STATEMENT OF DR. RICHARD E. NEUSTADT PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BEFORE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY STAFFING AND OPERATIONS SENATOR HENRY M. JACKSON, CHAIRMAN MONDAY , MARCH 25, 1963 10:00 A.M.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 18
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2004
• Sequence Number: 28
• Publication Date: March 25, 1963
• Content Type: PREL

Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
FOR RELEASE ON DELIVERY
Monday, March 25, 1963, 10:00 A.M.
STATEMENT OF DRn RICHARD E, NEUSTADT
Professor of Government, Columbia University
BEFORE
SENATE SUBCCHMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY STAFFING AND OPERATIONS
SENATOR HENRY M. JACKSON, CHAIRMAN
Monday, March 25, 1963
10:00 A.M.
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee:
It is a privilege to appear before you. This Subcommittee and its
predecessor have contributed a great deal to the fund of information on which
we in universities depend for the enlightenment of those we teach. If I can be
of use to you today, please take it with my thanks as a return for benefits
received.
You have asked me to comment on basic issues in national security staffing
and operations. This is a vast field and a very complex one, where troubles are
hard to track down and "solutions" come harder still. The field is full of
genuine dilemmas, many of them quite new to our governmental system but all of
them quite likely to endure as far ahead as one can see. Durability is a common
characteristic. So is difficulty.
Perhaps the chief of these dilemmas is the one placed first in the
Subcommittee's recent, cogent staff report on "Basic Issues." To quote from
that report:
"The needs of a President and the needs of the departments and
agencies are not identical ...
"What does a President need to do his job?
"Essentially ... to keep control ... to get early warning of items
for his agenda before his options are foreclosed, to pick his issues
and lift these out of normal channels, to obtain priority attention
from key officials on the issues he pulls to his desk, to get prompt
support for his initiatives, and to keep other matters on a smooth
course, with his lines of information open, so that he can intervene
if need arises.....
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
"What do the officials of our vast departments and agencies need to
do their jobs?
"Essentially ... orderly, deliberate, familiar procedures -- accustomed
forums in which to air their interests, a top-level umpire to blow the
whistle ... written records of the decisions by which they should be
foverned.
... middle-level yearnings for some equivalent of the OCB Loriginate7
in the desire to have one's views heard through some set, certain, reliable
procedure which binds the highest levels as well as other agencies."
A President needs flexibility, freedom to improvise, in dealing with
those below. Officialdom needs stability, assurance of regularity, in dealing
with those above. To a degree these needs are incompatible; hence the dilemma.
As your staff report notes:
"it is not surprising that the departments often find a President's
way of doing business unsettling -- or that Presidents:smetimes
view the departments almost as adversaries,"
In considering the problems now before you, I find it the beginning of wisdom
to face this dilemma candidly. That is what I hope to do today.
The President versus Officialdom
So much of our literature and every-day discussion treats the Executive
Branch as though it were an entity that effort is required to visualize the
President apart from the departments, in effect a separate "Branch," with
needs and interests differing from those of "his" officialdom. Yet constitu-
tional. prescription, political tradition, governmental practice, and democratic
theory all unite to make this so. In all these terms the separateness of
presidential need and interest are inevitable -- and legitimate.
The man in the White House is constitutional commander of our military
forces, conductor of foreign relations, selector of departments heads, custodian
of the "take care clause" and of the veto power. No other person in our system
has so massive a responsibility for national security. At the same time he is
the one Executive official holding office on popular election, and save for the
Vice Preside Rcpvgg Fo4~5r ~p 0 o/ f i oar ~DoP65 a00383di~0e~ Oro to a8 national
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
electorate. He is, besides, a relative short-timer in our government. Members
of Congress and career officials often hold high places for a generation. He,
at most, holds his for just eight years. The first year is a learning-time,
the last year usually a stalemate, Whatever personal imprint he can hope to
make is usually reserved to the short span between. Yet his name becomes the
label for an "era" in the history books; his accountability widens as time goes
on. School children yet unborn may hold him personally responsible for every-
thing that happens to the country in "his" years.
The constitutional responsibility, the political accountability, the
time-perspective, the judgment of history: all these adhere to the President
himself, not as an "institution" but as a human being. In this combination his
situation is unique. No one else in the Executive Branch -- or for that matter
in the government -- shares equally in his responsibility or feels an equal
heat from his electorate and history. It is no wonder that his needs can be
distinguished from, and actually are different from, the needs of most officials
in Executive departments.
