Read carefully this NiemanWatch Q-and-A with Freeman from 2006 (or read any of Freeman's recent policy articles here) and ask yourself two questions: do these sound like the views of an unacceptable kook? And, would you rather have had more of this sensibility, or less, applied to U.S. policy in recent years?
His first point was that Freeman was being proposed for a post within
the president's discretionary appointment power, like one of his White
House aides, and therefore didn't have to reflect the Senate's sense of
who should be in the job. The more important point, he said, was that
Freeman's longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional
wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was
exactly what a president needed from the person in this job.
A
president's Secretary of State had to represent the country's policies
soberly and predictably around the world. His National Security Advisor
had to coordinate and evenhandedly present the views of the various
agencies. His White House press secretary had to take great care in
expressing the official line to the world's media each day. His
Director of National Intelligence had to give him the most sober and
responsible precis of what was known and unknown about potential
threats.
For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not
be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence
Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have
no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to
raise provocative questions, to ask "What if everybody's wrong?", to
force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that
normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic
known as "groupthink." As Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatch wrote in an item that called Freeman "A One-Man Destroyer of Groupthink,"
He
has... spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that
otherwise might never get answered -- or even asked -- because they're
too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.
For him to be put in charge of what [Laura Rozen
of Foreign Policy] calls "the intelligence community's primary
big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence
estimates" is about the most emphatic statement the Obama
Administration could possibly make that it won't succumb to the kind of
submissive intelligence-community groupthink that preceded the war in
Iraq.
Again, I don't know Freeman personally. I don't
know whether the Saudi funding for his organization has been entirely
seemly (like that for most Presidential libraries), which is now the
subject of inspector-general investigation. If there's a problem there,
there's a problem.
But I do know something about the role of
contrarians in organizational life. I have hired such people, have
worked alongside them, have often been annoyed at them, but ultimately
have viewed them as indispensable. Sometimes the annoying people, who
will occasionally say "irresponsible" things, are the only ones who
will point out problems that everyone else is trying to ignore. A
president needs as many such inconvenient boat-rockers as he can find
-- as long as they're not in the main operational jobs. Seriously:
anyone who has worked in an organization knows how hard it is, but how
vital, to find intelligent people who genuinely are willing to say
inconvenient things even when everyone around them is getting impatient
or annoyed. The truth is, you don't like them when they do that. You
may not like them much at all. But without them, you're cooked.
