Finally, the urge of modern Presidents to engage in personal diplomacy—summit meetings, personal visits, and a flow of private correspondence with kings and prime ministers everywhere—has enlarged the domain of national security advisers and pushed them into operational activism. They leave State the routine diplomacy, but they pull the most urgent business into the White House.
Richard Nixon’s activism and mistrust of the State Department enabled Henry Kissinger to move out of the old mold of national security adviser as coordinator and honest broker for the foreign policy apparatus, and to set a new pattern, largely supplanting the secretary of State.
Under Carter, Brzezinski aspired to similar preeminence and established himself as a rival power center to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. They battled toe-to-toe on Soviet policy, Vance handling arms negotiations, Brzezinski managing Carter’s tougher line, especially after Moscow’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski had his back channel to the Kremlin through Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Also, Brzezinski was more of a strategist than Vance. He laid the groundwork for Carter’s diplomatic recognition of China and handled crisis management when the shah of Iran was falling. Later, he and his staff were the architects of a rapid deployment force to cope with threats to the Persian Gulf.
Kissinger and Brzezinski established ample precedents for the bold actions of Reagan’s national security advisers. The supreme irony is that Reagan came into office believing he would establish cabinet government and downgrade the national security staff. But Reagan’s effort lasted for only a year.
What is remarkable—and significant—is that the national security job vaulted back to preeminence under Bill Clark, who had no experience in foreign affairs except one year as number two to Alexander Haig at the State Department.
Clark, who took the NSC job in January 1982, was not shy about exercising power. He projected the boyish modesty of a tall, lanky rancher who gave up a sunny life on the California Supreme Court to help his old friend Ron Reagan. Clark evoked Gary Cooper in the White House Situation Room, quiet-spoken and clad in cowboy boots. I recall Clark’s constant self-deprecating litany that his NSC role was to be “referee” of the policy free-for-all and “coordinator” for the president. His stated recipe was to be invisible—not to be a policymaker but to be a lawyer insuring that all arguments were put before his one-man court, the president. Indeed, unlike most power brokers, Clark did not crave the limelight. He shied away from television appearances, made few speeches, and gave fewer interviews.
Nonetheless, within a few months he became the most influential foreign policy figure in Reagan’s entourage. Clark engineered Haig’s ouster and brought in Shultz. He pushed Reagan to center stage on foreign policy and encouraged Reagan’s hard line. As an old Reagan crony (chief of staff in Sacramento), Clark had enough clout to muscle the cabinet barons. In mid-1982, Clark forced the brawling bureaucracies to agree on a strategic arms proposal. Without consulting Haig, he got Reagan publicly to propose an informal, get-acquainted meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Later, leaving Shultz in ignorance, he prodded Reagan to make his strategic defense proposal. In 1983, Clark sent U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to Central America to craft a more aggressive regional policy. Then with Weinberger, he persuaded the president to approve a huge American show of force in Central America, again with Shultz in the dark. Although State coveted the role of managing arms negotiations, Clark drew that function to himself and even toyed with setting up his own diplomatic back channel to the Kremlin.
Clark’s activism demonstrated that power gravitates to the center of the administration. Even an admitted amateur such as Clark is quickly tempted to exercise broad authority in the president’s name, consulting whom he will and ignoring others. With a laissez-faire president like Reagan, the latitude of the NSC staff is vast. Zbigniew Brzezinski gleefully observed that the Reagan presidency proved that it was not merely Kissinger’s legendary ego or Brzezinski’s celebrated instinct for the jugular which drew power to the national security staff.7 It was the very nature of the modern foreign policy game that did it.
SDI: Short-Circuiting the System
President Reagan unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983—intending it as a radical departure from the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by which this country had been defended since World War II. SDI marked a far more momentous shift of policy than many issues which were thrashed out for months and years in the National Security Council. Yet not a single NSC meeting was called to discuss SDI before Reagan unveiled it.