Cold War and nuclear weapons make the difference greater. A new dimension
of risk has come upon American decision-making. Its effect has been to magnify
the President's responsibility, and to intensify his needs for flexibility, for
information, for control. This new dimension first began to manifest itself in
President Eisenhower's second term. Mr. Kennedy is the first President to live
with it from the outset of his Administration.
The President as Risk-Taker
What a President now lives with is the consequence of a substantial
nuclear delivery capability acquired by the Soviet Union as well as the United
States. It is the mutual capability which pushes our decision-making -- and
theirs too, of course -- into a new dimension of risk. In an article included
in yourApOvmedd1biS 2B@#dW~2I G"MRfi58NDOI LWO1W( x00,28-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
_4-
"irreversibility:" the risk that either bureaucratic momentum in a large scale
undertaking or mutual miscalculation by atomic adversaries, or both combined,
may make it infeasible to call back, or play over, or revise, an action taken in
our foreign relations, at least within the range of the Cold War. But the term
"irreversibility," standing alone, does not really suffice to convey what is new
in this dimension. Bureaucratic momentum and multiple miscalculations made a
German Emperor's snap reaction after Sarajevo "irreversible" as long ago as July,
191'+. Therefore, to amend the term: what is new since the Soviets acquired their
ICBM is the risk of irreversibility become irremediable. Unlike the problems
facing Kaiser Wilhelm fifty years ago -- or those of President Roosevelt in
World War II, or even those of President Truman in Korea a possible result
of present action is that nothing one does later can ward off, reduce, repair,
or compensate for costs to one's society.
The consequences for the Presidency are profound.
One consequence is that the sitting President lives daily with the
knowledge that at any time he, personally, may have to make a human judgment
(or may fail to control someone else's judgment) which puts half the world in
jeopardy and cannot be called back. You and I will recognize his burden
intellectually; he actually experiences it emotionally. It cannot help but set
him -- and his needs -- sharply apart from all the rest of us, not least from
the officials who have only to advise him. As Mr. Kennedy remarked in his
December television interview;
"The President bears the burden of the responsibility .... the
advisors may move on to new advice."
A second related consequence is that now more than ever before his mind
becomes the only source available from which to draw politically legitimated
judgments on what, broadly speaking, can be termed the political feasibilities
of contemplated action vis-a-vis our world ant ~~~ Ii
Approved Fo-rrlTeleas"e`2004/05/12: CIA-R6 ~5BUd383'FSW&'61 6h - re
history is tending, what opponents can stand, what friends will take, what
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
-5-
officials will enforce, what men-in-the-street will tolerate; judgments on the
balance of support, opposition, indifference at home and abroad. Our Constitu-
tion contemplated that such judgments should emanate from President and Congress,
from a combination of the men who owed their places to electorates, who had
themselves experienced the hazards of nomination and election. The democratic
element in our system consists, essentially, of reserving these judgments to men
with that experience. But when it comes to action risking war, technology has
modified the Constitution: the President, perforce, becomes the only such man
in the system capable of exercising judgment under the extraordinary limits now
imposed by secrecy, complexity, and time.
Therefore as a matter not alone of securing his own peace-of-mind, but
also of preserving the essentials in our democratic order, a President, these
days, is virtually compelled to reach for information and to seek control over
details of operation deep inside Executive departments. For it is at the level
of detail, of concrete plans, of actual performance, on "small" operations to
say nothing of large ones, that there often is a fleeting chance -- sometimes
the only chance -- to interject effective judgment. And it is at this level
that risks of the gravest sort are often run. "Irreversibility become
irremediable" is not to be considered something separate from details of
operation. If, as reported, Mr. Kennedy kept track of every movement of block-
ading warships during the Cuban crisis of October 1962, this is but a natural
and necessary corollary of the new dimension of risk shadowing us all, but most
of all a President.
The net effect is to restrict, if not repeal, a hallowed aspect of
American military doctrine, the autonomy of field commanders, which as recently
as Mr. Truman's time was thought to set sharp limits upon White House inter-
vention in details of operation. The conduct of diplomacy is comparably
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
-6-
affected. So, I presume, is the conduct of intelligence. Also, we now
rediscover that age-old problem for the rulers of States: timely and secure
communications. The complications here are mind-stretching.
