http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html
Key figures
Irving Kristol
Widely referred to as the "godfather" of neoconservatism, Mr. Kristol was part of the "New York Intellectuals," a group of critics mainly of Eastern European Jewish descent. In the late 1930s, he studied at City College of New York where he became a Trotskyite.
From 1947 to 1952, he was the managing editor of Commentary magazine, later called the "neocon bible."
By the late 1960s, Kristol had shifted from left to right on the political spectrum, due partly to what he considered excesses and anti-Americanism among liberals. Kristol built the intellectual framework of neoconservatism, founding and editing journals such as The Public Interest and The National Interest.
Kristol is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of numerous books, including "Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea." He is the father of Weekly Standard editor and oft-quoted neoconservative William Kristol.
Norman Podhoretz
Considered one of neoconservatism's founding fathers, Mr. Podhoretz studies, writes, and speaks on social, cultural, and international matters. From 1990 to 1995, he worked as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine, a neoconservative journal published by the American Jewish Committee.
Podhoretz advocated liberal political views earlier in life, but broke ranks in the early 1970s. He became part of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority founded in 1973 by Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson and other intervention-oriented Democrats.
Podhoretz has written nine books, including "Breaking Ranks" (1979), in which he argues that Israel's survival is crucial to US military strategy. He is married to like-minded social critic Midge Decter. They helped establish the Committee on the Present Danger in the late 1970s and the Committee for the Free World in the early 1980s. Podhoretz' son, John, is a New York Post columnist.
Paul Wolfowitz
After serving as deputy secretary of defense for three years, Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, was chosen in March 2005 by President Bush to be president of the World Bank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
The second child of Warsaw native Jacob "Jack" Wolfowitz (1910–1981) and Lillian Dundes, Paul Wolfowitz "was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, and grew up mainly in the university town of Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell University." "In addition to being prolific in research" and "very well read," his father's friend and colleague Shelemyahu Zacks writes in a tribute, Jacob Wolfowitz "fought at the time for the liberation of Soviet Jewry. He was a friend and strong supporter of the state of Israel and had many friends and admirers there."
Strongly influenced by his father, according to Eric Schmitt, Paul Wolfowitz became "A soft-spoken former aspiring-mathematician-turned-policymaker … [whose] world views … were forged by family history … [His father] escaped Poland after World War I. The rest of his father's family perished in the Holocaust." Such family trauma led to Jack Wolfowitz "liv[ing] in a world haunted by atrocities" and deeply affecting his son's personal and intellectual development. As a boy, Wolfowitz devoured books ('probably too many') about the Holocaust and Hiroshima — what he calls 'the polar horrors'"
Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago over Harvard University, according to James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans, because he wanted to study under Bloom's mentor, Leo Strauss. Wolfowitz enrolled in Strauss' courses, on Plato and Montesquieu, but, according to Mann, they "did not become especially close" before Strauss retired; nevertheless, Mann points out, "in subsequent years colleagues both in government and academia came to view Wolfowitz as one of the heirs to Strauss's intellectual traditions."
Professor Albert Wohlstetter, who had studied mathematics with Wolfowitz's father at Columbia, and who ("Significantly") directed Paul Wolfowitz's research at the University of Chicago, instilled in his students the importance of maintaining the supremacy of the United States through advanced weaponry. Wohlstetter feared that plutonium produced as a by-product of U.S.-sponsored nuclear-powered desalination plants to be built near the Israeli-Egyptian border could be used in a nuclear weapons program. He returned from a trip to Israel with a number of Hebrew language documents on the program that he handed over to Wolfowitz (who is fluent in Hebrew); these later became a basis of Wolfowitz's doctoral dissertation on "water desalination in the Middle East".[citations needed]
In the summer of 1969, Wohlstetter arranged for his students Wolfowitz and Wilson, as well as Richard Perle to join the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy which was set up by Cold War architects Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson to maintain support in the U.S. Congress for the Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system.The opposition to the ABM system in the U.S. Congress employed scientific experts to argue against the ABM system, so Nitze and Acheson turned to Wohlstetter and his young protégés to counter these arguments. Together they wrote research papers and drafted testimony for U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson. Nitze later wrote: "The papers they helped us produce ran rings around the misinformed papers produced by polemical and pompous scientists."The U.S. Senate eventually approved the ABM system by 51 votes to 50, but U.S. President Richard Nixon later signed the ABM Treaty, restricting the extent of deployment of such systems.
