Why Write a Biography?

The decision to write the biography was the outcome of several separate projects under consideration that converged on writing Scowcroft’s life narrative. One of the projects was an exploration of how U.S. foreign policy evolved from the Cold War to the post-Cold War era, inclusive of the period both preceding and following the attacks of September 11, 2001. How could the momentous changes in U.S. international relations over the late twentieth century and early twenty-first be explained? How did the sole superpower after the end of the Cold War again find itself as a fearful power, now with a global war against terror in place of a global war against international communism?

A second project was an investigation of how presidential administrations decide national security policy. How do different presidents and their chief advisers choose personnel, manage interagency coordination, coordinate with the relevant public agencies and private actors, and implement the policies they decide upon? Presidents have their own administrative styles and their own individual relationships with their principal foreign policy advisers, to be sure, but there seemed surprisingly little cumulative learning from one administration to the next on what can be called the “NSC process.” As often as not, presidents and their aides appeared to depart deliberately from the processes and policies adopted by their predecessors, even those of the same political party—and often with counterproductive results. It was abundantly clear that Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush each differed significantly as to how he and his chief advisers organized the national security decision-making process. It was also clear that how they did so carried immense consequences for U.S. national security and international relations.

The third project I was considering was to write about Scowcroft himself, although I was not (yet) sure about what form this would take. As a longtime defense intellectual and presidential confidant, Scowcroft had been closely involved with setting national security policy from 1970s through the early 2010s. Then, in mid-2002, he spoke out against going to war against Iraq, despite the fact that he was a life-long Republican and very close friend of the senior George Bush, and despite the fact that his dissent came at considerable personal cost. But he never said “I told you so” to George W. Bush or others; instead, he quietly advised Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Robert Gates during Bush’s second term in office, and in 2007 came out in public support of the troop “surge” in Iraq. Scowcroft’s ability to accept situations as they developed and divorce his ego from his previously held policy positions—behavior he demonstrated throughout his career—seemed exceptional among Washington policymakers. Notwithstanding Scowcroft’s remarkable behavior and long and influential career, he was relatively unknown.^{Footnote 3}

Having read several biographies in the process of writing my dissertation^{Footnote 4} and first book^{Footnote 5} and then more biographies,^{Footnote 6} for a later project,^{Footnote 7} I found these and other biographies to be at once absorbing and revealing. They were able to explain sophisticated and technical topics,^{Footnote 8} to impart valuable lessons about American politics^{Footnote 9} and foreign policy,^{Footnote 10} and also to hold my interest.

But each of these potential projects presented distinct challenges. A broad overview of U.S. foreign policy and what I saw as the missed opportunities of the 1990s and early 2000s—years when the United States dominated the world—seemed too large and tendentious a topic. With many of the relevant materials of the Clinton and Bush administration still classified, moreover, I was not sure how I would undertake such a project. Neither did I want to start a project under the premise that U.S. policymakers had missed important opportunities to fashion more constructive domestic and foreign policies in the aftermath of the Cold War.^{Footnote 11}

As for studying the NSC process, it was not clear what I would add to the accounts and analyses of John Prados, Robert Gates, and David Rothkopf,^{Footnote 12} among others, of how presidents have organized the national security process, appointed personnel, and used their advisers and staff. Too, each of these authors was either a former policymaker or a career student of U.S. national security or both; I was neither.^{Footnote 13}

Undertaking a biography had its own pitfalls. It was hardly a given that a biography would be credible to political scientists, especially specialists of national security policy, the presidency, and international relations. Furthermore, because biography is without explicit theory, does not offer testable hypotheses, and does not have established criteria by which to gauge its quality, it is rarely studied by political scientists or taught in graduate programs. Rather, biography has a “subjective and highly interpretative method”^{Footnote 14} making it vulnerable to writers who have prior political or ideological agendas. In addition, I was concerned that my prospective biography could be biased, however inadvertently, because of my selection of sources and own predispositions.

Conversely, would a book by a political scientist that described and analyzed the specifics of national security policy since the 1970s, examined the inner workings of five presidential administrations, investigated the NSC process in detail, and conducted in-depth studies of significant episodes in the history of U.S. national security be read and accepted by historians, policy experts, or attentive members of the public?

