Interviews
An Interview with James Mann
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 postWorld War II American history into two periods -- from 1945 until the end of the Cold War as the end of one story. Then the postCold 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.