robert gallucci, macarthur foundation head honcho

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What Robert Gallucci is doing with the billionsat his disposal to figure out world peace.

By Darren Gluckman

Profile Robert Gallucci

111lifestyles magazinePre-sPring 2013

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f you wanted some in-sight into Robert Gallucci, you could do worse than

to watch him tear at a hermetically sealed wrapper with his teeth to get at the medication therein. There’s no emergency: The meds, he advises, are something not quite essential, meant to deal with something not at all con-tagious. There’s nothing particularly telling in the style of his full-jawed dental attack. It’s where he is at the time: the dais of the American Secu-rity Project, a bipartisan national se-curity think tank, being introduced in laudatory terms by ASP’s chair-man, who betrays not the slightest acknowledgment of the gnashing and gnawing taking place 10 feet to his left. It’s perhaps this cheerful, charm-ing affectlessness that was integral to one of Gallucci’s former assign-ments, namely, a special envoy for the U.S. State Department charged with tackling—in part through nego-tiations with recalcitrant regimes—“the threat posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.”

Of course, when you’ve carved, as he has, an almost comically ac-complished career path, it must get

I tiresome, whenever you’re invited to speak (and the man does not lack for invitations), to have to listen to a recitation of those accomplishments time after time in sonorous, deaden-ingly respectful tones before you can get a word in edgewise. So while the odd deviation from decorum may be just a symptom of boredom, it’s not the decrepit, world-weary kind. On Gallucci—trim, silver-haired, and youthful at 66 years old—it reads like the foot-twitching restlessness of a 10-year-old, bored by the speechify-ing, itching just to get outside and slay dragons (or, as he does these days when time permits, ride horses, “western-style”).

The talk at ASP, in March 2012, ad-dressed the threat posed by a nuclear Iran. Gallucci notes, as a starting premise, that the nature of the nuclear threat, generally, has shifted. During the Cold War, military strategy was predicated on the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction, whereby two rational actors are both aware that a strike by one will necessarily result in a response from the other, and that the one who launches the first strike will surely perish.

“The good news,” he says later, in a



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nal actor and thus capable of being deterred from launching a nuclear strike, it may nevertheless achieve deniability (and thus reduce the like-lihood of retaliatory action) by trans-ferring fissile material (that is, the kind necessary to ignite a nuclear reaction) to non-state actors, like Al Qaeda. While this prospect is not ter-

conversation from his Chicago office, where he currently presides over the MacArthur Foundation, “is that the plau-sibility of a massive nuclear strike” of the kind that would invite an equivalent counterresponse “is magnificently re-duced as compared with, say, 30 years ago. These days the fear ought to be, because the threat is, a terrorist attack: a single nuclear device in an American city. That’s what I worry about.”

As he points out, if one assumes Iran is indeed a ratio-

Above: Gallucci, in 1994, with President Bill Clinton in the White House briefing room.



ribly new, and has been of late a veritable plot staple for hit television shows, international peace and security is one of the foundation’s declared areas of interest, and it is in this capacity that Gallucci has been speaking about the need, as he sees it, to reduce global stockpiles of fissile material; as president of the foundation, he’s responsible for guiding at least a part of the $5.6 billion endowment toward the study of how best to achieve that objective.

One might ask, What’s in it for Iran if it were to pull off such an attack, but under the auspices of a terrorist group? Isn’t this, on some level, an exercise in brand manage-ment? If an Iranian-orchestrated but terrorist-attributed attack wouldn’t raise Iran’s prestige, garnering the fear of its enemies and respect of the Muslim “street,” then what’s the point?

“I would say there’s an interest in raising the cost of the American presence in the Gulf, and in the Middle East generally.” Iran is on the ascendance in the Gulf, relative to its regional competitors, who fear the lack of a cred-ible Sunni bulwark against potential Persian aggression. Egypt, as Gallucci points out, is a long way from the Gulf, and has its own problems. With Egypt on its heels and Iraq an open question, an American retreat would leave a void Iran might exploit. The Gulf states could unite under a defensive pact. Trouble is, one already exists—the Gulf Cooperation Council—where the hope was “commonality in their military acquisitions, coordinated military exer-cises, etcetera.” The problem, says Gallucci, is that the Gulf states have never been able to work together.

Al Qaeda’s actions are also designed “to chill the Ameri-can calculation about our balance of interests and risks” regarding U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, he says, “never mind Israel. That’s the first point.”

“Second is aggrandizement,” he continues, returning to the question of Iran. Even if the Iranians were to seek deni-ability, “they might nevertheless be hoping for credit.” He’s aware of the logical inconsistency, but says that “ideally, they’d like to have their cake and eat it, too.”

Before coming to the foundation, Gallucci was the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, which followed several international postings, and before that, a dizzying array of roles in government. A bachelor’s degree from a SUNY school led to a master’s and Ph.D. from Brandeis, which begat a junior assignment at the State Department’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agen-cy in 1974. Within four years, he was division chief of the

department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Several postings later, in 1984, he left Washington for Rome, where he served as the deputy direc-tor general of the multinational force charged with keeping the peace in the Sinai. In 1991 he relocated to New York’s United Nations Headquarters to hand out business cards reading “Deputy Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM),” responsible for oversight in the dis-armament of Iraq. In 1992 he was confirmed as the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. These positions, you understand, are just a selection of highlights. To read his résumé is to wonder what you’ve been doing with your life.

