The Vulcans is a nickname used to refer to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush's foreign policy advisory team assembled to brief him prior to the 2000 US presidential election. The Vulcans were led by Condoleezza Rice, a former member of the National Security Council. The group's ranks included Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Dov S. Zakheim, Robert Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, and Wolfowitz protégé, Scooter Libby. During the campaign, Bush sought to deflect questions about his own lack of foreign policy experience by pointing to this group of experienced advisers. After the election, all the members of the team received key positions within the new Bush administration. Other key campaign figures including Dick Cheney, George P. Shultz and Colin Powell were also closely associated with the group, but were never actually members. The name "The Vulcans" alludes to a huge statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking, in Rice's home town of Birmingham, Alabama. It may also allude to fictional, humanlike, alien beings who suppress their emotions in favor of cold rational logic in Star Trek. The most famous of those Vulcans is Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy. Origin During the summer of 1998, George W. Bush met with Condoleezza Rice at the behest of George H. W. Bush at the Bush estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. Rice had been director for Soviet and East European Affairs of the National Security Council under Brent Scowcroft during George H. W. Bush's administration and Scowcroft had been guiding her career ever since, ensuring she came to the attention of Bush Sr. "Eventually he was quite taken with her", Scowcroft recalled in an interview by James Mann for his book Rise of the Vulcans (2004). According to Coit D. Blacker, Rice and George W. Bush also "bonded at Kennebunkport" in August 1998. The several days of discussions that followed resulted in Rice agreeing to take charge of foreign policy for George W. Bush's upcoming presidential campaign. Later that year, Paul Wolfowitz, a former protégé of George Shultz and Dick Cheney, was taken on as well. Wolfowitz had also served as foreign policy advisor to Bob Dole during the 1996 US presidential election. In early 1999, a team largely drawn from the middle echelons of the first Bush administration began to act as foreign policy advisors to George W. Bush: Richard Armitage, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International