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Securing the NSC
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13824 |
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BOOK WORLD
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12 / 1988 |
2,431 Words |
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James T. Hackett
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As a new administration prepares to assume office, it is worth taking a fresh look at the conduct of national security policy. Constantine Menges, a former National Security Council staffer under Reagan, has done that in a book entitled Inside the National Security Council.
Menges presents a glimpse of the often bitter internal feuding within the Reagan administration over foreign policy. He describes a coterie of officials—William Casey, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Caspar Weinberger, William Clark, and others (including, of course, Menges himself)—who tried valiantly to carry forward the Reagan foreign policy agenda. Sometimes this "Reagan underground" was successful, as with the Grenada rescue mission, in which Menges' own efforts were crucial. More often they were defeated by the maneuvering of George Shultz, who, aided by Michael Deaver and Robert McFarlane, pursued policies favored by the relatively permanent State Department bureaucracy—policies that often were quite different from the president's.
Menges recounts efforts to prevent the State Department from undermining the president's policies on Nicaragua, Angola, Radio Marti, and counterterrrorism. He describes the daily fight that was required to preserve the president's policies against those intent on changing them. Even President Reagan, according to Menges, was misled by officials seeking their own ends. Reagan made good decisions when he was given access to adequate information; bad ones when his options were artificially limited. In Menges' experience, Reagan acted consistently to further his own agenda, even against tough odds, when he knew the facts. Hence Menges spent considerable time trying to get messages to the president.
Although Menges details outright failures for Reagan (certainly the Reagan-Wright peace plan should be counted here), he tells mostly of lost opportunities. These problems might have been avoided if Reagan had appointed strong national security advisers and given them, and the NSC staff, the support they needed to develop the means to carry out his agenda.
The Structure of the NSC
Established by the National Security Act of 1947, the NSC is an inner cabinet, consisting by law of four men: the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state and defense. But NSC meetings also include the national security adviser, the director of Central Intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and anyone else the president wants to include. Not normally invited are those members of the cabinet who deal primarily with domestic issues.
The NSC is the only U.S. government entity capable of pulling together the often divergent foreign policy and defense views in the government and presenting to the president the full range of policy options available to him. This NSC role, if performed effectively and impartially, should guarantee that the president, before making a decision, has all the choices before him. It should assure that he is aware of any disagreement or warning that his senior advisers, or the career staffs they direct, want to bring to his attention. The NSC process, therefore, is essential to rational decision making.
The NSC staff is part of the White House staff. It has varied in size over the years, from thirty to seventy,
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