Furthermore, I wanted to secure General Scowcroft’s cooperation—making the book an authorized biography—since only with his permission could I get copies of his Air Force officer efficiency reports (and medical records) and his high school, West Point, and Columbia University transcripts. And only with his cooperation could I interview him.

The interviews would allow me to write much more knowledgeably about Scowcroft’s childhood and early adult years and help me understand his later political career. They would provide insight as to how he regarded the presidents with whom he worked, how he perceived foreign leaders, and how he viewed his White House colleagues, other officials, military leaders, select members of Congress, and news correspondents. But I had no guarantee he would cooperate.

A further concern was the potential size and complexity of the project. I would have to explore Scowcroft’s background as a Mormon, investigate his three-decade Air Force career, and address the specifics of the many areas that he participated in and exerted important influence—e.g., nuclear deterrence and the U.S.–Soviet strategic balance, conventional weapons and arms control; the Vietnam War, German reunification; and the 1991 Gulf War. I would need to become expert in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and two Bush presidencies, since Scowcroft served as White House military assistant under Richard Nixon and then deputy national security advisor, chaired the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces, was on the three-person Tower Board during the Reagan administration, and headed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in George W. Bush’s first term in office. This would demand a significant commitment and likely take several years of research and writing. I was not sure it was what I wanted.

The fact that Scowcroft was alive—he was born in 1925 in Ogden, Utah—posed another problem. My planned interviews with him exposed me to the risk I might “go native”: the more I talked to him and his friends, colleagues, and family members and the more I studied his career, the greater the likelihood I would unduly sympathize with his choices and actions. Or, I might be “played”: Scowcroft and others who I interviewed might offer skewed interpretations of people and events, withhold important evidence, or outright mislead me. Any of which might lead me to make inaccurate analyses and draw mistaken conclusions. The biography might overly benefit Scowcroft’s public image, in consequence, and might lend unwarranted support to a particular political position, or interpretation of events, or inappropriately bolster a president’s reputation.

The fact of Scowcroft being alive was relevant to a related issue: the comparative recency of his time in office. Many of the documents I wanted to consult from the Bush and Reagan presidential libraries were not yet available (notwithstanding my filing of dozens of FOIAs and Mandatory Reviews). The same also held true, to a lesser degree, with respect to the Nixon and Ford libraries (I did not attempt to consult the Clinton or George W. Bush libraries). Neither did I have access to Scowcroft’s personal files or business records. The idea of waiting or letting someone else write his biography had its appeal.

Drafting the biography would achieve my first two objectives, though. With Scowcroft’s role as an adviser to Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the two Bush presidents, the biography provided me with an up-close lens through which to study the long arc of U.S. national security policy from the 1970s to the present (albeit with some gaps) and to observe the changes in national security policy over the last third of the Cold War, the decade-long immediate post-Cold War years, and the post-9/11 era.

While many White House, State Department, Pentagon, and intelligence officials have served under multiple presidencies, few become the confidant of two or more presidents. Scowcroft also devoted his career to essentially one issue area only: national security policy. Dick Cheney served as White House chief of staff, secretary of defense, and vice president, and many of his duties were unrelated to national security. James A. Baker III, served as a campaign manager, White House chief of staff, treasury secretary, and secretary of state, but few of these roles touched on national security. The same holds for George Shulz’s long, accomplished political career. A narrative of Scowcroft’s career thereby offered a means by which to examine the evolution of NSC process and to compare how presidential administrations managed national security policy.

The more I read about Brent Scowcroft, the easier the decision to write the biography became. From what I read of the Nixon, Ford, and two Bush presidencies, diplomatic history, and Scowcroft’s own writings—consisting of over one hundred op-eds, dozens of magazine and journal articles, transcribed interviews, chapters in edited volumes, commission reports, and co-authored books with George Bush and Zbigniew Brzezinski^{Footnote 15}—it grew increasingly apparent he had lived a remarkable life.

I learned that Scowcroft was reared in an established Ogden family and had a happy childhood. But I discovered that after going to West Point and joining the Army Air Corps, Scowcroft nearly died when his F-51 Mustang crashed during training exercises over central New Hampshire. With his back broken and no longer able to fly, he had to reinvent his military career. After two years in military hospitals he earned an M.A. from Columbia University, taught at West Point, worked as an intelligence officer in Belgrade, and became head of the Department of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He then got a Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University under the supervision of William R. Fox, a student of Hans Morgenthau, served in the Pentagon on Air Force Long-Range Plans, and directed the U.S. Air Force’s component of Vietnamization.

