SCOWCROFT CERTAINLY DIDN’T think Gerald Ford should have lost the 1976 election.1 Ford was smarter and savvier than most politicians, journalists, and members of the public gave him credit for. Not only did he have a Yale law degree, but he was an expert on the federal budget, had considerable people skills, and understood national politics.
Former US trade representative Carla Hills, who would go on to work with presidents Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush and advise George W. Bush, would recall that she found the Ford White House to be the most transparent she’d worked with and Ford himself to be uniquely decisive. “No other President I know has been [as] involved as Ford in calling the shots,” she said. And no other president she knew of had such an “encyclopedic knowledge of our government and where the money is spent.”2
Besides being very smart and decisive, Ford was energetic and positive. In less than two and a half years in office, he had more meetings with foreign heads of state (124) than any other US president, and in that brief period he was able to establish close personal relationships with British prime minister James Callaghan, French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, among others.
All in all, Ford turned out to be a good president—and arguably a very good president. Ford, Hills noted, “cared so much about the country and got so little credit.”3
Scowcroft did what he could behind the scenes during the 1976 presidential campaign to see that Ford got elected in his own right. He helped draft position papers, write speeches, and prepare Ford for the election debates with Jimmy Carter.4 But he was frustrated by the fact that Ford distanced himself from his own foreign policy. Under pressure from the right, Ford—or his leading political advisers—didn’t feel he could run on his foreign policy record or that of Henry Kissinger, whom conservative Republicans were portraying as “cozying up” to the Soviet Union. So the president broke off further arms control talks with the Soviets and tried to distance himself from his famous secretary of state.5
Scowcroft wasn’t entirely unsympathetic to some of this criticism. He disagreed with Kissinger’s approach to détente as being an end in itself. Scowcroft feared the Soviet Union was “pulling the wool” over American policy makers’ eyes, and he worried that Soviet leaders believed the United States’ resolve was weakening.6
Thus, Scowcroft was somewhat ambivalent about the direction of US foreign policy in the mid-1970s. While he clearly supported the Ford presidency, he disagreed with how President Ford had backed away from his earlier support of SALT II, and he “deplored the killing of arms control.” He wanted to see actual results from the US-Soviet détente, such as major agreements on nuclear and conventional weapons, not just rhetoric and symbolism. And he felt that by turning away from Nixon’s and Kissinger’s foreign policy during the campaign, Ford had put himself in a “very difficult position” in the Republican primary campaign against California Governor Ronald Reagan.7
Scowcroft played a crucial role in two significant events that occurred during the 1976 presidential campaign, one obscure and the other well known. The former was the “Korean tree crisis” (also known as the “Korean axe murder incident” or the “Panmunjom incident”), sparked by the killing of two US officers by North Korean soldiers in the demilitarized zone; the latter was Gerald Ford’s infamous statement of October 6, made during his debate with Jimmy Carter, that the Soviet Union didn’t dominate Eastern Europe.
The incident in the DMZ happened first. On the morning of August 18, North Korean officers and soldiers demanded that American and South Korean soldiers stop pruning a hundred-foot-tall poplar standing in the joint security area of the Korean demilitarized zone in the village of Panmunjom. The crew was accustomed to such harassments and to North Korean threats, and they continued their work. They had almost completed the pruning when Lt. Pak Chul of North Korea, the head of the North Korean troops in the joint security area, physically threatened the American-led crew if it didn’t cease its work immediately. As the crew began to withdraw, Pak shouted out, “Kill” (or “Kill them all,” depending on the translation), and the North Korean soldiers, who vastly outnumbered the American and South Korean work crew, began hitting them with axe handles as well as their hands and feet, using martial arts. Pak himself used an axe handle to bludgeon Capt. Arthur G. Bonifas to death, and other North Korean soldiers dragged 1st Lt. Mark T. Barrett a short distance away and took turns beating him to death.8
Although there had been constant friction and a steady stream of incidents along the DMZ, the murder of the two US military officers was unprecedented. It is possible that North Korean president Kim Il Sung wanted to provoke US and South Korean forces into a bloody reprisal, since any significant retaliation could have legitimated an invasion of South Korea. The North Korean army was more than double the size of the UN forces under US command in South Korea.
