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Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 3 (Fall 2000)
Effective National Security Advising
A Most Dubious Precedent
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR., is professor emeritus in the humanities at the City University of New York. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for History and for Biography and served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. His most recent book is A Life in the Twentieth Century: I, Innocent Beginnings
Presidents seek administrative structures in which they feel comfortable, and presidential comfort derives from past experience and expectations as well as from present needs. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a military man, accustomed to a relatively rigid, orderly, hierarchical structure with firm assignments and obligatory channels, all ruled by detailed organization charts. President John F. Kennedy was a political man, accustomed to a far more flexible, informal, and untidy system, hoping thereby to stop others from defining his choices and enabling him to question information and recommendations rising upward through the ordained channels.
JFK did not act lightly in dismantling Ike's heavily-layered national security advisory apparatus. The incoming president had been much impressed by the thoughtful review of the Eisenhower national security procedures conducted in 1960 by Senator Henry M. Jackson's Subcommittee for National Security Staffing and Operations and published in a series of Senate reports. So far as governmental organization goes, Jackson had found a kindred soul in the political scientist Richard Neustadt, and in September 1960 he asked Neustadt to prepare a memorandum on the administrative problems that would confront Kennedy if elected.
Kennedy read Neustadt's "Organizing the Transition" with admiration and delight, appreciating especially its emphasis on the virtues of flexibility. He invited Neustadt to elaborate his points in further memoranda. Neustadt said, "How do you want me to relate to Clark Clifford?" Clifford had also been asked by Kennedy to submit his thoughts about the transition. Kennedy replied quickly, "I don't want you to relate to Clark Clifford. I can't afford to commit myself to one set of advisers. If I did that, I would be on their leading strings."
Kennedy, a political man, was returning quite consciously to the administrative methods of Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR, as his budget director Harold Smith once said, was an "artist in administration," seeking what he needed without great regard for bureaucratic tidiness. Neustadt's classic work Presidential Power had appeared the previous April, and his analysis greatly attracted Kennedy. FDR's methods, Neustadt pointed out,
were almost literally the opposite of those employed by Eisenhower's Presidency. Eisenhower often was reported in the press to have transformed the White House into an Army headquarters. That he did not do—nobody could—but he did manage to impart more superficial symmetry and order to his flow of information and of choices than was ever done before. Thereby, he became typically the last man in his office to know tangible details and the last to come to grips with acts of choice. His one-time chief assistant in the White House, Sherman Adams, is reported to have told a close associate: "I count the day lost when I have not found some new way of lightening the President's load." This but suggests the spirit of the "staff system," so called, in Eisenhower's time. The aims of that system were of the best. Within its limits it was reasonably well-designed and rather more than reasonably effective. In Eisenhower's instance there is no disputing that it may have been essential to his health and peace of mind. But its workings often were disastrous for his hold on personal power. 1
The concept of a chief of staff was very much in the military tradition and not at all (at least then) in the political tradition. After the election, Neustadt said to Kennedy, "You would be your own `chief of staff.'" Clark Clifford similarly advised Kennedy, "A vigorous President in the Democratic tradition of the Presidency will probably find it best to act as his own chief of staff, and to have no highly visible major domo standing between him and his staff." 2
JFK can hardly be blamed for making FDR rather than Ike his model. Harry Truman, too, though he had a more orderly approach to administration than FDR, had been his own chief of staff and had especially ignored the National Security Council as a rather pointless bureaucratic appendage.
For all their indifference to formal administrative structures, Roosevelt and Truman have gone down in history as able, creative, and effective foreign policy presidents. Indeed, history rates their initiatives considerably higher than those of the Eisenhower administration. That comparison would seem equally true for Kennedy, who accomplished more of note in foreign affairs (the Cuban missile crisis, the test-ban treaty, the Trade Expansion Act, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress) in a thousand days than the Eisenhower model produced in two-thousand nine-hundred and twenty days.
My friends Fred Greenstein and Richard Immerman make an oddly abstract case for the Eisenhower model. Their argument is based on the logic of organization charts, not on the practicality of results. Forgetting the biblical injunction: "By their fruits, ye shall know them," they fail to cite a single concrete example as a triumph of Eisenhower's national security machinery. They even admit (sort of) that Ike's Operations Coordinating Board was a flop ("The performance of the OCB never achieved Eisenhower's expectations").
What seems particularly unbelievable to the historian is their claim that the dismantlement of the Eisenhower machinery "led to such fiascoes as Kennedy's abortive effort to land anti-Castro guerrillas at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in 1961." Actually, Eisenhower himself, reluctant to use conventional armed force, had from the beginning of his administration turned routinely to the CIA as the instrument of American intervention abroad. Under Ike, covert-action operatives overthrew governments considered pro-communist in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), failed to do so in Indonesia (1957), helped impose supposedly pro-western governments in Egypt (1954) and Laos (1959), and plotted the overthrow and murder of Fidel Castro in 1960.
