THE PERSON WHO had the greatest influence on Scowcroft’s development as a strategist wasn’t George Lincoln, Herman Beukema, or any of his other West Point or Air Force Academy teachers. Neither was he William Fox, Frank Tannenbaum, or any of Scowcroft’s other Columbia professors. Nor was he any of the leaders Scowcroft would work with during his later career, such as Andrew Goodpaster, Henry Kissinger, or Richard Nixon. Rather, he was an extremely smart, very energetic, and highly respected Air Force major general by the name of Richard A. Yudkin.163
General Yudkin, six years older than Scowcroft, was a graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth—whose alumni include Dwight Eisenhower, Andrew Goodpaster, Omar Bradley, and Douglas MacArthur—and the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. In author Fred Kaplan’s description, he was “rotund, Jewish, bookish, a bachelor with no hobbies or interests outside the Air Force.” (He was also “semi-bald,” Scowcroft added.) What made Yudkin’s stellar Air Force career that much more exceptional was the fact that he was nonrated: he’d never qualified as a pilot, but had risen through the ranks by virtue of the quality of his mind. By the mid- to late 1960s, Yudkin had become the “intellectual master” of a new generation of Air Force staff officers who studied nuclear warfare.164
Together with the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Thomas D. White, Yudkin established the single integrated operations plan (SIOPS) for US strategic forces, replacing the old plan that had simply aggregated the plans of the various service branches, leading to redundancy and illogic. Yudkin had also worked closely with the RAND Corporation, where he’d supervised James Schlesinger. When Scowcroft began working for him, Yudkin had just returned from serving in NATO and was deputy director of advanced planning at Air Force headquarters.165
In mid-1964 Scowcroft relocated to Washington following his two and a half years at the Air Force Academy. He bought a modest two-story brick house in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of the District, and Jackie began working part-time as a nurse. Their daughter attended the local Bethesda elementary school.166
The Air Force assigned Scowcroft to the Directorate of Doctrine, Concepts, and Objectives, where he filled two separate positions—first with the Policy Planning Studies Program (1964–1965), then with Long Range Planning (1965–1966). In both jobs, Scowcroft worked on sensitive projects involving the Air Force’s future force structure. One of his assignments, for instance, was to determine the optimal balance in the United States’ nuclear arsenal between the number and type of Strategic Air Command bombers and the number and configuration of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
In order to develop and design concepts that could be applied to future aerospace operations, Scowcroft had to elicit, coordinate, and evaluate proposals from Air Force staff agencies as well as from the industrial, scientific, and academic communities, including the RAND Corporation. This meant that he had to help Yudkin and others in the Air Force assess how the Air Force’s contributions to national security meshed with other governmental, cultural, and societal factors. Scowcroft then had to integrate these analyses into the Air Force’s and the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s long-range plans, draft comprehensive reports on these assessments, and brief senior officers.167
Scowcroft applied his usual intelligence and initiative to his responsibilities. He coordinated with the policy expert, academic, and industrial communities. He negotiated with representatives from the State and Defense Departments. He expanded the Air Force’s contacts with the research and academic communities through written correspondence and by attending conferences. And he prepared and staffed out—that is, assigned groups of officers to execute—proposals that recommended how to improve the joint functions of the Air Force’s plans for future operations.168
He learned quickly, and the longer he worked with Doctrine, Concepts, and Objectives, the more responsibilities he took on. Among his accomplishments was the preparation of Part II of USAF Planning Concepts, which provided long-range direction and guidance, projecting as many as fifteen years ahead. He was the project manager for three policy planning studies done by academic scholars under contract with the Air Force, which, according to his superior officer, constituted “important reference documents for strategy and policy formation in both [the] Department of Defense and . . . the State Department.” He was also “assigned the task of developing a rationale and methodology to improve the capability of the Air Staff to deal with issues of critical importance to the Air Force.”169
Scowcroft’s success as a staff officer grew in part from his ability to balance the qualities of independence, initiative, and self-confidence with those of loyalty and discipline. In pursuit of his objectives and those of his superior officers, he could be creative, resourceful, and even entrepreneurial in his dealings with the military bureaucracy. At the same time, he was a team player. With his cheerful and straightforward demeanor, his quiet leadership, and the force of his own example, he was able to disarm or deflect almost all potential personal clashes or bureaucratic conflicts. He was also completely loyal to the Air Force. So when his superior officers decided on a course of action, Scowcroft could be counted on to carry it out.