Reagan told the nation that he was announcing his bold promise to render nuclear weapons obsolete—“after careful consultation with my advisers.” In fact, the consultation had been hectic, belated, chaotic, and minimal for practically everyone in Reagan’s own government. The central issues raised by the president were not examined in depth beforehand by most top policymakers. The highest officials at State, CIA, and the Pentagon were shown drafts of the president’s speech too late to offer more than modest adjustments.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, though they had urged more research on defenses, were so shocked at what Reagan and his staff had done with their ideas that their chairman, General John W. Vessey, recommended that Reagan not give his famous Star Wars speech. Three military Chiefs told me they were stunned by how fast Reagan moved and how he had overstated their ideas. They had expected a serious study before the president announced a shift in policy. Secretary Shultz, fearing repercussions among NATO allies, also tried in vain to stop the speech, as did Richard Perle, then the Pentagon’s top civilian thinker on arms issues. But suggestions to delay were brushed aside by the president and National Security Adviser Clark.
“Clark wanted this to be Ronald Reagan’s legacy,” said one high-level official. “They were far more concerned with building Ronald Reagan’s image than whatever might be the losses, like Allied relationships or congressional criticism.”
Star Wars epitomized an end run by the national security staff. It was a stunning example of how that staff can outgun the cabinet in making policy. Without exaggeration, Bud McFarlane, who as deputy national security adviser was midwife to the new plan, could boast to me that SDI was an “NSC creation.” For years, Reagan had harbored the dream of strategic defenses; a tiny circle of staff led by Clark and McFarlane orchestrated its birth. The national security staff was not the sifter of options from other agencies but the policy entrepreneur.
Star Wars was launched in haste and intentionally sprung as a surprise, not only for dramatic political effect but to minimize internal opposition. “The impulse of other people in government would have been negative—because it would make their lives harder,” one member of the policy cabal told me. Another top White House staffer candidly added: Star Wars was deliberately hatched in tight secrecy “to keep skeptics and doubters from strangling it in its crib.”
The policy process was driven by Reagan’s impulses. He had a personal epiphany on July 31, 1979, during a visit to the North American Defense Command, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. At the end of an all-day tour, Reagan and a domestic policy aide, Martin Anderson, were briefed on America’s early-warning radar system by General James Hill, the Norad commander. Anderson asked what would happen if Moscow fired one of its big SS-18 missiles at an American city. “Well,” Hill replied, “we would pick it up right after it was launched, and the officials of the city would be alerted that their city would be hit by a nuclear bomb in ten or fifteen minutes. That’s all we can do. We can’t stop it.”
Disbelief spread over Reagan’s face. Flying home to California with Anderson, Reagan talked soberly about what Hill had said. Obviously thinking ahead, he turned to the dilemma of a president once a Soviet attack was launched. “The policy options he would have would be to press the button or do nothing,” Reagan said starkly. “They’re both bad. We should have something in the way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles.”8 Years later, Reag
an used the dramatic image of a “Mexican standoff”—the Soviet and American leaders like two gunmen with nuclear pistols drawn “and if one man’s finger flinches, you’re going to get your brains blown out.”
Within weeks, Anderson drafted a ten-page memo proposing that Reagan, as a candidate, come out for developing a “protective missile defense system.” Reagan liked the concept but his top political handlers, John Sears and Michael Deaver, vetoed the proposal as political suicide, fearing such talk would add to jitters that Reagan was a warmonger. “Hey,” Deaver told Anderson, “Ronald Reagan does not go out and talk about nuclear weapons.”
After his election, Reagan was lobbied on strategic defenses by Edward Teller, a nuclear physicist who helped develop the U.S. hydrogen bomb, and by some of Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” and millionaire conservative financial backers (among them, Joseph Coors, the brewery owner, and Karl R. Bendetsen, a former Army undersecretary and later chairman of the Champion International Corporation). Teller, an ardent advocate of a space-based defense weapon—the X-ray laser—had first pushed space-based defenses with Reagan when he was governor of California. With support from Clark and Meese, the Bendetsen group met Reagan twice in 1982 to promote strategic defenses.
