KISSINGER, HENRY A.

Dear Jack:

Thank you for your kind note of June 20 and for
passing on the news of your retirement.

You are to be warmly applauded at the culmination
of your long and outstanding career. I am pleased
that your article on the NSC turned out so well and
has been so well received. It is a major contribution
to the field.

I am also glad to hear you are still interested in
doing that article. I have to be in California for a
couple of weeks with the President and will try to
get in touch with you after I return.

Mr. John P. Leacacos
2401 Fort Scott Drive
Arlington, Virginia 22202

PWR:nm:6/27/72

RECEIVED
JUN 22 1972
CENTRAL NEWS

THE PLAIN DEALER

OHIO'S LARGEST MORNING AND SUNDAY NEWSPAPER

WASHINGTON BUREAU

521 NATIONAL PRESS BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20004
METROPOLITAN 8-1366

June 20, 1972

PUBLISHED BY

THE
FOREST CITY
PUBLISHING COMPANY
CLEVELAND, OHIO 44114

OFFICE OF

JOHN P. LEACACOS
WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

Mr. Henry A. Kissinger
Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs
The White House
Washington, D. C. 20500

Dear Henry:

Now that I am leaving the newspaper business, I want to thank
you for your courtesies of the last few years and your help in
particular for the article on your NSC apparat that appeared in
the Winter issue of *Foreign Policy*.

As you know from having read the entire manuscript, the second
half about the germination of your personal thinking did not get
published at that time because the whole piece was too long.

Without presuming to play a Boswell to your Johnson, I do feel I
have an uncompleted duty to offer to re-do and up-date the second
half of that initial Kissinger opus, but, as you yourself best
appreciate, on a *serious* basis.

To that end, you have my standing offer of my services, completely
unconnected with the press, to do a proper article, all specifics
in the context of your unique general insights. Therefore, I
have to leave it, my dear Henry, that *you have to call me*, and
*I won't call you*.

With fond good wishes for your personal health and happiness --
the continuation of your brilliant career you will take care of
yourself -- and a prayer that I will live long enough to read
your own definitive opus, I am, as ever,

Law School of Harvard University

Cambridge, Mass. 02138

KISSINGER, HENRY A.

PERSONAL

3 February 1969

Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
The White House
Washington, D. C.

Dear Henry,

An officious suggestion.

You know of my long standing interest in air-
power. I have been especially interested to note what
impact airpower, by its presence or absence, has had during
times of tension over recent years. In my judgment, com-
prehension of airpower and its application deserve informed
attention as the new administration addresses itself to the
many vexing problems which face us.

What to do? The answer to me is clear.
General Glen W. Martin is Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans
and Operations in the Air Force. You ought to know him any-
way because (a) his responsibilities are right down your
alley, though usually indirectly, and (b) he is in my judg-
ment the ablest officer in a light blue uniform. I predict
you would find him very helpful.

I dare say that your experience is the same as mine:
effective personal relations are more likely to be established
over the luncheon table than in a formal office.

WBL:has

RECEIVED

FEB 21 1969

CENTRAL FILES

Member of
Audit Bureau of Circulations
Associated Press

Tri-City Herald

The Voice of The Mid-Columbia Empire

Pasco • Kennewick • Richland

P. O. Box 2608, Pasco, Washington 99302

Area Code 509 586-2121

September 28, 1971

Dr. Henry Kissinger
Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs
The White House
Washington, D. C.

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

It was a great day at Hanford and for the Tri-Cities when you and
President Nixon and other members of his staff visited our area.

Enclosed are follow-up editorials for Monday and Tuesday from the
Tri-City Herald which are self-explanatory.

Also enclosed is a copy of my remarks at Hanford before you arrived.
I thought you would like to see how deeply we appreciate consideration
of Hanford.

We hope that fact and fate and circumstance will bring the liquid metal
breeder reactor to Hanford. We'll do everything in our power to be
helpful and to cooperate.

Under separate cover I'm sending you the first section of Monday's Tri-
City Herald so you can see the complete coverage.

GCL/lpl
Enclosures

The Only Local Afternoon Daily and Sunday ABC

Newspaper Serving Washington's 4th Market

Advance Copies
For Release After 1:30 p.m.
September 26, 1971

Remarks By
Glenn C. Lee, Secretary
Tri-City Nuclear Industrial Council, Inc.
On The Occasion Of
The Visit Of President Nixon At Hanford
September 26, 1971

This is an informal get together. I'm not here to make a speech but while we wait for the President to arrive we should review where we are, and where we're going. If we were sitting together in the back yard, waiting for the President, what would we be talking about? Probably it would be about the fantastic changes which have taken place over the last few years around the Tri-Cities, and the sparkling, exciting, magnificent future which is ahead of us.

The fact President Nixon and other distinguished people will be arriving here shortly emphasizes the potential of our future.

Scientists like Dr. Seaborg took an element you could see only under a microscope and developed it into a factory operation in a few short years. It was done here at Hanford. There are thousands of you in the audience who helped construct the reactors, starting with the new development in 1947 when General Electric came and DuPont departed.

It was at this time that the laboratories became more important and started to expand. The community filled out. It began to look for the first time as though Richland was here to stay. Later, about 1958-59, people bought the houses they were living in. Richland became home instead of a company town, we soon had a city council.

Downtown Richland, which was dominated by the wooden buildings, began to take on a new look when Senator Magnuson was able to win approval to build our beautiful new Federal Building.

However, expansion, development and growth of military reactors at Hanford had come to the end of the line in 1962. The new N reactor was in the final stages of completion. The question was: Will there be a steam generating plant attached to it or not? That question was a milestone of Tri-City resolve, resolution and effort to get the job done. The attempt to make the N reactor dual purpose had been defeated five times in Congress. But a delegation of Tri-Citians went back to turn the vote around in Congress and showed it is possible to do the impossible with time and circumstance on your side. We won approval for dual purpose operation and for the first time Hanford was keyed to the future, not to the past.

next page

- 2 -

The result was the construction of the steam plant by Washington Public Power Supply System and the expenditure of over $100-million.

In our many trips to Washington, D. C. contacts with the AEC, the Joint Committee, and in talking to more than 50 congressmen and senators, we learned of the impending danger to Hanford from the possible closure of ALL reactors because of the international attitude towards the danger of atomic weapons and the huge stockpile of plutonium.

We had nine reactors at Hanford. Another five had been built at Savannah River. Shucks, anyone could argue you couldn't go on making plutonium for atomic bombs when the last one was dropped in 1945.

So we saw a community 80 per cent directly or indirectly dependent on Hanford's payroll living on borrowed time. Something had to be done. We could not sit and wait for the ax to fall.

So we took inventory. What we had was a single purpose plant geared to military weapons. The magnificent nuclear knowledge now in possession of men at Hanford couldn't be utilized for peaceful purposes here because the government wouldn't let private industry do it. Consequently the knowledge and the ideas were exported and drained out of the plant and went elsewhere for private development.

The not-for-profit Nuclear Council of local citizens was formed to tear down the fences, tear down the walls, open up Hanford for utilization of ideas and diversify away from the dead-end military applications of the atom.

We talked to Senator Henry Jackson, who was on the Joint Committee for Nuclear Energy. We told him about the innocent people of Richland who in good faith had sunk their savings into their homes and had mortgages on the assumption that Richland was here to stay. If all the reactors were closed down it would be jerking the rug right out from under them. It would not only be an economic disaster, it would be a national disgrace and a waste of assets.

The senator agreed. So did the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense. As a newspaper publisher I even made a speech and suggested auctioning off Hanford to the highest bidder. It got a lot of laughs. But it went over like a lead balloon.

The Nuclear Council rattled the cage, shook up the establishment, got attention. And just look what happened.

