Beyond Israel, the other major focus of Perle and Jackson was weapons of mass destruction—Soviet ballistic missiles. Jackson was the leading advocate of an antiballistic missile system that would be able to knock down incoming nuclear warheads. It was one of the most controversial and contentious issues of the day. Opponents argued that building such a system would be the opening shot in a new arms race. Not only would the United States have to compete with the Soviet Union on building more and bigger missiles, it would now have to also compete in building more and bigger anti-missile systems. But Jackson and his supporters argued that the Soviets had already deployed such a system around Moscow and America was falling behind.
One of his principal outside consultants helping to prepare legislation to push such a system through Congress was a University of Chicago mathematician who specialized in strategic warfare planning, Albert J. Wohlstetter. Among a small cadre of intellectual hawks, their weapons of choice were slide rules and slim pieces of squeaky chalk. Wars were fought not on battlefields but on blackboards covered with advanced mathematical formulas, like hieroglyphics on an ancient Egyptian tomb. Their language was Pentagonese, cluttered with acronyms and infused with the arcane euphemisms of mass death—kill ratios, throw weight, megatons. And they wore uniforms of tweed and corduroy as they shuttled from think tank to faculty lounge to corporate boardroom.
Born in New York in 1913, Wohlstetter went on to serve as a consultant for the War Production Board during World War II and later joined RAND. At RAND, Wohlstetter’s work helped lead to the Cold War concept of “fail-safe.” The idea was that bombers armed with nuclear weapons would be launched immediately toward Russia at the first indication of an attack, but forbidden from dropping their loads until they received an encrypted confirmation message from the President. He also helped develop the theory of “second-strike deterrence,” where some missiles would be “hardened”—buried in the ground—to be able to survive a first strike in order to retaliate with a second strike. “To deter an attack means being able to strike back in spite of it,” he wrote in his 1958 paper “The Delicate Balance of Terror.”
By the 1960s, Wohlstetter was becoming known as the intellectual godfather of Cold War hawks. He strongly opposed any form of détente or disarmament, and instead developed strategies not for passive deterrence but for active fighting and winning both conventional and nuclear wars. These ideas included building smarter bombs and taking preemptive action—attacking first with surgical, pinpoint strikes against key military targets.
Wohlstetter also weighed in firmly in favor of American expansionism. “He was a firm believer in a global order,” noted writer Khurram Husain, “underwritten by America’s might and secured through the export of American secular and humanistic values to the rest of the world. In his view America could not be a great power without a worldwide web of interests.”
In 1962, Wohlstetter left RAND but remained a part-time consultant and, after brief stints at Berkeley and UCLA, joined the University of Chicago’s Political Science Department in 1964. There he continued his nuclear weapons research as well as his opposition to détente and disarmament. Slowly, he began developing a cultlike following among some of his students and others within the right-wing establishment. In Scoop Jackson, Wohlstetter found a soul mate. Throughout his career, Jackson considered initiatives to bring the arms race under control to be “appeasement,” and constantly fought against them.
In 1969, he and Wohlstetter began fighting their biggest political battle as they tried to win passage of a bill that would fund development of an anti-ballistic missile system (ABM). The ABM debate was scheduled for the summer of 1969, with Jackson leading the battle on behalf of the Nixon administration and Wohlstetter acting as his principal theoretician. With enormous stakes riding on the outcome of the vote, Wohlstetter needed all the help he could get and decided to call two students he thought might be able to help out. Their names were Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
“I, at the time, was a graduate student of Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago,” recalled Wolfowitz, who was twenty-four at the time. “It was during the ABM debate in 1969 . . . And on the morning of the debate, lucky for me, Albert was in California, so I had the good fortune to be the one to take our charts to Senator Jackson all by myself and brief him. I had never personally met a senator in my life and I probably would’ve been awestruck at that time by even the most insignificant member of that great body. And there I was, face-to-face with one of the titans.”
Richard Perle, then twenty-five years old, also recalled the first time all four—Perle, Wolfowitz, Jackson, and Wohlstetter—came together. “Albert Wohlstetter phoned me one day. I was still a graduate student at Princeton doing some research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he said, ‘Could you come to Washington for a few days and interview some people and draft a report on the current debate shaping up in the Senate over ballistic missile defense,’ which was a hot issue in the 1969 debate. This was in 1969. And he said, I’ve asked somebody else to do this too, and maybe the two of you could work together. The someone else was Paul Wolfowitz.”
Perle had first met Wohlstetter while in high school in California. “Albert’s daughter, Joan, was a classmate at Hollywood High School,” he recalled. “We sat next to each other in Spanish class. She passed, I didn’t, but she invited me over for a swim and her dad was there. We got into a conversation about strategy, a subject I really didn’t know much about. Albert gave me an article to read—that was typical of Albert. Sitting there at the swimming pool, I read the article, which was a brilliant piece of exposition, and obviously so. We started talking about it . . . it was called the ‘Delicate Balance of Terror.’ It became quite a famous article in foreign affairs, and it was a way of looking at the strategic relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and the product of the serious piece of research that he had done as the director of the Research Council at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica.”
Following Hollywood High, Perle went on to graduate from the University of Southern California and then Princeton with a master’s degree in politics in 1967, before beginning studies for his Ph.D.
To Wolfowitz, Wohlstetter registered a blank: “One of my professors at Cornell said, ‘And by the way there’s this guy Albert Wohlstetter who’s just moving to [University of] Chicago from RAND, and you and he would probably get along very well.’ I’d never heard of the man, if that tells you something about how unconnected I was to the field. This was 1965. I arrive in Chicago. The first student/faculty tea I’m introduced to Wohlstetter, and he said, ‘Oh, are you related to Jack Wolfowitz?’ I said, as a matter of fact that’s my father. He said, I studied mathematics with him and Abraham Wald at Columbia.”