The Ford administration found itself in a tight spot. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the United States’ support of the Indonesian government’s invasion and annexation of East Timor, the US-supported coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende, and its support of Israel against the Palestinians, the United States had a poor reputation among nonaligned states. Several Third World countries expressed their approval of a proposed UN resolution that called for the United States to actually pull out of South Korea—a policy that was anathema to Scowcroft and others in the Ford administration. As Scowcroft explained in his 1979 article for the Naval War College Review, “We are here not simply dealing with the confrontation between two small powers on a remote peninsula. Korea is the point at which the interests of all the great powers in the Pacific area converge. . . . Any suggestion of US withdrawal or lessening interest is fraught with the profoundest implications, particularly if done at a time of the questioning at home of the moral validity of our commitment to South Korea’s defense.”9 The secretive and mysterious nature of the North Korean regime complicated matters further. No one really knew what the North Korean leaders had in mind or how they would likely respond to any American actions.
When the news of the killings—and the US Army film footage of them—reached Washington later on August 18, military leaders and civilian officials within the administration were outraged. Scowcroft, who was then with Ford at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, immediately set up a Washington Special Actions Group meeting for that afternoon (with William Hyland attending in his place). Although Ford was “extremely upset” at the killings, he pointed out that time wasn’t of the essence in deciding how the United States should react, since there was no pending action the United States had to take by a specific date.10
In the WSAG meeting, Kissinger and State Department officials, officers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and officials with the International Security Affairs Directorate in the Defense Department explored a wide range of possible responses to the killings. One option was for the United States to retaliate militarily, whether by mining harbors, sinking a North Korean ship, or bombing North Korea. At the other extreme, the United States could choose not to respond and avoid any risk of escalating tensions in the DMZ. Or it could deploy additional equipment (such as an aircraft carrier) to the area or elevate the readiness level of the UN forces under US command in South Korea, with the goal of deterring the North from any further rash action and providing the president with additional military options should he later decide to respond with force.11
The WSAG participants recommended that the United States inform the UN Security Council and UN delegates of the North Korean attack and take a number of military steps, including increasing the alert status of US forces in the area, beefing up the number of American planes in South Korea with a squadron of F-4 fighters, another of F-111 fighter-bombers, and a number of B-52s sent from Guam, and having the aircraft carrier Midway (which was then in a Japanese port) sail to the area. As soon as the meeting ended, Kissinger called Ford and Scowcroft to fill them in, and Scowcroft agreed that the president should approve the WSAG’s recommendations. Shortly thereafter, the State Department formed a Korean working group to address the crisis, including State Department officials and representatives from the NSC, the Joint Chiefs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the CIA.
However, the next step taken by the United States was not proposed by any member of the WSAG’s Korean working group. It came from Army Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, the head of the UN command in South Korea and commander of the US forces in Korea. Stilwell simply proposed that the UN command should reassert its rights in the DMZ by cutting down the poplar, since the tree obstructed sightlines in the sensitive area (which was why the work crew had been cutting it back), and by dismantling two illegal road gates that the North Koreans had erected in Panmunjom.
The WSAG met early on the morning of Thursday, August 19, and endorsed Stilwell’s plan, named Operation Paul Bunyan. Kissinger then flew out to Kansas City to brief Ford and Scowcroft on the WSAG’s recommendations. Kissinger spoke of his reservations about Stilwell’s proposed action. The secretary of state wanted a stronger show of force, and he discounted the possibility that either North Korea or China would respond with military force.
Scowcroft disagreed. He believed there was a non-negligible risk of an armed response by North Korea, and he worried that an escalation of fighting in the DMZ would put the United States and South Korea at a severe disadvantage given the much larger North Korean military forces. Arguing that the United States’ response should be commensurate with the original attack, he recommended that Ford endorse Operation Paul Bunyan.
After spending three-quarters of an hour reviewing the possible options with Kissinger and Scowcroft, the president decided on Stilwell’s plan—with a few qualifications. He wanted additional US forces to be mobilized; he wanted the tree-cutting operation to be accompanied by extensive US air cover and US fleet maneuvers; and he wanted it executed without advance notice, to surprise the North Koreans and the rest of the world.
At 7:00 A.M. Korean time on Saturday, August 21—half an hour before the North Koreans were scheduled to man their guard stations—UN forces under US command moved into the DMZ and began cutting down the poplar with chainsaws and other equipment. The UN engineers quickly reduced the tree to a tall stump and removed the two illegal road barriers. With helicopters overhead, F-4s and F-111s flying over at a little distance from the joint security area, and B-52s flying toward North Korean airspace and then pulling off at the last minute, the North Koreans didn’t interfere.