In 1963 and 1964 we had an amazing constant stream of visitors from the Atomic Energy Commission, Department of Army, Navy, Air Force---you name them; they were here. They came to see what else could be done at Hanford, apart from making weapons-grade plutonium. The answer was "practically nothing."

next page

It was very discouraging. We had a huge land area, water, sunshine, and people. But we were an isolated community, a long way from market and with a highly specialized labor force. The AEC had a top flight consultant firm called Booz, Allen and Hamilton to draft a report, an inch thick, which you can bet cost a lot of money. It didn't tell us a thing we didn't already know. But it did put our problem in perspective and on a lot of official tables.

The consensus was that the single operating contractor had to go. A division of the various segments of the plant made, and a variety of companies attracted to Hanford.

The carrot was an opportunity to get in on the secrets and methods developed at Hanford; to inject their company into the growing nuclear industry. The "stick" was that they help diversify the Tri-Cities, help stabilize it economically, create new payrolls.

So Douglas United Nuclear operate the reactors, created Donald Douglas Labs and Sandvik Steel; Battelle Laboratories of Columbus took over the Hanford Labs and you can see right here today their new labs. Computer Sciences came in to operate the computer system and have expanded their payrolls. ITT took over support services and they built a fine new plant assembling electrical parts; U. S. Rubber and Martin Marietta came in to operate the chemical separations facilities and formed a company called Isochem. They promised diversification but nothing happened.

They were told to shape up or get out. They got out. In came Atlantic Richfield Hanford Co. to do the job. They've built the beautiful new Hanford House and the meat packing plant operated by Cudahy east of Pasco. U. S. Testing came in and built its plant.

So what has happened? Since 1964 eight of nine reactors have been closed. And we're still alive. Why is that?

Strange as it sounds, it's because of some of our failures as well as our successes. In 1965-66 the Nuclear Council put forth a herculean effort to get the 200-BEV atom smasher to Hanford. We had the best site in the world and many advantages. But we lost it. It went to Illinois.

Our effort was a failure but we had penetrated so deeply into the mind of important people in Washington, D. C. with our sales pitch---stressing the advantages of Hanford, its dependence on AEC that we were given the FFTF as a consolation prize. And what a consolation prize. We lost a battle but won a war, but we didn't realize it and were bitterly disappointed.

next page

We were told then that the fast breeder program had a great future and we should be patient, that in five years the FFTF would put our show on the road. But by nature we were not patient men. The people had to eat. We were worried about our community. We kept grinding the ax for Hanford. But we got these new things as consolation prizes. One of them was the Life-Sciences Laboratory. The price tag? $6-million. But more important it is a permanent payroll.

Then there was the $5-million high temperature sodium test facility, which led us to the $100-million FFTF.

And all the way along the line in the history of reactor cutbacks and the accelerator loss we impressed and obtained the help and sympathy of some pretty top people. They helped us. They still are.

As an example, in January 1970, after another reactor cutback announcement, Sam Volpentest and National Committee Woman, Gwen Anderson, and I went to Washington, D. C. Through Gwen we visited the White House and we learned some facts about what confronted us for Hanford.

In February 1970, we met Governor Dan Evans in Seattle on a non-stop flight from Seattle to Washington for 5-1/2 hours I briefed him on Hanford and the Tri-Cities, our problems, our troubles and our potential for the future.

That week in Washington the Governor and I visited with John Ehrlichman, the President's closest advisor on domestic affairs. We told him all about Hanford. He sent us to the Bureau of the Budget where we visited with Robert Mayo, Director, and his assistant Mr. Schlessinger, who is now chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Both Mr. Ehrlichman and Mr. Schlessinger are on the helicopter which is getting closer to Hanford every minute.

Through that effort by Governor Evans, and with an open-door policy at the White House to listen to us by John Ehrlichman, last year we had a total of five visits to the White House telling them about Hanford. This knowledge of our situation stood the Governor in good stead when we fought to get the N reactor back on line. Without the Governor's effort it would probably never run again.

Reactor closures were delayed. We were given time to get things rolling. And one of the things which really rolled was the fast breeder program. We had our foot in the door with the sodium test facility and the FFTF right here. Plus the wonderful backup in the fine companies and the fine people now at Hanford, including our new neighbor, Jersey Nuclear.

You know the further away you get from Hanford the more you find people refusing to have nuclear power reactors in their backyards. Utilities wanted to build reactors north of Seattle and down by Aberdeen. The environmental considerations and the danger of delay caused the Washington Public Power Supply System to take the bull by the horns and decide to go to Hanford.

next page

- 5 -

Hanford's second nuclear power plant is rapidly taking place on the drawing boards. It's scheduled for a 1977 completion. That means jobs, dinner buckets, and payrolls.

In June of this year, President Nixon declared in a national speech in June, that the fast breeder program was an item of the highest priority in the race to produce adequate energy, conserve our natural fuels and protect the environment.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President and key members of his advisory staff and his cabinet will be here in a few minutes.

I think they are coming to Hanford for only one purpose---to hear facts, see the Hanford site, meet the Hanford people at a time when final decisions are being made by the President as to where the first reactor of the new generation of nuclear power reactors is to be located: namely, the $500-million Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Demonstration Reactor.

It's been great to visit with you. You're a wonderful people. You have stuck together through times of stress and strain in the Tri-Cities.

Instead of going to pieces you've built a good foundation for a solid future. I've lived in the Tri-Cities 25 years. I can honestly say I've never been so excited, so convinced as I am now, that Hanford stands on the threshold of vast developments beyond anyone's imagination.

918

ROUTING SLIP

TO:

R. Allen
F. Bergsten
F. Chapin
D. Davidson
M. Halperin
S. Keeny
W. Lemnitzer
L. Lynn
D. Moor
R. Morris
A. Nachmanoff
H. Saunders
R. Sneider
H. Sonnenfeldt
V. Vaky
R. Osgood
A. Caubet
L. Eagleburger
A. Haig
R. Houdek
A. McCafferty
L. Moock
Moose - file
Moose - suspense
Log
File
Hollinger

The attached correspondence directed to Henry Kissinger
is being referred to you for:

___ Reply for HAK signature

___ Reply for your signature

___ ✓ Recommendation to HAK

___ No action, for your information

It would be appreciated if you could reply within three days.

___ Retain file

___ Return file with response

OFFICE OF THE MINISTER OF CONSTRUCTION
REPUBLIC OF KOREA

July 22, 1969

Mr. Henry A. Kissinger
White House
Washington D. C.
U. S. A.

Dear Mr. Kissinger,

I hope you and your family have been well.

Since I assumed the post of Minister of
Construction last February, I have been heavily
committed in my daily schedule and found a little
time to attend to my correspondence.

So I would like to take this means and extend
my warm greetings to you and your family.

Please accept my best wishes for a most enjoy-
able summer vacation.

I am looking forward to seeing your continuous
concern on Korea.

With my kindest personal regards.

The Joong-ang Ilbo.

(The Central Daily News)
58-9, Seosomun-Dong
SEOUL, KOREA

Tong-yang Broadcasting Co., Ltd.
TBC-TV (Ch. 7 & 9)
TBC-Radio(AM & FM)

CABLE ADDRESS
JOONGANGILBO
TEL: ☎ 8210-28

November 15, 1969

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
The White House
Washington, D.C.
U.S.A.

Dear Professor Kissinger:

It gives me a great pleasure and feeling of pride whenever I read about you in various publications as I am a 1966 participant in the Harvard International Seminar.

I have sent Mr. In Ho Kim, my deputy managing editor, to the United States on a reportorial mission. He is a brilliant and promising journalist in Korea and speaks good English. Mr. Kim's reports will be used by various publications and media owned by my newspaper. They include a weekly newspaper, a high-brow monthly magazine, a monthly magazine for women, a monthly magazine for children, and a radio and television network.

Mr. Kim naturally wishes to meet some important persons in Washington and you are on top of his list. It would be deeply appreciated, therefore, if you would spare a few minutes for him, who represents one of the leading dailies of Korea.

