Photo: Ambassador George Argyros, President George H.W. Bush, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Brent Scowcroft, and Larry Higby at the Nixon Library in 2000.
Remembering Brent Scowcroft
August 7, 2020
Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor for Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush who began his foreign policy career under President Richard Nixon, died at his home in Falls Church, Virginia yesterday. He was 95.
Scowcroft was one of America’s leading voices on foreign policy for decades and it was his work in the Nixon administration that started him on that trajectory.
After his service as a pilot in the Army Air Corps and professor of Russian history at West Point, Scowcroft became military assistant to President Nixon in 1972 and accompanied the President on his history-making mission to China.
Just months later, Scowcroft’s fluency in Russian proved invaluable when he accompanied the President on his equally-historic visit to the Soviet Union.
Just a year later, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger tapped Scowcroft as deputy assistant for national security. Scowcroft would go on to serve as National Security Advisor himself, under two different presidents.
In 2000, Scowcroft, alongside his friend and fellow Nixon administration alumni George H.W. Bush, was awarded the Victory of Freedom Award by Julie Nixon Eisenhower on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.
“I’d do anything for Richard Nixon,” he said at the event.