Perle’s Passion Is Served

A huge video screen hung from the ceiling, behind the ornate mahogany desks and oil portraits of elders that give the House International Relations Committee room an air of history.

Peering down from the screen, three times the size of anyone else in the room, was the committee’s next witness, live from the U.S. Embassy in London. Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), no small figure himself, looked up at the screen and observed, “Richard Perle is hovering over us.”

When he was assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, adversaries called him the Prince of Darkness for his fierce resistance to arms control treaties with the Soviets. Today, Perle is often described as the Bush administration’s leading hawk on Iraq. As chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a panel of leading Republican foreign policy thinkers who advise the secretary of Defense, his sway inside government circles is considerable. He speaks to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld regularly. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz is a friend.

But it is his role outside the government -- from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute -- that affords Perle the luxury of moral outrage. While liberals look for accommodation with European allies before taking action against Iraq, Perle offers that it would be nice if antiwar German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would resign.

When some military experts urge time for weapon inspections to work, Perle charges appeasement, invoking the specter of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain underestimating the menace of Adolf Hitler.

Few of Perle’s ideological allies go so far in their outspokenness. But Perle’s pronouncements on Iraq have made him a hot media draw -- the Arabic news network Al Jazeera calls regularly, as do newspapers from Tokyo to Toronto and every alphabet news channel on the satellite spectrum. Like a test marketer for the most doctrinaire ideas, Perle keeps lobbing his verbal arrows into media cyberspace. Some in the administration think his outbursts are a distraction. But many of his pronouncements on Iraq have echoed in subsequent Bush administration positions. For weeks, Perle has been arguing that eliminating Iraq’s suspected weapons of mass destruction is “indistinguishable” from ending Saddam Hussein’s rule. He has been warning Iraqi generals that they could face war crime trials if they carry out Hussein’s orders to use biological or chemical weapons. President Bush made use of both points in his nationwide address last week.

Perle’s influence is indirect. He does not talk to White House speech writers.

The last time he briefed Bush one-on-one was during the campaign, when he lobbied for NATO enlargement. For critics of administration policy, however, Perle’s influence is unnerving.

“Rumsfeld, [Vice President Dick] Cheney, Wolfowitz -- these are new conservatives, hawks, rational hard-liners,” said one Arab diplomat who asked not to be quoted by name. “Then you have Perle, who is blindly obsessive. It’s almost neo-imperialistic.”

Perle’s view of foreign policy is contained in an ideological odyssey from a culture of liberalism in Southern California to one of conservatism in Washington. His course was steered by two mentors -- one an erudite academic, the other a Democratic senator -- who drew a generation of conservatives to the belief that great powers survive only if they exercise military might.

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Culinary Fantasy

Beyond the policy debate, Perle is an original -- a conservative agitator with a passion for the good life, a member of the Washington establishment who defies the town’s workaholic habits, a weapon strategist who at the height of the Cold War fantasized about opening a souffle restaurant.

There is no question that Perle, 61, now enjoys his role as the enfant terrible of the neoconservatives, defined by their hawkish views on foreign policy and their free-market ideas on economic issues. Bemused by Hyde’s comment that he is hovering over the debate on Iraq, Perle says later, “I should have thrown thunderbolts too.”

But he is careful not to overstate his role. “I’ve been in Washington for many years, and you end up knowing pretty much everyone,” he said over a lunch of sashimi (gourmet tastes have added pounds and put him on a low-carbohydrate diet), at a favorite Japanese restaurant. “So if you have an idea, you can get it out much more quickly. That’s what it means to have influence in Washington. In the end, it’s the quality of the idea that matters, not that it came from me.”

The contest for ideas has defined Richard N. Perle almost from the beginning, or at least as far back as Hollywood High School, circa 1959.

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Perle was not a child of privilege. After World War II, his father moved the family from New York to Los Angeles, where he worked in the wholesale drapery business.

His parents worked hard to send him to private school. But he was frequently late to class, and often got into arguments with exasperated teachers. When he was elected president of the junior class, the school asked his parents to send him elsewhere.

So he ended up at Hollywood High. The general atmosphere of just-good-enough forced those of ambition and intellect to band together, clinging to the instruction of a few good teachers.

The climate was post-McCarthyism, but still Cold War. He co-edited the campus poetry magazine with a student whose father, an attorney, represented one of the Hollywood Ten, the writers blackballed by accusations that they were communist sympathizers. On the debate team, he argued with kids whose parents had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He still calls them “commies.”

“The commies troubled me from the beginning,” he says. “I would visit them in their homes; they were quite affluent. It’s what the French call ‘gauche caviar.’ The hypocrisy bothered me a lot.”

He befriended a classmate named Joan Wohlstetter, who invited him to her home in the Hollywood Hills. There, he was smitten -- with her father’s intellect.

Albert Wohlstetter is an icon to many conservative thinkers. An elegant worldly man who enjoyed fine cuisine, he researched at the Rand Corp. and taught at the University of Chicago, molding neoconservative thought.

A logician by training, he applied the rigors of math to military planning, turning U.S. nuclear strategy on its head. In “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” Wohlstetter challenged the prevailing assumption that neither superpower would dare to use nuclear weapons. Technology made nuclear war winnable, he argued, and deterrence questionable. “He started talking about those issues,” Perle recalled. “It was fascinating.”

At USC, Perle took a class on international relations from Ross Berkes, who cited Hans Morgenthau, a political scientist who argued that militarily strong nations survive, while weak ones do not. Until then Perle had been a humanities major, his dream to teach English at some Midwest college. Now he began to study the world.

