From the Publisher

When George W. Bush campaigned for the White House, he was such a novice in foreign policy that he couldn't name the president of Pakistan. But he was advised by a group that called themselves the Vulcans—a group of men and one woman with long and shared experience in government, dating back to the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and first Bush administrations. After returning to power in 2001, the Vulcans—including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleeza Rice—were widely expected to restore U.S. foreign policy to what it had been in past Republican administrations. Instead, they put America on an entirely new course, adopting a far-reaching set of ideas and policies that changed the world and America's role in it.

In this revelatory and newsworthy volume, James Mann narrates the hidden story of these six history makers, their early careers and rise to power, the interactions and underlying tensions among them, their visions, and their roles in the current administration. Along the way, he offers a wealth of new information (about how Rumsfeld schemed in the Nixon White House, how Cheney toiled as Rumsfeld's doorkeeper, how Wolfowitz first warned of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East in the 1960s) to complete a remarkable look at George W. Bush's inner circle.

Author Biography: James Mann is the senior writer in residence at the CSIS International Security Program and the author of two critically acclaimed books: About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton and Beijing Jeep. Previously, he was a long-time correspondent with the Los Angeles Times, and his writing has also appeared in The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly.

The New York Times

… lucid, shrewd and, after so many high-decibel screeds from both the right and left, blessedly level-headed. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the back story of how and why America came to deal with the rest of the world the way it is doing under the Bush administration. — Michiko Kakutani

The Washington Post

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again," Ronald Reagan liked to say, quoting Thomas Paine. But the efforts of the Vulcans to create a new world order today, Mann persuasively argues, are at heart not new at all. They are an effort to repeal the inhibitions and restrictions that have constrained American power in the last 30 years and to revive an earlier moment when the unapologetic and unbridled pursuit of global primacy was a widely accepted national goal. — Alan Brinkley

Publishers Weekly

Mann, a former correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, offers a lucid, nonpolemical and carefully researched history of President Bush's foreign policy team, the self-described "Vulcans" (after the Roman god of fire). In doing so, Mann illuminates the administration's rationale for the Iraqi war with impressive clarity. For the Vulcans, he shows, the war is not an anomalous foreign adventure or a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. On the contrary, the foreign policy, devised by Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, was 35 years in the making and has its roots in the Republican Party faction that opposed d tente with the Soviet Union. Vulcan philosophy has three major tenets: the embrace of pre-emptive action, the notion of an "unchallengeable American superpower" and the systematic export of America's democratic values. Implicit is the rejection of both the notion that transatlantic relationships are the natural focus of U.S. foreign policy and the Kissingeresque realpolitik that dominated much of 20th-century policy. Mann's purpose is to explicate Bush's foreign policy, not to make sweeping value judgments about its wisdom; he takes care to expose not only errors in the Vulcans' assumptions about the war in Iraq but also those of the war's opponents. This well-written, serious, evenhanded effort should be essential reading for anyone interested in American foreign policy. Agent, Rafe Sagalyn. First serial to the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. (On sale Mar. 8) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Today every presidency has its own shelf of contemporary histories and other accounts, but rarely do these books combine the immediacy and depth of this one. Mann (About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton) has written a collective biography of George W. Bush's foreign policy inner circle: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice. In tracing their personal histories in the military, government, business, and academia, Mann aims to show how America's stance toward the world changed over the 40 years between the Vietnam War and our invasion of Iraq and how the notion of distinct pre- and post-Cold War eras is misleading. "The ideas that the United States should emphasize military strength, should spread its ideals and should not accommodate other centers of power," Mann shows, were long in the making. Mann interviewed dozens of insiders, including several of his principals, and researched archival and other printed sources to produce this exceptionally evenhanded and well-written book. Highly recommended.-Robert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Intricately shaded and scary profile of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and to a lesser degree Condoleeza Rice. In a steady voice that likes to hew to the facts, Mann (About Face, 1999, etc.) profiles a group of associates with close, intricate, and overlapping ties. Dubbing themselves the Vulcans in honor of the Roman god of fire, they craft, in the stead of a president with little to no experience in the greater world, the global vision of the current administration, which the author broadly summarizes as a willingness to deploy sledgehammer and fire to protect and further American interests abroad. Not that this chorus sings in harmony, notes Mann: they have manifold strategic and tactical differences, but they share an overriding sense of the country's potential as a unilateral military power, with its unbridled ability to affect events on the global stage. The author anatomizes in exquisite detail the players' backgrounds and the experiences that shaped them, to whom they are beholden, and the trajectories of their careers-no mean feat with this seemingly incestuous and opportunistic lot, whose alliances and perspectives shift through time and space. But they all emphasize US supremacy, confrontational and self-interested, diplomatically thuggish, built on "coalitions" or "ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted." Iraq, of course, is the unpersuasive field test for their belief in retaliation, an emphasis on weapons on mass destruction (real or otherwise), stanching terrorism, containing the "axis of evil" states. None of these rationales obviously apply, but all are brought tobear. Mann doesn't address the thorny question of how the Vulcans plan (or have failed to plan) to contend with the swarm of variables that assert themselves once the facade of tyranny is dismantled. A neat dissection of current American tactics overseas that, understandably, as history has yet to be played out, leaves hanging the question of their efficacy.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Barnes & Noble.com: What made you want to write this book about the Bush "War Cabinet?"