Neither was it any accident Scowcroft became Kissinger’s deputy security advisor, I learned. In 1971 Air Force leaders proposed that he be appointed the White House military assistant (with responsibility for the two thousand military personnel who saw to the president’s land, air, and sea travel, his personal health and safety, and his secure communications, among other duties) in order to attract Kissinger’s attention. Kissinger duly selected Scowcroft as his deputy, and in less than a year, in September 1973, he served as de facto national security advisor when Kissinger became secretary of state. As Nixon’s and then Ford’s right-hand man, Scowcroft worked closely with both presidents and Kissinger on virtually all national security issues and in December 1975 he was appointed national security advisor outright.

After the Ford administration Scowcroft continued to be engaged in national security policy. In 1983 he advised the Reagan administration on the MX-missile and in 1986–1987 he investigated the Iran-Contra scandal as a member of the Tower Board. What I found out, too, was that as Bush 41’s national security advisor (1989–1993), Scowcroft was instrumental in getting the United States and Soviet Union to agree to large cuts in conventional and nuclear weapons, in orchestrating German reunification, and in maintaining a dialogue with Chinese officials after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Earlier and more adamantly than anyone else, he insisted that Iraqi forces be evicted from Kuwait should Saddam Hussein not withdraw them first.

Scowcroft was also in the vanguard of former foreign policy advisers who established their own international business consulting firms. In 1994, Scowcroft and former NSC colleagues established the Scowcroft Group—not unlike Kissinger Associates, Inc., which Scowcroft helped found in 1980.^{Footnote 16} Then, in August 2002, he became the foremost national security expert and most prominent Republican to speak out publically against attacking Iraq. By so doing, he estranged himself from his former friends and colleagues such as Cheney, Rice, and Hadley, and was vilified by Republican politicians and media pundits alike.

The fact that Scowcroft had not been the subject of a comprehensive biography provided me with additional impetus. Almost all analysts of U.S. national security policy and students of the Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 administrations have paid Scowcroft little heed. Cheney, Gates, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Baker, and others have also served at very high levels of government in multiple presidential administrations, but they have already written their memoirs—more than one memoir in some instances—and each has been the subject of a biography or many biographies. But Scowcroft has neither completed his memoirs, nor been the subject of a comprehensive biography.^{Footnote 17} And only occasionally has he appeared on national television or been in the national or international press.

Not only did Scowcroft play central roles in the final phase of the Vietnam War, the rise and fall of U.S.–Soviet détente, German reunification, the first Gulf War, and other important episodes of U.S. foreign policy history, I discovered that he had crucial roles in other important—though less well-known—developments. Among them were the intelligence reforms under President Ford and those proposed in the summer of 2001 (before and after 9/11); the rescue of the British pound by the United States and IMF in late 1976; the Bush administration’s neglect of Afghanistan following the departure of Soviet forces in February 1989; and the United States’ passivity in the face of the horrors in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1991 and 1992.

Deciding that Scowcroft’s life merited thorough study and realizing that writing the biography would go far toward fulfilling my two initial objectives, I contacted Scowcroft’s office. Scowcroft agreed to meet and he subsequently granted me access to his academic and military records and let me interview him on a regular basis.

Writing a Biography

Conducting research on Scowcroft’s life was an open-ended process, since biography has no “explicit, conceptual framework for the selection, organization, and presentation of data.”^{Footnote 18} Neither does it have a “set of common rules or standards by which to choose which facts are relevant.”^{Footnote 19} Nor could the voluminous archival materials, (few) published profiles, Scowcroft’s own writings, and his (guarded) interview responses direct me on how to proceed. I had to find out myself what Scowcroft’s contribution to the U.S. Air Force was, determine what role he played in the development of U.S. national security policy and management of the NSC process, and establish his place in the history of the American presidency and U.S. foreign policy. I had to sort “through numerous accounts of the subject’s career and [settle] on a final version that impose[d] order and structure.”^{Footnote 20} I needed to organizing my evidence “novel-fashion,” as one political biographer puts it, “to tell the tale” I wanted “to tell”^{Footnote 21} and write my version of Scowcroft’s biography “as if it [was] the story.”^{Footnote 22} “[L]ife is packaged” in biography with “the loose ends snipped off.”^{Footnote 23} It can “never [mirror] the messiness of a subject’s life.”^{Footnote 24}

