A New NSC System

excerpted from the book

The Price of Power

Kissinger in the Nixon White House

by Seymour M. Hersh

Summit Books, 1983, paper

p25
A New NSC System

... The NSC had been set up, at the same time as the Central Intelligence Agency, by the National Security Act of 1947, which assigned it the task of advising the President "with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security." But the NSC was to be more than a clearing house for competing interests in the bureaucracy. Congress also ordered it to independently "assess and appraise the objectives, commitments, and risks of the United States in relation to our actual and potential military power." Statutory NSC members included the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the director of the Office of Emergency Planning, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of Central Intelligence serving as advisers.

The 1947 legislation also called for an executive director of the National Security Council, who, in theory, was to have immense influence on the control and monitoring of the overseas operations of the armed forces and the intelligence agencies. But each President, beginning with Harry S Truman, tended to delegate responsibility for national security affairs to a special assistant on his White House staff who operated independently of the NSC and its executive director. During the Eisenhower Administration, the NSC system became heavily bureaucratized, with the establishment of a formal Planning Board that monitored all foreign policy papers going to the President for review. The result was cautious consensus and generalized policy guidance that diluted the influence of the NSC and did little to challenge the authority of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had close personal and philosophical ties to the President. President Kennedy further eschewed the NSC's formal apparatus and moved the job of assistant to the President for national security affairs into the limelight with the appointment of McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard professor and dean of faculty. In crises Kennedy consistently bypassed the NSC, with its interagency discussions and disputes, and brought decision making into the White House on an ad hoc basis. During the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of T96', for example, decisions were made and ratified through what was called the Excomm, a hastily assembled committee of Kennedy insiders, on which Bundy played a significant role. The NSC and its executive director continued to operate in these years, but had increasingly little of import to do. President Johnson also chose to maneuver informally on key issues, especially in dealing with the war in Vietnam, and eventually set up a regular Tuesday lunch at which the administration's principals, including Walt W. Rostow, who became special assistant after Bundy resigned in I966, would meet to discuss and formulate policy without any advance memoranda or planning. During those years, the staff aides on the NSC routinely found themselves serving in support of the President's assistant for national security affairs, and the size of the NSC staff steadily increased. By the early I960s, NSC staff aides were filling dozens of offices in the White House and the Executive Office Building. The NSC executive director, with his small staff, also maintained offices in the Executive Office Building. The two staffs were not formally consolidated until Richard Nixon took office.

Of the men closest to the President-elect in December I968, Kissinger was the most experienced in national security affairs. He had been a consultant to the NSC under Kennedy, and was far from a newcomer to covert intelligence operations. He had served in the Army Counterintelligence Corps at the close of World War 11 and stayed on active duty in occupied West Germany after the war. He was eventually assigned to the 970th CIC Detachment, whose functions included support for the recruitment of ex-Nazi intelligence officers for anti-Soviet operations inside the Soviet bloc. After entering Harvard as an undergraduate in I947, at age twenty-four, he retained his ties, as a reserve officer, to military intelligence. By I950, he was a graduate student and was working part time for the Defense Department-one of the first at Harvard to begin regular shuttles to Washington-as a consultant to its Operations Research Office. That unit, under the direct control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conducted highly classified studies on such topics as the utilization of former German operatives and Nazi partisan supporters in CIA clandestine activities. In I952, Kissinger was named a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board, an operating arm of the National Security Council for covert psychological and paramilitary operations. In I954, President Eisenhower appointed Nelson Rockefeller his Special Assistant for Cold War Planning, a position that involved the monitoring and approval of covert CIA operations. These were the days of CIA successes in Iran, where the Shah was installed OR the throne, and in Guatemala, where the government of Jacobo Arbenz, considered anti-American and antibusiness, was overthrown. In I955, Kissinger, already known to insiders for his closeness to Rockefeller and Rockefeller's reliance on him, was named a consultant to the NSC's Operations Coordinating Board, which was then the highest policy-making board for implementing clandestine operations against foreign governments.

... There is evidence, however, that Nixon and Kissinger, within days of Kissinger's appointment, were working in far more harmony than outsiders-and many Nixon insiders-could perceive. The grab for control had been signaled at President-elect Nixon's news conference on December 2, I968, at which he made the formal announcement of Kissinger's appointment and introduced his national security adviser to the press. Nixon told the press that Kissinger would move immediately to revitalize the National Security Council system. He would set up "a very exciting new procedure for seeing to it that the next President of the United States does not hear just what he wants to hear, which is always a temptation for White House staffers, but that he hears points of view covering the spectrum...." In addition, "Dr. Kissinger is keenly aware of the necessity not to set himself up as a wall between the President and the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense. I intend to have a very strong Secretary of State."

Nixon's public statements had little to do with what he wanted done. At their first meeting, on November 25, according to Kissinger's memoirs, Nixon talked about "a massive organizational problem . . . He had very little confidence in the State Department. Its personnel had no loyalty to him; the Foreign Service had disdained him as Vice President and ignored him the moment he
was out of office. He was determined to run foreign policy from the White House. He thought the Johnson Administration had ignored the military and that its decision-making procedures gave the President no real options. He felt it imperative to exclude the CIA from the formulation of policy; it was staffed by Ivy League liberals who behind the facade of analytical objectivity were usually pushing their own preferences. They had always opposed him politically."

Kissinger records himself as merely agreeing that "there was a need for a more formal decision-making process." Nixon recalls much enthusiasm. In his memoirs, he even credits Kissinger with actually articulating the notion of centralizing power in the NSC inside the White House: "Kissinger said he was delighted that I was thinking in such terms. He said that if I intended to operate on such a wide-ranging basis, I was going to need the best possible system for getting advice.... Kissinger recommended that I structure a national security apparatus within the White House that, in addition to coordinating foreign and defense policy, could also develop policy options for me to consider before making decisions."

The dispute between Kissinger and Nixon over who proposed what remains, but the fact is that what they discussed in private that November [was] the centralization of power in the White House ...

The Price of Power

Henry Kissinger page

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