Recalling two mentors

1. Jonathan D. Pollack

My father, Jonathan Pollack, died at the end of May after what’s politely called a long convalescence. He had worked over several decades as a scholar of Chinese foreign and defense policy. After completing his PhD at the University of Michigan, he took a postdoc at Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs, followed by a full-time research position at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. He eventually chaired RAND’s political science department. At some point, he also joined the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academy of Science (NAS CISAC). After RAND, he led the strategic research department at the US Naval War College, and then the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. A distinguished career.

Jonathan was probably a better researcher than an administrator. He took leave from the Naval War College to write a book on North Korea’s nuclear program, titled No Exit (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010). It argued that Pyongyang would not give up the Bomb. That was at the time a controversial stance, and unfortunately it’s held up well.

My own career formed in his intellectual orbit. Mostly by personal example, he taught me critical thinking—or, as I thought of it, how to read the newspaper. Who were the sources for this story, he asked. Why would they be talking to reporters? With all that in mind, what does the story’s appearance tell us?

Other aspects of my father’s mental machinery I came to appreciate later. In the early 2000s, when he had begun to apply more of his energies to North Korea, he once remarked to me that with Pyongyang, the old methodologies still worked. He didn’t elaborate, but I now believe that he meant reading the newspapers of a totalitarian state. His PhD adviser, the China-watcher Allen Whiting, had practiced the art as an intelligence analyst.

Jonathan never served in the intelligence community, but like many of his colleagues, he had a security clearance for most of his career, and his research seems to have found an audience in obscure places. Once—I don’t recall when, but certainly before No Exit—he told me that the work he was proudest of was a history of the opening of relations between China and South Korea. I’ve never found such a publication. On another occasion, he told me that he had been asked to join the National Intelligence Council as the National Intelligence Officer for Asia. For personal reasons, he declined.

Jonathan also exposed me to places and people from a young age. I remember watching the original broadcast of The Day After at a viewing party full of RAND researchers. That evening must have been formative. Various other occasions down the years meant even more; some of the people I met through my father I later came to know as professors and mentors.

But to the wider world, who is indispensable? Even the wise man, sayeth Solomon, is not remembered forever. Sadly, none of the institutions where Jonathan Pollack contributed has seen fit to commemorate him. In Washington especially, all is fleeting.

2. Barry M. Blechman

Barry Blechman, best known as a co-founder of the Stimson Center, died in late June. Barry also gave me my first real job. At the urging of my grad school adviser—the late John Steinbruner, whom I’d first met on the sidelines of a NAS CISAC meeting—I applied for an entry-level research position at Barry’s company. I walked into an interview with photocopies of my heavily footnoted master’s thesis on national missile defense. (I was a critic.) Not much later, I started work.

Barry was an unusual cat. After working long years in government on arms control and disarmament, he made millions by anticipating demand for defense-industry clients. Nor was that the only Blechman paradox. Barry’s enthusiasm for missile defense was proportional to his disdain for nuclear weapons; he reasoned that only with defenses in place would the public accept nuclear disarmament. That combination of views might sound straightforward, but perhaps only Ronald Reagan shared it. In any case, Barry’s missile-defense boosterism didn’t stop him from hiring me.

Barry’s expertise—and, I assume, his views on missile defense—opened doors. He found himself invited onto various advisory panels during both Democratic and Republican administrations. The list included the congressionally mandated Rumsfeld Commission, whose report disputed the conclusions of a 1995 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The NIE judged that neither North Korea, Iran, or Iraq could field a missile able to reach the United States before about 2010. The commissioners found that excessively optimistic.

Bear with me now on a tangent. The appearance of the Rumsfeld report in spring 1998 echoed the “Team B” report of 1976, which had challenged an NIE on the US-Soviet strategic balance. Team B paved the way for the Reagan-era nuclear buildup. The Rumsfeld report, assisted by North Korea’s decision to fire a three-stage rocket over Japan in summer 1998, ushered in the Missile Defense Act of 1999, as recounted in my master’s thesis a year later.

My thesis also described earlier congressional attempts to challenge the 1995 NIE, including a panel headed by former Director of Central Intelligence Bob Gates. Barry’s wife, the late Janne Nolan, had served on the Gates Panel. As it happened, the Gates report defended the NIE. Doing so implicitly questioned the need for an expensive national missile defense system, just as the Rumsfeld report later implicitly supported the idea.

Janne was an original in her own right. I once asked her if she and Barry had ever discussed the NIE controversy. No, she said, not unless you count the morning when Barry loomed up in the bathroom mirror while she was brushing her teeth. “So, you think we should be vulnerable?” he asked, or words to that effect. There she stood with raised eyebrows and a mouth full of toothpaste, unable to even try to respond. No conversation followed. You’ll just have to imagine her expression, and her laughter when recounting the story.

I’ve probably failed to convey the irony of Barry Blechman as a latter-day Team B-er, so here’s one more story. Just last year, I had the pleasure of sending Barry a link to a newly declassified document: detailed notes of a national security briefing to 1976 presidential candidate Governor Jimmy Carter. The notetaker, who was also among the briefers, was Barry Blechman.

The notes include a description of remarks by Paul Nitze, the hawk’s hawk and the intellectual godfather of Team B. Nitze dissented from the previous briefings, insisting that the Soviets were poised to acquire overwhelming advantages over the United States in nuclear weapons. Blechman’s notes then recount the other briefers’ refutation. Despite the notes’ dry, professional tone, Nitze comes off in Barry’s telling as alarmist, maybe even as a hysteric who was being humored by the others present.

That was Barry, to the extent I could pin him down: understated in his delivery, and contradictory when seen from a distance, but true to his own particular convictions.