James Mann: I wanted to look at this foreign policy team and understand how they built the current policy. I wanted to look at these six key people -- [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld, [Vice President] Dick Cheney, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, [Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz, [Deputy Secretary of State] Richard Armitage, and [National Security Advisor] Condoleezza Rice -- and see how they got their ideas over the last 30 years and how they were connected to each other in previous administrations.

B&N.com: What does the title refer to?

JM: The advisors who were working on the 2000 Bush presidential campaign gave themselves the name "Vulcans." Vulcan is the Roman god of fire and the forge. The name was then extended from this group of campaign advisors to anyone who worked on foreign policy and military policy in previous administrations and was coming back into office with the new administration. So, in the book, "The Rise of the Vulcans" is meant to refer to the rise of their careers and the blossoming of the schools of thought discussed in the book.

B&N.com: Foreign policy can be a very dry subject, yet you wrote a narrative as exciting and engaging as a novel. How did you do this so successfully?

JM: As a reporter, I watched foreign policy being made not in the abstract but by individuals. These people are extremely interesting. In writing a book like this, I spent a lot of time thinking about the narrative and detail. My background is as a journalist. I spent 25 to 30 years doing news stories that were actually 900-to-1,500-word narratives. In the same way, I always thought a book -- in this case a book about foreign policy -- should always be a narrative.

B&N.com: You say you chose to write about the "supporting cast" rather than the "leading" or "starring role" of the president. Why?

JM: The theme of the book is how United States foreign relations evolved over the 30-year period from the early 1970s to the George W. Bush administration. With these six people [Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Armitage, Wolfowitz, and Rice] I chose to write about, I got to trace this evolution, because almost all of them took positions in previous administrations. Through these six "Vulcans," you can see the development of American foreign relations in this period. With George W. Bush, you can't see it, because he has no prior foreign policy record before his presidency.

B&N.com: Tell our readers a little about each one of the six people, the dramatis personae, if you will? Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld?

JM: He is a man known for sheer force of his aggressive personality within the bureaucracy. From the Nixon administration into the Ford administration, briefly in the Reagan administration, and into the present Bush administration, he has been the most bureaucratically tenacious guy. In the Nixon years, he fought for domestic programs. In the Ford years, he personally fought and challenged Henry Kissinger over Kissinger's views on détente and American defense policy. In the current Bush administration, he has regularly been at odds with Secretary of State Colin Powell.

B&N.com: Vice President Dick Cheney?

JM: Dick Cheney is a perfect complement to Rumsfeld, which is why they've worked together so well for 30 years. Rumsfeld is assertive and outgoing, openly contentious, while Cheney is low-keyed, seemingly self-effacing, discreet. Rumseld is likely to appear in public. Cheney is likely to operate behind closed doors. If Rumseld doesn't like something, he'll tell you straight on. If Cheney doesn't like something, he will make you feel that his not liking it is just business, not personal.

B&N.com: Secretary of State Colin Powell?

JM: Two things stand out about Powell. Both involve his rise within the military. First, Vietnam produced splits between military and civilian leaders of the military in the Defense Department and Congress. In the 1970s, the military leaders were looking for someone who could talk to the civilian leaders in Washington, and conversely, the civilian leadership was looking for someone to talk to in the military. Colin Powell became the vehicle for that. When the secretary of defense needed an assistant from the military or when the military needed someone to fill a staff job that was opening up, the military leaders started to push Powell and the civilian leaders also wanted him in those positions. It was ironic because Powell at first wanted a traditional military career but instead got a new kind of career.

