We walked outside toward the restaurant for dinner. “Steve,” I said, “I would have loved to serve with you. You would have been a great deputy national security advisor.” I flew home to California the next day, believing that it was over. When I got off the plane and into the car, my driver, Mary Reynolds, gave me an update. The Supreme Court had, by a 5–4 decision, issued a stay, halting the manual recounts and setting a hearing for the matter on Monday, December 11. That meant that the judges in the majority were likely to rule in favor of Bush, certifying him as the winner of Florida’s electoral votes. George W. Bush would indeed become the forty-third President of the United States.
That night I went to a birthday party for George Shultz at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. The mood was very festive, and everyone congratulated me on my appointment. It hadn’t been announced, but it had been assumed for a long time that I would accompany the governor to Washington as national security advisor. I accepted the thanks, but the next morning I called the governor and told him that I didn’t think I could go to Washington. I explained that I could not leave my father in his current state. In fact, I’d already told a couple of close friends. I remember a conversation with Janne Nolan, with whom I’d been a research fellow at Stanford in 1981. “People would understand if I said I can’t do it because of the children,” I said. “They won’t understand my obligations to my father.”
“Rent a baby,” Janne advised. We laughed, but she was one of the few who seemed to understand.
The governor called back and said that he understood but it was important I go. “I’m not asking you to leave your dad alone. He’s always been there for you, and you want to be there for him. We’ll make it work.” We agreed that I would go to Washington but travel back to California every two weeks. In my heart I knew that it wasn’t a practical solution, but I wasn’t prepared to leave my father alone.
Three days before Christmas I went to have dinner at the home of my good friend and sports buddy Lori White. I stopped by to see Daddy on the way, and he seemed in pretty good spirits. I called a few hours later as I was leaving Lori’s house, and Daddy got on the phone.
“I’m going home,” he said.
“Daddy, you are at home,” I answered.
“No, it’s time for me to go home.”
I knew in my heart what he meant, and it terrified me. My father, a Presbyterian minister and a man of great faith, believed that at the end of our earthly existence God calls us home to eternal life.
I rushed to his house. He seemed fine, and I left. I drove the ten minutes to my house. As I walked in the door, my stepmother, Clara, was calling. Daddy had stopped breathing. We rushed to the hospital. This time the physical and mental damage was irreparable. On Christmas Eve, after slipping into a coma, my father died.
I’d told Daddy just after the election that George W. Bush wanted me to go to Washington and become national security advisor. Daddy was able to communicate his understanding, but he also cried, and I couldn’t tell whether they were tears of joy for my achievement or tears of despair because he knew that we would be separated. With his death he resolved my dilemma. Was it coincidence? I’ve always prayed that it was because I can’t bear to think that John Wesley Rice, Jr., deliberately did that one last thing to make sure I fulfilled my dreams. Honestly, it would have been just like him.
Inauguration Day
I SAT ON the dais a few rows back of the President-elect, my feet freezing and covered in a plastic poncho to protect me from the sleet of that January day. I reflected on my journey to that point and ached to have my parents sitting on the Mall to see George W. Bush take the oath of office, ushering me into the White House with him. Still, it was a joyous day as I took in the sights and sounds of this most remarkable demonstration of the United States’ democratic stability, despite the controversy surrounding the election. At the lunch in the National Statuary Hall, the new President entered for the first time to the strains of “Hail to the Chief.” I felt chills of pride and excitement. And then the celebration was over. We returned directly to the White House and got down to work.
From that day on, my “routine” reminded me that nothing would, in fact, be routine. Entering through the guarded gate each morning, passing stiffly standing marine guards, walking through the corridors that Lincoln and Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy and Reagan had frequented, gave me an extraordinary sense of a place—a small place—in history. But those who became too focused on the atmosphere didn’t last very long. There was work to do, under enormous pressure, and missteps could have dire consequences. The White House was a hothouse, and everyone who worked in those highly coveted jobs knew the stakes.
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HONEST BROKER
I’D GIVEN A LOT of thought to the type of organization that I wanted to form. The National Security Council was established by the National Security Act of 1947 when, after World War II, it became clear that the United States would be permanently and dominantly involved in world politics. There are four original statutory members of the National Security Council: the President, the Vice President, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. The only other statutory position created through the act is the executive secretary of the NSC, a largely administrative but very vital function. That person manages the paper flow, oversees the Situation Room, handles interagency communication, and often staffs the President during travel. The role requires a very good administrator who can “keep the trains running on time” internally and work seamlessly with the other agencies. But it also helps to have a seasoned foreign policy hand who can understand the context and meaning of the paper he’s seeing. Our executive secretaries, Bob Bradtke, Steve Biegun, and then Greg Schulte, possessed both sets of qualifications.