Navigating the contrary currents in the Pentagon during the 1960s wasn’t easy. Many in the military strongly disliked secretary of defense Robert McNamara and those who surrounded him, and the feeling was mutual. Scowcroft’s West Point classmate Gen. Robertson described the period as “extremely disagreeable,” “an era of total arrogance . . . by young, bright, or maybe even brilliant, members of the McNamara staff.”170 Fortunately, Scowcroft didn’t join the Pentagon until after the Kennedy administration (although McNamara himself stayed on through February 1968).
The overall atmosphere in Washington was toxic. “I didn’t like the way we, within the military, treated our own people,” Robertson remarks. “I certainly didn’t like the way I was treated by the civilians on the Secretary of Defense staff.” Furthermore, it was a “difficult period in the Washington area anyway because of the beginnings of the anti-war movement” and because life “was becoming more and more difficult” for military personnel living in the area.171 Worse, as H. R. McMaster and Thomas E. Ricks point out, the top brass were themselves compromised, with Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Gen. William Westmoreland, Gen. Earle Wheeler, and others willing to go along with what Kennedy and Johnson and their advisers wanted. Even two of Scowcroft’s own mentors, Col. George Lincoln and Gen. Goodpaster, had their analyses pushed aside by their fellow military officers. Scowcroft, though, said that these issues did not affect him much and that he did not experience them personally.172
Scowcroft dealt with these conflicts by compartmentalizing. Once his superiors at Air Force Headquarters, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff received his reports, his job was done. Scowcroft then accepted the decisions that were subsequently made, irrespective of his former positions.173 He did not complain, question, or challenge the decisions made or attempt to maneuver around them. Nor did he passively resist his superiors’ decisions by delaying implementing them or ignoring them—tactics officials often use to avoid taking actions that run contrary to their own preferences.
This ability to divorce his own ego from his professional performance distinguished Scowcroft from most other blue suiters and policy experts. It was a quality that caused Scowcroft’s colleagues to see him as both the quintessential team player and an independent-minded officer of impeccable integrity. People trusted him. They recognized he was acting on behalf of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs, or the president of the United States, whichever the case might be, and not trying to enhance his own reputation or feather his own nest. He succeeded at appealing to his colleagues’ better angels.
In all these ways, Scowcroft could be considered the ideal “staff man,” as described by NSC staff member Jeanne W. Davis in her paper “The Role of the Coordinative Staff Officer”:
The coordinative staff man must accept the fact that his responsibility greatly exceeds his authority; indeed, the staff officer has no authority in his own right, but only that which he acquires as an extension of the official personality of the executive he serves. A good staff man can usually work with this shadow authority, rarely if ever finding it necessary to invoke the authority of his principal. Indeed, a demand by a staff officer for exercise of authority by his executive to force compliance with his wishes is a confession of weakness and ineptitude. Given this fact, the wise staff officer comports himself in his dealing with others in the manner best designed to persuade them to do his will. The staff man cannot afford the luxury of temperament. It can never be said of a staff man that “he’s a so-and-so but he gets results.” In staff work, a “so-and-so” does not get results.174
In recognition of Scowcroft’s “singularly distinctive accomplishments” in the period from September 1964 to July 1967, the Air Force in December 1971 would award him the Legion of Merit. “Lt. Col. Brent Scowcroft,” the citation read, “distinguished himself by exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service to the United States.” His “exemplary ability, diligence, and devotion to duty . . . were instrumental factors in the resolution of many complex problems of major importance to the Air Force.” Earlier that year, in March, he received the Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification Badge, an award given for his “important and loyal service in a position of responsibility in support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”175
If Scowcroft got results, it also meant that he heeded the authority of his ultimate superiors, persons such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who was appointed Air Force vice chief of staff in 1957 and chief of staff in 1961, and other Air Force leaders. Scowcroft did not regard questioning the Air Force leadership, whether that of LeMay; Gen. Thomas S. Power, the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command from 1957–1964; or of other military and civilian leaders, as consistent with his role as a military officer. Nor was it part of his personality.
