THE FACT THAT the White House cut its ties with Brent Scowcroft after his controversial Wall Street Journal op-ed in August 2002 didn’t dissuade him from remaining in touch with Rice, Hadley, and others in the White House. Even though he was hurt by Rice’s harsh reaction to his dissenting op-ed, he didn’t “want to break with the administration,” he told her—and he didn’t.183 In August 2003, only a few months after the United States entered Iraq, Scowcroft wrote that the United States had “no choice but to succeed”—this just a year after his dissenting op-ed.184 In fact, Scowcroft was seen visiting Rice not long after she became secretary of state in early 2005 and was in touch with the new national security advisor, Stephen Hadley. Two years later, in February 2007, Scowcroft spoke before the Senate in support of President Bush’s proposed troop surge in Iraq.185
Yet the damage had been done. The US government would spend more than $1 trillion on the war in Iraq. Thousands of American soldiers would lose their lives, and tens of thousands more would suffer debilitating physical injuries and serious psychological damage. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kurds would be injured or killed, while millions more would be displaced. There were also many deaths and injuries among the United States’ allies as well as among US-based and foreign military contractors.
As opinions in Congress, the press, and the public shifted against the Iraq war beginning in 2004, the administration itself changed tack at the beginning of Bush’s second term. One manifestation of this new turn was the president’s selection of Stephen Hadley as national security advisor. Hadley reinstated the role of the national security advisor as an honest broker, began to hold more regular meetings—formal and informal—and when there were strong disagreements among the principals, he didn’t attempt to “dumb it down” or “reach a consensus” at all costs. Instead, he made sure that all had “their say” and that the NSC process functioned “in a transparent way.” Not only was Hadley “comfortable” bringing issues before the president, he explicitly modeled his role on the model articulated in the Tower Commission report and Scowcroft’s example. Like his former boss, business partner in the 1990s, and friend, he kept a low profile, exposed the president to more options, and gained Bush’s confidence.186
Scowcroft’s views on foreign policy gained further traction when after the 2006 midterm elections Bush appointed Scowcroft’s former deputy and close friend Robert Gates as secretary of defense. Scowcroft was in touch with Gates at least once a week—and several times a week when Gates first got into office—and the two met regularly for lunch or dinner. They shared a fundamental commitment to the current and future security of the United States, held similar views on the United States’ global responsibilities and on the need for international cooperation, and were equally cautious with respect to the use of force.187
Part of the reason Gates received such strong praise for his performance as defense secretary—and he is generally regarded as one of the best secretaries of defense in the postwar era—was his good working relationships with Secretary of State Rice, with whom he had worked under Scowcroft on the NSC, and with Hadley. Meanwhile, Cheney’s influence over the president and the administration’s policies waned over the course of Bush’s second term.188
Gates joined the Bush administration under difficult conditions, however. Faced with the United States’ lack of success in Iraq, the increasing cost, and the growing unpopularity of the occupation, Gates began to rethink the US role in Iraq and, with Rice, Hadley, and the president, began to consider various exit options. Victory wasn’t a realistic outcome, at least not as conventionally defined, so unless the United States was prepared to occupy Iraq indefinitely, Gates had to find a way for the administration to be able to pull out US forces and leave Iraq with a viable elected government.
Gates, Rice, and Hadley also realized that they’d put themselves into a bind with respect to the Middle East. They knew the United States was in a poor position to attack Iran, despite the calls from neoconservatives, others on the right, and the vice president himself for just such an attack. The administration consequently began to reduce its belligerent rhetoric against Iran and opened up an avenue for dialogue with Iranian leaders. This, of course, had long also been Scowcroft’s position. Just as important, the administration proceeded to jump-start talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, appreciating that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian issue was critical to political stability in the Middle East.189 In December 2007, Secretary Rice hosted a large summit in Annapolis, Maryland, to mark its new diplomatic course on the Middle East and to try to begin a dialogue. The summit no doubt came too late in the second term to have much impact, given all that had already happened, but it nonetheless signaled to domestic and international audiences alike that the administration was trying to repair the dismal situation in the Middle East.
