28

AN INDEPENDENT VOICE

WITH BILL CLINTON’S election as the United States’ forty-second president, Scowcroft was again wrenched from his position as national security advisor. Once more, he did not expect to be out of a job. And like almost all other White House officials, he did not actually believe Bush would lose his reelection bid. Even the president couldn’t fathom the election results. “I just never thought they’d elect him” Bush told Colin Powell.²

Scowcroft had “played a minor role in the campaign,” although at Lee Atwater’s request he spoke to Republican groups on foreign policy and at fund-raisers for House Republicans. Otherwise, Scowcroft didn’t have a relationship with Bush’s campaign advisers—except when on behalf of the president he had to ask Baker to leave his position as secretary of state and take over the reelection campaign. Bush couldn’t ask his friend directly—he’d then be conceding he needed Jim’s help. Baker agreed, and he quickly stopped the self-destructive infighting that had been damaging the campaign. But the change came too late to salvage Bush’s reelection.³

The president was handicapped by not having “Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft running his domestic policy,” said Dave Carney, a political consultant with the Bush campaign. Bush’s domestic policy team did not operate “as smoothly” as his foreign policy team and was “not as focused, not as unified, and . . . not as media-savvy.”⁴ Worse yet, the campaign staff “decided that foreign policy was a negative,” Scowcroft said, and they chose to stay “away from foreign policy through the whole of 1992.” Scowcroft thought—as he had during the Ford campaign—that it was “ill-advised” for them “to run away from what [Bush] had done at a very crucial period in U.S. and world history.”⁵ He found it immensely frustrating that the campaign didn’t play to Bush’s strong suit and didn’t do a good job of reminding the American people what President Bush and his administration had accomplished; they never really explained to the American people, in no uncertain terms, why the president deserved reelection.⁶

Even so, without the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who received 19 percent of the popular vote, Bush might have been reelected. Scowcroft, by his own account, had to devote a “huge amount” of his time to handling Perot, who was obsessed with Vietnam POWs and MIAs, and the subsequent investigation by Massachusetts senator John Kerry and Senator Robert Smith of New Hampshire into the missing US servicemen.7 To Scowcroft, it seemed that Perot was “just dredging up issues” nearly twenty years after US troops had been fighting in Vietnam. He thought there was little to gain through further investigation, and he regarded Perot’s inquiries as “much ado about nothing.” He believed Perot was just demogoguing the issue, trying to “make hay” at Bush’s expense and, in the process, going “way off the reservation.”⁸

Perot clearly had it in for Bush, who, in turn, regarded Perot with undisguised hostility; Bush perceived Perot as erratic and unreliable, and assumed he’d sooner or later self-destruct. Their falling-out dated from when Perot had said to Vice President Bush, “This world is full of lions and tigers and rabbits. And you’re a rabbit.” From then on, Herbert Parmet reports, Bush was “in Perot’s crosshairs.” Perot continued to go around “talking about Bush as ‘weak’ and a ‘wimp.’”⁹ It’s not surprising Bush didn’t try very hard to placate Perot, then. Perot’s very presence in the campaign exemplified one of Bush’s vulnerabilities as a politician, however: his tendency to take insults and disagreements personally.¹⁰

Further damaging to Bush’s bid for reelection was the last-minute news of Friday, October 30 that special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh had indicted former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-Contra scandal. Played up by the major television networks’ anchors, the news once again raised questions about Bush’s role in Iran-Contra and resulted in an almost overnight reversal in public opinion polls as to whether Americans could “trust” the president. With Election Day on Tuesday, moreover, there was no time for the administration to respond or otherwise reverse the swing in the public’s confidence in George Bush.¹¹

But if Walsh had not released the news when he did, if Bush had originally had a better campaign team in place, if there been an earlier or stronger rebound in the American economy, or if there been a less capable opponent, Bush could well have won reelection, regardless of Perot.

This time around, it was easier for Scowcroft to be out of a government job. Not only had he accomplished a great deal over the past four years as national security advisor, he had his consulting experience with Kissinger Associates and International Six behind him. Yet he said he didn’t want to go back to work with Kissinger and didn’t want to be doing something he had already done. Instead, he and his colleagues and friends on the NSC staff wanted to do something that would allow them to work together.12