Scowcroft admitted he found neither staff position very stimulating. Notwithstanding his noteworthy achievements, Scowcroft thought that neither job really seemed to affect US national security policy at the end of the day—and both involved extensive paperwork and speechwriting. The best thing about being at Air Force headquarters, Scowcroft said, was being able to work closely with Richard Yudkin.176
Yudkin was a genuine mentor to Scowcroft, someone who taught him how to be an effective staff officer and policy adviser and who cared about his professional development and future career.177 Yudkin had exacting standards. He was extremely hardworking. And he expected those associated with him to abide by those same standards. He set an example of how to manage national security issues and to administer personnel.178
Scowcroft learned how the Defense Department and the military establishment operated, thanks to Yudkin’s stature in the Air Force and to his many contacts throughout the Air Force, industry, and the research community. He began to see how it was possible to get things done in the vast, intricate, and politically fraught bureaucratic environment of defense policy. Perhaps even more important, Yudkin was farsighted and got Scowcroft to think rigorously about the relationship between the Air Force’s strategic bombing and its tactical missions. He “gave me a feel for the whole of the NATO mission, the whole issue of alliances, and raised my sights in a very interesting way,” Scowcroft said. For example, he caused Scowcroft to rethink what the Italian military theorist Giulio Douhet had said about what kind of bombing was appropriate. (Douhet believed that command of the air meant victory because of the offensive potential of air power, its use in total war against an opponent, and its damaging effects on enemy morale—to the detriment of air defense and the use of air power for tactical support for ground or sea operations.)179
Scowcroft’s relationship with Yudkin was similar to his later relationship with Henry Kissinger. Yudkin and Kissinger were both highly accomplished, extremely demanding, and had great affection for Scowcroft. However, Yudkin was the more patient of the two, the more generous with his time, the more hands-on as a teacher, and he served as Scowcroft’s mentor for a longer period. He was “more influential than Kissinger,” Scowcroft said. “He actually told me how to get things done, how to think.” What’s more, he brought Scowcroft to the attention of Air Force leaders, thereby helping to prepare the way for his subsequent promotion to colonel and, eventually, general officer.180
After Scowcroft had submitted his dissertation, he learned that his advisory committee wanted him to cut its length in half.181 The news did not wholly surprise him, as he had deliberately erred on the side of writing too inclusively, knowing that he normally wrote too sparely for most readers’ tastes. But this meant that it had to be rewritten, in effect. Somehow, using odd hours and weekends, he managed to find the time to do it, submitting a final draft in the fall of 1966.182
“Congress and Foreign Policy: An Examination of Congressional Attitudes Toward the Foreign Aid Programs to Spain and Yugoslavia” compared congressional policy toward Spain and Yugoslavia during the Cold War. The dissertation started from the premise that the United States had to cooperate with Yugoslavia and Spain out of strategic necessity, even though both countries had governments antithetical to American democratic values: Spain had a fascist government under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and Yugoslavia had a Marxist government under Marshal Tito. Yet Spain was vital to European and Western security and had three major US Air Force bases, just as Yugoslavia formed a bulwark against Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.183
Since Spain and Yugoslavia had undemocratic governments with contrasting ideologies, Scowcroft sought to determine how Congress’s foreign aid to the two differed. After analyzing years of roll call votes and congressional testimony, he discovered that Congress voted on a more ideological basis with respect to socialist Yugoslavia than it did with Falangist Spain. Congress protected aid to Spain under Franco and defended its aid program against what some members of Congress perceived as the hostility of the executive branch, whereas it cut funding and restricted foreign aid to Yugoslavia. He found, too, that congressional conservatives were more influential in setting US foreign policy than liberals (and this was before “liberal” and “conservative” in American politics became almost synonymous with “Democratic” and “Republican”). Religious and southern conservatives in Congress were especially influential, particularly when foreign aid issues became tinged with emotional and ideological overtones. Congress was more conservative on US foreign aid decisions than was the executive branch, he also discovered—even during Republican presidencies. Nor were members of Congress likely to be persuaded by White House arguments based on pragmatic considerations or on the United States’ national interests.184
