Product Description

In this trenchant analysis, historian Bruce Kuklick examines the role of intellectuals in foreign policymaking. He recounts the history of the development of ideas about strategy and foreign policy during a critical period in American history: the era of the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The book looks at how the country's foremost thinkers advanced their ideas during this time of United States expansionism, a period that culminated in the Vietnam War and détente with the Soviets. Beginning with George Kennan after World War II, and concluding with Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War, Kuklick examines the role of both institutional policymakers such as those at The Rand Corporation and Harvard's Kennedy School, and individual thinkers including Paul Nitze, McGeorge Bundy, and Walt Rostow.

Kuklick contends that the figures having the most influence on American strategy--Kissinger, for example--clearly understood the way politics and the exercise of power affects policymaking. Other brilliant thinkers, on the other hand, often played a minor role, providing, at best, a rationale for policies adopted for political reasons. At a time when the role of the neoconservatives' influence over American foreign policy is a subject of intense debate, this book offers important insight into the function of intellectuals in foreign policymaking.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #592084 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 264 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780691123493
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
Kuklick, a University of Pennsylvania American history professor, studies three groups of thinkers (the RAND Corporation; Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt and Ernest May's "May Group"; and academics who became presidential advisors, including George Kennan, McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger) to understand intellectuals' "thinking about war" and how their ivory-tower-nurtured philosophies meshed with "political reality." Kuklick's deconstruction of the doctrines of massive retaliation, flexible response and gradual escalation will ring familiar to students of the cold war, and he underlines rather than upends the traditional consensus on "philosophers in government." (Kennan is the "first intellectual middleman of the postwar national security studies," and Kissinger is "supremely gifted in translating ideas into politics.") But it is RAND, an Air Force-created think tank, and the reactions to its blend of "mathematical-economic" reasoning, organizational theorizing and "rational choice" decision making that dominate the volume. The book picks up a full head of steam in the Vietnam chapters where RAND analysts like Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and policymakers get their comeuppance. Kuklick equates his scholar-advisors subjects with "primitive shaman" who perform "feats of ventriloquy" and concoct "muddled" policy. A devastating indictment of brilliant but flawed men.
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Review
"... the best I've read this year on U.S. foreign policy and one of the most enjoyable books of the year in any category." John Wilson, Christianity Today -- John Wilson, Christianity Today

"Looks at the often obtuse-and occasionally catastrophic-contributions of intellectuals to foreign policy from WWII to Vietnam". -- Benjamin Healy, The Atlantic Monthly, June 2006

Review
Blind Oracles . . . brilliantly combines in concise yet penetrating fashion analysis and reflection on a range of intellectuals.
(David Ryan International Affairs )

A provocative exploration of the connection between knowledge and politics.
(Choice )

An engaging and important study. . . . Kuklick . . . demonstrates . . . an impressive capacity to relate ideas to politics and diplomacy.
(Gary R. Hess Register of the Kentucky Historical Society )

Likely to provoke an interesting debate about the role of academics and social science theories in contemporary American foreign policy.
(Robert A. Strong Journal of American History )

Kuklick's is . . . an informative and persuasive account of a significant subject matter, argued with skill and eruditeness.
(Kaeten Mistry 49th Parallel )

Creative, ambitious, and stimulating, Blind Oracles is . . . [a] distinctive addition to the literature on Cold War thought.
(David Greenberg Political Science Quarterly )

Customer Reviews

Shows that war is too important to be left to academicians
BLIND ORACLES is an informative and unsettling analysis of scholars' role in influencing national-security policy from approximately 1945 to 1976 by a noted student of American intellectual history. The author's analysis destroys many longstanding shibboleths about the importance of academic thought in the world of policymaking, and the book is unnerving in its revelations of such thinkers' pretensions. Bruce Kuklick begins by sketching the history of U.S. infatuation with expert knowledge in the twentieth century and argues that in the field of national-security policy this orientation flourished after World War II. Among scholars, those at the RAND Corporation are perhaps the best known. Also in this tradition but differing in important respects have been the academicians housed at centers for national-security studies established in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Finally, Kuklick credits thinkers such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Henry Kissinger as being influential though outside the positivist mainstream of RAND and the university centers.