Scowcroft planned to form a different kind of think tank. He brain-stormed with Arnold Kanter, Virginia Mulberger, Stephen Hadley, and Richard Haass, and they came up with the idea to establish a nonprofit company, to be called the Forum for International Policy. It would be a brain trust whose principals would use “Op-Eds, articles, Issue Briefs, media interviews, and informal meetings with decision makers to provide cogent and practical perspectives on current international issues and forecast developments not yet in the public eye” and thereby able to provide “practical, real-world policy options designed to further U.S. national interests in the new international environment.” The premise for establishing the think tank was Scowcroft’s concern that with the Cold War over, the United States would withdraw from its international commitments, turn inward, and pull back from global leadership—that as Kanter put it, policy makers would think that “we can go home and tend our garden.”¹³

By setting up a small, quick-responding organization able to turn out short, relevant pieces on the issues of the day, Scowcroft and his partners—Haass ended up not joining—would be offering a different product than other Washington think tanks. The latter usually commissioned lengthy, in-depth studies, with the result that some were already dated by the time they were released. Scowcroft and his colleagues further agreed they wouldn’t do any Monday-morning quarterbacking; they wouldn’t second-guess presidential actions or revisit decisions that had already been made or get in the business of assigning blame for past mistakes.

By January 20, 1993, the day of President Clinton’s inauguration, Scowcroft, Mulberger, and Kanter were already settled in two vacant law offices loaned to them by Fred Fielding, an attorney friend of Scowcroft’s who had been Reagan’s White House counsel (Fielding later served as President George W. Bush’s White House counsel). They worked on rented desks and fished out the files they needed from cardboard boxes stacked in their offices. A few months later, they moved to new space on Farragut Square—the present offices of the Scowcroft Group—in downtown Washington.¹⁴

The Forum for International Policy started with just Scowcroft, Mulberger, and Scowcroft’s personal assistant, Florence Gantt. Kanter also had a position at RAND, where he spent much of his time, and Hadley was an attorney with Shea & Gardner (since merged with Goodwin Procter). Their initial funding came from a $30,000 loan from Scowcroft himself, and then he and Mulberger began fund-raising, receiving contributions from former president Bush, George W. Bush, and other friends and former associates; in the late 1990s and early 2000s, annual contributions totaled in the low six figures. They soon realized they wanted the Forum to be self-financing, though, and so they soon began plans to establish a consulting business.15

Once in office, the Clinton administration quickly moved away from Bush and Scowcroft’s deliberate, realist policies. The change of direction, coupled with the near-absence of any alternative vision of the United States’ role in the world, gave Scowcroft and his coauthors multiple opportunities for writing op-eds. Scowcroft wrote or coauthored eight op-eds in the Forum for International Policy’s first two years, 1993 and 1994, which he placed in the New York Times (three), Washington Post (two), Newsweek, and the Washington Times. He coauthored four others, separately, with Lawrence Eagleburger, Eric Melby, Kanter, and Haass. (Never did others ghost-write editorials for Scowcroft.)¹⁶

Over the two terms of the Clinton administration Scowcroft wrote about three dozen op-eds, which also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, and National Interest as well as other newspapers and periodicals. The op-eds were often reprinted in other US and foreign newspapers, moreover, especially in the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and major Canadian and Australian newspapers.

The variety of Scowcroft’s topics reflected the range of his interests and the intellectual diversity of the dozen friends and associates with whom he coauthored many of the op-eds. The op-eds reflected Scowcroft’s abiding emphasis on the need for US leadership and constructive engagement in the post–Cold War world, whether with respect to trade, Russia, nuclear arms control, China and China-Taiwan relations, India-Pakistan relations, North Korea, Iran and nuclear proliferation, or the Middle East peace process. The United States, he wrote, now had “an opportunity to mold an international system more compatible with the values we have held for two centuries.” Exiting the international system was no option; the United States thus needed to “maintain a global presence backed by credible forces.”¹⁷ But because of the United States’ finite resources, it had little choice but to work as much as possible with international institutions such as NATO, the IMF, the UN Security Council, GATT, and the World Trade Organization—and to develop a full range of policy options, whether diplomacy, foreign aid, military intervention, or other actions. Scowcroft also emphasized that the president could not and should not tolerate interference with respect to his foreign policy responsibilities, and stated his opposition to a post–Cold War peace dividend.¹⁸

The Forum for International Policy became the victim of its own success. Virginia Mulberger (formerly Virginia Lampley) said “corporations started coming to us and saying, ‘Would you help us with this problem and that problem?’” Motorola was the first, and was followed by others, such as Pennzoil (on whose board Scowcroft served).19 And since Scowcroft and Mulberger were the only two raising money for their nonprofit, since neither particularly enjoyed fund-raising, and since the Forum for International Policy paid none of the principals’ salaries (except for Mulberger’s), they liked the idea of starting a for-profit international consulting firm, which would allow them to add Scowcroft’s associates and friends as their partners. They would now have a source of livelihood, be able to cover their office overhead, and be able to keep writing op-eds.