Creating my own version of Scowcroft’s life, applying my own criteria and values so as to assess his choices, interpreting his historical significance, and, ultimately, ascribing meaning to his life made the biography an exercise in subjectivity. This was new terrain. I had to describe, interpret, and evaluate Scowcroft’s life, even though my subject was much more knowledgeable of the international, domestic, interpersonal circumstances of the times, even though he had served in the military and the White House, and even though he was a generation older. Not only did this seem presumptuous on my part, this was a different kind of scholarship; it was “interpretive-qualitative” research, rather than the qualitative-positivist and quantitative-positivist research characteristic of political science.^{Footnote 25}

The interviews—over forty with Scowcroft himself and about a hundred others—assisted me with this subjective interpretive-qualitative research. One advantage of writing on Scowcroft while he and most of his contemporaries were still alive was that Scowcroft and his friends, colleagues, family members, and political rivals could provide me with further information on the significance of Scowcroft’s decisions, on the quality of the advice he gave the president, and on how he ran the commissions he headed and on what impact his commission reports had. My own interviews with Scowcroft indicated how he saw his responsibilities, revealed what choices he thought he had, and suggested what the most important factors influencing his behavior were.

The interviews further allowed me to cover Scowcroft’s life in more detail than I could otherwise. I could address his childhood and experience as a West Point cadet (1944–1947), his time as a student at Columbia University (1952–1954), the Armed Forces Staff College (1961–1962), and National War College (1967–1968), and his experience as assistant air attaché in Yugoslavia (1959–1961), faculty member at West Point (1954–57) and the Air Force Academy (1962–1964), Pentagon staff officer (1964–1971), and White House military assistant (1971–1972). The interviews furnished me with facts and perspectives not always present in the published histories, memoirs, military and foreign policy analyses, and news accounts.^{Footnote 26}

The interviews were thus a critical supplement to the incomplete archival record, since many relevant documents from the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush presidential archives remain classified and since some decisions were not put down in writing. Not only do documents rarely speak for themselves, extent scholarship, political memoirs, (other) biographies, and news stories often cover events from a narrow perspective, take evidence out of context, omit crucial details, neglect to discuss certain issues, or present inconsistent accounts of the historical record.

As my research progressed, Scowcroft’s life slowly took shape. It became increasingly clear that Scowcroft’s life story provided an unusually comprehensive overview of U.S. national security policy by virtue of his multivocality: i.e., his capacity to bridge professions, reach across specializations, link policy subsystems, and connect knowledge communities. As a retired Air Force general and an expert on weapons systems, strategic forces, and military organization, Scowcroft was able to speak to Department of Defense personnel, military leaders, defense policy experts, members of Congress specializing in national security affairs, and Pentagon reporters, among others.^{Footnote 27} As the holder of a Ph.D. in International Relations, national security advisor, and author of articles, reports, op-eds, and books, Scowcroft could communicate with U.S. and foreign diplomats, foreign policy experts, academics who study the presidency, national security, and international relations, and the relevant news correspondents.

As a former intelligence officer, consumer of intelligence, and former chair of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Scowcroft could talk to and was respected by intelligence officials across the intelligence community. And as the head of a successful international business-consulting firm; a leader of the Atlantic Council and Aspen Strategy Group; and the co-chair or a member of several presidential commissions that included both business leaders and foreign policy experts, Scowcroft was accessible to policymakers, company executives, and others doing business both in the United States and abroad.

With rare exception, other high-ranking policymakers—American presidents included—are less adept at understanding and connecting these several aspects of national security policy. The combination of Scowcroft’s multivocality^{Footnote 28} and the longevity of his career allowed my biography to cover more diverse terrain than could a biography of probably any other foreign-policy principal of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—whether a secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security advisor, or other official.^{Footnote 29}

What Biography Offers Political Science

The process of writing The Strategist clarified the potential contributions of biography to political science. In fact, I found that biography fulfills several of political science’s objectives as a discipline: it studies “important” issues of politics and government; it provides the “thick description” necessary for making causal inferences; it addresses the “agency versus structure” issue; it constitutes both a “single case study” and a “single outcome study”; it is falsifiable; and it can explain politics and government to those outside political science and beyond the academy. Let me take each in turn.

