Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Casey pointed Reagan to another chart, showing that in the next few years SALT II would force the United States to dismantle more nuclear warheads than Moscow, a coincidence because Washington planned to retire old American submarines.

  “Why should we do this when they’re ahead?” Reagan demanded, his face flushed.

  “That’s the point, Mr. President,” Casey pursued.

  Poindexter, acting as a referee, interrupted to say that the American weapons were old and would be dismantled regardless of SALT II. He could have added that the American warhead total would actually rise, because new American submarine missiles carried more warheads than the old ones.

  “Mr. President,” Shultz objected, “We think the chart is just deceptive.”

  “In what way, George?” the president asked.

  The answer lay in other charts provided to all of them. One chart showed that the Soviets would have to dismantle as many missile launchers as the United States in the coming years. Another chart showed that since 1972 Moscow had already dismantled 540 bombers and ballistics missiles in order to comply with SALT II—nearly three times the number Washington had dismantled. In sum, the charts showed Moscow making sacrifices to comply with SALT II. The Weinberger clan knew about those charts, as one member admitted to me, but they did not point them out to Reagan because that would hurt their case. Shultz was not schooled enough to cite these numbers quickly, to rebut Casey’s chart.

  “It’s just wrong,” Shultz insisted to Reagan.

  “Well, in what way is it wrong?” Reagan asked.

  “We don’t think it’s an accurate portrayal of the real case,” Shultz replied.

  The discussion moved on, but Reagan kept staring at the charts singled out by Casey and Adelman. The charts seemed to fix in Reagan’s mind the idea that Moscow had finally breached SALT II’s overall limits and that the treaty would be harder on him than on Gorbachev in the years ahead. It was a case of visuals beating oral arguments, selective facts overcoming a larger, more complex reality—and critically affecting the outcome.

  To others, Reagan’s mind seemed made up in principle; the question was what specific action to take. The Navy still did not want the old Poseidon submarines; Reagan was ready to dismantle them. To help him demonstrate he was disavowing SALT II, Casey proposed that Reagan break through the treaty limits in the fall by fitting out the 131st American B-52 bomber with long-range cruise missiles and not retiring some other weapon system to compensate. Reagan liked that idea.

  After the meeting broke up, Shultz still had one major card to play—the reactions of Allied leaders, which had restrained Reagan in the past. Emissaries were sent to brief European leaders on a presidential decision document, NSDD-222. The problem was that NSDD-222 was fuzzy; it did not accurately convey to the European leaders just how close Reagan was to canceling the arms treaty. It left the fate of SALT II uncertain.

  Thus, Shultz’s political ace in the hole was wasted through confusion. The European leaders were pleased to see that Reagan had decided to dismantle the old American submarines; but NSDD-222 did not make clear what Reagan would do about the 131st B-52 bomber in the fall. Some Allied leaders were uneasy, but when Reagan met them personally at the seven-nation economic summit meeting in Tokyo in early May, they did not object strenuously enough to deter Reagan from abandoning SALT II.

  Back in Washington, Reagan had some final discussions with Vice President Bush, Chief of Staff Regan, and National Security Adviser John Poindexter, but Shultz was traveling abroad. When he got home, he objected in writing to a new presidential decision document—this one with teeth in it—but his protest was to no avail.

  On May 27, Reagan signalled the death of SALT II. He announced he would dismantle two old Poseidon submarines because of their inefficiency, but he would arm the 131st B-52 bomber with air-launched cruise missiles, breaching SALT II limits. Declaring SALT II null and void, Reagan said that from then on, the American force structure would be set by the “nature and magnitude of the threat posed by Soviet strategic forces, and not on standards contained in the SALT structure.…” [Emphasis added.]

  The Weinberger clan had won the tribal war. Finally, on November 28, 1986, the 131st B-52 bomber was deployed, and the United States broke through the SALT II limits.

