The Assassins' Gate Read Online Free PDF Page B

late 1970s, when he was a midlevel official in the Carter Pentagon and was instructed by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to direct what would become a prophetic project, called the Limited Contingency Study. Wolfowitz set about to review threats to American interests outside Europe, and he ended up focusing on Persian Gulf oil—in particular, on the possibility of an invasion by Iraq to seize the oil fields of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Wolfowitz’s thinking took him well beyond conventional Cold War analysis, and it was received without enthusiasm at the Pentagon, where the study was shelved. The Iranian revolution in 1979, and the Iran-Iraq War that followed, turned American policy in the Gulf toward Iraq even as Saddam Hussein consolidated total power and exercised it with extraordinary brutality on his own population as well as on the Iranian enemy. There’s no reason to think that Wolfowitz, serving in several different capacities under Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, dissented from the tilt to Iraq. The concern of the Limited Contingency Study had been strategic threats to Persian Gulf oil, not the nature of Arab totalitarianism.
    But Wolfowitz was cut from finer cloth than Donald Rumsfeld, who on a diplomatic errand in 1983 famously shook Saddam’s hand, or Dick Cheney, who spent the decade in Congress opposing human-rights legislation, or George H. W. Bush, who looked the other way when the Chinese army crushed a popular movement in Tiananmen Square. Wolfowitz was raised on ideals in the household of Jack Wolfowitz, a Cornell mathematics professor whose family had fled anti-Semitism in Poland in 1920; several family members who had stayed behind eventually perished under the Nazis. Paul Wolfowitz grew up reading Orwell, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and his father’s library of books on war and the Holocaust. The atmosphere in the Wolfowitz home was morally serious, academically ambitious, and, politically, devoted to the midcentury liberalism that worshipped the memory of Roosevelt and supported Truman’s anticommunism.
    When Wolfowitz entered Cornell in the early 1960s, where he lived in an intellectual pressure cooker called Telluride House, he fell into the orbit of Professor Allan Bloom, for whom politics raised and answered the deepest questions about the purpose and value of human life, and whose late-night conversations at the house became legendary. In Saul Bellow’s fictionalized homage to Bloom, Ravelstein, published in 2000, Wolfowitz appears thinly disguised as Philip Gorman, a high government official who likes to phone his former teacher Bloom/ Ravelstein with the latest inside dope from the councils of government, always careful to keep state secrets to himself. Ravelstein has his own classified information—the higher truths of the human soul that date back to the Greeks. “It was essential to fit up-to-the-minute decisions in the Gulf War made by obviously limited pols like Bush and Baker into a true-as-possible picture of the forces at work, into the political history of civilization. When Ravelstein said that young Gorman had a grasp of great politics, something like this was what he had in mind.”
    But at Cornell, Wolfowitz kept some distance from Bloom’s magnetic pull; he was already politic enough to recognize that Bloom was a divisive figure. Throughout his career, Wolfowitz has had a talent for charming powerful people and becoming a protégé without also becoming a threat. He was always a good boy, the kind on whom adults fasten their dreams, with a yeshiva student’s purity about him, though his education was entirely secular. He organized a journey with friends to join the March on Washington in 1963, but when antiwar protest came to Cornell in Wolfowitz’s last semester in 1965, he and two others formed the Committee for Critical Support of the U.S. in Vietnam and held up signs at a tiny counterprotest. (Wolfowitz, like nearly every