Secondly, Powell is considered famous for being cautious in the application of military force. But the reality is, he hasn't always been that way. There have been times when he has been willing to use military force in a big way. When he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he pushed hard for the intervention in Panama in 1989 on a large scale.

B&N.com: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage?

JM: Armitage is an amazing story. He is an Annapolis graduate and had a combat background in the Navy in Vietnam. He was not just in regular military operations but also in covert operations. He re-upped in Vietnam formally twice and then left the Navy to stay in Vietnam as a civilian. Armitage was furious at the American withdrawal from Vietnam. He said America was behaving like a man who got a woman pregnant and ran away from his responsibilities -- a runaway father.

B&N.com: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz?

JM: It is fair to say that intellectually, he is the most fascinating. Wolfowitz is remarkably innovative with his ideas. For example, while he was working for the Defense Department in the 1970s, he focused on the possibility of Iraq invading Kuwait. Many of the ideas put forward by Wolfowitz were precursors of the positions that Republicans and neoconservatives would take after the end of the Cold War. He really had a way of seeing ahead.

B&N.com: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice?

JM: She is remarkable for her political skill. She is very good at courting all sides in a policy dispute. She is an expert in U.S.-Soviet relations, and that is what originally brought her to prominence. One of her other great characteristics is her toughness. One amazing incident she had was with Boris Yeltsin before he became president of Russia. He was insisting on seeing President George H. W. Bush (she had a position in his administration), and there was a standoff between Yeltsin and her. She absolutely refused to back down. Ultimately, he backed down. That shows how resolute she is.

B&N.com: What role does President Bush play in leading or -- being led -- by the Vulcans?

JM: President Bush is the ultimate decision maker. He's not taking orders from the Vulcans. He makes the final decisions. But he gets his options -- many of his final ideas -- from the Vulcans, who are, of course, his advisors.

B&N.com: What is the main idea you want readers to take from your book?

JM: That these six people and their careers represent a whole separate, unrecognized era in American history. By convention, people tend to divide post–World War II American history into two periods -- from 1945 until the end of the Cold War as the end of one story. Then the post–Cold War, beginning in 1989 or 1991, as a whole new story.

If you look behind this conventional division, you will see a whole separate era beginning in the early 1970s through the beginning of early 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. The book is actually the story of those 30 years. Vulcans describes that era in which there was the rehabilitation and growth of American military power.

Read a Sample Chapter

Rise of the Vulcans

Viking Adult

Chapter One

Whenever the younger Bush stumbled over details-as he did, for example, when an ambush-style "pop quiz" by a television reporter demonstrated that he couldn't name the leaders of Pakistan or India candidate could argue that what mattered was a president's ability to select good people. "I've got one of the finest foreign policy teams ever assembled," he said in response to one Democratic challenge. He pointed to the men and women supporting him, such as his vice presidential nominee, Dick Cheney, Cohn Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, as symbols of continuity and stability. This group of advisers became, for all practical purposes, Bush's principal foreign policy plank in his first race for the White House. His message was not so much what he would do as whom he would appoint.

During the campaign Bush's foreign policy advisers came up with a nickname to describe themselves. They dubbed their team the Vulcans, in honor of the Roman god of fire, the forge and metalwork. Rice, who was serving as foreign policy coordinator for the Bush campaign, had been raised in Birmingham, Alabama, where a mammoth fifty-six-foot statue of Vulcan on a hill overlooking downtown paid homage to the city's steel industry The name had started as a joke, but it caught on, and the campaign group began to use it in public. That word, Vulcans, captured perfectly the image the Bush foreign-policy team sought to convey, a sense of power, toughness, resilience and durability. (Ironically, Birmingham's statue of the Vulcan was taken down for repairs in 1999 because it was beginning to fall apart, a detail that the Bush team understandably did not emphasize when it began employing the metaphor.)

To no one's surprise, once Bush became president-elect, he turned to this same group of veterans to fill most of the top jobs. By the time the new administration's foreign policy team was assembled in early 2001, it had the feel of a class reunion. Most of its members had already worked closely alongside one another in previous administrations, and the ties among them were close, intricate and overlapping.