Scowcroft defended the dissertation in April 1967, and he received his PhD in political science from Columbia University on June 6, 1967, at the age of forty-two.185
For the 1967–1968 academic year, Yudkin and other Air Force leaders recommended that Scowcroft attend the National War College. Classes there would prepare him for a joint staff appointment by increasing his knowledge of the many components of the national security establishment and rounding out his education. He would then be ready to be promoted to general officer.186
Attending the National War College held little appeal for Scowcroft. He felt he had already spent too much time in classrooms, not to mention the added research and writing he’d done for his PhD in international relations. So he turned down Yudkin’s offer the first time, but accepted it the second time around. He ended up being glad he went, as he found the whole experience “extremely broadening.”187
The National War College, located at Fort Lesley J. McNair in southeast Washington, DC, represents the pinnacle of postgraduate training for US military officers. Each year, the NWC selects outstanding military officers from the four services along with highly rated officials from the Department of State, the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce, and other federal agencies. It then trains them to plan national security policy and formulate grand strategy. The 140 military officers and federal officials chosen for the intense ten-month program are typically the most senior officials attending any of the military’s postgraduate programs.188 Army Gen. Wesley Clark, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, Army Gen. Colin Powell, USMC Gen. Anthony Zinni, Air Force Gen. Norton A. Schwartz (President Obama’s first Air Force chief of staff), and USMC Gen. James L. Jones (Obama’s first national security advisor) were all graduates of the National War College, as was Scowcroft’s one-time officemate Paul Gorman.
The premise of the NWC’s forty-three-week curriculum is that the students are members of the National Security Council staff who have been directed to come up with policies that meet the United States’ strategic requirements. The program therefore teaches students the comprehensive skills needed for planning national policy, securing the resources for implementing strategy, and exercising the joint and combined high-level policy, staff, and command functions. The students learn about the complex scientific, political, psychological, and social factors that influence US national security and the United States’ capacity to wage warfare successfully. By attending with others from throughout the government, students are supposed to become familiar with the roles, functions, and missions of the other military services and other government departments and agencies. The expectation is that the seminar discussions will cause students to say, “Well, I never thought of looking at it that way.”189
Scowcroft’s classes were arranged in a sequence of blocks, with each class lasting from seven days to six weeks. The introduction to the ten-month course of study was a four-week “statement of the problem”; the second part, which lasted twenty-four weeks, featured separate classes on “the facts bearing on the problem”; and the final thirteen weeks incorporated a three-week overseas field trip.190
Scowcroft’s courses included US Military Capability and Strategy, the International Environment and US Interests in the World Today, National Security Policymaking, and Problems of Subversive Insurgency, as well as courses on “free Europe,” the Western Hemisphere, the Communist states, and other regions of the world. The classes included lectures, discussions, group projects, field trips, and guest lectures by prominent academics, high-ranking military officers, well-known journalists, and leaders from the business world, the intelligence community, and the defense industry.