Scowcroft, with the help of Kanter, Mulberger, Melby, and Hadley, therefore created the Scowcroft Group in June 1994 to advise US multinationals on risk assessment, foreign investment, and joint ventures in emerging markets in China, Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Once they were on their feet financially, they brought in Walter Kansteiner and Daniel Poneman (both of whom had served on the NSC under George H. W. Bush); later they added a former US ambassador, a retired career Foreign Service officer, a former consultant to the energy and telecommunications industries, and a lawyer in defense and technology sector mergers and acquisitions. For the board of directors, Scowcroft and his partners asked Lawrence Eagleburger to be chairman, and invited Dwayne Andreas, David Boren, John Deutch, Robert Gates, Rita Hauser, John Hennessy, Carla Hills, Kenneth Lay, Harold Poling, and Robert Strauss—all of whom were committed to the United States’ international engagement. Scowcroft was also on the board.²⁰

The fact that Scowcroft and his associates formed the Scowcroft Group to capitalize on their expertise is hardly unusual; they all agreed it would be a good way to make a living. What does make it unusual was its genesis as the outgrowth of the Forum for International Policy and the fact that all of its partners were from the NSC (with some referring to the company as the “NSC in exile”). Also unusual was its very small size, with only eight or nine principals—smaller than almost any other similar firm with the exception of Kissinger Associates Inc., which J. Stapleton Roy called “really a boutique consulting firm.”²¹

The reason for the company’s small size, the company’s managing partner says, is that they wanted to have an office where they liked coming in to work and could enjoy each other’s company. Their concern with compatibility has been a hallmark of the firm, and only a few partners have left—Poneman went to the Department of Energy under President Obama, Kansteiner left to work for Exxon, and Kanter passed away.

With its small size, the Scowcroft Group, unlike most other consulting firms, doesn’t have “people on the ground,” doesn’t provide weekly newsletters, and doesn’t offer other targeted benefits, such as setting up schedules or preparing detailed planning documents. Neither, however, do Scowcroft and his partners “parachute in” to handle problems or crises; rather, when they took on a client they took a hands-on approach and would communicate with that client on a weekly basis.

Large multinationals have their own contacts in foreign governments, to be sure, but they usually don’t have the personal ties with officials at the ministerial level. This is where a Brent Scowcroft, a Henry Kissinger, or a Madeleine Albright is indispensable—someone who knows how decisions get made, who has extensive experience with foreign governments, and who can’t be replaced. Scowcroft and his staff are thereby in a position to work with their clients on sensitive and complex political and governmental issues, whether having to do with trade restrictions, tax laws, constraints on direct investments, licensing agreements, market strategies, closing particular deals, or assisting on other points of business transactions.

Yet it’s not as though a Scowcroft, Kissinger, or Albright can simply meet with a foreign leader, raise a client’s concerns with the host country, and resolve matters. Rather, the government officials—friends or acquaintances of the consultant—want something in return, usually a substantive discussion of issues, and if the consultant “abuses the access, he won’t get the appointments anymore.” So the consultant has to understand “how to walk those lines,” Stapleton Roy said. The issue has to be approached in the right way if the consultant is to have a chance of moving it in the right direction. And if it is a big issue, the corporations need to be able “to turn to people who know how the government functions . . . if there’s going to be any hope of moving an issue in the right direction,” in former ambassador Stapleton Roy’s analysis.22

Neither Scowcroft nor his partners wanted their company to become a lobbying firm or to work as a foreign agent.²³ “I would say that my passion is foreign policy and strategy,” Scowcroft says, “so my business interests are as close to that [as I can] and make money.”²⁴ He and his partners emphasize that the Scowcroft Group works only with companies that are committed to the highest ethical and legal standards. They believed that their business interests needed to coincide with the United States’ strategic interests as much as possible. Scowcroft describes the “fairly simple” criteria they use for accepting clients:

Do I think this company behaves in a way that advances the interests of the United States and is someone I’d be proud to associate with? Do I think this company and country X is operating in a way and has the interest of that country, as well? It’s just . . . kind of common sense, but I’m careful about that. I don’t want to do lobbying; I don’t want to represent foreign governments. So, it’s my sense of being a part of the government for a long time now, that still is what makes me operate.25