Political scientists who study social science methods extol the desirability of doing “important” scholarship^{Footnote 30} and presume the subject’s significance as a politician, public official, party leader, or other political figure. The premise of (political) biography is that the study of the subject’s life is indispensible to an explanation of regime transformations, of macro shifts in partisanship, of the adoption, disruption, or transformation of major policy initiatives, of the formation, growth, or reorientation of government agencies, or of other significant phenomena. The study of the subject’s life may be as central to an explanation of a political outcome as is the analysis of a political party, legislative process, judicial system, or other institution.

Biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and other U.S. presidents are cases in point: besides constituting the life narratives of centrally important politicians, they constitute studies of the American presidency at critical junctures in its institutional history.^{Footnote 31} So, too, are the biographies of select members of Congress, influential cabinet secretaries and agency heads, individual Supreme Court and federal justices, high-ranking military officers, and other political officials:^{Footnote 32} they are at once also studies of Congress, the party system, the federal government, the court system, U.S. foreign policy, the military, or other institutions.

Biography also illuminates the influences that family background, education, professional training and socialization, personal ambition, or other factors have on the subject’s behavior. By providing the details that can explain why the subject was the primary cause, principal cause, or proximate cause of a particular outcome, biography provides the micro-foundations of individual actions. It situates the subject within his or her networks, whether based on educational background (e.g., the USMA), career (e.g., the Air Force), religion (e.g., Mormon), or kinship.^{Footnote 33} If the great doors of history swing on tiny hinges, to paraphrase Max Weber, biography makes these small hinges visible.

Assumed by biography, though, is that the subject can exercise discretion, and that she or he has done so to a significant degree and to significant effect. It is about agency.

Were an individual but a cipher for a political party, organized interest, or particular government agency, the biography would be of little interest. Likewise, the life story of a single taxpayer, sole voter, or new immigrant who did not otherwise importantly affect political life would almost certainly—although not necessarily—be of scant concern. But the premise of biography is that agency is not random and that the study of a subject’s life is more than idiographic. On the contrary, only through research on both the structural and personal foundations of individual behavior can we know why people take some paths while others are foreclosed, and why they have some options and not others.^{Footnote 34}

In order to account for why the subject did what she or he did, biography necessarily attends to the mix of reasons, from the private to the contingent, through its “thick description” (i.e., a “statement about what has occurred”).^{Footnote 35} Biography’s detailed study of the subject, consistent with “the importance of deep knowledge of the research context,”^{Footnote 36} enables it to explain why the subject was influential and why at other times—presumably—he or she did not prevail. “[T]he close observation of particular events or the summary of historical detail,” King, Keohane, and Verba write, “are [sic] the prerequisites to explanation.”^{Footnote 37} The thick description (or “deep knowledge”) of biography can thereby explain the causes of the subject’s actions.^{Footnote 38}

All the same, thick description forecloses the opportunity for biography to realize political science’s goal “to increase the number of observations” and thereby make more robust general claims.^{Footnote 39} Biography cannot offer encompassing theory.^{Footnote 40} Yet it can allow for the drawing of “descriptive inferences” from its detailed documentation of the subject’s life. Consistent with thick description, biography’s “observations from the world” enables the biographer and reader “to learn about other, unobserved facts” and, however implicitly, to “extrapolat[e] from known facts to the unknown.”^{Footnote 41} Like much of political science, then, biography makes a conscious effort to describe, explain, and interpret phenomena (here, a person’s life) based on “inevitably partial or imperfect information about the real world.”^{Footnote 42} This may not amount to “encompassing” theory, but it does make such theory possible.