Hoping that you will give a favorable consideration to this request and wishing you every success,

627 Woodlawn Road
Ford City, Pa. 16226

August 27, 1972

LEFTON, BARBARA

[10]

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

This letter is concerned with your origin and not the political aspect of your life.

As you might know in traveling, it is a coincidence to meet, thousands of miles from home, a friend or relative unexpectedly. It would be a particular coincidence that this person originated from your hometown. It's this type of coincidence I thought would bring interest to you.

My mother, whose name was Erika Baneman, was born in Nuremburg, geographically three miles east of your hometown, Furth.

She left Germany when eleven, since the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and it is possible you were on that same

boat to America.

This letter might seem irrevalent
but does one ever meet anyone that
had escaped their country during such a
crucial period in history?

I would just like to end saying—
if you have not met anyone that has
fit my mother's circumstances, this
address will be always open to you.

Consulat Général de France
à New York

NEW YORK, December 16, 1968.

Cher ami

I am just back from WASHINGTON. H.E. Ambassador Charles LUCET told me that he would be most desirous and happy to meet with you, should you come to WASHINGTON before the end of the week.

I avail myself of this opportunity to say good-bye to you, as I shall be relinquishing my post as Consul General of France in NEW YORK this coming Thursday in order to take up my new duties as Ambassador of France to Pakistan.

I extend to you my warm personal greetings and wishes for your entire success in your new and so important functions.

Hoping to meet you in the near future in PARIS,

I am,

Michel LEGENDRE
Minister Plenipotentiary
Consul General of France

Mr. Henry A. KISSINGER
Hotel PIERRE
NEW YORK

LAURENCE J. LEGERE

400 Army-Navy Drive
Arlington, Va. 22202

30 January 1970

558-1489

Brigadier General Alexander M. Haig Jr.
The White House
Washington, D. C. 20500

Dear Al:

Since starting with you on 11 December, my main
sweep through the NSC staff, BoB, State, OSD, and
the Joint Staff has resulted in over 30 additional
interviews in connection with my job of looking at
Defense's major "interfaces" within the national
security area for Secretary Laird's blue-ribbon
defense panel. A list of those interviewed so far
is attached.

Although very much aware of the severe con-
straints involved, I now feel it my duty to ask
for an appointment with Henry Kissinger--Saturday,
Sunday, anytime--and so turn to you. I manage to
come to these interviews pretty well prepared for
intensive business, and therefore believe that it
would probably not be appropriate for the session
I am requesting to coincide or interfere with Mr.
Gilbert Fitzhugh's proposed call on Henry.

An interview with Henry would naturally be of
great help to me, and I think it might in some re-
spects prove reciprocally interesting to him,
given the frankness with which the people I have
interviewed have responded to my sometimes aggres-
sive questioning across the broad area of national
security organization.

I am available on 558-1489 whenever you want
to pass along a go or no-go to this request.

Thanks, and with best wishes,

LJL/sm

TABLE OF CONTENTS

<table><tr><td>FOREWORD</td><td>i</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">MAIN BODY</td></tr><tr><td>I. The Initial National Security Organization of the Nixon Administration</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>A. Introduction</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>B. Elements of the Initial Formal System</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>II. Major Developments in Practice 1969-1970</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>A. Introduction</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>B. Developments Within the Formal NSC System</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>C. Some Modifications of the Formal NSC System</td><td>13</td></tr><tr><td>III. Major Relevant Developments in DoD 1969-70</td><td>19</td></tr><tr><td>A. Introduction</td><td>19</td></tr><tr><td>B. Some Major Guiding Principles</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>C. Systems Analysis and the New Planning-Programming-Budgeting System</td><td>21</td></tr><tr><td>D. The Military in the NSC System</td><td>23</td></tr><tr><td>E. International Security Affairs (ISA) in the NSC System</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>F. Reaction to the DPRC</td><td>27</td></tr><tr><td>IV. Some Major Issues</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>A. "Quasi"-Issues</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>1. Political Guidance for Military Planning</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td>2. Too Many National Security Study Memoranda</td><td>31</td></tr><tr><td>3. Clarifying the Functions of the Under Secretaries Committee</td><td>32</td></tr><tr><td>B. True Issues</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>1. The Defense Programs Review Committee</td><td>34</td></tr><tr><td>2. International Security Affairs (ISA)</td><td>36</td></tr><tr><td>3. Recession of Formality</td><td>38</td></tr><tr><td>4. Relations with Congress</td><td>40</td></tr></table>

iii

1111 Army-Navy Drive, Apt. C-912
Arlington, Virginia 22202

December 16, 1971

Mr. Chalmers M. Roberts
The Washington Post
1515 L Street, N. W.
Washington, D. C. 20005

Dear Mr. Roberts:

Footnotes on history are always interesting. Yours "on
Nixon and India" in this morning's *Post* was especially so to
me, since it was I who wrote the first draft of the Nixon
Manila speech of 1956 while working for Bill Jackson when he
was a special assistant to President Eisenhower.

At the time, Bill had only Walter Stoessel from State,
Oren Stephens from USIA, Wayne Jackson from CIA, and me, an
army lieutenant colonel from Defense. As you note, President
Eisenhower was planning to deliver a Fourth of July speech in
Manila on the tenth anniversary of Philippine independence.
At an NSC meeting one day, probably sometime in May, it was
announced that if for any reason the President could not make
the trip, then the Vice President would go in his place.
After the meeting, the Vice President approached Bill Jackson
and, citing his lack of substantive staff, asked if Bill could
prepare a draft speech for him in case he did have to fill in
for the President.

When Bill returned to his office I was probably the first
person he saw. In any event, I caught the drafting assignment
and went promptly to work, although not very hard because it
appeared that the President was sure to go to Manila himself.
My draft was practically complete when the President suffered
his ileitis attack, and of course it thereupon became a very
important draft indeed. Please note that from the beginning
it had been intended for contingent use by the Vice President.
Presumably the President had his own staff of professional
speech writers at work, or was looking to State, or whatever;
I just don't know, but have sometimes wondered why the Vice
President had not planned on simply appropriating whatever
the President was going to use.

State naturally became interested and probably alarmed
when it learned that somewhere in EOB there existed a draft
speech that the Vice President was going to deliver in Manila--
one in which State had played no part up to that point. Bob
Bowie, then head of the Policy Planning Staff, came over to

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

"Mailed by Author"

TOPIC 1:

NOV 02 1971 ADDED

THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE PRESIDENT

By
Dr. Laurence J. Legere

"This is an official document of The National War College. Quotation from Altrastion from, or Reproduction of all or any part of this document is NOT AUTHORIZED without specific permission of the Commandant of The National War College."

<table><tr><td>NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE</td></tr><tr><td>LIBRARY</td></tr><tr><td>NOV 01 1971</td></tr><tr><td>CLASSIFIED RECORDS</td></tr></table>

Presented at
The National War College
Washington, D.C.
4 October 1971

FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

Dr. Laurence J. Legere, Senior Research Analyst, Institute for
Defense Analyses, was born 2 January 1919 in Massachusetts. He attended
the U. S. Military Academy and upon his graduation in 1940 received the B. S.
degree. In 1947 he accepted a fellowship at Harvard University where he
earned his M. P. A. (1948), M. A. (1949) and Ph. D. (1951). He is a graduate
of The National War College (1961).