BLIND ORACLES is much more than a rehash of the tragic foibles of McNamara and of those who thought as he did. It is a searching and carefully nuanced examination of the relationships between policy decisions and the analysts and advisors who claimed to be able to understand and control events. Again and again, Kuklick notes these rational positivists' arrogance and their denigration of the more politically oriented policymakers. It is, then, especially jarring to read of McNamara occasionally breaking into tears and crying at staff meetings as he sensed the unraveling of U.S. policy in Vietnam. A more fundamental cause of unease among many readers will be the realization that military action and the threat of such action spawned an entire coterie of experts and scholars whose livelihood and professional self-interest became inextricably intertwined with U.S. military power. It may be that war is too important to be left to the generals, but Kuklick shows that it is definitely too important to be left to the rationalist pretensions of academicians.

When intellectuals wage war
Prof. Kuklick has written before about both philosophy and politics in America, and in his latest book, "Blind Oracles", he brings the two together in the most extreme of all political acts, the waging of war. Beginning with the theoretical underpinnings of the ideas about war in the aftermath of WWII, "Blind Oracles" follows the birth and increasing influence of the RAND corporation from the beginnings of the Cold War, through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and up to the Vietnam War, when a new breed of intellectual-adviser, many from Harvard's Kennedy School, came into prominence, attempting to transform their philosophies into policy. Finally, Kuklick ends with the realpolitiking of Kissinger who was "supremely gifted in translating ideas into politics," even if some of those ideas may be considered abuses of American power.

Besides portraying the dangers of attempting policy in the vacuum of the ivory tower or the blinders of rigid ideology, "Blind Oracles" also shows how foreign policy thinking has not changed in its essentials since Clausewitz, whose famous dictum, "War is the continuation of policy (politics) by other means," underlines the motives and decisions of men who tried to conceptualize state-sponsored violence in ways to justify its bloody costs.

A fascinating study of self-delusion

This fascinating book looks at the influence in government of intellectuals such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Walt Rostow, Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. It also examines their shared myths, for example that US interventionism is necessary, that the USA is uniquely virtuous, and that war only comes from malevolent surprises by others.

Kuklick shows that their basic function was to provide politicians with justifications for doing what they were going to do anyway, to give them cover and act as defense counsel. He judges, "The accepted wisdom of the era fell short of what we might want." Their assessments of Soviet strengths and motives were `simplistic'. "Much of what strategists `knew' was wrongheaded or muddled, if not mistaken."

He notes that these civilian strategists showed an acute distrust of democracy and were committed to `a select management that would lead by exaggeration'. Proximity to power brought arrogance and ignorance.

After the US war against Vietnam, McNamara organised a conference at which he tried to make the Vietnamese participants accept that the war had been due to `mutual misunderstanding'. But Nguyen Thach, a former foreign minister, responded, "I would say, with all due respect to Mr. McNamara, that the U.S. mindset, as he says was incorrect, but that the Vietnamese mindset - our assessment of the U.S. - was essentially correct."

General Nguyen Giap, Vietnam's chief military strategist, said, "I don't believe we misunderstood you ... Excuse me, but we correctly understood you ... you are wrong to call the war a `tragedy' - to say that it came from missed opportunities. Maybe it was a tragedy for you, because yours was a war of aggression, in the neo-colonialist `style', or fashion, of the day for the Americans."

Kuklick concludes, "The men of knowledge did well by their societies, yet their actual knowledge was minimal while their sense of self-regard and scholarly hand-waving was maximal. They did their best work in constructing ways of thinking that absolved leadership of liability, deserved or not. Undoubtedly there was a symbiosis between the defense specialists and the nonintellectual elite that wanted their services in places of power, but the culture paid a pretty penny for the expertise, especially when so many intellectuals disdained a democratic republic."