Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of
Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W.
Bush
By Peter
W. Rodman. Introduction by Henry A.
Kissinger.
(Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $26.95)
Reviewed by Mark Falcoff
THE LATE PETER RODMAN, who died last summer, was one of those
remarkable people rare in Washington—the key insider unknown to the
general public and (rarer still) happy to remain that way. A lawyer
by training, a former student of Henry Kissinger at Harvard, he
accompanied his mentor to the capital in the early days of the
Nixon administration, where he labored quietly during those
decidedly unquiet days on the staff of the National Security
Council. During the presidency of George H. W. Bush he was director
of policy planning at the State Department, and during the first
administration of our most recent president he was assistant
secretary of defense for security assistance. In between his tours
of government he worked as a research assistant for Dr. Kissinger
in the latter’s production of his monumental memoirs.
Presidential Command is not, however, a memoir itself but
rather a detailed review of the role of the president in the field
of national security during our last seven administrations. It
draws upon the abundant academic and journalistic literature—the
endnotes reveal just how vast it really is—but far more importantly
it brings to bear the qualified judgment of someone who in many
cases was actually there. This fly-on-the-wall perspective is not
to be discounted. A friend of mine who worked on the Clinton
National Security staff—since departed for academic life— remarked
to me recently that most of the literature in his own field
(U.S.-Latin American relations) reveals an appalling ignorance on
the part of his fellow professors “as to how policy actually
works.”
Rodman knew better from hard experience. The United States
government is a sprawling and enormous bureaucracy, he explains,
and as it has grown it has proven more impervious to direction and
presidential leadership. This is particularly true in the field of
foreign policy and national security, where dozens of agencies have
found their way into the decision-making process—not just State,
Defense, and the intelligence community, but commerce, labor,
agriculture, and environment. Unfortunately, the American system,
Rodman writes with characteristic understatement, “has not solved
the problem of presidential control.”
The major poles of contention, of course, are the national
security adviser, whose office is in the White House itself, and
the secretary of state, whose office is halfway across town. The
former position was created during the Eisenhower administration to
provide the president with a kind of synoptic view of the larger
policy process and to lay out a menu of options. Its other
purpose—vain hope that!—was to assure policy coordination. The
importance of the NSC increased vastly during the presidency of
Richard Nixon (1969–1974), largely because the latter harbored a
deep distrust of the State Department. Indeed, so hostile was Nixon
to that agency that he eventually ignored (some would say even
humiliated) his own secretary, William Rogers, who in any case
proved a far less agile practitioner of bureaucratic warfare than
Dr. Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser. Moreover,
although Rogers was one of President Nixon’s oldest political
friends (he had served as attorney general in the Eisenhower
administration), he was quickly co-opted by the institutional
culture of his department. “Periodically,” Rodman reveals,
Kissinger’s staff felt obliged to put together “a compilation of
instances of State’s overeagerness in contacts with the Soviets,
press leaks disparaging presidential policy, refusals to clear
important cables at the White House, and/or efforts to curry favor
with Congress at White House expense.” In the end Nixon and
Kissinger decided on an end-run policy; they established a back
channel with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, which “kept the top
political levels involved on both sides and facilitated rapid
decision.” Nixon’s only problem wasn’t with the State Department,
however. His secretary of defense, Melvin Laird—a seasoned veteran
of trench warfare on Capitol Hill—had his own agenda when it came
to troop withdrawals from Vietnam, and was not above leaking his
numbers to the press to force the president’s hand “or make clear
that delays in getting out were Nixon’s fault, not Laird’s.” As
Rodman puts it, “the interagency process [was] decidedly unhelpful
when it came to…basic questions of strategy.”
If so vigorous and determined an executive as Richard Nixon
failed in the end to get a full handle on the policy process, how
much more was that the case with his accidental successor Gerald
Ford (1974– 1977)! Kissinger, who had taken over the State
Department in the late months of Nixon’s presidency, stayed on to
assure policy continuity, but Ford, a modest man of modest talents,
was simply overwhelmed by events. And he proved unequal to a
rebellion both to his right and his left—against pursuit of détente
in one case, and against efforts to resist Soviet involvement in
the Third World on the other. In any event, from the day he took
office Ford was hamstrung by a raft of legislation dating back to
1974 that seriously limited the executive’s power in foreign
policy. The best-known innovation is the War Powers Act, passed
over Nixon’s veto, but Rodman provides a long list on pp. 112–113
of this book.
In contrast to Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter (1977–1981)
encouraged what he regarded as “natural competition” between the
State Department and the NSC. The result was a kind of
“philosophical schizophrenia” (Rodman’s term). One former Carter
staffer told Rodman that Carter “had no consistent philosophy in
foreign policy except that what had gone on in his predecessors’
administrations was bad.”1 Although Carter had some important
foreign policy achievements to his credit—notably the Camp David
accords, normalization of relations with China, and aid to
anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan—in the crucial case of Iran
he was immobilized by guilt and indecision, weaknesses magnified by
his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, himself unable or unwilling to
impose political direction on the Department’s career
bureaucracy.
