Suddenly Quotable Paul Kennedy

Two months ago Paul Kennedy wasn’t famous and he wasn’t tired.

But early this year political movers and shakers, presidential candidates, critics and Washington pundits got wind of the Yale University history professor’s new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000,” a broad exploration of why countries--including the United States and the Soviet Union--gain and lose worldly prominence, wealth and power.

His life has been in tumult ever since.

In the time it takes to turn on a television, Kennedy seemingly has been lofted from “reasonably decent obscurity” to the frantic, jet-lagged life of an instant guru. He’s in demand all over the country for lectures. Congressional committees rearrange their schedules in order to get his testimony. Bankers invite him to pontificate at lunch.

And, yes, he’s been on TV, “The Today Show” and the “McNeill-Lehrer News Hour,” to name two.

Everybody, it appears, thinks he’s the guy with the answers this election year--how to balance the budget, how to rethink America’s global military strategy, how to meet the Japanese challenge, how to run the United States, possibly the world. Last weekend, for instance, as his book boomed to the upper reaches of best-seller lists, Kennedy flew into Los Angeles for a conference on rebuilding America.

Fresh off the plane, Kennedy, wearing a heavy topcoat and carrying an overloaded, battered briefcase, turned out to be a sardonic man harried by both his instant notoriety and the mundane hassle of reclaiming lost luggage from the clumsy grasp of an airline.

After a flurry of activity to straighten things out--and place a call to a magazine editor--Kennedy reflected on what fame has done to his biorhythms.

Suddenly a Sleepwalker

“My wife found me sleepwalking the other night,” he said. “I never sleepwalked in my life. I was climbing over furniture. I’m not getting very good sleep because I keep imagining I hear the telephone (because) every other time of day except 2 in the morning I find the telephone going. I find it fairly easy to be interviewed and to talk and I don’t sort of twitch or do things like that on television but it’s just a physical strain.”

Before lightning struck, Kennedy--a native of Great Britain and the son of a shipyard worker--was a well-rested, relatively unknown specialist in strategic and diplomatic history whose books included studies of World War II in the Pacific, European diplomacy and British naval strategy. With an unexpected best seller fueling his bank account, the Oxford-educated professor says that he and his wife now can afford to send their three sons to college without going into debt like the spendthrift nations he deplores.

Fame apparently has stimulated Kennedy’s dry sense of humor--about both himself and “the bizarre nature of those coming forward asking you to be a pundit.”

For example, last month he was asked, “Can I go in and address the entire editorial board of the New York Times? This was three weeks ago, a long lunch on the future of the world,” he recalled. “They said we’re having problems in our editorial board working out the future of the world. I feel like Nostradamus, or something, looking into a globe: In the year 1999 a specter is going to come out of the North.”

All this has happened because Kennedy, 42, has conceived a deterministic explanation of modern world history that seems especially relevant to many in 1988. Much simplified, Kennedy’s theory is that the rise and fall of most great countries and empires since 1500 share a pattern and that there is an inescapable linkage between wealth and military might. Major players on the world stage usually have begun the descent to lesser roles because they failed to prudently finance their military commitments and to match their military commitments to their capabilities, Kennedy argues. Moreover, any measurement of a nation’s power must always be made “relative” to that of its neighbors, whose fortunes also are constantly waxing and waning, he says.

In the most noticed and talked- about section of “Rise and Fall” (Random House, $24.95), Kennedy suggests that the United States is at the beginning of an era when the country’s relative share of the world’s wealth is declining from a post-World War II high of 40% or more to a more “natural” share of 16% to 18%.

In the decades ahead, Kennedy writes, national leaders ought to recognize “a need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies that bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.” Specifically, he warns that countries such as Japan and, perhaps to a greater extent, China will inevitably become more powerful, in absolute terms and relative to both the United States and the Soviet Union.

He concludes, “The tests before the United States as it heads toward the 21st Century are certainly daunting, perhaps especially in the economic sphere; but the nation’s resources remain considerable, if they can be properly organized, and if there is a judicious recognition of both the limitations and the opportunities of American power.”

Kennedy comes to this point after spending more than 500 pages surveying the Hapsburg Empire, the British Empire and numerous other countries. It is a complex, subtle exercise in historical analysis and Kennedy seems somewhat exasperated by frequent oversimplifications--especially by the electronic media--of his “Teutonic monster” of a book.

‘A Crude Rendition’

“You get the weirdos on the radio call-in shows,” he said, “You know, it’s San Antonio W-Blank-Blank-Blank and they do a crude rendition of the book . . . Is it evening for America? Is America going down the tubes? Yale history professor has new idea about collapse of American Empire. Phone in at this number.

“And, of course, you’ve got everybody advancing their theories about the moral decrepitude of the nation--the increase in sodomy and what did I think the relationships between sodomy and empire declines were. Old ladies phoning in, saying they thought everybody had been too unfair to Mr. Reagan, he really was the best President, and I’m saying, ‘What’s the question, lady?’ ”

He added: “And some of the questions have been so trite. Which of the Democratic candidates do you think has the best knowledge of world history? I feel like guffawing--none of the above.”

But Kennedy also has been pleased with the response of what he calls “the thinking classes,” including in Washington where he has been consulted by Republican Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregan and presidential candidate Robert Dole’s campaign, among others.

“What struck me as interesting was the very considerable response by congressmen and senators who feel that the dear old cowboy is going to ride off into the sunset at the end of this year, leaving them as well as others with a whole lot of clearing up of the mess and unscrambling of omelets to do,” he said.

“Interestingly, I found a larger number of Republican congressmen, especially younger Republicans, wanting to talk about this. I think the Democrats still worry about being labeled with things like relative (national) decline or (strategic) overstretch or withdrawal or whatever,” he continued. “Probably some of them think about it but they don’t want to get it on the agenda while they’re trying to stand tall in the South (in next week’s Super Tuesday primaries).”

Kennedy believes his book has attracted readers from across a spectrum of professions partly because it offers the comfort of historical perspective.

‘Not Unique’

“Here comes a history book which says that that particular debate or concern you’re having is not unique,” he explained. “It’s quite a common one historically and it takes place within the opinion-forming elites and decision-makers of a society which has become a mature economy and found itself overstretched in its commitments and is beginning a discussion of how to restructure itself internally. I think this explains why one day I’ll be asked to talk to some bankers and the next day to the Naval War College.”

On the whole, Kennedy is unwilling to prescribe specific remedies or to exactly predict the consequences of current trends.

However, this reticence evaporates when he talks about the federal budget deficit, which in the seven years of the Reagan presidency has more than doubled the national debt to $2.4 trillion.

“I think nothing in the annals of 500 years of history--that I can find--is the equivalent of what the Republican Administration has done since ’81. . . . It really is extraordinary. The one case I can think of of a great power’s central government increasing their national debt so swiftly in peacetime was France in the 10 years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, which isn’t a very happy precedent at all. The only other two cases I can think of are Nazi Germany and Japan in the mid- to late ‘30s. But they were putting it into armaments because they were going to go to war and they were going to plunder and make other people pay. So that’s not really a good analogy either.”

Striking an ominous note, Kennedy said, “If I’m going to preach about the lessons of history at all, it is that societies which did not invest in the future but invested too much either in defense or consumption were destined to be overtaken by those with a different set of priorities.”