Less than an hour later, President Kim Il Sung issued a statement: “It is regretful that such an incident occurred in the joint security area.” The North Korean leader hoped that “such incidents may not recur in the future” and urged that “both sides should make efforts.” Interestingly, the message not only implicitly accepted at least partial North Korean responsibility for the situation—in stark contrast to the North Koreans’ usual intransigence—but also expressed Kim’s desire to put the crisis in the past and for both sides to proceed on a new basis.
This was not much of a concession, to be sure. Neither Kim Il Sung nor North Korean military leaders accepted responsibility for the murders or promised to punish those at fault, and General Stilwell and the State Department both initially rejected the North Korean statement. But the US officials in the interagency Korean working group were “amazed at the message,” given the previous tenor of North Korean communication. So upon further deliberation, the State Department and the White House decided to accept the statement. It was “more than we expected,” Kissinger said. In any event, it was enough to defuse the crisis. Kissinger released a statement indicating that the North Korean message represented “a positive step” and proposing that the military armistice commission convene so as to secure the safety of personnel in the demilitarized zone. President Ford was pleased by the strong signal the United States had sent to North Korea, the Soviet Union, and China by virtue of the quick, forceful response.12
Over the three days of the crisis, Scowcroft had had to devote most of his time to overseeing the US response as well as briefing and advising a very busy and preoccupied President Ford. Most important, he had persuaded Ford—and, implicitly, Kissinger—not to take more drastic action. He had also helped persuade Kissinger to accept the North Korean president’s message as constituting a constructive step toward the stabilization of the DMZ.
Once the crisis blew over, the North Koreans and South Koreans agreed to jointly survey a new military demarcation line through the joint security area and to restrict all guard posts and military personnel to their respective sides. The overwhelming reaction in Washington, among foreign ministries, and in the American and foreign press was approval of both the content and the manner of the United States’ response. And the nonaligned states quietly dropped any consideration of the proposed UN resolution calling for the United States’ military withdrawal from the Korean peninsula.
Throughout the crisis, Scowcroft had exerted a stabilizing, tempering influence. In a situation in which the United States knew almost nothing about what motivated the North Korean leadership and how they would respond “to any kind of stimulus, either positive or negative,” he had advised Ford “that more important than being tough is appearing steady [and] mature.” In contrast to Kissinger, James Schlesinger (who had started working for Jimmy Carter), and others who advocated bombing North Korea, Scowcroft cautioned the president that the United States was “able to resolve a crisis in other ways” (as Robert McFarlane reported).13 Events proved him right.
However, the quick defusing of the Korean tree crisis couldn’t save the Ford presidency. By many accounts, a misstatement by the president in his second debate against Jimmy Carter played a central role in Ford’s electoral defeat.
Ford was the first White House incumbent to debate a presidential challenger (there having been no incumbent in the Kennedy-Nixon debate, of course). In preparation, he trained hard, held mock debates with members of his staff, and rehearsed answers to the questions his staff expected. One such question was about the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The contents of Ford’s debate briefing book show that the president was to deny that he or his administration accepted any such domination and to say that he “was totally opposed to so-called spheres of influence—or ‘domination’ of Eastern Europe—by any power.”14
So when the New York Times’ Max Frankel asked if the Soviets were getting “the better of us”—as they were bragging, presumably because of the Helsinki accords and other supposed gains—Ford was primed for an answer. But he was also, because of how the debate was evolving, on the defensive. And that was when the president got into trouble: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration,” the president said. Neither the Yugoslavians nor the Romanians nor the Poles, he continued, “consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.” On the contrary, “each of those countries is independent, autonomous. It has its own territorial integrity and the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”15
As soon Ford said these words—indefensible and absurd at face value—William Hyland let out a moan. Scowcroft, who was in a room near the stage in San Francisco, went white and told Stu Spencer, who was assisting the campaign, “You’ve got a problem.” He then put his head in his hands.16
An hour after the debate, Scowcroft, Cheney, Michael Raoul-Duval, and Stu Spencer held a press conference to explain—or explain away—the president’s comment. Scowcroft led off: “I think what the President was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet dominance of Europe and that he took his trip to Eastern Europe . . . to demonstrate, to symbolize their independence, and their freedom of maneuver.” Scowcroft admitted that Ford made a “bad mistake” and emphasized that Ford didn’t “concede the domination of Eastern Europe.” But the clarification did little good. The press “damn near laughed us out of the room,” campaign director James A. Baker III said, and he added that this had been an occasion “I will never forget as long as I live.” (By contrast, Kissinger called Ford immediately after the debate and told him he had done a superb job; he didn’t mention Poland or Eastern Europe.)17
Ford may have meant to use the word “dominion” instead, since to say “There is no Soviet dominion of Eastern Europe” makes more sense. Or he may have meant to say that the United States did not accept the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe (which was what Scowcroft repeatedly told the press).18 In any case, if Ford had quickly conceded his misstatement, there almost certainly wouldn’t have been much of a problem. Instead, he doggedly maintained that everyone knew what he meant and there was no need for a retraction—Ford was a “stubborn cuss,” one White House observer remarked—and he refused to give in to Scowcroft’s, Cheney’s, and Nessen’s entreaties to issue a correction. The national security advisor even pleaded with Ford to retract, but Ford refused: “I said what I said. I know what I said. I said what I meant, and I’m not going to change it.”19
The press had a field day, and Jimmy Carter began to exploit Ford’s comment in his own public statements. The result was that a debate the experts had scored as a narrow victory for Carter and that the public had considered a narrow win for Ford was transformed into a sharp defeat—a fifty-six-point swing, according to the White House’s own poll.20 Not until four days after the debate did the president finally offer a public apology. By then the damage had been done.
