelligence School, studying the fundamentals of strategic intelligence, the work of an attaché, security defense, photography, and intelligence collection.
Scowcroft also studied Serbo-Croatian at Georgetown University’s School of Languages and Linguistics, with Jackie joining him in order to be prepared for living in Belgrade. In September 1958, she gave birth to their daughter, Karen.132
In the spring of 1959, the Air Force sent Scowcroft on temporary assignments at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base and the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center in St. Louis, Missouri, for further intelligence training.133 In April 1959, Scowcroft was promoted to major, and in late May, Brent, Jackie, and their eight-month-old daughter left for Yugoslavia.134
Scowcroft looked forward to the assignment. Trieste, Italy, the subject of Scowcroft’s master’s thesis, lay just across Yugoslavia’s northwestern border, on the Adriatic. Yugoslavia itself represented an experiment in communism. Under the rule of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia was turning toward a workers’ management model of industry and away from Soviet-style communism. Tito, because of his break with Stalin and the Soviet bloc in 1948, was a heretic in the international communist community. He was thereby the beneficiary of US foreign aid, including military assistance in the form of air and ground equipment and agricultural aid that allowed Yugoslavia to become more self-sufficient in wheat and corn.135 Scowcroft had reason to think that the experience of living and working in Yugoslavia would be able to provide him with unusual insights into both Yugoslavia and communism, given that the Belgrade-Moscow relationship dominated Yugoslavia’s foreign policy.136
As an “intelligence staff officer”—the Army’s official title for the assistant air attaché position—Scowcroft was responsible for organizing confidential missions for gathering, evaluating, and reporting air intelligence on Yugoslavia and, when possible, Eastern bloc countries. Scowcroft adapted quickly, worked hard, and learned a lot. He dedicated himself to mastering Serbo-Croatian, using the language whenever possible and taking personal language lessons on the side. Although beset with provocations and “myriads of minor problems,” Scowcroft was still able to develop new intelligence sources and to obtain important intelligence that other attachés had not previously recognized. His supervising officer noted that Scowcroft was “cool and observant,” showed “great perception of the intelligence collection targets,” and displayed “ingenuity, skill and tenacity in devising methods of collecting intelligence under the most adverse situations.” Scowcroft performed his duties with “outstanding understanding, intelligence, skill, and judgment,” and he had an “iron will.”137
Scowcroft had other responsibilities. He had to maintain an inventory of all top-secret documents at the US embassy and ensure they were all properly logged, inventoried, handled, and, if necessary, destroyed. As the Air Force’s representative, he was also in charge of the embassy’s supply account. So he had to supervise a small Yugoslavian staff and fly to Wiesbaden, Germany, at least once a month to refresh the embassy’s supplies. Scowcroft excelled in this capacity as well—the first time in his life he’d held a significant supervisory or administrative position—transforming a poorly organized office into a well-functioning and efficient one by the force of his example. Scowcroft’s superiors in the embassy and Air Force noticed, and they respected and trusted the young assistant air attaché. By the end of Scowcroft’s two-year tour, the visiting inspector had only words of praise for how well the supply account was being managed.138
A smaller part of his job—apart from his attendance at diplomatic functions—was flying the US ambassador and other VIPs around Yugoslavia. (In fact, while in Yugoslavia, Scowcroft made it a point to fly at every opportunity, whether to take US State Department or military officials around the country or to train on his own to keep up his pilot’s rating and make up for his lost time in the air because of the crash.) In this way Scowcroft became acquainted with George Kennan, who served as US ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961 to 1963. Decades later, when Scowcroft was Bush’s national security advisor and the Cold War was winding down, Scowcroft invited Kennan down to the White House on several occasions to discuss US-Soviet relations and possible changes in the United States’ strategic mission.139
In his memoirs, Kennan describes the Belgrade embassy staff in some detail—although the passage probably says as much about Kennan’s passion for writing, his delight in description, and his willingness to paint in bold strokes as about the embassy staff:
These were men of a different generation than my own. They had come up in a different sort of bureaucratic environment; less human, less personal, vaster, more inscrutable, less reassuring. Some of them tended initially, to be wary, correct, faithfully pedantic, but withdrawn and in a sense masked. The studied absence of color, in personality and colored thought, had become a protective camouflage. But of course they were real people underneath, and in most instances very valuable and intelligent ones, in some instance highly competent and even talented. . . . They viewed me, I suspect, with a certain amused astonishment, enjoyed the rhetorical melodrama of my numerous telegraphic conflicts with the Department of State, were intrigued by the unorthodox reactions to the work they performed and the experiences they reported to me, and were aware—as I like to think—of the genuine respect and affection in which I came to hold them. For me, in any case, the Belgrade experience would have been worth it for the association with them alone.140
Much of this description could apply to Scowcroft. But rather than viewing Kennan with “a certain amused astonishment,” he considered him “a breath of fresh air,” Scowcroft later said. Kennan was an ambassador who brought intellectual interest to what could have been a dull, hardship assignment in a then-impoverished country.141
While at the embassy, Scowcroft also began research for his doctoral dissertation.142 US-Yugoslavian relations were then entering a difficult phase. Tito hosted the Belgrade Conference of nonaligned nations while Scowcroft was in Yugoslavia—a bold maneuver that induced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to reach out to Tito and invite him to Moscow. The result was a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.143 But the US government declared a “Captive Nations Week” in the same period—and the list of nations included Yugoslavia. The declaration thus implied that the United States was committed to overthrowing Tito’s regime, and a year later Congress stopped all aid to Yugoslavia and withdrew its most-favored-nation trade status.
