Brent Scowcroft: Internationalism and Post-Vietnam War American Foreign Policy by David F. Schmitz (review)

David Schmitz's volume on the career of Brent Scowcroft is part of a series of biographies that places the lives of important figures in U.S. foreign policy in their historical context. This is an important project and is a welcome change from studies, particularly of the Cold War, that have increasingly become detached from historical circumstances and subjected to post hoc moral and historical reasoning. Schmitz's fluidly readable contribution is not merely a retelling of the events of Scowcroft's career; rather, Schmitz takes us through the formation of this most archetypal establishment Cold Warrior, from the 1970s through today, while developing a narrative of the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in the same period.

One question that might immediately arise even from a quick look at the cover is whether Scowcroft merits an entire biography (or an entire biography yet). Unlike Colin Powell (who is profiled in the same series), Scowcroft did not rise to a cabinet appointment, nor was he ever mooted as a serious candidate for high elected office. If anything, Scowcroft has been the very model of a modern American general: serving his country both in uniform and out, while maintaining the careful distance from the rough-and-tumble of elected politics that eventually tarnished the legacies of some of the people around him, like Powell and Condoleeza Rice. But Scowcroft was no "Zelig," merely a face in every picture of every important gathering of policymakers. He was, to employ a cliché, one of the architects of U.S. foreign policy both in defeat in the 1970s and in triumph in the 1980s. That is a mixed record; few people who were associated with Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush retain the kind of remarkably apolitical and almost universal respect accorded to Scowcroft.

Schmitz succeeds in both introducing us to Scowcroft and providing a primer on traditional center-right foreign policy in the last phases of the Cold War. But although Schmitz does not fall into hagiography, readers looking for a more uncritical account of Scowcroft's career may find two aspects of the book troubling.

First, Schmitz often tells us what Scowcroft was thinking or feeling, without much to go on other than the Bob Woodward device of simply saying so. Schmitz interviewed Scowcroft, and it shows. In places where the reader might question a particular fork in the road, Schmitz is careful to note that Scowcroft has concerns or worries or thoughts that in some cases he kept to himself. For example, Schmitz writes, "Scowcroft had mixed opinions about [Jimmy] Carter's foreign policy, although he characteristically kept his most critical views and opposition to specific policies private" (p. 65). Why? What were they? This is a hazardous enough device for a journalist, but it is even more problematic for a scholar, who must judge the motivations of a policymaker's actions based on the way he or she saw things at the time, which may or may not correspond to the way he or she views things decades later. Memoirs and first-hand accounts are crucial tools for historians and political scientists alike, but even the best of these must be interpreted carefully, and others—Mikhail Gorbachev's mendacious post-Soviet writings come to mind—are more a challenge than a guide to establishing the truth.

This leads to the second problem: Schmitz relies too much on a few public sources, especially Scowcroft's own retrospective writings. The two chapters that cover the period from 1989 to 1991, including the momentous events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the defeat of Iraq in the first Gulf War, account for nearly half the book. Schmitz's sources here amount to a staggering 182 footnotes, but of those, half are references either to Scowcroft's book with former President George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, or to the book Scowcroft wrote in 2008 with Zbigniew...