“We gave him a written proposal,” Coors recalled. “We had hoped that the president would set up a separate agency outside the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs.” Coors had in mind a massive crash project comparable to the hush-hush Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II.9
Teller’s tales of the scientific potential for supermodern defense intrigued the president. Reagan questioned the Bendetsen group about the cost, duration, and technical difficulty of the project, but he was noncommittal. What really put strategic defenses on Reagan’s agenda was the House vote in December 1982 blocking funds for the MX missile. That vote stymied Reagan and, according to aides, drove home to him how difficult it would be to get funds to continue a major buildup of offensive land-based missiles.
Politically, diplomatically, and militarily, Reagan needed a bold stroke to escape his stalemate and put life back into his foreign policy game. Clark saw that and favored doing something on defense, but he lacked specific knowledge. Within the NSC apparatus, Bud McFarlane became Reagan’s idea man, and he put together the pieces on defense, operating secretively.
McFarlane is a quintessential staff man. New to Reagan’s personal circle, he gained influence because he understood arms issues and had good links to Congress, a rare combination in the Reagan foreign policy team. McFarlane’s father had been a Texas congressman, and McFarlane himself had worked on the Senate Armed Services Committee staff for Chairman John Tower. In early 1983, McFarlane was the White House link with leading House Democrats, trying to devise a compromise to save the MX missile.
In an administration that had no high-level strategic thinkers, McFarlane knew much more about nuclear strategy and Soviet-American relations than Reagan, Clark, Shultz, Weinberger, Casey, or Meese. He had learned these issues in the mid-1970s as a staff aide to Henry Kissinger, his mentor and model.
Personally, McFarlane is a curious amalgam of boldness and insecurity. He is superearnest, methodical, and prone to bureaucratic circumlocutions about “families of options,” delivered in a monotone. Yet he can be a jokester, entertaining friends with flashes of humor and hilarious spoofs of Kissinger’s pompous Germanic elocution.
More than once, I heard McFarlane say he felt he was not on a par with the cabinet power brokers who had won Reagan’s admiration by success in the corporate world. After McFarlane’s promotion to national security adviser in late 1983, he made awkward confessions that he felt over his head in a job once filled by Kissinger. During his twenty-year Marine career, McFarlane had risen to lieutenant colonel but no farther. He is not an imposing figure—short, slight, squint-eyed—but he is ramrod straight and emphatic about duty and self-control. He was surprising in his policy and personal daring, though depressed by exposure of the Iranian arms debacle and evidently fearful of being forever a pariah in governmental circles, he attempted suicide with an overdose of Valium pills in early 1987.
Back in January 1983, McFarlane watched in dismay as Reagan’s defense consensus crumbled—beset by opposition in Congress, torn by internal disagreements on the MX missile among the Joint Chiefs, under fire from the nuclear freeze movement and the Catholic bishops’ berating the immorality of nuclear deterrence. Actually, the administration was pushing ahead with Trident submarines and their new eight-warhead missiles, with new Stealth strategic bombers and modernized cruise missiles. But Reagan talked incessantly about trailing Moscow in land-based ballistics missiles, as if no other weapons systems mattered.
McFarlane feared the United States could not match two new Soviet ICBMs (the single-warhead SS-25 and the ten-warhead SS-24) because both were mobile missiles and Moscow had such vast territory for hiding them. “The traditional concept of offensive deterrence was becoming less stable,” McFarlane believed, “so defense was conceptually an answer”—offering some protection for America’s vulnerable deterrent forces. Moreover, McFarlane reasoned that the Russians feared a technological race with the United States on defenses. Finally and “most compelling,” he later told me, SDI offered “something which would leverage the Russians” to make concessions in arms negotiations.10 As McFarlane told others, he pushed SDI with President Reagan as the best “bargaining chip” for negotiating deep cuts in Soviet ICBMs.
