Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Twenty years ago, Stewart Alsop decried the “rich jungle growth of bureaucracy” and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, then undersecretary of State, complained that only twenty percent of the people representing the United States overseas actually worked for the State Department.3 The jungle is thicker now. George Shultz protested that “government action is crab-like” because “everybody wants to get into the act.”4

  Nor is it easy to carve up the action, as the military services carve up the Pentagon—with State handling diplomacy, Defense handling military matters, and the CIA doing covert operations, for policy issues intertwine. A military buildup affects arms control negotiations and vice versa. An embargo against Nicaragua affects diplomacy in Europe. The jurisdictions are so overlapping, the lines of responsibility so ambiguous, and the temptations to barge into each other’s policy terrain so strong that only the most clear-headed, strong-willed president can impose order. Each cabinet department jealously fights for its views, its mission, its autonomy, its prerogatives.

  Seeking some structure for the labyrinth, five successive presidents set up interagency groups to coordinate different policies. By Reagan’s second term, there were twenty-five senior interagency groups (high-level), fifty-five interagency groups (mid-level), and more than one hundred other task forces, committees, and working groups. And all were riven by institutional rivalries.

  While tribal warfare feeds off bad personal chemistry at the top, it is really driven by more basic organizational imperatives. Generally, cabinet officials become champions of the bureaucratic legions below, the advocates of their agencies—localities, in Washington lingo. Exceptions do occur, but usually policymakers identify national security with the programs, actions, budgets, roles, and functions—the very essence—of the agency they run. Their instinct is to influence presidential policy to foster the growth and importance of their own agencies. Typically, the policy options they promote are the ones which they will carry out if the president approves.5

  As James Reston of The New York Times says: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” In short, an official’s policy viewpoint flows from his or her job. The State Department has a vested interest in diplomacy, negotiations, stable relations with other countries, summit meetings, and making concessions to get concessions in return. The Pentagon has a vested interest in building up forces, buying and selling arms, making deployments, creating a show of force, getting the technological jump on the Russians, and persuading others of the worst-case danger if the Russians get a jump on us. The stock in trade of the Central Intelligence Agency is spying and covert operations. The White House, ever mindful of the president’s political standing, wants bold-sounding initiatives—either tough talk or peace proposals, to make the president look good politically.

  One seeming anomaly is that State presses harder to use American military force abroad than does the Pentagon. But that, too, reflects organizational interests. The top military brass, burned by defeat in Vietnam, has been gun-shy of new American military interventions abroad. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are wary of getting caught in battle without mass political support. For State, the use of force puts steel behind diplomacy and costs the State Department nothing, either in coin or blood. Historically, secretaries of State such as Dean Acheson under Truman and John Foster Dulles under Eisenhower were more eager to commit American troops in Korea or in Indochina than the military chiefs were. And George Shultz was true to that pattern under Reagan.

  In general, Reagan’s main foreign policy advisers—Weinberger, Casey, and Shultz—fitted the institutional molds almost to a T. Weinberger, a tough budget cutter under Nixon, became the Pentagon’s most tireless, tenacious salesman; his theme song was more money, more weaponry. Shultz, reflecting State’s interests, has been a proponent of patient diplomacy, of summitry with Moscow, of flexibility on tough issues, caution about strategic defenses. Casey, an old espionage fox from the World War II OSS (Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA), was a passionate proponent of covert operations in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola, and under-the-table deals with Iran.

  The personal tendencies at the top are reinforced by the bureaucracies below; institutional loyalty is a powerful centrifugal force in the foreign policy game. Careerists feel strong tribal identity and loyalty, fueling policy conflicts higher up. Top-level policymakers feel pressure from their career bureaucracies not to compromise agency positions. Of course, agencies have internal differences, but they like to thrash them out within the family and present a solid front to outsiders. For one axiom of the foreign policy game is that career officials generally defend their agency’s position and undercut proposals from other agencies. The shorthand is “N.I.H.”—meaning an idea is “not invented here,” and hence dubious. The competitive instincts thrive: Which agency’s option does the president buy? Who wins? Who loses?

  Throughout the executive branch, and especially in the foreign policy arena, people identify with the institution they work for and its building. State has its square-cut modern building in Foggy Bottom near Georgetown; Defense has the “five-sided funny factory” across the Potomac River in Virginia; CIA headquarters has a wooded campus setting at Langley, Virginia.

  “Buildings are important,” Michael Pillsbury, formerly a high Pentagon official, mused one night. “A building is territory. It has flags out front. It has symbols. It has its own security badge, a different color and design from all the others. People who belong to a building have tribal feelings.

  “It’s almost animal behavior. Animals band together when they have to protect common territory or seek food or face a common enemy. Animals mark off their territory. Wolves and dogs go around and urinate on different bushes to mark out their territory. Within the government bureaucracy, people do the same thing with memos. They write memos to say, This is my subject. This is my turf.’

