Chester A. Crocker

The policy of "constructive engagement," by means of which the administration of former president Ronald Reagan sought to influence events in South Africa with the carrot of closer ties with the white-minority government in Pretoria rather than with the stick of economic sanctions, was the brainchild of Chester A. Crocker, a widely respected educator and specialist in African affairs. As assistant secretary of state for African affairs throughout the Reagan years, Crocker pursued a comprehensive agreement that led to the independence of Namibia (formerly South West Africa) and the withdrawal of Cuban forces from Angola.

Although it took a change in Soviet foreign policy in the late 1980s to bring Cuba and Angola to the bargaining table, the final agreement was nevertheless a personal triumph for Crocker, who had been roundly criticized for complicating the question of Namibian independence by linking it to an end to the Cuban presence in Angola. "Mr. Crocker has proved a master craftsman of...complex negotiations," a writer for the Economist observed in the mid-1980s. "He negotiates informally and travels lightly. He encourages his staff to develop friendships with key personalities in each center, often just dropping by for a chat when in town. He regards personal trust and confidence as crucial to honest brokerage. It is the authentic American diplomacy, contrasting vividly with the anonymous formality of the Europeans."

Early Years

Chester Arthur Crocker was born on October 29, 1941 in New York City, the son of Arthur M. Crocker and Clara C. Crocker. He is distantly related to his namesake, Chester A. Arthur, who from 1881 to 1885 was president of the United States. After graduating cum laude with special distinction in history from Ohio State University in 1963, Crocker completed his postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he obtained a master's degree in international studies in 1965 and a doctorate at the School of Advanced International Studies in 1969. Meanwhile, he worked on the staff of Africa Report magazine, serving as an editorial assistant during 1965 and 1966 and as news editor during 1968 and 1969.

In 1969 Crocker joined the faculty of American University in Washington, D.C., as a lecturer in African government and politics. In the following year he was hired by Alexander M. Haig Jr., then the deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon for national-security affairs, to replace Roger Morris as the African-affairs expert on the staff of the National Security Council. In that post Crocker conducted interagency policy studies on issues affecting Africa as well as the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.

Rise to Prominence

In August 1972 Crocker returned to academic life as the director of the master of science in foreign service program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Concurrently, he taught African politics and international relations, advancing from assistant professor to associate professor during his nine years there. As the director of African studies at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies from January 1976 to 1981, he oversaw the research and policy analysis of teams of experts he assembled from government, academia, the private sector, the media, and various African nations. Among the works produced by the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies was Implications of Soviet and Cuban Activities in Africa for United States Policy (1979), in which Crocker, as one of its five authors, argued that Soviet intervention in Angola demonstrated clearly that Moscow was prepared to stir up trouble around the globe despite all the talk of detente. Other works he produced at that time included South Africa into the 1980s (1979), which was coedited by Richard E. Bissell, and South Africa Defense Posture (1981). Meanwhile, he also served as a consultant to the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Army War College, and the Republican National Committee as well as to the Rockefeller Foundation and other private organizations.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Crocker was the chairman of Ronald Reagan's Africa Working Group. After the election, he attracted the attention of the Reagan transition team with an article entitled "South Africa: Strategy for Change" in the winter 1980–81 issue of Foreign Affairs, in which he lambasted the outgoing administration of President Jimmy Carter for its open hostility to the white-minority government in South Africa. Although Crocker, like Reagan, abhorred apartheid, he argued that Carter's confrontational approach had only made the Pretoria government dig in its heels. "Effective coercive influence is a rare commodity in foreign policy," he wrote. Instead, he urged a policy of "constructive engagement," encouraging in positive ways greater freedom for black South Africans.

With his former mentor Alexander M. Haig Jr. installed as secretary of state in the new Reagan government, Crocker was named assistant secretary for African affairs. Although his nomination was approved unanimously by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1981, a floor vote was held up for nearly three months by Republican senator Jesse A. Helms of North Carolina, who questioned the authenticity of Crocker's conservative credentials. He was finally confirmed by a vote of 84 to 7 on June 9, and he was sworn in later that day. Although Crocker enjoyed the complete confidence of Secretary Haig and his successor, George P. Shultz, he was never too popular on Capitol Hill. "He has kind of a Kissinger-like view of the Hill," a congressional staffer was quoted as saying by Neil A. Lewis of the New York Times (June 9, 1987). "He seems to view Congress as an obstacle to conducting foreign policy."