Of course, one debate gaffe, however serious, didn’t decide the 1976 election. Ford had an uphill battle due to a series of challenges, many of them related to foreign policy. For example, there was Senator Jesse Helms’s proposed plank for the Republican platform that called for a “moral foreign policy,” directly targeting Secretary Kissinger’s realpolitik approach. Scowcroft had urged Ford to oppose the plank, but Ford didn’t feel he could do that, so he essentially ignored the whole platform.21 Ford’s narrow victory over Ronald Reagan in the most hotly contested Republican primary campaign since William Howard Taft defeated Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 divided the country and caused notable defections among Ford’s supposed allies.
Former president Nixon didn’t help matters. Ford and Kissinger both thought that Nixon wanted a primary stalemate between Ford and Reagan in hopes that John Connally, a former cabinet member and governor of Texas, could get the nomination (Connally had been Nixon’s first choice for vice president after Spiro Agnew’s resignation).22 Just three days before the New Hampshire primary, Nixon stole the headlines—and reminded voters of Ford’s unpopular pardon—by taking a well-publicized trip to China, possibly in protest of Ford’s slowing of the normalization of US-China relations, as journalists Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy suggest in their book The Presidents Club. The private diplomacy appeared to do nothing to help US-China relations and indicated Nixon’s lack of respect for his successor, since he had said when he resigned that he would not go to China. Ford was livid; even Scowcroft said, “Nixon is a shit.”23
As the primary battle between Ford and Reagan raged, Kissinger tried to broker a deal with Reagan to get Ford on the ticket—at the bottom of the ticket, moreover—but did so a little too eagerly for Ford’s taste. (The president didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, but soon discarded it as unworkable.) The secretary of state also attempted to woo the Republican right and ingratiate himself with Reagan’s foreign policy advisers, but with little success: the Rockefellers, the mainstream media, and the financial establishment—his patrons and political allies—were all the bogeymen of the far right.24
All these maneuverings left Ford largely isolated in his own party and prevented him from using his foreign policy record as an asset in the general election campaign. Scowcroft considered Ford’s response to the right-wing challenge a mistake. He believed that successful negotiation of a SALT II deal might have turned the 1976 election in Ford’s favor. Instead, pushed by his political advisers and by Don Rumsfeld in particular, Ford backed off from SALT II, deemphasized the strategic arms limitations talks in Vladivostok, omitted the significance of the Helsinki accords, and downplayed foreign policy in general. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld was portraying the Soviet Union as a “dark menace” in his briefings to Congress, which made US-Soviet relations appear even worse.