It’s hard to know just how influential Scowcroft was with respect to US Middle East policy and US foreign policy more generally during Bush’s second term in office. Rice, Gates, and Hadley could hardly publicize the fact that they were receiving advice from Scowcroft, and Hadley gave Rice all the credit for progress on talks toward a Middle East peace settlement. Scowcroft, for his part, only says that he “stayed in touch with people, but quietly and carefully.” We know that all three principals were in close touch with him, however, as was DCI Michael Hayden, and that they wanted to make changes. Scowcroft’s successor as PFIAB chairman, James C. Langdon Jr.—an attorney with Akin Gump and close to President Bush—simply says that Scowcroft was “very, very instrumental to major decisions Bush made” after 2004.190
With his renewed visibility, enhanced reputation, and established experience, Scowcroft became a prime source for US and foreign correspondents writing on US national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. Paul Krugman wrote that Scowcroft was among the few who should be honored “for their wisdom and courage” in braving “political pressure and ridicule to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called ‘the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States.’”191 Or, as a close observer of the intelligence community remarked, “There’s nobody more respected, nobody up and down the line, who is more respected than Scowcroft.” Others have said much the same.192
Scowcroft’s informal advising during the last years of the Bush 43 White House and then the Obama administration—where he remained in touch with Gates—was one indicator of his stature as an elder statesman. Another was his participation in the mid-2000s and early 2010s on a number of important commissions—invitations that Scowcroft’s ethic of public service made it hard for him to decline. He cochaired a 2004 study of the United Nations, a 2008 Council on Foreign Relations study on the control and reduction of nuclear weapons, a 2009 National Research Council study of export controls, US economy, and national security, and President Obama’s 2011–2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which studied the disposal of nuclear waste. (Its deliberations were hampered by the Fukushima disaster in March 2011; the Obama administration ultimately decided to bury the report.)193
Scowcroft’s life in these more recent years remained full with public appearances, meetings, consulting work, travel, interviews, and other obligations. He continued to spend almost half of his time on Scowcroft Group business (and continued to arrive at the office by six in the morning on the weekdays so he could beat the traffic). Throughout, he continued to think about, give speeches on, and write of the larger issues at stake in US foreign relations and national security policy.
He wrote more than thirty op-eds over the two terms of the George W. Bush presidency, where the issues he addressed in those pieces were much like those he had emphasized in years past. He maintained that the United States had to be willing to act either bilaterally or multilaterally, since different issues called for alliances with different partners.194 He insisted that the United States needed to persuade other states to cooperate, even states such as Russia, China, India, and Pakistan, if it wanted to reduce international instability. He exhorted policy makers to be willing to rely on international institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, or the European Union if doing so would help the United States achieve its objectives. Likewise, the United States had to agree to participate in, abide by, and, when required, renegotiate treaties and agreements such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear weapons and the comprehensive agreements on chemical and biological weapons (the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention).