From 1970 to 1972, Wolfowitz taught in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where one of his students was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In 1972 Wolfowitz earned a Ph.D. in political science, writing his doctoral dissertation on "water desalination in the Middle East".
In the 1970s Wolfowitz served as an aide to Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson, whose political philosophies and positions have been cited as an influence on a number of key figures associated with neoconservatism, including Wolfowitz and Richard Perle; Jackson "was the quintessential 'Cold War liberal.' He was an outspoken and influential advocate of increased military spending and a hard line against the Soviet Union, while supporting social welfare programs, civil rights, and the labor movement."
In 1972 U.S. President Richard Nixon, under pressure from Senator Jackson, who was unhappy with the SALT I strategic arms limitations talks and the policy of détente, dismissed the head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and replaced him with Fred Ikle. Ikle brought in a completely new team including Wolfowitz, who had been recommended by his old tutor Albert Wohlstetter. Wolfowitz once again set to work writing and distributing research papers and drafting testimony, as he had previously done at the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy. He also traveled with Ikle to strategic arms limitations talks in Paris and other European cities. His greatest success was in dissuading South Korea from reprocessing plutonium that could be diverted into a clandestine weapons program, a situation that would re-occur north of the border during the George W. Bush administration.
Under President Gerald Ford, the American intelligence agencies had come under attack from Wohlstetter, among others, over their annually published National Intelligence Estimate. According to Mann: "The underlying issue was whether the C.I.A. and other agencies were underestimating the threat from the Soviet Union, either by intentionally tailoring intelligence to support Kissinger's policy of détente or by simply failing to give enough weight to darker interpretations of Soviet intentions." In an attempt to counter these claims, the newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush authorized the formation of a committee of anti-Communist experts, headed by Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes), to reassess the raw data. Richard Pipes picked Wolfowitz, " brilliant young weapons analyst," who was still employed by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and about whom he was unfamiliar at the time, to serve on this committee, which came to be known as Team B: "'Richard Perle recommended him,' Pipes says of Wolfowitz today [2003, as quoted by Tanenhaus]. 'I'd never heard of him.'" According to the IRC profile of Pipes, citing an interview with former intelligence officer Anne Hessing Cahn (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977–1980), "Pipes said, 'I picked Paul Wolfowitz [who at the time was working as special assistant for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT] because Richard Perle recommended him so highly'"; Cahn has been highly critical of the report.
The team's report, delivered in 1976 and quickly leaked to the press, stated that "All the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the 'worldwide triumph of socialism,' but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony," highlighting a number of key areas where they believed the government's intelligence analysts had got it wrong. According to Jack Davis, Wolfowitz observed later:
The B-Team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the [intelligence] analysts and one that provided a much closer fit to the Soviets' observed behavior (and also provided a much better forecast of subsequent behavior up to and through the invasion of Afghanistan). The formal presentation of the competing views in a session out at [CIA headquarters in] Langley also made clear that the enormous experience and expertise of the B-Team as a group were formidable. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic reaction to the whole experience was largely negative and hostile.
There has been and is still much controversy about the work of Team B, the accuracy of its conclusions, and its effects on U.S. military policies.
In 1977, during the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Wolfowitz moved to The Pentagon, aiming to broaden his experience of military issues, because, according to Mann, Wolfowitz believed that "The key to preventing nuclear wars was to stop conventional wars." He was employed as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs for the U.S. Defense Department, under then U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, where he was put to work on the Limited Contingency Study, charged with examining possible areas of threat to the U.S. in the third world.
After taking up the post, Wolfowitz attended a seminar presented by Professor Geoffrey Kemp of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in which Kemp argued that the U.S. was concentrating too much on defending against the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Europe through the Fulda Gap in Germany and ignoring the far more likely possibility of them turning southward to seize the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. "
This warning struck a chord with Wolfowitz," according to Mann, as it "fit well with the conclusion he had just reached in the Team B intelligence review." Wolfowitz hired Kemp and Dennis Ross, a Soviet specialist from the University of California, to work with him on preparing the study. "We and our major industrialized allies have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict," the report stated, going on to conclude that Soviet seizure of the Persian Gulf oil field would "probably destroy NATO and the US-Japanese alliance without recourse to war by the Soviets."
