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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
For the past eight decades, we have lived in “the American Century” – a period during which the US has enjoyed unrivalled power – be it political, economic or military - on the global stage. Born on the cusp of this new era, Joseph S. Nye Jr. has spent a lifetime illuminating our understanding of the changing contours of America power and world affairs. His many books on the nature of power and political leadership have rightly earned him his reputation as one of the most influential international relations scholars in the world today.
In this deeply personal book, Joseph Nye shares his own journey living through the American century. From his early years growing up on a farm in rural New Jersey to his time in the State Department, Pentagon and Intelligence Community during the Carter and Clinton administrations where he witnessed American power up close, shaping policy on key issues such as nuclear proliferation and East Asian security. After 9/11 drew the US into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Nye remained an astute observer and critic of the Bush, Obama and Trump presidencies. Today American primacy may be changing, but he concludes with a faint ray of guarded optimism about the future of his country in a richer but riskier world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Notes
Abbreviations
1 The Early Years
The 1940s: FDR and Truman
The Eisenhower years
Princeton
Dreaming spires
The Kennedy years
Harvard
Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika
Notes
2 The Vietnam Years: Johnson, Nixon, Ford
Guatemala
Times of upheaval
Losing faith
Peaceful interlude in Geneva
From tranquility to turmoil
Power and interdependence
Notes
3 The Carter Years: The State Department
The proliferation problem
The first hundred days
Concentric circles
Pakistan, India, and other hard cases
The Second Year
Re-entry
Summing up Carter
Notes
4 The 1980s: Reagan, Bush, and the End of the Cold War
Avoiding nuclear war
Behind the Iron Curtain
Cuban Missile Crisis
A new frontier: China
Influence from outside
Using and creating networks
Aspen Strategy Group
The perils of public intellectuals
1988 presidential campaign
Defeat and recovery
Gorbachev and the fall of the Wall
1990 Gulf War
Personal life
Notes
5 The Clinton Years: The National Intelligence Council
Look but don’t touch
Japan and China
Russia
Bosnia
Southeast Asia
Europe and NATO
The Somalia debacle
Nuclear North Korea
Moving from truth to power
Estimating the future
Changing my future
6 The Clinton Years: The Pentagon
Around the world
Clinton’s trip to the Middle East
East Asia and Japan
NATO problems
From the Pyramids to the Taj to the Gulf
Latin America
Africa
Personal bombshells
Notes
7 The Clinton Years: Kennedy School Dean
New challenges
Government consulting
Innovations
Blair, Clinton, and the Third Way
The China puzzle
Russia souring
The Lewinsky affair
Rules and red lines
Technology: new and old
Asia redux
Kosovo and Russia
Problems of globalization
Political limits
The Middle East impasse
Optimism about China
Europe as a challenger?
Back to school and politics
Summing up Clinton
Notes
8 The Bush Years
Unipolar hubris
The view from Europe
9/11 and its fall-out
Problems of peace
Track 2 with India
Cutting back
The invasion of Iraq
Leadership and soft power
Resigning as dean
The 2004 election
Puzzles of leadership
Teaching leadership
Divisions over Iraq
US politics heats up
Russia and Gorbachev
Meeting Qaddafi
Soft power and smart power
The mood in Europe
Trilateral affairs
Cyber conflict
The 2008 election approaches
Assessing Bush
Notes
9 The Obama Years
False alarm
The limits of social science
Afghanistan
European disunion
The Putin problem
The Arab Spring
A mess in the Middle East
An Iran war?
Pivot to rising Asia
The Senkaku conflict
Year’s end
Back to Asia
Cyber conflicts
Almost the end
The rise of Trump
Assessing Obama
10 Trump, Biden, and Beyond
Retirement
The Asian balance of power
European anxieties
AI and cyber
The year of Covid
Populism and politics
Signing off
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For family and friends who shared this; above all, Molly
A LIFE IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Joseph S. Nye Jr. 2024
The right of Joseph S. Nye Jr. to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6068-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938122
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Preface
“May you live in interesting times,” goes an ancient Chinese blessing and curse. I have. The world has changed dramatically during my life, which has coincided with what is often called “the American century.” With poetic hyperbole, in 1983 the American Catholic bishops described our era as “the first generation since Genesis with the capability of destroying God’s creation.” For better or for worse, for four score years, I have lived in interesting times, and confronted the existential threat of nuclear weapons. The story I am telling is personal, but I hope it helps historians to look back, and our grandchildren to look forward.
My earliest political memories are of World War II, the atomic bomb, and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. From a child’s point of view, the war was represented by my parents’ concern about rationing coupons, conserving gasoline, and defeating evil people. Dropping an atomic bomb on Japan meant we would win, and the boys would soon come home. Little could I have imagined that I would one day visit Hiroshima as a guest of the Japanese government, or that I would be in charge of President Jimmy Carter’s policy to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and would win the State Department’s Distinguished Service Medal for my work. Subsequently, when I returned from Washington to Harvard, I tried to think through what I had done and wrote a book with the title Nuclear Ethics. During the Reagan Administration, I wrote and commented in national newspapers, magazines, and television on nuclear arms control and our policy toward the Soviet Union.
Nor could I have imagined that I would then work in Bill Clinton’s Pentagon and be responsible for an East Asian security policy that the Japanese dubbed the “Nye Initiative,” and for which I would one day stand in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to receive the Order of the Rising Sun from the Emperor of Japan.
