A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I should have read this book much sooner, as it contains some exceedingly valuable material regarding the personalities that dominate and dominated the Bush foreign policy team (who are called "the Vulcans," as the title of the book suggests). Bet you didn't know that back in the day, Donald Rumsfeld was considered a moderate to liberal Republican who wanted to end American involvement in the Vietnam War as soon as possible. Bet you didn't know that Dick Cheney's rise to power consisted at first of being concerned about the White House plumbing, the style of the salt shakers and making sure that former First Lady Betty Ford got a pillow for her head whenever she was on Marine One. The depth and degree of Condoleezza Rice's ministerial and administrative talents, the nature of Paul Wolfowitz's idealism and the background of Richard Armitage--perhaps the least known of all of the Bush Administration foreign policy denizens--are explored as well, along with the way in which the lives of the Vulcans intersected with an ideology that was devoted to ensuring that the United States remained the preeminent military power in the world and that it would take a forward-leaning posture against international threats.

There are some flaws regarding the book, however. A single sentence in the book is devoted to informing the reader that Paul Wolfowitz was an Ambassador to Indonesia. In fact, Wolfowitz's ambassadorial tenure was quite consequential, as this article points out:

At the height of President Suharto's autocratic rule, then-U.S. Ambassador Paul D. Wolfowitz publicly offered advice in 1989 that could have landed domestic critics in prison, pointedly telling the dictator that his record of rapid economic growth was not enough.

"If greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well," Wolfowitz said in May 1989 farewell remarks at Jakarta's American Cultural Center as he prepared to leave Indonesia after three years as ambassador.

 This single, unexpected sentence stunned some members of Suharto's inner circle. Wolfowitz's colleagues and friends, both Indonesian and American, said the statement was in line with the U.S. envoy's quiet pursuit of political and economic reforms in Indonesia, and they say he will bring those same values to the World Bank if approved as its new president.

But he has been criticized by Indonesian human rights activists for remaining silent for too long as Suharto was repressing dissent and enforcing harsh military rule in rebellious regions of the country. And many of his admirers in Indonesia have expressed dismay at his later evolution into a chief architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Wolfowitz's decision to speak of "openness" substantially advanced the pursuit of democratic reform, said David Merrill, who ran the embassy's U.S. Agency for International Development program. "It was not a very revolutionary word," said Merrill, now a retired ambassador. But at the time, "It had a huge impact."

Even Suharto acknowledged in a 1991 interview with Time magazine that Wolfowitz's remarks had "intensified and aggravated" the debate over openness in the country. Faced with popular protests, Suharto resigned in 1998 after 32 years in power.

Additionally, while author James Mann makes a diligent effort to be fair, he does at times reveal a bias against the Vulcans and their ideas about national security in general and democracy promotion in particular. Mann does well to shine a light on some of the inconsistencies inherent in the Vulcan philosophy of democracy promotion, but does little to suggest the superiority of other approaches, especially for the post-Cold War, war-on-terrorism world in which we live.

That having been written, as far as current events books go, this is one of the better ones. I imagine that I would have been an even greater fan of this book had I read it immediately after it came out, but many of its points and commentary remain salient and relevant.