Where Are America's Wise Men & Women?
Today: Reflecting on today’s equivalents of Dean Acheson, W. Averell Harriman and the like.
The Agenda 👇
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men
Three characteristics of the group
Why something has to change in America
What about Eric Schmidt? And Kamala Harris?
Thumbs up/down for last week
Earlier this year, I read a fantastic book titled The Wise Men, which was originally published in 1986 by Walter Isaacson (the author of the famed Steve Jobs biography) and Evan Thomas (another specialist of historical biographies). It’s about how America shaped and built the post-war order to serve its interests and consolidate the Western bloc as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union, all viewed from the perspective of six close friends who played key roles at the time:
Dean Acheson, the son of a priest who excelled at law at Harvard and helped shape the postwar international order as US Secretary of State.
Charles E. Bohlen, a fluent Russian speaker and expert in the Soviet Union who had a distinguished career as a US Ambassador, notably in Moscow and later in Paris.
W. Averell Harriman, the high-flying businessman and financier with a taste for diplomacy, who tried to make business deals in the USSR and later became Stalin’s personal friend.
George F. Kennan, the austere diplomat and scholar who authored the legendary “Long Telegram” that paved the way for designing and implementing containment of the Soviet Union.
Robert A. Lovett, a shy business executive and investment banker who helped scale up the US Air Force during the war and later became Secretary of Defense.
John J. McCloy, an Irish-American lawyer from a modest background who rose to prominence in the American establishment over several decades.
Focusing on this group of six is somewhat artificial since it leaves aside major political figures such as Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George C. Marshall, as well as other significant characters of the Cold War era such as James Forrestal, Paul Nitze, and Clark Clifford. But there was a logic to Isaacson and Thomas picking these six individuals as their subject:
It’s a bipartisan group. Some, such as Acheson and Harriman, were staunch Democrats, while Lovett and McCloy were lifelong Republicans who nonetheless served in Roosevelt and Truman’s Democratic administrations. That bipartisanship really mattered because it made the group’s achievements and legacy resistant to dismantling once the other party came to power (in this case, under the presidency of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower).
It’s a group that mixed deep experience in both the public and private sectors. Bohlen and Kennan dedicated their life to diplomacy and scholarship, but the four others had strong private sector backgrounds and extensive experience in business: Acheson as a corporate lawyer, Harriman as the heir to a railroad empire and an investment banker, Lovett as a railroad executive and Harriman’s partner on Wall Street, and McCloy as a sought-after counsel who later became an effective lobbyist for the American oil industry.
It’s a group that was interested in the rest of the world even as they cherished their home country. A key part of that outward-looking mindset was due to the WASP upbringing’s deep connection to European (especially English) culture. But the “Wise Men” all took the wide world as a playing field: Harriman as a businessman and later a diplomat, Acheson, Bohlen, and Kennan as diplomats, McCloy as High Commissioner in charge of rebuilding Germany after the war and then as first president of the World Bank (and later as a backchannel messenger to governments in the Middle East once he became the top lawyer for the US oil industry).
There are many logical connections between these three characteristics (bipartisanship, business experience, and an outward gaze), but I think it’s really the business dimension that makes the difference. Business makes people more pragmatic and open to overcoming political differences; business needs room to expand and usually forces executives to take an interest in the rest of the world; and in the US there’s the unique tradition of bringing people with a business background into government, thus creating mixed careers that hardly exist in Europe.
Which brings me to a timely question: With the new Biden-Harris administration about to take charge, will we witness the rise of a new generation of “Wise Men (& Women)”, bringing business experience to the table and advancing American interests in a bipartisan manner?
It would be a good thing for at least three reasons.
First, America has been retreating into itself for too long. I agree with Peter Zeihan’s thesis that it predates Donald Trump by a long while, but that doesn’t make it any less worrying. Being truly engaged with the world is not only in the rest of the world’s interest, it also makes America a better society and a better-functioning economy. Think about it:
If America is inward-looking, it contributes to more rent-seeking at home (which comes with the resulting incompetence, cronyism, and corruption), a widening inequality gap, and the heightened political tensions and polarization that we’ve been observing for quite some time.
If, on the other hand, America embraces its own version of a “Go Out policy”, it doesn’t only gain access to foreign talent, ideas, and resources (like a vaccine); it also opens foreign markets on which its tech giants can expand without limit, all while inviting more competition at home, which fosters innovation that eventually benefits American consumers.