As I entered my teens, my political imagination was captured by maps colored for areas representing American troops moving up the Korean peninsula and then being pushed down again after Chinese troops surged across the Yalu River. I did not imagine that someday I would sit in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and meet General Chi Haotian, the Chinese Defense Minister, who, as a young soldier, had participated in those battles. Or attend a 1995 summit meeting between the American and Chinese presidents and hear Bill Clinton tell Jiang Zemin that the United States had more to fear from a chaotic China than from a rising China, echoing an estimate by the National Intelligence Council that I chaired in 1993. Later, in 1999, I wrote an invited editorial for The Economist of London, speculating on whether we were fated to replicate Thucydides’ prediction that an established and a rising power were fated to clash. How we handle that relationship is one of the great questions that has preoccupied me, and I will return to it often below. But first, let me go back to the beginning.
When I was born in 1937, one of every four Americans was out of work. War raged in Spain, and Hitler’s growing strength portended world war. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and Japan slaughtered Chinese civilians in the “Rape of Nanjing.” This was also the year Pablo Picasso painted his iconic image of the horrors of the destruction of Guernica, but most Americans, including my family, were strongly isolationist, despite Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to coax Americans to look outward and broaden their horizons.
Today, our nation debates whether we are witnessing the end of the American century in which the United States has been the dominant power. Some believe that we are about to be displaced by China, but I have argued that the future is still open. I have lived through eight decades of an American era that included World War II, Hiroshima, and wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Nuclear holocaust was always a background fear. School children were told that, in the event of a nuclear explosion, they should duck under their desks and cover their heads. The Cold War ended without the nuclear catastrophe that hung over our heads, but it was replaced by a period of hubris as America became the world’s sole superpower. That unipolar moment was soon replaced by fears of transnational terrorism and cyber wars and analysts today speak about a new cold war with a rising China and fear of nuclear escalation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Our mental maps of the world have changed dramatically over my lifetime.
So has our technology. When I was born, there were no real computers. Today, most of us carry a computer in our pocket that would have required a building to house just a few decades ago. I have an even smaller one implanted in my body that paces my heart. In 1937, transcontinental and transoceanic air travel was barely possible. Over the years, I have logged more than 1 million frequent flyer miles on more than one airline. And then, during the Covid pandemic of 2020, I suddenly stopped traveling. Nonetheless, new technology allowed me to give talks on four continents in the course of a week without spending a drop of jet fuel. At the beginning of the American era, no one considered the impact of humans on the earth’s climate: today, it is a major concern as we confront ever more intense wildfires, storms, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and forced migration of peoples.
My family is a very American mix of immigrants. Benjamin Nye was a Puritan who came to Massachusetts in 1639 and the house he built is still preserved as a museum in the small town of Sandwich on Cape Cod. One of my ancestors fought in the American revolution before moving to Maine. My grandmothers, however, were more recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. My paternal great grandfather, John Ward Nye, was a farmer from Maine who joined the California gold rush but found no gold. Unlike so many New Englanders, I have a grandfather who was born in California but decided to return East to work for another branch of the Maine family that had prospered in New York. When my grandfather fell in love and married Lillian Spaulding, the artistic daughter of an Irish Catholic family that ran the Brooklyn boarding house where he was staying, the staunchly Protestant family was scandalized, and he was forced to resign from the family company. After his mother died of cancer when he was nine, my father was brought up by two Baptist “old maid” aunts (as they were then called). They told him his mother had gone to hell because she was a Catholic. The little boy loved his caring aunts and loved his mother, so he developed a distrust of organized religion. As an adult, my father refused to go to church but retained a broad belief in God. He sent me and my sisters to Sunday School; I too wrestled with religion during various phases of my life, at one time even contemplating a career as a minister. That was not to be.
Religious intolerance was intense in twentieth-century America, but by 1960 I was able to cast my first vote for Jack Kennedy, an Irish Catholic. I never knew my Irish grandmother, but l like to imagine her smiling at this vote by her grandson. America has serious flaws, many of which preoccupy us now, but we have also had a capacity to recreate ourselves. Growing up, society told me that homosexuality was abhorrent. Today my wife and I accept and love a transsexual member of our extended family. Racial prejudice was rampant, and I had no African American friends. Now my granddaughters date across racial divides. Our nation is far from overcoming our original sin of slavery, but we have made racial progress, including the election of a Black president. I deeply believe more will come. Without that hope, who are we? As my friend and co-chair of the Aspen Strategy Group Condoleezza Rice said in celebrating Juneteenth 2021, our saving grace as a nation is “that we are always working toward a more perfect union – that we may never get to the ‘perfect’, but that we are always striving for it.”1
Americans have worried about our decline right from the start. As a fragment of European society that broke off to worship in a purer way, we have long worried about whether we were living up to those standards. American exceptionalism can blind us, but it has deep roots. Today, both our values and our power are changing. Every modern generation witnesses what it believes to be unprecedented changes in technology and society, but not every generation experiences the rise of a nation to global power and suffers recurrent anxieties about national decline.