In a situation where “what we proposed to do was contrary to US policy or our understanding of our interest, we won’t do it,” Arnold Kanter said. The firm works to serve “the interest of the United States, not just the interest of our clients.” In this sense, the Scowcroft Group differed from other consulting firms. “There’s an alignment between our personal beliefs and what we do,” Kanter went on. And because most of the Scowcroft Group’s clients are major US corporations, it is in the interest of both the Scowcroft Group and its clients to ensure that neither the firm’s interests nor those of the United States would be damaged as a result of the actions of the client corporations. The integrity of his own name and of his firm is of paramount importance to him. Mulberger, the company’s managing partner, explained that Scowcroft wanted nothing scandalous, questionable, or embarrassing to appear on the front page of the Washington Post—or anywhere else in the news. Because trust is the “scarcest, most precious commodity,” she said, Scowcroft and the partners do what they can to create and retain this trust with their clients and foreign governments.²⁶

There is a self-selection process, in short—Scowcroft and his partners are only interested in working with certain clients, and other potential clients are, for those same reasons, either inclined or not incline to retain the Scowcroft Group.²⁷

Among the Scowcroft Group’s early clients were Motorola, Pennzoil–Quaker State (now part of Shell), and SBC Communications (now AT&T). The company’s website says that Scowcroft’s “clients are industry leaders in the telecommunications, insurance, aeronautics, energy, and financial products sectors; foreign direct investors in the electronics, utilities, energy, and food industries; and investors in the fixed income, equity, and commodities markets around the world,” including hedge funds—about one and a half to two dozen at a given time, according to one member of the Scowcroft Group.²⁸

Neither is the Scowcroft Group’s emphasis on integrity just talk. Even though Lockheed Martin was a client, for instance, Scowcroft had for years publicly opposed the development of Lockheed Martin’s F-22 fighter plane. “So when he spoke for a client, he was very credible,” Mulberger said. And with confidentiality agreements in place, the Scowcroft Group didn’t release the names of its clients, and the clients didn’t disclose they had retained Scowcroft’s firm as a consultant.29

What further distinguishes the Scowcroft Group is its atypical compensation model. The Scowcroft Group’s partners (it has only a “tiny” backbench of associates) receive equal remuneration from total revenues (after adjustments for the business they bring in and for their individual expenses). This distinctive pay structure—most companies compensate their chairpersons and leading partners more than the others—replicates how Scowcroft’s first consulting firm, International Six, compensated its partners. (It is possible the Scowcroft Group’s egalitarian business model was influenced by the examples of Mormon businesses, but Scowcroft denied any linkage. He says he simply wanted an association rather than a hierarchy and that “Ginny [Mulberger] was the prime mover.)³⁰

Although law firms, investment banks, and public relations firms have long represented US clients internationally, just as they have represented foreign clients in Washington, strategic consulting firms are relatively recent phenomena. The archetype is probably Kissinger Associates, Inc. (although Alexander Haig, Richard Helms, William Colby, Richard V. Allen, and other former officials also went into business for themselves at about the same time, though with less success).³¹ In 2001, former senator William Cohen formed the Cohen Group. That same year, Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s secretary of state, formed the Albright Group and Sandy Berger, Clinton’s second national security advisor, separately established Stonebridge International. The two firms then merged in 2009 to create the Albright Stonebridge Group. Also in 2009, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley formed the RiceHadley consulting company (in partnership with APCO Worldwide) and in 2012 Rice and Hadley brought in former defense secretary Robert Gates as a third partner to form RiceHadleyGates. (It is not clear whether Scowcroft seriously considered inviting Gates to join the Scowcroft Group. In any case, Gates said he preferred to stay on the West Coast.)³²

The Scowcroft Group’s peers, including the Albright Stonebridge Group, the Cohen Group, and international law firms such as Akin Gump, Mayer Brown, and WilmerHale, vary in size, economics sectors in which they specialize, the range of services they offer, and the strategic alliances they have with other consulting companies, law firms, or strategic communications firms. While these and other companies are all ostensibly in the same business, each typically occupies a distinct economic niche and stakes out one or more particular geographic regions. The Cohen Group concentrates in the defense sector, for instance, while others focus on finance or strategic communications. The clients also tend to stay with their consulting firms, and vice versa, so there’s little jumping ship or poaching of others’ clients. The consulting firms’ standard fee for major corporate clients is between $350,000 and $500,000 a year usually (as of 2013).33

The business model Kissinger and Scowcroft first developed with Kissinger Associates, Inc. has now proliferated, and consulting partnerships, virtually all of them privately held, have become a standard feature of the nation’s capital. Yet these firms and their famous principals typically receive little attention, since they almost always work behind the scenes, often do business in foreign countries, and are hidden behind the confidentiality agreements signed by both parties. And as privately held companies, their transactions are not a matter of public record. At the same time, the consultants are often active in the Washington policy community, participate in advisory groups, and help draft think tank reports on issues of US foreign policy.³⁴

