Review of Peter Van Buren's book "We Meant Well," an illustration of a failure of US public diplomacy

We Meant Well Reviewed by John H. Brown, American Diplomacy (October 19, 2011)

Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, New York Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2011 ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-9436-7 Hardback, 288 pp. $25

State Department twenty-three-year veteran Peter Van Buren served in Iraq for twelve months in 2009 “as part of the civilian Surge deployed to backstop the manlier military one.” (1) He worked in an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (ePRT) on a Forward Operating Base (FOB). His first FOB, Hammer, was in the desert, halfway between Baghdad and Iran. His second, FOB Falcon, was located south of the capital. His duties were “to meet with Iraqis, hand them money for the projects we hoped would spring up, and then assess the results of our spending.”

In 2009 and 2010, Van Buren points out, suicide caused more deaths among the U.S. military than combat. While often depressed during his tour and missing his family “terribly,” the very rational Van Buren opted, thank God, for staying alive, keeping sane by scrupulously observing the situation around him. The result is this black-humor book, personal and often very funny, which recounts, from an “on the ground” perspective, the pathetic and tragic American attempt to remake the cradle of civilization.

In snappy, brief chapters (titles: “Help Wanted, No Experience Necessary,” “Haircuts and Prostitution,” “Chicken Shit”), Van Buren provides numerous examples of waste, lack of coordination among U.S. government agencies, overpaid contractors (some earning $250,000 a year), and unqualified “experts” coming to Iraq knowing little about the country. Among the projects taxpayers paid for was an effort — pure theater of the absurd — to provide Iraqi widows with fifteen beekeeping sets at the cost of just under $25,000. But “widows were not as keen to keep bees as we thought, showing roughly the same enthusiasm as they had for short skirts.” So, Van Buren notes, “we did not have any extra widows to give the stuff to.”

But forget about widows and bees. What really mattered for Americans dumped by the USG in Iraq was how well their pet reconstruction projects (such as $2.58 million for a chicken-processing plant in Iraq that led nowhere) could be hyped to please higher-ups as well attract media attention. Van Buren:

How many PTR staff members does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to hire a contractor who fails to complete the job and two to write the press release in the dark. We measured the impact of our projects on us, not by their effects on the Iraqis.

Of the many boondoggles witnessed by Van Buren is the Vatican-city-sized American Embassy in Baghdad and its staff (“male, pale, and Yale ... their work involved staying in the Embassy and sending important memos”). In one of many passages making one laugh in order not to groan, he describes efforts by the U.S. ambassador to have a grass lawn in front of the main Embassy building in the heavily protected “Green Zone,” a world apart from the dangerous “Red Zone” outside the compound, where the dreaded “bad guys” lurked.

No one dared to admit the cost of this exercise in herbaceous futility, which included sod to be brought from Kuwait delivered to the Embassy by armored convoy. But the project reportedly required expenditures of between two and five million dollars. “The grass,” Van Buren notes, “was the perfect allegory for the whole war.”

Despite all the grass we grew, our “meaning well” in Iraq by no means resulted in universal love toward the US occupiers. “I remember”, writes Van Buren, “when we tried to give away fruit tree seedlings a farmer spat on the ground and said: ‘You killed my son and now you are giving me a tree?’”

Van Buren does cite rare projects that resulted in some local good will, such as organizing a 4-H club in Mahmudiyah, which “set down tender, delicious roots.” But the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people ended mostly in defeat. Indeed, Van Buren learned, Iraqis nostalgically preferred the colonial British to the PRT Americans. Under Mesopotamian eyes (and, evidently, Van Buren’s own as well), the British “conquered the world with good administrators. Their officers were highly educated, committed, conscientious, hardworking, and conversant in the local language — regular Flashman in the Great Game characters.”

Despite all his self-deprecating humor, the above quotation suggests there is something of a Victorian noblesse oblige in the intelligent and sensitive Peter Van Buren. This attitude is, perhaps, an understandable reaction to the crudity and parochialism of many of his American military and civilian colleagues as he depicts them. It also could have stemmed from his evident lack of trust in, and enthusiasm about, the tribal nature of Iraqi society (about which he knew little, he readily admits). Local sheiks, to him, were little more than thugs with whom he had no choice but to do business in order to appear to be getting things done, no matter how absurd they were.

The State Department, The Washington Post reports, “is racing against an end-of-year deadline to take over Iraq operations from the U.S. military.” (2) If the 16,000 civilians taking part in this massive initiative wish to prevent their assignments from being doomed to failure, I suggest they place Peter Van Buren’s unsettling “lessons learned” book very high on their reading list.


(1) Full disclosure: I was one three US diplomats who left our Foreign Service in opposition to the planned war in Iraq. Full text of my unanswered email to Secretary of State Colin Powell regarding my decision at: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0312-11.htm. See also http://www.afsa.org/fsj/sept03/brown.pdf

(2) Mary Beth Sheridan and Dan Zak, “State Department readies Iraq operation, its biggest since Marshall Plan,” Washington Post (October 7, 2011) http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/state-department-readies-iraq-operation-its-biggest-since-marshall-plan/2011/10/05/gIQAzRruTL_print.html

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The Age of Kennan

November 10, 2011
The Age of KennanBy HENRY A. KISSINGER

Review of:
GEORGE F. KENNAN:
An American Life
by John Lewis Gaddis

Illustrated. 784 pp. The Penguin Press. $39.95.

While writing this essay, I asked several young men and women what George F. Kennan meant to them. As it turned out, nearly all were essentially oblivious of the man or his role in shaping American foreign policy. Yet Kennan had fashioned the concept of containment in the name of which the cold war was conducted and won and almost concurrently had also expressed some of the most trenchant criticism of the way his own theory was being implemented. To the present generation, Kennan has receded into a vague past as has their parents’ struggle to bring forth a new international order amid the awesome, unprecedented power of nuclear weapons.

For the surviving participants in the emotions of that period, this state of affairs inspires melancholy reflections about the relevance of history in the age of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Fortunately, John Lewis Gaddis, a distinguished professor of history and strategy at Yale, has brought again to life the dilemmas and aspirations of those pivotal decades of the mid-20th century. His magisterial work, “George F. Kennan: An American Life,” bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants. The reader should know that for the past decade, I have occasionally met with the students of the Grand Strategy seminar John Gaddis conducts at Yale and that we encounter each other on social occasions from time to time. But Gaddis’s work is seminal and beyond personal relationships.