Summoned repeatedly to the foreign-affairs panels of the two houses to defend or explain administration policy, Crocker struck many members as uncooperative and arrogant. "He has been unwilling to take Congress into his confidence even in closed sessions," observed Democratic congressman Stephen J. Solarz of New York, according to the New York Times (August 28, 1988), "and in any parliamentary system, he would have been obliged as a matter of honor to have resigned a long time ago." Crocker was at times buffeted by criticism on the right for failing to support the anti-Communist rebels in Angola and on the left for cozying up to South Africa, but within the State Department he was widely respected for his breadth of knowledge of African affairs and his refusal to be drawn into departmental politics. With powerful backing from the Reagan administration, he was able to survive calls for his resignation from such influential Republican senators as Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and Jesse A. Helms, and he went on to serve longer in the African Affairs Bureau than any other assistant secretary of state in history.

Even before he was sworn in as assistant secretary, Crocker already was engineering a major shift in United States policy toward southern Africa. In 1978 the United Nations Security Council, with the support of the Carter administration, had adopted Resolution 435, which called for South Africa's withdrawal from Namibia in preparation for its eventual independence. On February 7, 1981 Crocker completed an internal document proposing that the United States link Namibian independence to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, where they had been helping the Marxist government of Jose Eduardo dos Santos in its effort to crush the pro-Western rebels of Jonas Savimbi.

Although Crocker had reportedly been cool to the idea when it was first raised by Elliott Abrams, the new assistant secretary of state for human rights, because it might muddle the prospects of Resolution 435, he nevertheless embraced it as his own. Soon he was boasting to reporters that the administration would turn a "triple play" by ridding the region of Cuban forces, bringing an end to the cross-border clashes between South African and Angolan troops, and creating a free and independent Namibia. In the internal memo, Crocker argued that black African leaders should readily agree to such a deal once they were made to realize that they could get a Namibian settlement only through the United States and that Americans were serious about getting such a settlement. It turned out to be an overly optimistic assumption.

In April 1981 Crocker, though as yet unconfirmed as assistant secretary, was dispatched to Africa on a two-week, eleven-nation tour to lay the groundwork for the plan. Any hopes he may have had for a quick settlement, however, were dashed, since many black leaders were wary of the Reagan administration's friendly approach to the white-minority government in Pretoria, and Prime Minister P. W. Botha of South Africa refused even to receive him after he had tried to arrange meetings with black leaders hostile to Botha's government. Despite those setbacks, Crocker continued to insist that a comprehensive solution was the only way to allay the fears of all concerned. In his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa on February 15, 1983, he argued: "Security, of which the Cuban troop issue is an integral part, has always been a prerequisite for agreement on Namibian independence. As a practical diplomatic matter, it will not be possible to obtain a Namibian independence agreement without satisfactory regional-security assurances."

Amid widespread skepticism, Crocker embarked on another two-week tour of southern Africa in January 1984 in an attempt to restart the stalled peace process. He was able to negotiate a thirty-day cease-fire along the southern border of Angola, but fighting quickly resumed and in July 1985 Angola broke off talks altogether. The turning point came as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev consolidated his grip on power and began to withdraw Soviet support for wars of liberation in the Third World. As major beneficiaries of Soviet aid in the past, neither Angola nor the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO)--the Namibian independence movement led by Sam Nujoma--could afford to ignore the Crocker plan any longer.

At the behest of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo, the peace initiative was renewed at a meeting between American and Angolan representatives in Brazzaville in April 1987. Three months later, Cuba agreed to join the process. By March 1988 Crocker had persuaded the Marxist representatives to abandon their insistence that at least some Cuban troops remain in Angola, and he had achieved an agreement in principle for the removal of all such forces. South Africa, however, balked at preparing for Namibian independence until a firm timetable for the Cuban withdrawal could be established.

To break the deadlock, Crocker embarked on what turned out to be ten rounds of intensive negotiations with South Africa, Angola, Cuba, and SWAPO, which kept him flying between New York, London, Cairo, Geneva, and Brazzaville from May to December 1988. He also met with Soviet officials during that period to make sure that Moscow would not scuttle the deal at the last minute. The agreement that emerged in December 1988 ended twenty-two years of fighting between South Africa and Namibian rebels and converted the triple play, just as Crocker had predicted eight years before. Both Cuba and South Africa withdrew their forces from the region in 1989, and Namibia achieved its independence early in 1990.