For eight decades, we have lived in what TIME publisher Henry Luce in March 1941 baptized “the American Century.” In the nineteenth century, the global balance of power was centered in Europe, which sent its imperial tentacles around the world. The US was a bit player with a military not much larger than that of Chile. As the twentieth century began, the US became the world’s largest industrial power, and accounted for nearly a quarter of the world economy (as it still does today). When Woodrow Wilson decided to send 2 million troops to Europe in 1917, the US tipped the balance in World War I. But afterwards, the US “returned to normal” and in the 1930s became strongly isolationist. It is more accurate to date the American century with Franklin Roosevelt’s entry into World War II in 1941. It was in that context, to resist isolationism and urge participation in the war, that Luce coined his famous term. Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or for worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.
With five years as a political appointee in the State Department, Pentagon, and Intelligence Community, I spent enough time in Washington to witness American power up close, and occasionally play a part in it. TIME and US News described me as a member of the “foreign policy establishment,” and I served on the boards of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, and others.
At the same time, my career as a Harvard professor and dean whetted my curiosity about America’s role and power in world history, and I have spent a lifetime trying to understand and interpret it. In 1990, while writing a book questioning the concept of American decline, I invented the concept of “soft power” – the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment. The term has subsequently been widely cited – a quick Google search shows millions of citations – but the most surprising was in 2007 when the President of China declared soft power to be their national objective. That led to countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.
My interest in developing the concept was to explain how American power rested not just on our economic and military might, but also on our values. Historians sometimes divide the American era into four overlapping phases: the postwar liberal order up to the 1970s; the neoliberal market order that began with Reagan in the 1980s; the sole superpower era following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until the Iraq war and the financial crisis of 2008–9; and now, the fourth phase, which is ongoing and is marked by populist reaction to globalization and the rise of China.
In 1945, the US represented nearly half of the world economy and had the only nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union broke our atomic monopoly in 1949, but it was not until 1970 that our share of the world economy returned to where it had stood before World War II, to one quarter. President Nixon and others interpreted this return to normal as decline and broke the dollar’s tie to gold in 1971. The US remained the world’s strongest military power as well as the largest economy, but since the 2010s China has become a near peer economic competitor, and large parts of our country have reacted negatively to the disruptions caused by globalization. As yet, this contemporary era has no fixed label. As one author commented: “The order will remain American because of the centrality of the US dollar, but it will become increasingly diverse in the social purpose(s) that it enshrines.”2
One of the great questions for the future will be what happens to American (and Chinese) soft power. In 2015, I published a book titled Is the American Century Over? Will the US still be the strongest power in 2045? After looking at potential challengers – Russia, China, the European Union, India, and Brazil – my guess was a tentative “yes,” but with the warning that we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarization of our society and politics. That book was full of facts and figures. This book is about my personal story of what it felt like to live through this American century.
Telling stories is an important way for humans to create meaning in their individual and collective lives, but the audience or reader is at the mercy of the storyteller. Fortunately, I kept diaries for fifty years, including those I spent in government. Diaries help protect against “the rosy glow of the past.” Nonetheless, while I have checked memories against my diaries and contemporary accounts, storytellers always resemble people trying to describe an elephant while wearing blindfolds. We touch different parts, and they feel different. It is difficult to describe the whole. Selection is a necessary part of storytelling, but I have tried to tell a true story as best I can.
Notes
1
Condoleezza Rice, “Keeping Freedom Strong,” Hoover Institution, Stanford, June 19, 2021.
2
Mark Blyth, “The End of Social Purpose?” in Peter Katzenstein and Jonathan Kirshner, eds.,
The Downfall of the American Order?
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), p. 51.
Abbreviations
ACDA
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
AID
Agency for International Development
AIPAC
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
ANW
Avoiding Nuclear War
APEC
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
APSA
American Political Science Association
ASG
Aspen Strategy Group
CFIA
Center for International Affairs (Harvard)
CSIS
Center for Strategic and International Studies
CTB
Comprehensive Test Ban
DMA
Defense Ministerial of the Americas
DOD
Department of Defense
DOE
Department of Energy
DPB
Defense Policy Board
EASR
East Asia Strategic Report
FCO
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
GATT
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GCC
Gulf Cooperation Council
GCSC
Global Commission on Stability in Cyberspace
IAEA
International Atomic Energy Agency
IISS
International Institute for Strategic Studies
IMF
International Monetary Fund
INF
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
INFCE
International Fuel Cycle Evaluation
ISA
International Studies Association
ISKRAN
Institute for US and Canadian Studies
MFN
most favored nation
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Area
NIC
National Intelligence Council
NIEs
National Intelligence Estimates
NIO
National Intelligence Officer
NPT
Non-Proliferation Treaty
NRC
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
NSC
National Security Council
OES
Oceans, Environment, and Science
PDB
President’s Daily Brief
PFP
Partnership for Peace
PLA
People’s Liberation Army
PRM
Presidential Review Memorandum
R2P
Responsibility to Protect
ROTC
Reserve Officer Training Corps
SALT
Strategic Arms Limitations Talks
SDS
Students for a Democratic Society
STR
Special Trade Representative
UNCTAD
UN Conference on Trade and Development
UNPROFOR
UN Protection Force
WEF
World Economic Forum
WTO
World Trade Organization
1The Early Years
Because the local hospital was overstretched as a result of a flu epidemic, I was born at home in South Orange, New Jersey, a leafy suburb of New York. Every day, my father took the train to Hoboken and a ferry boat across the Hudson to Wall Street where he was a junior partner in Freeman and Company, a bond trading firm started by distant cousins and neighbors from the Kennebec valley in Maine. He had started as a messenger boy at age 15 when his family ran out of money at the end of World War I. He never graduated from high school or college, but over the years filled in with evening classes at New York University (NYU). While he was proud when I earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1964, he loved to tease me about how long it took me to get educated. When I later became dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, I donated a tree in his memory in the school’s courtyard. My father and I were close, and I was very proud of him. He had an enormous influence on me, but there was always a bit of tension related to competition and independence.