Amid these changes in US-Yugoslavian relations and the increasingly ideological American domestic politics, Scowcroft asked William Fox how he could best profit from his time in Belgrade. Fox suggested that he research the influence of ideology on US foreign policy as a potential dissertation topic and use Yugoslavia as his case study.144
Scowcroft and other embassy employees had only limited exposure to current information, however, since they were living in a controlled environment: the only radio broadcasts they received were from Voice of America, they were without television, and the Pentagon and State Department cables mostly handled intelligence and top-secret traffic specific to Yugoslavia and the Balkans.145
Scowcroft found living in Yugoslavia highly instructive, as he had hoped. Most significant was that it altered his view of communism, giving him a fresh appreciation for the fact that Russia lacked natural boundaries that might protect it from invasion. Since Russia had long been vulnerable to invasion, he didn’t find it at all surprising that Russian leaders sometimes tried to improve their security by extending their borders and by acquiring more territory within which they could maneuver.
He thus concluded that Soviet ideology—Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, or other variants of communism—was essentially the servant of nationalism and Russia’s own geopolitical insecurity. Scowcroft didn’t deny that the Soviets were intent on military expansion and that it was fully consistent with communist ideology, but in his assessment the expansion was mostly being done in the cause of protecting the Russian heartland. He didn’t think the Soviet Union was intent on world domination or that there was anything inherent “in the Slavic soul,” as he put it, that necessitated the Soviet Union’s geographical expansion.146
Although Scowcroft does not comment on how his study of Russian history and Soviet Communism accorded with McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the early- and mid-1950s, it would seem that the relatively junior and insulated positions he held during those years sheltered him from American national politics and the political climate of the period.
As much as Scowcroft liked his Yugoslavia assignment, Jackie “hated” it. Although Jackie had learned enough Serbo-Croatian to get around, she was more of a homebody than was her husband. She also had a baby girl to take care of and was living far away from her family and friends. Making things worse, the Yugoslavian secret police would harass the Scowcrofts’ servants, making them report on everyone who visited the major each week. (Scowcroft, for his part, assumed as a matter of course that his phone was tapped and that the house was bugged.)147
The Scowcrofts returned to Washington in late August 1961. The Army assigned Brent to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk—now the Joint Forces Staff College and part of the National Defense University—where he was to attend an intensive twenty-two-week program on joint and combined operations. Classes covered such subjects as the interrelationship of the military branches, the principles of joint command, the strategic, tactical, and logistical dimensions of joint command, and the organization and planning required for combined operations.148
Scowcroft excelled. He impressed the faculty as broadly intellectual, highly analytical, and very capable, and he appeared to enjoy mixing with students from the other services. He didn’t find the Joint and Combined Operations program particularly challenging, though, probably because of his previous graduate studies, teaching experience, and work in Yugoslavia.149
An unfortunate side effect of having to attend classes full-time was that Scowcroft was unable to fly enough hours—a minimum of eight hours a month and one hundred hours a year—to keep his pilot’s rating. So despite the fact he was judged to be “a cool and skillful” and “extremely competent pilot” whose “interest and active participation in flying [were] exemplary,” he had to turn in his pilot’s wings on January 1, 1962—along with a wrist-watch, two flying jackets, coveralls, two helmets, and other issued equipment. Despite his initial choice as a West Point graduate, his training with the Army Air Corps, his demonstrated love of flying, and his evident skill, he never made senior pilot or, therefore, command pilot.150
In late 1961 the Army asked Scowcroft to fill in for Brig. Gen. Wesley Posvar, the head of the Department of Political Science in the new Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, who would be on leave studying for his doctorate at Harvard. Scowcroft would be an associate professor from January 1962 through June 1962, serve as the deputy department head for the 1962–1963 academic year, and the acting department head in 1963–1964.151
Scowcroft welcomed the assignment, and following a two-week course on counterinsurgency at the State Department Foreign Service Institute, he and his family moved out to Colorado in January 1962. At the Air Force Academy he was chairman of First Class instruction, oversaw the two capstone classes on international relations and on defense policy, edited a new edition of the Air Force’s Readings in Defense Policy, and was responsible for interviewing, evaluating, and selecting new instructors, advising the officer-instructors on their graduate education, and planning the curriculum. Scowcroft quickly gained the respect of the twelve instructors who were teaching the First Class courses.