He argued in 2002 that the United States should be prepared to use force unless Pyongyang stopped expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities. With respect to Iran, however, he recommended that the United States work with other nuclear powers and that Iran itself should commit to an international agreement that would make it unnecessary for it to continue with its nuclear weapons program—an approach that came to fruition in 2013.195
The Israeli-Palestinian issue likewise remained a prominent subject. Scowcroft repeatedly called for US officials to directly engage in defusing Arab-Israeli hostilities—a possibility made easier by Yasser Arafat’s death in late 2004—and to take the lead in pursuit of a two-state solution, which he believed held the key to stability in the Middle East.196 And he wrote on Colombia, Taiwan, or other topics when he felt US policy demanded a policy debate or deeper analysis. Only infrequently did he go on television.197
THE FACT THAT Scowcroft’s active career extended into his eighties is to some extent the result of his disciplined attention to physical fitness. When in Washington he works out regularly with a personal trainer who mixes aerobic exercise with strength and resistance work; he also does calisthenics on his own at home. When hiking during the annual Aspen Strategy Group meetings in Colorado, Scowcroft in his seventies and early eighties could climb thirteen-to-fourteen-thousand-foot peaks faster than colleagues and friends in their fifties and sixties. (One of the standard hikes was nicknamed “Scowcroft’s Bataan Death March” or simply “Scowcroft’s Death March” by Aspen Strategy Group members, with some of the members contacting the Aspen Strategy Group staff before the five-day August meetings to find out what day the hike would be on, so they wouldn’t miss it.)198
On one occasion, in the summer of 1991, his enjoyment of hiking and physical exertion got the better of his judgment. He and Jan Lodal—Lodal was one of McNamara’s “whiz kids” who had been on Kissinger’s NSC staff and was an active Aspen Strategy Group member from 1976 until 1994—didn’t start their hike until two o’clock in the afternoon. But because they wanted to have lunch and had to drive to the base site before even starting to climb the fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, they didn’t return before nightfall. Others naturally got worried, and DCI William Webster joked that he would use all of his powers to find them. The two finally got back at ten o’clock that night with some “fairly minor injuries” from stumbling in the dark.199
Notwithstanding Scowcroft’s superb fitness, in the 2000s he began to be bothered by arthritis and bad knees, had to have hip replacement surgery, suffered outbreaks of bronchitis and shingles, and experienced more fluctuations in his energy than he had previously. On some days he felt “okay,” “fine,” or “pretty good,” while on others he’d say self-disparagingly that he was “still vertical,” “surviving,” or doing “better than I deserve.” On still other occasions he described himself as feeling “worse and worse” or as having “a horrible day.”200
More than compensating for his slowly declining health was the birth of his granddaughter, Meghan, in 2008. She “made him absolutely euphoric,” said one of his longtime friends. He was “so proud of her, and so excited to be with her.” Perhaps because he spent a lot of time with his granddaughter and she was wearing him out, he began to sleep a little longer, take a little more time off in his busy schedule, and cut down on his travel. Most weekends he spent with his daughter and granddaughter, either in New York (he’d take the train up) or at home in Bethesda (they’d come down). In the summers they would often meet up at his condo in Kennebunkport.
Before Meghan was born, he spent every other summer weekend up in Maine, going up on Friday and taking the six o’clock air shuttle back on Monday morning. On vacations he would go skiing at various Utah resorts, often with his daughter, until his knees gave out. He also took trips with former president George H. W. Bush until that was no longer possible because of the former president’s fading health. He also spent more time with his nieces, nephews, and other members of his extended family.201
Scowcroft also began to devote attention to his legacy. He wanted “to help people the way I would have liked to have been helped when I was in their position”—perhaps referring to times in his early career, such as after his crash and before his attendance at West Point, when he’d been largely on his own. Now, he said, he wanted to “give back in appreciation” what he’d “been lucky to get” at other points in his career, from mentors like Fox and Yudkin. Accordingly, he began to establish various programs to assist people who had ambitions similar to his own.202
He helped fund a scholarship for West Point cadets in 2000, the Government Internships Endowment. The money allowed West Point to underwrite a cultural and professional immersion program that gave thirty to fifty cadets the chance to spend three to eight weeks in the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the White House, and other departments and agencies of the US government in Washington. Separately, Scowcroft contributed to another fund, the Olmstead Scholars Program, that enabled young officers to spend time overseas and in the District of Columbia.203 General Daniel Christman, the superintendent at West Point, said Scowcroft “felt so strongly about the necessity of young officers to have this identification with other religions, cultures, languages.” And Scowcroft made a point of attending a reception that Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island hosted every summer in Washington for cadets in the West Point programs.204
Scowcroft also funded the Arnold Kanter Chair at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security in 2006 and established a paid internship program at the Aspen Strategy Group. The highly competitive internship program allowed four outstanding college graduates interested in working on national security issues to spend a summer in Washington and part of August out in Aspen.205
When former president George H. W. Bush established the Bush Presidential Library and the Texas A&M regents created the Bush School of Government and Public Service, they also wanted to establish an affiliated research institute. When the former president asked his friend if he would like his name on it, Scowcroft said he would be honored. The Scowcroft Institute opened on November 10, 2007, and Scowcroft himself endowed it with funds for scholarships, administrative support, grants, a major annual conference, and a chaired faculty position. Just as important, he helped find other donors to get the Bush School off the ground. As a member of the Bush School advisory board, he goes to College Station at least once a year and uses the time to meet one-on-one with students, give a public address, and visit the former president.206
In 2009, he established and endowed the Brent Scowcroft Professorship in National Security Studies within the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies in the Department of Political Science at the US Air Force Academy. The chair was to be filled by a scholar of national reputation, someone with a distinguished military record as well as outstanding academic record.
