Intricate Network With Harvard Roots : Dukakis Advisers Play Crucial Offstage Role

In the middle of the vitriolic Democratic primary campaign in New York last month, Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. thought fleetingly that the perfect gift had fallen into his hands--a major foreign-policy blunder by the front-runner, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

Dukakis had appeared to say in a New York Daily News interview that if conventional forces in Europe were unable to stop a Soviet invasion, he as President would use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. “This,” crowed a Gore aide, “will be viewed as the giant gaffe of the Dukakis campaign,” a reckless statement by a candidate ill-versed in foreign affairs.

But it was not to be. In Boston and Washington, an intricate network of Dukakis advisers ground into action to show that what he had said--which differed from how he had been quoted--was consistent with U.S. and NATO policy.

Within a day, the issue was dead. A week later, so was Gore’s campaign.

The episode was only a small skirmish on Dukakis’ long and apparently inevitable march to the Democratic presidential nomination. But it provided a telling indication of the important role policy advisers play behind the scenes of the Dukakis campaign, shoring him up on a multitude of topics that no individual alone could master.

Of all this year’s Democratic presidential candidates, none assembled as large and intellectually potent a contingent of issues advisers as Dukakis. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas that appeal to the candidate and a glimpse of the Administration he might form.

Harvard to Washington

Laid end to end, as a campaign quip has it, the legion of Dukakis’ issues advisers would reach from Harvard to Washington. And if Dukakis is elected, many of those in Cambridge probably will reach Washington.

Drawing on contacts made during his teaching stint at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1979 to 1982 between terms as governor, Dukakis has built a multi-layered network of advisers that spreads outward from Harvard Yard.

Christopher Edley Jr., 35, the campaign’s issues coordinator, is on leave from Harvard Law School (as is Susan Estrich, also 35, Dukakis’ campaign manager). Backed by three deputies and a dozen volunteer research staffers, Edley has the task of helping Dukakis shape a message that defines his candidacy and then backing him up with the arguments he needs to sell it.

“We’ve probably called on 200 people so far,” Edley said. “Some we call several times a week, others less frequently. We may ask for help on briefing memos, pulling things off bookshelves for the governor to read, writing speeches or trying to figure out how to react to stories in the morning newspaper.”

The campaign has not published lists of advisers, Edley and other senior staffers note, for several reasons. Some might be offended at being left off the list, while others prefer not to be identified with a political campaign. More important, Edley said, “we don’t want people to infer the candidate’s positions” from the views of those he consults.

“We try hard to solicit advice from a pretty broad range of people,” he said. “When I call for help, I don’t ask whether they support the governor. Dukakis has a bit of the litigator in his style. He wants to hear different points of view, argue things out.”

Liberal to Centrist

Yet the views of Dukakis’ leading economic and foreign policy advisers fall in a relatively narrow philosophical range of liberal to centrist Democratic. There is less input from conservative Democrats and practically none from the radical left.

“The campaign does not reach out to the left, nor very far to the right,” said one Harvard adviser, who asked not to be named. “It’s pretty centrist, maybe a little left-of-centrist, but firmly in the mainstream.”

Dukakis’ chief policy advisers contrast markedly with those around the Rev. Jesse Jackson, his only remaining Democratic rival, who depends heavily for advice on the leftist Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. Its director, Robert Borosage, is the senior issues adviser on Jackson’s campaign plane. One of the ironies of the 1988 campaign is that Borosage and most of Jackson’s other senior issues advisers are white, while Edley is black.

Apart from Dukakis’ formal campaign issues network, he relies heavily on his longtime friend and classmate from Harvard Law School, Paul Brountas, who like Dukakis is the son of Greek emigrants. A successful Boston lawyer who is regarded as the gray eminence of the campaign, Brountas was chairman of Dukakis’ gubernatorial campaigns in 1978, 1982 and 1986 and holds the same title now.

Brountas spends much of his time traveling with Dukakis and serving as a “continuous back-channel,” someone off whom the governor can bounce the advice he receives from his formal network.

On issues of domestic economic policy, which Dukakis considers his forte, the governor is his own top adviser, said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor who is co-author of his campaign book, “Creating the Future: The Massachusetts Comeback and its Promise for America.”

Domestic policy advice also comes from two of Dukakis’ closest Statehouse aides, operations director John DeVillars and economic development chief Alden Raine, and from several Democratic members of Congress and their staffs. Among them are Sens. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

On international economics, which extend beyond Dukakis’ experience as a governor, the campaign has turned in particular to two Harvard professors of political economy, Robert B. Reich and Lawrence H. Summers.

Reich argues in his current book, “Tales of a New America: The Anxious Liberal’s Guide to the Future,” that national economies, societies and cultures are being woven increasingly into a single global fabric.

“National borders are eroding as money, information, goods and services, weapons of destruction, pollution and immigrants can all slip easily through them,” Reich writes. He urges closer coordination of U.S. economic policies with those of other industrial nations.

Summers, Reich’s colleague, recommends more aggressive tax collection--an idea Dukakis has adopted--along with selective revenue-raisers ranging from higher gasoline, alcohol and tobacco taxes to a half-percent tax on exchanges of financial securities.