While my father was a natural extrovert, my mother was an introvert, stoical and quietly strong-willed. She grew up in South Orange, one of two daughters of a divorced mother who was the daughter of German immigrants. When my grandmother later came to live with our family, she and my mother would speak German when they wanted to keep secrets from the children, particularly around Christmas time. My mother graduated from Columbia High School and attended Smith College, but had to drop out after her freshman year for financial reasons. She worked as a secretary in New York, where she met my father. They were a loyal couple, but almost polar opposites as personality types. I sometimes think I am more like my mother, but, like all humans, I am a hybrid.
Childhood portrait, age 4
The 1940s: FDR and Truman
During World War II, when I was in kindergarten, my parents moved thirty miles west to New Vernon, a rural hamlet of a few hundred people. My father doubled his daily commute so that my three sisters and I could grow up on a farm. We lived in a white clapboard colonial house across from an old Presbyterian church. Although we were in the center of the town, behind the house we had a 100-acre farm with barns, chicken and pig pens, and flowing fields and deep woods for a child to explore. Dad hired a farm manager, but also insisted that we children work on the farm: picking and storing apples, harvesting and grading potatoes, shucking field corn, helping to take care of the cows, pigs, and chickens. On Saturdays, it was often my job to kill, pluck, and dress a chicken that we would eat for the Sunday noon meal.
Another job I had as a boy in New Vernon was to mow a patch of lawn with an old-fashioned push mower, for which I was paid 25 cents; if I forgot, I was chastised. Rather than being given an allowance, we children were given tasks to earn money to encourage our independence. Having grown up poor and survived the Great Depression, my parents were quite frugal despite accumulating wealth. My father was not interested in conspicuous consumption or having children who flaunted wealth.
New Vernon was a small community: one stop light, one church, one grade school, one gas station, one small village store which doubled as the post office, and a volunteer fire department where square dances were held on Saturday nights. Our farm manager was the caller and I loved to attend as a kid. Everybody knew each other, everyone was white, and almost all were Republican. One evening, my father warned us that a Democrat was coming to dinner, but not to worry because he was a contractor and they had to be Democrats.
We bemoan our political polarization today, but partisanship was intense where I grew up. FDR was president at the beginning of Henry Luce’s American century. He had saved democracy in America during the challenge of the Great Depression, and he had overcome isolationism and led the United States into World War II. But FDR was no hero in rural Republican New Vernon. At the time of his death in April 1945, I was walking home from the township school in our little village when one of my first-grade friends echoed his parents’ views of FDR by proclaiming, “The tyrant is dead!”
Similarly, Harry Truman was an important president who launched the 1948 Marshall Plan in Europe and the creation of NATO in 1949, but in New Vernon many people dismissed him as an accidental president who would soon be voted out of power. On the eve of the November 1948 presidential election, my father sent me to bed before the results were known but assured me that, when I awoke in the morning Thomas Dewey would have defeated Harry Truman. (The Chicago Tribune made that same mistake with its premature much-photographed iconic headline “Dewey Wins!”) Our country is politically polarized today, but extreme partisanship is not new. It goes back to the early days of the Republic.
Beneath the sense of Republican community, there were also severe class and ethnic differences. At our little primary school, Harding Township School, it was more important to be an athlete than to be rich, and if you were from a very poor family or had an Eastern or Southern European name, other kids talked behind your back. Race was not an issue because there were no African American students. Years later, when my wife and I bought a house in a small New Hampshire town, I was fascinated to find a similar social structure. I have always been amazed at the ways in which humans, like the chickens we raised, work out pecking orders. On the surface, rural life may appear to resemble Edward Hicks’s famous primitive painting of “the peaceable kingdom,” but appearances can be deceptive. A small community has both pluses and minuses.
I came from a wealthier family than the average, but I was not an athlete. I had few neighbors to play with, and I was younger than the other kids in my class, which, at that age, was a disadvantage. I was usually near the last to be picked when sides were chosen for games at school. Unfortunately, this did not drive me to excel in my academic work, which held little status among my peers. Some of the most popular kids had “stayed back” in previous years, and that made them bigger, stronger, and bossier. My academic goal was just to get by, which I did. When a teacher spoke to my parents about underachieving and assigned me extra homework, I treated it as punishment, not an incentive. Kids will only learn when they are ready to do so.
Though I did like to read, my favorite activities involved being outdoors. I loved to hunt and fish. The center of our village had a crossroads with a blinking stoplight. Down the hill from the crossroad was a pond amidst open fields where I would catch sunnies and catfish and bring them home for my patient German grandmother to cook. In an age before cell phones and computer games, radio and television were our other sources of entertainment, but the screens were small, and the programs were few. More often, I played outside, where I crept through the woods and constructed forts of logs and re-enacted the fantasy of defending our farm. Or I would ride my bike to a friend’s house, or a few miles further to fish for trout in Primrose Brook in Jockey Hollow, where George Washington’s troops had spent the Winter of 1779.
