Washington's Conventional Wisdom

When I was camped out at the Carnegie Endowment, in the early 1990s, my office was just down the hall from the office of Richard Haass. Because Bosnia was often in the news, because the then head of Carnegie, Mort Abramowitz, was intensely interested in the crisis, and because, clearly, careers were being made out of it, Richard from time to time sought my views. Unlike Mort, whose interns ghost-wrote many of his op-eds, Richard wrote his own stuff but his ideas were always derivative. He was a nice enough guy and, to be honest, I've never heard bad things spoken about him, but his intellectual acumen never impressed me in the slightest way. A think-tank version of Chauncey Gardiner.