George Kennan’s thought suffused American foreign policy on both sides of the intellectual and ideological dividing lines for nearly half a century. Yet the highest position he ever held was ambassador to Moscow for five months in 1952 and to Yugoslavia for two years in the early 1960s. In Washington, he never rose above director of policy planning at the State Department, a position he occupied from 1947 to 1950. Yet his precepts helped shape both the foreign policy of the cold war as well as the arguments of its opponents after he renounced — early on — the application of his maxims.

A brilliant analyst of long-term trends and a singularly gifted prose stylist, Kennan, as a relatively junior Foreign Service officer, served in the entourages of Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if contradictory, personality. Kennan was austere yet could also be convivial, playing his guitar at embassy events; pious but given to love affairs (in the management of which he later instructed his son in writing); endlessly introspective and ultimately remote. He was, a critic once charged, “an impressionist, a poet, not an earthling.”

For all these qualities — and perhaps because of them — Kennan was never vouchsafed the opportunity actually to execute his sensitive and farsighted visions at the highest levels of government. And he blighted his career in government by a tendency to recoil from the implications of his own views. The debate in America between idealism and realism, which continues to this day, played itself out inside Kennan’s soul. Though he often expressed doubt about the ability of his fellow Americans to grasp the complexity of his perceptions, he also reflected in his own person a very American ambivalence about the nature and purpose of foreign policy.

When his analytical brilliance was rewarded with ambassadorial appointments, to the Soviet Union and then to Yugoslavia, Kennan self-destructed while disregarding his own precepts. The author of trenchant analyses of Soviet morbid sensitivity to slights and of the Kremlin’s penchant for parsing every word of American diplomats, he torpedoed his Moscow mission after just a few months. Offended by the constrictions of everyday living in Stalin’s Moscow, Kennan compared his hosts to Nazi Germany in an offhand comment to a journalist at Tempelhof airport in Berlin. As a result, he was declared persona non grata — the only American ambassador to Russia to suffer this fate. Similarly, in Belgrade a decade later, Kennan reacted to Tito’s affirmation of neutrality on the issue of the Soviet threat to Berlin as if it were a personal slight. Yet Tito’s was precisely the kind of neutralist balancing act Kennan had brilliantly analyzed when it had been directed against the Soviet Union. Shortly afterward, Kennan resigned.

Nonetheless, no other Foreign Service officer ever shaped American foreign policy so decisively or did so much to define the broader public debate over America’s world role. This process began with two documents remembered as the Long Telegram (in 1946) and the X article (in 1947). At this stage, Kennan served a country that had not yet learned the distinction between the conversion and the evolution of an adversary — if indeed it ever will. Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue one’s ultimate foreign policy goal in imperfect stages.

America had conducted its wartime diplomacy on the premise that Stalin had abandoned Soviet history. The dominant view in policy-making circles was that Moscow had embraced peaceful coexistence with the United States and would adjust differences that might arise by quasi-legal or diplomatic processes. At the apex of that international order would be the newly formed United Nations. The United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were to be the joint guardians. (China and France were later additions.)

Kennan had rejected the proposition of an inherent American-Soviet harmony from the moment it was put forward and repeatedly criticized what he considered Washington’s excessively accommodating stance on Soviet territorial advances. In February 1946, the United States Embassy in Moscow received a query from Washington as to whether a doctrinaire speech by Stalin inaugurated a change in the Soviet commitment to a harmonious international order. The ambassador was away, and Kennan, at that time 42 and deputy chief of mission, replied in a five-part telegram of 19 single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that Stalin, far from changing policy, was in fact implementing a particularly robust version of traditional Russian designs. These grew out of Russia’s strategic culture and its centuries-old distrust of the outside world, onto which the Bolsheviks had grafted an implacable revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. Soviet leaders would not be swayed by good-will gestures. They had devoted their lives (and sacrificed millions of their compatriots) to an ideology positing a fundamental conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds. Marxist dogma rendered even more truculent by the Leninist interpretation was, Kennan wrote, “justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value. . . . Today they cannot dispense with it.”

The United States, Kennan insisted (sometimes in telegramese), was obliged to deal with this inherent hostility. With many of the world’s traditional power centers devastated and the Soviet leadership controlling vast natural resources and “the energies of one of world’s greatest peoples,” a contest about the nature of world order was inevitable. This would be “undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face.”

In 1947, Kennan went public in a briefly anonymous article published in Foreign Affairs, signed by “X.” Among the thousands of articles produced on the subject, Kennan’s stands in a class by itself. Lucidly written, passionately argued, it elevated the debate to a philosophy of history.

The X article condensed the Long Telegram and gave it an apocalyptic vision. Soviet foreign policy represented “a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.” The only way to deal with Moscow was by “a policy of firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”

So far this was a doctrine of equilibrium much like what a British foreign secretary in the 19th century might have counseled in dealing with a rising power — though the British foreign secretary would not have felt the need to define a final outcome. What conferred a dramatic quality on the X article was the way Kennan combined it with the historic American dream of the ultimate conversion of the adversary. Victory would come not on the battlefield nor even by diplomacy but by the implosion of the Soviet system. It was “entirely possible for the United States to influence by its actions” this eventuality. At some point in Moscow’s futile confrontations with the outside world — so long as the West took care they remained futile — some Soviet leader would feel the need to achieve additional support by reaching down to the immature and inexperienced masses. But if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed over night from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”

No other document forecast so presciently what would in fact occur under Mikhail Gorbachev. But that was four decades away. It left a number of issues open: How was a situation of strength to be defined? How was it to be built and then conveyed to the adversary? And how would it be sustained in the face of Soviet challenges?

Kennan never dealt with these issues. It took Dean Acheson to translate Kennan’s concept into the design that saw America through the cold war. As under secretary to George Marshall, Acheson worked on the Marshall Plan and, as secretary of state, created NATO, encouraged European unification and brought Germany into the Atlantic structure. In the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles extended the alliance system through the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East and SEATO for Southeast Asia. In effect, containment came to be equated with constructing military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents.

The practical consequence was to shelve East-West diplomacy while the positions of strength were being built. The diplomatic initiative was left to the Soviet Union, which concentrated on Western weak points, or where it calculated that it had an inherent advantage (as in the exposed position of Berlin). Paradoxically containment, while hardheaded in its absolute opposition to the further expansion of the Soviet sphere, failed to reflect the real balance of forces. For with the American atomic monopoly — and the huge Soviet losses in the world war — that actual balance was never more favorable for the West than at the beginning of the cold war. A situation of strength did not need to be built; it already existed.

