The Neutral/Honest Broker Role in Foreign-Policy Decision Making: A Reassessment

Analysis of presidential decision making, particularly in the area of foreign and national security policy, has been a well-mined area of research. Much attention has focused on a range of variables thought to have some causal impact on and explanatory value for understanding presidential decision making: the organization and structure of decision-making processes, the impact of presidential personality, management, and leadership style, the development and effects of a White House-centered institutional presidency, the presence of bureaucratic politics and group dynamics, and the consequences of rational actors operating within institutionally defined parameters, to list just a few. However, with some important exceptions, (1) relatively little attention has focused on how the particular roles of participants in presidential decision-making processes are defined and operate. The Case for the Broker Role Most notable has been the lack of attention to the place of the broker role in presidential decision making and the contributions that it might make to its effectiveness. It is an issue that received much scrutiny and debate over thirty years ago in Alexander George's discussion of the "managerial custodian" (a particular variant of the role) in a lengthy article in the American Political Science Review (George 1972a), one that merited a comment by I. M. Destler (1972) and a rejoinder by George (1972b) and then was further explicated in his work Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy (George 1980). According to George, six tasks are required of the role of the managerial custodian: 1. Balancing actor resources within the policymaking system; 2. Strengthening weaker advocates; 3. Bringing in new advisers to argue for unpopular options; 4. Setting up new channels of information so that the president and other advisers are not dependent upon a single channel; 5. Arranging for independent evaluation of decisional premises and options, when necessary; and 6. Monitoring the workings of the policymaking process to identify possibly dangerous malfunctions and instituting appropriate corrective action. (1980, 195-96) Although George places the managerial custodian role within a larger theory of effective structure and organization ("multiple advocacy"), the role is interesting in its own right and some parts of it may be applicable in a wider array of organizational and decision-making settings. Perhaps more significant is George's argument that it can contribute to--but not necessarily guarantee--effective presidential decision making (George 1980, 201-06; Porter 1980, 214-15). The broker role has also become a common self-definition (or part thereof) of many who have occupied the position of national security adviser, as well as a point of reference for journalistic observers and political pundits. For example, the introduction to the oral history project of the Brookings Institution on the role of the National Security Council adviser (which included a roundtable and interviews with nine former national security advisers) observes that "since the Kennedy administration, the assistant to the president for national security affairs (a.k.a. 'the national security adviser') has played two roles: manager ('honest broker') of the day-to-day policy process and substantive policy adviser" (Daalder and Destler 1999, 1). (2) As a part of political vocabulary and practice, moreover, the neutral/honest broker role has been applied to other White House positions, most notably that of the chief of staff. At the time his appointment as chief of staff was announced during the 1988 transition to office of George H. W. Bush, for example, John Sununu saw as one of his responsibilities "to be an honest broker and present the views on the various sides of the issue." (3) Once in office, however, Sununu quickly acquired the reputation of a policy advocate and a heavy-handed operative with a tough, even intimidating style (Burke 2000, 16669). …