On November 1, 1976, with the election still in doubt, President Ford wrote a letter to Scowcroft. “Dear Brent,” Ford wrote, “I want to say, before the voters return their verdict, how deeply I have appreciated your loyalty and long hours of work throughout my Administration and especially during the demanding period of recent weeks. I have been greatly supported and sustained by the superb performance of my staff, and while you may have missed the excitement of the cheers and the crowds, you have my lasting gratitude for your continuing dedication to duty and the best interests of our country.”25
Ford’s praise of Scowcroft—he sent similar letters to other members of the NSC staff—was well deserved. He had performed admirably as national security advisor in the face of the huge challenges that confronted the Ford administration in the tumultuous mid-1970s—the hostile political climate fostered by Watergate, the ignominious end to the Vietnam War, the unraveling of détente, and a host of other foreign and domestic troubles. Amid these difficulties, Scowcroft was “the near-perfect national security advisor,” in the words of Bud McFarlane.26
But with Watergate, Vietnam, the end of détente, the intelligence scandal, and the oil crisis, commodity price increases, and resulting inflation of the early 1970s, the Ford White House faced voters who now doubted the legitimacy of their government. Americans distrusted Washington and were ready to turn to a credible outsider. So despite the best efforts of Scowcroft and the rest of Ford’s advisers—and contrary to the expectations of most people in and around the Ford White House—Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election.27
AFTER THE ELECTION, worried about the ascent of the Republican right, Scowcroft wanted Ford to “stay in the limelight and lead the party. Otherwise Reagan will take it over.” Ford didn’t follow Scowcroft’s advice, however, and the Republican Party was indeed inherited by Reagan. Scowcroft and Kissinger also worried about US foreign policy under Carter. (Immediately after the election, Kissinger told Ford and Scowcroft, “Carter I think could easily be a one-term President.”)28 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Scowcroft’s old acquaintance, became Carter’s national security advisor.
As for Scowcroft, he joined one of the nation’s capital’s distinct subpopulations: the hundreds of policy experts, former government officials, and retired military, intelligence, and Foreign Service officers waiting for an opportunity to serve in the US government. In the meantime, they held a variety of positions—working at a DC-area think tank, teaching in a college or university, or working in a law firm, in the media, in business, or in another occupation.
Scowcroft left the White House in a cheery mood, ready for new challenges and new opportunities.29 Neither was he “dying to go back.” He signed up with a speakers agency and proceeded to go on the lecture circuit around the country, giving paid talks. The Air Force gave him an office and a desk in the Pentagon, which he used. He also helped friends with their transitions to civilian life, and “had good connections” and lots of friends, as Bill Gulley recalls.30
Instead of feeling despondent, Scowcroft felt relieved to be out of office, as though a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders after the intense, difficult, and frustrating four years of the Nixon and Ford administrations. “It was fun,” he said about being out of office. No longer did he have to worry about negotiations with the Soviet Union. No longer was he responsible for nuclear weapons and the alignment of strategic forces. No longer did he have to work at all hours and, during crises, for all intents and purposes live in the White House. After a professional life devoted to the US Air Force, two US presidents, and the US government, he now had to answer only to himself, his family, his close friends, and others with whom he chose to associate.31
Despite his anger over Nixon’s unauthorized trip to China late in the 1976 campaign, Scowcroft kept in touch with the former president after the election:
I got very close [to Nixon] after he resigned. He asked me to come out after Ford’s defeat to help him write RN. I stayed out in San Clemente a couple of weeks. After that we commuted when he came to New York, and I would go up and have dinner occasionally. He would call all the time during the Ford administration from San Clemente. With USSR, he’d call and I’d relay the messages to Bush. I had a great regard for him. In intellectual sagacity he was very good and unusually close. He had a close relationship with Henry Kissinger, but I wasn’t a threat so he would confide more.32
Scowcroft helped to write the foreign policy component of RN, Nixon’s memoirs, with much of the work being done over the telephone, Gulley reports—all gratis. Scowcroft also said that the two of them would “have long, rambling conversations at this time when [Nixon] was relaxed.” But as Scowcroft read draft chapters of RN, he found some occasions to say, “Mr. President, it really didn’t happen this way.” Nixon would say, “I’ll show you, because my diary has it in it.” It turned out that the president had a “Walter Mitty diary,” one that captured how Nixon would have liked the day to end, not how the day actually ended. Sometimes the president would correct his chapters when Scowcroft showed him the records; other times he didn’t.33
Although the two stayed in touch over the next decade and a half, it was never an especially close friendship—probably because Nixon was incapable of one. The transcripts of their telephone conversations show that the former president invariably maintained a certain distance from his former military assistant and often spoke to Scowcroft in a high-handed manner. Taken at face value, their conversations suggest that Nixon took Scowcroft for granted, apparently assuming that his former aide—despite being a retired three-star general with a doctorate in international relations—remained his loyal subordinate. Scowcroft, when asked, explained that Nixon’s behavior was “somewhat his way,” adding that Nixon’s manner was “also a defense mechanism” since he was “so insecure.” Even so, Nixon’s friendship with Scowcroft may have been as close as the former president could get to anyone beyond his own family.34
Much of Scowcroft’s energy during the next several years was focused on his new consulting business. He and five partners—four of them former White House officials, and three of them also former military officers—decided to form a company to specialize in opportunities in Oman and Iraq (but no business with the Pentagon). They called their company International Six Incorporated (ISI).35
