It became known in foreign policy circles as “the Scowcroft model.” Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser for Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, who died Thursday, was frequently praised for establishing a paradigm for doing that job that many of his successors attempted (or claimed) to follow. The irony is that the real Brent Scowcroft, a man of strong views, didn’t always fit the paradigm himself.
Under the Scowcroft model, the national security adviser shouldn’t become a strong advocate for his or her own ideas on foreign policy. Rather, the national security adviser’s main task should be to collect the policy recommendations of others in the administration and make sure that the various, often conflicting positions of the State Department, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and other foreign-policy agencies are passed on to the president in a fair and balanced way. In this model, the national security adviser should stay home handling the meetings and the paper flow and let the secretary of state travel the world and speak for the United States.
The “Scowcroft model” wasn’t drawn up out of thin air. It was a reaction to the modus operandi of Henry Kissinger, who was for a time Mr. Scowcroft’s boss. As President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Mr. Kissinger became the dominant force in that administration’s approach to the world. Mr. Kissinger reduced Mr. Nixon’s secretary of state, William Rogers, to an almost marginal figure, who was not even allowed to be in the room for Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger’s meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972. At the beginning of Mr. Nixon’s second term, Mr. Kissinger took on the job of secretary of state, while keeping his portfolio as national security adviser.
Mr. Scowcroft’s role as a new, more modest sort of national security adviser began of necessity under President Ford, who sought to circumscribe Mr. Kissinger by taking away his national security position and giving it to Mr. Scowcroft. But there wasn’t really a “Scowcroft model” yet. Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, often sought to be a powerful, activist national security adviser like Mr. Kissinger. And Robert McFarlane, one of Ronald Reagan’s string of national security advisers, was clearly trying to channel Mr. Kissinger when, after leaving office but on behalf of the administration, he made a secret visit to Iran in 1986, which he wrongly hoped would be akin to Mr. Kissinger’s groundbreaking secret trip to China in 1971.
It was under President George H.W. Bush that the “Scowcroft model” took hold. It was in those years that Mr. Scowcroft (and others) articulated the notion of a national security adviser who steps back, coordinates and lets the cabinet secretaries take center stage. Condoleezza Rice, who had worked for Mr. Scowcroft and considered him a mentor, specifically cited him as a model even before she took the job for President George W. Bush. Ms. Rice was far from alone. Over the years, I’ve listened to various national security advisers of both parties, including one of President Barack Obama’s national security advisers, Tom Donilon, say that they were trying to do their jobs in line with the Scowcroft model.
The record shows that in real life, Mr. Scowcroft himself was both far more opinionated and more of an activist than the model bearing his name would suggest. He was not merely a neutral referee. He was a man of determined beliefs, who sometimes voiced strong disapproval of those whose ideas were different.
The best example was China. Mr. Scowcroft believed deeply in perpetuating the secretive, anti-Soviet relationship with Beijing that had been forged under Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger, and he saw most things connected to China through that lens. Early on, he angrily rebuked Winston Lord, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, for inviting a Chinese dissident to a large dinner with the president — and Mr. Lord, once a rising star, never got another job in the administration.
In June 1989, after China’s bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests, the Bush administration announced a suspension of all high-level exchanges with Chinese officials. That was the public policy. In private, Mr. Scowcroft made a secret visit to Beijing that same month for talks with the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Mr. Scowcroft made a second trip six months later, and, to his later regret, was photographed clinking glasses at a banquet with top Chinese leaders.
On these China trips, Mr. Scowcroft was carrying out the wishes of his boss, President Bush. Other officials in the administration, notably Secretary of State James Baker, had reservations about the China policy, but Mr. Scowcroft didn’t try to draw them out, and they knew better than to question too much on China.
On policy toward the Soviet Union, similarly, Mr. Scowcroft was far less detached and more opinionated than the “Scowcroft model” might suggest. In Ronald Reagan’s final two years as president, Mr. Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz came to believe that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was different from past Soviet leaders, and they pursued a series of agreements with him. Mr. Scowcroft, along with Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger, opposed Mr. Mr. Reagan’s new, more dovish Soviet policy. After Mr. Bush took office, the hawkish Mr. Scowcroft led the way in putting everything on hold for the better part of a year.
To be sure, in some other instances, Mr. Scowcroft did act in ways that matched the idealized model. Before the Persian Gulf War, Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, began expressing private qualms about the idea of military action against Iraq, arguing instead for a policy of containment. Mr. Scowcroft, who thought containment wouldn’t work, allowed General Powell to come into the White House to put forth his ideas directly to Bush — and then the administration moved ahead toward war anyway.
Twelve years later, in private life, Mr. Scowcroft strongly opposed President George W. Bush’s war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He had first aired his opinions on television and was then persuaded to put them in writing in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. At the time, in 2002, I was in the middle of a series of interviews with Mr. Scowcroft for a book on the two Bush administrations. He expressed surprise at the furor his antiwar op-ed had created and even more at the fact that he had suddenly become something of a hero to the political left. “Twenty-five years ago, I was a leading hawk,” Mr. Scowcroft told me. “I feel the same way about things, and now I’m a leading dove.”
He had firm judgments, and as national security adviser, he acted on them. In other words, not even Brent Scowcroft could conform to the Scowcroft model.
James Mann (@byjamesmann), a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of “The Great Rift: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and the Broken Friendship that Defined an Era” and “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.”
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