Scowcroft’s capstone field trip was a journey with a small group of classmates from March 20 to April 8, 1968, to the Middle East, including Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iran, with additional stops in Pakistan, India, and Spain. (Other groups took trips to Africa, the Far East, or Europe.) Scowcroft found his first trip to the Middle East “fascinating” and “extremely enlightening.” Not only did he get a sense of the culture, climate, and life in an area of the world new to him, but he met with top policy makers and military leaders from various countries—including an hour-and-a-half visit with the shah of Iran.191
If Scowcroft didn’t find the readings and class discussions particularly challenging or innovative—not surprising, perhaps, considering his extensive academic experience—the “most important thing” that the National War College provided him, he said, was that he “got to know the people from the other services” and “understand other perspectives.”192 The experience enabled him to build relationships with others across the government—in the Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, State Department, and CIA, as well as in the two branches he was already familiar with, the Army and the Air Force. Later, when Scowcroft was working in the White House and needed to speak with someone in a particular department or agency, he often used contacts he had made at the NWC.193
Scowcroft’s required research paper, titled “Deterrence and Strategic Superiority,” described and illustrated the problems with measuring and operationalizing the concept of strategic superiority. Because of the varying definitions of the term, Scowcroft warned, policy makers who used the phrase uncritically risked dangerously oversimplifying complex problems. Scowcroft later published the paper in the foreign policy journal Orbis.194
Being at the National War College further allowed Scowcroft to become acquainted with General Goodpaster, who was commandant in the 1967–1968 academic year (Yudkin, who was friends with Goodpaster, introduced the two of them). Scowcroft admired Goodpaster’s careful and thoughtful approach to problems. He appreciated his patient and respectful handling of people. And he liked Goodpaster’s quiet and unobtrusive style: reserved, highly disciplined, deliberate in speech, unflappable, and self-confident. Scowcroft saw that Goodpaster didn’t put himself before others and wasn’t manipulative. Goodpaster let the ideas speak for themselves, rather than advocating them dogmatically; he was “gentle and intellectual,” in Scowcroft’s description, “not forceful and not bragging.” He felt that they both “thought very much alike.”195 Scowcroft and Goodpaster later worked together on the Atlantic Council in the late 1970s and the 1980s, and they remained in touch when Scowcroft was national security advisor under President George H. W. Bush.196
But they had their differences. Goodpaster would become a member of the Committee on the Present Danger—something Scowcroft later said he didn’t know about Goodpaster—and close to Edward Teller, Albert Wohlstetter, James Schlesinger, Caspar Weinberger, and other hardcore anti-Soviet hawks, many of them associated with 1980s neoconservatism. Goodpaster would also be an early supporter of the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), whereas Scowcroft, as we shall see, remained a skeptic.
SCOWCROFT RETURNED TO the Pentagon, where he held three offices in quick succession: country director for Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay in the Western Hemisphere Region in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense on International Security Affairs (1968–1969); deputy assistant for National Security Council matters in the Directorate of Plans (1969–1970); and special assistant to Air Force Gen. John W. Vogt in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1970–1971).
In the first job, Colonel Scowcroft—he was promoted on July 1, 1968—helped design and execute US military policy regarding Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay (as well as for Latin America more generally). The position incorporated many separate responsibilities, just as he preferred. As the liaison to the air forces of these four friendly Latin American countries, all of which used US-made equipment, Scowcroft implemented military arms sales and monitored their execution, helped plan joint exercises, and coordinated policy and practices with the personnel of their respective air forces (many of whom were US-trained). Not that the late 1960s was an easy period for US relations with most Latin American countries.
The job also required Scowcroft to help formulate diplomatic and military strategy on sensitive and complex matters involving the United States’ security interests in the four countries and the region. He had to recommend Defense Department positions on proposals originating from the State Department. Scowcroft was further responsible for managing important special projects involving US policies in Latin America, drafting studies for the National Security Council (the most significant a study of overall US policy toward Latin America), and consulting daily with his counterparts in other US agencies and the military attachés of Latin American governments.197
As deputy to the special assistant for Vietnamization from 1969 to 1970 in the Directorate of Plans, Scowcroft’s next job was to oversee the US Air Force’s component of the Vietnamization program. The purpose of Vietnamization was to transfer the burden of the war to the South Vietnamese through the withdrawal of US forces, replacement of American personnel by South Vietnamese personnel, and transfer of US equipment to the South Vietnamese armed forces—the Vietnamese army (ARVN), air force (VNAF), navy (VNN), and marines (VNMC). Although the Vietnamization policy had originated under defense secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson in 1967, Nixon made it the United States’ top priority in 1969 and the centerpiece of his plan for “peace with honor.” Vietnamization stood as the chief manifestation of Nixon’s (and Kissinger’s) strategy of the United States working more through allied governments in lieu of acting directly on its own so as to reduce the costs of US foreign engagement.198
Air Force leaders handpicked Scowcroft for the job of integrating and uniting all of the Vietnamization efforts for the secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force chief of staff. The fact that he had little guidance about how to proceed and little direct supervision gave him further opportunity to use his initiative. Scowcroft could define the scope of operations, decide how different functions would be divided, and determine who would play what roles in the transfer of US Air Force matériel and military operations to the VNAF. He then supervised the handover of US Army aviation units—helicopters, equipment, and maintenance operations—to newly activated VNAF helicopter squadrons. He oversaw the transfer of C-123 cargo planes to the VNAF (USAF instructors, meanwhile, trained Vietnamese pilots to fly the C-123s as well as C-5s). He started the relinquishing of air base commands to VNAF officers and directed the redeployment of US Air Force and Army aviation personnel.