  Weinberger’s ultimate victory was not so astonishing. What was astonishing was that it took so long. The lesson for the foreign policy game was that Reagan had allowed prolonged maneuvers to stalemate him—and stall decision—for six years.

  A more sure-footed foreign policy leader—Eisenhower, Nixon, or Kennedy—might have broken the stalemate sooner, but no president can avoid institutional deadlocks. The SALT II epic is but one of many battles that frustrated Reagan; it typifies the foreign policy game in virtually every administration.

  In Reagan’s case, the marathon battles between Shultz and Weinberger contributed to Reagan’s eventual disaster in Iran. The frustrating paralysis of tribal warfare, added to Reagan’s well-known distaste for confrontations, apparently made Reagan impatient with debating contentious issues and ready to set policy secretly, in league with one faction or another.

  Some of Reagan’s advisers admitted to me that the foreign policy apparatus had become so constipated that high officials felt moved to short-circuit the normal interagency process and sell Reagan privately on some policy. In other words, some gravitated toward a secretive, conspiratorial style of policy-making, not only to avoid Congress and a prying press but to bypass internal critics and paralysis. In a very real sense then, the deadlocks of tribal warfare laid the groundwork for the secretive policy-making of Reagan’s fateful Iranian arms deals.

  16. The Other Foreign Policy Game: End Runs and Back Channels

  The trend seems to be for staff officers to consider themselves powers in their own right. The staff sometimes takes the president more seriously than the Great Man himself.

  —John S. D. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower’s son

  As revelations of President Reagan’s secret arms deals with Iran and of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s diversion of Iranian funds to Nicaraguan contras burst upon the country in November 1986, the public reacted with dismay. How could this policy cabal have happened? How could Secretary of State Shultz be so ignorant and uninvolved? How could Defense Secretary Weinberger be so opposed and distant? What murky figures were running American foreign policy? Had the system run amok?

  Three months later, former Senator John Tower, head of President Reagan’s special review board, called the Iran-contra operation “an aberration.”

  In one sense Tower was correct. The Iran-contra conspirators, as some later said, regarded themselves as above the law or the normal channels of decision. As a covert operation in fund-raising, cowboy diplomacy, gunrunning, dummy businesses, and conniving with foreign arms dealers to conceal Reagan’s policies and to escape congressional law and accountability, it was an aberration for the American system.

  Reagan pushed the NSC staff into covert operations, using it as his personal CIA. That raised echoes of Nixon’s “plumbers”—an extralegal investigative staff unit subsidized by taxpayers but unknown to Congress. The deviation from the norm lay in the monumental deception of Reagan’s declaring one policy toward Iran and following the opposite; his administration’s defiance of a congressional ban on funding and arming the Nicaraguan contras; and the conspiracy to cover up policy through phony scenarios, false testimony, and shredding incriminating documents.

  But in another sense Tower was wrong. As an example in how foreign policy can be made in secret by a small clique, short-circuiting the normal process of decision making, the Iran-contra affair was not an aberration. It was a case study in the “other foreign policy game”—the opposite of tribal warfare—the game of end runs and back-channels.

  Part of the shock to the public of the Iran-contra operation was that it baldly stripped away the institutional formalities of cabinet government and exposed the great power of
the national security staff. But there were precedents in Reagan’s presidency for bypassing the regular policy apparatus, policy-making in secret by a small cabal, keeping most of government in the dark—not to mention Congress and the public.

  At least two years before the Iran-contra operation began, Reagan had used his vest-pocket State Department—a small group of national security aides—to hatch one of his most important policy initiatives. In that vital sense, the Iranian operation was not unique. There is a parallel between the way it was run and the way Reagan generated his Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) in 1983. SDI was hatched in conspiratorial urgency by the NSC staff and sprung on other top policymakers too late for serious debate. Like the Iran-contra operation, SDI was kept secret from internal critics for fear their resistance would kill it. Indeed, several high-ranking advisers were so taken aback by Reagan’s Utopian notions that they tried to stop him from giving his famous Star Wars speech. But just as Reagan intended, they were too late. Stealth enabled Reagan to proclaim policy suddenly before dissent could coalesce and then to force skeptical advisers into line.