But it is an axiom of the foreign policy game that every major weapon system requires endorsement from the top military hierarchy. McFarlane worked “back channels” to fish for Pentagon support. Through Rear Admiral John Poindexter, then number three on the national security staff, McFarlane found a willing ally in Admiral James Watkins, chief of naval operations.
Watkins had been worrying for some time that the nation was near a dead end in the offensive arms race. Hunting for new ideas, Watkins lunched with Edward Teller on January 20, 1983. He was moved by Teller’s vibrant optimism about emerging defense technologies and his worrisome assertions that the Soviets were already hard at work on strategic defenses.11 McFarlane and Poindexter encouraged Watkins to push his views with the other Chiefs. “You can be assured that your input is always going to be welcomed” at the White House, Poindexter told Watkins.12
In the power game, timing can be everything—and the moment was ripe for defense. The Joint Chiefs were due to meet with Reagan on February 11 to examine the “strategic equation.” At their private dress rehearsal on February 5, Watkins laid out the rationale for “forward strategic defense.” He took pains to emphasize that he did not advocate scrapping the offensive side of nuclear deterrence, but he favored a new push to see how defenses could be combined with offensive deterrence. This idea was an embryo, Watkins emphasized, something that required much more study. As a devout Catholic, he added a moral argument: “We should protect the American people, not avenge them.” Later, Reagan hungrily grasped that line.
The other Chiefs had reasons for liking the defense notion. They were all—especially the Air Force—exhausted by the political wrangle over the MX missile. The Army already had a $1 billion-a-year program for testing and research on ballistics missile defenses and saw a chance to do more.
On February 11, 1983, Reagan met with the five uniformed Chiefs in the Roosevelt Room. Secretary Weinberger, still bent on the offensive buildup, told the president the Chiefs had another idea. “We have not studied this,” Weinberger cautioned. “It’s not something I can endorse at this time.”13
The session followed the McFarlane-Clark script. It began with a look at trends in the arms race. Then General John W. Vessey, as chairman, laid out Watkins’s logic, telling Reagan the Chiefs felt the time had come to take another look at defense.
“Do you all feel that way?” the president asked.
The room got very quiet, as Reagan looked around at Vessey, Watkins, General E. C. Meyer of the Army, General Charles Ga
briel of the Air Force, and General Robert Barrow of the Marines. Clark and McFarlane wanted the Chiefs on record. “It was a very, very auspicious moment,” one top White House participant told me.
Each Chief endorsed the general concept. Meyer said he felt that the historic balance between offense and defense had gotten “out of kilter—whether you’re talking about defense against tanks, defense against aircraft, or defense against missiles.” Watkins told the president he had heard hopeful things about developing defensive technologies against missiles.
“Wait a minute,” McFarlane said. “Are you saying that you think it possible, not probable but possible, that we might be able to develop an effective defense against ballistics missiles?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Watkins replied.
“Mr. President,” McFarlane said, throwing his weight behind the idea, “the implications of this are very, very far-reaching. If it were feasible to find an alternative basis for maintaining our security against nuclear ballistics missile weapons, that would be a substantial change, obviously.”
Reagan nodded, “I understand that.”
The concept of stepping up research on defenses was vague, the discussion very general. The Chiefs did not make clear whether they were talking about a defense against all nuclear weapons or just ballistics missiles, whether they had in mind a defense of cities or silos, a limited defense, or a total national shield. Nor did they specify whether they were talking about building a land-based defense, permissible under the 1972 ABM Treaty, or a space-based defense, forbidden by the treaty. Nor did they examine cost, time-frame, or specific programs. Significantly, the Chiefs were not proposing an end to the doctrine of deterrence, but supplementing it with defenses.
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