Second, it’s important that there’s an alignment of interests between the US government and the business world. We tend to see the government as the one in charge of the long term, but I don’t find that it’s true. What we just witnessed, with Trump as president, is that anyone in power can dismantle almost everything their predecessor achieved, regardless of the country’s interest. No such thing happens in business, because, well, business is serious (there’s actual money at stake), and no executive can succeed if they mess with the continuity of direction, a key pillar of strategy.
Clearly that was something that the likes of Harriman, Lovett, and McCloy brought to the government: a sense of alignment over the long term, pointing out the importance of maintaining a continuity of direction, as every successful business must do.
One couldn’t say that the Trump administration was very far removed from the business world, but there’s a clear distinction between two segments of business:
The inward-looking (mostly labor-intensive) industries that have an interest in erecting trade barriers and in America removing itself from the world: those industries are historically close to Republicans, and they were the ones pulling the strings over the past four years.
The capital-intensive industries that really need foreign markets to expand their operations and generate high enough returns on invested capital. Those are historically closer to the Democratic Party as Democratic politicians have been more favorable to free trade.
And so this is something that could change with the upcoming Biden administration: outward-looking, capital-intensive industries gaining the upper hand, starting with the tech industry, and installing a business-inspired consensus that can perhaps survive another Republican president.
Third, there’s the unprecedented possibility of bipartisanship. A few Democratic CEOs tried bipartisanship with the Trump administration and, for some of them, it ended horribly. For instance, it triggered the whole process by which Travis Kalanick had to resign from his position as Uber CEO, as I explained in What Trump Did to Silicon Valley:
Trump had a very concrete and negative impact on particular companies. Do you remember, for instance, that the dire situation Uber finds itself in today was all kicked off because of Trump? Shortly after his election, he invited then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to join his new economic advisory council. It wasn’t only Uber employees who were shocked when Kalanick accepted, including some with high profiles. Uber customers, too, decided that they wouldn’t have it and started to spread the hashtag #DeleteUber—with 500,000+ accounts deleted as a result! The unexpected activist campaign triggered by Kalanick reluctantly making friends with Trump didn’t only revive Lyft, which was apparently nearing bankruptcy at the time. It also created the setting for the long string of scandals and embarrassments that ultimately resulted in Kalanick being fired by his own board a year later.
Still, I see an opportunity for a modern version of Isaacson and Thomas’s “Wise Men” to emerge:
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is already emerging as such a figure: he’s a Democrat, but he became the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Board under a Republican administration. I don’t expect Schmidt to go to Beijing and conduct high-level talks with Xi Jinping, as Averell Harriman once did with Stalin. But I definitely see him contributing, much like Robert Lovett in his time, to helping the US government scale up its capacity in cutting-edge technology and modern warfare—maybe not to the point of becoming the Secretary of Defense, but close.
Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that Kamala Harris is part of this equation. She’s about to become vice-president at a time when, unlike 70 years ago, the vice-presidency is a power center in and of itself—with prominent predecessors such as Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden himself. And because Harris is a US Senator from California, has her base in San Francisco, and is personally close to the tech industry, she could definitely contribute to making this new consensus happen, setting the new direction that could see America winning and opening to the world again, all in the interest of its most flourishing industry.
Of course, there are obstacles. Political polarization doesn’t look like it’s receding. Democrats themselves have somewhat turned against the tech industry. And part of the industry appears ready to bet on the GOP instead, even if that means waiting a few more years. At any rate, the coming months (the transition and the inauguration) will be interesting!
Here are a few articles to go further:
What Trump Did to Silicon Valley (me, European Straits, October 2019)
Big Tech in a Fragmented World (me, European Straits, November 2019)
I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China. (Eric Schmidt, The New York Times, February 2020)
Adieu to Old America (me, European Straits, April 2020)
Pandemic live read. The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil (Venkatesh Rao, Twitter, July 2020)
Kamala Harris and the Future of Silicon Valley (me, European Straits, August 2020)
Inflection Points in Silicon Valley Politics (me, European Straits, October 2020)
Europe still needs America (Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Politico EU, November 2020)
What Biden means for European tech and startups (me, SIfted, November 2020)
How Eric Schmidt Plays Politics (David Pierce, Protocol, November 2020)
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From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