Because of a very capable career administrative staff that works for the executive secretary, there is a kind of bureaucratic continuity. This allows for smoother functioning on the national security side of the White House than on the domestic side, which has essentially no standing career apparatus. When I returned to Washington, I was struck by the degree to which the paperwork looked exactly as it had when I had left as special assistant for Soviet affairs on the NSC staff of George H. W. Bush in 1991.
Given the prominence today of the national security advisor, it is surprising that the role, officially known as the assistant to the President for national security affairs, is not even mentioned in the 1947 legislation. McGeorge Bundy, who served President John F. Kennedy, is widely regarded as the first person to hold the position. Since then, there have been many variations in how the role is played. Some, such as Henry Kissinger, have sought—successfully—to become independent power centers. Others, such as Brent Scowcroft, have been honest brokers in representing the views of the secretaries to the President but giving him advice privately, never publicly.
The national security advisor is staff—rarified staff, to be sure, but staff nonetheless. There’s no doubt that sitting a few feet from the Oval Office confers influence, but it is the reflected influence of the President and must be used sparingly. The national security advisor must find a way to get the secretaries to do what the President wants them to do. I once told the President that this was a bit like trying to execute policy with a remote control. You don’t own troops, diplomats, or a budget. You have only your relationship with the President. I felt confident in mine and was sure that I knew what kind of NSC I would run.
We are all captives of our earlier experiences, and mine had been a very good and successful one when I had worked for Brent Scowcroft. I patterned my role after Brent, as an honest broker, not a separate power center. There would be a small staff, dedicated to doing the work that the Cabinet departments could not but avoiding the tendency of the NSC staff to duplicate their efforts. And never would the NSC become involved in operational matters. The execution of policy was to be left to the Cabinet secretaries, who carried the authority that Senate confirmation conferred. The NSC staff, on the other hand, ca
nnot be held accountable by Congress because it is part of the President’s personal staff. It is too small and too close to the President to actually act on behalf of the United States.
The imperative that secretaries (and their departments) handle operational matters was a conviction shared by everyone who’d studied the disasters that had befallen presidents when the NSC tried to be something more than a coordinating body. The most recent example had been the Iran-Contra affair, when the NSC staff had taken it upon itself to devise and then carry out a policy widely viewed as risky at best and likely illegal. As the facts emerged, it was clear that the plan to divert funds from covert Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan resistance (the Contras) had been cooked up secretly within the NSC staff—apparently without the knowledge of the secretary of state, let alone Congress. The fallout was disastrous; the affair almost brought down the Reagan presidency.
The counsel to the Tower Commission, which was chaired by former Texas Senator John Tower and investigated the affair on behalf of President Reagan, was none other than Steve Hadley, now the deputy national security advisor. He and I vowed that the NSC staff would play a limited but effective role, carrying out the agenda of the President through, not around, the Cabinet secretaries whom he’d appointed. As for my role in particular, I intended to keep a low public profile.
But if the NSC is to be an honest broker, it helps enormously to have Cabinet secretaries who work well together. The NSC should intervene when there is a policy disagreement among the departments or when they cannot coordinate among themselves. But the NSC cannot do so on every single issue every day, or the system would grind to a halt, wallowing in inefficiency. Most of the time the Department of Defense and the State Department need to find a way to work together—at all levels.
To be sure, tensions between Defense and State are almost endemic, and there have been some cases—Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz come to mind—where the two principals barely spoke to each other. That is not, as some might think, because State is from Venus and Defense from Mars. In fact, there are many times when the secretary of state is more willing to use force than the Pentagon, given the admirable conservatism of professional officers about the use of military power.
Nonetheless, secretaries of state find the Pentagon all too willing to exert influence in foreign policy. With a budget nearly forty times that of the State Department, the Defense Department possesses an awe-inspiring logistical capacity, and State sometimes finds itself dependent on and resentful of the military’s reach. No U.S. response to a humanitarian crisis, such as the 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, is possible without the extraordinary capabilities of the Pentagon. The military undertakes humanitarian work around the world through, for example, the USNS Mercy hospital ship. In the best of circumstances, those capabilities merge seamlessly with the diplomatic expertise of the ambassador and his embassy, producing a unified U.S. response to a crisis or opportunity.
But that’s not always the case. Combatant commanders exist for each region of the world, and they sometimes act quite independently, developing their own relationships with foreign leaders and bringing their influence to bear on issues that at best cross and at worst shatter the lines between diplomacy and security policy. Those commanders have enormous assets. For example, the commander in the Pacific (USPACOM) lives in Hawaii and travels on dedicated military aircraft across the Pacific and in Asia. By contrast, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs will often find himself in a web of connecting commercial flights that can take more than twenty-four hours to deliver him to the region.