What I learned from growing up in rural New Vernon in the 1940s was self-discipline and self-reliance. I had a few good friends, but there were not many kids to play with. I wasn’t a lonely child because I had a large warm family that gave me confidence and my father was generous with praise and strict with criticism when deserved. I learned self-initiative, which served me well during my college years when I had a summer job in a mining camp on the Alaskan border and hitchhiked alone across the country. I benefited from that self-reliance later, too, as a young researcher in East Africa, and when I joined the State Department and felt like the proverbial child thrown into a pool and told to swim or sink.
America today is divided between urban and rural cultures, and while the population trends favor the cities, our federal constitution gives rural areas a persisting political power. Growing up in rural America has helped me appreciate that culture, but even more important it gave me a deep love of nature and the outdoors. In the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that two things filled him with awe – the starry heavens above and the moral law within. When I become too discouraged with my study of the latter and disillusioned by the many terrible ways that humans treat each other, I can always find solace in the former. This came in very handy when the pandemic struck in 2020, when my faith was restored by raising baby chicks and my vegetable garden flourished from the additional attention. I have maintained a vegetable garden all my life. I love watching things grow. Over the years, I have received numerous honorary degrees, but one of my favorite prizes is a purple ribbon I won for a cauliflower that was rated the best vegetable in the show at a local New Hampshire fair.
The Eisenhower years
Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, the hero of World War II in Europe, was a moderate Republican with broad popular appeal. His victory in 1952 helped to reconcile a large part of the Republican Party (including my parents) with the New Deal. He ushered in what is sometimes portrayed as a “return to normal” in the US. While we were locked in a bipolar Cold War with the Soviet Union, American culture, economic preponderance, and military strength were the foundation of the American century.
Eisenhower came into office with modest objectives. He consolidated Truman’s doctrine of containment and made it sustainable by a set of prudent judgments such as avoiding land wars in Korea and Vietnam that later trapped his successors. He strengthened the new alliances with Europe and Japan and was willing to negotiate with the Soviet Union. While he relied on nuclear threats of massive retaliation to offset Soviet conventional superiority in Europe and to save spending on expensive land forces, he was simultaneously very careful in resisting the actual use of nuclear weapons against North Korea and China.
Eisenhower understood the limits of American power, and managed crises well. Although he used the misleading metaphor of dominoes falling in Southeast Asia, he avoided letting this suck him into major involvement in Vietnam. He considered intervening with air power, nuclear weapons, or ground troops, but finally ruled out acting unilaterally. He kept his emotional needs separate from his analysis and avoided the trap that later destroyed Lyndon Johnson, who lacked Eisenhower’s emotional and contextual intelligence. One result of Ike’s prudence was eight years of peace and prosperity.
But it was also a period marked by fear of communism, and the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose career prospered for four years on the basis of his big lies. Fear encouraged conformity. Books like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and William Whyte’s The Organization Man were critical of conformity. TIME magazine dubbed my college contemporaries “The Silent Generation.” There was a great deal of conformism, but that title fails to capture what for many of us was also an age of exploration, at home and abroad, as Otto Butz described in his book The Unsilent Generation.
In 1950, I no longer walked up a rural road to Harding Township School but took a school bus to Morristown School in the county seat ten miles away, where I discovered that, in a new environment, with a little effort, I could be first in class and a leader. As I tell my friends who worry about their children, kids learn when they are ready to learn, but a change in incentives and reinforcement can make a big difference. I also learned to play team sports, traveled to Europe with my family, and was introduced by my younger sister to her classmate Molly Harding, who would become the most important person in my life. When it was time for college, I never did the type of proper search with multiple applications that creates anguish for so many young people today. Fortunately for me, competition was not as tough then. I applied to two schools, Princeton and Yale, but growing up in Northern New Jersey, I had my heart set on the former. In my ignorance, I turned out to be lucky.
Princeton
At first, Princeton was something of a shock. At Morristown I was a big fish in a small pond, but among the beautiful gothic spires of Princeton, I was a lonely minnow. I was the only student from Morristown, while students from large prep schools like Exeter, Deerfield, and St Paul’s came by the dozen. Now, no one knew my name and I had to find an identity. I tried football and crew, but was outclassed. I often drank too much on weekends to be one of the boys. The social difficulty was reinforced by the unfortunate system of “bicker,” or bidding for entry into the eating clubs, where we adolescents were ranked by other adolescents on a social status I barely understood. I was accepted by a good club but was rejected by two higher-ranked clubs. I quietly suffered the blow to my ego.
The following summer, I took a job as a laborer at the Granduc mining camp that was exploring for copper on the border between British Columbia and Alaska. It is a land of breathtaking jagged snow-capped peaks, and our mine was perched above a huge glacier. On the mountain above us was another glacier from which (years later) an avalanche broke off and destroyed the camp. We slept in sleeping bags in shacks perched on the mountain side and donned our gear in a wash shack where we hung our helmets and lights and heavy rubber jackets. The latrine was a large canvas tent over a rushing glacial stream. If I was on the graveyard shift at night, I sometimes drove the little train of ore carts out of the tunnel to dump the rocks down onto the lower glacier, and would be greeted by a spectacular display of northern lights.