According to Mann, Wolfowitz enlarged the purview of the Limited Contingency Study by questioning what would happen if another country in the region were to seize the oil fields.
In late 1979 Jeane Kirkpatrick began a migration of neoconservatives from their traditional base in the U.S. Democratic Party over to the U.S. Republican Party and its Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.[citations needed] Wolfowitz joined this exodus after receiving a phone call from his old boss Fred Ikle, then working on the Reagan campaign, in which he said "Paul, you’ve got to get out of there. We want you in the new administration."
Wolfowitz broke from the official line by denouncing Saddam Hussein of Iraq at a time when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan's official envoy, was offering the dictator support in his conflict with Iran. Other areas where Wolfowitz disagreed with the administration was in his opposition to attempts to open up dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and to the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. "In both instances," according to Mann, "Wolfowitz demonstrated himself to be one of the strongest supporters of Israel in the Reagan administration."
From 1989 to 1993, Wolfowitz served as under secretary of defense for policy in charge of a 700-person team that had major responsibilies for the reshaping of military strategy and policy at the end of the cold war. In this capacity Wolfowitz co-wrote with Lewis "Scooter" Libby the 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance, which called for US military dominance over Eurasia and preemptive strikes against countries suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. After being leaked to the media, the draft proved so shocking that it had to be substantially rewritten.
After 9/11, many of the principles in that draft became key points in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, an annual report. During the 1991 Gulf War, Wolfowitz advocated extending the war's aim to include toppling Saddam Hussein's regime.
Richard Perle
Famously nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness" for his hardline stance on national security issues, Mr. Perle is one of the most high-profile neoconservatives. He resigned in March 2003 as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board after being criticized for conflicts of interest. From 1981 to 1987 he was assistant secretary of defense for international security policy.
Perle is, in the words of foreign affairs analyst Holger Jensen, “an ardent Zionist, a close personal friend of Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, head of Hollinger Digital, part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in London, a board member of the Jerusalem Post, resident ‘fellow’ of the American Enterprise Institute and ex-employee of the Israeli weapons manufacturer Soltam.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perle
Perle was born in New York to a Jewish family. His family moved to California, and Perle attended Hollywood High School in Los Angeles (his classmates included actor Mike Farrell and singer Ricky Nelson) and later, the University of Southern California, earning a B.A. in International Politics in 1964. As an undergraduate he studied in Copenhagen at Denmark's International Study Program. He also studied at the London School of Economics and obtained a M.A. in political science from Princeton University in 1967.
From 1969 to 1980, Perle worked as a staffer for Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington. As a staffer, Perle drafted the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1972 International Grain Agreement (IGA), or "Russian Wheat Deal" negotiated by Richard Nixon and the Soviet Union which for the first time made a trade agreement contingent upon the fundamental human right of Soviet Jews to emigrate.
Perle is a chief architect of the "creative destruction" agenda to reshape the Middle East, starting with the invasion of Iraq. He outlined parts of this agenda in a key 1996 report for Israel's right-wing Likud Party called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm."
Perle helped establish two think tanks: The Center for Security Policy and The Jewish Institute for National Security. He is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an adviser for the counter-terrorist think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a director of the Jerusalem Post.
Douglas Feith
The defense department announced in January 2005 that Mr. Feith will resign this summer as undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian position, which he has held since being appointed by President Bush in July 2001. Feith also served in the Reagan administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy. Prior to that, he served as special counsel to Richard Perle. Before his service at the Pentagon, Feith worked as a Middle East specialist for the National Security Council in 1981-82.
Feith is well-known for his support of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. In 1997, Feith was honored along with his father Dalck Feith, who was active in a Zionist youth movement in his native Poland, for their "service to Israel and the Jewish people" by pro-Likud Zionist Organization of America at its 100th anniversary banquet. In 1992, he was vice president of the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Mr. Feith is a former chairman and currently a director of the Center for Security Policy.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Mr. Libby is currently chief of staff and national security advisor for Vice President Dick Cheney. He's served in a wide variety of posts. In the first Bush administration, Mr. Libby served in the Department of Principal Deputy Under Secretary (Strategy and Resources), and, later, as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
Libby was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century. He joined Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and others in writing its 2000 report entitled, "Rebuilding America's Defenses - Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century."