Donald Rumsfeld, the new defense secretary, had first worked along side Cheney more than three decades earlier, when Cheney served as Rumsfeld's administrative assistant in the Nixon administration. Cheney, as defense secretary in the first Bush administration, had selected Cohn Powell (over several more senior generals) to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and served alongside him for three years. Richard Armitage, the new deputy secretary of state, had worked with Powell when the two men helped run the Pentagon in the Reagan administration. Paul Wolfowitz, the new deputy secretary of defense in 2001, had collaborated closely with Armitage when the two men were responsible for America's relations with Asia under Reagan. Wolfowitz had also served in the Pentagon as a top aide to Cheney. During the 1990s, when the Republicans were out of power, Wolfowitz had served on a prominent missile commission headed by Rumsfeld, and Armitage had run a small private consulting firm that employed Cheney's daughter.

By 2001 the Republicans had already controlled the White House for twenty of the previous thirty-two years. Their frequent successes in presidential politics had opened the way for ambitious Republicans such as the Vulcans to accumulate more years of on-the-job experience in foreign policy than their counterparts in the Democratic Party. They had a long history, a collective memory Even the two youngest members of the Bush foreign policy team of 2001-the president himself and Rice, his national security adviser-had extraordinarily close ties to this legacy of the past. Bush's father of course had been president of the United States and before that had served as director of central intelligence and U.S. vice president. Rice had had the arduous task of coordinating policy toward the Soviet Union in the first Bush administration; she had been carefully groomed as a protégée by Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security adviser.

The interconnecting relationships and the overhang of the past extended down through the ranks of the faithful. The aides and disciples of the top leaders had also toiled and advanced together through the series of past Republican administrations. Some of them shuffled back and forth from one boss to another. I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Cheney's new chief of staff, had been an undergraduate student of Wolfowitz's at Yale University three decades earlier and had served as an aide to Wolfowitz for more than a decade during the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Several members of Rice's new National Security Council team had worked previously for Cheney, Wolfowitz or Armitage.

Because of this legacy, as the Republicans prepared to return to power in 2001, there were suggestions that America relations with the world were about to be restored to what they had been in the first Bush administration. During the same week, New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman chose the same word, retreads, to describe the people surrounding Bush. "George II was an obedient son who emulated his father, the old king, in all respects," wrote Dowd a few weeks later. "He felt no need to put his own stamp on his monarchy."

Such perceptions extended well beyond the realm of newspaper columns. Overseas many foreign governments and scholars basked in a sense of security that a new Bush administration would follow largely along the lines of the previous one and that its policies would be predictable. Its veterans were thought to care about great power diplomacy, not moral crusades; about maintaining stability, not changing the world. "The Republicans are generally better at foreign and security policy than the Democrats," observed Yang Jiemian of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

These predictions of restoration and continuity were soon shown to be wrong. From its first months in office the new Bush foreign policy team made clear that it would deal with the world in new ways. Its style was, from the outset, at variance with that of the first Bush administration. During the first nine months of 2001 the new administration adopted a more confrontational approach to dealing with North Korea and with China. It quickly pressed forward with plans to develop a missile defense system, despite the uneasiness of its European allies. It displayed a pronounced skepticism about the value of international agreements and treaties that it believed were not in the American interest.

The administration's distinctive approach to the world became considerably more pronounced after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Over the following year the Vulcans put forth a remarkable series of new doctrines and ideas, ones that represented a dramatic break with the foreign policies and strategies of the past. In dealing with hostile powers, the Bush administration decided that the United States would no longer hold to the policies of containment and deterrence that had been the fundamental tenets of the cold war. Instead the United States would be willing to start a war through a preemptive attack. In the Middle East, where the United States had for decades worked closely with such authoritarian regimes as Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration broke precedent by openly espousing the cause of democracy and by talking about the political transformation of the entire region.

These developments represented something more profound than a minor change of direction from one Republican administration to another. They represented an epochal change, the flowering of a new view of America's status and role in the world. The vision was that of an un challengeable America, a United States whose military power was so awesome that it no longer needed to make compromises or accommodations (unless it chose to do so) with any other nation or groups of countries.

This new worldview represented the culmination of ideas and dreams that had been evolving in Republican administrations for more than three decades. Their intellectual origins can be traced back to the Reagan administration and, still earlier, to events in the Ford administration-notably, to the responses to the American defeat in Vietnam and to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union.