RONALD REAGAN (1981–1989) was a horse of an entirely different
color, Rodman writes, but only when he was engaged. The key to his
approach to U.S.-Soviet relations was the Strategic Defense
Initiative, which he rightly saw as a lever to move Moscow in the
direction of political and strategic reevaluation. Not
surprisingly, he was constantly being urged by State and other
agencies to abandon this approach, and one of his most memorable
moments—his speech at the Berlin wall—was made over the bitter
protests of his own diplomats. Where he let things slide, as in the
case of Central America, others took over and ran roughshod over
the terrain (the famous Iran-Contra episode). But whatever his
weaknesses, Ronald Reagan understood one important fact: the
avoidance of hard choices may actually increase risk.
Reagan was fortunate to have as strong and talented a secretary
of state as George Shultz, but his successor, George H. W. Bush
(1989–1993), was even more fortunate in the case of James Baker and
Dick Cheney, both of whom saw themselves as the president’s man at
the departments of State and Defense, respectively. Bush senior was
able to knit together an unprecedented international coalition and
in spite of resistance from the career military (notably Gen. Colin
Powell, chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff) to pursue a policy
of reversing Iraqi aggression in the Persian Gulf. Perhaps unique
among all the administrations surveyed in this book, that of Bush
senior enjoyed a unique degree of policy coherence between the
major departments.
In some ways President Bill Clinton (1997–2001) most nearly
resembles Ronald Reagan, at least in the sense that when he was
actually focused on major foreign policy issues he often brought a
high degree of coherence to the outcomes. “In other cases,” Rodman
writes, “the loose informality of his style and decision-making
often permitted bureaucratic stalemate and indecision.” But, Rodman
adds, “even when the President was deeply engaged, discipline was
not his strong suit.” Unlike Reagan, he also had to face serious
philosophical contradictions within his administration—the liberal
predilection to be for all good things and against all bad things,
regardless of the fact that the two are often inextricably
intertwined in real life. (The Balkan crisis festered for two long
years before the administration summoned up the courage—and the
leverage—to force a satisfactory outcome.).
The presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009) is obviously too
recent for more than cursory evaluation, but Rodman does offer some
interesting insights, many of them gathered from his time at the
Pentagon. He describes Bush the Younger as “like Ronald Reagan…a
leader capable of great decisiveness but who set up or tolerated a
system that impeded his exercise of it.” (More than once he denies
that Vice President Dick Cheney was really running the show, as
often claimed by partisan opponents and the media.) On the major
issues of his presidency, Bush’s own judgment “was better than that
of some of his senior advisers.” Yet, he adds, “the system
floundered when it did not have his decisive intervention, and it
sometimes fostered bitter bureaucratic resentments even when it
did.”
Perhaps the most interesting part of this chapter deals with the
run-up to war in Iraq and the diplomatic games played at the United
Nations in New York. With much arm-twisting and horse-trading,
Secretary of State Colin Powell was able to obtain passage of UN
Resolution 1441 in November 2002 declaring Iraq to be in “material
breach” of its obligation to renounce weapons of mass destruction
or face “serious consequences.” But when Washington sought a second
resolution to act upon this finding, which is to say, to go to war
(a vote that British prime minister Blair badly needed to pacify
critics in his own Labour Party), the French (who told the
administration privately to “just do it” without another vote),
sabotaged the effort. “Such,” Rodman declares dryly, “are the joys
of multilateralism.” (Obamites, take careful notes.) Rodman
concludes that any president, no matter how talented or visionary,
is dependent on what he calls “the permanent government.” Each
presidents requires “a variety of tools to reinforce his
persuasion—political appointees in the departments who are attuned
to his wishes, and cabinet officers for whom the presidential
agenda is a top priority.” So far no president has enjoyed the
entire range of resources to successfully implement his foreign
policy. Those who just now imagine that the mere change of
personalities at the White House will nullify this problem are
living in a dream world.
One cannot conclude discussion of this book without paying
tribute to Peter Rodman. Although he was at the center of so much
that had happened in Washington these past three decades, his
outstanding characteristic was modesty and generosity. Even those
of us who knew him fairly well never realized the fund of knowledge
he carried around with him. Fortunately in this posthumous work he
has bequeathed his country a priceless legacy. One can only hope
that administrations present and future will make good use of
it.
1 I recall being present some years ago at a conference with
former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt at which the latter
related that when the Carter administration came into office it
immediately dispatched envoys to Bonn to tell him “to ignore
everything our predecessors told you; the truth is exactly the
reverse.” Schmidt said that he tried as best he could to explain to
Carter’s people that this was not necessarily so.
