[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.

                          ____________________