Scowcroft and Bill Gulley first conceived of the partnership, and Nixon introduced the two of them to Omar Zawawi, a Harvard-trained MD, a wealthy owner of several Omani construction companies, and the brother of Oman’s foreign minister. Zawawi put in $200,000 in start-up money. Charles Trout, a wealthy young entrepreneur from Ohio who had started and then sold a water purification company, also joined the company and put in his own money. Rounding out the six were Jack Brennan, a Marine Corps colonel, military assistant, and Nixon’s post–White House chief of staff, and Marvin Watson, President Lyndon Johnson’s appointments secretary and the postmaster general.36
Scowcroft and his partners leased a four-thousand-square-foot double suite at 1875 K Street and hired a couple of secretaries. Just as he had in the White House, Scowcroft again had “stacks three feet high” on his desk (“but he knew where everything was,” Gulley said). Brennan, whom Scowcroft called a “free spirit,” soon dropped out of the company, as did Watson, although Watson stayed on as a consultant rather than as a partner. The remaining four agreed on an egalitarian business model: they’d divide their proceeds evenly, 25 percent each, after subtracting individual expenses and Gulley’s salary. (Gulley thus received both a salary and a share in the company’s net proceeds; the other partners each had independent sources of income.) The more typical partnership arrangement is for the founders of a company, which in this case would have been Scowcroft and Gulley, to receive larger shares of a partnership’s profits or for the most prominent of the partners, who would have been Scowcroft, to receive a larger percentage of the proceeds.37
They hustled. Scowcroft and his associates devoted their biggest effort to getting a new Disney theme park built in Egypt outside Cairo—Zawawi had ties to Anwar El Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, who succeeded Sadat in October 1981—and they got a deal, but it never came to fruition. They sold Florida phosphate fertilizer to China through a French company, thanks to Chinese contacts that Nixon and Jack Brennan gave them. Even though they had established ISI to specialize in opportunities in Oman, Iraq, and the Middle East, they made most of their money from deals with China. They also pursued business in the United States, buying a company in California and property in Vail, Colorado, and brokering the sale of a large farm with an eight-bedroom farmhouse in upstate New York to members of the rock group the Eagles, among other deals.38
Scowcroft and Gulley would close up shop in late 1988, when George Bush asked Scowcroft to join his administration.39 (When the FBI later questioned Scowcroft about ISI to clear him for work in the Bush White House, he declined to provide the FBI with any details about the company.) Gulley said that the company made only about $2 million over the course of its life.40
Meanwhile, and perhaps because of ISI’s mixed success, Scowcroft embarked on another enterprise concurrently, joining with Kissinger in 1982 to establish Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international business consulting company. The two of them had talked about doing so for what Scowcroft called “a long time,” without any single model in mind (though they had looked at Booz Allen). Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Lawrence Eagleburger, who came on board soon afterward, used their foreign policy expertise, government experience, and diplomatic connections to advise a small handful of US-based and foreign multinationals on joint ventures, strategic planning, risk assessment, and other matters. Scowcroft was vice chairman and Kissinger Associates’ representative in Washington, DC. Among Kissinger Associates’ clients in the early 1990s—some of which postdate Scowcroft’s departure for the Bush White House—were American Express, AIG, Anheuser-Busch, the Atlantic Richfield Company, Chase Manhattan Bank, Coca-Cola, Daewoo, Ericsson, Fiat, Fluor, Goldman Sachs, GTE, Heinz, Merck, Midland Bank, Revlon, Union Carbide, and Volvo.41
Working with Kissinger was lucrative for Scowcroft; by one account, he earned $300,000 a year for his work with Kissinger Associates, while another researcher figured that in 1988 Scowcroft took in more than $500,000. Independently, Scowcroft also served as a private consultant to the Lockheed Corporation.42
Some have wondered whether Scowcroft’s consulting work and his later assignments on behalf of the US government—for example, his chairmanship of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces, known as the Scowcroft Commission (discussed in Chapter 15)—expose him to accusations of conflicts of interest. Yet if anyone could pull off juggling these roles, it would be Scowcroft, with his capacity to wear different hats at the same time, his ability to compartmentalize, and his impeccable integrity. Nonetheless, Scowcroft’s later service on the two Townes Boards that addressed missile-basing issues, the Scowcroft Commission, and the Defense Policy Review Board—all of which recommended policies affecting Lockheed and possibly other clients of Scowcroft and of Kissinger Associates—would cause some on both the left and the right to view his motives with suspicion.43
One specific episode—the so-called Iraqgate scandal—embroiled Kissinger Associates in controversy during the 1980s. Kissinger Associates did business with Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), an Italian bank with an office in Atlanta, which made $4 billion in unauthorized loans to Iraq. This appears to have been a way for the Reagan administration to covertly aid Iraq in its war against Iran. Critics also pointed out that from 1984 through 1986 Scowcroft was a member of the board of directors of Santa Fe International, a subsidiary of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, and was connected with several other firms that had a stake in the war between Iraq and Iran and, later, the Iraq-Kuwait dispute.44
It is not clear what if any role Scowcroft may have had in this, but for Scowcroft to help with US intelligence operations as part of his consulting work would be in character given his background in Air Force intelligence and his experience in the Nixon and Ford administrations.45 No specific allegations of misconduct have ever been raised against Scowcroft in connection with his consulting work.
