[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 14 (Thursday, February 6, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1112-S1113]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBERING ALBERT WOHLSTETTER
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, on January 10, 1997, Albert
Wohlstetter passed away. His death is a great loss--not only to his
family and friends--but to our Nation, which has benefited over many
decades from his intellectual brilliance, vision, and moral clarity.
For more than 40 years, Albert Wohlstetter was involved in all
aspects of U.S. national security policy. Presidents, from Truman to
Bush, profited from his analysis of major defense and foreign policy
issues. What students of strategic policy, what policymakers in the
Pentagon have not read, ``The Delicate Balance of Power''--and been
awed by his penetrating insight? It speaks to his extraordinary,
visionary intellect that he influenced so many from outside the
beltway. Albert never joined any administration; he was never willing
to take a position that may require compromise between truth and the
demands of politics.
As we approach the next century and the challenges it brings, we
should keep in mind that Albert Wohlstetter was one of the staunchest
champions of ``peace through strength''--before the term became popular
during the Reagan administration. Albert cautioned against the folly of
seeking security in arms control agreements, and advocated placing our
trust in America's military strength and technological ingenuity.
As we look back on his article, ``Spreading the Bomb Without Quite
Breaking the Rules,'' we can see so clearly that Albert was also ahead
of his time--recognizing in the mid-1970's that the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty's peaceful nuclear cooperation provisions would
fuel the proliferation of nuclear technology. As a result, America, our
friends and allies are faced today with a growing number of countries
who possess or are on the way to possessing, nuclear weapons.
Whether he was analyzing strategic issues or unveiling the hypocrisy
of Western policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one could be sure of two
things: Albert Wohlstetter was intellectually honest and thoroughly
principled. For 4 long years, in countless articles, Albert reminded
our leaders that with America's superpower status came not only vast
military strength, but immense moral responsibility--and for those
reasons, allowing a small nation in the center of Europe to become the
victim of genocide was unconscionable.
Mr. President, I have barely scratched the surface of Albert
[[Page S1113]]
Wohlstetter's tremendous contributions to our Nation. I ask that the
eulogy given by Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense,
be printed in the Record.
The eulogy follows:
Albert Wohlstetter, 1913-1997
(By Richard Perle)
Not long before he died, Albert amused himself and--anyone
who would listen--by reading a poem by Wallace Stevens called
Six Significant Landscapes. Joan and Roberta thought I should
read it here. And when they faxed it to me in Washington, I
knew why: you can't hear this short poem without thinking
about Albert, without seeing, in your mind's eye, that
wonderful, warm, engaging smile which, prompted by a
recollection or an idea or a phrase, would fill a room. So
here it is, Landscape Six:
Rationalists, wearing square hats
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles,
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses--
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon--
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Had I'd known the poem, or read it before telling a New
York Times reporter on Sunday that Albert was a rationalist,
I would have added that he was a rationalist who wore a
sombrero. Because if there is one thing Albert never did, it
was to wear square hats or confine himself to right-angles.
Albert, in fact, never confined himself, period. His vision
was wholly original, never conventional. And it was vast.
Whether the subject was the design of strategic forces or the
future of technology or the inadequacy of treaties and
agreements or the implications of new systems of
communication, or income distribution as a function of race
or nuclear proliferation or the impact of topography on the
stability of peace in Bosnia, Albert saw old issues in new
lights--and new issues before anyone else.
Albert's refusal to accept the conventional wisdom on any
subject fueled his unrelenting drive to comprehend, to know,
to learn, to understand. Thus he spent a lifetime searching
for evidence, digging for facts, unearthing details. His
appetite for documents was voracious. Maps, charts,
statistics, studies, findings, testimony--he devoured them
all, and on every conceivable subject. And thanks to
Roberta--a wellspring of warmth, affection, wisdom and such
order as could be detected at Woodstock Road--the ever rising
flood of material that eventually forced the purchase of a
second house, was there when needed.
As so many here know well, Albert's capacity to assemble,
analyze and absorb mountains of information was limitless.
This was bad news indeed for those square hats who made the
mistake of blundering into debates with him: anything they
had ever said or done was certain to be dissected and
delivered back. It would hit one right between the eyes.