Libby co-authored the once-shocking draft of the 'Defense Planning Guidance' with Mr. Wolfowitz for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. Libby serves on the advisory board of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of the RAND Corporation.
John Bolton
In February 2005, Mr. Bolton was nominated US ambassador to the UN by President Bush. If confirmed, he would move to this position from the Department of State where he was Under Secretary for Arms Control, the top US non-proliferation official. Prior to this appointment, Bolton was senior vice president of the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. He also held a variety of positions in both the George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations.
Bolton has often made claims not fully supported by the intelligence community. In a controversial May 2002 speech entitled, "Beyond the Axis of Evil," Bolton fingered Libya, Syria, and Cuba as "other rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction."
In July 2003, the CIA and other agencies reportedly objected strongly to claims Bolton made in a draft assessment about the progress Syria has made in its weapons programs.
Elliott Abrams
In February of 2005 Elliott Abrams was appointed deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. From December 2002 to February 2005, Mr. Abrams served as special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and North African affairs.
Abrams began his political career by taking a job with the Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. He held a variety of State Department posts in the Reagan administration.
He was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute from 1990 to the 1996 before becoming president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which "affirms the political relevance of the great Western ethical imperatives." Abrams also served as chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
In 1991, Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. President George H. W. Bush pardoned him in 1992. In 1980, he married Rachel Decter, daughter of neocon veterans Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter.
Robert Kagan
Mr. Kagan writes extensively on US strategy and diplomacy. Kagan and fellow neoconservative William Kristol co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. Kagan signed the famous 1998 PNAC letter sent to President Clinton urging regime change in Iraq.
After working as principal speechwriter to Secretary of State George P. Shultz from 1984-1985, he was hired by Elliott Abrams to work as deputy for policy in the State Department's Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.
He is a senior associate at the Carnegie endowment for International Peace (CEIP). He is also an international affairs columnist for The Washington Post, and contributing editor at The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. He wrote the bestseller "Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order." Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland, was chosen by Vice President Dick Cheney as his deputy national security adviser.
Michael Ledeen
Seen by many as one of the most radical neoconservatives, Mr. Ledeen is said to frequently advise George W. Bush's top adviser Karl Rove on foreign policy matters. He is one of the strongest voices calling for regime change in Iran.
In 2001, Ledeen co-founded the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. He served as Secretary of State Alexander Haig's adviser during the Reagan administration. Ledeen is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works closely with Richard Perle. he is also a member of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs' advisory board and one of its founding organizers.
He was Rome correspondent for the New Republic magazine from 1975-1977, and founding editor of the Washington Quarterly. Ledeen also wrote "The War Against the Terror Masters," which advocates regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.
William Kristol
Son of "godfather" of neoconservatism Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol is currently chairman of the Project for a New American Century, which he co-founded with leading neoconservative writer Robert Kagan. He is also editor of the influential Weekly Standard.
Like other neoconservatives Frank Gaffney Jr. and Elliott Abrams, Kristol worked for hawkish Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. But by 1976, he became a Republican. he served as chief of staff to Education Secretary William Bennett during the Reagan administration and chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle during the George H. W. Bush presidency.
Kristol continuously called for Saddam Hussein's ouster since the 1991 Gulf War. With the like-minded Lawrence Kaplan, Kristol co-wrote "The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission." He is on the board of advisers of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, established as a counterterrorist think tank after 9/11.
Frank Gaffney Jr.
Mr. Gaffney is the founder, president, and CEO of the influential Washington think tank Center for Security Policy, whose mission is "to promote world peace through American strength."
In 1987, President Reagan nominated Gaffney to be assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. he earlier served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under then-Assistant Secretary Richard Perle. In the late 1970s, Gaffney served as a defense and foreign policy adviser to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
He is columnist for the Washington Times and a contributor to Defense News and Investor's Business Daily. He is a contributing editor to National Review Online, WolrdNetDaily.com and JewishWorldReview.com. Gaffney is also one of 25 mostly neoconservative co-signers of the Project for a New American Century's Statement of Principles.