The ensuing ABM debate become one of the most dramatic events in the history of the Senate. “I was told later that Scoop literally ‘mopped the floor’ with Senator Symington’s chart,” said Wolfowitz, who like Perle would become a protégé of both Wohlstetter and Jackson. The vote was 51 to 50 in favor of the missile system, with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew breaking the tie.
The Cold War between the United States and Russia would eventually end and Albert Wohlstetter and Scoop Jackson would quietly disappear from the scene. But their protégés, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, would become their intellectual disciples.
After his stint in Washington with Jackson and the ABM treaty, Wolfowitz returned to the University of Chicago to continue his doctoral studies and then accepted a teaching position at Yale. While there, he began hammering away on his dissertation. His topic was nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, and he argued that the United States must do whatever it can to prevent even the hint of weapons of mass destruction from being introduced into the area.
Wolfowitz also argued that American security was dependent not just on defending traditional allies from Communist incursion. Equally important, he said, was going on the offense when necessary to protect America’s vital economic interests, such as oil. They were the thoughts and words of a geopolitical activist, eager to use force and preemption to advance American power, words that must have greatly pleased his dissertation advisor, Albert Wohlstetter.
In February 1980, Richard Perle quit Jackson’s office and joined Abington Corporation, an international consulting firm, to earn substantially more than his Senate staffer pay. His chief client was an Israeli arms company called Soltam Ltd. For much of his Senate career, he and his wife, Leslie Barr, who worked at the Department of Energy and later at Commerce, lived in a town house on Capitol Hill. The extra income allowed Perle to buy an aging, shingle-style, Postmodern three-bedroom bungalow in the fashionable Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Chevy Chase.
But his days in the private sector ended with Reagan’s election. Nicknamed “The Prince of Darkness,” Perle became the Pentagon’s new Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, a job that dealt with nuclear weapons issues worldwide, among other things.
In turn, he nominated a young lawyer named Douglas Jay Feith as his Deputy Assistant Secretary. It was an extraordinary appointment for someone just six years out of law school with only two years of experience in defense issues. But he was seen by many as Perle’s protégé.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Doug Feith had gone on to Georgetown Law. While there he joined up with Joseph Churba, a longtime friend and associate of Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose violent Jewish Defense League was declared a terrorist organization in both the United States and Israel. Feith and Churba coauthored an op-ed piece for
The Washington Post
that praised the tough, anti-Palestinian policies of newly elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
In 1981, he joined the Reagan administration’s National Security Council as a Middle East expert, but he lasted only about a year. Nevertheless, Richard Perle took him under his wing as his special assistant in 1982, before skyrocketing him to the Deputy Assistant Secretary position in 1984.
At the close of the Reagan years, many of the neocons, including Perle and Feith, left government, having received a chilly reception from George Bush, Sr., when he became president. Soon after leaving the Pentagon and into the 1990s, Feith began turning more and more extreme in his pro-Israel and anti-Arab and -Palestinian views. He churned out constant diatribes in Israeli newspapers complaining about the Israeli government’s policy on settlements (there should be more) or the Oslo peace process (it should end—he was even against the Camp David peace accords), or the Occupied Territories (they belong to Israel), or the Palestinians (they belong in Jordan), or Iraq (there should be regime change). Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute, called Feith’s published opinions “quite extreme.”
Beyond angry newspaper opinions, Feith denounced President George H. W. Bush for his “mistreatment of Israel” and even organized a committee to fight him—the Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East—complete with a full-page ad in
The New York Times
. He advised the Israeli government to pressure the White House to depose Saddam Hussein; led a Senate effort to pressure the Clinton administration to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; became the head of a right-wing pro-Israel special-interest group, The Center for Security Policy; became a founding member of One Jerusalem, an Israeli organization determined to prevent any compromise with the Palestinians over the fate of any part of Jerusalem; and became the vice chairman of the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a pro-Israel, defense-related special-interest group.
During these years, Feith was also putting together a legal practice. He teamed up with L. Marc Zell, a fellow associate from his days at the Washington law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Kampelman. Like Feith, Zell had turned into a zealot on the issue of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. In the late 1980s, he became an orthodox Jew and decided to join the right-wing Israeli settler movement. U.S. policy has always been, and continues to be, adamantly opposed to Israeli settlements.
“Feith is a partner of Zell, and Zell is a leading settler,” said Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Middle East Institute director. “He lives in a settlement; he is an advocate of expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. He and Feith are ardent, committed, extremist Likud supporters—that is to say, they support a policy of Israel’s expansion, they support a policy of crushing the Palestinians, they support the expansion of settlements.”
“I can bear personal witness to Feith’s adamancy on the issue [of settlements],” said Larry Cohler-Esses. “As a reporter during the late 1980s and early 1990s for
Washington Jewish Week
—whose attorney he was—I debated him several times over dinner on the very notion of Palestinian peoplehood.”
A few months after the Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada began, in December 1987, Feith’s partner, Zell, flew to Israel to lend his support to the settlers. He had received his welcoming indoctrination into the settler movement the year before in Israel by Gush Emunim (“bloc of the faithful”), the point on the spear for the extreme-right-wing Israeli settlement group.
Just a few years earlier, Gush Emunim devised a plot to blow up the Temple Mount—the Dome of the Rock—the third-holiest site in Islam. Their goal was to start a cataclysmic war between Jews and Muslims to hasten the coming of the Messiah and also to scuttle the Camp David accord, which called for the return of land under Israeli control to the Palestinians. The act was never carried out, only because in the end the plotters could not get rabbinical backing.