Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger

Kuklick, a University of Pennsylvania American history professor, studies three groups of thinkers (the RAND Corporation; Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt and Ernest May's ""May Group""; and academics who became presidential advisors, including George Kennan, McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger) to understand intellectuals' ""thinking about war"" and how their ivory-tower-nurtured philosophies meshed with ""political reality."" Kuklick's deconstruction of the doctrines of massive retaliation, flexible response and gradual escalation will ring familiar to students of the cold war, and he underlines rather than upends the traditional consensus on ""philosophers in government."" (Kennan is the ""first intellectual middleman of the postwar national security studies,"" and Kissinger is ""supremely gifted in translating ideas into politics."") But it is RAND, an Air Force-created think tank, and the reactions to its blend of ""mathematical-economic"" reasoning, organizational theorizing and ""rational choice"" decision making that dominate the volume. The book picks up a full head of steam in the Vietnam chapters where RAND analysts like Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and policymakers get their comeuppance. Kuklick equates his scholar-advisors subjects with ""primitive shaman"" who perform ""feats of ventriloquy"" and concoct ""muddled"" policy. A devastating indictment of brilliant but flawed men.