The Power Brokers

Eisenhower was more committed to the NSC and met with it virtually every week that he was in Washington. He created the position of special assistant for national security affairs (H. R. Haldeman would remove "special" from the title in 1969) and tasked its initial occupant, Robert Cutler, with developing a comprehensive policy-planning process in which papers were drafted by senior departmental officials with NSC staff support, then debated at council meetings, and finally promulgated as policy to guide (but not dictate) day-to-day decisions. For the here and now, Ike had Goodpaster, a no-profile aide who brought people and intelligence together as the president required. Because Rothkopf interviewed Goodpaster, and because he draws on a good (though unabashedly pro-Eisenhower) book by Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman (Waging Peace), he gets the Eisenhower story basically right. But because he seems to have read little else in the policy literature covering the period, he succumbs to Eisenhower hagiography -- as inadequate a view of the complex 34th president as was his earlier denigration.

Rothkopf's failure here is particularly costly to his treatment of Kennedy, whose key role in shaping the modern NSC he misses almost entirely. Kennedy, as Rothkopf correctly notes, picked Bundy as his NSA without any specific idea of what Bundy would do, and together they dismantled the Eisenhower NSC structure without fully understanding it (contributing to, among other things, the Bay of Pigs disaster). But Kennedy's changes, as refined later in his administration, established a new NSC-based presidential advisory structure that has endured to the present. This structure has three elements: a senior-ranking NSA who manages current issues for the president, a staff recruited for the specific administration, and a White House situation room that provides the technical capacity to monitor departmental communications, particularly those of the State Department. In his 1968 campaign, Nixon talked about restoring Ike's NSC and denounced the "catch-as-catch-can talkfests" of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but it was Kennedy's structure that Nixon built on and formalized once in office.

As the story moves on, Rothkopf runs through the basics. He depicts the extreme centralization of the NSC under Nixon and Kissinger, the conflict between Cyrus Vance and Brzezinski under Jimmy Carter, and the six years of disarray under Reagan. Rothkopf's obvious sympathy for Brzezinski causes him to ignore the connection between Brzezinski's controversial performance as NSA and Reagan's initial decision to downgrade the position. But he is right about the abysmal performance of the system under the Great Communicator. Reagan's hands-off style made it impossible for his NSAs to manage the bitter conflict between Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- paving the way to the Iran-contra affair and the near collapse of the administration. The NSC was then reorganized according to the biting critique of the Tower Commission, whose three members -- former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John Tower, former and future NSA Brent Scowcroft, and former Senator and Secretary of State Edmund Muskie -- took specific senior officials to task for their failings.

The administration of George H.W. Bush was notable for its collegial and productive policy process, with Secretary of State James Baker and NSA Scowcroft playing complementary roles. Clinton NSAs Lake and Berger retained the basic interagency coordinating structure -- a cabinet-level "principals committee" chaired by the NSA and a "deputies committee" below it for ongoing issue management -- put in place by their predecessor. In the current Bush administration's first term, NSA Rice succeeded in staving off a reported effort by Vice President Dick Cheney to chair the principals committee himself. But, as Rothkopf notes, the administration's policymaking process remains highly unbalanced: Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have managed to keep a heavy "thumb on the scales" of high-level deliberations, particularly on critical issues such as Iraq.

POLICYMAKING VERSUS POLICY

Running the World is only partly about the process of policymaking and the NSC. At many points, there is a book about policy struggling to break free. The chapter about the NSC's origins, for example, is preceded by one contrasting the multilateralist approach chosen by U.S. leaders in the wake of World War II with Bush-Cheney unilateralism in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. The final chapter, aptly titled "U.S. Foreign Policy in the Age of Ambiguity," devotes barely 3 of its 29 pages to conclusions about policymaking, and many more to Rothkopf's views about how policy has gone wrong under Bush's leadership. As a result, the book provides no synthesis, no serious effort to generalize from 58 years of NSC experience.

If Rothkopf had provided a thoroughgoing analysis of policymaking, he would have focused not mainly on substantive issues (multilateralism versus unilateralism, for example), but rather on how decisions are made and implemented (was Bush provided with a full analysis of the pros and cons of abandoning the Kyoto Protocol or of invading Iraq with thin international support?). Since the NSC's performance is central to these process questions, one would like a book on the council to focus persistently, not intermittently, on the way each administration's NSA and supporting staff affected how issues were managed. And one would like it to draw from the broad variety of NSC experience some lessons about what works best. But Rothkopf fails to do either.