On May 21, 1962, at the end of Scowcroft’s first semester at the Air Force Academy, Professor Fox accepted his revised dissertation proposal (he’d submitted a draft of his dissertation proposal earlier that spring). Scowcroft spent the summer of 1962 at Columbia University working on his doctoral dissertation. He then returned to the Air Force Academy to serve as deputy department head.
His promotion brought additional responsibilities. Besides continuing as the chairman of First Class instruction for the nearly six hundred cadets who were taking courses in international relations and defense policy and the dozen instructors teaching the courses, he helped formulate department policy. He supervised course directors and instructors. He represented the department at faculty meetings, where he could act with the authority of the department head if he had to. He also helped the department head, Col. William McDonald, supervise and guide the Third Class political science classes and plan the Cadet Assembly (attended that year by secretary of state Dean Rusk).
In the summer of 1963, Scowcroft returned to Washington, DC, to do more work on the dissertation. He, Jackie, and their daughter lived in a small apartment in the Meridian Park neighborhood, and during the week Scowcroft would hole up in the Library of Congress, researching and writing. He continued working on the dissertation once he got back to Colorado Springs, finding time at night or on weekends. “Agony” was Scowcroft’s description of the writing process.152 Later that fall, he submitted a final draft to his committee for their approval.
Upon his return to Colorado Springs, Scowcroft was promoted to professor and began his role as the acting head of the Department of Political Science. Whereas he had previously taught three courses each semester, he now taught only one. He impressed the dean of the faculty, Brig. Gen. Robert F. McDermott, as a highly “dedicated, sincere, loyal, and hard working” officer who was always concerned about the mission above his own welfare.153
Scowcroft had also been able to boost morale among the political science faculty “higher than it had ever been,” McDermott pointed out.154 This was no small feat, since the new Air Force Academy still had its rough edges and was still developing its guiding principles. In recognition of his “outstanding leadership, knowledge, and initiative” on behalf of the Political Science Department and the Air Force Academy, Scowcroft was awarded an Air Force Commendation Medal.155
ALTHOUGH SCOWCROFT LIKED being a professor and enjoyed academic life, he was “too restless” to stay long at the US Air Force Academy or at any other teaching job. He worried he’d stagnate; he’d seen some of his professors at Columbia, “eminent names in their field”—not Fox or Tannenbaum, he volunteered—come into the classroom, deliver the same lecture they had given for the past ten or fifteen years or so, take questions, and then leave. He feared a merely routine job. He wanted assignments that demanded a wide range of skills, involved a variety of activities, and exposed him to new and important challenges. Above all, he wanted to be closer to the formation of US national security policy.156 So even as Scowcroft thrived in Colorado Springs, he wasn’t eager to stay on.157
Scowcroft was promoted to lieutenant colonel in July 1964. That same summer, the Air Force assigned him to a high-level staff position at Air Force headquarters in the Pentagon, just as his superior officers had recommended. Scowcroft, Jackie, and their daughter moved back to Washington. Jackie took moving households in stride—as her niece later observed, she could “put up with anything” for the sake of her family—and wherever she went, she took with her the ability to cook “the best beef stroganoff in the world.”158
Scowcroft’s presence in the Pentagon was unusual. His stellar military record was unaccompanied by any line assignments. He hadn’t flown in a fighter squadron during the Korea War or led any fighter or bomber wings in Vietnam, Thailand, or elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Neither had he led any Air Force squadrons in Great Britain, Germany, or other countries with US air bases. Nor had he commanded Air Force training facilities, flight operations, or missile installations. (By way of comparison, Edwin Robertson, Scowcroft’s classmate at West Point and in flight school in Texas and Arizona, fought in South Korea, served as vice commander of a tactical fighter wing in Vietnam, commanded a tactical fighter wing in Germany, was vice commander of the Sixteenth Air Force in Spain, and commanded the Chanute Technical Training Center in Illinois.159) Scowcroft’s only command assignment had been as an administrator—as the deputy head and then acting head of the Air Force Academy’s Political Science Department.
Scowcroft appreciated the fact that his commanding officers were willing to treat him differently. The Air Force “always made exceptions for me,” he recognized. It “always supported me” and “was very tolerant of a maverick.”160 It didn’t hurt that he had what in Air Force slang was called a “40 lb. cranium.”
Scowcroft was in this sense following in the steps of one of his heroes, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, who had been one of Eisenhower’s most trusted foreign policy advisers and later served under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Goodpaster was also a West Point graduate who earned a PhD in international relations and was an extremely capable and highly effective officer.161
Over the next six years, however, Scowcroft’s life as a soldier-scholar would end. He was about to become a “blue suiter”—one of the many senior Air Force officers at the Pentagon distinguished by their blue Air Force uniforms.162 He would have to dedicate his considerable talents to the bureaucratic needs of the Air Force, Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Office of the Secretary of Defense—the next stage in an education that would ultimately lead him to the very top of the national security apparatus.