Where in all this global commotion was the wonderful Eisenhower national security advisory machinery? In January 1956, Eisenhower created a Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities composed of former government officials experienced in foreign affairs. In the fall of 1956, two of its most distinguished members, Robert Lovett and David Bruce, submitted a report to the Board on CIA covert operations. "Although these extremely sensitive, costly operations are justifiable only insofar as they are in support of US military and foreign policies," Lovett and Bruce told the Board, "the responsible long-range planning and sustained guidance for these, which should be forthcoming from the Defense and State Departments, appears too often to be lacking. . . . Once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal lunch meetings of the OCB inner group) can, at best, be described as pro forma. . . . A corollary to this is the exclusion of responsible American officials from knowledge they should have to properly discharge their obligations."
Lovett and Bruce went on to ask:
Should not someone, somewhere, in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be counting the immediate costs of disappointments (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, et al.), calculating the impacts on our international position, and keeping in mind the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed our virtual abandonment of the international `golden rule,' and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible, in a great measure, for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? . . . . Where will we be tomorrow? 3
Where indeed? The full Board adopted the Lovett-Bruce report and on 20 December 1956 expressed in person its dismay to Eisenhower about the confusion in his foreign policy created by the absence of planning and supervision of CIA projects. "We are concerned about the extremely informal and somewhat exclusive methods used in their present handling. We urge that present practices be regularized to insure that in all appropriate instances these clandestine projects receive the benefit of proper joint staffing and formalized approval and that both the State and Defense Departments be kept abreast of the developments of these projects." 4
The Board continued to warn Eisenhower about his free-wheeling CIA and its destructive impact on the overall conduct of foreign affairs. February 1957: "All too often the Department of State knows little or nothing of what the Deputy Director of Plans (covert action) is doing. In some quarters this leads to situations which are almost unbelievable because the operations being carried out by the DD/P are sometimes in direct conflict with the normal operations carried out by the Department of State." December 1958: "There are no present provisions for any regular external review of Clandestine Cold War programs and no formal accounting of them. . . . The Indonesian operation was at no time considered formally by the OCB Special Group. . . . On different occasions it was considered by the President, by the National Security Council, and by assorted ad hoc groups for various purposes. There was no proper estimate of the situation nor proper prior planning on the part of anyone." November 1960: the Board "extensively examined the covert action program for Cuba and . . . . expressed considerable reservations thereon, including reservations as to the manner in which the planning and programming of the operation was being administered." And January 1961: "We have been unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved." 5
The president brushed off his own Board's warnings and recommendations. His national security machinery quite failed to bring planning and coherence into his conduct of foreign affairs. And it does seem a little much for Greenstein and Immerman to blame Kennedy's dismantling of the Eisenhower national security advisory system for the Bay of Pigs. It was, after all, the Eisenhower administration that conceived the Cuban adventure in the first place—and also hired members of the mob to murder Castro. This harebrained scheme passed unscathed through the allegedly exemplary Eisenhower system. And Eisenhower's own recommendation to Kennedy on the day before the inauguration in January 1961 was full speed ahead.
Allen Dulles, the CIA director, subsequently told Kennedy that he was much more confident this time about success than he had been about the CIA overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala seven years earlier. When Dulles detected inadequate enthusiasm on Kennedy's part, he called attention to what he delicately called "the disposal problem." 6 If Kennedy did not go ahead with Eisenhower's Cuban project, what would happen to the 1,200 Cubans the CIA had been training for months in Central America? They would, Dulles said, wander about the hemisphere, saying that the great United States, after preparing an expedition to overthrow Castro, had lost its nerve under the new president. This would maximize Castro's standing and influence throughout Latin America.
JFK well understood that Dulles was also tacitly warning that there would be a political explosion in the United States if a former naval lieutenant j.g. dared veto an operation organized and recommended by the supreme commander of the greatest amphibious landing in history. Kennedy was trapped. But, if the Eisenhower system had lived up to the Greenstein-Immerman billing, he would never have been presented with the operation.
Is the layered Eisenhower machinery really "a precedent for effective national security advising"? On the record, surely not. It is wrong too in theory. Organization charts are less important than people. As James Bryce wisely wrote in The American Commonwealth, "The student of institutions, as well as the lawyer, is apt to overrate the effect of mechanical contrivances in politics." 7
Moreover, the hierarchical Eisenhower model is all the more wrong now that we are rushing irreversibly into the digital age. As one corporation after another has discovered, the computer has a levelling effect on traditional administrative structures. The vertical arrangements of the past are being replaced by increasingly horizontal arrangements—which is the way that presidents like FDR and JFK operated instinctively.
Message to the next president: do pass by this particular "recovery of institutional memory."
Endnotes
Note 1: Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: John C. Wiley, 1976), 226-227. Back
Note 2: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 123-124. Back
Note 3: David Bruce and Robert Lovett, "Covert Operations," Report to President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities 1956, Robert F. Kennedy's Papers; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 455-456. Back
Note 4: President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 20 December 1956. (Emphasis in original.) Back
Note 5: President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities to the Special Assistant for National Security, 12 February 1957; and President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities to Eisenhower, 5 January 1961, Robert F. Kennedy's Papers; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 457-458. Back
Note 6: Quoted in Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 242. Back
Note 7: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. i (New York: Macmillan, 1888), 349. Back