Conservative Brain Trust: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of the American Enterprise Institute

339 Pages·2009·1.57 MB·English

by  Howard J. Wiarda

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Memoir (cid:129) International Relations
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A
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“Howard J. Wiarda authors a fascinating, evocative memoir as a ‘semi-insider’ to the
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Reagan ‘Conservative Revolution’ in his capacity as director of the Latin American A
program for the American Enterprise Institute. Wiarda offers a candid and revealing
assessment of Washington think tanks from his personal diaries and his involvement
with the White House and Congress, the Defense and State departments, and the CIA,
blending with these a description of the programs and individuals with which he dealt
during the 1980s.” —Philip Kelly, Emporia State University
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“Howard J. Wiarda’s observations on his years at the American Enterprise Institute and O
his service as key adviser to the Kissinger Commission on Central America provide an
invaluable glimpse at the way in which U.S. foreign policy was formulated and imple- N
mented during the Reagan era. Wiarda is a keen observer of the Washington policy
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scene and a provocative critic of the major players who shaped U.S. policy during
the Central American revolutions. This book is essential reading for those who want to E
understand how Washington really works.” R
—Michael Kryzanek, Bridgewater State College
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Conservative Brain Trust traces the history of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for A
Public Policy Research. More than that, it is the story of one of Washington’s leading
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think tanks: what it’s like to work there, how Washington works, and how AEI infl uences
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policy, including policy on the controversial Iraq War. V
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This book is a wide-ranging review of the Washington think tank world, focused particularly

on AEI. It is a social science and political study of the role of think tanks in Washington
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policy-making and also, in part, a personal memoir of the author’s adventures and
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perceptions in linking academic research and American foreign policy. What emerges
is a portrait of AEI as an infl uential, but also troubled, think tank with access to the A
highest levels of the U.S. government. Irreverent and analytical, the author recounts his
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adventures and experiences in the think tank and policy worlds. N
Howard J. Wiarda is Dean Rusk Professor of International Relations at the University CONSERVATIVE
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of Georgia; professor emeritus of political science and comparative labor relations
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and the Leonard J. Horwitz Professor of Iberian and Latin American Studies at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst; public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson U
BRAIN TRUST
International Center for Scholars; and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and
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International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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THE RISE, FALL, AND RISE AGAIN OF THE
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
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A division of Rowman & Littlefi eld Publishers, Inc. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2884-8
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Conservative Brain Trust

