(Some thoughts on the death of Robert F. Ellsworth, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and Deputy Secretary of Defense who died last month. His memorial service took place on Saturday in Maryland.)
I only knew Bob Ellsworth in passing; his office was above mine in the 1990s and I saw him nearly every morning. We’d meet in the hall and he’d give the usual Washington greeting – “What do you know?” – with a sly but friendly smile. He walked with a mild stoop but one could still feel his height, emphasized by the oval of his head, which attracted the eye vertically from the slope of its large bald top down past the slant of his eyes along the sharp angle of his beard. A portraitist might describe the appearance as “hawkish,” but there was something kinder about it. Ellsworth did not gaze somewhere off in the distance above your middle brow, as politicians tend to do; he looked right at you, not judgmentally (although one sometimes wondered) or as to challenge, but rather with apparent sincerity, as if he really did mean to learn, what do you know?
Sincerity drew people to him. His movements and appearance spoke the language of honest and confidence. I remember now seeing his silhouette on television during one of the presidential debates in 1996; he seemed to trail his good friend Bob Dole everywhere, looking every bit the gray eminence. And there he was slightly offstage, in muted light, watching the audience, arms crossed but relaxed, with the fingers of one hand resting slightly above the crook of his forearm as Eisenhower used to stand at press conferences. All confidence.
I also remember that it was about this time that some colleagues and I took an office poll; we spared ourselves another presidential prediction (it’s hard to imagine it, but there really were some people who thought Dole might win. The “where’s the outrage?” comment didn't totally do him in). So we decided, let’s vote on the job we really care about (back in the idealistic 1990s!): Secretary of State, Ellsworth versus Holbrooke.
Ellsworth won hands down. It wasn’t entirely fair, of course: he was familiar to most of us, although we had also come into contact with his opponent, and had mixed feelings about him. Ellsworth didn’t inspire many of those. He wasn’t so much revered as trusted. Perhaps appearances had something to do with it. Perhaps by 1996 Washington had tired of the flamboyant and the dramatic (little did it know of what was to come!). One of us joked that Ellsworth just looked too much like Lord Palmerston not to win the election. And there he would have sat on the seventh floor of State, not jetting around the world from press conference to war zone or chasing people like Yasser Arafat around chancery courtyards, but simply staying put, being thoughtful and methodical, setting clear priorities, and imparting good judgment in all things.
This speculation was not entirely fair; Ellsworth was not lazy. Yet there is some use in drawing a contrast with Holbrooke, whose tragic death in the saddle a few months ago still resonates. It brought hundreds of tributes. It is ironic that a man whom so many people disliked, distrusted and dismissed as a celebrity, politician and journalist manqué would earn so much posthumous praise as the diplomat’s diplomat and the master of his profession. A good deal of it, alas, is justified. Holbrooke was very good at what he did. He got results. His heart (generally) was in the right place. And so was his head.
But good judgment doesn’t always reside in the head, or in the heart, or somewhere precisely in between. Perhaps this is why so many of our little office group voted instinctively for Ellsworth. There was also the man's disposition – the ineffable but critical quality that matters so much but is so overlooked, poorly understood and less often remembered. What is disposition? It's more than style and personality; it is also the philosophy, the approach, the orientation of the mind, as well as attitude, taste and temperament. Ellsworth’s disposition was a conservative one in that his ends were usually traditional but he was open to new approaches, to new ideas. He was creative with means but there were limits. Again the contrast with Holbrooke is sharp: the latter liked to compare diplomacy to jazz: you just didn’t know where you’d end up necessarily; you played it by ear; you made the best music you could in the circumstances but you didn’t constrain yourself. Hence the Clinton foreign policy… which one observer described so aptly at the time as “itinerant.”
The results were not all temporary, or bad. One of Holbrooke’s contributions that has got relatively less attention is the conversion (or elevation, as he called it) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe into an organization, now called the OSCE. He was committed to it. People may debate whether today’s broader OSCE is more or less effective than its predecessor arrangement once was, or the degree to which a headquarters and a large staff really constitute significance and value in today’s world. Suffice it to say that Holbrooke’s instinct to institutionalize the old CSCE was rather contrary to the principles of jazz.
Ellsworth liked institutions. He tended to remain loyal to them over long periods, albeit while asserting a certain freedom of thought and the right to dissent from the inside. Some people, in recalling the latter, ascribed a slight eccentric quality to him. One White House official who served opposite Ellsworth on an interagency group, remembered him as being diversionary and opaque, almost mystical, in their meetings. There was this side to him. But then a straight gaze from the blue eyes and the “I’ll do it” in that hard, Midwestern baritone, kept the trust.
In fact, without Ellsworth there probably never would have been a CSCE. Nixon named him Ambassador to NATO and it was at the mission in Brussels that the initial plans for what became the Helsinki Final Act and the CSCE were drafted in quiet collaboration with others, namely the French. The foreign service officers on Ellsworth's staff designed and pushed the human rights provisions of the Final Act especially, despite the intense opposition from Henry Kissinger and others back home who alternately feared and disparaged the intrusion of such matters into the high politics of superpower détente.
