Leadership Quote by Frank Carlucci

A bureaucrat’s disclaimer dressed up as a civic virtue, Carlucci’s line is really about power: who owns the consequences when “the intelligence” turns out to be wrong. He stakes out a posture of sobriety - I argued, I judged, I was responsible - that sounds like accountability while quietly shifting the burden away from the system that produced the estimate. The key move is grammatical. “The intelligence they’ve received” frames intelligence as a delivered product, like a memo sliding across a desk, rather than something policymakers shape through questions, priorities, and pressure. It’s an alibi built into the workflow.

The phrase “best judgment” does cultural work, too. It’s flexible enough to mean prudence, skepticism, even dissent, without specifying what that dissent looked like or whether it changed outcomes. In Washington speak, arguing “with” an estimate can mean anything from rigorous pushback to a token objection logged for later. The subtext is preemptive: don’t confuse an intelligence failure with a policy failure. Or, more pointedly, if policy fails, don’t pin it on me; I was judicious.

Carlucci’s era matters. As a Cold War national security figure, he lived inside a government where intelligence was both indispensable and politically combustible - from Vietnam-era credibility gaps to the Reagan years’ constant struggle over covert action and public justification. This sentence is a snapshot of that dance: affirm respect for intelligence, assert independence from it, and claim responsibility without admitting culpability. It’s not cynicism so much as institutional self-defense, polished until it sounds like principle.