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Henry M. Jackson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson
As a Cold War anti-Communist Democrat, Jackson's political philosophies and positions have been cited as an influence on a number of key figures associated with neoconservatism, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.[1]
Personal life and early career
Born in Everett, Washington, Jackson went on to graduate with a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a law degree from the University of Washington, where he joined the Delta Chi fraternity. In 1935 (the year of his law school graduation) he was admitted to the bar and began to practice law in Everett. He found immediate success, and won election to become the prosecuting attorney for Snohomish County from 1938 to 1940, where he made a name for himself prosecuting bootleggers and gamblers.
In 1961, Jackson, called by Time the Senate's "most eligible bachelor,"[2] married Helen Hardin, a 28-year old Senate receptionist, but Jackson didn't move out of his childhood home where he lived with his unmarried sisters for several years. The Jacksons had two children, Anna Marie Laurence and Peter Jackson; Peter is currently a speechwriter for Governor Christine Gregoire.
Jackson was nicknamed "Scoop" by his sister in his childhood, after a comic strip character that he is said to have resembled.
Legislative career
Jackson successfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1940 and took his seat in the House of Representatives with the 77th Congress on January 3, 1941. From that date forward, Jackson did not lose a congressional election.
Jackson joined the Army when World War II started, but left when Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Congressmen to return home or resign their seats. As a representative, he visited the Buchenwald concentration camp a few days after its liberation in 1945. He attended the International Maritime Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1945 with the American delegation, and was elected president of the same conference in 1946, when it was held in Seattle, Washington. From 1945 to 1947 Jackson was also the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs.
In the 1952 election, Jackson relinquished his seat in the House for a run at one of Washington's Senate seats — he won that election, and remained a Senator for over thirty years. Jackson died in office in 1983 after winning re-election for the fifth time in 1982.
Though Jackson opposed the excesses of Joe McCarthy (who had travelled to Washington State to campaign against him in 1952), he also criticized Dwight Eisenhower for not spending enough on national defense, and called for more inter-continental ballistic missiles in the national arsenal. Jackson's support for nuclear weapons resulted in a primary challenge from the left in 1958, when he handily defeated Seattle peace activist Alice Franklin Bryant before winning re-election with 67 percent of the vote — a total he topped the next four times he ran for re-election.[1][3]
In 1963, Jackson was made chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, which became the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1977, a position he held until 1981.
In 1974, Jackson sponsored the Jackson-Vanik amendment in the Senate (with Charles Vanik sponsoring it in the House) which denied normal trade relations to certain countries with non-market economies that restricted the freedom of emigration. The amendment was intended to help refugees, particularly minorities, specifically Jews, to emigrate from the Soviet Bloc. Jackson and his assistant, Richard Perle also lobbied personally for some people who were affected by this law — among them Natan Sharansky. Jackson also led the opposition within the Democratic Party against the SALT II treaty, and was one of the leading proponents of increased foreign aid to Israel.
For decades, Democrats who supported a strong international presence for the United States have been called "Scoop Jackson Democrats," the term even being used to describe contemporary Democrats such as Joe Lieberman and R. James Woolsey, Jr.[4][5]
Jackson served almost his entire Senate tenure concurrently with his good friend and Democratic colleague Warren G. Magnuson. "Scoop" and "Maggie" — as they affectionately called each other — were one of the most effective delegations in the history of the United States Senate in terms of "bringing home the bacon" for their home state. Washington State received nearly one sixth of public works appropriations, even though it ranked 23rd in population.[6]
CRITICISM
Jackson was often criticized for his support for the Vietnam War and his close ties to the defense industries of his state. His proposal of Fort Lawton as a site for an anti-ballistic missile system was strongly opposed by local residents, and Jackson was forced to modify his position on the location of the site several times, though he continued to support ABM development. American Indian rights activists then protested Jackson's plan to give Fort Lawton to Seattle instead of returning it to local tribes, staging a sit-in. In the eventual compromise, most of Fort Lawton became Discovery Park, with twenty acres leased to United Indians of All Tribes, who opened the Daybreak Star Cultural Center there in 1977.
Opponents derided him as "the Senator from Boeing" because of his consistent support for additional military spending on weapons systems and accusations of wrongful contributions from the company; in 1965, eighty percent of Boeing's contracts were military.[1][6] Jackson and Magnuson's campaigning for an expensive government supersonic transport plane project eventually failed.
