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The Strategist: Brent Scowcroftand the Call of National Security By Bartholomew Sparrow New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2015 752 pages $34.99
Few people have influenced US national security policy as much as Brent Scowcroft. Some luminaries burned more brightly - Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski come to mind - but their time in the spotlight was shorter. Scowcroftwas a senior policy maker in both the Ford and George H.W. Bush administrations, and an influential figure in Washington policy circles between and after his stints in the White House. And he was there for some of the most seminal events in American history including the final collapse of South Vietnam and the end of the Cold War. As Bartholomew Sparrow puts in The Strategist, his massive new authorized biography of Scowcroft, "...no other official or analyst has consistently had such a profound impact on the national security policy of the United States. For many in Washington, Brent Scowcroftis a pillar of the foreign policy community and a global strategist par excellence." (xii)
Capturing a career of this magnitude is an ambitious undertaking so Sparrow's book includes well over 500 pages of primary text. It draws deeply from both secondary and primary material - including Scowcroft's personal files - as well as extensive interviews...