The Age of (Scoop) Jackson

The study of conservatism and of the post–World War II conservative movement in the United States has become a vast and booming field, yet the hard questions remain: the definition and coherence of conservative thought; whether intellectuals, politicians, or political operatives deserve credit for conservative success; the factors that produced such broad social and political change; and the precise relation of ideas to interests in conservative political success. In what ways the “neoconservatives”—the intellectuals who shifted from left to right in the 1960s and 1970s—provide answers to the aforementioned matrix of questions remains unclear.¹

Justin Vaïsse, a French scholar with experience in the world of policy analysis (having worked at the Brookings Institution in the U.S. and for the French Policy Planning Staff), provides a new, synthetic account of neoconservatism, which, while depending heavily on previous accounts of neoconservatism—in particular the histories by Gary Dorrien and John Erhman—provides new insights and a fresh interpretation.² In Vaïsse’s neoconservative world, Irving Kristol, the famous “godfather” of the movement, shrinks in importance, as does Norman Podhoretz and the much-studied crew of predominantly Jewish New York intellectuals. Vaïsse gives them their due, but his account focuses on moderate Democrats in the 1970s: veteran foreign policy and defense intellectuals like Eugene Rostow; younger acolytes in the world of government and think-tank policy-making, such as Penn Kemble and Richard Schifter; and, most notably, the senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Vaïsse mined the records of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and the Committee on the Present Danger at the Hoover Institution; he spoke with “thirty or so witnesses” to neoconservative events; and he makes use of published neoconservative writings, and his findings shape his analysis.

Vaïsse provides a centrist Democrat’s analysis of neoconservatism—one in which policy intellectuals and Washington bureaucrats take center stage and in which disgruntled and alarmist Cold War liberals hog the spotlight. In Vaïsse’s account, neoconservatism is more a political than an intellectual movement. The result is less a study of ideas than of ideological maneuvering and public and private politicking; there is little detailed analysis of the ideas of neoconservative thinkers, much less contextualization of their arguments. Rather Vaïsse provides thumbnail summaries of their general points—the “Seven Pillars of Neoconservative Wisdom” or the five principles of the neo-conservative foreign policy. Vaïsse is not uncritical, but he provides a history of neoconservatism that is also a neoconservative history of American politics and government since the 1960s.

To Vaïsse, the neoconservative “school of thought” originated sometime between 1965 and 1972 and had three distinct “ages” or generations. The first occurred in the 1960s, as a segment of the liberal intelligentsia broke with the Left under the pressure of that decade’s tumult and social crisis. This is the group conventionally identified as neoconservatives—Kristol, Podhoretz, and a variety of other intellectuals who migrated from left to right and specialized in iconoclastic policy critiques and bracing polemics. Vaïsse devotes his first two chapters to the background and thinking of this group. In Vaïsse’s telling, the New Left destroyed postwar “Vital Center” liberalism, which had stood for the principles of a free and open society against the mortal threat of communist totalitarianism. He believes that the older liberals, whom the young dismissed as dogmatic and dangerous, were vanquished by the New Left, who were armed with an array of “new themes” such as civil rights, the “whole ideology of multiculturalism,” and new value positions regarding women, sexual freedom, homosexuality, conscientious objection, drugs, ecology, and atheism (p. 42).

As do some Hollywood screenwriters, Vaïsse tends to compress and simplify his story of the past to make his point. The spectrum of cultural and political radicalism of the 1960s becomes the “New Left,” which is conflated with the rights-oriented...