The most illustrious advocate of this point of view was Winston Churchill. In a series of speeches between 1946 and 1952, he called for diplomatic initiatives to produce a European settlement while American strength was still preponderant. The American policy based on the X article appealed for endurance so that history could display its inevitable tendencies. Churchill warned of the psychological strain of a seemingly endless strategic stalemate.

At the same time that Churchill was urging an immediate diplomatic confrontation, Kennan was growing impatient with Washington’s tendency to equate containment with a largely military strategy. He disavowed the global application of his principles. As he so often did, he pushed them to their abstract extreme, arguing that there were some regions “where you could perfectly well let people fall prey to totalitarian domination without any tragic consequences for world peace in general.” We could not bomb the Soviets into submission, nor convince them to see things our way; we had, in fact, no direct means to change the Soviet regime. We had instead to wait out an unsettled situation and occasionally mitigate it with diplomacy.

The issue became an aspect of the perennial debate between a realism stressing the importance of assessing power relationships and an idealism conflating moral impulses with historical inevitability. It was complicated by Kennan’s tendency to defend on occasion each side of the issue — leading to incisive and quite unsentimental essays and diary entries analyzing the global balance of power, followed by comparable reflections questioning the morality of practicing traditional power politics in the nuclear age.

Stable orders require elements of both power and morality. In a world without equilibrium, the stronger will encounter no restraint, and the weak will find no means of vindication. At the same time, if there is no commitment to the essential justice of existing arrangements, constant challenges or else a crusading attempt to impose value systems are inevitable.

The challenge of statesmanship is to define the components of both power and morality and strike a balance between them. This is not a one-time effort. It requires constant recalibration; it is as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise. It implies a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible. Kennan, as a public servant, was exalted above most others for a penetrating analysis that treated each element of international order separately, yet his career was stymied by his periodic rebellion against the need for a reconciliation that could incorporate each element only imperfectly.

At the beginning of his career, Kennan’s view of the European order was traditional. America should seek, he argued, an equilibrium based on enlightened self-interest and sustained by the permanent introduction of American power. “Heretofore, in our history, we had to take the world pretty much as we found it,” he wrote during the war. “From now on we will have to take it pretty much as we leave it when the crisis is over.” And that required “the firm, consistent and unceasing application of sheer power in accordance with a long-term policy.”

In pursuit of that European equilibrium, Kennan urged Washington and its democratic allies to oblige the Soviet Union to accept borders as far east as possible. In 1944, he proposed that Poland be placed under international trusteeship to prevent its domination by the Soviet Union. But when this was rejected by Roosevelt, who did not want to risk alienating Moscow in the last phase of the war, Kennan adjusted his view to the new realities as he saw them. If the United States was unwilling to force the Soviet Union into acceptable limits, “we should gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” That meant dividing Europe into spheres of influence with the line of division running through Germany. The Western half of Germany should be integrated into a European federation. He called this a “bitterly modest” program, but “beggars can’t be choosers.”

Six years later, Acheson was building an Atlantic partnership in essentially the manner Kennan had proposed. But Kennan rejected it for three reasons: his innate perfectionism, his growing concern about the implications of nuclear war and his exclusion from a role in government.

The irony of Kennan’s thought was that his influence in government arose from his advocacy of what today’s debate would define as realism, while his admirers outside government were on the whole motivated by what they took to be his idealistic objections to the prevalent, essentially realistic policy. His vision of peace involved a balance of power of a very special American type, an equilibrium that was not to be measured by military force alone. It arose as well from the culture and historical evolution of a society whose ultimate power would be measured by its vigor and its people’s commitment to a better world. In the X article, he called on his countrymen to meet the “test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.”

Kennan saw clearly — more so than a vast majority of his contemporaries — the ultimate outcome of the division of Europe, but less clearly the road to get there. He was too intellectually rigorous to countenance the partial steps needed to reach the vistas he envisioned. Yet policy practice — as opposed to pure analysis — almost inevitably involves both compromise and risk.

This is why Kennan often shrank from the application of his own theories. In 1948, with an allied government in China crumbling, Kennan — at some risk to his career — advanced the minority view that a Communist victory would not necessarily be catastrophic. In a National War College lecture, he argued that “our safety depends on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” A wise policy would induce these forces to “spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us,” so “that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.” But when, in 1969, the Nixon administration began to implement almost exactly that policy, Kennan called on me at the White House, in the company of a distinguished group of former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, to warn against proceeding with overtures to China lest the Soviet Union respond by war.

So emphatically did Kennan sometimes reject the immediately feasible that he destroyed his usefulness in the conduct of day-to-day diplomacy. This turned his life into a special kind of tragedy. Until his old age, he yearned for the role in public service to which his brilliance and vision should have propelled him, but that was always denied him by his refusal to modify his perfectionism.

A major element in this refusal was Kennan’s growing repugnance at the prospect of nuclear war. From the beginning of the nuclear age, he emphasized that the new weapons progressively destroyed the relationship between military and political objectives. Historically, wars had been fought because the prospect of accommodation seemed more onerous than the consequences of defeat. But when nuclear war implied tens of millions of casualties — and arguably the end of civilization — that equation was turned on its head.

The most haunting problem for modern policy makers became what they would in fact do when the limit of diplomatic options had been reached: Did any leader or group of leaders have the right to assume the moral responsibility for taking risks capable of destroying civilized order? But by the same calculus, could any leader or group of leaders assume the responsibility for abandoning nuclear deterrence and turn the world over to groups with possibly genocidal tendencies? Acheson chose the risk of deterrence, probably convinced that he would never have to implement it. Kennan abandoned deterrence and the nuclear option, at one stage even seeking to organize a no-first-use pledge from American policy makers and musing publicly in an interview whether Soviet dominance over Western Europe might not be preferable to nuclear war.

When Kennan was operating in the realm of philosophy, he tended to push matters to passionate and abstract conclusions. Yet under pressure of concrete events, he would swing back to the role of a hard-nosed advocate of specific operational policies. After the Chinese offensive across the Yalu in 1950, he overcame his distaste for Acheson’s more militant policy to urge him to refuse any attempt at diplomacy with the Communist world and instead adopt a Churchillian posture of defiance. Similarly, in 1968, his decade-long advocacy of military disengagement in Europe did not keep him from urging President Johnson to respond to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia by sending another 100,000 troops to Europe.