Several of the Vulcans had begun their careers in Washington in reaction to those two developments. Three top officials of the George W. Bush administration-Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz-had been participants in the debates over detente. Two others, Powell and Armitage, had served in the military in Vietnam. As these men rose through the ranks of Washington's foreign policy apparatus, they kept in mind the lessons and experiences of the 1970s: The United States should build up its military power, regain popular support for the armed forces and advance democratic ideals in such a way as to confront and, where possible, overwhelm its leading adversaries.

As a group the Vulcans embodied a generation in American foreign policy, one every bit as distinctive as the Wise Men (such as Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Averell Harriman and John McCloy) who created a new American foreign policy at the end of World War II or the Best and Brightest (the Kennedys, Robert McNamara, the Bundys and Rostows) who prosecuted the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

The Wise Men had come to government from the worlds of business, banking and international law; their spiritual home was Wall Street and the network of investment banks and law firms connected to it. The Best and Brightest had come to government with strong backgrounds in academia; their spiritual home was Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Harvard campus where many of them had studied or taught.

The Vulcans were the military generation. Their wellspring, the common institution in their careers, was the Pentagon. The top levels of the foreign policy team that took office in 2001 included two former secretaries of defense (Cheney and Rumsfeld), one former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Powell), one former undersecretary of defense (Wolfowitz) and one former assistant secretary of defense (Armitage). Even Rice had started her career in Washington with a stint at the Pentagon, working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In the 1940s the Wise Men had concentrated on constructing institutions, both international and in Washington, that would help preserve democracy and capitalism in a threatened Europe. For institution building, their skills of law and business proved invaluable. Kennedy's Best and the Brightest had attempted, with less success, to make use of their academic expertise to extend American influence in the third world and counter what they saw as Communist movements in Asia and Africa.

The Vulcans were different. They were focused above all on American military power. In the 1970s and early 1980s their goal was to help the armed forces recover and rebuild after Vietnam. In the late 1980s and early 1990s they attempted to figure out when and how America's revitalized military power should be employed. By the first years of the twenty- first century, with U.S. war-making abilities beyond question, they were trying to sketch out a new role for America, one that took into account the overwhelming gulf between America's military power and that of any other nation.

The Vulcans represented the generation that bridged what are commonly depicted as two separate and distinct periods of modern history: cold War and post-cold war. For the Vulcans, the disintegration of the Soviet Union represented only a middle chapter in the narrative, not the end or the beginning.

Hundreds of books have been written about America's role in the cold war. Most of these works end in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or in 1991, with the Soviet collapse. There is an entire school of study that is now called cold war history. Meanwhile, over the past decade, many other books have been devoted to what is commonly called the post-cold war world, and these works tend to begin in 1989-1991. All these books tend to assume that the end of the cold war marked a break so fundamental that historical narratives must either start or stop there.

The story of the Vulcans serves as a reminder that this bifurcation of history into cold war and post-cold war is ultimately artificial. In their careers, the Vulcans worked on both sides of the arbitrary divide. 'While working in government, they confronted firsthand both the world of the Berlin Wall and the world without it.

If we can reach beyond our continuing preoccupation with the end of the cold war, then we can begin to detect, through the lives of these Vulcans, a coherent narrative. It is the story of the gradual rise of an America whose strength is without precedent in the history of the world. Indeed, we can look at the time span covered in this book as itself a distinct historical period. Between the early 1970s and 2003 American power rose gradually from its nadir, at the end of the war in Vietnam, to a position of incontestable military power.

At the beginning of this era the United States was reeling from its de feat in Southeast Asia. A common view, both overseas and at home, was that the United States was in decline. The American military was in disrepute and was beset by racial tensions; in Congress, defense budgets were regularly under attack. The United States was eager for a new series of understandings overseas: détente with the Soviet Union and, meanwhile, a new relationship with China to help keep the Soviets in check.

Then America reversed course. Over the following decades the United States elected repeatedly to augment its power and to wield its economic and military might in such a way that it could overwhelm any potential rival. The Vulcans were at the center of these events and these choices. They were among those who were convinced America was not in decline, that it was and should be the world's most powerful nation and should advance its values and ideals overseas. Through the Vulcans and their careers we can see the transformation of America and the emergence of its role as the world's reigning superpower.

Continues...

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