Born in Brooklyn in 1946 to Sam-uel and May, Gallucci spent most of his early childhood in Staten Island before moving to Brentwood, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he went to high school and where sum-mers were spent being a lifeguard at the beach. He has one sibling, an old-er brother, Vincent, currently the di-rector of the Center for Quantitative Science at the University of Washing-ton in Seattle.

How did your parents produce this pair of heavyweight intellectuals?

“You have to understand—you don’t have to, but I’d like you to—this was a very solid, working-class, blue-collar environment that we grew up in.” They didn’t discuss current events around the dinner table and his par-ents weren’t regular readers of the Times, but “what they gave us was an appreciation and respect for learn-ing, and we had to take it from there.” Though neither of his parents went to college, there was no question that their sons would go and gradu-ate. “What happened after that was


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up to us.” Gallucci recalls it as a time full of possibility, “the happy ’50s,” when he and Vincent could be cred-ibly reminded, “over and over again, that this is a country where anything is possible, but you must get a good education.”

Samuel, who worked routing pack-ages for UPS, was from Italy, and both of May’s parents were, too. May was a homemaker most of the year, but in the run-up to Christmas, as was the

custom in the neighborhood, she would supplement the family income by taking seasonal work at one of the local department stores.

You talk of the happy ’50s, but you grew up in the shad-ow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. Did that reality temper the joys of your youth, even as it formed the terrain of your subse-quent career?

“I don’t know that anyone else in my high school had checked out Herman Kahn’s book On Thermonuclear War, but I had. I was interested in war. It was an organizing thought for me.” Rather than filling him with existential

Above: Gallucci, in 1994, flanked by Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director General Shunji Yanai and South Korea’s

Special Ambassador for the Nuclear Issue Kim Sam-Hoon.

Right: Tetsuya Endo, Japan’s ambassador to the Korean

Peninsula Energy Development Organization, with Gallucci.



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despair, the idea of doom piqued his intellectual interest. But the prospect of an imminent apocalypse did nothing to mar what he describes as an “idyllic” high school ex-perience, when “life rotated around things like the junior prom and the varsity club dance. It was a terrific time to grow up.”

Asked how he met his wife, Jennifer, with whom he has a boy and a girl (and, recently, twin grandsons), he chuckles. “I married the summer intern.”

It was 1976. The State Department was hiring. Jennifer Sims was a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with an undergradu-ate degree from Oberlin. “I interviewed her,” Gallucci says, adding impishly, “and I thought she had real promise.” It took a month before her security clearance came through. Gallucci gives himself credit for at least waiting until the afternoon of her first day at work to ask her out. Six weeks later they were engaged; four months after that they were married.

Do you apply your negotiation and diplomacy skills to your marriage? Gallucci says it’s the other way around, that being married and having children helped to incul-cate certain capacities for empathy and problem solving that became useful tools in his professional arsenal.

The Obama administration has been criticized for not having done more, whether covertly or overtly, during the 2009 popular uprising in Iran, but Gallucci dismisses the suggestion that it was a missed opportunity. As a general rule, he thinks the United States “shouldn’t be going around the world intervening in countries to fix them. That’s too heavy a burden.” Does that mean you weren’t sympathetic to the argument for going to war against Iraq in 2003? “I wasn’t at all sympathetic to it, no.” What about the claims (made, for example, by the late Christopher Hitchens) that the war resulted in the roll-up of the Libyan nuclear pro-gram and the dismantling of the notorious A. Q. Khan net-work in Pakistan? Gallucci isn’t impressed, insisting that neither outcome was contingent on the war, that Libya would have surrendered its program in any event, having been subject to intense and effective diplomatic pressure, and that A. Q. Khan’s network was well known to Western intelligence by then and was already in the process of be-ing neutralized.

In talking with him, one gets the sense that Gallucci is a repository of some of the juiciest back-stage gossip at-tending the most pressing geostrategic issues of the day, but the foundation’s public affairs veep, Andrew Solomon,

is on hand to ensure the conversation doesn’t run long. Time for one more question.

As a former deputy director of the Sinai peacekeeping force, does the ceding of the Sinai by Israel (and the country’s increasingly fractured rela-tionship with Egypt) and its unilat-eral withdrawal from Gaza (and the rocket barrage that’s followed), to say nothing of the concessions Ehud Ba-rak was prepared to make to Yasser Arafat in 2000 (which immediately preceded the second intifada), belie the idea of land for peace as a viable solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict?

“I don’t believe that,” he says, not quite convincingly, and despite the optimistic posture, there is a sober-ing tenor to his explanation. “I don’t see peace around the corner. I think regimes and even the Arab street can change over time. I think Israel is a fact in the Middle East; I pray it is a permanent fact. I recognize and respect all the tensions that go with that, and the concerns for the Pales-tinians, but I’m not about to embrace the proposition that it is inconceiv-able or impossible to eventually get to the point where there is territorial integrity for Israel and some sort of justice for the Palestinians.”

Even an optimist would struggle to see silver in that cloudy expression of hope, that prayerful refusal to accept the impossibility of peace. Gallucci, in conversation and at the lectern, has an infectiously upbeat demeanor, but he didn’t get where he is by counte-nancing fantasies. There is, of course, more to discuss, including the time his horse broke his wife’s leg, and the fact that he has yet to see an episode of Homeland (it’s on order, he advises). But Gallucci has to go. He’s got drag-ons to slay.

robert gallucci, macarthur foundation head honcho

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