  “People are creatures of the organization and the physical building they belong to. Look at the shorthand terms they use to describe where they work. They say “State” or “Defense.” That’s like saying, ‘I belong to the Zulu tribe.’ At interagency meetings, people will ask, ‘What’s State’s position on this?’ or, ‘What does Defense think?’ Never mind that different parts of State have fought over it internally or the Pentagon has its own differences inside. When they go out to meet with the other tribes, they have a tribal position.”6

  That habit, of organizational identity, has roots far back in American history. Historian James Sterling Young described how Washington worked in the Jeffersonian era, executive-branch departments battling each other and lining up their support in Congress. “Each was an organizational empire unto itself, with its own field forces, its own independent system of communication with the outside world, its own sources of information, its own considerable resources and patronage,” Young wrote. “Departmental segmentation locks conflict into the system of Executive Government.…”7 The words fit today, 180 years later.

  Other laws of political behavior and Washington sociology affect the foreign policy game, regardless of party or administration. We take it for granted that Congress will battle with the executive branch, usually over money but also over foreign policy, especially since the Vietnam War. But more is at work here than traditional clashes between institutions. People’s differing functions and careers play affect how policy is made, as much as institutional boxes do.

  What is involved is not just a conflict of two branches of government but a clash of two different cultures: the open brawling of Capitol Hill and the hidden processes of executive agencies. Basically, politicians and bureaucrats represent two different personality types, playing two different games. By nature and function, they are bound to clash.

  Success for each group requires strikingly different behavior. For starters, the foreign policy bureaucrat has a passion for anonymity and the congressman a passion for publicity. The reasons are simple: The keys to survival and advancement for a bureaucrat are operating efficiently in
private and staying out of trouble. The key to reelection for a congressman is making a name for himself, often by making a public fuss. The bureaucrat benefits by blending in; the congressman, by speaking out. The bureaucrat makes his way by developing professional expertise; the congressman by being a quick-study generalist who can jump from field to field, exploiting political openings. Most bureaucrats put a high premium on continuity in policies, careful to make slow, incremental changes so as not to jar the system. Plenty of congressman get their ride to Washington by denouncing the misguided policies of the past and by casting themselves as agents of change—the more dramatic, the better. According to Stanley Heginbotham of the Congressional Research Service, the normal tensions between politicians and bureaucrats are most acute in the foreign policy game.8

  Officials inside the administration try to address other governments with one voice, one policy line. Career diplomats, and even Pentagon officials, want to conduct their negotiations with foreign governments in private. One of their most vital goals is to have stable, friendly relations with countries such as South Korea, the Philippines, Greece, and Turkey, and that means avoiding avoid noisy squabbles over human rights or military bases. Their tendency is to cast policy in terms of national interest, to avoid crises with other governments, to minimize the impact of crises when then arise, and to seek solutions through mutual accommodation.

  Those characteristics invite clashes with Congress. In the Capitol Hill game, there is a political payoff for senators and House members who cultivate reputations for independence, by challenging the established foreign policy line. Quite often, they cast policy in terms of parochial rather than national interests, such as the economic impact of foreign imports on industries in their home state. Also, most elected officials have to deal with too many issues to follow closely foreign policy toward any one country or region. So they jump on hot crises to score P.R. points and to maximize personal influence.

  Or again, the diplomatic game requires long, arduous negotiations and reassuring other governments that agreements will be ratified. But the congressional game exploits delay, surprise, and procedural maneuver to increase congressional leverage during ratification. In short, the two games don’t mesh.

  Dozens of examples come to mind: In the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger’s insisted on “quiet diplomacy” to arrange for large-scale emigration for Soviet Jews, but Senator Henry Jackson of Washington and Congressman Charles Vanik of Ohio preferred the public club of denying trade benefits to Moscow. Jackson and Vanik won, and emigration later dwindled. The Reagan team suffered gadflies, pouncing on controversial disclosures about Nicaraguan contras or the perennial ulcer of Pentagon cost overruns and spare-parts scandals. Clearly, Capitol Hill thrives on broken-field play, while the administration prefers what sports writers call “ball control”—keeping policy in its hands.

  Obviously, debate is healthy for winnowing out bad ideas and formulating sound, durable policy, but it can also be paralyzing when divisions run rampant inside an administration. Then, it takes some grand design to give shape to policy, and a powerful hand at the center to control the clutter and cacapohony of government. Kennedy and Nixon, both bright, intensely curious and assertive, reached out to resolve internal controversy. Kennedy probed the bureaucracy. Nixon and Kissinger labored above it. But President Reagan’s normal slack disengagement from foreign policy, except during the run up to a summit meeting or in some crisis, fed conflict within his foreign-policy apparatus.

  What’s more, Reagan’s well-advertised preference for consensus among his advisers rewarded obstinacy. A holdout knew the president was reluctant to move without his assent. In his first term especially, Reagan’s urge for collegialism made it hard to formulate policy. It increased the power of obstruction.

  “It’s almost impossible to move because the American position has to be checked with so many people: State, Defense, Joint Chiefs, NSC, White House, the Arms Control Agency,” groaned a top Reagan aide, exhausted by internal strife. “The biggest problem in government is that there are too many overlapping functions. Too many people are doing the same job. That creates turf problems and infighting, and you can’t get anything done.”