The implication of biography is that persons in similar positions vary in behavior.^{Footnote 43} The (usually silent) comparison in biography between the subject and larger population of those in equivalent circumstances who make different choices allows biography to go beyond the idiographic and to generate broader lessons about politics and government. The biography of an American president, House speaker, Supreme Court justice, or general officer is necessarily about more than that one politician or individual official, then. Not only does it inform us of political institutions, it informs us of the population of U.S. presidents; House speakers; Supreme Court justices; or Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps generals. Just as a biography of Brent Scowcroft is in an implicit dialogue with studies of other national security advisers and influential presidential aides, so, too, does biography of Jefferson unavoidably invite comparisons with other founders and other U.S. presidents, and one of FDR invite comparisons with Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Biography provides a wide vista from which to perceive politics and government, then, and implied is that the more prominent the subject the more significant the changes in the ideas, institutions, policies, and processes which involved him or her. It cannot but study a person’s “life and times,” then, per the shared subtitle of many biographies. Biography may in fact not even be about the subject; he or she may be “just a vehicle, a peg, a device by which the writer insinuates himself and gains the attention of the reader who—intrigued by the developing personality, the tragedy, and the drama—gets engaged in the background, which is the real meat of the story.”^{Footnote 44}

Biography’s sensitivity to agency and structure thus allows it to point to alternative developmental paths, counterfactual histories, and new causal models—whether of electoral results, regime changes, public policy initiatives, institutional divisions, international conflicts, or other political outcomes. The biography of an influential figure also addresses—if usually indirectly—theories of political behavior, electoral politics, the causes of war, civil-military relations, judicial interpretation, or other relevant phenomena. Should the subject be a longstanding member of Congress or work in multiple presidential administrations, for example, biography would facilitate the generation of causal inferences with respect to the processes, organizations, and substance of the legislative process or the politics of the executive branch. A longitudinal study of political process and institutional development enables biography to illuminate reciprocal causation—i.e., how agency affects structure and how the organizational and procedural consequences of new policies can alter the political environment and thereby influence the subject’s own later thoughts and actions. It allows for the study of policy feedback.^{Footnote 45}

The fact that biography at once constitutes an in-depth description of the individual subject and facilitates causal inferences makes it a case study of larger political phenomena (i.e., the subject as an independent variable). So a biography of that single taxpayer, sole voter, or new immigrant could be of scholarly interest, just as a biography of a member of Congress, U.S. president, or influential public figure is also a case study of Congress, the presidency, a federal agency, or other institution. Biography may often be an “extreme case,” moreover, since the subject is often someone regarded as unrepresentative of the larger population.^{Footnote 46}

“So long as these background cases are not forgotten (i.e., that they are retained in subsequent analysis as points of reference),” Seawright and Gerring report, “the analysis is not likely to be subject to problems of sample bias.”^{Footnote 47} Accordingly, “the extreme case method often serves as an entrée into a subject.”^{Footnote 48} Biographies of a George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon are precisely of this kind: each is regarded as an outlier, unrepresentative of the population of presidents. We can similarly imagine biographies of Otto von Bismarck, Benito Mussolini, Nelson Mandela (and F. W. de Klerk), and other transformative figures. Scowcroft, too, is regarded as the exemplary national security advisor^{Footnote 49} and for that reason, atypical.

Yet biography can also be a “single outcome study”^{Footnote 50} since it explains the subject’s life as the outcome of her or his circumstances and background. As a single outcome study (the subject as the dependent variable), biography describes, explains, and interprets the subject’s life. As such, biography resembles other single outcome studies conducted for their own sake, such as the United States being a welfare state laggard or the outbreak of the French Revolution.^{Footnote 51} And by being able to promote a better understanding of how the subject’s actions lead to significant political and institutional changes, biography is able “to describe and explain political and social phenomena.”^{Footnote 52} It engages in the collective endeavor of political science.^{Footnote 53}

Creating an accurate picture of someone’s life is impossible, to be sure. Lives have discrepancies and inconsistencies; they permit different interpretations; and there is much the biographer cannot know. Yet such constraints also obtain in political science, as when researchers investigate the causes of World War I or why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did. “Many single outcome studies produced by academics do not have clearly defined outcomes,” Gerring notes. “A general history of the First World War is about many things related to the First World War,” and a “biography of Stalin is about many things related to Josef Stalin.”^{Footnote 54}

Biography can nonetheless be falsifiable. New evidence or a more consistent or more compelling interpretation of the known facts may allow a new biography, or parts of a new biography, to supersede all or parts of an existing biography (or existing biographies). Biography is not “essentially unfalsifiable.”^{Footnote 55} On the contrary, scholars, policymakers, and other readers recognize which biographies are (more) credible and (more) authoritative, and which are less reliable. Academics, book reviewers, and attentive readers commonly speak of the merits of different biographies and of the “best biography” of a subject.

