Paul Wolfowitz: Realist

George Will interviews Paul Wolfowitz as he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank: “A man who has mattered.” This column is a wonderful piece of reporting, all of which is worth reading. Here’s my favorite part:

Because he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during the ascendancy of political philosophers Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom — a thinly disguised Wolfowitz appears in “Ravelstein,” Saul Bellow’s novel about Bloom — many attempts have been made to trace to them the pedigree of his thinking. He says, however, that to the very limited extent that “academic things” shaped him, they were classes on America’s Constitutional Convention and Lincoln’s political thought, classes stressing that “the foundations of liberal democracy are about a helluva lot more than elections.”

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