Why crystal Ball failed to shine

Acheson, Vance, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Brzezinski, Kissinger. The names of those who influenced United States foreign and security policy in the 1960s and 1970s are familiar enough, even to nonspecialists in the field. But Ball? George Wildman Ball served as under secretary at the State Department under Kennedy and Johnson successively. Thereafter, until his death in 1994, he remained an influential adviser and commentator on foreign policy, whose views were intermittently sought even by arch political opponents such as Nixon and Kissinger.

Despite considerable ambition, a generously proportioned ego, ample connections, and abundant intelligence, Ball never acquired the highest office to which he aspired. Others, including his friend Dean Rusk, always pipped him to the post of secretary of state.

Thus James Bill's study of Ball is also a meditation on the role of the "second tier" of government - those policy advisers who do not enjoy the limelight of their more high-profile peers, but who nevertheless may exert considerable backstage influence both in the formulation and implementation of policy. Ball was one such par excellence.

Indeed, Bill presents him as the very model of "effective statecraft": a man of "prudence and prescience, of purpose and practicality, of proportionality and morality".

In 1989, Roy Jenkins introduced Ball to an Oxford University audience as "the man who has been more nearly right on every major foreign policy issue of the past 45 years than anyone else I know".

Ball actively championed European political and economic integration from the start, his role model and mentor being Jean Monnet (an unusual choice for an American midwesterner, surely). He also took powerful stands against various aspects of American foreign policy.

Sitting on Kennedy's Ex-Comm during the Cuban missile crisis, he opposed the use of force to remove Krushchev's newly deployed missiles, a position which persuaded Kennedy.

He alone of JFK and LBJ's inner policy-making circle opposed US escalation in Vietnam from 1962, winning converts to his side, though not quickly enough or many enough to produce the "tactical surrender" he sought.

In later life, when he developed a particular interest in the Middle East, he vocally opposed America's uncritical backing of Israeli foreign policy, denouncing the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and arguing for the implementation of United Nations Resolution 242 which would return the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians.

In addition, Ball might have been introduced as the man whose crystal ball was more nearly right in its predictions than anyone else's. He foresaw and advocated a Channel Tunnel from as early as 1956. That same year, he shocked a New York audience by suggesting that, with the advent of television, a Hollywood actor might someday become president. He later suggested that Nixon's administration would be brought down by corruption only months before the Watergate scandal broke. And he managed to predict what many scholars of international relations have been so roundly condemned for failing to foresee: the demise of the USSR was proclaimed by Ball during a visit in 1972.

Ball was also, however, a man of paradox. A radical disjuncture emerges between his astuteness of judgment in the public sphere, and the often catastrophic mismanagement of his private life.

He appears to have been more adept at losing money than at making it. He also managed to cast a long shadow over his married life by returning to work in postwar Europe while his wife underwent major surgery in America.

Relations with his two adoptive sons were yet more difficult, despite the fact that Ball's most formative relationships were always with men:his father, Adlai Stevenson, Jean Monnet, Dean Rusk, the members of the almost exclusively male "big shots" club, the Bilderberg group (of which he was a founding member) and the acolytes with whom he surrounded himself in the State Department, the "Ball boys".

But despite his relish of this elitist, masculine milieu, and despite the spectacular "success" of his prognoses and prescriptions, Ball was ultimately a thwarted aspirant to the great office of state he sought.

An intriguing question emerges as to whether Ball's reputation for prescience and morality would have remained intact had he successfully lobbied Carter for the job of secretary of state in 1976.

Is it possible that he might have developed (if to a lesser degree) the bloated ego and etiolated moral sense for which he so attacked his long-time sparring partner, Kissinger?

Even as it is, the moral foundations of Ball's policy prescriptions sometimes appear somewhat insecure, often based more on pragmatism than idealism, and certainly not on an empathy with the dispossessed and powerless, who held no interest for Ball.

Perhaps, though, with its enthusiasm for globalisation and championship of the multinational corporation, Ball's particular breed of internationalism might ensure that this elegantly written volume finds a receptive audience in Robin Cook's Foreign Office.

Susan Carruthers is lecturer in international politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.