In New Job, Diplomacy Displaces Saber-Rattling

"He's smart as a whip," said Van Cleave, a national security official in three Republican administrations. And "he thrives in stressful situations."

As a professor, Crouch wrote blistering critiques of U.S. policy. He spoke out against arms control pacts, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And he advocated resuming nuclear testing to modernize the U.S. arsenal.

In a 1995 article titled "Clinton's Slow Boat to Korea" in the journal Comparative Strategy, Crouch blasted President George H.W. Bush for "a major geopolitical mistake" in removing tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea and castigated President Bill Clinton for relying too much on diplomacy and the United Nations in handling Pyongyang.

"Absent positive, visible steps by the North Korean regime toward" abandoning its nuclear program by a firm deadline, Crouch wrote, the United States should "authorize the destruction of as much of this complex as possible by U.S. and allied air power."

Today, the current President Bush is withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea and relying on diplomacy with the North. Bush has not set a firm deadline for disarmament nor threatened military action, instead contemplating taking the matter to the United Nations.

Foreign policy was not the only arena in which Crouch was provocative. In an essay on the Web site of the Claremont Institute, a group promoting limited government, Crouch scorned additional gun restrictions after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. "The sources of this anarchism," he wrote, "are 30 years of liberal social policy that have put our children in day care, taken God out of the schools, taken Mom out of the house, and banished Dad as an authority figure from the family altogether."

Crouch plays down such rhetoric today without retreating. "I can certainly understand why people would take issue with my point of view, but at the same time we have a society today where . . . we need to strengthen these kinds of institutions like the family," he said. "I'm certainly not against women in the workplace."

Senate Democrats scrutinized such writings in 2001 during Crouch's Pentagon confirmation hearings at the same time they considered the nomination of Douglas J. Feith, later a chief architect of the Iraq war. In the end, some Democrats say now, Crouch has proved more of a professional than an ideologue.

"We sort of decided that J.D. was the one we would take a harder view of," said one Senate Democratic staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "But as it turned out, we probably should have focused more on Feith than him. [Crouch] didn't pan out to be the archfiend that we thought we had on our hands."

Van Cleave dismissed the importance of Crouch's earlier writings. "That's his academic hat," he said. "Part of his job [was] to be provocative. We in academia don't have any responsibility except to teach our students."