  Actually, the genealogy of Oliver North’s rambunctious staff activism can be traced back to the Lone Ranger diplomacy of Henry Kissinger. As President Nixon’s national security adviser—not as secretary of State—Kissinger circled the globe, secretly orchestrating Nixon’s surprise trip to China in 1972. Then, Kissinger personally struck the most important arms deals with Moscow behind the backs of regular American negotiators. Kissinger’s back-channel negotiations with North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho carried on the real business of American disengagement from Vietnam, supplanting the formal peace conference. No one, except Nixon, knew what Kissinger was doing. Kissinger was “end-running” the foreign policy apparatus.

  There were conscious parallels between Kissinger’s operations and those of Reagan’s aides. Kissinger was a role model for Bud McFarlane, a principal architect of both Star Wars and Reagan’s Iranian operation. McFarlane had worked on Kissinger’s staff from 1973 to 1975, and he nursed a driving ambition to prove himself a new Kissinger by forging some stunning stroke of policy and by Kissinger-style personal diplomacy. As national security adviser in 1985, McFarlane persuaded the president to approve the first Iranian arms deals and guided Oliver North’s operations. After leaving government, McFarlane flew to Iran in May 1986, hoping to meet Iranian leaders and bring home all six American hostages held in Lebanon. When the Iranian plot was exposed, McFarlane publicly invoked Kissinger—comparing his efforts to open up Iran for Reagan to Kissinger’s China opening for Nixon.1

  The common thread from Kissinger’s secret diplomacy to Reagan’s hush-hush preparation of Star Wars and the clandestine Iran-contra operation is the tremendous power of the White House national security staff. These episodes dramatize its capacity for initiating policy, conducting secret diplomacy, and running covert operations, unsupervised by Congress or other policymakers, except the president. The role and power of the national security staff has changed enormously since the National Security Council was first established by law in 1947.*

  Well-publicized clashes between secretaries of State and Defense in several administrations obscure the fact that in the past quarter century, secretaries of State have lost less power to rivals in the Pentagon than to ambitious national security advisers. Since President Kennedy, national security advisers have moved into the terrain of the secretary of State and sometimes usurped his role as chief architect and manager of foreign policy, even as chief diplomat.

  When the National Security Council was established by law under Truman in 1947, its job was to integrate policy, to help other foreign policy agencies and departments “cooperate more effectively,” and “to advise” the president. Truman’s NSC began with a neutral, anonymous executive secretary, Sidney Souers, who was to sift, channel, and coordinate the flow of foreign policy advice to the president. Robert Cutler did that for Eisenhower; Brent Scowcroft, for Gerald Ford. The idea of the NSC staff was high-level civil service, not policy-making.

  But over time, the NSC staff’s function got turned on its head. Starting with McGeorge Bundy under Kennedy, the president’s right-hand man on national security plunged increasingly into influencing policy, forcing decisions, taking initiatives, and pulling power to the national security staff. The NSC staff developed into policy managers and entrepreneurs. By the time of Nixon and Reagan, powerful national security advisers were not working as policy coordinators to cut cabinet secretaries in on the action, but they were cutting cabinet secretaries out of the action. The Iranian conspiracy was the culmination of that trend.