He even set up an internship program at the Scowcroft Group. The program began when Scowcroft was president of the Forum for International Policy and Condoleezza Rice, who was back at Stanford University, asked him to host her teaching assistant one summer. He agreed, and ever since then, the Scowcroft Group has as a matter of routine had two interns at any one time. They work full-time in the summer and on a part-time basis during the academic year, since they are typically also taking graduate classes at DC-area universities while they are working at the Scowcroft Group. The interns are exposed to strategic issues and international business consulting during their internship, and every two weeks Scowcroft sits down with them and invites their questions in an off-the-record “stump-the general” session. With just the three of them in this setting, Scowcroft can be “extremely candid”; the interns call him “Yoda.”207
Neither could he say no when schoolchildren or students wanted to meet with him, his colleagues attest.
“Brent . . . feels a strong obligation to help the next generation of scholars, public servants, whatever,” Kanter said. “He gives interviews, answers questions from graduate students and people working on their dissertations . . . [T]his or that group will ask him to give a speech” and he will do so, even though “he’s not getting paid.” When a friend and West Point classmate, Maj. Gen. Edwin Robertson, invited Scowcroft to give a talk to junior officers at the Chanute Tactical Training Center in southern Illinois, Robertson observed that for all his brilliance, “Brent . . . never talks down to anybody. And if you express an idea, he always interested in it, and he’s just a delightful person to deal with.”208
Scowcroft’s attention to cultivating succeeding generations of public servants constitutes an implicit response to the lesson of Vietnam as captured by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest: that leadership by foreign policy elites failed. Scowcroft’s answer is that with proper mentoring and more careful attention to personnel decisions—and here is where personal networks are critical—policymakers can make better choices. Institutions such as the Aspen Strategy Group, the Atlantic Council, the US Military Academy, and the National Defense University enable future public servants to be exposed to their peers and their seniors in the federal government, in Congress, in the military, in the media, in academia, and in the business world—that is, with those they will have to work and those whose views they will have to take into account.