The Scowcroft Group has provided well for Scowcroft and his partners. The firm reigns as one of the most prestigious international business consulting firms in the nation’s capital, with some regarding it as the single most respected and influential firm. David Jeremiah, who also had investment banking experience, described the Scowcroft Group and Kissinger Associates, Inc. as the “granddaddies” or “patriarchs” of the international business consulting firms. Another former policy maker and businessman identified Kissinger Associates as being “at the top of the pyramid” and the Scowcroft Group “to some degree being its successor.” The Scowcroft Group set the gold standard, though, according to Jeremiah and others in the DC area. It recruited “very good people” who were “very steady and well regarded.” Another longtime Washington observer and prominent national security expert said that none of the other consulting firms “had the juice” of the Scowcroft Group.³⁵

Scowcroft and his partners ran the Scowcroft Group and the Forum for International Policy side by side for about a dozen years. Few of the op-eds the Forum published identified Scowcroft as being affiliated with the Scowcroft Group, though, in part because the newspapers (or other publications) themselves determined how Scowcroft (and his coauthors) were to be identified. It was also because Scowcroft did not want to be identified that way, since he might then be seen as defending the interests of one or more of his clients or to be promoting his own business, with the result that his arguments would then be taken less seriously.

As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, however, more and more of Scowcroft’s op-eds, letters to the editor, articles, and reports identified him as a former national security advisor rather than as the president of the Forum for International Policy. The last use of the “Forum for International Policy” by which to identify Scowcroft in the byline was in a New York Times op-ed of January 4, 2007. In 2012 he and his colleagues formally shut down their nonprofit.36

Besides writing op-eds and screening clients, Scowcroft’s concern with national security manifested itself in other ways. He gave newspaper and magazine interviews or went on television so as to ensure that the perspective he wanted to present was being reflected in policy debates. More commonly, he quietly contacted the policy makers or officials involved in the policy in question, since many of the people in office during the Clinton and Bush presidencies were his acquaintances, former colleagues, or friends. White House advisers, too, have often sought him out for advice, notwithstanding any differences they might have on US policy toward Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, or the expansion of NATO. “He knows a great deal,” former national security advisor Sandy Berger told Jeffrey Goldberg; “I always found it useful to speak to him.”³⁷

SCOWCROFT ALSO SOUGHT to influence the thinking of public officials, business leaders, and policy experts on national security by using his role in and leadership of such groups as the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Strategy Group to educate others. In these venues he could speak directly on issues of national security and international relations, depending on the topic of the particular session or conference, and also indirectly shape the debate by virtue of his role in the choice of conference topics, the decisions on who was to speak and be on the panels, and the selection of who was to be invited to attend and become new members. While these were rarely his decisions alone to make, his fundamental roles in both organizations gave him considerable influence.

The Atlantic Council was formed in 1961 as a nonpartisan and not-for-profit think tank to sponsor speakers, symposia, and research on directed topics—most of them on the North America–Europe relationship, although others involve Asia or other regions or have a global focus. Smaller and more specialized, it is less well known than the Council on Foreign Relations. In the early 1990s, after the Cold War, the Atlantic Council was at its most critical stage since its establishment according to its current president and CEO, Fred Kempe. It was underfunded, had lost some of its foundation money, and had diminished membership. This was when Scowcroft took over.

Scowcroft, with the assistance of Christopher Makins, a British diplomat, and former US ambassador to the United Kingdom, Henry Catto, “shook it up.” Scowcroft and Makin introduced new leadership, revived the membership, and got the Atlantic Council on better financial grounds. Makins served as president until his death in 2005, and a year later Scowcroft recruited Fred Kempe from the Wall Street Journal to head the Council. Scowcroft himself served as chairman of the board of directors in 1998–1999, after which Catto was chairman until 2007. Scowcroft then asked Gen. James Jones to serve as chairman. When Jones was appointed Obama’s national security advisor in 2009, Scowcroft asked former US senator Charles Hagel to take over. When Hagel left in 2013, to become secretary of defense, Scowcroft filled in until January 2014, when Jon Huntsman, former US ambassador to China, became chairman.38

One of Scowcroft’s most important contributions was to create an international advisory board composed of prominent company executives and former policy makers of cabinet rank or above. Scowcroft chairs the international advisory board and recruited about two-thirds of its members.

Scowcroft also helped create the Young Atlanticist program for the purpose of bringing along the next generation of leaders, Kempe also pointed out.