It was my good fortune to know both Acheson and Kennan at or near the height of their intellectual powers. Acheson was the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period. He designed the application of the concepts for which Kennan was the earliest and most eloquent spokesman. The growing estrangement between these two giants of American foreign policy was as sad as it was inevitable. Acheson was indispensable for the architecture of the immediate postwar decade; Kennan’s view raised the issues of a more distant future. Acheson considered Kennan more significant for literature than for policy making and wholly impractical. Kennan’s reaction was frustration at his growing irrelevance to policy making and his inability to convey his long-term view.

On the issues of the day, I sided with Acheson and have not changed my views in retrospect. If Europe was to be secured, America did not have the choice between postponing the drawing of dividing lines or implementing a diplomatic process to determine whether dividing lines needed to be drawn at all. The application of Kennan’s evolving theories in the immediate postwar decades (particularly his opposition to NATO, his critique of the Truman doctrine and his call for a negotiated American disengagement from Europe) would have proved as unsettling as Acheson predicted.

At the same time, Kennan deserves recognition for raising the key issues of the long-term future. He warned of a time in which America might strain its domestic resilience by goals beyond the physical and psychological capacity of even the most exceptional society.

Kennan was eloquent in emphasizing the transient nature of a division of the world into military blocs and the ultimate need to transcend it by diplomacy. He came up with remedies that were both too early in the historical process and occasionally too abstract. He at times neglected the importance of timing. Gaddis quotes him as pointing out that he had problems with sequencing: “I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself, so that I appear to be inconsistent.”

In a turbulent era, Kennan’s consistent themes were balance and restraint. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he applied these convictions to his side of the debate as well. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the Vietnam War but on the limited ground that there was no strategic need for it. He emphasized that the threat posed by Hanoi was exaggerated and that the alleged unity of the Communist world was a myth. But he also warned elsewhere against “violent objection to what exists, unaccompanied by any constructive concept of what, ideally ought to exist in its place.” He questioned the policy makers’ judgment but not their intent; he understood their dilemmas even as he both criticized and sought to join them.

Oscillating between profound perceptions of both the world of ideas and the world of power, Kennan often found himself caught between them. Out of his inward turmoil emerged themes that, like the movements of a great symphony, none of us who followed could ignore, even when they were occasionally discordant.

s time went on, Kennan retreated into writing history. He did so less as a historian than as a teacher to policy makers, hoping to instruct America in the importance of moderation in objectives and restraint in the use of power. He took as an example the collapse of the European order that led to the outbreak of World War I. He produced two works of exemplary scholarship and elegant writing, “Russia Leaves the War” and “The Decision to Intervene.” He published a book of lectures and essays about the making of American foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century, “American Diplomacy: 1900-1950,” which remains the best short summary of the subject.

Yet Kennan did not derive genuine satisfaction from the accolades that so fulsomely came his way from the nonpolicy world. His partly self-created exile from policy making was accompanied by permanent nostalgia for his calling. In his diary he meticulously recorded the tribute that was paid to him by the American chargé d’affaires at an embassy dinner in Moscow in 1981, noting that no secretary of state had ever paid him comparable attention.

Policy makers, even when respectful, shied away from employing him because the sweep of his vision was both uncomfortable (even when right) and beyond the outer limit of their immediate concerns on the tactical level. And the various protest movements, which took up some of his ideas, added to his discomfort because he could never share their single-minded self-­righteousness.

Dean Acheson wrote that separation from high office is like the end of a great love affair — a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensitivities and focused concerns. What is poignant about Kennan’s fate is that his parting came before he reached the pinnacle. He spent the rest of his life as an observer at the threshold of political influence, confined to what he called “the unbroken loneliness of pure research and writing.”

Though he lived until the age of 101 (dying in 2005) and saw many of his prophecies come into being, even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not confer on him the elation of vindication. Rather, it marked in his mind the end of his literary vocation. The need for his influence on policy making had irrevocably disappeared. “Reconcile yourself to the inevitable,” he confided to his diary, “you are never again, in the short remainder of your life, to be permitted to do anything significant.” He put aside the third volume of his majestic history of pre-World War I diplomacy. He had no further lessons to teach his country.

We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.

Early in his career, Kennan wrote that he was resigned to “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.” Gaddis had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.

Henry A. Kissinger’s latest book, “On China,” was published in May.

An excellent, succinct article on cultural diplomacy/public diplomacy

See http://www.thevizir.com/world-music-as-cultural-diplomacy

Public Diplomacy Footnote: When People Really Listened (long, long ago)

"Listening" by the public-diplomacy practitioner is increasingly recommended as a sine qua non for effective PD. But it's not always a sure thing that anyone actually "listens" to a public diplomat, even if he/she tries/pretends to be listening to others. As a footnote to such a situation, I offer this excerpt from The Times Literary Supplement (October 21, 2011, p. 29, review by Peter Marshall of

Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640), which recalls a time and place long, long ago when certain audiences truly listened to the speaker addressing them:

Hunt's book ... [is] a brilliant and original re-examination of the importance of preaching in later Reformation England. Strictly, Hunt's subject is not preaching but hearing: it is in the relationship between a preacher and his congregation (their "interpretative collaboration") that the true meaning lies. This requires imaginative reconstruction of venues and audiences: at Sunday parish sermons, weekday "lectures", and such set pieces as court sermons, assize preaching, and orations from the London pulpit of Paul's Cross. Hunt finds preachers tailoring the message to the audience in front of them, aware that listeners might vote with their feet. ...

Particularly valuable is Hunt's insistence on going beyond the published text in search of the spoken event. Printed sermons tended to be tidied up: eloquent and learned, but politically and theologically cautious. By contrast, the manuscript sermons Hunt has assiduously ferreted out show preachers employing homely language, and shamelessly tugging at the heart strings. In fact, unlike modern academics, desperate to get their thoughts into print, many preachers were deeply suspicious of the press, only gradually coming around to appreciation of its importance during the seventeenth century. The most committed preachers were Puritans, and for the "godly", the "Word of God" was not the bare text of Scripture, but a "latent force" to be activated in the hearts of believers by the living words of the preacher. In late sixteenth-century England, it was the deaf, not the illiterate, who had cause to worry about their prospects for salvation [my emphasis]. Hunt argues that it was an insistence on hearing the Bible expounded in preaching, rather than merely reading the text privately, that formed the key ideological fissure between Puritans and conformist Protestants.

