The Power Brokers

The birth of the National Security Council did not exactly make the headlines. When the National Security Act established the NSC in 1947, The New York Times gave top billing to the creation of a new post of secretary of defense. Only on page 2 did the story get around to mentioning that "the legislation also provides for a National Security Council," composed of the most senior national security officials, whose "meetings will be presided over by the President."

In the half century since, the NSC has become a central institution -- in important ways, the central institution -- of U.S. foreign policymaking. And over this period, its basic character has changed: from a council of senior cabinet members deliberating with the president to a group of White House staff members headed by the assistant to the president for national security affairs, known as the national security adviser. Over the years, the NSC has increased the power of the NSA and the president but weakened those cabinet members without strong ties to the man in the Oval Office. All told, the advent of the NSC represents one of the most important organizational innovations of the U.S. government since 1945.

In its early years, the NSC was the subject of dozens of scholarly and journalistic analyses. More recently, however, it has received little serious treatment, even as it has become entrenched as the presumptive center of presidential foreign policymaking. A comprehensive book on the NSC's origins and evolution is thus very much needed.

David Rothkopf presents Running the World as just such a book -- The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. And in part, he delivers on this promise. Rothkopf has interviewed, on the record, all the most important NSAs since the late 1960s: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, Anthony Lake, Sandy Berger, and Condoleezza Rice. (He also had an informative conversation with the late Andrew Goodpaster, President Eisenhower's staff secretary for national security.) Extensive quotations from these and many other important players are the strongest element of the book, illuminating how policymaking really happens. Rothkopf quotes no fewer than 50 former officials, all of whom he interviewed between May and September 2004. For these conversations alone, anyone with an interest in the process of foreign policymaking will want this book on his or her shelf.

As a comprehensive analysis of its topic, however, the book falls short. Rothkopf provides lots of raw material -- page upon page of relevant stories and insights -- but no clear set of conclusions or even a general idea of how everything adds up.

MISTAKES AND OMISSIONS

Rothkopf declares in his introduction that "the primary focus of this story is the post-Cold War period in the life of the National Security Council." Perhaps, but it takes him over half the book to get there. This is unfortunate because the post-1989 chapters (plus the chapter on the Reagan era) are the best in the book. The earlier experience is less accessible through interviews, and it shows.

There are also needless errors. Rothkopf twice includes the International Labor Organization among the multilateral institutions created after World War II: one click on "About Us" at the organization's Web site would have told him that it was founded in 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles. He writes that McGeorge Bundy (NSA to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) was succeeded in 1966 by "his deputy Walt Rostow"; in fact, Rostow had left the NSC for the State Department in November 1961, to be replaced as deputy by Carl Kaysen, a key player who goes unmentioned. Rothkopf is similarly careless about NSC staff numbers: he states on page 84 that "Bundy cut his staff from 71 to 48," then on page 85 that "Bundy reduced it in size from several scores of staff aides to about eleven." He is also inconsistent about the number of aides who served Henry Kissinger.

More important, Rothkopf misses the fundamental change that was initiated under Kennedy and confirmed under Richard Nixon. For its first 13 years, the NSC was staffed by career civil servants who managed interagency policy planning. Under Kennedy, these men (and few if any women) were replaced by aides appointed to serve a specific president, whose job was not planning but day-to-day issue management. Every administration since has followed the Kennedy model. (When Scowcroft resumed the post of NSA during the George H.W. Bush administration, Rothkopf tells us, he instructed his predecessor, Colin Powell, "to tell his staff that they were all fired unless [he] particularly asked them to stay.")

When the NSC was founded, President Harry Truman was quite happy with his secretary of state, George Marshall. He was even happier with Marshall's successor, Dean Acheson. He found the NSC helpful mostly as a forum for deliberation among his cabinet secretaries and for coordination across departments (particularly the State Department and the Pentagon). But the NSC's role was expanded under Kennedy. Although Clark Clifford and Averell Harriman were important ad hoc policy players as senior White House staff members under several presidents, their roles were nothing like those of the NSAs from Kennedy's presidency onward.