The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War

Critics of the academy have lambasted faculty doves. History shows that academia has roosted a flock of hawks.

By Lionel Lewis

It has become part of the conventional wisdom that a decidedly left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite colleges and universities in America, chiefly at Ivy League institutions. This perception has been common at least since the congressional investigations in the late 1940s into Communist Party activities in the United States, and surely since the publication of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951.

Liberal faculty, abetted by permissive or weak academic administrators, are said to indoctrinate impressionable students with an un-American ideology passed off as objective inquiry. The more prestigious the school, the more clear this bias is thought to be. In the 1950 speech that fixed his place as a national political force, Senator Joseph McCarthy laid the blame for the threats to America's democracy on "the traitorous actions" of those "who have all the benefits" of "the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government." Buckley's book is a catalogue of "teachers and texts" at Yale that "assiduously disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine security, and discourage self-reliance."

Opinion surveys throughout the 1950s showing that professors were less rabidly anticommunist than members of the public fed this perception of the radical right. Some extremists still argue that students or faculty with conservative or traditional views find the climate on many campuses inhospitable. Shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni prepared a report detailing over a hundred examples of "how our universities are failing America." The alleged failures ranged "from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America" on campuses across the country. "Indeed," the group asserted, "the message of many in academe was clear: blame America first."

Unscathed by the Ivory Tower

The facts have never supported such fanciful claims. Many, for example, who have taught and been taught at elite universities have helped develop America's aggressive and confrontational foreign policy (a policy resting on the premise that the nation's strength should be felt around the world) while serving as secretary of defense or as national security adviser. The secretary of defense is the president's principal assistant on defense matters and heads the Department of Defense, a cabinet position established in 1949 to provide the military forces necessary to deter war and protect the national security. The national security adviser is the chief counsel to the president on national security issues. This position was established by the National Security Act of 1947, legislation passed to give the president and the country mechanisms to coordinate foreign policy and reconcile diplomatic and military commitments and requirements to fight the Cold War effectively.

By 1950, the military was unified and placed under the command of the Defense Department. The creation of the National Security Council, headed by the national security adviser, kept the White House's initiatives at the center of foreign policy. All of this centralized authority existed outside of what had been understood to be normal constitutional structures of democratic accountability. It also further lodged American foreign policy in an establishment. Many of those with ties to this establishment have passed through or have other connections with a handful of elite institutions among the more than three thousand U.S. colleges and universities.

Here are some facts. First, among the fifteen individuals serving as secretary of defense under ten presidents—from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush—eleven had at least one degree from an elite university. The current secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for example, received a BA from Princeton University.¹ At one point in their careers, former secretaries Robert McNamara, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, and William Perry even spent some time on the faculty of a prestigious university.

Second, two of the six leading members of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team who most vigorously promoted the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have undergraduate degrees from Ivy League institutions, beginning with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who has a degree from Cornell University. Bush himself has a bachelor's degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University. Moreover, two members of the team have taught and have been academic administrators at elite universities: Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, at Stanford University and Wolfowitz at Yale and Johns Hopkins universities. In contrast, the two members of the team most reluctant to rush into war—before international arms inspectors had completed their task and without support from the United Nations—have military backgrounds with no ties to elite academic institutions: secretary of state Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, his deputy.

Some believe that the inner circle of the Vulcans—the label often applied to passionate backers of the Iraq war in the Bush administration—is somewhat larger than this handful, making it possible to extend this line of analysis a bit further. In his book, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, James Mann notes that "[Lewis] Scooter Libby [assistant to the president and chief-of-staff to the vice president], deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith, and undersecretary of state Paula Dobriansky . . . all . . . qualify as Vulcans." All four have at least one degree from an elite academic institution. Libby has a BA from Yale and a JD from Columbia University; Hadley has a BA from Cornell and a JD from Yale; and Feith has an AB and Dobriansky a PhD from Harvard.