Whether in articles or briefings or congressional testimony
or professional panels, when Albert set out to make a point,
the holders of opposing--especially conventional--views were
well advised to take cover. And all the while, over decades
of intense debate and controversy, Albert conducted the
discussion of public policy with style and wit, with humor
and civility and, above all, with reason and integrity. He
was on the front lines in countless battles over public
policy for decades. Yet not once, in the nearly 40 years I
was privileged to know him, did Albert exhibit even a sliver
of the small minded, ill-tempered discourse that so often
characterized the debate over issues of strategy. For half a
century, the high ground was his.
Albert's scoffing at conventional thinking sometimes had
its humorous side. A few years ago, when Leslie and I were
visiting at 2805 Woodstock, I watched Sam Tanaka, the
Wohlstetter's Japanese gardener, hard at work planting
something with great difficulty while muttering a stream of
what I suspected were Japanese expletives. ``What are you
doing?'' I asked. ``Oh,'' he said, resignedly, ``every year
Mr. Wohlstetter makes me plant water chestnuts. Every year I
tell him water chestnuts don't grow in southern California.
He won't listen. `Try again,' he tells me. Ten years--no
water chestnuts.''
Albert's motto might well have been ``All the world's a
school and all the people in it merely students.'' For he
made students of us all. It didn't take one very long to
understand that Albert's towering intelligence and vast
knowledge were gifts he felt impelled to share. I was in the
eleventh grade at Hollywood High School when I had my first
Wohlstetter tutorial, standing by the swimming pool at
Woodstock Road. ``The Delicate Balance of Terror'' had
recently appeared in Foreign Affairs, and Albert had just
completed 80 or 90 classified briefings over many weeks in
Washington. What a marvel of precision and compression that
article was, and how intricate and subtle was the underlying
analysis. I would never have pursued a career in strategic
policy without Albert's patient, gentle, generous teaching
which began one day in 1958 and continued for 40 wonderful
years. And I might be a good deal thinner if Albert had been
less successful instructing me in the joys of the Michelin
Guide.
To those of us who were fortunate enough to be his
students, Albert had so very much to teach, not only about
his chosen field, but about history and economics and music
and art and architecture and food and wine and, for the
really smart ones, mathematics and mathematical logic. There
was hardly a subject about which Albert did not know a
great deal and--invariably what was most important. Above
all, he taught us the importance of accuracy and
precision. He believed that one earned the right to
comment the old fashioned way--by setting and meeting the
highest standards of rigor and objectivity.
I won't even attempt to catalogue Albert's extraordinarily
rich intellectual legacy. He tackled a succession of vexing,
complex issues of public policy from the early days at RAND
in the 1950's until his death last Friday. He brought clarity
and wisdom to everything he studied. But I do want to say a
word about Albert's most recent work concerning Bosnia.
No one worked harder than Albert to make the case for
protection and just treatment for the victims of aggression
in Bosnia, or to explain the broad implications of a failure
to do so. In his eighties, when most men shed burdens rather
than acquire them, Albert took upon himself the burden of
gathering, analyzing and publishing the facts about the
genocide in Bosnia and fitting those facts into the context
of western security and values. In his customary manner, he
worked tirelessly, night and day, for a distant people about
whose plight he came to know everything important. His
articles in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, his advice
and counsel to others, his mobilization of friends,
colleagues and students in the Bosnia cause were a wonderful,
moving testimony to his sense of rectitude. And his singular
effectiveness in shaping the opinion of thoughtful people
around the world is a tribute to the power of a great mind
hard at work.
As he confronted the nightmare in Bosnia, I was never
prouder of my friend and teacher.
In all its depth and richness, Albert's life was in every
sense a partnership. He and Roberta taught us all how far
beyond the sum of its parts a marriage so whole and complete
can reach. Those of us who marveled over the years at their
seamless collaboration know that it was no bow to the
feminist movement when Ronald Reagan awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom jointly to Albert and Roberta.
Albert had many favorite things, among them a poem by Dylan
Thomas. It goes like this:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into the good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into the good night.
Rage rage against the dying of the light.
____________________