A book that came out last year deserves special
recognition. It is the Rise of The
Vulcans by James Mann. I read every
word of it with intense interest. Mann
is an excellent writer and does a superb job describing the history of Powell,
Armitage, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the people who became G.W.
Bush’s war cabinet.
The biggest surprises in the book, for me, were Armitage’s history in Vietnam and his love of the people. He is a fluent speaker of Vietnamese and he and his wife have adopted dozens of Vietnamese children. I was surprised by the early role of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in shaping the We Need Democracy policy that was solidified by the early 1980s and became established national policy in 2001. The secret surprise that stunned me were the quarterly trips of Cheney and Rumsfeld to head the government-in-hiding that rehearsed a post-nuclear attack with 60 other Washington officials for nearly a decade.
Wonderful as the book is, the book is unable to convey the
power of the ideas that were brought to American policy by Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz was heavily influenced by The
Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Dean Acheson and
Albert Wohlstetter.
Social Thought is the discipline that recognizes ideas,
metaphors and concepts as the core structure of all institutions (including
nations, peoples and governments.) That understanding is what led to the
recognition that America needed to raise a flag, after the Cold War, that
Americans can rally around and that could attract the support of other nations,
especially nations under tyranny. That
flag is democracy. We, at this blog,
know that democracy also connotes modernity and commerce, but the pure flag of
democracy, representative elections, is the one around which the most people
can rally and from which the other concepts derive.
Wolfowitz is the idea hero and the cohesive group of friends, who called themselves the Vulcans, are the founders of 21st Century America.