Despite their years of collaboration, Scowcroft and Kissinger gradually drifted apart. Kissinger lived and worked in New York City; Scowcroft lived in Bethesda and worked in Washington, DC. Scowcroft came up to New York only about once a month, and “didn’t talk much on the telephone” with Kissinger and the New York company office. Eagleburger described the relationship between Kissinger and Scowcroft at the time as “less than close.” According to Eagleburger, who was also living in New York, “Between Henry and him and between Brent and me . . . we were off doing things without a hell of a lot of conversation back and forth with Washington.”46
Kissinger and Scowcroft also had different interests. Kissinger wanted to be wealthy—in 1988 he had annual earnings of $7.5 million—and he enjoyed socializing with those at the top of the New York financial, business, cultural, and social worlds, such as the investment banker Pete Peterson, who served as chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers before cofounding the Blackstone Group in 1985. Scowcroft, for his part, wasn’t particularly interested in high society or being a celebrity, and he didn’t feel the need to adopt the lifestyle of the very rich or socialize with the extremely wealthy. As Gulley remarked, he wasn’t one for spending a lot of money or ostentation.47
Rather, Scowcroft very much remained a student and analyst of US foreign policy and national interest. Even on the occasional weekend at the Palm Springs house he bought with Gulley, Jack Brennan, and two others in 1974, for instance—the house was sold in 1989—Scowcroft didn’t sign up for tee times, sit around watching ballgames, or while away the hours drinking with his buddies (although Alan Greenspan and Dick Cheney would occasionally come down to visit, Gulley recalled). His attention was overwhelmingly devoted to national security as well as his business consulting.48
Scowcroft wrote a number of op-eds (many of them coauthored), contributed several scholarly articles and chapters in edited volumes, cochaired studies (four by the Atlantic Council, for which he coedited the subsequent pamphlets and books), and edited an American Assembly publication entitled Military Service in the United States.49 Most of his writings focused on strategic issues; in some of his op-eds and (fewer) letters to the editor, he would make more pointed remarks, often in defense of the Nixon and Ford administrations’ records. In his longer writings, Scowcroft typically took analytical and historical approaches to the United States’ national security interests. As a cochairman of several Atlantic Council working groups and other commissions, he didn’t do the drafting of the studies—a rapporteur did that—but he worked with others to create a consensus and closely edited the final drafts to ensure that they reflected his views and those of the group.
In a brief introduction to an edited volume on the all-volunteer army, for instance, Scowcroft and the volume’s other contributors made it clear that in the period since the discontinuation of the draft in 1973, questions demanding debate had accumulated about the effectiveness and merits of the volunteer army. In the discussion of strategic deterrence, to give another example, Scowcroft and other members of the Atlantic Council working group expressed their fear of the growing dominance of the Soviet Union, noted their concerns about NATO and its challenges, and advocated higher levels of defense spending by Japan and the United States’ European allies. In a study of oil and the Middle East, Scowcroft addressed the United States’ dependence on oil imports from the Middle East, pointed out that the Soviet Union should be denied a larger presence in the region, and emphasized the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship to the security and stability of the Middle East. He and his Atlantic Council colleagues commented that the United States could reduce its dependence on the Middle East’s petroleum by both diversifying its energy supply and conserving more.