He also represented the Air Force in all Joint Chiefs decisions regarding Vietnamization. Some of these decisions involved psychological warfare. In order to boost South Vietnamese morale, for instance, the Air Force and other services established Operation Limelight, which the US Air Force history office described as “a public affairs program designed to lift the VNAF’s esprit de corps of the troops and give more recognition to their performance and progress.”199
Particularly impressive about Scowcroft’s performance was his ability to assemble almost overnight a staff consisting of personnel from different Air Force agencies and forge them into an effective and responsive organization. He organized a series of comprehensive briefings for the relevant units within the Air Force and for other agencies in order to coordinate the extensive transfers. And because of his ability to collaborate effectively with others, his efforts were quickly recognized and readily accepted throughout the Pentagon.200
By objective indicators, the Air Force’s Vietnamization program was highly successful—especially in consideration of the fact that Nixon’s decision to speed up the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese military imposed significant additional demands on the Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The VNAF expanded from 19,000 people in late 1968 to 45,000 in early 1970 and 64,000 by 1973. The recruiting and training of VNAF pilots and specialists grew in parallel, and US Air Force mobile training teams helped to upgrade Vietnamese maintenance and logistics facilities.201 As a result, the VNAF participated in a much larger share of all air operations in South Vietnam during 1969, according to a history produced by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with total VNAF sorties rising from 54,900 in the first quarter of 1969 to 73,700 in the last quarter. And by 1970, the US command in South Vietnam rated the VNAF combat performance on a par with that of American units.202
As a practical reality, however, in terms of South Vietnam actually becoming militarily self-reliant, Vietnamization was a failure. It would not have been necessary—or even possible—without the previous “Americanization” of the war in the late 1950s and early 1960s because of the vulnerabilities of the government of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem. Yet Americanization had the perverse effect of depriving the Vietnamese armed forces of the experience and responsibility they needed to successfully defend South Vietnam and wage war against the North Vietnamese.203
So when Vietnamization began in 1967, it was a cynical exercise almost certainly doomed to failure, since the South Vietnamese air force, like other components of the South Vietnamese military, was neither sufficiently trained nor sufficiently motivated to succeed in taking over from the US armed forces. However great the quality and quantity of US matériel, the VNAF, like the South Vietnamese army, navy, and marine corps, suffered from a number of serious problems. Among them were problems of morale (low pay and desertions), a deficiency in leadership (the low quality and shortage of leaders), poor training (the lack of standardization, the low quality of instructors, and weak logistical support), and inadequate maintenance (the shortage of sufficiently experienced personnel, since military equipment cannot function without regular high-quality maintenance).204
Without much experience, with little professionalism, and with corruption rampant among the Vietnamese military and the civilian government, the South Vietnamese armed forces were ill positioned to benefit from Vietnamization. Nixon, Kissinger, and their top military and civilian advisers knew these facts full well, and few US officials actually believed the South Vietnamese would be able to hold their own against the North. However, they hoped at least to buy some time to separate a peace agreement from the eventual withdrawal of all US support of South Vietnam. To prop up the regime long enough to establish this “decent interval,” the administration was expanding US military activities in Cambodia and, on occasion, massively bombing North Vietnam even as it transferred equipment and withdrew US forces.205 Thus, the “decent interval” later established through the 1973 Hanoi peace agreement pointed to the discrepancy between American rhetoric and the uncomfortable facts on the ground.