Biography’ has the further advantage of its narrative form. A persuasive narrative of someone’s life, one that shows how the subject acted within the conditions and constraints,^{Footnote 56} can offer the reader a direct stake in the subject’s life story. The potential accessibility of the narrative form allows biography to reach a wide audience of political scientists, other scholars, policymakers, political writers journalists, and interested readers. Indeed, the ability to communicate to and instruct broader society is one of the desiderata of political science.^{Footnote 57}

Biography’s capacity to explain and interpret issues of political consequence may even allow it to answer the question, “What Is Political Science For?”^{Footnote 58} Since biography can offer a coherent account of the personal, institutional, and societal factors central to politics and to the institutions of government, the life narrative of an important political figure could help policymakers, other public officials, and members of the public better understand the issues and features of politics and government and thereby possibly help them address those issues (or those of another representative democracy). The promise of biography is that it can help political societies govern themselves and, if need be, reform their politics and government.^{Footnote 59} It can “prove useful to humanity.”^{Footnote 60}

Conclusion: Stretching Political Science

These reflections on why I wrote a biography of Brent Scowcroft and on the gains to be had from doing so suggest that political scientists would be remiss not to consult biography as routine part of their research (as some already do). With biography, the reader can acquire a thick description of people and events that can facilitate the generation of causal inferences. Biography can serve as a single case study as well as a single outcome study. It can reveal the role of individual agency in causing particular outcomes, and it can show how political problems are resolved in a world where the political, social, economic, and institutional forces influencing political outcomes are rarely straightforward or unambiguous.^{Footnote 61} And it is falsifiable. What is more, the detailed study of an individual’s actions can help politicians, public officials, journalists, and the public better understand political society; it may even help them better govern themselves.^{Footnote 62}

Political science as a discipline could return to an appreciation of biography “as a vivid corrective to the overemphasis laid upon the study of institutional ‘mechanisms,’ ‘structures,’ and ‘system,’” in the words of Harold Lasswell.^{Footnote 63} Lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science, observes that an institutional study “of the constitutional development of the United States without a life of [Chief Justice] Marshall and a life of Lincoln would be but the dregs of a rich and ebullient history.”^{Footnote 64} The same could be said of studies of institutional changes in legislatures, presidential powers, or government agencies that ignore those who effect such changes. “Political science without biography,” Lasswell comments in Psychopathology and Politics, “is a form of taxidermy.”^{Footnote 65} Lasswell’s claim may be an overstatement, yet biography offers a set of distinct advantages to students of governmental institutions, political processes, and the ideas that inform political societies.

Research on particular electoral results, certain legislative outcomes, specific presidential actions, the establishment of new government agencies, the emergence of new governmental functions, and the eruption of civil war, revolution, and other conflicts all stand to benefit from the study of the life histories of the leading politicians influential legislators, presidents, bureau chiefs, or military leaders most involved. Biography thereby offers political scientists another tool with which to construct theories and decide how to collect data and design models. This is one lesson from this reflection, then: the extent to which biography may be congruent with political science.

Because of the potential complementarity of and synergy between biography and political science, a second lesson is that more political scientists could contribute to this form of scholarship. Political scientists are better positioned to write biographies than are most other scholars and non-academic writers. They have expertise on the political institutions, partisanship, bureaucratic politics, and others political structures within which politicians, government officials, and other figures act. Political scientists can make causal inferences. And they are aware of biography’s methodological pitfalls. For all these reasons political scientists are well suited to describe, explain, and assess the lives of politicians, governmental officials, and other persons of political significance.

The narrative, interpretative, and interdisciplinary^{Footnote 66} qualities of biography are less common features of political science, admittedly. Yet many political scientists’ research is already interdisciplinary and contributes to communication and media studies, economics, history, psychology, public administration, sociology, statistics, or other disciplines. Political scientists already demonstrate their willingness to interpret politics and advance their own analyses in op-eds, blogs, lectures, and media appearances. And more than a few political scientists are accomplished stylists who could compose the narratives biographies require.

The discipline has much to gain.