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THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 1 JOHN SHATTUCK: Good afternoon on this wonderful sunny afternoon on Columbia Point. One of the rare days. And we’re very honored that you would come inside on a day like this. I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of myself and Deborah Leff, the Director of the Kennedy Library and Museum, I welcome you this evening to the last of our spring 2006 Kennedy Library Forums. I want to thank our lead sponsor, Bank of America, for making these forums possible, as well as our other sponsors for their generous support: Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, and our media sponsors WBUR, which broadcasts all Kennedy Library Forums on Sunday evenings at 8:00, the Boston Globe , and our latest media sponsor, New England Cable News. On October 28 th , 1962, President Kennedy announced the end of the most dangerous crisis of his presidency. The Soviet Union had begun to remove the nuclear missiles it had secretly placed in Cuba. The U.S. naval blockade around Cuba had worked. Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev had backed down from his confrontation with the American president. The Cuban Missile Crisis was over. A nuclear holocaust had been averted. What was not known by many Americans at the time, but is now graphically clear from the documents and recordings displayed here in our Museum and at the Library, is that the world survived the Cuban Missile Crisis not only THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 2 because Kennedy prevailed against Khrushchev, but also Kennedy prevailed against his generals -- his own generals in the Pentagon -- who had been urging him to conduct a preemptive nuclear attack on Cuba. A year and a half earlier the new president had learned the hard way to question the military advice he was receiving. The lesson he learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle of April 1961 may well have saved the world from destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The relationship between the presidency and the Pentagon is probably the most fateful of all in government. Who defines the threats to our national security, devises the strategy for addressing them, and calls the shots in response? Under our Constitution, these powers are given to the President and the Congress, but in reality they are often exercised by top civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon. In his Farewell Address as President, Dwight Eisenhower, General Dwight Eisenhower, spoke about the dangers of a foreign policy dominated by the Pentagon and the projection of U.S. power through force alone. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists,” he warned. “We must never let the weight of this military industrial combination endanger our liberties or our democratic process.” Nearly half a century after Eisenhower’s warning and Kennedy’s lesson, what’s the role of the Pentagon in our country today? At a time when we’re THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 3 fighting multiple wars on multiple fronts and losing influence around the world because of some of this activity, we need to know how decisions are being made about Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East and other places in the U.S. government’s open ended global war on terrorism. We also need to know what we’re doing about humanitarian crises in places like Darfur where genocide is being committed, and why we didn’t come to the rescue of the victims of a genocide a decade ago in Rwanda. How can we learn to be skeptical, as Kennedy was, about military advice? And how can we defend the democratic process as Eisenhower urged from the danger of military control? These are some of the questions explored by our lead speaker this evening in his monumental new book, The House of War . James Carroll is one of Boston’s most thoughtful writers. He was born in 1943, the year the Pentagon was built, as he points out in his book. And his life has been intertwined with the Pentagon’s history. His father was an Air Force General and the first Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The personal interplay between a father who is a lifelong Cold Warrior and a son who questioned the military culture in which he grew up gives The House of War its special appeal and animates its analysis of American military leadership over the last six decades. THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 4 Jim Carroll has been a civil rights worker, an anti-war activist and a community organizer. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1969. He served as chaplain at Boston University until 1974 when he left the priesthood to become a writer. He is the author of 15 books, including a number of widely acclaimed novels, and his syndicated column appears weekly in the Boston Globe and in newspapers around the country. His extraordinary history of the Catholic Church, Constantine’s Sword , received rave reviews and his personal account of his relationship with his father, An American Requiem , received the National Book Award. The House of War is on sale at our bookstore, and I’m sure Jim would be very pleased to sign copies after the forum. Sarah Sewall served from 1993 to 2000 as the first Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance. She now directs the Program on National Security and Human Rights at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She was the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell from 1987 to ’93, and she’s also worked at a variety of defense research organizations and has written widely on U.S. foreign policy, military intervention and peacekeeping operations. Her current research focuses on civilians in war and includes facilitating a dialogue between military and human rights leaders on the use of force. THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 5 We will soon be joined by Colonel Douglas Macgregor who left the U.S. Army in 2004 after 28 years of service, most of which he spent in mechanized infantry and armored cavalry formations. I want to introduce him now so that he can join our panel when his plane gets him to the Kennedy Library, or at least the taxi which is bringing him from his plane. Colonel Macgregor is the author of three books on military strategy, the latest of which America’s Last Victory in the Long War to Liberate Iraq addresses both the 1991 Gulf War and the current Iraq war. Colonel Macgregor has written for the Washington Post , The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Army Times . And he regularly appears as a military expert on the Lehrer News Hour and ABC World News . And we’re fortunate to have as our moderator tonight Tom Gjelten, a veteran correspondent for National Public Radio who reports on a wide variety of national security issues. From 1995 to 2003 Tom covered U.S. diplomacy and military affairs, first from the State Department, when I’m proud to say I was one of his subjects. TOM GJELTEN: Several times. JOHN SHATTUCK: He’s a regular panelist on the television program Washington Week. He’s written for The New Republic , The New York Times , and the Washington Post , and has received many awards over the years, including the Overseas Press Club Award, the George Polk Award, and the THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 6 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. So please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library, James Carroll, Sarah Sewall, Tom Gjelten, and very soon Colonel Douglas Macgregor. [applause] TOM GJELTEN: Thank you very much, John. Well, it’s great to be here and let me second John’s comment in appreciating how many of you have turned out on this lovely afternoon. I’m thrilled and flattered, and I’m sure I speak for Sarah and Jim in that regard as well. John, as you’ve framed this discussion, I think it’s clear that when we talk about the Pentagon and the presidency today it will be in the sense of separate ideas, separate things, separate institutions within the U.S. government, sometimes working in concert, sometimes working at odds. And I think that it’s the dynamic relationship between these institutions that we’re going to be looking at today. Even, however, with that premise for the discussion, I think, it seems to me, that there are a couple of ways that this could be approached. First, obviously, we can talk about the current presidency and the current Pentagon. Because this is really in many ways a very interesting time to consider that relationship. We have a presidency in the administration of George W. Bush that has asserted executive power and prerogative to an extent, I think, virtually without parallel in modern American history. Your local newspaper, the Boston Globe , recently reported that President Bush has claimed the right to ignore more than 750 laws enacted since he became THE PENTAGON AND THE PRESIDENCY 6/12/06 PAGE 7 President. With respect to the administration’s authorization of warrantless wire taps, the conservative organizer Grover Norquist, who is normally close to the Bush administration, was quoted in the current issue of the New York Review of Books as saying, “If you interpret the Constitution’s saying the President is Commander-in-Chief, to mean that the President can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws, you don’t have a Constitution, you have a king.” As for the Pentagon, we have another virtually unprecedented situation these days with the so-called “Revolt of the Generals.” Of all the Generals who have commanded divisions in Iraq since the war there began, two have since resigned, meaning that two have become free to speak out.

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