Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush
The late Rodman held high-level national security posts in every Republican administration since Nixon’s, and this posthumous work is his analysis of a president’s foreign-policy apparatus. Nominally, the CIA and the Departments of State and Defense are executive instruments, but in reality, they have institutional outlooks and agendas that can conflict with a president’s policies. Control of these bureaucracies, then, is Rodman’s topic, in which the statutory steering wheel—the National Security Council and its staff—looms large. Taking each president since Nixon in turn, Rodman appraises the personal interactions of foreign-policy chieftains with each other and with their chief executive, underlining whether comity or confusion reigned at the top. Rodman argues that a president’s fortunes in foreign policy depend on his clarity and decisiveness and on his inclination to work through the bureaucracies or to bypass them. Given the author’s judgment that a president’s national-security appointments presage whether he becomes their leader or their captive, observers of the new Obama administration and its inaugural moves in foreign affairs should find lessons in Rodman’s experienced outlook. --Gilbert Taylor