Power Game (106 page)

The Primacy of the NSC Staff

Somewhat disingenuously, given his aggressive activism as national security adviser, Henry Kissinger wrote later that the president should make the secretary of State his principal foreign policy adviser and restrict his national security adviser to a coordinating role. But then, he shrewdly added, “For reasons that must be left to students of psychology, every President since Kennedy seems to have trusted his White House aides more than his Cabinet.”
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The power dynamic is natural enough. Presidents see their staffs, domestic or foreign policy, as extensions of themselves, whereas they look at cabinet secretaries and departments as sometimes difficult allies or even liabilities and nuisances. Proximity is one key reason. Top White House staffers orbit constantly around a president; cabinet secretaries have their own orbit. The senior White House staff, including the national security adviser, live with the President. They are constantly in and out of the Oval Office or on the phone with the president. They know his views, feel his triumphs, share his frustrations, read his moods, sense when to make a pitch and when to leave him alone. They are like family or like courtiers in royal households, contesting the power of cabinet barons.
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Staff aides are often true believers, their creed unsullied by the independent views of a departmental bureaucracy. Except for people
of unusual self-confidence and independence, the mentality of staff aides is to see policy and politics from the president’s personal perspective. Totally dependent on him for both job and influence, they rarely stand firmly against his policy impulses—even though it might be in his interest for the staff to oppose him. The natural impulse of staff is to tell the President what he
can do
and help him try to do it, not advise him what he
should not do
and try to talk him out of it. For the nearer the pinnacle of the political pyramid, the more loyalty to the boss is the vital touchstone.

The national security staff, as part of the White House apparatus, is more alert to the president’s political interests than is the State Department—more sensitive to his itch for political theater. National security aides are more prone than are career diplomats to think of the domestic payoff of a foreign policy spectacular (summitry, a hostage release) or to weigh the domestic downside of a policy line (arms for moderate Arab states).

By the unwritten rules of the power game, it is practically immoral for presidents to admit that domestic politics play a role in foreign policy decisions. But everyone knows they do, and presidents listen to those who heed the political winds. That is why leaders like Reagan, Nixon, or Kennedy often lean on the advice of loyal national security advisers. Even Jimmy Carter, under pressure to silence Zbigniew Brzezinski, retorted: “I need Zbig to speak out publicly. He can go after my enemies. He can protect my flanks.”
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By contrast, presidents from Kennedy to Reagan have felt State Department careerists were too prone to treat foreign countries as their clients. Epitomizing this mistrust, Richard Nixon told his staff that foreign policy was to be managed by the White House, “not by the striped-pants faggots in Foggy Bottom!”
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Presidents get impatient with State’s resistance to radical change, its stress on patient diplomacy, accommodation, and pursuit of long-term interests. From a presidential point of view, State is too nonpolitical and too frequently the bearer of bad news. Presidents resent the expertise of career diplomats when it challenges their own view of reality. As George Shultz learned with Reagan on Iran, the naysaying of diplomacy is a necessary check on presidential impulses, but it makes a secretary of State unpopular at the White House.

In the game of bureaucratic warfare, the national security staff has great advantages over the State Department. Proximity gives it constant contact with the president, presence in almost all high-level meetings, the chance to put in the last word with the boss. Its job is
to write cover memos critiquing positions of other agencies. Moreover, somebody has to mesh the competing views and the strands of diplomacy, defense, aid, propaganda, and intelligence. State would like to do that, but State is one of the partisan tribes, and therefore unacceptable to rival tribes as the sifter of options, the arbiter. However, other agencies accept the primacy of the White House staff.

As Zbigniew Brzezinski contended, “ Integration is needed, but this cannot be achieved from a departmental vantage point. No self-respecting Secretary of Defense will willingly agree to have his contribution, along with those of other agencies, integrated for presidential decision by another departmental secretary—notably, the Secretary of State. And no self-respecting Secretary of State will accept integration by a Defense Secretary. It has to be done by someone close to the President, and perceived as such by all the principals.”
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What’s more, modern technology has robbed the State Department—and the Pentagon—of important advantages in the power game. The two departments used to have exclusive global communications networks to American embassies or forces abroad. But in recent years, the White House has gained the technical capability to bypass State or Defense electronically. Its Situation Room has links to a worldwide network that lets the president get in touch with any leader in any country instantaneously. His national security staff can read the incoming electronic mail from around the globe and contact any embassy or CIA operation without ever informing State or CIA headquarters, as Oliver North often did. That means the White House can step into any issue at any time in any place.

Finally, the urge of modern Presidents to engage in personal diplomacy—summit meetings, personal visits, and a flow of private correspondence with kings and prime ministers everywhere—has enlarged the domain of national security advisers and pushed them into operational activism. They leave State the routine diplomacy, but they pull the most urgent business into the White House.

Richard Nixon’s activism and mistrust of the State Department enabled Henry Kissinger to move out of the old mold of national security adviser as coordinator and honest broker for the foreign policy apparatus, and to set a new pattern, largely supplanting the secretary of State.

Under Carter, Brzezinski aspired to similar preeminence and established himself as a rival power center to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. They battled toe-to-toe on Soviet policy, Vance handling arms negotiations, Brzezinski managing Carter’s tougher line, especially after Moscow’s
1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski had his back channel to the Kremlin through Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Also, Brzezinski was more of a strategist than Vance. He laid the groundwork for Carter’s diplomatic recognition of China and handled crisis management when the shah of Iran was falling. Later, he and his staff were the architects of a rapid deployment force to cope with threats to the Persian Gulf.

Kissinger and Brzezinski established ample precedents for the bold actions of Reagan’s national security advisers. The supreme irony is that Reagan came into office believing he would establish cabinet government and downgrade the national security staff. But Reagan’s effort lasted for only a year.