IN EARLY 2008 Scowcroft and David Ignatius worked together on America and the World, in which he and Brzezinski offered their perspectives on the changes of the previous two decades, from the end of the Cold War to the late 2000s, and used the occasion to look both backward and forward in time. America and the World was the brainchild of Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, and the project gave Scowcroft (and Brzezinski) the chance to expand on several of his many op-eds, provided him the opportunity to delve into the history of contemporary issues, and also allowed him to be more speculative.209
The first argument Scowcroft made in America and the World was to underscore that the end of the Cold War “marked a historical discontinuity.” The Cold War conditioned “everything we did,” for a single mistake could “blow up the planet”; anything not related to the Soviet-US relationship was “pinpricks,” in Scowcroft’s analysis. But then, “in the blink of any eye, that world came to an end,” and now everything was pinpricks. The problem was that the US and global institutions and ideas that accompanied the Cold War had been developed and had evolved with the Cold War in mind. So even while American policy makers and opinion leaders understandably felt “enormous relief” with the passing of what Scowcroft considered to be the last of the great empires, the collapse of the Soviet Union also left US policy makers and opinion leaders “befuddled” and rudderless.210
Scowcroft recognized that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, arrested the drift of US foreign policy. But the attacks weren’t inevitable, just as the United States’ war against Iraq didn’t have to happen. The Bush administration’s ill-advised decision to invade Iraq was, in Scowcroft’s view, a failure of intelligence. He also observed that there seemed to be “a fundamental change in the attitude of the president after 9/11. A sort of religious fervor”—hinting at the selective perception and ideological zeal of the president, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others, especially after 9/11.211
If the events of September 11 constituted one of the benchmarks of the contemporary world, others were the rise of China and India as centers of power and the rapid globalization arising from changes in information technology, public health, and the environment. In a world with more interdependent national economies and more liquid global finance (thanks in part to sovereign funds), the United States had no choice but to adjust its national security policy. Yet the United States’ own institutions, whether the Defense Department, the CIA and intelligence community, the State Department, or other department and agencies, as of 2008 weren’t suited to this new complexity. They hadn’t been developed for today’s interdependent, globalized, quickly changing world. The same held for international institutions such as the United Nations, which were likewise created for “a very different world” of separate nation-states.212
Scowcroft proposed that the worldwide effects of globalization were analogous to the effects that the industrial revolution had on regional economies and the formation of the nation-state. It was as if a new world, with its flood of instantaneous (and often unchecked) information, its near-immediate financial transactions, and its fast-moving trends, had been superimposed on the timeworn international structures of the old. What made things even more difficult was the fact that the United States of the late 2000s and foreseeable future was more negatively disposed to international organizations than it had ever been before.213
If there was nothing groundbreaking about Scowcroft’s analyses in America and the World, what was striking about his comments was the comprehensiveness of his thinking, his command of the issues, his knowledge of the histories of individual countries and regions of the world, and his ability to connect the details of policy with a larger perspective on the United States’ grand strategy.
There was another issue Scowcroft weighed in on shortly after the publication of America and the World. This was a widely heralded call for a world free of nuclear weapons written by George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on January 4, 2007. Using statements by Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Rajiv Gandhi advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons and the end to the possibility of a nuclear war as their points of departure, the four men outlined the concrete steps the United States could take so as to lead an international coalition of nuclear powers to realize their vision of a world free of the nuclear threat. These included increasing the warning time on nuclear weapons, reducing the size of nuclear forces, and ensuring the physical security of stockpiles of nuclear weapons, weapons-grade plutonium, and highly enriched uranium.214
While Scowcroft didn’t disagree with the steps that Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn were recommending, he had serious disagreement with the goal of “zero nukes.” “The concept has several serious flaws,” he told an interviewer. “First of all I think it’s unlikely that we could ever achieve it. Even trying to achieve it, I think, may get in the way of doing some more practical things to improve the stability of the nuclear world and to achieve a goal which I think is perhaps possible, and therefore may be more desirable, and that is to insure that nuclear weapons are never used.” And while he didn’t think the United States and other nuclear powers “could ever get to zero, if we somehow did, and nothing else changed in the world, it could be a very perilous, unstable world.” There was no way that “the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons and, in a world of zero, just a few nuclear weapons could make a tremendous difference.” It would leave the United States in “an extremely unstable world.” The zero nukes idea was chimerical and it gave rise to false hopes to Americans and people around the world. For Scowcroft and Kanter, it was “unhelpful rhetoric.”215