Dr. Legere's distinguished military and civilian career has included parachute landing in Normandy on D-Day in 1944; Assistant Professor of International Relations at the U. S. Military Academy (1945-47); Executive Officer to U. S. Commander, Berlin (1950-53); Battalion Commander, 35th Infantry, Korea (1953-54); and assignment to the Operations Division, Army General Staff (1954-56). In 1956 he was selected for White House duty as Defense Assistant to Mr. William H. Jackson, Special Assistant to President Eisenhower (1956-57). From 1957 to 1960 he served as Special Assistant for Politico-Military Affairs to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (General Norstad). He returned to the White House for duty on the staff of Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (Mr. McGeorge Bundy) (1962-63). The years 1963 and 1964 were spent with the 101st Airborne Division overseas. Upon his return to the States he served (1963-64) on the Policy Planning Staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. After retiring from the Army in 1966, he was a member of the Harvard-MIT arms control seminar (1966-67), and since 1967 has served on the United Nations Association's national policy panels on Europe and on space communications and the U. N. Dr. Legere assumed his present position as Senior Research Analyst, International and Social Studies Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses in January 1968. At IDA he directed a study of the national security process entitled *The President and the Management of National Security*, published in 1969. In 1970 he prepared an analysis of the external relations of the Department of Defense in the Nixon administration's national security organization for the Blue Ribbon Defense Panel of the President and the Secretary of Defense.

This is Dr. Legere's first lecture at The National War College.

4 October 1971

TOPIC 1:
THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE PRESIDENT

By
Dr. Laurence J. Legere

(4 October 1971)

CAPTAIN RIZZA: I introduced the speaker.

DR. LEGERE: General McPherson, Admiral Jackson, Members of the Faculty and Student Body of The National War College; and special greetings to the two guests who made the trip over here to hear this talk.

I thought I would open the treatment of "The Central Role of the President in National Security Affairs" this morning by firsting a few glancing blows off the conception of the office, much as a jeweler who is about to make a detailed examination of some gem would first hold it up to the light and look for major characteristics and perhaps major flaws--sort of an attitudinal, quick look at the presidency, with emphasis on the President's role in national security affairs.

First of all, we hear that it is the most powerful office in the world. That is probably cliché number one about the office. I would remark that while it undoubtedly is the most powerful office in the world, it is significant that the memoirs of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, the memorists of President Kennedy, and, I daresay, the memoirs of President Johnson when they come out, have stressed and will, I think, continue to stress not the powers of

the office, but the limitations and constraints under which Presi-
dents must labor.

The second cliché often applied to the Presidency is that
he is the Chief Executive of our land, and that, too, is literally
true. That is what it says in the rather skimpy Article II of the
Constitution: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President
of the United States . . .."

However, I submit that "Chief Executive" has come to mean
not only, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, execution of laws
passed after consideration in detail by Congress, but a great deal
besides. As a matter of fact, in contemplating the "separation of
powers," as when we speak of the President as Chief Executive, the
implication is that those powers are genuinely separate, whereas I
agree with Richard Neustadt's more sophisticated observation that we
have, not separate branches with separate powers, but *separated in-
stitutions sharing powers*.

In that respect, the President has always had a role as a
legislator, through the exercise of the veto power in the legis-
lative process. But in the development of the modern Presidency,
far more significant than that has been the role, especially since
the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, of the President as a truly
active legislator. Indeed, in *anno Domini* 1971 it is hardly an ex-
aggeration to speak of the President as the *Chief Legislator* because
it is on his detailed program that Congress chiefly acts, or it is
to his detailed program that Congress chiefly reacts; and so if he
is not the Chief Legislator in fact, then I do not know who is.

2

A third attribute of the office that is very familiar to this group is the constitutional function of Commander in Chief. We will be speaking about that in a little more detail later. Here is an attribute which I would say lies largely in the eye of the beholder. The Constitution could hardly be more spare than it is: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy . . ., and of the Militia . . ., when called into the actual Service of the United States; . . ." Yet, I doubt that members of this group, with its military experience, would use the Commander-in-Chiefship as an example of typical command; for here is a commander who has no deputy, who has no chief of staff, who has no executive, and who has no Presidential staff constituted for the specific purpose of assisting him in the discharge of his command functions.

I am already implying that the Commander-in-Chiefship, to which I notice a great deal of attention was given in the readings assigned to you today, is effective not so much for what it says about it in the Constitution, as for what it is _perceived_ to be by those whom it affects.

Specifically, if I were to ask what is the most striking example of the President's authority in the national security area, what is the single most compelling instance of his authority or power--if I kept reworking that phrase to ask what in the nuclear age is the most appalling single decision at his command, all of you would realize I was getting close to his power to authorize the

3

release of nuclear weapons, a power vested solely in him. Every-
body knows that. Right? Or shall we have a closer look at it?

Two years ago I spent a month or so researching some as-
pects of Presidential succession. This authority to release
nuclear weapons came up there in an unclassified way. I daresay
some of you know better than I what the basis is for the statement
that the President and only the President has the authority to re-
lease nuclear weapons, but I submit to you, based on my research,
that there is no such specific authority in law. It is simply an
abdication by everyone else, a constructive abdication, as it were,
in the light of the enormity of the decision, a sort of general
acceptance that this _must_ belong to the President.

If your curiosity survives that, you may say, "All right,
let us assume that it is vested in the President, but I want to poke
into it a little further. How can I do it?" One way might be to
see how the authority devolves in the event of the inability of
the President to make this decision, due to his death, disability,
unavailability, or whatever. There you can get into some fine Italian
refinements. First, if you hold that the authority descends through
the "chain of command," what chain of command do you mean? Chain of
command as Commander in Chief? I said a few minutes ago that I do
not believe there is a Deputy Commander in Chief. Some might try to
make a case for the Secretary of Defense as Deputy Commander in
Chief, but it would be very difficult to do constitutionally.

4

If it cannot go to the Secretary of Defense in a chain of
command, even though he is certainly a commander by the Act of
1958, it is difficult to establish down which chain this authority
would proceed--especially since we have no law authorizing the
President to release nuclear weapons.

My conclusion two years ago was that the authority to re-
lease nuclear weapons is quite simply an attribute of the majesty
of the Presidential office toward which everyone defers and abdi-
cates responsibility. Therefore, it would descend through the
chain of Presidential succession, which means the Secretary of Do-
fense is not first in that order, but sixth--after the Vice Presi-
dent, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the
Senate, and so on (the Cabinet officers in order of rank).

For another glancing blow off the nature of the Presiden-
tial office in the conduct of national security affairs, there is
the notion of the President as an executive presiding over certain
formal machinery which, if he is clever enough to master it, will
rationally grind out the decisions he requires. I would like in a
moment to read just a sentence or two from President Nixon's so-
called "State of the World Message" of last year, which was called
**Strategy for Peace**. In that message, the section on the National
Security Council and its so-called "machinery" was the **first**
chapter. In this year's corresponding State of the World Message,
the section on the National Security Council and its machinery was
the **last** chapter. I put it to you that if you are looking for

5

insights in this murky area of national security affairs, little
things like this often provide meaningful insights. I will later
come to how, in my judgment, the Nixon Administration has moved
away from the considerable, some would say excessive, formality of
its first year to somewhat less formal procedures.

In reading to you I will try, via inflection if I can man-
age it, to emphasize the phrases in here that I want to emphasize
in President Nixon's opening section of his *Strategy for Peace* mes-
sage, this being for my purposes an example of a view of the Presi-
dency and of national security affairs as the meshing of some
rational processes through which to arrive at decisions:

If we were to establish a new foreign policy for the
era to come, we had to begin with a <u>basic restructuring</u>
<u>of the process</u> by which policy is made. Our fresh pur-
poses demanded new <u>methods of planning</u> and a more <u>rinor-</u>
<u>ous and systematic process of policy-making</u>. We required
a system which <u>would summon</u> and gather the best ideas,
the best analyses and the best information available to
the government and the nation.

There is nothing wrong with that approach. There is noth-
ing starkly "wrong" with any approach, really, in this area. But
there are some who do challenge it as the <u>sole</u> way in which to ap-
proach the formulation of national security policy.

There is a relatively young man up at Harvard named Graham
Allison, who has been sort of a protégé of Professor Richard
Neustadt. As all of you know, it is not uncommon for a scholar to
do an excellent Ph.D. dissertation, make journal articles out of
various chapters, and eventually make a book out of the whole.
The subject of the dissertation thus becomes sort of a "production"

6

over a number of years. This is true of Graham Allison's conceptual view of the Cuban missile crisis, which in digest form appeared in the *American Political Science Review* two years ago. In that article, Allison advanced three conceptual models, which were just that and nothing more. Nine-tenths of you out there know more about models and modeling than I do, but even I can understand his.