  Policy by Preemptive Strike

  One case of prolonged paralysis was the epic bureaucratic battle fought in the Reagan administration over the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty signed by President Carter in 1979. It took Ronald Reagan nearly six years to decide what to do about that treaty, known in the arms control fraternity as SALT II.

  What makes that prolonged delay so amazing is that for Reagan, SALT II was anathema. He and his partisans reacted to it viscerally, as did the Committee on the Present Danger, a bipartisan conservative group that supplied many top-drawer policymakers for Reagan. The SALT II treaty, never ratified, was nonetheless being observed by Washington and Moscow in 1980. It was the prime symbol of what Reagan and company felt had been wrong with arms control. They had even disliked the SALT I Treaty signed by Nixon in 1972.

  In the 1980 campaign, Reagan condemned the Carter treaty as “fatally flawed.” What galled Reagan and his hawkish advisers was SALT II’s acceptance of the nuclear status quo. They felt the treaty legitimized Moscow’s huge arsenal of heavy, multiwarhead missiles and created a “window of vulnerability” for American land-based ICBM’s—years when the American force was vulnerable to Soviet attack. Reagan vilified SALT II as false arms control because it sought only arms limitation—limits on future buildups—but not actual reduction in existing nuclear arsenals. Late in the campaign, Reagan pledged to negotiate a new treaty. The implication was that he would quickly discard SALT II.

  But paradoxically, once Reagan was in office, he got hooked into keeping Carter’s treaty by failing to understand how the foreign policy game is played. He got trapped by a typical bureaucratic skirmish—because the White House did not grasp its significance. This was one of those quintessential behind-the-scenes Washington episodes that barely causes a ripple in the press and is often missed entirely by TV. Yet its outcome established an important policy line for nearly six years.

  That first skirmish was a microcosm of the foreign policy game: ploy and counterploy between some of very sharp policy players. On March 3, 1981, just five weeks into Reagan’s term, John Lehman, the outspoken Navy secretary, fired the first official Reaganite salvo against SALT II. Under President Ford, Lehman had been deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, under Fred Iklé; together they had helped block Kissinger, then secretary of State, from achieving a SALT II treaty before the 1976 elections. In 1980, Lehman had helped draft the anti-SALT II Republican party platform. Now, Lehman at Navy and Iklé, number three in Reagan’s Pentagon as undersecretary of Defense for Policy, were bent on killing Carter’s treaty.

  Even though arms control was not his bailiwick, Lehman made the opening move. He told reporters that the United States should stop complying with both SALT I and SALT II. Technically, SALT I had expired in 1977, and Lehman contended that Carter had extended it illegally—without Senate approval. Since SALT II had never been ratified, Lehman said he would recommend that the Reagan administration stop adhering to it informally.

  It was a bold opening gambit. Lehman was not high enough ranking to be on the National Security Council. But as a savvy power player, Lehman was short-circuiting the policy hierarchy by going public.

  At State, the press agency report carrying Lehman’s remarks rang alarm bells. State saw Lehman invading its policy turf and attempting unilaterally to force policy action—before there had been high-level discussion of arms policy.

  Ranking State Department officials favored SALT II. They saw benefits in the limits it imposed on Soviet multiwarhead missile deployments and believed it helped the United States monitor and predict Soviet weapons development. Some State officials, having helped develop the SALT I and SALT II agreements, had a personal stake in them. As a former NATO commander, Secretary Haig knew that West European governments liked th
e SALT treaties because they set a climate of accommodation between East and West. Also, Haig reasoned that it was unwise to scrap an existing treaty without something to replace it.

  Haig reacted swiftly to Lehman’s encroachment on his turf; he decided to “countermand” Lehman’s statement. Otherwise, Lehman’s comments would gain legitimacy; they would be read in government circles and foreign embassies as the authoritative word on Reagan’s policy. There was no time—and for that matter no inclination at State—to check with the Reagan White House, where both National Security Adviser Richard Allen and his boss, presidential counselor Edwin Meese, shared Lehman’s antipathy to SALT II. Haig acted on his own, using newspapers to fix a policy line. Haig had his spokesman phone a statement to The New York Times and The Washington Post, just before their evening deadlines. That timing insured headline play for the State Department, repudiating Lehman and setting out Haig’s policy.

  The statement crafted by Haig and two high officials, Larry Eagleburger and Richard Burt, was a masterpiece of bureaucratic gamesmanship, for it was disarmingly simple but it had major policy impact. The statement said that arms-control policy was being reviewed and that “no decision has yet been taken on our adherence to existing SALT agreements.” Then it added: “John Lehman’s statements on SALT, as reported by the press, were not authorized, nor did they reflect administration policy. While we are reviewing our SALT policy, we will take no action that would undercut existing agreements so long as the Soviet Union exercises the same restraint [emphasis added].”

  Technically, that did not commit the administration to abide by every detail of SALT I and SALT II, though it did promise not to take any action that would permanently abrogate the treaties.

  Haig’s statement, issued anonymously, landed on the inside pages, only a few paragraphs in the Times and the Post. It deserved more play, for Haig was unilaterally declaring that SALT I and SALT II remained in force for the foreseeable future—and, as it turned out, that policy stayed in force until mid-1986.