By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 23, 2005; A17

The situation was dire, but J.D. Crouch II had a solution. North Korea's nuclear program presented such a threat, he determined, that the United States should dispatch more troops to South Korea, redeploy tactical nuclear weapons and plan airstrikes against the North's nuclear facilities should diplomacy fail. "Diplomacy in Pyongyang without military power," he declared, "is appeasement plain and simple."

That was 1995. A decade later, North Korea's nuclear program has become a graver threat, and now Crouch is in a position to do something about it as President Bush's new deputy national security adviser. But the solutions of Crouch's youth in academia look more complicated from the seat of power.

"The world is different," he says. "Circumstances have changed."

Few more than Crouch's own. The little-known saber-rattling professor at a Missouri university now reports to work on the second floor of the West Wing. As the second-ranking official at the National Security Council, he serves as principal backup to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and plays an influential role in the interagency deputies committees that develop administration foreign policy.

At 46, Crouch no longer publicly agitates for attacking North Korea, or for returning U.S. nuclear weapons to the peninsula. Instead, he emphasizes that "we're trying to solve this in a diplomatic way." Yet he does not repudiate his past views so much as place them in context. Age, he says, brings more nuance to the understanding of foreign affairs.

"On the one hand, you're more experienced, but you're less certain as you get older," he said in an interview at his office. "You want to challenge your own thinking and your own assumptions about things, whereas when you're young, you're a lot more certain."

Crouch will be a key player in finding certainty in an uncertain world during Bush's second term. As he assumes Hadley's old job -- becoming in effect Hadley's Hadley -- Crouch is a go-to guy in a revamped NSC structure. Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's only deputy, has reorganized the office to install six deputies, with Crouch designated the No. 1 deputy.

He brings a quiet persona and easygoing demeanor to the task but a willingness to tackle tough assignments. Even as a professor, he volunteered 20 hours a month as a sheriff's deputy, once pulling a man out of a burning car wreck. ("It's no big deal," he said. "People do this sort of thing all the time.") He spent much of the first Bush term promoting missile defense and revising nuclear military policy at the Pentagon.

"He took some very extreme positions during the Clinton administration when he was out of government," said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms control advocacy group. "But I must say since he entered this Bush administration at the beginning of the first term, we haven't heard much about what he's been doing. It shows that some of the more conservative types from the first [term] are surviving and thriving in the second. He seemed to keep his head down."

Friends say Crouch understands that his role is to promote the president's views, not his own. "He has a very good understanding of where the president wants to go, he has a good understanding of the process, and he has good relations with other people in the process," said David Trachtenberg, who served under Crouch at the Pentagon.

Crouch, a Santa Monica, Calif., native who spent childhood summers in Missouri, studied foreign relations at the University of Southern California, and, like many of his generation, his perspective was profoundly shaped by President Jimmy Carter's tribulations with Iran and the Soviet Union. "There's no question that we were unsure of ourselves," he recalled. "The one thing President Reagan gave us in foreign policy was the sense of being sure of ourselves again. That was so vital."

Crouch went to work in Ronald Reagan's State Department, then for Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) and finally as deputy to Hadley in George H.W. Bush's Pentagon under then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney. In 1992, Crouch followed his USC mentor, William R. Van Cleave, to Southwest Missouri State University. When George W. Bush was elected, Crouch returned as assistant defense secretary for international security, then later served as ambassador to Romania.

"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."