Vietnamization was but a fig leaf for defeat, the historian Robert Dallek writes. Scowcroft conceded that he “thought it was an uphill battle all along” and that “the overall outcome was against it succeeding” (although he added that the overall strategy was not of his own doing).206 As one Pentagon official put it, “Vietnamization was like getting nine women pregnant in order to have a baby in one month.”207
Scowcroft may have had his own ideas about how the war should be run, but as an Air Force colonel and staff officer, he knew his views did not matter. Years later, though, Scowcroft expressed his doubts about the US government’s policies. While he believed in the basic merits of the war and the containment doctrine that was the war’s underlying rationale, he also believed that a whole generation of US political and military leaders had behaved irresponsibly. They had never thoroughly, methodically, and dispassionately deliberated over exactly what the United States hoped to accomplish in Vietnam, he said, and never determined precisely what steps the United States should take to achieve its goals.208
At the time, though, Scowcroft enjoyed the challenges posed by Vietnamization, especially compared to the drudgery of the paperwork and speechwriting required in his previous Pentagon assignments. “In a way I enjoyed Vietnamization. I had to deal with the real world and real problems,” he noted. He was a professional military officer with a job to do, and by all accounts he did it superbly. “There was not a single incident of failure in a series of high priority tight suspense actions,” Scowcroft’s supervising officer reported. His personnel ratings were consistently “absolutely superior” and his growth potential was considered “unlimited.”209
In his next assignment, Scowcroft worked as the special assistant to the Air Force vice chief of staff, Lt. Gen. John Vogt. In this role, Scowcroft set up and managed the agenda for the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended the meetings, sitting in the back of the room, and afterward tasked the Joint Chiefs’ decisions to the relevant offices and organizations within the Pentagon. He also ensured that the Joint Chiefs’ practices and programs were militarily sound as well as consistent with their stated objectives and the United States’ larger interests. One of his other responsibilities was to brief the deputies in charge of operations and the Air Force chief of staff before they went into their meetings. Another was to process “a whole bunch of study requirements for issues around the world” for the Nixon administration. As a result, he was constantly engaged in monitoring, evaluating, and executing the Joint Chiefs’ policies. He judged his position to be the single most important job in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.210
In acknowledgment of Colonel Scowcroft’s “singularly distinctive accomplishments” between March 1970 and December 1971, he received the Air Force’s Distinguished Service Medal. The award cited Scowcroft’s “penetrating analyses and consistently sound judgment and advice on matters developed for consideration of the Joint Chiefs of Staff dealing with the most significant aspects of our military posture and national strategic policy.”211
Scowcroft nonetheless found the tasks involved in his three previous positions overly bureaucratic and uninspiring—not unlike his previous assignments under General Yudkin. It wasn’t as if he felt his work for the Air Force, Department of Defense, and Joint Chiefs of Staff was unimportant or that he wasn’t proud of his efforts and accomplishments. It was just that none of the jobs involved major issues or ideological disputes. He viewed his staff duties as being essentially managerial positions in which he had to administer ongoing operations and handle existing problems. In this sense he was a blue suiter par excellence: doing the staff work necessary to keep the Air Force, Defense Department, and Joint Chiefs of Staff functioning well.212 However, it was not much fun.
Despite his lack of enthusiasm for high-level staff work, Scowcroft’s supervising officers—now all generals, of course—commented consistently on his inquisitive intelligence, his manifest brilliance, and his uncommon ability to grow in stature as his responsibilities increased. They likewise appreciated Scowcroft’s cordiality and ability to get along with others. General Vogt, in particular, was impressed, reporting that Scowcroft assisted him “in an absolutely outstanding manner” and describing him as extremely dedicated, completely loyal, and very hardworking.213 More impressive still, none of Scowcroft’s supervising officers, among the most senior officers in the Air Force, was able to determine a ceiling on his capacity for additional responsibilities. They unanimously recommended his promotion to brigadier general.