Allison's first conceptual model of the Cuban missile crisis is one in which he looks at the decisions of the Cuban missile crisis as the products of *rational* intercourse among *rational* men.

In his second model he looks at the crisis in terms of *organizational outputs*, the theory being that organizations in government, particularly standing bureaucracies, do what they know how to do, what they do best; and even in crises they do what they know how to do and what they do best. Therefore, one way of looking at the Cuban missile crisis, or at the formulation of policy in any respect or for any crisis, is to look at the typical products of standing organizations in the bureaucracy.

His third conceptual model is rather a variation of the second; it focuses on bureaucratic interchange, on the footwork of bureaucratic bargaining.

Let me read Allison's comment on model one, the rational model:

> Model I's implication that important events have important causes--i.e., that monoliths perform large actions for big reasons--must be balanced by an appreciation for the facts:

7

(a) That monoliths are black boxes covering various gears and levers in a highly differentiated decision-making structure; and

(b) That large acts are the consequences of innumerable and often conflicting smaller actions by individuals at various levels of bureaucratic organizations in the service of a variety of only partially compatible concepts of national goals, organizational goals and political objectives.

You will have concluded quite correctly by this time that I do not construe my mission up here this morning as one of trying to do my humble best to clarify via simplification the central role of the President in the conduct of national security affairs. I have considered it to be my mission to try to point out the complexities as I see them and let you draw whatever conclusions you like. To wind this up, I would like to cite a couple of illustrations bearing on the idea of the President as the omnipotent man issuing decisions to loyal subordinates who are monolithically oriented to him, who stand there quivering, waiting for his every order in order to implement his will out in the far reaches of government.

First I have something here from fiction. Although our subject today is the Presidential office, it applies, as you will see, more to a Presidential assistant. (I must say that when I dug it out in preparation for this lecture, I was reminded of how some people might see it as applicable to Henry Kissinger; since I know he has not lost his sense of humor, I think I may send it to him.) It is from one of the Sherlock Holmes novels, in which Sherlock describes his brother Mycroft as follows:

8

Well, his position is unique. . . . There has never been
anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tid-
iest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for
storing facts of any man living. . . . The conclusions of
every department are passed to him, and he is the central
exchange, the clearinghouse which makes out the balance. All
other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.

We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a
point which involves the Navy, India, Canada, and the bimetal-
lic question; he could get his separate advices from various
departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all,
and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. . . .
In that great brain of his everything is pigeonholed and can
be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has da-
cided the national policy. [Laughter]

Whether or not Henry Kissinger enjoys that, if and when I
send it to him, it does apply in a parallel sort of way to some
persons' conception of the Presidency.

We are about to listen for a moment to a President thinking
aloud about certain of his principal subordinates, but first let me
quote something else to you. A distinguished public servant once
said, "The Cabinet are the President's natural enemies." This
sounds like a highly unorthodox statement to make, so it will in-
terest you to know that it was made by Calvin Coolidge's Vice
President, Charles G. Dawes, and it is surely hard to find anyone
more conservative than that! [Laughter] What he had in mind was
that each Cabinet member in the room was ever-mindful of his bureau-
cratic "constituency" on Constitution or Independence Avenue or
wherever it was, a "constituency" that was expecting him to repre-
sent them avidly and come home with some bacon--or pork. It is
with that perspective that the Cabinet member so often confronts the
President, or at least has to consider as he weighs his duty to the
President.

9

This is Franklin Roosevelt, quoted directly from the mem-
ours of Marriner Eccles, longtime chairman of the board of the
Federal Reserve System:

The Treasury is so large and far-flung and ingrained in
its practices that I find it is almost impossible to get
the action and results I want, even with Henry there
[Morgenthau, not Kissinger - (laughter)]/ But the Treasury
is not to be compared with the State Department. You should
go through the experience of trying to get any changes in
the thinking, policy and actions of the career diplomat,
and then you'd know what a real problem was! [/Laughter/]
But the Treasury and the State Department put together are
nothing compared with the Na-a-vy. The admirals are really
something to cope with, and I should know: To change any-
thing in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You
punch it with your right, and you punch it with your left
until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the
damned bed just as it was before you started punching!
[/Laughter/]

Now I would like to take an overview of the Presidency in
the field of national security by way of some conventional and,
hopefully, helpful categorizations.

First we have "strict construction" versus "broad con-
struction" of authority. You and I know that strict construction-
ists become broad constructionists when the purpose suits them and
vice versa. What we have here is on the one hand, a notion that
the President can feel himself commissioned only to execute the
will of Congress in an almost literal sense; versus, on the other
hand, the "stewardship" theory, first so-called by Theodore Roose-
velt, who considered himself the steward of the people for the
purpose of exercising all the power that was not specifically de-
nied him in the Constitution. Somewhere between these two extremes
is where actual practice has operated in most cases.

10

For a strict constructionist followed by a broad constructionist, we have the example of James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln before and just at the onset of the Civil War, respectively. We have later, although not in a national security context, the contrast between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as the depression years slip from 1929-32 to 1933-36. Herbert Hoover has undoubtedly been badly treated by history. Nevertheless, I think even the stoutest defenders of President Hoover's reputation would grant that he looked upon his authority to do something about the deepening economic depression of the early 1930s in a rather strict-constructionist way. Roosevelt, from the time of his inaugural address, spoke about attacking this problem as though it were a war, thus implying he would if necessary bring his powers as Commander in Chief (whatever they may be) to bear. This was clearly the approach of a very broad constructionist.

When President Truman reacted as we all know he reacted in June 1950 to the North Korean crossing of the 38th parallel, there was no real consultation with Congress. This gave rise to a big flap later, in the so-called "Great Debate" of the succeeding year or so. In contrast, some five years afterwards, when President Eisenhower was considering what to do about the situation in the Formosa Straits, he went to Congress for the purpose of securing a joint resolution, and did. And, as we all know in a more recent context, President Johnson felt constrained to do the same thing in 1964--for all the good it later did him.

11

Strict constructionists have been known to mend their ways, and vice versa. The classic hero of states' rights is Thomas Jefferson, a great agrarian, great champion of states' rights; yet his action when President of purchasing the vast territory of Louisiana outright was an extremely broad-construction stroke, and was so viewed by his enemies at the time and by many historians since. It had not been thought that the territory of the United States could be added to without reference to Congress and perhaps a Constitutional amendment.

President Grant, who had been the general Lincoln finally found--an extremely hard-nosed, hard-thrusting, command-oriented general, became in the Presidency a strict constructionist, a "literalist" sort of man, who allowed a mediocre Cabinet (with one exception) to lead him and the country into all sorts of trouble.

Besides the strict construction-broad construction overview of the way a President can approach problems, a second is a formal versus an informal mode. As a vehicle for discussing formality and informality, we might consider a President's use of the Cabinet or, since World War II, of the National Security Council (NSC).

For an example of rather formal use of the Cabinet, we have President James Knox Polk, who was Commander in Chief during the Mexican War. Polk was the first President who ever really ran a war, and he ran it in great detail. He used his Cabinet on almost all occasions for decision, and, being a strong willed man, rammed many things down the Cabinet's throat, even though in principle

12

votes were taken. He actually was an orderly-minded President,
inclined toward a somewhat formal handling of his office, par-
ticularly in its Commander in Chief aspect.

In contrast we have the more informal style of President
Lincoln, about a decade and a half later during the Civil War.
Lincoln tended to use his Cabinet only as an occasional sounding
board. Many of you have heard how he took the vote in his Cabinet
one day on a particular consequential question by asking, "How
many for and how many against?" All six members of the Cabinet
voted "No." So the President said, "Six noes and one aye. The
eyes have it!" /Laughter/ This is a story that President Kennedy
liked to tell.