Kempe, who administers the Atlantic Council on a daily basis, could unequivocally say that there was “no doubt” that over the past two decades Scowcroft was the Atlantic Council’s most important person.³⁹ The former national security advisor was “instrumental” in saving the Atlantic Council, Kempe said—“more important than people know”—and in increasing its membership sevenfold in the last six years (to about five hundred as of 2013), recruiting new board members, and raising funds. The Council’s funding comes principally from four sources—foundations (such as the Ford Foundation and the German Marshall Fund of the United States), corporations (such Boeing, Chevron, Daimler, General Dynamics, Goldman Sachs, Northrop Grumman, and Toyota), governments (the German government, the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Energy Departments, and the US Mission to NATO), and individuals. Scowcroft and Kempe are at pains to ensure that the Atlantic Council stays independent from its funders, however, so as to protect its credibility. For this reason, there are no “Atlantic Council positions” on particular issues.

In view of Scowcroft’s central role in promoting the Atlantic Council, he agreed in 2012 to have the centerpiece of the Atlantic Council, the International Security Program, renamed the “Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security.” Although Scowcroft didn’t endow the center with his own money, putting his name on the center served as a way to emphasize the Atlantic Council’s nonpartisan nature, and the stellar quality of his reputation assisted in development.

Scowcroft has also been deeply committed to the Aspen Strategy Group, which was established in the mid-1970s for holding serious bipartisan discussions about strategic warfare and nuclear arms control. Scowcroft calls it “nonpartisan” instead of “bipartisan,” since when the members come to Aspen each August for up to five days, they are expected to leave ideology and personal agendas behind and to focus on the issues at hand. From its original focus on arms control, strategic warfare, and nuclear proliferation and its original membership of twenty to thirty people, it now has a broader mission, with an expanded scope of security-related seminar topics, including economics and finance. The membership, too, has steadily expanded to between fifty and sixty. Scowcroft and his cochair Joseph Nye, together with the director and deputy director, try to strike a balance in the membership in terms of age, partisanship, open-mindedness, government service, and business and economics. It is trigenerational, in effect, with Scowcroft and Nye representing the senior members, people such as Madeleine Albright, Philip Zelikow, and Condoleezza Rice occupying the middle tier, and a younger group of policy makers and experts in their late thirties and forties.40 With the Aspen Strategy Group, too, Scowcroft has been intent on building the succeeding generations of leaders.

Scowcroft and Nye have been cochairs of the Aspen Strategy Group since the late 2000s; Scowcroft had previously been chairman from 1983 to 1989. Nicholas Burns serves as director, succeeding Philip Zelikow. Scowcroft and Nye, together with the director and deputy director, choose the annual topics to be discussed each summer.

Since genuine discussion on serious foreign policy and strategic issues confronting the United States is rare in Washington, the Aspen Strategy Group meeting is an oasis of relaxed and open exchange. The participants get to know each other not only through the multiple-day panels and discussions, but also more informally by taking hikes together, riding horses, going fishing, playing softball, and participating in other activities. Perhaps needless to say, the connections formed at the Aspen meetings are able to create valuable personal networks, they often lead to later collaboration, and they can help launch careers.⁴¹

Scowcroft was also consistently willing to chair or to serve on government and nongovernmental boards as a way of focusing attention on what he believed to be issues that affected US interests and those of the American people. He served on several government boards, just as he had in the 1980s and late 1990s, and did some troubleshooting for presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He enjoyed working on different aspects of national security, as he had throughout his career, and almost always agreed to serve when asked. In 1996, for example, he and Zbigniew Brzezinski served as cochairs of a Council on Foreign Relations group to investigate US policy in the Persian Gulf (the study was triggered by Congress’s passage of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996). Scowcroft’s and Brzezinski’s 1997 report recommended that the United States be more flexible and more nuanced in its approaches to both Iran and Iraq. Since “strident” approaches weren’t working and since the stability of the Persian Gulf was of paramount interest to the United States, the report stated, the United States should explore “creative trade-offs” with Iran and ways to facilitate mutual accommodation in the region.42

Scowcroft was also asked to serve on or advise other corporate and nonprofit boards after leaving the White House, and he served on the boards of Northrop-Grumman (1993–1997), Enron Global Power & Pipelines (1994–1997), Qualcomm, Inc. (1994–present), and the American-Turkish Council (2000–2010). He has also been on the boards of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the National Defense University, Rand, the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, the US Air Force Academy, and the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation (where he is also president).