However, President Nixon trusted Ellsworth and never ordered him (so far as we know) to kill the effort. Ellsworth was his steady hand in Europe; today we would say he provided the necessary “political cover” in more ways than one. Eventually the effort took on a life of its own, culminating at Helsinki in 1975. Dissidents throughout the former Soviet bloc insist that the largely peaceful demise of the Soviet empire would never have happened without it. Even Kissinger got on board in the end and today speaks of the Final Act as a great achievement.
I know about this not from Ellsworth himself but from reading about it in archives. I asked him a few times to recall his views on Helsinki, but he always demurred. Perhaps others can speak to similar episodes and similar achievements from his military, diplomatic and political careers. They are not lost to history, but proper credit for them probably is, which, according to most “practitioners” like Ellsworth, is how it should be.
Or perhaps this is not really the point. Seeking credit for a policy during or after the fact can be a distraction, sometimes a fatal one. But it need not vitiate all wisdom.
There is of course no wisdom gene, no ideal recipe of nature and nurture to produce it. Foreign policy audiences in particular tend to encourage the exuberance of both theorists with superior formulas and empirical relativists with vast knowledge “of facts on the ground.” Here, empathy and sympathy seem to work at cross purposes. Both groups can lose sight of wise policy choices amid competing ideologies, including Realpolitik. Wisdom no doubt is a gift and an art. But that needn’t stop us from trying to know and reproduce it.
The wisest policies do two things: they adhere to certain axioms that most Americans can understand and support; and they allow for flexibility in implementation. They tend to accentuate the ‘isms that Americans like best—legalism and moralism, for example—while at the same time giving freedom of action to Americans’ reputed instinct for pragmatism, entrepreneurship and organization. The CSCE is one example; the Marshall Plan is another.
Too clever or calculated a foreign policy tends to backfire, partly by drawing too much critical attention to its authors and partly by constraining the imagination of subordinates. Too haphazard and improvisational a policy tends to do the same. Good policies tend to strike a balance between innovation and prudence in both form and substance. Reassurance tends to be as important as creativity: the two feed off one another.
That is how I remember Bob Ellsworth: as a harmonious fusion of gravitas and good cheer, with both in tasteful moderation. That the fusion seemed effortless was all the more advantageous in achieving the aims he sought at any given moment. More mystical people than myself probably have other names for it; but to me it is what wisdom should do and be.
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On Wisdom in Foreign Policy
June 18, 2011
(Some thoughts on the death of Robert F. Ellsworth, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and Deputy Secretary of Defense who died last month. His memorial service took place on Saturday in Maryland.)
I only knew Bob Ellsworth in passing; his office was above mine in the 1990s and I saw him nearly every morning. We’d meet in the hall and he’d give the usual Washington greeting – “What do you know?” – with a sly but friendly smile. He walked with a mild stoop but one could still feel his height, emphasized by the oval of his head, which attracted the eye vertically from the slope of its large bald top down past the slant of his eyes along the sharp angle of his beard. A portraitist might describe the appearance as “hawkish,” but there was something kinder about it. Ellsworth did not gaze somewhere off in the distance above your middle brow, as politicians tend to do; he looked right at you, not judgmentally (although one sometimes wondered) or as to challenge, but rather with apparent sincerity, as if he really did mean to learn, what do you know?
Sincerity drew people to him. His movements and appearance spoke the language of honest and confidence. I remember now seeing his silhouette on television during one of the presidential debates in 1996; he seemed to trail his good friend Bob Dole everywhere, looking every bit the gray eminence. And there he was slightly offstage, in muted light, watching the audience, arms crossed but relaxed, with the fingers of one hand resting slightly above the crook of his forearm as Eisenhower used to stand at press conferences. All confidence.
I also remember that it was about this time that some colleagues and I took an office poll; we spared ourselves another presidential prediction (it’s hard to imagine it, but there really were some people who thought Dole might win. The “where’s the outrage?” comment didn't totally do him in). So we decided, let’s vote on the job we really care about (back in the idealistic 1990s!): Secretary of State, Ellsworth versus Holbrooke.
Ellsworth won hands down. It wasn’t entirely fair, of course: he was familiar to most of us, although we had also come into contact with his opponent, and had mixed feelings about him. Ellsworth didn’t inspire many of those. He wasn’t so much revered as trusted. Perhaps appearances had something to do with it. Perhaps by 1996 Washington had tired of the flamboyant and the dramatic (little did it know of what was to come!). One of us joked that Ellsworth just looked too much like Lord Palmerston not to win the election. And there he would have sat on the seventh floor of State, not jetting around the world from press conference to war zone or chasing people like Yasser Arafat around chancery courtyards, but simply staying put, being thoughtful and methodical, setting clear priorities, and imparting good judgment in all things.