At other times, a storm would roll in from the Pacific to fill our valley with fog for a week until it rained itself out. That was not only visually disappointing, but it stopped the planes from landing with our supplies. Two planes crashed during the summer I worked at Granduc. A deHaviland Beaver failed to clear the lip of the glacier face after flying up from the river valley under the clouds. The scar on the ice wall showed where the pilot just missed clearing the lip by a few feet before crashing to his death in the river that flowed out of the glacier. I was part of a crew that went down to find the pilot’s body and carry it back to camp. It was my first experience of violent death. The memory often returned to me years later when I flew hundreds of miles in bad weather in Alaskan bush planes during fishing and camping trips.
At Granduc, I again had to prove myself, but this time among rough men who had never heard of Groton or Andover or Princeton, and could not care less about any of them. Now I had to prove myself with the hard work of shoveling muck into ore carts or wrestling heavy creosoted mine timbers into place. Warren Bennis, a leadership theorist who taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School when I was dean, wrote about people going through personal crucibles from which they emerge with a better understanding of themselves. The mining camp was that type of a crucible for me.
At the end of the summer, I hitch-hiked back across the country, dependent on the good will of strangers. I spent many hours by the roadside, slept outside, and learned what a large and wonderful country we inhabit. The result of my summer adventure was a new perspective and self-confidence when I returned to Princeton. I often tell students that a gap year or summer job working with people who labor with their hands is as valuable as any course they will take in college, and it has made me an advocate of public service that cuts across classes.
I wrote a regular column for the Daily Princetonian, and one of my editorial crusades was to criticize Princeton’s practice of compulsory chapel, as I continued to struggle with the role of religion in my life. In New Vernon days, I had wanted to become a minister, but that aspiration died at Princeton. In my freshman year, a philosophy class challenged me to ask how I knew what I thought I believed. I still feel the impact of reading Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am.” I spent much of freshman year stripping away things I thought I knew; reading and annotating my Bible and questioning my faith until I became agnostic. There is so much in life we can never know. On many evenings, I sat alone in a pew at the back of Princeton’s lovely gothic chapel, my favorite building on the campus. l recall the stillness and the soft yellow glow of the chandeliers as I peered into the shadows of the long narrow nave and wrestled with my religious views.
After a brief flirtation with psychology, trying to understand why we humans think the way we do, I decided to major in a program in economics, history, and politics to better understand what we humans have done. I was fascinated by Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of capitalism as “creative destruction” and the role of entrepreneurs who took the risks to make it happen. In my senior year, my thesis advisor, the economic historian Jerome Blum, obtained access for me to the files of a failed Philadelphia company, the American Preserve Company, which led to my thesis “Death of a Family Firm.” It won a prize. I was also named Class Day Speaker at graduation, and I can remember standing in Alexander Hall and telling my classmates that, while we could not alone save the world, we could each do our small bit to improve it. I learned a lot at Princeton, with Woodrow Wilson’s famous precept system and its close attention to undergraduate education, but I disliked the social system.
There were no women and no African Americans in my class. I grew up knowing few African Americans, except for Clara Pearson who helped my mother and whose husband was the foreman at a small construction company where I worked on road building on a high school summer job. Clara and my mother sat together at the kitchen table for lunch, and my Republican father helped Clara with her finances. But I did not have to be acquainted with many African Americans to know that society’s treatment of them was not just. Neither Thomas Jefferson nor our nation lived up to his words that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, but those words had a profound effect on a boy growing up in a Republican family in rural New Jersey. I was not politically active in 1954 – and was attending a de facto segregated school – but I was elated when I learned of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregated schools. In 2008, when Michelle Obama, a Princeton graduate, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, tears came to my eyes. Years later, when I had an opportunity to meet her, I told her what her example meant to a middle-aged white man.
At the beginning of my senior year at Princeton, I planned to join the Marine Platoon Leaders’ Corps. All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge. Then in the Fall of my senior year, I bumped into one of my professors, E. D. H. Johnson, in Firestone Library and he convinced me to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. I did so and, to my surprise, I won. The process involved grueling interviews at the New Jersey state competition and then at the regional level in Philadelphia, where Milton Eisenhower chaired the committee. Late that night, after driving home from Philadelphia, I stood on the front steps of our home in New Vernon and paused to stare at the infinity of a Van Gogh starry night and wonder at it all. One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took thirty-five years before I saw service with the Department of Defense (DOD), and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.
Dreaming spires
Oxford was a new type of learning experience. At first, the common English language fooled me into thinking that British culture and education was like ours, but it is not. With my Rhodes group, I sailed from New York to Southampton on the Queen Elizabeth, a nice way to get to know the others before we split up into the various colleges that comprise the University of Oxford. We were a geographically diverse group chosen from competitive districts around the country, but there was no diversity in terms of race or gender.
Exeter, one of the oldest but not richest of Oxford’s colleges, was founded in 1314 in the center of the city. Rector Kenneth Wheare thought that the best way to integrate the Yanks was to match them with a British roommate. I shared a wonderful eighteenth-century paneled suite with high ceilings and leaded windows, but there was no central heating and the original fireplace had long ago been blocked up and replaced by a little electric coil with a meter into which you fed a shilling to produce an hour of warmth. My British roommate Richard Buxton (who later became Lord Justice Buxton) was a graduate of a private school who had done his national service as an army officer in the British colony of The Gambia. He believed in the bracing value of fresh air and would return to the room and throw open the windows. As I watched my shillings fly out the window, I almost relaunched the American revolution, but eventually we became friends.