Formality-versus-informality is a convenient way of looking
at how Presidents approach the discharge of their office, even in
the national security area, and we will be doing it in a few
minutes. But it can be overdone, because the fact of the matter
is that here, as elsewhere in this area, nothing is 100 percent
simon-pure. All Presidents operate with some mixture of formality
and informality. But let us say that Presidents, as they arrive
in the office and especially when there is a turnover from one po-
litical party to the other, feel a personal inclination toward
either formality or informality. For a number of reasons, after
about one year the Presidents initially inclined to formality find
that the formal, wide-sweeping review they have conducted has sort
of ground to a halt. They have uncovered all the alleged

13

substantive iniquities of their predecessors, and they have cor-
rected all the allegedly profitless processes their predecessors
preferred. With that, a measure of informality begins to assert
itself; the balance begins to be reestablished. But it is a very
critical year indeed.

On the other side, Presidents who come to office with a
commitment to informality will, especially if the predecessor re-
gime has been one characterized by considerable structure and
process, probably tend during their first year to tear down much of
the structure and repeal much of the process. What happens after
their first year is often one or two very sharp comeuppances, when
their informal processes permit something important to drop between
the cracks, and as a consequence some crisis turns out badly for
them. Then there follows a reaction, some movement toward reas-
serting a degree of formality in the conduct of the office on the
national security side.

Besides the strict construction versus broad construction
approaches of Presidents and the formal versus informal modes,
there is a third way to characterize Presidential preferences.
That is their desire to delegate to responsible subordinates versus
their desire to centralize in their own persons and in their own
offices. In the national security area since World War II, this
issue of centralization versus decentralization has come out pretty
much as a State-Department-centered versus a White-House-centered

14

approach. That may be an oversimplification, but I think it is
useful for analytical purposes.

Going back well before World War II for an example of a
President who decentralized extensively turns up Warren Gamaliel
Harding, who, as you know, does not enjoy the brightest reputation
among American Presidents. [Laughter] But it is remarkable how
the man's realization of his limitations led him to select such a
distinguished Cabinet: Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of State;
Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury; Henry C. Wallace (the
father of the later Henry A. Wallace), Secretary of Agriculture;
Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce; and so on. He let these men
run their departments and had little to do with them. This worked
out all right in the cases of the distinguished gentlemen I have
cited, but got President Harding into very, very bad trouble--Teapot
Dome and all that--in the case of the Attorney General, the Secre-
tary of the Interior, and one or two others. At least, there was
an example, an extreme example, of decentralization.

President Harry Truman makes for interesting consideration,
because as his reputation has improved, even among persons who did
not think much of him at first, he has come through as a forceful
President with a solid record of accomplishment, particularly in
the foreign-military area. Forceful as President Truman was as
an individual, he is looked upon as the best example of a President
in the modern era who really made it clear throughout the national
security community that his Secretary of State--first, General

15

(George C. Marshall, whom he considered the greatest living American, and second, Dean Acheson, who to this day sings the praises of President Truman--was literally the first among equals horizontally across the top of the Government, just below the President. I think most Foreign Service officers in this audience would agree that the oldtimers in the Department of State look back to that period as a golden age in which the Department was truly prime among departments and agencies of Government involved in so-called "national security affairs."

The Dwight D. Eisenhower who became President in 1953 had been, above all, a general; and I think it not much oversimplified to say that he tried to organize the Presidency like an army general staff--which was his privilege. If that seems too simple a notion, I invite you to study the Administration in detail, study some of the case histories and other available material. At least I have found that for an understanding of how Eisenhower tried to conduct his office in the area of national security affairs it is extremely helpful to bear in mind that he was indeed a military officer, intimately familiar with the general staff approach to problems.

One aspect of that approach is delegation. These great powers of industry now in the Cabinet were going to really run their departments. They were going to come to the "leader" only when they needed major decisions. This has a familiar ring to it, but it did not always work in the Eisenhower White

16

House. For example, in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense "Engine
Charlie" Wilson did not turn out to be a strong executive. The
poor man was on the spot because his boss in the White House was
viewed by all Americans as the greatest living authority on mili-
tary affairs. To be Secretary of Defense in such circumstances
was not the most enviable job in the world; but in any event,
Eisenhower had to make the great decisions, which Secretary Wilson
simply carried to him.

President Kennedy, whom we think of as being very much a
personalist kind of President, a White-House-centered man, found
he had in the Defense Department a man named Robert McNamara. It
did not happen right away, but it was not very long before Presi-
dent Kennedy discovered that he could leave the running of the De-
partment of Defense to Secretary McNamara. There were many ad-
vantages to this from the President's point of view, including the
fact that unpopular decisions, which Mr. McNamara was very good at
making /Laughter/, would not appear to proceed directly from the
President.

So in many instances, as in these Eisenhower and Kennedy
examples, we have had a President whose general mode was along one
track but who has left it pragmatically when necessary. And this
"mixture" is surely more the rule than the exception.

Regarding the Commander in Chief role, I mentioned in my
opening remarks that we have a government of separated institu-
tions sharing powers. That idea applies with particular force, I

17

think, to powers over military affairs.

On the one hand, the military powers of Congress according
to the Constitution are vast: to declare war, to raise and support
armies, to provide and maintain a Navy, to make rules and regula-
tions for the government of the armed forces, and so on--all of it
under the very extensive Article I that recounts in great detail
the duties of the legislative branch, the duties of the Congress.

The substantively skimpy Article II merely says that the
President shall be Commander in Chief, period, but was there any-
thing else in the way of an understanding by the Founding Fathers?
The question is not an academic one, because poking into contem-
porary documents, contemporary authorities, figures in the deci-
sions of court cases that can become very significant for the in-
terpretation of Presidential power.

If we go to that great exegesis, the *Federalist Papers*, we
find that No. 69, written by Alexander Hamilton, bears on our
question. These are plain words that he used, and I read nothing
fancy into them. The office of the Commander in Chief, he said,
would be "nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the
military and naval forces, as first General and Admiral of the
Confederacy."

Several Presidents have made much of the Commander-in-Chief
clause, simple though it is. By relying on it and on the other
clause in Article II which says that the President shall take care

going on in this government. It seems to me that in the technical
domain a lot of people out there may think that MIRV is the name of
a television talk-show man. Laughter But apart from the tech-
nical domain, there were 25 million veterans in the country in 1967,
before many Vietnam veterans had started to join the group. You
know some of those veterans and so do I. The notion of the Presi-
dent as Commander in Chief, rightly or wrongly, never mind what the
law books in the lawyers' offices and judges' sanctuaries say, is a
very real one to them. It is also a very real function of the
Presidential office to the Congress when times become something
less than happy and felicitous--that is to say, in times of crisis,
domestic or foreign.

The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is not a bad example,
perhaps, of how Congress defers to the President when he swings
his power under the alleged authority of the Commander-in-Chief
clause. On almost all of you out there, too, the Commander-in-
Chief clause presses strongly. You know it because you are on
active service, and I know it because I was once and have observed
others since. The attitude of a military man toward the President
is different in kind, not just in degree, from his attitude toward
other civilian authorities placed over him. I think this also ap-
plies to Foreign Service officers--not with respect to the Com-
mander-in-Chief clause, but with respect to those clauses of the
Constitution which make the President, in effect, chief diplomat.
It is very real and very important to a Foreign Service officer

21

that the President of the United States is at the head of the
professional corps of which he is a part, that the President
directly appoints ambassadors, who are then responsible directly
to him.

I am in this general connection reminded of a story William
Manchester tells in his book, *The Death of a President*, about the
assassination of President Kennedy. He tells of the rainy day
when Secretary McNamara went out to Arlington Cemetery with General
Taylor and several military officers to pick the gravesite. All
present except McNamara were wearing raincoats, carrying umbrellas,
or in some other way were sheltered from the hard rain. Everyone
apparently let poor McNamara get soaking wet, and I think
Manchester's point was: Isn't it odd that no military man offered
the Secretary of Defense a raincoat or an umbrella?