Conservative Brain Trust
The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of
the American Enterprise Institute
Howard J. Wiarda
LEXINGTON BOOKS
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham •Boulder •New York •Toronto •Plymouth, UK
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Adivision of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright ©2009 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiarda, Howard J., 1939-
Conservative brain trust : the rise, fall, and rise again of the American Enterprise
Institute / Howard J. Wiarda.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2883-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2883-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2884-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2884-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3305-7 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3305-5 (electronic)
[etc.]
1. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. 2. Policy sciences.
3. Economics—Research—United States. 4. Wiarda, Howard J., 1939- I. Title.
H62.5.U5W534 2009
320.60973—dc22 2008040887
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Preface ix
The book analyzes the hot ’n’heavy social life of Washington, D.C., its po-
litical machinations, and AEI’s strong role in Washington policy-making. The
book is full of insider stories, tales of how things work above and beyond the
textbook accounts, and the role of AEI at the heart of all this. Because, as we
tell the story, “everyone” in Washington knew that Ronald Reagan lacked the
brains to be president; AEI, it was assumed, had to be running the government
for him as Reagan’s behind-the-scenes eminencegrise.
In this book we provide an insider’s view of what the author saw and heard
at the Conservative Revolution. Of all he experienced at AEI. Here are fasci-
nating insights on the policy process, on how the White House works, on
Congress, the CIA, State and Defense departments. And on the key individu-
als involved: President Reagan, Ollie North, Michael Deaver, Nancy Reagan,
Ed Meese, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Al Haig, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Bill
Casey, Cap Weinberger, Margaret Thatcher, and many more. For the author
(and the detailed journals he kept during this period) is a walking storehouse
of insider stories and gossip, as well as a shrewd analyst of the policy process.
In this book we not only chronicle the rise, fall, and rise again of AEI, its
internal battles, and its policy influences; but we also provide in-depth analy-
sis of some of the major issues of the time: the crisis in Central America, the
Kissinger Commission efforts to solve it, the Cold War, the “great” Third
World debt crisis, the U.S. campaign to promote democracy abroad, the cri-
sis of American policy-making. For I was something of an insider, a partici-
pant in many of these great events, a “policy influential” as well as an ob-
server of how the process works. In one chapter I write, “The first time I went
down to the White House for a policy briefing, I covered my eyes with my
hands in mock agony; it was so nutty and ideological that I couldn’t believe
what I was hearing. After that, I started writing it all down.”
And now we have the full story in book form, full of what I think are fas-
cinating tales, analyses of the policy process, portraits of key personalities,
and my own political, social, and policy adventures and misadventures along
the way. This is not a tell-all book, let alone a “kiss ’n’tell,” but it is a book
about Washington and policy-making from a semi-insider, as well as a per-
sonal story of my own role and position within AEI and in the broader for-
eign policy community. I think it’s a fun and provocative read with numerous
insights on Washington, the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the policy
process.
In the preparation of this book I have incurred a large number of debts. Ray
Vernon and Sam Huntington were responsible for recruiting me at Harvard’s
CFIA; without that affiliation and the use of Harvard stationery, I doubt if I’d
ever gotten the call to Washington and AEI. Above all, I owe a large debt of
gratitude to Jeane Kirkpatrick for bringing me to AEI and thereby changing
Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction: “The Call” 1
2 “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”: An Introduction to
Washington and AEI 13
3 Into the Swim: AJaundiced View of the Main
Washington Foreign Policy Institutions 29
4 Think Tanks and Foreign Policy 45
5 Latin America on the Agenda: Foreign Policy in a
Peripheral Area 63
6 Power and Policy-Making in Washington, D.C.:
How Foreign Policy Gets Made 79
7 The Democracy Initiative in American Foreign Policy 93
8 The Kissinger Commission on Central America 109
9 Am I Entitled to Be Called “Honorable”?:
Serving the White House at Home and Abroad 137
10 Congress, the President, and Foreign Policy
Decision-Making: Conflict and Confrontation 165
11 On the Lecture Circuit: Doing Well by Doing Good 187
12 Washington Adventures and Misadventures:
Are We a Banana Republic or What? 209
v
vi Contents
13 The Looming Crisis of AEI 235
14 AEI in Collapse: AFarewell to D.C. 257
15 AEI Reborn and Reconstituted 279
Conclusion 303
Index 311
About the Author 327
Preface
Until 1980 I had been mainly an academic political scientist. I had been a
sometimes policy adviser during both the Dominican Republic revolution and
U.S. intervention of 1965 and the Portuguese revolution and its aftermath in
1974. I’d been involved, albeit on the periphery, in the 1968, 1972, and 1976
presidential elections. But these were mainly sideline activities; my main
work to that point had been as a university professor of comparative politics,
specializing in Latin America and Western Europe. I’d written several books
by then, taught courses on those areas, and climbed the academic ladder to
tenure and a full professorship at age thirty-seven. At the moment that the call
came that changed my life, I was happily situated as a research scholar at Har-
vard University’s Center for International Affairs (CFIA—later the Weather-
head Center).
The call, whose contents are detailed in Chapter 1, was from Jeane Kirk-
patrick. She had just been named UN ambassador by President-elect Ronald
Reagan and she wanted me to accompany her to New York as a top-ranking
aide. My position would also carry the title of ambassador. Wow! But as my
family (wife Iêda, children Kristy, Howard, and Jonathan) contemplated life
in New York, a follow-up call came in from Jeane. She was terribly sorry but
she had offered more UN ambassadorships than the State Department had
available. My heart sank. But then Jeane offered an alternative: come to AEI
as a foreign policy analyst and work on UN things for me from my Washing-
ton office.
So that’s how I got to Washington and AEI, the American Enterprise Insti-
tute for Public Policy Research. That’s how I became a denizen of one of
Washington’s leading think tanks and idea factories. That’s how I joined the
Reagan Revolution and, for a time, the “neocon” (neo-conservative) commu-
nity. That’s how I became a Washington insider, what we call a “mover ’n’
vii
viii Preface
shaker,” a policy wonk. And that’s how my life changed forever, no longer
“merely” an academic political scientist but now engaged in policy analysis
and advocacy.
Thus begins my memoir of the Reagan Revolution and the think tank that
was the brains behind it all—AEI. AEI came to be known as “the thinking
man’s think tank,” the source of all the great ideas—privatization, state down-
sizing, social security reform, health care reform, welfare reform, supply-side
economics, the Democracy Initiative, winning the Cold War—that consti-
tuted the core of President Reagan’s far-reaching revolution. AEI was the
source of the reform agenda that was enacted into policy and is still with us
today. AEI and its core group of scholars and intellectuals were instrumental
in designing and fashioning all these policies. For most of the 1980s I was a
part of this group; though my work focused on foreign policy, I also saw, up
close and personal, all the major domestic policy proposals that constituted
the Reagan reform agenda.
AEI’s sterling reputation as the source of Reagan Administration policy
disguised the fact that all was not well within the think tank. There were many
policy arguments, ideological and personal rivalries, and bitter disputes over
the future of the institute. AEI was a veritable “Peyton Place” of subsurface
political fights, internecine battles, and a neocon coup d’etat. Then, in the
midst of these political and ideological wars, AEI went belly-up financially.
Its president began secretly dipping into the private endowments that sup-
ported his most prestigious and high-powered scholars, AEI verged on the
edge of bankruptcy, and in a major upheaval the trustees had to come gallop-
ing in like John Wayne (or maybe Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) to
fire the president and bail out the institute. Only in recent years with its neo-
con ideologies and closeness to the George W. Bush Administration has AEI
begun to recover both its financial health and its policy influence.
All this is analyzed in this stirring and personal story of the rise, fall, and
rise again of this hothouse of intellectual inquiry and policy ideas. Hard
though it is for outsiders to believe, the government, even with its $3 trillion
budget, doesn’t think anymore; that has passed to the think tanks, AEI and
others, which do the government’s thinking for it. And not just thinking but
policy formulation, speech-writing, budget analyses to say nothing of (largely
illegal) political campaigning and policy advocacy. AEI is at the heart of it all
and serves up a hearty brew.
In this evocative memoir, we try to capture all this and more. We tell the
story of my recruitment at AEI and my initial meetings (and often stormy
confrontations) with the then big guns of the neocon movement: Jeane Kirk-
patrick, Arthur Burns, Michael Novak, Herb Stein, Irving Kristol, James
Miller, Walter Berns, Ben Wattenberg, Howard Penniman, and many others.