Qualcomm, for instance, wanted a director with strong foreign policy experience, and George H. W. Bush recommended Scowcroft, who joined the board in December 1994. In 2000 CEO and founder Irwin Jacobs met Scowcroft in Beijing and after “lots of discussion” about Qualcomm’s expectations for China and its state-guided economy with Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, Scowcroft and Jacobs helped get a license for Qualcomm to provide China Unicom, China’s second-largest telecommunication company, with its proprietary CDMA cell phone technology. Only after things settled down following the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the Hainan Island incident and China sought to enter the WTO, however, was the deal struck for Qualcomm to enter the Chinese market.⁴³

Scowcroft has been “exceedingly helpful” to the Qualcomm board over the years, Jacobs said, because of his ability to listen carefully and his broad understanding of organizations and business. It is his continued “very valuable” advice—a result of his historical and international perspective on issues and sound judgment as well as his Chinese contacts and close knowledge of China—that has kept Scowcroft on Qualcomm’s board of directors for two decades.44 (Interestingly, when Scowcroft traveled to China, whether on behalf of Qualcomm or another of the Scowcroft Group’s clients, he sometimes carried messages from the White House.)⁴⁵

Because of Scowcroft’s long-standing role on the Qualcomm board and because of Qualcomm’s continued commercial success, his stock options have made Scowcroft a very wealthy man. Scowcroft doesn’t think of himself as being wealthy, perhaps because his circle of friends includes people worth considerably more, such as Henry Kissinger and the CEOs of IBM, Exxon, and other major corporations. Neither does he especially seem to care.⁴⁶ On the contrary, he lives unostentatiously even though he is able to do whatever he wants and travel wherever he wants. And he is still in his same modest house in Bethesda, the one he first bought in 1964.

One of Scowcroft’s grandnephews lived with him for about a year in 1999 and 2000 and was astonished at the energy of the seventy-five-year-old Scowcroft. “Workaholic doesn’t begin to describe it,” said the young man, adding that he didn’t “know how he keeps the pace he does.” Scowcroft would doze off on the couch after work, “then revive, and sometimes go jogging around midnight, three to five times a week.” Sometimes he never made it up to bed and just slept on the couch. Then he’d be “up at 5:30 A.M., ready to go again.” Scowcroft’s grandniece, who also lived with him for five months when she first moved to the Washington area, was similarly “shocked by how much he works.” The twenty-four-year-old discovered she was “working less than her eighty-year-old great-uncle.” Neither was Scowcroft an absentee landlord. He helped with the cooking—according to her, he “makes a nice salmon loaf” and “always had dessert.” More importantly, when Scowcroft wasn’t off to China, Saudi Arabia, California, or elsewhere and they were at home together, the two of them discussed serious issues as well as family matters. They talked about campaign finance, about the conflicts involved with raising money, and—to her mild surprise—about how he didn’t think that women needed to change their names when they got married. She also revealed his favorite joke for starting off his public speeches: “Washington is the only city in the world where people walk down Lover’s Lane holding their own hand.”⁴⁷

SCOWCROFT TOOK ON another commitment in the mid-1990s: working with George Bush on A World Transformed, Bush and Scowcroft’s account of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Bush said he had no desire to write an autobiography—his collected letters and diary entries effectively served as substitutes. But when Scowcroft proposed writing a book together, Bush agreed. The book was to be about “the seven dramatic changes in the world during the four years of the Bush administration,” according to Barbara Bush. But Bush was never wholly comfortable writing. When talking to Nixon about his and Scowcroft’s idea, Bush complained, “Dick, you can write. I can’t.”48

Their chief assistant for the research and writing was James McCall. McCall would take notes of their conversations, which were taped and then transcribed. It was because Scowcroft couldn’t very well pass longhand pages back and forth to Bush and McCall that he learned how to use a computer. Until then, he had always had secretaries type up what he wrote out longhand.

The origins of A World Transformed explain its unusual format, which consists of three interspersed and complementary texts: (1) a general history (set in boldface) that Bush and Scowcroft both agreed to, drafted by Scowcroft and McCall; (2) Bush’s own accounts of events, which were his own responsibility and which he mostly drew from his diaries; and (3) Scowcroft’s own descriptions and analyses, which he wrote himself.

A World Transformed reviews how Bush and Scowcroft planned the United States’ international relations when they took office. It describes their initial wariness of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, and the reasons for that caution. It addresses the events in Panama and the role of Manuel Noriega. It deals at length with the reunification of Germany and with the administration’s reaction to the Tiananmen Square massacre. It explains how President Bush, Scowcroft, and others responded to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and then handled the Persian Gulf War. And it explores the rise of Boris Yeltsin, the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because of this limited focus, the book skips over other aspects of Scowcroft and Bush’s foreign policy with respect to Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, NAFTA, Somalia, the Uruguay Round of GATT talks, the environment and global warming, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and other issue areas. Neither does the book focus on the budget, economic policy, the reelection campaign, or other hallmarks of the Bush administration, such as the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

That Bush coauthored A World Transformed with Brent Scowcroft, rather than James Baker, Nicholas Brady, Robert Mosbacher, Boyden Gray, or another longtime friend who served in his administration, speaks to how comfortable the two were with each other personally and how well matched they were with respect to how they viewed US foreign policy. (But they always remained “Mr. President” and “Brent,” just as Scowcroft always called Gerald Ford, who also became a close friend, “Mr. President” when they were together after Ford left office).49 And of Bush’s friends, only Scowcroft bought a condominium near Bush’s compound on Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport after leaving office.