It was not far from there to the London School of Economics, where Edward N. Luttwak, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recalls Perle defending President Kennedy’s bold embargo of Soviet missiles in Cuba in a university debate, almost single-handedly turning anti-American audience opinion. Or from there to Princeton University, where Perle received a master’s degree in international studies. Or from there to Washington, where Wohlstetter called him to come muster the case for a ballistic missile defense.

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Will Recalls Perle

George Will, the conservative commentator, knew Perle at Princeton, and in Washington, when Perle worked for Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.) and Will was press secretary to Sen. Gordon Allott (R-Colo.). He remembers Perle as a sweet person -- a fan of T. S. Eliot. “He is not a fierce combatant,” Will said. “He just has convictions and information and a worldview.”

Perle’s worldview gained muscle under the tutelage of Jackson and his chief foreign policy aide -- Dorothy Fosdick, daughter of the famous pacifist the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick and one of the first women in American diplomacy.

Jackson had gathered a brain trust that included Perle, Wolfowitz, Frank Gaffney, currently head of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, and Charles Horner, now at the Hudson Institute. “There was a rich intellectual and philosophical tradition there,” Horner recalled. Heated political debates were not uncommon in “the bunker,” Room 135 of what is now the Russell Senate Office Building.

Jackson treated his staff, and particularly Perle -- whose father died shortly after he went to Washington -- as his own children. To this day, Perle says he is a registered Democrat, out of respect for Jackson, who died in 1983.

Mostly, Jackson indulged his staff’s brainstorming sessions, matching their quest for ideas with his own. Jackson would hold congressional hearings with then-unknown speakers such as Middle East expert Bernard Lewis, defense analyst James Schlesinger and Kremlinologist Leopold Labedz to talk about the world as they saw it. “Scoop thought ideas mattered, even if there was no immediate legislative issue,” Perle said.

In Jackson’s view, the only antidote to political dictatorship was military might. And the only way to win liberal votes for hawkish foreign policy positions, he believed, was to link their issues to yours. When the Soviet Union slammed the door on emigration, Jackson’s answer was simple: no freedom, no commerce. Liberals, who worried that cutting off trade would only hurt the Soviet people, were in no position to oppose free immigration of dissidents.

It was a ploy Perle adopted in 1981, when, at the height of arms control fever, he proposed the famous “zero option.” Faced with European protests over Reagan administration plans to put medium-range missiles in Germany, Perle in one stroke quieted the protesters and the Soviets by suggesting that both superpowers lower their arsenals to zero. Many suspected that Perle was merely trying to kill off arms control pacts altogether, but they were loath to oppose the idea of eliminating a whole class of weapons. The result, as Perle and the Reagan administration knew, was to shift public opinion in Europe to the American argument that as long as the Soviets had medium-range weapons pointed at Europe, the allies had to have some pointing back.

“Zero option came right out of Scoop Jackson’s playbook,” said Bob Kaufman, a professor of international relations at the University of Vermont and author of Jackson’s biography. “Richard Perle had Scoop in his bones.”

Perle has been on the warpath against Saddam Hussein since 1987, when he criticized the U.S. government for tilting toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, arguing that Hussein was more of a threat than the ayatollahs. Four years ago he began questioning the U.S. edict against assassinating foreign leaders. Now he advocates elimination of Hussein, and offers no zone for compromise.

Disarming Iraq without regime change is impossible in his view. “You simply cannot leave him in control of that territory and expect that you will get real disarmament,” he said Oct. 6 on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Many Arab diplomats are still smarting that Perle invited an anti-Saudi speaker to brief the Defense Policy Board. They think Perle personally turned President Bush’s mind to war with Iraq, and suspect him of being an Israeli agent. Perle dismisses the charge, noting that he has argued with Israelis for years about the risks of taking out Hussein. Perle is Jewish, but was not attuned to Israel’s needs until Jackson took him to Saudi Arabia in 1970, where Perle pulled an all-nighter debating officials who accused him of writing Zionist speeches while he questioned their financing of Palestinian causes.

When Perle seeks brief refuge from the public policy battles, he can be found at home, in a kitchen any great chef would envy. Unlike the wars over arms control or Middle East policy, the gratification from a meal beautifully prepared is instantaneous. So attracted is Perle to the mechanics of cooking that he obsessed for years about opening a souffle restaurant in which a conveyor belt would bring a glass-enclosed oven to the table and patrons could watch their meals rise.

“I still think it’s a good idea,” he said, between bites of raw fish.

With his marriage in its 25th year, a son he adores, a house in France purchased with friends in 1982 as “a shrewd investment” and a friendly dog named Reagan, Perle has few regrets in life, although there are some. He supports his brother, who was born brain-damaged, in California, and it tugs at his heart.

He has a few policy regrets -- Egypt’s Anwar Sadat proved a greater leader than envisioned; he thinks President Ford’s Helsinki accord, with its emphasis on human rights, helped topple the Soviet Union despite conservative criticism.

He has no second thoughts about leaving the academic track, aware perhaps that his talents for tactical warfare might have been wasted there. Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who admits he was outmaneuvered by Perle on a few occasions, calls him “one of the few creative people around.”

During a recent hearing at the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.) apologized. “I keep wanting to call you Dr. Perle,” he told the witness.

Perle hesitated, perhaps remembering the uncompleted doctoral thesis he left at Princeton on international negotiating styles. He had opted instead to put his theories to practice in Washington. He had chosen the life of influence. “I never finished my dissertation,” he told the congressman, smiling.