Meanwhile, Crocker also set out to apply "constructive engagement" to encourage the white-minority government of South Africa to end apartheid and empower the black majority. In a confidential memo that he drafted soon after he joined the State Department, Crocker maintained, as was later reported in the New York Times (June 9, 1987), that the Reagan administration could expect to wield considerable influence in South Africa because Pretoria "knows that we are the best [American government] they can expect." In a major policy address before an American Legion convention in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 29, 1981, Crocker announced that the administration was seeking closer ties with South Africa not because it found apartheid any less abhorrent than the Carter administration had but rather to try to influence its government and at the same time preserve American interests. "In South Africa, the region's dominant country," he declared, "it is not our task to choose between black and white. In this rich land of talented and diverse peoples, important Western economic, strategic, moral, and political interests are at stake. We must avoid action that aggravates the awesome challenges facing South Africans of all races."

Over the next two years, the Reagan administration eased controls on exports to South Africa, beefed up its diplomatic mission there, approved visas for South African intellectuals and military leaders, and defended South African interests in the United Nations. South Africa responded to such gestures with a crackdown on the black majority, beginning in 1984, which was a brutal, at times bloody campaign that not only discredited the whole policy of constructive engagement but also guaranteed the imposition of economic sanctions that Crocker had tried so desperately to avoid. In light of the crackdown, South Africa's Bishop Desmond Tutu condemned Crocker's policy as "immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian," according to the Economist (March 30, 1985). Speaking to a reporter for the New York Times (May 3, 1985), Paul S. Sarbanes, the Democratic senator from Maryland, belittled Crocker for what he called his "ivory-tower mentality."

Nevertheless, Crocker continued to press for constructive engagement. According to the New York Times (August 28, 1985), he vowed "to keep pushing, to keep using the levers of influence we do have by being there, by having some kind of a relationship, by having our investments there, by having lines out to all elements in the community." He remained adamant in his opposition to economic sanctions beyond such limited measures as barring the sale of South African gold coins in the United States, which the administration had imposed in 1985 as a mild rebuke of the crackdown. In an interview with U.S. News & World Report (September 9, 1985), he said, "We don't believe that the cause of justice in ending apartheid will be advanced by economic measures that would, in fact, hurt those we're trying to help." Congress nevertheless enacted stringent sanctions over Reagan's veto in the fall of 1986.

By that time, however, even Crocker had grown so frustrated at Pretoria's intransigence that he began to at first indirectly and then openly criticize the government there. In January 1986 he toured Duduza, one of South Africa's black townships particularly hard-hit by the government's wave of repression. Two months later, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, he became the first Reagan administration official to allude to the black African National Congress as "freedom fighters" and for the first time called openly for black-majority rule. And in a speech to the Overseas Writers Club in Washington on July 10, 1986, he denounced South Africa for what he called its "scorched-earth policy."

Later Years

With the ascendancy of President F. W. de Klerk in September 1989, South Africa began to turn away from its campaign of repression, but that did not occur on Crocker's watch, for in May 1989 he had returned to Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service as a research associate at its Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He was also made a distinguished fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, a federally funded think tank in Washington, D.C. Herman J. Cohen was appointed to succeed Crocker at the State Department.

Writing in Foreign Affairs (Fall 1989), Crocker urged the administration of President George Bush to continue a policy of constructive engagement but to do it more effectively than Reagan had done in conveying the country's "sensitivity to the outrage of apartheid." At the same time, he warned the critics of his policy to keep in mind the limits of American influence. "The United States," he wrote, "should reject at every turn the notion that South Africa is an American problem--it is not....The conflict in South Africa will not be 'solved' by crude American efforts to manipulate the distant and slippery levers of the South African power balance."

In an Op-Ed piece that was published in the New York Times (February 14, 1990), Crocker applauded the release of Nelson Mandela and urged the Bush administration to promote negotiations between the South African government and the newly legalized African National Congress but again warned of the limits of Washington's influence. "This is a time for Americans to restrain our messianic impulses," he cautioned, "and admit the possibility that the breakthroughs and tragedies occurring around the world are not necessarily the result of some American action or inaction."

Chester Crocker is a slender, soft-spoken, scholarly-looking man who guards his privacy and rarely displays emotion. He has been married to the former Saone Baron, a lawyer and native of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), since December 18, 1965. They have three children: Bathsheba, Karena, and Rebecca. Crocker is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the African Studies Association, and the Cosmos Club.

Selected Biographical References: Department of State Bulletin 81:55 Ag '81 por; "Who's Who in America," 1988–89; "Who's Who in American Politics," 1989