Third, an examination of the educational backgrounds of U.S. national security advisers since World War II shows that most earned academic degrees or taught at elite universities. These are the architects of the muscular American foreign policy that resulted in the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Of the seventeen national security advisers serving ten American presidents (half of whom themselves earned degrees from Harvard or Yale), four had military backgrounds, four spent most of their careers in government service, four came from the private sector, and five—McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Condoleezza Rice—came from academia (Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, and Stanford). Eleven of the seventeen earned fourteen degrees from six elite institutions: Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the California Institute of Technology.²

The five national security advisers from academia proved no less unapologetic than the other twelve in championing the vigorous pursuit of America's economic, ideological, and political interests. Bundy was one of the "wise men" surrounding President John Kennedy during the misguided American-led invasion of Cuba; early in his tenure, he was a strong proponent of American participation in Vietnam. In other government positions before his appointment as national security adviser, Rostow consistently recommended the use of force in American foreign policy. He was one of the first to advocate aerial bombing as a way to quickly end the conflict in Vietnam and avoid a major Asian war. Not only did Kissinger press for escalating the Vietnam War even further, but he also urged controversial bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia. (Many have also accused Kissinger of illegally undermining domestic policy in other countries, most notably Chile.)

Immediately after his appointment and before he took office, Brzezinski, described as a "hard-nosed cold warrior," wrote in his diary of "the need to have somewhat more tough-minded a group in security and arms-control-oriented areas." To thwart his bête noire, the Soviet Union, Brzezinski successfully urged support for the mujaheddin in Afghanistan and helped develop a policy that promoted Islamist radicalism. The history of Rice's role in Operation Iraqi Freedom has yet to be written, although she has publicly defended the policy of waging unilateral preventive war: "America's power and purpose must be used to defend freedom," and "we are fighting the war in Iraq for our security,as well as for the benefit of the Iraqi people."

In other words, little distinguishes the national security advisers with academic backgrounds from those without them, not even the possession of an advanced degree, which almost all of the advisers earned. Not surprisingly, the ideas of those with academic credentials in world affairs, history, and international relations were more often published by university or prestigious commercial presses than those of advisers without such expertise. Brzezinski and Kissinger established solid academic reputations before beginning their work in the White House. Both men's work, however, was more ideologically driven than is typical of much social science. Rostow wrote many of his major publications after his work in government. Bundy was an academic administrator with few publications, most of them co-authored. Also a career academic administrator, Rice did little serious research after publishing her dissertation. In short, all had successful academic careers, but none could be counted as a towering academic figure.

Little Discernible Difference

The putative nonworldliness of academics has long been a subject of derision and scorn. When asked who could best serve as chancellor of Germany, longtime chancellor Otto von Bismarck reportedly replied: "It makes no difference what sort of person becomes chancellor, provided it isn't a professor." Yet the vigor with which academic and nonacademic U.S. national security advisers have advanced America's growing global power suggests that the academics are no less attuned than their nonacademic colleagues to realpolitik.

At the core of liberalism is the belief that government intervention can help solve problems. In this sense, the academic elite involved in formulating an activist foreign policy might be called liberal. They, however, would likely reject the appellation as a sophistic joke. In any case, it is doubtful that they acquired their ideas about how to further U.S. interests from liberal "teachers and texts" at America's leading universities.

In fact, almost all of those closely identified with crafting the post-World War II U.S. policy of containing and confronting communism around the globe have Ivy League degrees. Many were called "wise men" by their contemporaries, and all were seen as part of the "establishment." Graduating from Yale were Dean Acheson (secretary of state), Harvey Bundy (assistant secretary of state), William Bundy (assistant secretary of state and assistant secretary of defense), W. Averell Harriman (ambassador to Russia and secretary of commerce), Robert Lovett (undersecretary of state and secretary of defense), and Cyrus Vance (secretary of state). Studying at Princeton were David Bruce (ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and to Great Britain), Allen Dulles (director of the Central Intelligence Agency), John Foster Dulles (secretary of state), James Forrestal (secretary of the navy and secretary of defense), and George Kennan (a Kremlinologist). The Harvard graduates were Charles Bohlen (ambassador to the Soviet Union), C. Douglas Dillon (ambassador to France and secretary of the treasury), and Paul Nitze (secretary of the navy and deputy secretary of defense).

The only other foreign policy elites in the decades after World War II as important as these fourteen men (aside from several individuals who served as secretary of defense or as national security adviser) were graduates of institutions only slightly less prestigious: John McCloy, who earned an Amherst degree (president of the World Bank and high commissioner for Germany), and Dean Rusk, a graduate of Davidson College (secretary of state). Of these sixteen, none attended a public institution of higher learning as an undergraduate. And of the nine with a law degree, four were graduates of Harvard Law School.