This speculation was not entirely fair; Ellsworth was not lazy. Yet there is some use in drawing a contrast with Holbrooke, whose tragic death in the saddle a few months ago still resonates. It brought hundreds of tributes. It is ironic that a man whom so many people disliked, distrusted and dismissed as a celebrity, politician and journalist manqué would earn so much posthumous praise as the diplomat’s diplomat and the master of his profession. A good deal of it, alas, is justified. Holbrooke was very good at what he did. He got results. His heart (generally) was in the right place. And so was his head.
But good judgment doesn’t always reside in the head, or in the heart, or somewhere precisely in between. Perhaps this is why so many of our little office group voted instinctively for Ellsworth. There was also the man's disposition – the ineffable but critical quality that matters so much but is so overlooked, poorly understood and less often remembered. What is disposition? It's more than style and personality; it is also the philosophy, the approach, the orientation of the mind, as well as attitude, taste and temperament. Ellsworth’s disposition was a conservative one in that his ends were usually traditional but he was open to new approaches, to new ideas. He was creative with means but there were limits. Again the contrast with Holbrooke is sharp: the latter liked to compare diplomacy to jazz: you just didn’t know where you’d end up necessarily; you played it by ear; you made the best music you could in the circumstances but you didn’t constrain yourself. Hence the Clinton foreign policy… which one observer described so aptly at the time as “itinerant.”
The results were not all temporary, or bad. One of Holbrooke’s contributions that has got relatively less attention is the conversion (or elevation, as he called it) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe into an organization, now called the OSCE. He was committed to it. People may debate whether today’s broader OSCE is more or less effective than its predecessor arrangement once was, or the degree to which a headquarters and a large staff really constitute significance and value in today’s world. Suffice it to say that Holbrooke’s instinct to institutionalize the old CSCE was rather contrary to the principles of jazz.
Ellsworth liked institutions. He tended to remain loyal to them over long periods, albeit while asserting a certain freedom of thought and the right to dissent from the inside. Some people, in recalling the latter, ascribed a slight eccentric quality to him. One White House official who served opposite Ellsworth on an interagency group, remembered him as being diversionary and opaque, almost mystical, in their meetings. There was this side to him. But then a straight gaze from the blue eyes and the “I’ll do it” in that hard, Midwestern baritone, kept the trust.
In fact, without Ellsworth there probably never would have been a CSCE. Nixon named him Ambassador to NATO and it was at the mission in Brussels that the initial plans for what became the Helsinki Final Act and the CSCE were drafted in quiet collaboration with others, namely the French. The foreign service officers on Ellsworth's staff designed and pushed the human rights provisions of the Final Act especially, despite the intense opposition from Henry Kissinger and others back home who alternately feared and disparaged the intrusion of such matters into the high politics of superpower détente.
However, President Nixon trusted Ellsworth and never ordered him (so far as we know) to kill the effort. Ellsworth was his steady hand in Europe; today we would say he provided the necessary “political cover” in more ways than one. Eventually the effort took on a life of its own, culminating at Helsinki in 1975. Dissidents throughout the former Soviet bloc insist that the largely peaceful demise of the Soviet empire would never have happened without it. Even Kissinger got on board in the end and today speaks of the Final Act as a great achievement.
I know about this not from Ellsworth himself but from reading about it in archives. I asked him a few times to recall his views on Helsinki, but he always demurred. Perhaps others can speak to similar episodes and similar achievements from his military, diplomatic and political careers. They are not lost to history, but proper credit for them probably is, which, according to most “practitioners” like Ellsworth, is how it should be.
Or perhaps this is not really the point. Seeking credit for a policy during or after the fact can be a distraction, sometimes a fatal one. But it need not vitiate all wisdom.
There is of course no wisdom gene, no ideal recipe of nature and nurture to produce it. Foreign policy audiences in particular tend to encourage the exuberance of both theorists with superior formulas and empirical relativists with vast knowledge “of facts on the ground.” Here, empathy and sympathy seem to work at cross purposes. Both groups can lose sight of wise policy choices amid competing ideologies, including Realpolitik. Wisdom no doubt is a gift and an art. But that needn’t stop us from trying to know and reproduce it.
The wisest policies do two things: they adhere to certain axioms that most Americans can understand and support; and they allow for flexibility in implementation. They tend to accentuate the ‘isms that Americans like best—legalism and moralism, for example—while at the same time giving freedom of action to Americans’ reputed instinct for pragmatism, entrepreneurship and organization. The CSCE is one example; the Marshall Plan is another.
Too clever or calculated a foreign policy tends to backfire, partly by drawing too much critical attention to its authors and partly by constraining the imagination of subordinates. Too haphazard and improvisational a policy tends to do the same. Good policies tend to strike a balance between innovation and prudence in both form and substance. Reassurance tends to be as important as creativity: the two feed off one another.
That is how I remember Bob Ellsworth: as a harmonious fusion of gravitas and good cheer, with both in tasteful moderation. That the fusion seemed effortless was all the more advantageous in achieving the aims he sought at any given moment. More mystical people than myself probably have other names for it; but to me it is what wisdom should do and be.