After his death, critics pointed to Jackson's support for Japanese American internment camps during World War II as a reason to protest the placement of his bust at the University of Washington.[7] Jackson was both an enthusiastic defender of the evacuation and a staunch proponent of the campaign to keep the Japanese from returning to the Pacific Coast after the war.[8]
National prominence and presidential campaigns
Jackson was not only successful as a politician in Washington State, but also found recognition on the national level, rising to the position of chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1960 after being considered for the vice presidential ticket spot that eventually went to fellow Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Jackson ran for president twice; his campaigns were noted for the hostile reception they received from the left wing of the Democratic Party. Jackson's one-on-one campaigning skills, so successful in Washington state, did not translate as well on the national stage, and even his supporters admitted he suffered from a certain lack of charisma.[1][9][10]
Jackson was little known nationally when he first ran in 1972. George McGovern, who eventually won the most emotionally charged and tainted nomination in US political history, accused Jackson of racism for his opposition to busing, despite Jackson's longstanding record on civil rights issues. Jackson dropped out of the race after finishing well behind McGovern, Ed Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey in early primaries.[10][11]
1976 presidential campaign
Jackson raised his national profile by speaking out on Soviet-U.S. relations and Middle East policy regularly, and was considered a front-runner for the nomination when he announced the start of his campaign in February 1975. Jackson received substantial financial support for his campaign from Jewish-Americans who admired his pro-Israel views, but Jackson's support of the Vietnam War resulted in hostility from the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Jackson chose to run on social issues, emphasizing law and order and his opposition to busing and abortion. Jackson was also hoping for support from labor, but the possibility that Hubert Humphrey might enter the race caused unions to offer only lukewarm support.[1][9][10][12]
Jackson made the fateful decision not to compete in the early Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, which Jimmy Carter won after liberals split their votes among four other candidates. Though Jackson won the Massachusetts and New York primaries, he dropped out on May 1 after losing the critical Pennsylvania primary to Carter by twelve points and running out of money.[1][9][10][12]
Legacy
He was greatly mourned; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan stated "Henry Jackson is proof of the old belief in the Judaic tradition that at any moment in history goodness in the world is preserved by the deeds of 36 just men who do not know that this is the role the Lord has given them. Henry Jackson was one of those men." Jackson is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Everett.
Posthumous honors
- Jackson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984; Ronald Reagan called him "one of the greatest lawmakers of our century,"[13] and stated:
| “ | Scoop Jackson was convinced that there's no place for partisanship in foreign and defense policy. He used to say, 'In matters of national security, the best politics is no politics.' His sense of bipartisanship was not only natural and complete; it was courageous. He wanted to be President, but I think he must have known that his outspoken ideas on the security of the Nation would deprive him of the chance to be his party's nominee in 1972 and '76. Still, he would not cut his convictions to fit the prevailing style. I'm deeply proud, as he would have been, to have Jackson Democrats serve in my administration. I'm proud that some of them have found a home here.[14] | ” |
- In 1983, he was awarded Delta Chi of the Year.
- With his death in office, the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was initially renamed Henry M. Jackson International Airport, but political resistance to the change led to this being reversed in favor of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. It wasn't that the public didn't want to honor the late Senator, but rather leaders in both Seattle and Tacoma (Tacoma, in particular), fearing the loss of convention business, demanded that their cities name be included in the name of the airport. The airport lies between the two cities in the municipality of SeaTac.
- One of Jackson's last acts as Senator was to sponsor legislation creating what became the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, which was named after him after his death.
- The Jackson family created the Henry M. Jackson Foundation to give grants to nonprofits and educational institutions. Board members have included Richard Perle, Tom Foley, and Jeane Kirkpatrick.[15]
- The University of Washington has named the Jackson School of International Studies in his honor. However, students objecting to Jackson's hawkish views on the Cold War in the mid-1980s caused the university to move a bust of the senator to the end of an abandoned corridor until it was restored to a more prominent place outside the Jackson School in 2006.[7]
- The US Navy submarine Henry M. Jackson was also named after him, in recognition of his longtime support of the nation's military.
- In 1994, the Everett School District completed construction of Henry M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek, Washington.
- The Henry M. Jackson Wilderness Area was created in his honor by the 1984 Washington Wilderness Act.