That question as such does not interest me for present pur-
poses. What does interest me is my conviction that if any President
of the United States had been out there, every raincoat in the crowd
would have been offered to him. There is a lesson there somewhere.
[Laughter] I know what you are thinking of [laugherman], but ask you
to think of a lesson beyond that.

When you start probing into the role of the Presidency in
national security affairs, it is not very long before you are
through the hard scrabble and down to myth. I use the word "myth"
not in the sense of something false, but in the sense of something
intangible that commands belief, elicits loyalty, and inspires

22

action. And this may be particularly true of the Commander-in-
Chief aspect of the President's role.

To sum all this up, there are two basically contrasting
views of the Presidency between which specific Presidents in con-
ducting national security affairs move. The first is the executive
manager of rational policy machinery. A man who worked for me two
or three years ago and contributed toward the book Captain Rizza
mentioned put it this way:

In a perfectly rational setting, formulating national
security policy would involve a systematic examination of
all the available national security goals, arranging them
as to importance and worth, analyzing the full range of
alternative means for achieving them, weighing the relative
utility of each and, finally, linking the preferred means
and ends in a neat and logical synthesis in which all the
interactions and consequences are correctly accounted for.
Such a synthesis would be a first-class management tool.
The more comprehensive its coverage and the more detailed
its provisions, the easier it would be to delegate the
work of directing policy implementation, the more auto-
matic and trouble-free would be the coordination, and the
more nearly the entire executive organization would op-
erate as if with a single mind.

That is the view of the Presidency in command of rational
structure.

As against that, the other view has been brilliantly ar-
ticulated in a classic book by Professor Richard Neustadt of Har-
vard, the book being Presidential Power: the Politics of Leadership,
published in 1960, and which is known to have influenced President
Kennedy as he approached his assumption of office, influenced him
enough so that after the convention of 1960 he brought Neustadt
right onto his staff and had him help in preparing for the takeover
from the outgoing Eisenhower Administration.

23

Neustadt's is the notion of a President who has to fight
and claw, to work hard all the time, just to stay on top--not
through great, notable advances, great triumphs of rationality,
but through something someone once called "disjunctive incremental-
ism." *Laughter* It is like Lenin's two steps forward and one
step back; go out for a while, come back, and where is the next
bleeding issue, and how are we going to make some kind of progress
on that in the best way we can?

This is a view of the Presidency that can strike some people
as not very attractive, because it presumes a President who knows
he must capitalize on the needs and fears of his subordinates and
of others to whom he must relate. He must capitalize on their self-
interest, on their selfishness; he must try to persuade them; he
must bargain with them; and he must be prepared to hurt them and
hurt them hard if that is required to serve his purposes.

This sounds like a fairly Machiavellian view, and indeed
it is, but it is not far from what Samuel Huntington wrote in his
classic, *The Soldier and the State*, about the military-conservative
approach to the problems of humankind.

You will recall that Huntington identifies the military
ethic with conservatism, believing that both proceed from a pessi-
mistic view of human nature, one that sees man as a greedy and ac-
quisitive creature who, if you do not watch him, will do everything
he can to pursue his selfish ends. This, according to conservatism
and the military ethic, is why men will always have wars.

24

I only mention this to stress that this neo-Machiavellian
view of a beleaguered President trying to stay on top of his job
is not just some professor's isolately unmoral conception of the
office.

A while back I quoted Charles G. Dawes' opinion that the
Cabinet could constitute the President's worst enemies. How is
this? A member of the Cabinet, the head of a great agency, or, for
that matter, the chief of a great military service, has in this
view several clientele of which he must take account, toward which
he feels and must feel responsive. First of all, there is certainly
the President. Then there are the men in his own agency or in his
own service, who look to him to represent their corporate interest
as fiercely as possible. There is also his responsibility toward
Congress and toward those shifting groups in Congress that repre-
sent the power base of his agency or service on the Hill. He has
to keep them happy; he has to bear them in mind. Out in the gen-
eral public there are often "interest groups" the executive is ex-
pected not to forget. The Agriculture Department has the nation's
farmers; the Labor Department has the nation's labor unions; and
the military departments have (or may have) the general and special
veterans organizations, as well as whatever you believe of the
military-industrial complex. Still another responsibility the ex-
ecutive has to consider is his duty to himself, to his own future,
because many of these men are looking forward to continued careers
inside or outside government. Only after they have discharged all

25

those duties to all these varied clientele, then and only then,
according to Neustadt, does the individual concern himself with
his responsibility for cooperating with his peers. This is why
unstinting cooperation and coordination are so hard to come by in
government.

This is the way Neustadt summarizes this very complex thing:

Effective influence for the man in the White House stems
from three related sources:

First, the bargaining advantages inherent in his job with
which to persuade other men that what he wants of them is
what their own responsibilities require them to do.

Second are the expectations of those other men regarding
his ability and his will to use the various advantages they
think he has.

Third are those men's estimates of how his public views
him and of how their publics may view them if they do what
he wants.

In short, his power is the product of his vantage points
in Government together with his reputation in the Washington
community and his prestige outside.

But, once again, practice has always been mixed as between
a perfectly rational kind of Presidency and the manipulation of in-
dividuals by a President so as to move them toward goals which he
perceives to be necessary.

Just a word about a couple of Presidents before John
Kennedy and Richard Nixon; then I would like to press on to them.

Everybody knows that Harry Truman said, "The buck stops
here!" but there are two other stories about him that bear on his
understanding of the Presidential office.

In the summer of 1952, before the campaign of that year
had really begun, President Truman used to contemplate the problems
Eisenhower would encounter should he win the forthcoming election.

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"He'll sit here," Truman would remark, tapping his desk for emphasis, "and he'll say, 'Do this,' and 'Do that,' and nothing will happen. Poor Ike! It won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating."

The second remark of Mr. Truman was made to Neustadt while the latter was doing the research for his book: "I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the Presidency amount to!" [Laughter]

If we were to discuss the Presidency of Eisenhower in any detail, we would place a lot of stress on the formality with which he organized. To him the NSC was central, and he built a system around the NSC that was referred to by some people as "Policy Hill." All the papers coursed up "Policy Hill" via a Planning Board, committees and so on. They then reached the NSC and him for decision at the summit, after which they started rolling down the back side of "Policy Hill," through the Operations Coordinating Board, more committees and so on. That was the "Policy Hill" conception of the NSC system during the Eisenhower years.

During those years a central feature of the NSC system was an annual codification of policy in a worldwide paper called the Basic National Security Policy (BNSP). This was supposed to provide guidance for people throughout the national security community, so they would know what the grand objectives were.

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Here it is, more than a decade after the BNSPs stopped
issuing, and I do not know of anyone who really regrets their demise,
except possibly a few elder military men who recall that the BNSPs
seemed to make life a little easier for them occasionally. Senior
military men do not; for example, General Earle Wheeler and many
others believe they were simply all-things-to-all-men.

I think what characterized the approach of the Kennedy
group when they came in was the idea of a generation change, of a
new vigor, of liberation from the constraints of the past, of in-
novation lying ahead, of getting the country moving again, of a
lot of brains being available, of scattering those brains around
town, and of identifying issues through intellectual activity and
then securing action by managing them through individuals instead
of through committees. That is my feel of how the Kennedy Admini-
stration initially approached its problems, especially in the field
of national security.

Institutionally, President Kennedy moved swiftly to abolish
the formal structure that President Eisenhower had set up. He
could not very well abolish the NSC because it was created by law,
but little else survived.

It is a moot question to this day whether in his first
weeks as President, John Kennedy meant to issue a "mandate" to the
Department of State to assume a sort of "first among equals" role.
We know of his famous letter to all ambassadors in February 1961,
saying, in effect, "You're in total charge of that U.S. country

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team out there," but we do not really know whether he intended also
that back in Washington the Department of State assume the leader-
ship role in the conduct of foreign-military affairs. What we do
know is that if such a mandate was constructively offered, it was
declined; if such a gauntlet was cast down, it was not picked up.