Reflect a Vision

Such recommendations may or may not find their way into Dukakis’ policy agenda, but they appear to reflect a vision consistent with the candidate’s.

“I don’t think he’s looking for full-bore agendas he can just sign off on as his own,” said Summers, whose wife is associated with Brountas’ law firm in Boston. “He’s looking for as many sources as possible, for different perspectives he can meld into positions of his own. It’s a much more active, dynamic process than I see in the current Administration.”

On foreign and defense policy, where Dukakis’ years as a governor have benefited him least, he and his campaign staff have created two interlocking networks of expert advisers, one anchored in Cambridge and the other in Washington.

Four prominent strategic analysts at Harvard have played a central role in advising Dukakis on national security issues, and it is widely presumed that at least some of them would continue to do so in a Dukakis Administration.

They are Joseph S. Nye Jr., head of Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs and a Jimmy Carter appointee at the State Department; Albert Carnesale, academic dean of the Kennedy School; Graham T. Alison, dean of the Kennedy School, and Robert J. Murray, a Defense Department official in the Carter Administration and now director of the Kennedy School’s Center for National Security Studies.

On the spectrum from doves to hawks, Nye, Carnesale and Alison define themselves as “owls”--pragmatists who view a “Star Wars” missile defense system as just as unrealistic as the elimination of nuclear weapons.

In two recent books on nuclear policy they have staked out a middle ground, suggesting ways of tailoring defense programs to “lengthen the fuse” of nuclear conflict, reduce the risk of accidental war and stabilize the U.S.-Soviet relationship.

While the Harvard mafia, as even campaign staff members jokingly call it, helps shape the campaign’s geopolitical vision, the Washington end of the Dukakis foreign policy network stresses tactical aid. At its center is Madeleine K. Albright, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University.

‘Eyes and Ears’

“Madeleine,” said Edley, “is our eyes and ears in Washington.”

Albright, a National Security Council staff member in the Carter White House who served as chief foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential nominee Walter F. Mondale in 1984, now spends much of her time traveling with Dukakis in the same capacity. She is assembling “issue books” on key foreign and defense questions and compiling lists of experts to call on a moment’s notice.

“If we’re on the plane and Libya invades Chad, we’ve got to be able to call Joe Blow in the middle of the night--these things always happen in the middle of the night--and ask for an update,” Albright said in a recent interview. “The system has to be redundant, of course, because Joe Blow is never there when you need him.”

When Gore accused Dukakis immediately before the New York primary of reckless remarks about nuclear war, it was Albright who received the alarm from the Dukakis headquarters in Boston.

Albright in turn rang up Janne E. Nolan, a visiting scholar at Washington’s prestigious Brookings Institution, and gave her a crash assignment to backstop Dukakis’ claim that his remarks to the New York Daily News had accurately reflected the long-standing U.S. position on the use of nuclear weapons.

Nolan, a former staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a defense adviser to Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign, burrowed through documents dating to John F. Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara. In a few hours, she had distilled the essence of American nuclear doctrine into a memo and telefaxed it to Albright, who relayed it to campaign headquarters in Boston.

Although Dukakis was able to put out that fire, the question of his own competence on foreign policy issues is still burning.

“His experience is as a governor, not as a secretary of state, so you wouldn’t expect him to know much about foreign policy,” noted Harvard’s Carnesale. “It’s unfair to ask whether he understands as much as someone who’s spent the last 20 years of his life immersed in this. But does he understand the fundamentals? Yes, he does.”

It is unclear, however, to what extent Dukakis has been able to keep up with the course work since the primary campaign went into high gear late last fall. None of the key advisers at Harvard, for instance, said they had actually spoken with Dukakis since last October.

“It’s certainly true that he’s had less time for intellectual input since the campaigning began,” economist Summers noted. “But I think he’s kept on receiving stuff, reading stuff.”

Others, who are less directly involved in the campaign, question the depth of Dukakis’ knowledge and his tolerance for learning by immersion.

Martin Linsky, a professor at the Kennedy School who first worked with Dukakis when they served together in the Massachusetts Legislature in the 1960s--Linsky as a Republican--said Dukakis underwent a transformation between his first and second terms as governor.

Greater Willingness

“He certainly wasn’t interested in advice in the first term,” Linsky said. “He was interested in people carrying out his will. In the second term, there was a greater willingness to listen to other views.

“It’s remarkable how quick a read he is. But what is sometimes disconcerting is that he tends to think that once he’s got it, he’s got it all.”

Robert Komer, a former defense and intelligence official and a conservative Democrat currently at the Rand Corp.’s Washington office, took part in one of the seminars arranged last year to brief Dukakis on foreign policy. Komer came away with a decidedly mixed but ultimately positive impression:

“I was impressed. He’s quick, outgoing, charming. A guy with a personality. But he didn’t know toad-squat about foreign policy.”

Midway through the briefing, Komer said, Dukakis seemed to reach a point of saturation. “In midstream, he changed the rules and started talking about what he thought,” Komer said.

Nevertheless, Komer said he would support Dukakis in November.

“Right now he’s wallowing around in that Harvard crowd,” he said. “But once you’re elected, you can break free of anybody. I sense this guy can be a little bit ruthless, and that’s good. He’s good timber. He’ll learn.”