Paul Wolfowitz

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is an American academic and political figure. Wolfowitz is a polarizing and controversial figure both within the United States and abroad. He is often seen as a leading proponent of the 2003 Iraq War and architect of the ambitious foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration known as the Bush Doctrine. His views are often characterized as representing a modern American philosophy of neoconservatism. He is currently President of the World Bank.

Early life and education

Paul Wolfowitz was the second child of Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes. He grew up in the university town of Ithaca, New York, where his father was an eminent Professor of Statistics at Cornell University.

Related Topics:
Jacob Wolfowitz - Ithaca, New York - Cornell University

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Jacob Wolfowitz was a Polish national of Jewish descent who fled to the U.S.A. with his parents in 1920 to escape persecution. Many of Wolfowitz?s relatives left behind in Poland were to die in The Holocaust. James Mann, in Rise of the Vulcans, says that Jacob Wolfowitz "was a committed Zionist throughout his life and, in later years, was also active in organizing protests against Soviet repression of dissidents and minorities".

Related Topics:
Polish - Jewish - U.S.A. - 1920 - The Holocaust - James Mann - Rise of the Vulcans - Zionist

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Jacob Wolfowitz took his family with him when he taught sabbatical semesters at UCLA and the University of Illinois, and in 1957, at the age of 14, Wolfowitz spent a year living in Israel while his father was teaching at Haifa University; Wolfowitz?s sister would later emigrate permanently to Israel. In 1961 Wolfowitz graduated from Ithaca High School, where he had worked on the Tattler student newspaper. Wolfowitz was excused from military service in the Vietnam War through student deferments in order to pursue his academic studies, this has lead critics to dub him as a chickenhawk.

Related Topics:
UCLA - University of Illinois - 1957 - Israel - Haifa University - Ithaca High School - Tattler - Military service - Vietnam War - Chickenhawk

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Cornell University

Wolfowitz was expected to follow in his father?s footsteps and in 1961 he won a full scholarship to Cornell University that, according to Mann, despite his own personal desire to go to Harvard University, his father said was too good a bargain to turn down.

Related Topics:
1961 - Harvard University

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Wolfowitz was a member of the Telluride Association, of which his sister had been the first female member. The organization founded in 1910 aims to foster an everyday synthesis of self-governance and intellectual inquiry that enables students to develop their potential for leadership and public service. The students receive free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell campus and learn about democracy through the practice of running the house, hiring staff, supervising maintenance and organizing seminars.

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In 1963 professor of philosophy Allan Bloom served as a faculty member living in the house and would have a major influence on Wolfowitz's political views with his assertion of the importance of political regimes in shaping peoples? characters. That same year Wolfowitz joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom lead by Martin Luther King, Jr.. According to Mann, Jacob Wolowitz did not take well to his son?s new found passion or his mentor Bloom, Wolfowitz ?reflected that his father and Bloom regarded each other with a mixture of wariness and admiration?.

Related Topics:
1963 - Allan Bloom - March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom - Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Wolfowitz graduated in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry, and got a taste of government work as a managment intern at the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. Ignoring his fathers advice against pursuing a path in pure politics, suggesting economics as a possible compromise, Wolfowitz decided to go on to graduate school to study politics.

Related Topics:
1965 - Bachelor's degree - Mathematics - Chemistry - U.S. Bureau of the Budget - Economics - Graduate school - Politics

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University of Chicago

Wolfowitz chose the University of Chicago, over his long-term favorite Harvard, as he wanted the chance to study under Bloom's mentor Leo Strauss who was teaching there at the time and who, according to Mann, he thought "was a unique figure, an irreplaceable asset."

Related Topics:
University of Chicago - Leo Strauss

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Wolfowitz enrolled in a couple Strauss's courses on Plato and Montesquieu but, according to Mann, they "did not become especially close," as the aging professor was winding down his career and was to retire before Wolfowitz graduated. Fellow student Peter Wilson confirms that "Wolfowitz didn't talk much about Strauss in those days," but as Mann points out, "in subsequent years colleagues both in government and academia came to view Wolfowitz as one of the heirs to Leo Strauss's intellectual traditions." This legacy is discussed further in .

Related Topics:
Plato - Montesquieu

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Instead Wolfowitz came under the tutelage of Professor Albert Wohlstetter who had studied mathematics with Wolfowitz's father at Columbia University and was according to Mann "the sort of scholar of whom the mathematician Jacob Wolfowitz would have approved." Wohlstetter instilled in his students the importance of maintaining US supremacy through advanced weaponry. Wohlstetter feared that plutonium produced as a by-product of U.S.-sponsored nuclear-powered desalination plants to be built near the Israeli-Egyptian border could be used in a nuclear weapons program. He returned from a trip to Israel with a number of Hebrew language documents on the program that he handed over to Wolfowitz, these would form the basis of Wolfowitz's doctoral dissertation.

Related Topics:
Albert Wohlstetter - Columbia University - Plutonium - Hebrew language

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In the summer of 1969 Wohlstetter arranged for his students Wolfowitz and Wilson, along with an old acquaintance Richard Perle, to join the Committee to Maintain A Prudent Defense Policy in Washington D.C. Set up by Cold War architects Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson, the lobbying group was designed to maintain support in the U.S. Congress for the antiballistic missile (ABM) system. The opposition to ABM in congress had started employing scientific experts to argue against the system so Nitze and Acheson turned to Wohlstetter and his young protégés to counter these arguments. Together they set to work writing and distributing research papers and drafting testimony for U.S. Senator Henry M. Jackson. Nitze later wrote; ?The papers they helped us produce ran rings around the misinformed papers produced by polemical and pompous scientists.? Senate eventually approved ABM by 51 votes to 50. U.S. President Richard Nixon would however later sign-up to the ABM Treaty restricting the construction of such systems.

Related Topics:
Richard Perle - Committee to Maintain A Prudent Defense Policy - Washington D.C. - Cold War - Paul Nitze - Dean Acheson - U.S. Congress - Antiballistic missile - U.S. Senator - Henry M. Jackson - U.S. President - Richard Nixon - ABM Treaty

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From 1970-72 Wolfowitz taught at Yale University where one of his students was Lewis Libby who would become a long-term political associate. At this time Wolfowitz was not a regular speaker at Social Democrats USA conferences , as SDUSA did not exist until the December 1972 split in the Socialist Party, when the right Shactmanites defeated the Harrington center-left bloc and the hard left Debs Caucus faction, in a convention resolution . In 1972 Wolfowitz earned his doctorate in political science with a thesis on the dangers posed by the nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. In particular he highlighted:

Related Topics:
Yale University - Lewis Libby - Social Democrats USA - Middle East

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• The inefficiencies of international nuclear inspections.
• The risk of materials being diverted to clandestine weapons programs.
• The dangers of aiding a nation to develop nuclear technologies.

All these factors would reappear in his later analysis of Iraq.

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