One of the most significant innovations of the Kennedy
period affected the NSC staff. In the Eisenhower Administration
there had been a large and busy NSC staff that had devoted itself
to staffing matters enroute to and from the NSC. In the Kennedy
period it changed its nature, gradually but entirely. First of all,
it had to plug the information gap. There was not enough dops
coming to this very curious man in the White House, so the NSC
staff had to go out and get it. A little later, because the NSC
staff was there (like Mount Everest), it had to respond to the
President's idea of perceived inadequacies out in the bureaucracy.
I am not here to criticize the Department of State or the Depart-
ment of Defense, but I am here to say that the President and some
of the people around him did perceive inadequacies out there, and
the NSC staff rushed in to fill them, responding to this Presi-
dential dissatisfaction, whatever its merits.

Finally, it was really no longer the "NSC staff," a title
that became about as meaningful as the Warden of the Cinque Ports
in the British system. It became a Presidential staff that ex-
tended the President's eyes and ears. Then it extended the Presi-
dent's reach, clout and influence. Then some members, at least,

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of the staff became action-starters and action-stoppers; if some-
thing was beginning to stir out in the bureaucracy that was not
going to accord with Presidential policies, they went out and
stopped it. This, then, is the kind of staff that developed in
1961-63.

Because President Johnson inherited most of his national
security "team," from the Kennedy group and because of his lesser
inclination toward foreign/military affairs, there are not as many
striking lessons to be learned about approaches to the conduct of
the Presidency in the field of national security. I should stress,
however, that, unlike President Kennedy, President Johnson was not
comfortable with experts and specialists. Kennedy wanted, if he
became interested in the Congo, for one of his staff to get on the
phone so that the next morning there could appear in his office a
desk man from the Department of State, a lieutenant colonel from
the Army Staff, or perhaps both--anyhow, whoever the people were
who knew that subject best. President Johnson, on the other hand,
preferred to deal with established confidants. An expression one
of his people used, and which I have found useful, is that Johnson
liked to have each of his close advisers "calibrated" so that he
could mentally either discount or add to what that well-calibrated
man would say.

I am afraid that my tentative conclusion, not on the sub-
stance of what went on in the Johnson Administration but on the
way the President tried to run the office in a sort of instrumental

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kind of way, is that President Johnson may have had the worst of
both worlds. He does not seem to have enjoyed the advantages of a
vigorous, brilliant group operating informally; he could not quite
hack it that way, but rather, as I have noted, was more inclined
to rely on confidants. On the other hand, he, like President Ken-
ney, was not comfortable with the formality of structured groups,
so he never had the benefits of that approach either.

With the Administration of President Nixon, a group of
cool men, very cool, arrived on the scene, asking everyone to lower
their voices. They brought businesslike approaches, and no wonder,
because so many of them were businessmen! [Laughter] They brought
in a lot of businessmen partly because, fortunately or unfor-
tunately, the Republican Party does not have much of a constitu-
ency in the academic community. They cannot draw on those kinds
of brains because most of the professorial fellows out there are
Democrats. President Nixon was also determined to bring some
order into the approach to problems after all the alleged turmoil,
all the alleged crisis-hopping of the Kennedy-Johnson years.

Let me read fairly carefully from these next few notes
because I wrote them fairly carefully. [Laughter] I think this
was the approach of the Nixon group: They decided on a systematic
mustering of professional talent within the government because,
unlike President Kennedy, they could not bring in a lot of outside
brains and scatter them all over town; it was not (forgive the ex-
pression) a viable option for them. President Nixon decided that

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what he must draw on was the talent of the professionals out there,
including military and diplomatic professionals, so what followed
was an attempt at the systematic mustering of professional talents
in a formal NSC system. Here came a whole parade of alphabetical
soup: ICs (Interdepartmental Groups), Review Groups, Under Secre-
taries Committees, WSAGs (Washington Special Action Groups), and so
on, which I suppose will be covered later this week. This was a
formal NSC system, the purpose of which was to explore options and,
very important, to forward all of them up all the way for NSC con-
sideration and Presidential decision. Therefore, it was a very
White-House-centered and a very Presidential setup, much more so
even than the Kennedy Administration's, and certainly much more
overt, for President Nixon has not tried to fool anybody. He has
made no attempt to conceal, to dissimulate, the fact that he was
establishing a very heavily White-House-centered operation.

Some interesting things have happened around town as a result. I think that some senior professionals, particularly in the Department of State, feel a loss of status because in some of the more formal aspects of this system an Assistant Secretary does not necessarily function with the substantive autonomy one might expect. For example, the main business in an Interdepartmental Group with an Assistant Secretary of State in the chair can be little more than the progressively more elegant elaboration of options for forwarding up the line.

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If you are an Assistant Secretary of State who has made it
from the FSO corps after 28 or 30 years' service, you find, or
think you find, that you are merely superintending the elaboration
of options for decision in the White House. Then I think you may
wonder about the degree of responsibility that attaches to your
role. This is definitely not true of military professionals, who,
on the whole, feel they have never had it so good. They are rep-
resented throughout this hierarchy of committees on the same basis
as the Office of the Secretary of Defense. As a sort of aside,
furthermore, the civilian hierarchy in the Pentagon now deals on a
much more friendly and coequal basis with military opposite numbers.

One formal group that I would like to mention is the De-
fense Programs Review Committee (DFRC). It was set up toward the
end of 1969. It looks to me as though this Defense Programs Review
Committee of the Nixon Administration could eventually become the
organ that for the first time in history would bring the Defense
budget squarely into the NSC system, or at least squarely outside
the Pentagon in important respects. Despite the formality of the
Eisenhower years, it never was, even then.

The last thing I would say in reflecting on the NSC system
of the Nixon Administration is to point out the single greatest
difference from the Eisenhower NSC system, which was equally formal.
The staunchest defenders of the Eisenhower system will admit that
the object of the exercise was at some point to forward a *single*
recommendation to the President. There was room for dissent, to

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be sure. You could dissent in writing; you could dissent at the
table--but a single recommendation, however qualified, remained the
object of the exercise.

The object of the exercise in the Nixon Administration is
very much to preserve _all_ sensible options and thus avoid the risk
of falling into least common denominator solutions.

Finally, if I had one piece of advice for an incoming
President--if he would ask me, I would try to keep it as nonsub-
stantive as possible /laughter/--I think it would be: _Beware of_
overcompensating for the perceived errors of your predecessors.

Looking back at 1953, 1961, and 1969, I am appalled by the percep-
tions of the incoming Administrations of those years that everything
or almost everything their predecessors did was iniquitous, that
the way their predecessors organized was stupid; and that they had
to reverse everything instanter. There is a break-in period at
the beginning of every new Administration during which the important
affairs of the Republic can really suffer from this overcompensation
that all new Administrations insist upon lurching into.

I have used most of my time this morning to emphasize the
complexities that beset a President in his conduct of national se-
curity affairs. That seemed the right line to pursue because so
many people assume, I think, that to be effective, a President has
only to exercise something called leadership over something called
policy machinery. But that stress on complexity, important as it
is, is not the note I want to end on.

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The Presidency is very much something besides coping with complexity, and this I have tried to bring out too. When the nation has been shaken, torn, or challenged for its very life, it has not been either a President's skill at orchestrating policy machinery or his mastery at manipulating the self-interests of others that has caused his government and all the American people to turn to him instinctively and to ask, "What is happening to us? What can we do to help you?" It is at such times of travail that all elegantly elaborated conceptions of the President's office fall away, revealing what I think is its continuing and essentially uniquely personal role in our form of government--a role that is majestic, a role that is inspirational, and a role that remains, in the final analysis, basically mystical.

Thank you very much.

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