Paul Nitze's legacy: for a new world - Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - Transcript

US Department of Defense Speeches, April 15, 2004

Remarks as delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to the Aspen Institute at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, Thursday, April 15, 2004.

Wolfowitz: Thank you, Walter [Isaacson, President and CEO, The Aspen Institute], I guess, for that warm introduction. I think you've set me up, though, for possibly disappointing the audience. But I couldn't resist the invitation to come and speak on this occasion because Paul Nitze has had a huge mark on my career over many, many years, starting with 1969, when I was still a very much wet-behind-the-ears graduate student who came to Washington to work with three great men: Paul Nitze, Dean Acheson and Albert Wohlstetter who had formed a small, but extraordinarily effective lobby to support what was then known as the Safeguard ABM System. History has moved on a long way from that time, in part, because of what those three men did. But of course, by the time I met Paul, he was already well into his sixties. But as we know, he's always got the energy and the vitality of someone 20 years his junior. And I must say, in some ways, I think he bested me, 30 years his junior, 30-plus.

But it is a pleasure and an honor to be able to share this day with you. I noticed Walter mentioned that I was one of Paul's many less illustrious successors as head of the Policy Planning Staff. And I have to confess that when George Shultz took over as Secretary of State and I was head of Policy Planning, he asked me to give him a memo on how we could restore policy planning to the position of influence that it enjoyed under George Kennan and Paul Nitze, which I didn't take as a terribly complimentary description of my year and half in that job. But, anyway, I moved on to something else fairly soon.

But then I went to the Pentagon in the late '80s, early '90s, as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, which, in many ways, was a transformation of a job Paul held, called the Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA [International Security Affairs]. And of course, as everyone knows, Paul was one of our most distinguished Deputy Secretaries of Defense, even though it was for a relatively short period, but a very decisive one. A good friend of mine, who was one of the best of our military attaches, retired as a colonel who worked for Paul at ISA, described him once to me as the best Secretary of Defense we never had. And I think we all know that probably one reason we never had him as a cabinet officer was he was a little bit too outspoken about his views when he was less than a cabinet officer, but that is part of why we love him, and it's part of why he was so influential.

Paul and I once did enumerate the various jobs we have in common and we ended up by talking about our mutual love for the school that Paul co-founded the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I pointed out at the time that I had one thing on him--he may have founded SAIS [the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies], but he had never been dean of the Paul Nitze School. Of course, in many ways, he was the spiritual dean of SAIS for many decades, so I don't really have that one on him.

On Saturday, as I think some of you know and I'm told, by the way, that Paul--and we know Paul isn't here for lunch and part of it is they hope to save his energy and vitality to go up to Maine for the christening of the U.S.S. Paul Nitze destroyer named in his honor. To name a destroyer after a living American is an honor bestowed on very, very few people and, I confess, I don't expect to follow in Paul's footsteps on that one.

But I do have one more item to add to your list, Walter. When you hear what it is, you might think I would have done better to leave it off, but in the warm spirit of this occasion, I want to confess something else that Paul and I have in common. When the Eisenhower administration began--we learned this when we asked Paul to do a sort of oral history on videotape--Paul described how when the Eisenhower administration began and he found himself out of government and went to academia to his own beloved SAIS, he'd spent almost a decade, in his words, "being supported by the facilities of the government," which in this case I think translates into "Paul no longer had a driver." So he went out to buy himself a car.

It turns out that closing the deal was the easy part. It was the next step in the process that required some truly delicate negotiation. Paul got behind the wheel of the car, put it into reverse and ran into the car behind him. He tried again, this time going forward and hit the car in front of him. In Paul's telling of the story, he refers vaguely to some further trouble getting out of the parking lot, but I'm happy to report that things quickly improved, once he was on the road because, by the time he got to SAIS, as he put it, "there were only those three grievous errors."

And here's where I have to tell a story on myself. At SAIS, we also had a very tight parking lot. I had a reserved parking space, which I'm told new employees were instructed firmly to avoid. I only recently learned that it was worse than that. They weren't just warned to avoid parking in the space reserved for my car, they were told it would be wise to avoid parking anywhere near my car [laughter] which, apparently was referred to as "the red Blazer, with all the dents." So I guess I managed to emulate Paul in some other things as well.