Paul D. Wolfowitz: Visionary Intellectual, Policymaker, and Strategist

(Hardback)

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With the announcement of his resignation from the World Bank, the ongoing saga of Paul Wolfowitz, played out in the front pages of the world's newspapers, came to a dramatic conclusion. Paul D. Wolfowitz, as columnist George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post (May 12, 2005), has never been elected to office or served in a president's cabinet, but he has mattered much more than most who have. A longtime State Department hand (Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Ambassador to Indonesia), a leading scholar/intellectual (Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies), Deputy Secretary of Defense for four years, and one of the architects of the Bush Doctrine, Wolfowitz is a crucial figure in post-Cold War foreign and security policy. He most recently served as President of the World Bank. In each of these roles, he has stood out for his neoconservative and often uncompromising positions. It is no wonder that he is often vilified by the Left and lionized by the Right. In this first full-length biography of Wolfowitz, Solomon attempts to capture him not by delineating the quotidian details of his career, but by tracing his intellectual development and bureaucratic influence at key points along the road to Baghdad and beyond.

Reviews

Solomon provides a hagiographic profile of the ideas and actions of prominent neoconservative and Iraq War architect, Paul D. Wolfowitz, just recently forced to resign as head of the World Bank. Rather than attempt a comprehensive account of Wolfowitz's life and career, Solomon has chosen to focus on key moments as Wolfowitz traveled through the State Department, academia, the Pentagon, and the World Bank as means of illustrating the following themes: Wolfowitz's coupling of his longstanding quest to promote democracy overseas with US strategic national security and geopolitical interests, his belief in the global custodianship of the United States due because of its military superiority, his optimistic assessment of US capabilities in terms of money and commitment, and his support of the preemption of perceived threats. * Reference & Research Book News *
A must buy. * The Washington Post *

Author Bio

Lewis D. Solomon is Van Vleck Research Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School. He is the author of numerous books, among them From Athens to America: Virtues and the Formulation of Public Policy (2006), The Quest for Human Longevity (2006), and In God We Trust Faith-based Organizations and the Quest to Solve America's Social Ills (2003).