Scowcroft was himself confident he would receive his first star, since his two predecessors in the Office of the Joint Chiefs had also become general officers. And while he didn’t know what his next assignment would be, he assumed he’d be assigned another important Pentagon position.214 But Vogt had other plans for his forty-six-year-old assistant. He wanted him to replace Maj. Gen. James “Don” Hughes as military assistant to President Nixon.215
Although Scowcroft was surprised at Vogt’s offer, it came at an opportune moment. For some time he’d been thinking about retiring from the Air Force. Not only did he not care for the staff work, but it was while he was a lieutenant colonel—from 1964 to 1968—that for the first time in his career he had not been promoted at the earliest opportunity, and he began to wonder if he’d ever make general. Certainly the odds were against him: out of a hundred newly commissioned second lieutenants, a third make colonel, and only two make brigadier general. As of June 1967, Scowcroft had put in his twenty years, qualifying for retirement. He figured it might be time to go into business and to start making some money.216
As the White House military assistant, however, Scowcroft realized he would face very different challenges and have very different responsibilities. So he agreed to the offer, and on November 17, 1971, the White House announced that Col. Brent Scowcroft would be the new military assistant to the president. Remarkably, Scowcroft would never again work for the Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Department of Defense.217
Unfortunately, Brent’s mother was unable to witness her son’s transfer to the White House or, in just three months’ time, his promotion to brigadier general. On September 3, 1970, Lucile Scowcroft died from breast cancer at the age of seventy-nine. She’d had breast cancer in the mid-1960s and had had a mastectomy; the cancer went into remission for a time, only to recur.218
Vogt’s selection of Scowcroft as the White House military assistant and Kissinger’s later choice of Scowcroft as his deputy were not accidents. General Hughes had recommended that Scowcroft replace him as military assistant, since it was known that Lt. Gen. Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy national security advisor, wanted to return to the Army.219 Hughes further calculated that Scowcroft, once he was in position as Nixon’s military assistant, had the intelligence, academic training, administrative savvy, and personality to attract Kissinger’s attention.220 Both Hughes and Vogt wanted an Air Force officer to serve as Kissinger’s right-hand man, since the deputy national security advisor was the first to brief the president each morning and was in constant contact with the commander in chief. He would be well placed to learn of developments vital to Air Force interests, such as diplomatic breakthroughs or early drafts of the federal budget.221 If Scowcroft became Kissinger’s new deputy, Hughes and Vogt figured they would be kept apprised of Kissinger’s plans. Like the other Air Force and other military leaders, they both feared and distrusted Kissinger because of his unpredictable foreign policy and his apparent influence over the president. They, along with other Air Force leaders, especially disliked having the national security advisor tell them how many and what kind of missiles or bombers they could have.222
Hughes’s and Vogt’s scheming was not unusual within the Nixon administration. Haig had been providing top Army generals and defense secretary Melvin Laird with information on Kissinger’s activities and plans. Navy officers serving on the NSC staff had been found eavesdropping on Kissinger’s conversations and then passing along information to the chief of Navy operations, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt. And in December 1971, just before Scowcroft started his new job, the news broke that Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, who was on the NSC staff, had been spying for Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For months, Radford had been taking thousands of secret papers from Kissinger’s burn bag, papers Kissinger had not shared with the military, and delivering them to Admiral Moorer. (Nixon, upon finding out, decided not to take any formal action or punitive measures, because, as Scowcroft explains, the Defense Department wasn’t leaking information.)223
Air Force leaders wanted their own man as Kissinger’s deputy. They didn’t want another Army officer, much less—God forbid!—a Navy man. And Hughes and Vogt calculated that the best way to get their man selected as deputy national security advisor was to station him inside the White House as military assistant to the president. Nixon, meanwhile, had heard of Scowcroft’s superlative performance at Air Force headquarters and the Office of the Joint Chiefs, and was happy to accept Vogt’s and Hughes’s recommendation.224
Colonel Scowcroft was to be the Air Force’s White House spy. At least, that was the plan.