Some ironies ensued: the notion that reading was insufficient without preaching looked alarmingly analogous to the Catholic position that the Bible was insufficient without tradition; "Anglicans" like Richard Hooker stressed the unique authority of Scripture more than their Puritan opponents. ...

Hunt finds pastoral sensitivity, and even empathy for popular culture, in the sermons of godly clergymen. Their task was not to "convert" the people to Protestantism, but to make more committed Protestants out of laypeople who already had some grasp of theological basics.

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Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?

Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? November 24, 2011
Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books

The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For
by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Ivan R. Dee, 195 pp., $22.95

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters
by Benjamin Ginsberg
Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $29.95

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
by Jerome Karabel
Mariner, 711 pp., $36.95 (paper)

Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class
by Christopher Newfield
Harvard University Press, 395 pp., $21.95 (paper)

Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson
Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper)

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
by Anthony T. Kronman
Yale University Press, 308 pp., $27.50; $17.00 (paper)

Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education
by Nancy Folbre
New Press, 208 pp., $24.95

American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.

Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.

At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.

It’s not hard to see why colleges and universities resist simple evaluations. There are now almost five thousand universities and colleges—both two-year and four-year—in the US. Millions attend them, including around 40 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old Americans and a great many older students. Postsecondary education stretches from the tree-shaded Olympuses of the Ivy-plus private group and the imposing quadrangles of the great public universities to urban community colleges that run twelve hours a day, surrounded only by vast parking lots that are never big enough to accommodate everyone. It’s private and public, mass and elite, ancient and ivy-covered, contemporary and cutting-edge. No generalization could do justice to this vast and varied scene.

Many—perhaps most—books on the American university fall into two categories. Jeremiads seem to pop off the presses every week. A fair number of them conform to a single type, one that embraces books as varied in their origins as The Faculty Lounges (2011), a blast at professors written by a distinguished journalist, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and The Fall of the Faculty (2011), an attack on administrators written by a distinguished political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg. Instead of examining these complex communities from multiple points of view, they single out one group of actors as villains. Instead of offering detailed accounts of particular colleges and universities, which could give a sense of the rhythms and textures of academic lives, they pile up stories clipped from popular media and Web pages; describe individual experiences, often egregious ones, as if they marked a general rule; and recycle anecdotes already worn smooth by the handling they have undergone in previous polemical works.

Even so, not all their arrows miss their targets. Riley provides a well-informed and depressing account of the mistreatment of adjunct and contingent faculty. Ginsberg rightly points out that numbers of administrators and professional staffers have grown far more quickly than numbers of faculty, pushing up the costs that students and their families pay without enhancing the academic side of their experience. But when Riley dismisses most research as worthless because a few senior academics say it is, or Ginsberg dismisses the entire class of administrators as idlers interested only in the next pointless conference in Hawaii, both take flight into a realm of higher snark that is fun to read but ultimately unhelpful.

The other set of books is very different. Seriously researched, rich in data, and sometimes adorned with dozens of tables that the uninitiated may find cryptic, works like The Chosen (2005) by Jerome Karabel, Unmaking the Public University (2008) by Christopher Newfield, Crossing the Finish Line (2009) by William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson, and Academically Adrift (2011) by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa focus on particular aspects of the system. They excavate a world of ugly facts and unsatisfactory practices that has the gritty look and feel of reality—a reality that has little to do with the glossy hype of world university ratings.

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Second, and more depressing: vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.

For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.

In Britain, as Simon Head has shown in these pages, teachers in university departments are subject to mechanical standards of productivity that are much resented.* But for undergraduates an established system of outside examiners keeps programs across the country honest, ensuring that standards are maintained, even if most students are weak, and providing opportunities for the ablest at every level of the system. American higher education has no comparable system of assessment, and the opportunities that it provides at every level depend on the generosity and engagement of individuals.

In many ways, universities have reshaped themselves over recent decades to support the current version of student life. Particularly in the natural and social sciences, professors are encouraged to feel that it is legitimate to devote most of their energy to research. When they make a discovery, they receive a reward: exemption from time in the classroom. Even those who don’t discover America, as the Italians used to say, spend as much time as they can in the lab or the library. Teaching has been reassigned, more and more, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to graduate students and adjuncts.

In theory, budgetary constraints have forced these measures on reluctant deans. In fact, though, they also make it easier to recruit and retain star academics, whose salaries and research support are costly. It’s a lot easier to convince a Deep Thinker to move to Old Siwash and cogitate for a few graduate students than it is to convince the same Deep Thinker to come teach 120 kids a term.

Even in these supposedly tight times, finally, well-paid administrators and nonacademic professionals proliferate—as do the costly extracurricular activities that they provide, from bonding exercises for freshmen to intercollegiate sports. The message is clear: no one sees classroom learning as a primary pursuit.

Is this a crisis? Arum and Roksa say no, since students and their parents continue to seek and pay for places at colleges and universities, and government and graduate schools continue to accept their products, and corporations continue to hire them (and to spend more than $50 billion a year to train their employees in the skills they need). But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford. And no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact.

Many reform proposals are circulating—mostly the sort that will make matters worse. In Texas, where the debate about public universities has reached an especially sharp pitch, articulate and well-funded critics demand that faculty teach more students at lower cost. But there’s only one way to accomplish that: pushing still more undergraduates into enormous lecture halls where they have no personal contact with the professor, while putting smaller groups entirely into the hands of harried graduate students and adjuncts. Doing this won’t kindle the young to turn on their Kindles and read in their down time. Surely we don’t want to become even more efficient at turning off our students’ minds than we are already. Online courses, the other popular suggestion, can work well—so long as one also provides competent human supervision online, twenty-four hours a day, which makes such courses just as expensive as the traditional sort.

As William Bowen and his collaborators show in Crossing the Finish Line, our system fails on another level even more unequivocally than it does in generating academic engagement. Recent polemics about graduate education, especially in the humanities, have cited the high rate of attrition—around 50 percent—as clear evidence of a profound failure. Graduate programs certainly need scrutiny and reform. But their losses are hardly distinctive. Attrition is the American way in education at all levels. The whole Rube Goldberg machine leaks at every valve. Fewer than 70 percent of high school students graduate. Just over 70 percent of those graduates will enter some form of postsecondary education. But barely more than half of those who start BA programs will finish them in six years, and only 30 percent of those who start community college will win an associate degree in three years. After that point, most people don’t manage to graduate.

