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In the absence of State Department, the job is White House.

This operation of the NSC staff necessarily under-cuts State's
position. Staff members have usually been involved in, or at least aware
of, most issues before they reach the White House. Therefore, if the
staff man has views of his own (and the good ones usually do), State
officers will know them and take them into consideration.

The great majority of decision memoranda are promptly dis-
posed of by the President with a minimum of personal consultation with
his principal advisors. His decisions are relayed to the departments
informally and with a minimum of explanation. The NSC staff memoranda
which are the vehicles for decision rarely, if ever, go outside the White
House. State Department officers are often at a disadvantage to understand
the rationale of decisions.

Under President Kennedy there was a fairly consistent practice
of recording Presidential decisions in writing and disseminating them to
the principal departments in the form of National Security Action Memoranda
(NSAM's). Today most decisions are either relayed by telephone from the

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Special Assistant to the departments or communicated by the President
directly, either in a group or to one principal.

Larger and more critical questions rarely come to final
Presidential decision on the basis of a single, written presentation,
although they may be initiated by such a presentation. The President is
quite likely, however, to discuss it first with the Special Assistant and
then ask for additional work to be done, e.g., exploration of a particular
alternative or an effort to subdivide the larger problem so that it can be
dealt with in pieces. President Johnson typically engaged in a wide range of
personal consultation both inside and outside government through individual
conversations, phone calls, or _ad hoc_ meetings. There was no predictable
pattern to such consultation. At the end, a decision emerged, but many
well-qualified observers believe this approach to decision-making reduces
the bureaucracy's understanding of the President's views and consequently
impairs its ability to implement his wishes.

(b) *Monitoring of Departmental Operations.*

The activities described above involve the NSC staff quite

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deeply in the affairs of the departments. The information derived from
this activity is supplemented by the receipt at the White House of a
continuous flow of paper reporting the activities of the departments and
events bearing on them. Through the Situation Room and the Information
Liaison (IL) office of the NSC, the Special Assistant and Staff receive
copies of all significant communications received and sent by the departments.
All such telegrams are read by staff officers with a view to identifying
trouble spots and items of Presidential interest as well as their consistency
with known Presidential policy.

Beginning with the Kennedy administration the Department of
State, and on occasion the Defense Department, was expected to refer to
the Special Assistant for approval ("clearance") any outgoing telegrams
affecting Presidential interests. This was not entirely unknown in earlier
years, because Secretaries of State have always required Presidential
approval or signature on certain letters or instructions. The difference,
beginning in 1961, was that for the first time there were staff officers in
the White House with specific area responsibilities and interests reviewing

a broad range of matters on behalf of the President.

This system of clearances affords the White House staff an
effective means of keeping its eye on the operations of the Departments,
especially the State Department. It is clearly not the type of system which
accords the Department of State great independence.

d. <u>The National Security Council.</u>

The NSC as an institution does not figure significantly in
current process. It meets fairly regularly but the agenda rarely includes
the big issues of the day. The latter are dealt with either in the Tuesday
Lunch (of which more later) or in ad hoc meetings of the President with
the principal NSC figures either individually or collectively.

The decline of the Council began with Kennedy's dismantling of
the NSC system. Although Kennedy held fewer regularly scheduled meetings,
he held many meetings which, although they were not so labeled, were de
facto NSC meetings since all or most of the statutory members were present.

There were some differences other than the absence of the NSC
label. There were often no written papers on the agenda -- or if there were,

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they were not of the highly coordinated Planning Board variety -- and
more often than not did not result in formal written decisions. Never-
theless, the President obtained advice, there was a free exchange of views,
and they were oriented toward decision-making.

The most definitive manifestation of the _de facto_ NSC gathering
was the "ExCom" group of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The President
assembled advisers and experts of his own choosing and relied heavily upon
them for advice and counsel. As testimony to the power of the NSC image,
Kennedy went to the trouble of having the ExCom arrangement approved by
the full NSC and enshrined in a NSAM -- on October 22, when the existence
of the crisis was first made known to the NSC.

The ExCom experience points out the fallacy of the argument that
the _size_ of the statutory NSC impairs its effectiveness. The original ExCom
was larger in membership than the statutory NSC and included all the
statutory members except the Director of the Office of Emergency Planning
(OEP). By the same token, the Tuesday Lunch is also often larger than the
statutory NSC.