Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess

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СКАЧАТЬ did not add up to those later assumed by Henry Kissinger. The first assistant for national security affairs, Robert Cutler, described his domain as “the top of Policy Hill.”27 On the upside of the hill was the Planning Board (basically Truman’s NSC senior staff renamed). It was made up of departmental representatives at the assistant secretary level, with the presidential assistant as its chairman. The Planning Board developed position papers, which the presidential assistant carried up to the crest, the National Security Council. Assuming that decisions were made by the president at the summit, the decisions then went down the hill to be implemented by the departments. On the downside, Eisenhower placed a new mechanism, the Operations Coordinating Board, consisting of officers at the undersecretary level, whose job was to expedite decisions and follow them up.28

      The NSC Planning Board met Tuesday and Friday afternoons for three hours. It normally took three or four meetings before a paper was ready to be sent forward. Gordon Gray, special assistant for national security affairs, cited one paper that consumed all or part of twenty-seven meetings and on which twenty-three consultants worked. After reviewing a paper, the Planning Board would return it to a group of assistants, who met for four to eight hours on each redraft. This laborious process was designed to force agreement, but despite the best efforts of the chairman of the Planning Board that was not always possible, and Gray mentioned one policy paper that was finally forwarded to the NSC with nineteen “splits.”29

      The president presided over 329 of the 366 weekly NSC meetings during his two terms. These meetings were particularly useful during the first two years of the administration, when the work of the council was largely taken up with examining all the policies of the Truman administration. But the machinery kept getting more cumbersome. Meetings were attended by the five statutory members (president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization); the two statutory advisers (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of the CIA); three officers that the president added to the NSC (secretary of the treasury, budget director, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission); and enough regular invitees to add up to twenty persons around the cabinet table.30 In addition there were others, such as the attorney general or the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose presence was requested for specific agenda items. As Cutler early warned, at some point a group turns into a town meeting, and “once this invisible line is passed, people do not discuss and debate; they remain silent or talk for the record.”31

      When Eisenhower met with President-elect Kennedy on December 6, 1960, he reported that “the National Security Council had become the most important weekly meeting of the government.” Yet in one of the afterthoughts in his memoirs, he suggested that part of the committee structure could be usefully replaced “by a highly competent and trusted official with a small staff … who might have a title such as Secretary for International Coordination.”32 Still, as tedious as some of Eisenhower’s NSC procedures were, there is no evidence that they caused unreasonable delay when prompt action was necessary. The decision to dispatch U.S. troops to Lebanon in 1958 did not emanate from an NSC discussion; it was considered by a smaller gathering in the president’s office after an NSC meeting. The more urgent the stakes, the less likely a decision will be the result of large, formal sessions. Indeed, as Douglas Kinnard concluded in his study of Eisenhower’s national security planning: “I saw few instances where the key decisions on strategic policy were not made by the president in small informal meetings.”33 By the end of the administration, however, the NSC apparatus was coming under heavy attack from Senator Henry Jackson’s Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, whose reports would influence Senator John Kennedy.

      Much of the growth in the White House staff came in the area of foreign relations. Besides the elaborate NSC operation, the presidential establishment included new offices for psychological warfare, disarmament, foreign economic policy, food aid abroad, and the international aspects of science and atomic energy. Eisenhower also relied on his brother Milton, president of Johns Hopkins University and an expert on Latin America, who has been called his “closest and most versatile adviser.”34 John Foster Dulles viewed these offices and specialists with suspicion and, when possible, cut their ranks down to what he thought was an appropriate size. Neither Nelson Rockefeller, special assistant for cold war strategy, nor Harold Stassen, special assistant on disarmament, could long survive the secretary’s enmity.

      To explain the apparent paradox of the giving and taking of Dulles’s power, it is necessary to consider the role of Eisenhower’s growing staff. Grow it did. There were thirty-two presidentially appointed professionals in the White House at the beginning of his first term; forty-seven at the beginning of his second term; and fifty when he left office. The new aides fitted into four categories, each a perceived need of the president. What initially caused the expansion was Eisenhower’s desire for efficiency. “Organization cannot make a genius out of an incompetent,” he wrote. “On the other hand, disorganization can scarcely fail to result in inefficiency.”35 That was the reason for the creation of the staff secretary system. Eisenhower’s second need was for coordination, which brought about the cabinet secretariat and the NSC machinery. In certain areas, such as science and economics, Eisenhower also felt the need for his own experts. In paying tribute to the science adviser, a post he established in 1957 after the Soviets launched Sputnik, he wrote, “Without such distinguished help, any president in our time would be, to a certain extent, disabled.”36 And what was probably behind the increase in foreign policy advisers was Eisenhower’s quest to fill gaps in the regular advice system of the government, to make up for what he felt were deficiencies in his cabinet members. As Adams put it, “Granted that Dulles was a man of great moral force and conviction, he was not endowed with the creative genius that produces bold, new ideas.”37 Therefore Eisenhower turned to such special assistants as C. D. Jackson and Rockefeller to provide what he was not getting from his secretary of state. Eisenhower’s two “bold, new ideas,” the Atoms for Peace (1953) and Open Skies (1955) proposals, did not come from the State Department and were met with skepticism by Dulles. All presidents have shared Eisenhower’s need for coordination and expertise, but the desire for staff efficiency—until Jimmy Carter’s presidency—has been a uniquely Republican motivation, perhaps related to differences in philosophy and personnel of the two parties.

      Within the Executive Office, Eisenhower had an opportunity to kill off the Council of Economic Advisers in 1953. The Republican Congress, disenchanted with the politics and economics of Leon Keyserling, had drastically cut the CEA budget. But Gabriel Hauge convinced the president to keep the council and to hire Arthur Burns as its chairman. Under the 1946 enabling act, the three members of the council were to be coequal, but Eisenhower quickly won approval of a reorganization plan giving operating responsibility to the chairman, a variation of a Hoover Commission proposal. Burns chose his staff mostly from the academy rather than from government service. Although Adams feared that Eisenhower and Burns would not get along, his worry proved groundless. When the 1954 economic downturn began, Burns introduced regular briefings, often lasting thirty minutes, at the cabinet meetings, and according to Adams, “Eisenhower listened to him with fascination.”38 The CEA survived its first crucial transition in administrations because of the increased stake of the president in the behavior of the economy, because the council members and their staff were congenial to the president, and because they provided him with information he considered immediately useful.

      The Bureau of the Budget, so important in the Truman administration, did not fare as well. Two of Eisenhower’s four budget directors were bankers and two were accountants, whereas their predecessors had had backgrounds in public administration.39 For instruction in management reorganization the president was more apt to look to the second Hoover Commission and to his Committee on Government Organization (Nelson Rockefeller, Arthur Flemming, and Milton Eisenhower). Otherwise the Budget Bureau continued to do about what it had always done, but it was not as central to the making of policy. This was caused less by suspicion of the career bureaucrat than by a simple law of physics: everyone could not occupy the same space. Eisenhower’s system of an expanded White House staff and a more powerful cabinet left less room at the center for the Budget Bureau to occupy.

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