Like many Americans, my memories of Oxford are steeped in cold and damp. One winter, I kept a paper clip chain of the number of days without sunshine and got to twenty-one. I joined the college rugby team where I was tolerated not for any skill but for my temerity and strength in tackling as though I was still playing American football, albeit without pads. After a muddy practice, we would retreat to the college cellar where there was hot water for eight bathtubs, but by the time my turn came I often wondered whether there was more mud on me or on the rim of the tub. Fortunately, Oxford has since discovered central heating and plumbing.
Stroke of the rugby boat, Exeter College, Oxford, 1959
Source: B. J. Harris
We ate dinners at long benches and wooden tables in a great seventeenth-century hall with a vaulted ceiling, overseen by massive portraits of long-deceased bishops and nobles, and a platform at the end where the dons dined in black gowns at high table. There were two large fireplaces on either side in the middle of the hall. One night, I had tarried in my room and rushed in after the dinner bell. Searching for a seat, I remarked on my good fortune that one remained next to the roaring fire. I should have known better. Soon after I seated myself, someone passed me a note saying I was “sconced” for taking the seat of the senior scholar. Sconcing meant I had to order a silver pint tankard of beer. If I emptied it without taking it from my lips, I could sconce my challenger back with a two-pint tankard. For the sake of deterrence, I decided to do so, but when my opponent downed the two pints without taking it from his lips and challenged me again with a huge three-pint silver tankard, I capitulated. This was tougher than the mining camp!
My two years at Oxford provided an opportunity for a tremendous deepening of my education. At that time, the Rhodes Trust encouraged us to forswear pursuit of a graduate degree and instead take a second undergraduate degree and plunge into college life. I learned a great deal from my immersion in British college culture. Social class is ubiquitous in America, but somewhat less obvious than in Britain. For instance, at Oxford, I had a “scout” or servant who cleaned my room and brought me a pint of milk every morning. At Princeton, I had to clean my own room and go to the store for milk, but had a refrigerator to keep it fresh. Oxford taught me the difference between a capital-intensive and a labor-intensive class-ridden economy.
In terms of formal education, at Princeton I had taken four or five courses a term and received grades at the end of each. At Oxford, there were no courses and attending lectures was purely voluntary. Three times a week I would write an essay and discuss it one-on-one with my tutors in philosophy, politics, and economics. My philosophy tutor, William Kneale, taught me the importance of precise definition, which was characteristic of linguistic philosophy prevalent at that time. I remember my first essay, in which I thought I had proven the impossibility of altruism because even a donor who gives a coin to a beggar does it out of self-interest. Kneale dryly pointed out that I had not answered the problem but simply defined it away. My politics tutor, Norman Hunt (later Lord Crowther Hunt who became an important figure in Harold Wilson’s government), would patiently explain that in parliamentary systems power was tamed by civilizing it rather than through the checks and balances that the Americans practiced. He also proclaimed that Britain sent its best students into government, while the US sent them into business. Wilfred Knapp, my tutor in international relations, explained the weakness and folly of British foreign policy between the two world wars.
There were no grades awarded until the end, when one sat for six three-hour exams in the cavernous nineteenth-century Examination Schools. One day, after lunch, I was in my room in college boning up for an exam when I suddenly realized I had lost track of the time. I flew down the High Street to the Schools, my robe flapping, arriving half an hour late and realized with horror that, in my haste, I had forgotten my pen. The examining don, regaled in black robe and white tie, interrupted the hall of bowed student heads and asked if anyone could help this poor American with the loan of a pen. The loaned fountain pen leaked, and it was not my best exam.
Fortunately, I was looking for education rather than grades at that point. I was more interested in self-exploration. I tried and failed to write a novel (though I eventually published one four decades later). In the Exeter Fellows Garden, staring up at the gothic spires of the ancient Divinity School and Bodleian Library and wondering what I would become, I read books on a wide variety of topics ranging from art, theater, and ballet, to history and novels.
This is not to say I did not learn an enormous amount from my studies at Oxford, but it did not come in packaged courses like Princeton. I learned even more from travels during the long vacations in Western and Eastern Europe, and in Morocco. Visiting Auschwitz deepened my revulsion at anti-Semitism. I still vividly remember the bins of spectacles, clothing, and other personal belongings, each representing the destruction of a human being. My most remarkable trip was behind the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1959 with two other Rhodes Scholars, John Sewall and Sam Holt. We drove a small British Sunbeam Rapier car from Finland to Leningrad, Moscow, Smolensk, Minsk, Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague. At the time, Western visitors were very rare behind the Iron Curtain.
Whenever we pulled into a city, we were greeted by large crowds who treated us as though we had arrived from Mars. We were surrounded by people asking questions ranging from “Do you believe in God?” to “Why do you have so many hostile missiles aimed at us?” We were accompanied by an official “Intourist” guide who made sure we visited the obligatory sites in the daytime, but in the evenings, young people would often invite us to “parks of culture and rest,” where the girls would ask us to dance and the boys would challenge us to feats of strength like swinging a hammer to drive a weight up a pole. (Fortunately, Sewall, who rowed on the Oxford crew, could always win.) As we were leaving to return to our hotel after one such episode, we were stopped by a Soviet militiaman in uniform, who pulled out his revolver. I thought he had discovered that Sewall was a commissioned second lieutenant and that we would be arrested. Instead, much to our relief, he slipped the bullets from the chamber and said, “Here, throw these away for peace and friendship.”