Consider the public universities that offer the vast majority of places in bachelor’s degree programs. A few of them—the University of Virginia, William and Mary, Berkeley—graduate 90 percent or more of their students within six years. Another fifteen or so have six-year graduation rates of 80 percent or higher. At the rest, the numbers are even worse. In New Jersey, the flagship state campus, Rutgers/New Brunswick, has a four-year graduation rate of 52 percent and a six-year rate of 77 percent. 5,835 freshmen begin studies there every year. Of that group, 1,342 will not graduate within six years. Ohio State, Indiana University, Florida State, and Iowa lose a similar proportion of each class. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, historically one of America’s greatest public universities, only 48 percent of undergraduates make it through in four years, though over 30 percent more finish within six years. Yet this is the top, the shiny part of the iceberg that rises above sea level. At some state colleges—and in the for-profit sector—the majority gives up long before graduation day. America, once the world leader in educating its population, is now tenth.

Dropping out may not always be the worst fate: sometimes staying in proves costlier. For whether students lose interest or leave their places, they and their families are now in hock to the eyeballs. During the great expansion period of the late 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of Americans with college and university degrees increased rapidly. So did the practice of requiring a degree for many positions for which the universities provided no technical training. So, finally, did the size of public investment, which came to provide the funds for most higher education. Since states financed a large share of university budgets from tax revenues, tuition charges remained low. Students could borrow the modest amount of money needed to pay their share of tuition, work enough hours to earn what they needed to live on, and still graduate in good order, with only modest debts. If they dropped out, they faced financial difficulties, but not catastrophe, since the amounts involved remained small.

Since the Reagan revolution, however—as Christopher Newfield shows in his detailed study of the California university system—states have transferred more and more of the costs of education from their own budgets to those of students and their families. Flagship state universities set their prices below those of elite private colleges. But they are not cheap by any other standard. At the University of Michigan, an in-state freshman will face total expenses of $25,204, a senior $26,810. At Penn State, an in-state freshman will pay $25,416 for tuition, fees, and living expenses this year. In a great many cases, family savings, student earnings, and scholarship aid fall short of these amounts, and students and their parents must borrow the rest. This year, students who borrow in order to study, as two thirds do, will end up on average owing $33,798 when they graduate—twice as much as the average debt ten years ago. So much for those four relaxed years in college, all too often purchased at the expense of ten subsequent years or more in debt peonage.

Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.” The burden is distributed by the reverse of the Matthew principle: to him who hath not, no one gives anything. Poor students and students of color borrow more than white students. They also, perhaps because they know little about them, make less use than they could of the federal Stafford and Parent Plus programs, which are relatively cheap; they are more dependant on private lenders whom Dante would have consigned, with credit card administrators, to the lowest circle of the Inferno.

All this to pay for an education that—as we have already seen—means little, intellectually, to many of those who are courting debtors’ prison to pay for it. The unkindest cut of all, of course, is that those who drop out must still carry the full burden of the loans that so many of them have taken out—even though they will, in all probability, earn less and fare worse in hard times than graduates. Yet even unemployment among graduates has been rising—as have rates of student loan default.

Is the higher education bubble about to pop? I don’t know. The more thoughtful writers warn against monocausal explanations. Bowen and his colleagues, for example, test the effects of student loans on attrition rates. They conclude that it is not clear that debt is a primary cause of student failure. Still, these developments are interwoven, in the experience of many students if not in the intentions of legislators. Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.

It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes. Students drink too much alcohol, smoke too much marijuana, play too many computer games, wreck cars, become pregnant, get overwhelmed trying to help anorexic roommates, and too often lose the modest but vital support previously provided by a parent who has been laid off. Older students—and these days most are older than traditional university age—often have to work full-time and care for children or parents, or both. Those likeliest to encounter these problems are also the ones who haven’t been schooled since birth to find the thread that can lead them through the labyrinths of the bureaucracy. They aren’t confident that they will see an invitingly open door, where a friendly adviser or professor is eager to help them, and they don’t have parents hovering, eager to find that helper for them.

Happily, many students not only survive but flourish in the teeth of these obstacles. Many faculty members and administrators do their best to help. University cultures, like politics, are local. Many state schools are floundering—for example, the much-ballyhooed Arizona States. But many manage to cap class sizes and keep professors busy teaching. Dropouts and graduates differ, but they’re not the drowned and saved. Some transfer to other universities. Some join the military, straighten out their lives, and come back, powered by the GI Bill, to graduate too late to be counted with their class. Some find secretarial positions to support their kids, and earn BAs and better jobs in middle life. But those cases are exceptional.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The system runs, in part, on its failures. Administrators count on the tuition paid, from borrowed money, by undergraduates who they know will drop out before they use up many services. To provide teaching they exploit instructors still in graduate school, many of whom they know will also drop out and not demand tenure-track jobs. Faculty, once they have found a berth, often become blind to the problems and deaf to the cries of their own indentured students. And even where the will to do better is present, the means are often used for very different ends.

In many universities, finally, the sideshows have taken over the big tent. Competitive sports consume vast amounts of energy and money, some of which could be used to improve conditions for students. It’s hard not to be miserable when watching what pursuit of football glory has done to Rutgers, which has many excellent departments and should be—given the wealth of New Jersey—an East Coast Berkeley or Michigan. The university spends $26.9 million a year subsidizing its athletic programs. Meanwhile faculty salaries have been capped and raises canceled across the board. Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians. Repairs have been postponed, and classroom buildings, in constant use from early morning until late at night, have become shabbier and shabbier.

When critics argued that it made no sense to support football at the expense of teaching, an official spokesman replied: “The university’s direct support to athletics represents only about 1 percent of the Rutgers budget.” Presumably he counted on readers not to know that in any large organization’s budget, the entire amount of money that is not committed years in advance is no more than 1 or 2 percent—or, to put it more specifically, that athletics has swallowed the money that could otherwise have been used to improve the university’s core activities. Christopher Newfield is not the only sober, informed observer who believes that political elites are deliberately attacking middle-class education.

Perhaps it’s not a crisis. After all, as many observers have pointed out, this is the way we live now, and room remains for exceptions and for hope. Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas. It would also be instructive to see engaged teachers like Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), a recent polemic against the corruption of the humanities, concern themselves with the concrete situation in which most American students find themselves. Polemics about the death of the humanities, however eloquent, won’t remedy the inhumanities that thousands of students encounter, predictably, year by year.