Instead, Scowcroft recommended finding ways to “make it most unlikely that there would ever be a resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis.” One way to do this would be to alter “the character of the arsenals on each side” so as to make it “unlikely or impossible” that “he who strikes first can destroy enough of the opponents’ weapons that he can survive a retaliatory strike.”216 But the most important thing, Scowcroft told Charles Ferguson, the president of the Federation of American Scientists and the project director for the Council of Foreign Relation’s task force on US Nuclear Weapons Policy, was “the issue of crisis stability.” No matter what the United States’ policy was, “we have to make sure that we’re not inadvertently creating an incentive for the first use of these weapons.” Scowcroft wanted to minimize the chances that the use of nuclear weapons be a policy choice, even as he didn’t renounce the “no first use” of nuclear weapons.217
Whether as the cochair and coeditor the Council of Foreign Relations’ “US Nuclear Weapons Policy” report, the cochair of other task forces, such as “Colombia Task Force” of 2000 or the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future of 2010–2011, Scowcroft took a broad, conceptual approach in his role. He insisted on using specific, forceful prose rather than the vague, general language that many reports use. He sought to make meaningful, practical recommendations. And he tried to achieve as much consensus as possible among the commission members by involving the other task force members in drafting the report from early on and by leading with a light touch—even though he usually had a very good sense of where he wanted to go. Thanks to Scowcroft’s style, when task force members had differences with the final draft of the report, they expressed their views as “Alternative Views” rather than “Dissenting Views.” Scowcroft said he couldn’t remember any commission he chaired or cochaired issuing a “Minority Report.”218
Besides serving on blue-ribbon commissions and engaging in his many other activities, Scowcroft began writing his memoirs in the early 2010s with the assistance of Charlotte McCall, who had assisted Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush with A World Transformed. He had started thinking about writing his memoirs once he reached his eighties, and his friends and colleagues had been pushing him to do so for some time. Not until 2012, however, when he began to realize his memory was starting to fade and he started to feel more palpably the other effects of age, did he commit to the project.
Notwithstanding Scowcroft’s bipartisan foreign policy, the former national security advisor remained a loyal Republican. He consistently contributed to Republican candidates at the local, state, and national levels and in 2008 supported his old friend Senator John McCain, contributing to the campaign and offering foreign policy advice, despite his philosophical differences with McCain and the neoconservatives who dominated the campaign’s foreign policy positions. Although some of the Democratic presidential hopefuls approached Scowcroft for his support in advance of the 2008 primary election and although the foreign policies being proposed by Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama came closer to Scowcroft’s own positions than did McCain’s, Scowcroft declined to endorse either campaign.
But once Obama was elected president, Susan Rice, who would become Obama’s UN ambassador, talked to Scowcroft before she took office, as did the future secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Obama’s first national security advisor, Marine Corps Gen. James Jones, was Scowcroft’s friend as well as a former chairman of the Atlantic Council. Jones spent considerable time with Scowcroft before taking office, in fact, and periodically checked in with Scowcroft once in the job.219 In fact, members of the Obama administration repeatedly talked to Scowcroft about foreign policy issues involving the Middle East, China, Russia, Europe, and global strategy (Latin America and Africa not so much). And we know that Gates, an older hand who could guide the young administration feeling its way in foreign policy as James Mann points out, regularly stayed in touch with Scowcroft.220
In 2010 Scowcroft went so far as to describe himself as a Republican in name only—a RINO—in light of his general agreement with the Obama administration’s early foreign policy and the bitterly partisan behavior of the Republican Party in Washington and nationwide.221 Revealingly, Scowcroft didn’t support Mitt Romney in 2012, notwithstanding the Republican nominee’s international business background, his previous record as a pragmatic and moderate Republican when he was governor of Massachusetts, and his Mormonism. The problem for Scowcroft was that seventeen of twenty-four foreign policy advisers working on the Romney campaign were neoconservatives affiliated with George W. Bush.222
SCOWCROFT’S CAREER ACQUIRED another aspect as he aged: he started receiving prestigious awards. Many retired generals, admirals, statesmen, policy advisers, politicians, and diplomats receive awards in the latter stages of their lives, to be sure. What is extraordinary in Scowcroft’s case, though, is the combination of the large number he has received, the prestige of the awards, and the variation among the bestowing organizations. The prizes manifest the almost universal respect others have for him and reflect the desire on the part of many people to recognize the scope and quality of Scowcroft’s contributions to public service.