Scowcroft further engaged in US foreign policy and strategic issues through his participation in the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Strategy Group. The Atlantic Council had been founded in 1961 by Dean Rusk, Christian Herter, William L. Clayton, Theodore Achilles, and others as a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution formally united to support American-European cooperation under the Atlantic Treaty. “The essential elements in the ability of the United States to play an effective role in the world,” Scowcroft wrote in an article published in January 1979, “are support and leadership for friends and allies and the capability and determination to react strongly and effectively to Soviet adventurism.” And at the center of both those efforts was NATO. “NATO will remain the cornerstone of our national security posture,” Scowcroft told officers at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.50 At the Atlantic Council, Scowcroft joined the security working group in 1977 and then the political committee, where he was with the NATO committee, and in 1978 he became cochair of the political committee’s project on leadership in NATO. At the Atlantic Council’s conferences, he worked with Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, Gen. John Vogt, and Eugene Rostow—all members of the Committee on the Present Danger, with Rostow being one of the founders and Vogt also a member of the CIA’s Team B exercise in 1976.
Scowcroft, like many other national security experts, was critical of how détente had played out by the end of the Ford administration. He believed in the deep conflict between the United States and the West, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and international communism, on the other hand, and he thought the United States should not only arm itself accordingly but also reach out to and educate the American public about the Soviet threat. In this sense he shared some positions with the first generation of neoconservatives. He would have little in common with the next generation of neoconservatives.
The Aspen Strategy Group was a smaller bipartisan group formed out of an annual conference on arms control and strategic weapons sponsored by MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, with about half of its funding coming from foundations (such as MacArthur and Carnegie), and half from individuals and corporate donors. Participants—and it was a mostly closed group, with about twenty-five to thirty members at the core, although about sixty to seventy people sat in on the weeklong summer seminars—would meet in Aspen each summer for five days for the purpose of rethinking perceptions about a single theme. The members would read serious papers on particular aspects of the topic, then open the floor to questions. The format was much like a news conference, only with everything on background; the information could be repeated, but not attributed to a particular person. It was a rigorous, intellectual atmosphere that involved policy makers, journalists, and experts from think tanks and the defense industry. The papers would then later be edited and published.
Among those participating in the late 1970s and 1980s were an “astounding” number of people who would become prominent in government, including William Perry, Dick Cheney, Al Gore, Strobe Talbott, and Joseph Nye. Scowcroft served as cochairman of the Aspen Strategy Group from 1983 until 1989. He typically said little during the meetings, contributing only when needed. What made him special, Aspen Strategy Group member and former NSC aide Jan Lodal said—Lodal had also been a president of the Atlantic Council—was that “he was always a stable rock that everyone leaned on.” It wasn’t that Scowcroft convinced everyone of his positions; rather, it was that “he was so respected for his fairness, his objectivity, and his lack of political agenda.” And his stature only grew over time. What made him special among the members of the Aspen Strategy Group as well as with the Atlantic Council was—and is—the “incredible” amount of respect others have for him.51
SCOWCROFT REMAINED OPEN to the possibility of returning to public service. As the 1980 presidential election neared, Ronald Reagan and his advisers were attracted to Scowcroft because of his expertise, his military and governmental experience, and his excellent reputation. Reagan invited Scowcroft to be one of his foreign policy advisers for the 1980 general election campaign, and Scowcroft received frequent mention in the press and in policy circles as a possible nominee as US ambassador to the Soviet Union. Once Reagan won the election, Scowcroft was again mentioned as a likely nominee for a top foreign policy position, particularly after Richard Allen resigned as national security advisor after only one year in office.
But Reagan and his advisers were somewhat suspicious of Scowcroft, and none of the appointments developed. Scowcroft later described the situation as if he was allowed to work in the yard, cutting the grass and trimming the flowers, but never allowed inside the house.52 Some of Reagan’s advisers viewed Brent as being too close to his discredited former boss, Henry Kissinger; others thought he simply wasn’t a good fit in view of his realist positions, his pragmatism, and his lack of ideological fervor—views that clashed with the less nuanced and more ideological positions on US foreign policy taken by President Reagan and others on the Republican right. Indicatively, Alexander Haig kept his distance from Scowcroft and Kissinger when he served as Reagan’s secretary of state, as did Allen.
Scowcroft never became a member of the Reagan White House. But with his work on the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces (the Scowcroft Commission) and the Special Review Board (the Tower Commission), he was able to achieve things that may have been of greater importance than the work he might have done as an insider. One of these achievements was something that the Reagan administration was repeatedly unable to do itself—to find a solution to the vital MX-basing problem. The other was to acquire the power to inspect the Reagan White House and appraise its performance—a performance that he found sorely lacking on several levels.