Best of all would be for enterprising publishers to find curious writers and have them describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects. The polemical books, even those that have some substance, end up slinging mud—which, as Huckleberry Finn pointed out to Tom Sawyer, isn’t argument—more often than laying out the evidence. The empirical studies, with a very few exceptions, are deliberately cast in such general terms, and written in such a value- and metaphor-free style, that they won’t reach anyone without a professional interest. Neither sort would give an intelligent outsider—say, a parent or student, a regent or a trustee—a vivid picture of a year’s life and work at a college or university, as it is experienced by all parties; much less a lucid explanation of how finance and pedagogy, bad intentions and good execution shape one another in the academic world.

It must be fun to howl “Read Your Greeks” and denounce evil conspiracies. But public discussion and scrutiny would become much more productive if informed writers captured the texture and flavor of the American university as convincingly as Thomas Ricks, Evan Wright, Elizabeth Samet, and others have done for segments of the military. The novelists discovered this territory long ago. Where are the great journalists? They will find students who manage to do excellent work and many more cases of wasted possibilities, and they might gain some insight into why.

Propaganda and American Foreign Policy: A Historical Overview

http://kbpublisher.gu-scs.com/kb_file/LSHS-453_Spring_2012_Syllabus.pdf

Memories of the Bush Administration

November 3, 2011
Memories of the Bush Administration
By ALAN BRINKLEY, New York Times

KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
A Memoir
By Donald Rumsfeld
Illustrated. 815 pp. Sentinel. $36

IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
Illustrated. 565 pp. Threshold Editions. $35

[JB Note: My March 12, 2003 unanswered email to Secretary of State Colin Powell informing him of my decision to leave the US Foreign Service, as a gesture of opposition to the planned war in Iraq at. See also my "Too Parochial for Empire: The Bush Administration Conquers Washington," TomDispatch (2007)]


The administration of George W. Bush has already produced a remarkable body of contemporary history from a large group of talented journalists and writers — Jane Mayer, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Susan Faludi, Seymour M. Hersh, James Mann and many others. But in the last year, several members of the Bush administration have retaliated with books of their own. Among the most significant are former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Known and Unknown” and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “In My Time,” memoirs by perhaps the two most important figures (other than the president) in the years of terrorism and war. Both books have received mostly negative reviews — largely deserved. Rumsfeld’s book is dense and bloated, although modestly candid. Cheney’s is clearly written (with help from his daughter Liz Cheney), but with the exception of its last chapters, dry, earnest and dull. None of this seems to have had much impact on their sales. Both spent time at the top of the best-seller lists.

Political memoirs are normally unsurprising, but these two books are unusual for their defensiveness and occasional combativeness in the face of the broad popular contempt so many people expressed while Rumsfeld and Cheney were in office. The two men present similar arguments. Both rarely confess to making mistakes, though they often write sharply about others who have. But the most important question that these books raise is the one of their credibility.

That the two memoirs were published in the same year and are in many ways alike should not be surprising. Rumsfeld and Cheney have had a long and intimate relationship stretching back to the Nixon administration and into the present. But even before they met, they followed similar paths into politics and government.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were the sons of middle-class families — Rumsfeld raised in Chicago, Cheney in Nebraska and Wyoming. Both attended public high schools, excelled in athletics and enrolled in prestigious colleges. Rumsfeld attended Princeton, where he was a successful athlete and a popular social figure. Cheney went to Yale, but after two unsuccessful years moved to the University of Wyoming, followed by graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he hoped to get a Ph.D. in political science and become an academic.

Rumsfeld, who is nine years older than Cheney, became a member of Congress in 1962, while Cheney was still struggling through college. But in the early 1970s, their paths crossed, and they soon became close colleagues and friends. The relationship began when Cheney was a young, eager intern looking for a job in the Nixon White House. Rumsfeld — having abandoned a brief career in Congress — was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He hired Cheney as an aide — the beginning of a Horatio Alger-like rise — and their partnership shaped each other’s careers for decades afterward. In the aftermath of Watergate, Rumsfeld became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and took Cheney with him as his “stalwart assistant.” When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense in 1975, Cheney replaced him as Ford’s chief. Both men were Republicans with conservative leanings. But for many years, during which they often served simultaneously, they seemed to many people to be smart, pragmatic, nonideological young men who fit well into the moderate Ford administration.

When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, their paths diverged. Cheney was elected to Congress in 1978, where he remained throughout the Reagan administration. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed him secretary of defense, where he became a competent and generally respected figure. Rumsfeld moved into the private sector and remained there for 24 years, while staying active in a wide range of public service committees and commissions.

After the first President Bush left office, Cheney also moved into the private sector, spending time at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington before becoming the C.E.O. of Halliburton, one of the largest oil and construction companies in the world, with connections to militaries in several countries. When George W. Bush chose him as his vice president in 2000, Cheney helped persuade the new president to name Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense. Following the election, there was considerable relief that Cheney and Rumsfeld would be serving the new president, given the doubts that were being voiced about Bush’s capabilities. Even many Democrats were pleased that these competent, experienced figures would play a large role in the new administration.

Shortly before his election in 2000, when the vision of “compassionate conservatism” still seemed plausible, Bush said, “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’ ” But after the 9/11 attacks — eight months into his presidency — everything changed. “We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Cheney recalled. “We are dealing here with evil people.”

A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to “get it right this time.” Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge — the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a “war on terror.”

But what did a “war on terror” mean? For Cheney and many others, and eventually for President Bush, it seemed to mean only one thing — a regime change that would send a message through the Middle East that, as Paul Wolfowitz predicted, would undermine radical regimes and build new ones more consistent with American ­ideals. Although it was reasonably clear that no political regime had organized the 9/11 attacks, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush came to believe that the regime most in need of destruction was Iraq, even though there was no evidence that the Iraqis had played any role in the terrorist events. By late 2002, the Iraq war was on a fast track, justified by Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. There was resistance from some members of Congress, some United Nations investigators and some individuals in the State Department. But Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were among the most determined people in the administration to promote the assault on Iraq, were not deterred by the fact that the United States had never before launched a pre-emptive war. Their public argument was the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it soon became clear that there were no such weapons.

This discovery caused a political earthquake worldwide. The war now seemed to have no rationale at all, but Cheney and Rumsfeld quickly came up with new ones. Cheney in particular takes no responsibility for this remarkable failure of intelligence. Instead, he argues that the absence of weapons did not make Iraq any less dangerous, and perhaps more. As he often does throughout his book, he argues through others — in this case, David Kay, who worked on the Iraq survey group that was sent to find W.M.D.’s. Cheney quotes him: “I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war.” Charles Duelfer, another survey group member, insisted (with no visible evidence) that “Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s W.M.D. capability . . . after sanctions were removed.”

