For National Security: Gen. Brent Scowcroft
Scowcroft Paper No. 3 For National Security: Gen. Brent Scowcroft Bartholomew Sparrow, PhD June 2016 A significant address presented at the Scowcroft Legacy Conference Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas on April 26, 2016 For more information: bush.tamu.edu/scowcroft/ 1 For National Security: Gen. Brent Scowcroft0F by Bartholomew Sparrow Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin “A friend in Washington is someone who In 1925 Scowcroft was born into a family stabs you in the chest.” Brent Scowcroft that was, as we see, established socially and well sometimes tells this joke to break the ice when off materially; indicatively, his parents were beginning a speech. The irony, though, is that married in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. Scowcroft has a great many friends and admirers. By all accounts he had a happy childhood. Brent It is this capacity for friendship, together with his was a member of the Boy Scouts, skied, played other personal qualities, his upbringing, military golf, and roamed around the Wasatch foothills background, and intellectualism, that have made with his friends, only blocks from his home. As him so remarkably effective and so very much the youngest of three children and the only son, respected and, it is fair to say, so adored in Scowcroft was, he concedes, “spoiled.” Not once Washington, around the country, and around the did he remember hearing his parents fight, and he world. never remembered feeling any tension at home. Later, reflecting on his upbringing, Scowcroft To understand General Scowcroft’s wryly observed that his idyllic childhood gave success as a policymaker means returning to his him a highly distorted view of his fellow 2 family background—at least in part.
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