Scowcroft says that he is proudest of the Presidential Medal of Freedom he received after the Gulf War and then of the award of the insignia of an Honorary Knight of the British Empire (KBE) from Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 1993. Yet these are only two of many. Others awards include the Eisenhower Institute’s Eisenhower Leadership Prize from Gettysburg College (1992), the Hudson Institute’s James H. Doolittle Award (1994), the Les Aspin Democracy Award from the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University (2003), and the Association of the US Army’s George Catlett Marshall Medal (2003).
Scowcroft also received the William Oliver Baker Award for service on behalf of the US intelligence community (2005), the Andrew Wellington Cordier Award for superior and distinguished public service from Columbia University (2005), the Andrew J. Goodpaster Award for his exemplary service to the nation (2008), the Distinguished Service Award of the Military Order of the Carabao (2008), and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2009). On March 13, 2013, Scowcroft was elected into the National Defense University’s National Hall of Fame and received the National Defense University Foundation’s first Lifetime International Statesman and Business Advocate award. And in April 2013, he received the Gerald R. Ford Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Public Service.
The many awards bear witness to Scowcroft’s multiple spheres of achievement and the tremendous appreciation that former government officials, former elected officials, and prominent citizens have for him. The awards from Great Britain and Germany reflected Scowcroft’s efforts on behalf of two of the United States’ chief Atlantic partners. The William Oliver Baker award evidenced his commitment to the intelligence community. His prizes from the US Army Association, the Hudson Institute, and the National Defense University indicated his invaluable contributions to national security and the US armed forces, and his award from the National Defense University spoke to Scowcroft’s contributions to global peace and international commerce. The Goodpaster and Carabao prizes reflected others’ recognition of Scowcroft’s selflessness in the cause of national service. And the Les Aspin and Gerald Ford awards pointed to his extraordinary character and remarkable commitment to the government of the United States.
Scowcroft joked that the prizes are “a pain,” but added, “How could you not be pleased?” He was more than pleased in 2008 upon being inducted into the Hinckley Institute Hall of Fame at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, however. He broke down, telling the audience the induction was “a vindication that my parents gave me all their love and work.”223
The prizes further testify to the deep affection others have for him. He’s “very endearing” says NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell, a friend and longtime professional acquaintance. He has “a wonderful sense of humor” and “he’s sort of mischievous,” as though there were a “sort of a leprechaun quality to him at times.” John Deutch, Robert Gates, and Gen. Joe Jordan each separately used the identical term to describe Scowcroft, calling him a “national treasure.” And Eagleburger spoke of his colleague and friend as being “worth his weight in gold”—although finding that out, he added, “was a slow, gradual process.”224
The honors indicate just how uncommonly devoted Scowcroft has been to the presidency and his country. Neither did he “have a false sense of his own importance,” Gates remarks. Very simply, he has an encompassing dedication to national security, an extraordinary sense of duty, and no serious competing interests aside from his family. Even during relaxed moments together when Scowcroft was national security advisor and over the years since then, Gates says the two of them would “talk about foreign policy.”225 It’s hard to imagine many people being more single-minded about US national security broadly conceived or being so dedicated without having their own personal, policy, or ideological ambitions getting in the way.
Even those with whom Scowcroft got crosswise respect him. George Shultz, who profoundly disagreed with Scowcroft and Bush on US-Soviet relations in the late 1980s, who as one of the “Four Horsemen” (as some called them) differed with him on “zero nukes,” and who felt unfairly blamed by Scowcroft in the Tower Commission report, says “He’s always been a person that you have to respect because he’s thoughtful, informed, careful, and whatever his judgment is, it’s worth listening to. You may agree with it or you may not agree with it, but . . . you respect it.” Shultz even compliments the former national security advisor: “I thought the end game of the Cold War, they managed very well. I thought he must have had a lot to do with that.” Neither do neoconservatives such as Bill Kristol or Elliott Abrams have anything negative to say about Scowcroft, despite their ideological differences and their substantive disagreements over US foreign policy.226