Brent Scowcroft: Kuwait Inc.'s Friend In The Bush I White House

Before working for Kuwait Inc. as its Santa Fe International Director, President Bush I’s National Security Affairs advisor, Brent Scowcroft (http://www.scowcroft.com/html/staff/scowcroft.html ) , had a long career in the U.S. military. But like former U.S. Vice-President Quayle and former U.S. Secretary of Defense and current U.S. Vice-President Cheney, Bush I’s National Security Affairs advisor in the early 1990s also apparently had no military combat experience on an actual desert battlefield.

Born in Utah, Scowcroft came to New York State in the 1940s and graduated from New York’s U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1947. New York’s West Point Military Academy is located only 50 miles north of Downtown Manhattan and 4,500 cadets attended it in 1991—only 10 percent of whom were women in the early 1990s. Women were completely excluded from New York’s Military Academy when Scowcroft studied there.

When Scowcroft attended New York’s Military Academy it also “barred black cadets from social hops and dancing classes…and from intercollegiate sports teams” and “prohibited” African-Americans “from entering Officer Clubs with their classmates during summer trips,” according to the book The Long Gray Line by Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson. The Long Gray Line book also noted that, until the 1950s, African-Americans at New York’s Military Academy were also “forbidden to teach Sunday school classes attended by teenage white girls.”

After graduating from West Point, Scowcroft became a U.S. Air Force lieutenant. But in 1948 his disabled plane crashed and Scowcroft was unable to fly again. For the next five years, Scowcroft held a number of administrative U.S. Air Force staff positions at the same time he returned to New York to attend Columbia University’s graduate school. He was awarded a Master’s Degree in International Relations by Columbia University at the age of 28.

Scowcroft was then called back to New York’s Military Academy to teach Russian history at West Point until he was 32. At 33, Scowcroft was ordered down to Washington, D.C. to study Slavic Languages at Georgetown University’s School of Linguistics, before being ordered to serve as an “assistant air attaché’” at the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia between 1959 and 1961. In 1962, the 37-year-old Scowcroft returned to the world of military academic life when the Air Force ordered him to teach political science at the U.S. Air Force Academy until 1964. In 1964, Scowcroft was ordered to the Pentagon to work in the planning and operations section of Air Force headquarters and, at the same time, he was able to return to New York City to work on his PhD at Columbia University. In 1967, Columbia University gave Scowcroft a PhD in International Relations and the 42-year-old Dr. Scowcroft was then ordered by the U.S. Air Force to teach at the National War College.

The next year, during the height of the Vietnam War Era, Scowcroft was ordered back to the Pentagon to direct the staff of Joint Chiefs of Staff General John W. Voigt for the next three years. And in November 1971, the 46-year-old Air Force Colonel Scowcroft was named to be [the now-deceased] former President Nixon’s military aide.

Nixon was so pleased with Col. Scowcroft’s work that he was promoted to Brigadier General in 1972 before eventually leaving the Air Force after becoming National Security Affairs advisor Henry Kissinger’s deputy in January 1973. Two years later, Scowcroft, himself, became the National Security Affairs advisor of [the now-deceased] former President Gerald Ford. After Ford was defeated in the 1976 U.S. Presidential election, Scowcroft became a director of the National Bank of Washington until 1983.

In 1982, Scowcroft joined with his old boss, Henry Kissinger, to form the Kissinger Associates consulting firm before being named, along with former U.S. President Ford, by the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation to be a director of its Santa Fe International then-subsidiary. Shortly after George W. Bush II’s father, George Bush I, was elected president in 1988, Scowcroft was chosen to be Bush I’s National Security Affairs advisor on Nov. 23, 1988. By late January 1989, he had moved from his vice-chairman’s offices at Kissinger Associates in Washington, D.C. and in New York City into his White House office.

(Downtown 1/23/91)

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