There is also, of course, the tendency of civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to have many different opinions about how diplomacy ought to be carried out. State Department officials must politely remind them that getting other countries to do what you want is no easy task. It is State that must deliver, but everyone has views about how to get it done, and often those individuals are vocally critical of how State is doing its work. It isn’t surprising that the relationship between the two departments is sometimes a bit tense.
In the case of Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld, it went beyond such almost inescapable tensions. The two men had known each other for years, and there was a good deal of personal respect. There was an equal measure of distrust, however. The two did not confront each other face-to-face, let alone in front of the President. Rather, Don would send memos (snowflakes, we called them) that implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—criticized what State or the NSC was doing. Often those memos reflected discussions that had already taken place, but they left the impression that it was Don imparting new wisdom or making an important recommendation. In meetings, he would ask Socratic questions rather than take a position. This led to tensions with and frustrations for Colin.
In addition, Colin had to battle the perception that State was not always on the same page with the White House. There is a tendency of Foreign Service officers to regard the President and his political advisors as a passing phenomenon without the deep expertise that they, the professionals, bring to diplomacy. That sometimes led State to tell the world “What the President meant to say,” usually in some leak to the Washington Post or the New York Times. The inclination of some in State to display what they regard as their superior expertise was especially strong in the first turbulent years of the Bush administration, but former Secretary of State Dean Acheson had talked about the appearance of the phenomenon decades before. As Acheson put it in his memoir Present at the Creation, “The attitude that presidents and secretaries may come and go but the Department goes on forever has led many presidents to distrust and dislike the Department of State.”
The national security advisor is left to sort out those tensions. In general, I got along well with my colleagues. The Vice President had direct access to the President, and he used it. After those conversations, though, the President would fill me in on the Vice President’s thinking, so that I was rarely blindsided. Often the Vice President and I talked directly about what was on his mind. Later, when I became secretary of state, he and I often disagreed and argued vociferously in front of the President. But it was never personal.
That was not always true of the Vice President’s staff. At the start, there had even been one attempt to alter a long-standing tradition by having the Vice President chair the powerful Principals Committee, made up of the Cabinet secretaries, in place of the national security advisor. I went to the President and said, “Mr. President, this is what the NSA does: convene the national security principles to make recommendations to you.” He agreed, and that was the end of that. Later, Steve Hadley told me that he’d spoken to the Vice President who’d acknowledged that it was a stupid idea.
The problem was that the Vice President’s staff, which seemed very much of one ultra-hawkish mind, was determined to act as a power center of its own. Many things were done “in the name of the Vice President,” whether he had directed them to be done or not. To be sure, he shared his staff members’ views; they were not substantively out of line with his thinking. But some of the bureaucratic games that the Office of the Vice President played were not characteristic of my dealings with their boss.
My relationship with Don Rumsfeld was considerably more complicated, though not in the ways that accorded with common wisdom in Washington. Don and I had been friends for a number of years. I first met him when we participated in a three-day “continuity of government” exercise to prepare for nuclear war. (The Cold War was not yet over.) He played the President, and I was his chief of staff. Over the years we remained in contact, and Don and his wife, Joyce, gave dinners for me or joined me for a meal when Stanford business took me to Chicago. Don tried to recruit me to a couple of corporate boards on which he served, and it was I who helped recruit Don to George W. Bush’s cause in 1999. What’s more, when initial secretary of defense candidates fell by the wayside during the transition, I recommended to the President-elect that he choose Don, pointing
out that he was known to be a tough bureaucratic infighter but that he “knew where the bodies were buried in the Pentagon” and would be able to carry out the much-needed post–Cold War transformation of our military forces.
Throughout the ups and downs of the term, our relationship remained cordial. Don would come to my Christmas party and heartily sing “We Three Kings.” For a long time I saved a letter that Don sent me in 2006 offering me his weekend home on Maryland’s eastern shore should I want to get away from Washington. I knew that without proof no one would believe it. In other words, the tension that did build between us was not a problem of personal animosity but rather of professional conflict.
I am convinced that Don simply resented the role I had to play as national security advisor. He would become frustrated when my staff would reach out to military officers in the Pentagon to coordinate the particulars of a policy among the agencies. This was a routine responsibility for the NSC, but for some reason Don interpreted such actions as a violation of his authority.
In December 2002 he sent me a “snowflake” saying that I “was not in the chain of command”—a fact I well understood—and that if my staff and I did not stop “giving tasks and guidance” to the combatant commanders and the joint staff, he would take his objections to the President. I found the tirade amusing if slightly condescending and wished he had taken it to the President. I am confident that the President too would have found it bizarre.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 3