- The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, with the cooperation of the Jackson family, awards a Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Distinguished Service Award to individuals for their career dedication to U.S. national security. Jackson won the first award in 1982, and it was named after him after his death. Winners include Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney, Jane Harman, and Paul Wolfowitz.[16]
Influence on neoconservatism
Jackson believed that evil should be confronted with power.[15] His support for civil rights and equality at home,[7] married to his opposition to detente,[15] his support for human rights[17] and democratic allies,[18] and his firm belief that the United States could be a force for good in the world[19] inspired a legion of loyal aides who went on to propound Jackson's philosophy as part of neoconservatism.
In addition to Richard Perle, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Charles Horner, and Douglas Feith were former Democratic aides to Jackson who, disillusioned with the Carter administration, supported Ronald Reagan and joined his administration in 1981, later becoming prominent foreign policy makers in the 21st-century Bush administration. Neoconservative Ben Wattenberg was a prominent political aide to Jackson's 1972 and 1976 presidential campaigns. Wolfowitz has called himself a "Scoop Jackson Republican" on multiple occasions.[17][20] Many journalists and scholars across the political spectrum have noted links between Senator Jackson and modern neoconservatism.[1][21][22][18][15][23][24][25][26][27]
Jackson biographer Robert Kaufman says "There is no question in my mind that the people who supported Iraq are supporting Henry Jackson's instincts."[15]
Peter Beinart, author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, argues that the Democratic Party should return to Jackson's values in its foreign policy, criticizing current-day neoconservatives for failing to adopt Jackson's domestic policy views along with his foreign policy views.[19][22]
In 2005, the Henry Jackson Society was formed at the University of Cambridge, England. The non-partisan British group is dedicated to "pursuit of a robust foreign policy ... based on clear universal principles such as the global promotion of the rule of law, liberal democracy, civil rights, environmental responsibility and the market economy" as part of "Henry Jackson's legacy."[28] The Society, however, disclaims any neoconservative affiliation.[29]
Jackson Papers controversy
In 2005, twenty-two years after his death, US government officials, including three members of the Central Intelligence Agency, seized and removed several of Senator Jackson's archived documents housed at the University of Washington.[30][31]
The exact number or subject matter of the documents could not be disclosed because of the university's privacy policies. The papers, now considered classified, are being held in a secure location on campus until federal authorities declassify them.
Though a team of the university's staff in 1983 removed all information considered classified at the time, the officials were verifying that anything still considered classified, or reclassified since then, had been removed. The documents are pending declassification at the University as of March 2005.[32]
CIA's Seizure of Files Raises Questions
Morning Edition, March 15, 2005 · The CIA's recent "document sweep" of papers in an archive at the University of Washington raises issues of access to old classified documents that have been open to historians for 20 years. The CIA says the documents were never properly declassified. But some academics say the agency is trying to regain control over documents that have been in the public domain for two decades.
Quotes
- "In matters of national security, the best politics is no politics."[33]
- "I'm not a hawk or a dove. I just don't want my country to be a pigeon."
- "If you believe in the cause of freedom, then proclaim it, live it and protect it, for humanity's future depends on it."
- "The richest country in the world can afford whatever it needs for defense." (1960, campaigning for Kennedy)
- "We all want to put the brakes on the arms race...we all want to achieve arms control...but to those who say we must take risks for peace by cutting the meat from our military muscle, I say you are unwittingly risking war."[34]
- "When we have something we feel strongly about — and in this case it is civil liberties and freedom and what this nation was founded upon, that we should do something to implement international law — and it is international law now, the right to leave a country freely and return freely — that we should put that issue of principle on the table knowing that the Russians are not going to agree to it." (1974, opposing détente)[35]
- "I believe that international terrorism is a modern form of warfare against liberal democracies. I believe that the ultimate but seldom stated goal of these terrorists is to destroy the very fabric of democracy. I believe that it is both wrong and foolhardy for any democratic state to consider international terrorism to be 'someone else's' problem.... Liberal democracies must acknowledge that international terrorism is a 'collective problem.'" (1979, Jerusalem)[36]
- "The danger of Americans being killed, the danger of divisiveness that would accrue from those developments ... are all too real. A superpower should not play that kind of role in a cauldron of trouble, because sooner or later we are going to get hurt." (on Reagan's 1982 decision to send troops to Lebanon)[26]
Rostow was born on 25th August, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, a grandson of poor Jewish immigrants from Russia, and raised in Irvington, New Jersey, and New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were active socialists and their three sons, Eugene Victor Debs, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, were named after Eugene V. Debs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.