  The Primacy of the NSC Staff

  Somewhat disingenuously, given his aggressive activism as national security adviser, Henry Kissinger wrote later that the president should make the secretary of State his principal foreign policy adviser and restrict his national security adviser to a coordinating role. But then, he shrewdly added, “For reasons that must be left to students of psychology, every President since Kennedy seems to have trusted his White House aides more than his Cabinet.”2

  The power dynamic is natural enough. Presidents see their staffs, domestic or foreign policy, as extensions of themselves, whereas they look at cabinet secretaries and departments as sometimes difficult allies or even liabilities and nuisances. Proximity is one key reason. Top White House staffers orbit constantly around a president; cabinet secretaries have their own orbit. The senior White House staff, including the national security adviser, live with the President. They are constantly in and out of the Oval Office or on the phone with the president. They know his views, feel his triumphs, share his frustrations, read his moods, sense when to make a pitch and when to leave him alone. They are like family or like courtiers in royal households, contesting the power of cabinet barons.3

  Staff aides are often true believers, their creed unsullied by the independent views of a departmental bureaucracy. Except for people of unusual self-confidence and independence, the mentality of staff aides is to see policy and politics from the president’s personal perspective. Totally dependent on him for both job and influence, they rarely stand firmly against his policy impulses—even though it might be in his interest for the staff to oppose him. The natural impulse of staff is to tell the President what he can do and help him try to do it, not advise him what he should not do and try to talk him out of it. For the nearer the pinnacle of the political pyramid, the more loyalty to the boss is the vital touchstone.

  The national security staff, as part of the White House apparatus, is more alert to the president’s political interests than is the State Department—more sensitive to his itch for political theater. National security aides are more prone than are career diplomats to think of the domestic payoff of a foreign policy spectacular (summitry, a hostage release) or to weigh the domestic downside of a policy line (arms for moderate Arab states).

  By the unwritten rules of the power game, it is practically immoral for presidents to admit that domestic politics play a role in foreign policy decisions. But everyone knows they do, and presidents listen to those who heed the political winds. That is why leaders like Reagan, Nixon, or Kennedy often lean on the advice of loyal national security advisers. Even Jimmy Carter, under pressure to silence Zbigniew Brzezinski, retorted: “I need Zbig to speak out publicly. He can go after my enemies. He can protect my flanks.”4

  By contrast, presidents from Kennedy to Reagan have felt State Department careerists were too prone to treat foreign countries as their clients. Epitomizing this mistrust, Richard Nixon told his staff that foreign policy was to be managed by the White House, “not by the striped-pants faggots in Foggy Bottom!”5 Presidents get impatient with State’s resistance to radical change, its stress on patient diplomacy, accommodation, and pursuit of long-term interests. From a presidential point of view, State is too nonpolitical and too frequently the bearer of bad news. Presidents resent the expertise of career diplomats when it challenges their own view o
f reality. As George Shultz learned with Reagan on Iran, the naysaying of diplomacy is a necessary check on presidential impulses, but it makes a secretary of State unpopular at the White House.

  In the game of bureaucratic warfare, the national security staff has great advantages over the State Department. Proximity gives it constant contact with the president, presence in almost all high-level meetings, the chance to put in the last word with the boss. Its job is to write cover memos critiquing positions of other agencies. Moreover, somebody has to mesh the competing views and the strands of diplomacy, defense, aid, propaganda, and intelligence. State would like to do that, but State is one of the partisan tribes, and therefore unacceptable to rival tribes as the sifter of options, the arbiter. However, other agencies accept the primacy of the White House staff.

  As Zbigniew Brzezinski contended, “ Integration is needed, but this cannot be achieved from a departmental vantage point. No self-respecting Secretary of Defense will willingly agree to have his contribution, along with those of other agencies, integrated for presidential decision by another departmental secretary—notably, the Secretary of State. And no self-respecting Secretary of State will accept integration by a Defense Secretary. It has to be done by someone close to the President, and perceived as such by all the principals.”6

  What’s more, modern technology has robbed the State Department—and the Pentagon—of important advantages in the power game. The two departments used to have exclusive global communications networks to American embassies or forces abroad. But in recent years, the White House has gained the technical capability to bypass State or Defense electronically. Its Situation Room has links to a worldwide network that lets the president get in touch with any leader in any country instantaneously. His national security staff can read the incoming electronic mail from around the globe and contact any embassy or CIA operation without ever informing State or CIA headquarters, as Oliver North often did. That means the White House can step into any issue at any time in any place.