The advice they dispensed proved to be unwise—for example, that the United States should work in 1953 to overthrow the government of Iran; that the following year, it should do the same in Guatemala; that the Bay of Pigs operation was a good idea; and that the development of nuclear weapons for massive retaliation would help stabilize international relations. Still, they gave their advice in good faith, to enable the United States to pursue what they saw as its national security interests or to fulfill its national destiny, not because of a left-wing slant imposed by a Bolshevistic professoriate.

Indeed, it has long been known that it hardly matters what professors teach students. What matters is what they come away with—and that is pretty much what they bring with them when they first set foot on campus. The broadest range of ideas can be found on all but the most doctrinal campuses, and students can readily find a niche without having to change their beliefs. Research spanning six decades has shown that the effect of college on the attitudes, values, religiosity, and political views of students, on elite campuses and elsewhere, is almost nil. In light of this research, it hardly makes a difference if the professoriate is mostly liberal or conservative, teaching Leo Tolstoy or Leon Trotsky.

It is doubtful that there is a causal relationship in the fact that so many in the highest reaches of government have had ties with so few private institutions of higher learning. What it reflects is simply that these individuals have long been members of an interlocking and interacting social circle. Through their families and cliques, they have had lifelong access to each other, ranging from informal activities to common institutional experiences. From this interaction, sundry opportunities, including career opportunities, can be created. A cursory examination of the biographies of the sixteen foreign policy elite exemplifies the extent of these social ties, all of which existed before their involvement in government service.

There are family relations by birth (the Bundys, father and sons, and the Dulles brothers) and by marriage (William Bundy married Acheson's daughter). Harriman taught Acheson to excel at crew at prep school. In college, many of the sixteen had similar social affiliations. Bohlen and Nitze were in the Porcellian Club at Harvard; Vance and Acheson were in Scroll and Key at Yale; Harriman, Lovett, and the three Bundys were in Skull and Bones at Yale.

Harriman's and Lovett's fathers were close business associates, and they themselves became business partners. Nitze and Forrestal also had close business ties. Forrestal became president of the investment bank Dillon's father put together. The son later became its chair. Bruce not only helped manage the interests of his father-in-law, Andrew Mellon, but was engaged in business dealings with Harriman, serving for a time, along with Lovett, as one of the nine outside directors of the Harriman-controlled Union Pacific Railroad and as a member of the oversight board of the Harriman-controlled Aviation Corp. These are not the only instances in which Harriman, Lovett, Bruce, and McCloy served on the same corporate boards.

Some among the sixteen were also neighbors, including Forrestal and Lovett, whose wives were friends and whose children were playmates. And some spent considerable leisure time together, as did Forrestal and McCloy, longtime tennis partners.

The conclusion seems obvious: although students who attend elite institutions need not fear indoctrination by liberal faculty, they can look forward to opportunities to maintain or to form equal-status relationships with those with wealth and power in America.

Notes

1. Other defense secretaries who received degrees from elite institutions are Neil McElroy (1957-59), BA, Harvard University; Thomas Gates (1959-61), BA, University of Pennsylvania; Robert McNamara (1961-68), MA, Harvard; Eliot Richardson (1973), BA and LLB, Harvard; James Schlesinger (1973-75), BA and PhD, Harvard; Harold Brown (1977-81), BA and PhD, Columbia University; Casper Weinberger (1981-87), AB and LLB, Harvard; Frank Carlucci (1987-89), BA, Princeton University; Leslie Aspin (1993-94), BA, Yale University, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and William Perry (1994-97), BS, Stanford University. Back to text.

2. Robert Cutler (1953-55) earned an AB and an LLB from Harvard; Dillon Anderson (1955-56) and Gordon Gray (1958-61) received LLBs from Yale; McGeorge Bundy (1961-66) earned a BA from Yale; Walt Rostow (1966-69) had a PhD from Yale; Henry Kissinger (1969-75) earned a BA and a PhD from Harvard; Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-81) received a PhD from Harvard; John Poindexter (1985-86) earned a PhD from the California Institute of Technology; Frank Carlucci (1986-87) received a BA from Princeton; Brent Scrowcroft (1989-93) earned a PhD from Columbia; and Samuel Berger (1997-2001) received a BA from Cornell and an LLB from Harvard. Back to text.

Lionel Lewis is emeritus professor of sociology and adjunct professor of higher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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