Before our trip, the Soviet empire had seemed mysterious and foreboding. After the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957, there was a widespread belief that they would surpass us and that we were in decline. In 1959, Vice President Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev engaged in a much-publicized debate about which system was superior, with Khrushchev proclaiming that the Soviets would own the future. Our visit made me doubtful. Close-up, the much-vaunted empire looked far less foreboding.
I learned an enormous amount from the large number of friends I made at Oxford, both Rhodes Scholars, British students, and foreigners. My experience later led me to advise many of my Harvard students to take time to study abroad. One discovers what it means to be an American by meeting and understanding non-Americans.
Of all the many long conversations I had at Oxford, perhaps the most consequential were those with Kwamena Phillips, a college mate from Cape Coast, Ghana. At that time, African countries were becoming independent and the many debates about the future of the continent fascinated me. Kwamena thought that Africa would pioneer a new form of democracy; Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah was preaching African unity through Pan Africanism. I wondered about that future, and I am sure that it was those Oxford conversations that encouraged me to spend time in Africa and witness Uganda and Kenya become independent countries in 1962 and 1963. Watching the British flag come down and the new flags rise was a moving experience. Kwamena visited my family in the US before he went home to Africa, but unfortunately he died after returning to Ghana, so we never were able to discuss together the answers to his questions or to finish our conversation.
The Kennedy years
The long 1960s was a turbulent decade, which many scholars see as a turning point in modern American history. My colleague Robert Putnam refers to two 1960s – “rather like a swimmer making a flip turn, Americans entered the 1960s moving toward community, but midway through the decade abruptly changed direction and left the 1960s behind, moving toward individualism.”1 In terms of a balance between our basic values of liberty and equality, the pendulum was swinging back in a libertarian rather than the communitarian direction that had marked the Progressive era, the Depression, and World War II.
John Kennedy campaigned on restoring vigor in government, but his practice was more moderate than his campaign. In terms of our role in the world, Kennedy failed in his efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro with the Bay of Pigs invasion, but he avoided a crisis in Berlin by tolerating the Soviet construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and then managed the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the country came closer to nuclear war than ever. In 1963, Kennedy negotiated the first major arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Two years later, the US became deeply entangled in the disastrous Vietnam War that ended in defeat and tore us apart at home. Kennedy had limited American troops to 16,000 “advisors,” but in 1965 Lyndon Johnson decided to change the role to combat troops and eventually increased the number to more than half a million.
In 1967, I remember sitting on the front porch at my wife Molly’s family farm in Clinton, New York, gazing over the pastoral landscape of gentle green hills and dairy farms, wondering what was happening to our country. The decade had begun with Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric about asking what you could do for the country and the world, but by the end it was marked by riots in the streets, cities on fire, three major political assassinations, two failed presidencies, and crowds marching in the streets around the world protesting American policies in Vietnam. It was not a great era for America’s soft power of attraction.
At the same time, the 1960s also saw positive changes, such as the first major civil rights legislation since the Civil War era, the development of the women’s movement, and the landing of humans on the moon. In the 1950s, Eisenhower had represented stability, but by 1960 many saw that as stagnation. I remember the shock of learning that the Soviet Union had beaten the US to space with its launch of Sputnik in 1957. Americans took it seriously when Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table at the UN in 1959 and falsely claimed that the Soviet Union would soon surpass a declining United States. Kennedy called for a renewal of American vitality, and I became swept up in his Camelot myth.
Harvard
I did not have a career plan when I left Oxford. My father suggested joining him in the financial business, but I was more interested in international affairs. I thought I might possibly join the Foreign Service, but also that it would be a good insurance policy first to earn a doctorate. I applied to the government department at Harvard, following in the footsteps of my Rhodes friend Roy Hofheinz.
Unlike the freedom I enjoyed at Oxford, I now had to buckle down and take my studies seriously, with required courses and the looming hurdle of written and oral general exams at the end of two years. My examiners were the brilliant but erratic theorist Louis Hartz; my gentle mentor and thesis advisor Rupert Emerson; Suzanne Rudolph, a smart expert on India; and the gruff Henry Kissinger. They grilled me for two hours.
The most senior professors in the government department were like feudal barons with little fiefdoms which I tried to avoid joining. The sharpest division was between the famous theorists Carl Friedrich and William Yandell Elliott. Students were invited to dinners and lunches at their houses, and many became identified with one or the other. I was more impressed by the sharp conservative urbanist Ed Banfield, but my main interests were international. I audited courses by Henry Kissinger, Stanley Hoffmann, and Ernest May on foreign policy and nuclear weapons. I was strongly influenced by Hoffmann and Kissinger. Their backgrounds as children of European Jewish refugees initially made them close friends at Harvard, but their friendship was destroyed by differences over the Vietnam War.
I also enrolled in seminars by John Kenneth Galbraith, Edward S. Mason, and Rupert Emerson about the challenge of nationalism and economic development in newly independent African nations. Mason, an economist who chaired the World Bank team charged with helping Uganda prepare for independence, told our seminar one day that his mission had been puzzled by whether to plan for a Ugandan market of 8 million people or for an East African Common Market of 30 million, which made more economic sense. He said the answer was outside his competence as an economist and would require a political scientist. I immediately thought to myself: “There’s my thesis project!”