His younger brother, Walt Whitman Rostow, served as national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Education
Rostow attended Groton School, and was admitted to Yale College in 1929. At the time, his scores on his entrance examinations were so high that The New York Times called him the first "perfect freshman". In 1932 he earned Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1933 he earned a B.A., graduating with highest honors, and receiving the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, which is awarded annually to that senior who, through the combination of intellectual achievement, character and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring in his classmates an admiration and love for the best traditions of high scholarship.
From 1933 to 1934 Rostow studied economics at Cambridge University as a Henry Fellow. He then returned to Yale, attending Yale Law School, and earning his LL.B. with highest honors. From 1936 to 1937 he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.
Career
After graduation, Rostow worked at the New York law firm of Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine and Wood specializing in bankruptcy, corporations, and antitrust. In 1938 he returned to Yale Law School as a faculty member (becoming a full professor in 1944), and became a member of the Yale Economics Department as well.
During World War II Rostow served in the Lend-Lease Administration as an assistant general counsel, in the State Department as liaison to the Lend-Lease Administration, and as an assistant to then–Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He was an early and vocal critic of Japanese American internment and the Supreme Court decisions which supported it; in 1945 he wrote an influential paper in the Yale Law Journal which helped fuel the movement for restitution. In that paper he wrote, “We believe that the German people bear a common political responsibility for outrages secretly committed by the Gestapo and the SS. What are we to think of our own part in a program which violates every democratic social value, yet has been approved by the Congress, the President and the Supreme Court?”
In 1955 Rostow became dean of Yale Law School, a post he held until 1965. From 1966 to 1969 he served as Under Secretary for Political Affairs in Lyndon B. Johnson's government, the third-highest ranking official in the State Department. During this time he helped draft UN Security Council Resolution 242, one of the most important Security Council resolutions relevant to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
After leaving government service Rostow returned to Yale Law School, teaching courses in constitutional, international, and antitrust law.
Concerned about Soviet military expansionism, in the mid-1970s he was an active member of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and helped found and lead the Committee on the Present Danger.
In 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, making Rostow the highest-ranking Democrat in the Reagan administration.
Israeli West Bank policies
By Eugene W. Rostow
The New Republic, October 21, 1991
http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/islegal1.shtml
Assuming the Middle East conference actually does take place, its official task will be to achieve peace between Israel and its Levantine neighbors in accordance with Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Resolution 242, adopted after the Six-Day War in 1967, sets out criteria for peace-making by the parties; Resolution 338, passed after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, makes resolution 242 legally binding and orders the parties to carry out its terms forthwith. Unfortunately, confusion reigns, even in high places, about what those resolutions require.
For twenty-four years Arab states have pretended that the two resolutions are "ambiguous" and can be interpreted to suit their desires. And some European, Soviet and even American officials have cynically allowed Arab spokesman to delude themselves and their people--to say nothing of Western public opinion--about what the resolutions mean. It is common even for American journalists to write that Resolution 242 is "deliberately ambiguous," as though the parties are equally free to rely on their own reading of its key provisions.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Resolution 242, which as undersecretary of state for political affairs between 1966 and 1969 I helped produce, calls on the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" is achieved. When such a peace is made, Israel is required to withdraw its armed forces "from territories" it occupied during the Six-Day War--not from "the" territories nor from "all" the territories, but from some of the territories, which included the Sinai Desert, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
In launching a peace initiative on September 1, 1982, President Reagan said, "I have personally followed and supported Israel's heroic struggle for survival since the founding of the state of Israel 34 years ago: in the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again."
Yet some Bush administration statements and actions on the Arab-Israeli question, and especially Secretary of State James Baker's disastrous speech of May 22, 1989, betray a strong impulse to escape from the resolutions as they were negotiated, debated, and adopted, and award to the Arabs all the territories between the 1967 lines and the Jordan river, including East Jerusalem.
The Bush administration seems to consider the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be "foreign" territory to which Israel has no claim. Yet the Jews have the same right to settle there as they have to settle in Haifa. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were never parts of Jordan, and Jordan's attempt to annex the West Bank was not generally recognized and has now been abandoned. The two parcels of land are parts of the Mandate that have not yet been allocated to Jordan, to Israel, or to any other state, and are a legitimate subject for discussion.
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