Rumsfeld brusquely dismisses his failure to provide sufficient troops to avoid what soon became an out-of-control insurgency that continued for years. He responds in his book, as he did at the time, “Stuff happens,” a phrase he often used when confronted by failures. Among the stuff that happened was the absence of body armor in a highly dangerous country. Soldiers begged for it in vain for months during his occasional visits to Iraq. Rumsfeld’s response was that we had to fight with the Army we had. He is still fighting on the cheap, defending himself with his favorite phrase — “known unknowns” (which is even borrowed for the title of his book). It allows him to claim that it was all but impossible to determine what the military needed. But he also presents himself as realistic enough to understand that Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner and his claim that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” would “haunt his presidency until the day it ended.” And he is candid enough to admit that he should have realized that the war would be a long and difficult one, that democracy in Iraq would be unlikely and that the American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, had led the country into chaos by recklessly and incompetently disbanding the Iraqi police and military, and the Baath Party government.

The fact of a war of choice was perhaps bad enough. But the Iraq war (and the Afghanistan war as well) were fought not just by weapons and battles. They were also fought by torture. Rumsfeld brushes away the charges of torture in his book by noting either that the Defense Department did not participate, or that the techniques it employed were “legal and humane.” Cheney, however, makes clear from the start that “we would have to work ‘the dark side if you will,’ ” a statement he continues to defend in his book.

Cheney insists that the “enhanced interrogation” that he helped create was not torture. Waterboarding, he has said, was humane and effective because a few lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel said so. Many of their colleagues were aghast, but they were mostly ignored and in some cases dismissed. Even some high-ranking military officers called waterboarding criminal torture. So did Senators John McCain (no stranger to torture) and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans. Cheney passingly mentions other forms of enhanced interrogation in his book, but he does not describe what they were. Nor does he make any mention of the many terrorist suspects who were turned over through “extraordinary rendition” to other countries, where there was no inhibition to using torture.

By 2006, the Bush administration was falling apart. The president’s poll numbers were falling almost by the day. Democrats were on their way to winning majorities in both houses of Congress. Cheney — the most powerful vice president in American history — was becoming an increasingly lonely figure within the White House. Bush decided to make changes — in large part because of the administration’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (In his book, Cheney blames the failure on Kathleen Blanco, the Louisiana governor, for dithering.) Among the dismissed, over Cheney’s strong objections, was Rumsfeld. (The president timidly delegated Cheney to give him the news. Rumsfeld stepped down without complaint.) Cheney, of course, could not be fired as vice president. But he had now become the most toxic figure in the White House.

Cheney’s chief of staff and enforcer, Scooter Libby, was accused of leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, whose husband had challenged the claim that Hussein was building nuclear weapons. Libby was later convicted of perjury. The president commuted his sentence, but as Cheney writes, “I felt strongly that Scooter deserved a pardon, and I broached the subject on numerous occasions with the president.” In the last weeks of Bush’s presidency, he asked again and, when denied, says that the president had made a “grave error”; he told Bush, “you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”

That was not the only time Cheney was repudiated. In 2007, Cheney pushed hard to bomb a nuclear reactor in Syria. When the president asked who agreed with the vice president, no one, including the president, raised a hand — a hard defeat for a man whom Karl Rove had long called “management.” “I was a lone voice,” Cheney pathetically writes. (The Israelis successfully bombed the Syrian reactor several months later.) By then, Cheney was one of the most unpopular political figures in America, often ridiculed as “Darth Vader.” The polls showed an approval rating of 13 percent.

Cheney did not take his loss of power easily, and the final chapters of his book are filled with bile and contempt. It was no secret that he had been a critic of Colin Powell through much of Powell’s tenure as secretary of state. He writes that Powell was “not only failing to support the president’s policies” but was “openly disdainful of them.” (Some people in the foundering administration believed that “the president’s policies” were often Cheney’s.) He “was particularly disappointed in the way” Powell “handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. . . . But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection.” And he was at least equally contemptuous of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She had, he writes, “made concession after concession to the North Koreans and turned a blind eye to their misdeeds.” Cheney consistently complains about what he considered her weaknesses. He also goes after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, claiming that he was often speaking “for himself and not reflecting U.S. policy.” By the end, he even seems to be disappointed with Bush himself — a disappointment that was probably reciprocated. Although Cheney is cautious in his criticism of the president, it seems clear that he thinks Bush had slipped back into what the vice president calls a pre-9/11 mode.

Brent Scowcroft, Gerald Ford’s and George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, said about the man he had worked with in two previous administrations: “Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” What had turned this capable, pragmatic, respected figure into the harsh and belligerent man who seemed toward the end to believe that only he understood the world of his time? Part of it was that he had become “really conservative,” as he told President Bush when he was invited to join the ticket in 2000. Certainly, he was convinced that 9/11 had dramatically changed the world and had radically transformed America’s role in it. And he was disturbed that so many people did not share his views. He also had serious heart problems through much of his life, which intensified during his tenure as vice president, and though he courageously fought to keep going, his poor health may have contributed to what Scowcroft considered his change.

The angry responses to Cheney’s book are evidence of how embattled the Bush White House became in its last years, and how central Cheney’s role was. Colin Powell has accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots” in his book. He has challenged Cheney’s claim that he had forced Powell out of the State Department. Powell himself had long made clear that he would serve only four years, and he charged Cheney with lying. Powell also called Cheney’s statements in the book “the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.” Rice responded to Cheney by describing his book as “utterly misleading” and an “attack on my integrity.” Even Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his preposterous hints that he would run for president, gave an interview in which he accused Cheney of “lying.”

Together, Rumsfeld and Cheney served through many crises and many disasters. It is not surprising that in the turbulent post-9/11 years there would be contention, disappointment, failure, sniping and broken friendships. If they had written candidly about these battles, their books would be of real interest. Instead, both men have stuck to their defensive postures. Cheney said in a television interview that his book would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” For the most part, the explosions were tame. But perhaps the most remarkable explosion was one of Cheney’s own statements. Toward the end of his book, he boldly describes the Iraq war — one of the most disastrous events of recent decades — as a great American triumph. The fiasco that nearly destroyed Bush’s presidency was, according to Cheney, “one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency — the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.” If that statement isn’t an “explosion,” it would be hard to know what is.

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”