Former security advisers discuss their position

Former
security advisers discuss their position
…………………………………………………………………

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Filling the gap between what the U.S. president knows and
what he or she ought to know before making a decision is
the biggest job faced by the national security adviser (NSA).

Walt Rostow,
who served as NSA for presidents Kennedy and Johnson, expressed
that opinion when he and five other former advisers met
in Washington, D.C., April 12 at a forum to discuss the
role of NSAs. Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for
Public Policy and the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars sponsored the forum to define the NSA’s
involvement in the formulation, planning, conduct and coordination
of the nation’s foreign and national security policies.

CNN anchor Wolf
Blitzer moderated the panel discussion among Rostow and
former NSAs Samuel Berger (Clinton), Zbigniew Brzezinski
(Carter), Frank Carlucci (Reagan), Andrew Goodpaster (Eisenhower)
and Robert McFarlane (Reagan).

“It’s
not generally realized that the president steps off into
the dark with almost every decision,” Rostow said.
“Mobilizing” information to the president is the
NSA’s responsibility, and that entails being able to
state the point of view of each Cabinet member so the president
hears all sides of an issue.

While the NSA
serves as a gatherer of facts, “that doesn’t mean
you don’t express your own view,” Berger said.
“I think the national security adviser has to be the
one who often says that the president’s wrong. I always
felt it was my particular obligation and responsibility
to give the president the downsides of a particular step
he was about to take.”

Brzezinski noted,
however, there’s a time and place for sharing such
opinions.

“The president’s
always right in public,” he said. “Whenever there’s
a group, he’s right, because the national security
adviser is helping him. In private, you have the obligation
to tell him that he’s wrong.”

According to
Berger, the NSA’s principal role is to assure that
the president is “well-served in his decision making,
that his decisions are executed by the government in some
kind of coherent way.”

Berger pointed
out that the NSA often is in a position to facilitate decision
making. For example, if the adviser knows the president’s
thinking on a particular issue before the president has
made a formal decision and the adviser feels that the president
is headed in the right direction, the NSA “can try
to tee up a decision for him in a way that does not put
him in a box,” he said. “You can try to bring
the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and others
to what I used to call ‘the highest common denominator.’
If there was not a consensus at a fairly high level, it
was better to bring the president two starkly different
points of view.”

Carlucci said,
“I think there is a healthy tension between the Department
of Defense and the Department of State, which, in many instances,
the national security adviser has to mediate.”

Goodpaster cited
the importance of anticipating problems that might arise
and preparing solutions, often using the National Security
Council for studies and counsel.

McFarlane stressed
that neither the NSA nor the National Security Council should
get involved in operations; instead, they should restrict
themselves to an advisory capacity.

“What the
security adviser must guard against,” McFarlane said,
“is the frustration a president can experience as someone
who is there for four years to get something done, to be
able to demonstrate leadership in X or Y area, and the frustration
of not seeing that the Department of State or others in
his administration are apparently moving in that direction.
But that cannot lead the Security Council or the adviser
to go beyond the line and take on an operational role.

McFarlane said
the NSA plays more of a counselor or adviser role “when
you’re trying to take the country in a fundamentally
new direction, where you may have concerns or the president
may have concerns about a very novel idea being undermined
if it is bureaucratized to the point of pre-emptive destruction.”

The NSA, in
effect, serves as the president’s foreign policy chief
of staff, Berger said. But Berger added that only under
unusual circumstances should the NSA be the principal negotiator
or diplomat for foreign matters.

Goodpaster said
President Eisenhower wanted the secretary of state to have
a major role as the spokesperson for foreign policy, and
that tradition has continued.

The six former
NSAs agreed that the position of national security adviser
should not have Cabinet status nor have to be confirmed
by the U.S. Senate, because the NSA would be obligated to
testify before congressional committees, and that would
take up a great deal of his or her time. That role of responding
to Congress should be left with the cabinet secretaries
and their departments.

Ivo Daalder,
a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, served as
rapporteur for the forum. Edward Djerejian, director of
the Baker Institute, and Lee Hamilton, director of the Wilson
Center, led a question-and-answer session between the NSAs
and the audience during the second half of the forum.

A two-and-a-half-hour
video recording of the forum is posted on the Baker Institute’s
Web site, <www.
bakerinstitute.org>.