What is remarkable—and significant—is that the national security job vaulted back to preeminence under Bill Clark, who had no experience in foreign affairs except one year as number two to Alexander Haig at the State Department.

Clark, who took the NSC job in January 1982, was not shy about exercising power. He projected the boyish modesty of a tall, lanky rancher who gave up a sunny life on the California Supreme Court to help his old friend Ron Reagan. Clark evoked Gary Cooper in the White House Situation Room, quiet-spoken and clad in cowboy boots. I recall Clark’s constant self-deprecating litany that his NSC role was to be “referee” of the policy free-for-all and “coordinator” for the president. His stated recipe was to be invisible—not to be a policymaker but to be a lawyer insuring that all arguments were put before his one-man court, the president. Indeed, unlike most power brokers, Clark did not crave the limelight. He shied away from television appearances, made few speeches, and gave fewer interviews.

Nonetheless, within a few months he became the most influential foreign policy figure in Reagan’s entourage. Clark engineered Haig’s ouster and brought in Shultz. He pushed Reagan to center stage on foreign policy and encouraged Reagan’s hard line. As an old Reagan crony (chief of staff in Sacramento), Clark had enough clout to muscle the cabinet barons. In mid-1982, Clark forced the brawling bureaucracies to agree on a strategic arms proposal. Without consulting Haig, he got Reagan publicly to propose an informal, get-acquainted meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Later, leaving Shultz in ignorance, he prodded Reagan to make his strategic defense proposal. In 1983, Clark sent U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to Central America to craft a more aggressive regional policy. Then with Weinberger, he
persuaded the president to approve a huge American show of force in Central America, again with Shultz in the dark. Although State coveted the role of managing arms negotiations, Clark drew that function to himself and even toyed with setting up his own diplomatic back channel to the Kremlin.

Clark’s activism demonstrated that power gravitates to the center of the administration. Even an admitted amateur such as Clark is quickly tempted to exercise broad authority in the president’s name, consulting whom he will and ignoring others. With a laissez-faire president like Reagan, the latitude of the NSC staff is vast. Zbigniew Brzezinski gleefully observed that the Reagan presidency proved that it was not merely Kissinger’s legendary ego or Brzezinski’s celebrated instinct for the jugular which drew power to the national security staff.
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It was the very nature of the modern foreign policy game that did it.

SDI: Short-Circuiting the System

President Reagan unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983—intending it as a radical departure from the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by which this country had been defended since World War II. SDI marked a far more momentous shift of policy than many issues which were thrashed out for months and years in the National Security Council. Yet not a single NSC meeting was called to discuss SDI before Reagan unveiled it.

Reagan told the nation that he was announcing his bold promise to render nuclear weapons obsolete—“after careful consultation with my advisers.” In fact, the consultation had been hectic, belated, chaotic, and minimal for practically everyone in Reagan’s own government. The central issues raised by the president were not examined in depth beforehand by most top policymakers. The highest officials at State, CIA, and the Pentagon were shown drafts of the president’s speech too late to offer more than modest adjustments.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, though they had urged more research on defenses, were so shocked at what Reagan and his staff had done with their ideas that their chairman, General John W. Vessey, recommended that Reagan not give his famous Star Wars speech. Three military Chiefs told me they were stunned by how fast Reagan moved and how he had overstated their ideas. They had expected a serious study before the president announced a shift in policy. Secretary Shultz, fearing repercussions among NATO allies, also tried in vain to stop the speech, as did Richard Perle, then the Pentagon’s top civilian
thinker on arms issues. But suggestions to delay were brushed aside by the president and National Security Adviser Clark.

“Clark wanted this to be Ronald Reagan’s legacy,” said one high-level official. “They were far more concerned with building Ronald Reagan’s image than whatever might be the losses, like Allied relationships or congressional criticism.”

Star Wars epitomized an end run by the national security staff. It was a stunning example of how that staff can outgun the cabinet in making policy. Without exaggeration, Bud McFarlane, who as deputy national security adviser was midwife to the new plan, could boast to me that SDI was an “NSC creation.” For years, Reagan had harbored the dream of strategic defenses; a tiny circle of staff led by Clark and McFarlane orchestrated its birth. The national security staff was not the sifter of options from other agencies but the policy entrepreneur.

Star Wars was launched in haste and intentionally sprung as a surprise, not only for dramatic political effect but to minimize internal opposition. “The impulse of other people in government would have been negative—because it would make their lives harder,” one member of the policy cabal told me. Another top White House staffer candidly added: Star Wars was deliberately hatched in tight secrecy “to keep skeptics and doubters from strangling it in its crib.”

The policy process was driven by Reagan’s impulses. He had a personal epiphany on July 31, 1979, during a visit to the North American Defense Command, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. At the end of an all-day tour, Reagan and a domestic policy aide, Martin Anderson, were briefed on America’s early-warning radar system by General James Hill, the Norad commander. Anderson asked what would happen if Moscow fired one of its big SS-18 missiles at an American city. “Well,” Hill replied, “we would pick it up right after it was launched, and the officials of the city would be alerted that their city would be hit by a nuclear bomb in ten or fifteen minutes. That’s all we can do. We can’t stop it.”

Disbelief spread over Reagan’s face. Flying home to California with Anderson, Reagan talked soberly about what Hill had said. Obviously thinking ahead, he turned to the dilemma of a president once a Soviet attack was launched. “The policy options he would have would be to press the button or do nothing,” Reagan said starkly. “They’re both bad. We should have something in the way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles.”
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Years later, Reagan used the dramatic image of a “Mexican standoff”—the Soviet and American leaders like two gunmen with nuclear pistols drawn “and if one man’s finger flinches, you’re going to get your brains blown out.”