Despite Scowcroft’s insider status in Washington and his connections in the national security community, and despite Scowcroft’s occasional lunches with Clinton’s national security advisors, first Anthony Lake and then Sandy Berger, the Clinton administration essentially viewed him as an outsider. The Clinton White House worked under different assumptions than the Bush presidency and proceeded in different directions. It reoriented the US mission in Somalia; it intervened militarily in Haiti; it expanded NATO eastward and initiated the extension of a missile defense system into Eastern Europe. And in 1994 it intervened in Bosnia and in 1999 in Kosovo.

ONLY TWO AND a half years after he left office, Scowcroft’s world was darkened by Jackie’s death on July 17, 1995, at the age of seventy-two, from complications from diabetes. Jackie and Brent had been married forty-three years.

Her health problems had begun in the 1970s and only got worse. Matters were not helped by the fact that despite a family history of type 2 diabetes, her condition was misdiagnosed for ten years. The fact that her blood sugar levels were only marginally higher than normal levels misled her doctors. Not until Brent took Jackie to the Mayo Clinic in the mid-1980s was the correct diagnosis finally made. During the intervening decade, she was subjected to numerous misdirected treatments and suffered needless complications. For example, to relieve the severe pain in her legs, she underwent several operations, including having her veins stripped and her back operated on.

Even when he was Bush’s national security advisor, if Jackie was in the hospital, Scowcroft would leave the office at 5:00 P.M. to visit her; he would return to work later that evening. Scowcroft cared for her at home, and at one point got a hernia from lifting her and had to have surgery. So for a while he had to conduct business while lying down on his office couch.50

George Bush acknowledged he never got to know Jackie Scowcroft—a remarkable statement considering how close the two men were and how well Brent and Barbara Bush knew each other. “All the time [Scowcroft] was national security advisor he’d go home at night—he worked until eight or nine at night—go home at night, feed her, get prepared for bed, and then come back into the office. He was an indefatigable worker,” Bush remarked. “He had this—I would say burden, and he would say love—that he had for his wife and daughter. But we didn’t really get a chance to know her. She wouldn’t come to receptions. . . . I know just know he was devoted to her.” Robert Gates, too, who had known Brent since 1974, said, “Over those years, I never met her.”⁵¹

Scowcroft’s personal assistant said Brent’s wife attended social events during the Nixon administration, but ceased doing so in the early 1970s. Lawrence Eagleburger said he met Jackie a couple of times in the early 1970s, but then “at some point she was bedridden” and remained so for many years . . . she was very heavy.” Scowcroft “had to carry her from one place to another. He did all that without complaining [about it] to anyone I know,” Eagleburger remarked. “If sainthood is deserving, he’s one of them.” Robert Strauss spoke of how devoted Brent was to her. When people asked about Jackie, “the only thing Scowcroft would say is ‘she’s okay,’” even though her problems continued “for a long time.”⁵²

Marian Horner Scowcroft was buried at Arlington National Cemetery two days after she died, complete with full military honors. A thirty-five-minute Catholic service in the large chapel, packed with friends and relatives, was followed by a graveside ceremony that lasted twelve or thirteen minutes. Three rifle volleys by seven soldiers were succeeded by a cannon salute and finally by a bugler playing taps.⁵³

As hard as Jackie’s death was for Brent, it also came as something of a relief. He had taken care of his wife for decades and almost always by himself, except when he was traveling. The stress had been almost constant and the sacrifice considerable. Now he could work, travel, and visit family members and friends without worry. Close friends noticed that after her death he seemed more open and relaxed.⁵⁴

Jackie’s death nonetheless left Scowcroft with a great hole in his life, and for weeks after the burial he visited Arlington Cemetery every afternoon to put fresh flowers on her grave. And for years afterward he couldn’t eat chicken, since his routine had been to shop for the week’s groceries each Sunday morning, boil a chicken, and then make enough chicken salad so that Jackie could have it every day for lunch.

Scowcroft dedicated A World Transformed, which was published three years after Jackie’s death, to his wife. He never remarried.