The president may have the power to annihilate the world, but the experience of the past half-century shows that he may find it harder to get his own cabinet agencies to do what he wants. Peter Rodman's "Presidential Command" is a brilliant tutorial on the way presidents, regardless of party or ideology, have struggled to control the vast national-security bureaucracy that they inherit after taking the oath of office.
Mr. Rodman, who died in August at the age of 64, knew this world as well as anyone. Beginning as a 26-year-old assistant to Henry Kissinger in President Nixon's National Security Council, he worked under five presidents in the State Department, the Pentagon and the NSC. "Presidential Command" should be required reading for President-elect Barack Obama's national-security team and, if he has the time, for Mr. Obama himself.
"Every President in our history," President Truman wrote in his memoirs, "has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy." Truman faced the problem most dramatically in 1948, when he recognized the state of Israel over the objections of virtually everybody at the State Department, from the secretary on down. "I wanted to make it plain," he explained, "that the President of the United States, and not the second or third echelon in the State Department, is responsible for making foreign policy, and, furthermore, that no one in any department can sabotage the President's policy."
By Peter W. Rodman
(Knopf, 351 pages, $27.95)
President Nixon's approach was to pretend that the State Department didn't exist. He conducted policy through what Mr. Rodman calls "a committee of two." When Nixon met with foreign leaders, Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, was frequently the only other person in the room (aside from an interpreter). Transcripts would be forwarded to State, but they were often edited. The transcripts of Nixon's early exchanges with the Soviets, for example, left out references to a summit meeting he was secretly trying to arrange.
The secrecy was driven by Nixon's paranoia about press leaks but also by his well-founded belief that the senior ranks of the State Department were hostile to his policies. When the possibility that Nixon would pursue a diplomatic opening to China became public, Mr. Rodman writes, "delegations of senior State Department diplomats even came to the White House to counsel him against it, since it risked provoking the Soviet Union."
The "committee of two" approach brought coherence to Nixon's policy, but at a cost. The Pentagon set up a spying operation to figure out what President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were up to. They even placed a "mole" on Mr. Kissinger's NSC staff. Pentagon officials learned about Mr. Kissinger's plans to visit China only because their spy had rummaged through papers in Mr. Kissinger's hotel room while on a trip to Pakistan.
Nixon's abuses of power led to an effort to rein in the "imperial presidency." President Gerald Ford also had to deal with fallout from the investigations of the Senate's Church Committee, which revealed publicly, for the first time, the assorted misdeeds of the CIA. As Congress attempted to assert control over intelligence operations, Mr. Ford's CIA director, William Colby, decided that the CIA was more beholden to Congress than the White House because, he later explained, "the center of political power had moved to Congress." Colby defied a presidential order not to give highly classified documents to the Church Committee by "lending" them instead.
Like Nixon, Jimmy Carter installed a strong national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. But for balance he also picked a strong secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, who held often opposing views. This meant loud disagreements over policy and theoretically gave the president a wider range of options to choose from. Mr. Carter's approach made sense on an organizational chart, but in fact, Mr. Rodman contends, it "only enshrined the philosophical schizophrenia of its chief."
Mr. Rodman's central argument is that presidents perform best when they are consistently engaged in matters of national security and when they empower subordinates to impose policy on the bureaucracies at State and the Pentagon. President Clinton's successes, for example, came when he gave clear direction and appointed a powerful envoy -- George Mitchell for Northern Ireland and, eventually, Richard Holbrooke for Bosnia. President George W. Bush called himself the "decider," but Mr. Rodman argues that many of his foreign-policy failures -- including the incoherence of his approach to North Korea or the absence of a workable plan for postwar Iraq -- came in part from "a systematic failure to manage conflicts among his advisors."
We don't know what Mr. Rodman would think of Mr. Obama's incoming national-security team. He didn't know that Hillary Clinton would be heading the State Department when he wrote that the "pivotal" figure is a "strong and loyal Secretary of State." And he wasn't writing about Mr. Obama when he warned: "The risk involved in the future is that a president who is not a master in foreign affairs may have a difficult time keeping an energetic secretary under control."
Much has been made of Mr. Obama's Lincolnesque "team of rivals" approach to assembling his cabinet. Mr. Rodman's history lesson suggests that installing strong people to challenge the president can be a good thing -- if leadership ultimately comes from the top. Mr. Rodman offers the apocryphal story of Abraham Lincoln asking his cabinet to vote on whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. After all his cabinet secretaries voted "no," the story goes, Lincoln declared: "The ayes have it!"
Mr. Karl is the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11
* BOOKS
* JANUARY 12, 2009
Bookshelf
Team of One
How a president must manage his 'rivals' at the Pentagon and State Department.
By JONATHAN KARL
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