Philip D. Zelikow

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Philip D. Zelikow
Philip D. Zelikow

Philip D. Zelikow (b. 1954) was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He also acted as the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia until February 2005 when he was appointed Counselor of the United States Department of State.

Contents

[edit] Early life and education

After studying at the University of Houston, Zelikow completed a B.A. in History and Political Science at the University of Redlands, in southern California. He earned a law degree from the University of Houston Law Center, where he was an editor of the law review, and a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. In the early 1980s, Zelikow practiced law.

[edit] Career

[edit] Academic and federal government positions

In the mid-1980s, Zelikow turned toward the field of national security. He was adjunct professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1984-1985. He joined the State Department through the standard examination process as a career civil servant, and as a foreign service officer served overseas at the U.S. Mission to the conventional arms control talks in Vienna, at the State Department's 24-hour crisis center, and on the secretariat staff for Secretary George Shultz, during the second Reagan administration (1985-1989).

In 1989, in the George H. W. Bush administration, Zelikow was detailed to join the National Security Council, where he was involved as a senior White House staffer in the diplomacy surrounding the reunification of Germany and the diplomatic settlements accompanying the end of the Cold War in Europe. During the first Gulf War he aided President George Bush, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker in diplomatic affairs related to the coalition. He went on to co-author, with Condoleezza Rice, the book Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (ISBN 0-674-35324-2, Harvard University Press, 1995), a highly-regarded academic treatment of the politics of reunification.[1]

In 1991, Zelikow left the NSC to go to Harvard University, where from 1991 to 1998 he was Associate Professor of Public Policy and co-director of Harvard’s Intelligence and Policy Program, in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 1998, Zelikow moved to the University of Virginia, where he directed, until February 2005, the nation’s largest center on the American presidency, served as director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and, as White Burkett Miller Professor of History, held an endowed chair. The Center launched a project to transcribe and annotate the previously secret tapes made during the Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson Presidencies,[2] and a presidential oral history project, headed by James Sterling Young, that systematically gathers additional information on the presidencies of Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton.

[edit] Commissions and committees

In late 2000 and early 2001, Zelikow served on President Bush's transition team. After George W. Bush took office, Zelikow was named to a position on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board [PFIAB], and worked on other task forces and commissions as well. He directed the bipartisan National Commission on Federal Election Reform, created after the 2000 election and chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, along with Lloyd Cutler and Bob Michel. This Commission's recommendations led directly to congressional consideration and enactment into law of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.[3]

In Rise of the Vulcans (Viking, 2004), James Mann reports that when Richard Haass, a senior aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell and the director of policy planning at the State Department, drafted for the administration an overview of America’s national security strategy following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Dr. Rice, the national security advisor, "ordered that the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder, something that would represent a more dramatic break with the ideas of the past. Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, University of Virginia Professor Philip Zelikow." This document, issued on September 17, 2002, is generally recognized as a significant document in the War on Terrorism.

At the recommendation of Lee H. Hamilton, the vice-chair, but against some opposition from the Bush White House, Zelikow was appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission, whose work included examination the conduct of Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and their administrations. Although his appointment was supported by the largest 9/11 families group, his prior involvement with the administration of George W. Bush led to opposition from smaller groups including 9/11 Family Steering Committee and conspiracy theory group 9-11 Citizens Watch, citing a conflict of interest. The Commission co-chairs, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, rejected this position. 9/11 Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg dismissed the allegations: "Dr. Zelikow served one month on the Bush transition team," Felzenberg said. "He never served in the administration. Dr. Zelikow recused himself from all aspects pertaining to that one month." Felzenberg said the commission had known about Zelikow's connections all along, and that the executive director has satisfied the ethics policies set by law. "It's been looked into several times," said Felzenberg. "The commission disagrees he's in conflict and is perfectly satisfied."

[edit] Policy positions

Zelikow's role in the second Iraq war is discussed at some length in Bob Woodward's State of Denial, which presents him as an internal critic of the way the war was being conducted in 2005 and 2006, and as an originator of the alternative approach termed "clear, hold, and build." He is also named by sources such as Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency as an internal critic of the treatment of terrorist captives, and there was wide attention given to an address he made on this subject after leaving office in April 2007.

Based on speeches and internal memos, some political analysts believe that Zelikow disagreed with some aspects of the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policy.[4]

In 2002 Zelikow made remarks interpreted as alleging that the United States entered the Iraq War to protect Israel, when he said:

“ "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,"

"And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."[5]

 ”

Zelikow has called attention to various fallacies in this argument. In addition to observing that any use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would threaten U.S. and world interests, he noted that, though he publicly worried about the Iraq danger in 2002, he did not take sides in the debate at the time between whether to deal with this problem with war or with further inspections and other diplomatic measures. Nor did he think his views amounted to evidence one way or the other about the Bush administration's motives, since he had not participated in or been privy to the administration's deliberations on this problem.[6]

[edit] Expertise

Zelikow's area of academic expertise is the history and practice of public policy. In addition to the work on German unification, he has been significantly involved in contemporary scholarship on the Cuban missile crisis, including the relation between this crisis and the East-West confrontation over Berlin.

While at Harvard he worked with Ernest May and Richard Neustadt on the use, and misuse, of history in policymaking. They observed, as Zelikow noted in his own words, that "contemporary" history is "defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public's presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of 'public presumption'," he explained, "is akin to William McNeill's notion of 'public myth' but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word 'myth.' Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community."[7]"

Zelikow and May have also authored and sponsored scholarship on the relationship between intelligence analysis and policy decisions. Zelikow later helped found a research project to prepare and publish annotated transcripts of presidential recordings made secretly during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations (see WhiteHouseTapes.org) and another project to strengthen oral history work on more recent administrations, with both these projects based at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.

In writing about the importance of beliefs about history, Zelikow has called attention to what he has called "'searing' or 'molding' events [that] take on 'transcendent' importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene. In the United States, beliefs about the formation of the nation and the Constitution remain powerful today, as do beliefs about slavery and the Civil War. World War II, Vietnam, and the civil rights struggle are more recent examples." He has noted that "a history’s narrative power is typically linked to how readers relate to the actions of individuals in the history; if readers cannot make a connection to their own lives, then a history may fail to engage them at all."[7]

[edit] Terrorism

Zelikow has also written about terrorism and national security, including a set of Harvard case studies on "Policing Northern Ireland." In the November-December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article Catastrophic Terrorism, with Ashton B. Carter, and John M. Deutch, in which they speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded, "the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently." [8]

[edit] Works authored or co-authored

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Zelikow has co-authored many books. He wrote a book with Ernest May on The Kennedy Tapes, and another with Joseph Nye and David C. King on Why People Don’t Trust Government. Others include:

[edit] Miscellaneous

Zelikow is a member of the Global Development Program Advisory Panel, Gates Foundation [9]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Harvard University Press
  2. ^ White House Tapes
  3. ^ UNT Biography
  4. ^ Cooper, Helene and David E. Sanger. Rice’s Counselor Gives Advice Others May Not Want to Hear. The New York Times. 2006-10-28.
  5. ^ Emad Mekay IRAQ: War Launched to Protect Israel Inter Press Service News Agency. 2006-12-28.
  6. ^ "The Israel Lobby", letter by Philip Zelikow, London Review of Books, May 25, 2006
  7. ^ a b Philip Zelikow. Thinking About Political History. Miller Center Report, Winter 1999.
  8. ^ Ashton B. Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow. "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger", Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998. 
  9. ^ Program Advisory Panels Announced by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, accessed December 9, 2007.

[edit] External links