The only persons qualified to give you a full appreciation of the
President's felt needs in such a situation are Mr. Eisenhower, keeping his last
years in view, and Mr. Kennedy (Mr. Khrushchev might now be equipped to offer
some contributory evidence). The situation is so new and so unprecedented that
outside the narrow circle of these men and their immediate associates one cannot
look with confidence for understanding of their prospects or requirements as
these appear to them. I do not advance this caution out of modesty -- though
my competence suffers along with the rest -- but to suggest that there remains,
at least for the time being, a further source of differences between the
President and most Executive officials: the former cannot fail for long to see
what he is up against; the latter have not seen enough of men so placed to have
much sympathy or a sure sense for how it feels these days, in these conditions,
to be President. What they see with assurance is what they in their jobs want
of him in his, a very different matter. Such differing perceptions of the
presidential task are bound to widen differences of perceived need between the
White House where responsibility is focussed and officialdom where it is not.
The same phenomenon of differing perceptions seems to play a part in other
presidential relationships. No doubt it has some bearing on the current
difficulties of relationship between the White House and its counterparts in
certain allied capitals where political leaders, in their own capacities, have
not experienced the risk to which our President is heir because they lack the
power which produced it. Presumably some of the sore spots in congressional
relations have a comparable source. Certainly this is the case with some of the
complaints voiced against Messrs. Eisenhower and Kennedy, in turn, by private
groups intent upon particular action-programs.
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/1'27-CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
The lack of common outlook increases the Presidency's isolation and thus
reinforces the dictates of common prudence for a man who bears the burden of
that office in our time: namely to stretch his personal control, his human
judgment, as wide and deep as he can make them reach. Your staff report is
quite right in its catalog of presidential needs.
Officialdom versus the President
The Cold. Wax, however, and the pace of technology have not affected only
presidential needs. They also have affected departmental needs, and in a very
different way.
Well before the Soviets achieved ICis the pace of change in our own
weaponry combined with our wide-ranging economic and political endeavors
overseas were mixing up the jurisdictions of all agencies with roles to play,
or claim, in national security: mingling operations along programmatic lines,
cutting across vertical lines of authority, breaching the neat boxes on
organizational charts. Defense, State, CIA, AID, Treasury, together with the
President's Executive Office staffs, now form a single complex -- a national
security complex, if you will -- tied together by an intricate network of
program and staff interrelationships in Washington and in the field. AEC, ACDA,
USIA are also in the complex; others lurk nearby, tied in to a degree, as for
example Commerce.
As early as the National Security Act of 19+7 we formally acknowledged
the close ties of foreign, military, economic policy; these ties had been
rendered very plain by World War II experience. But in the pre-Korean years
when ECA was on its own, when CIA was new, when.MAAG's were hardly heard of,
while atom bombs were ours alone and military budgets stood at under $15 billion,
a Secretary of Defense could forbid contacts between Pentagon and State at any
level lower than his own, and within limits could enforce his ban. That
happened only fourteen years ago. In bureaucratic terms it is as remote as the
Stone Age. Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12;] lA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
While operations now have been entangled inextricably, our formal organiza-
tions and their statutory powers and the jurisdictions of congressional
committees remain much as ever: distinct, disparate, dispersed. Our personnel
systems are equally dispersed. In the national security complex alone, I
count at least seven separate professional career systems (military included),
along with the general civil service which to most intents and purposes is
departmentalized.
These days few staffs in any agency can do their work alone without active
support or at least passive acquiesence from staffs "outside," in other agencies
(often many others). Yet no one agency, no personnel system is the effective
"boss" of any other; no one staff owes effective loyalty to the others. By and
large the stakes which move men's loyalties -- whether purpose, prestige, power,
or promotion -- run to one's own program, one's own career system, along agency
lines not across them.
These developments place premiums on inter-staff negotiation, compromise,
agreement in the course of everybody's action. This Subcommittee has deplored
the horrors of committee-work; the wastes of time, the ear-strain -- and the
eye-strain -- the "papering over" of differences, the search for lowest common-
denominators of agreement. I deplore these horrors too and freely advocate
"committee-killing," periodically, to keep them within bounds. But given the
realities of programming and operations, interagency negotiation cannot be
avoided. To "kill" committees is, at most, to drive them underground.
Officials have to find at least an informal equivalent. What else are they
to do?
One other thing they can do is push their pet issues up for argument and
settlement at higher levels. Once started on this course, there is no very
satisfactory place to stop short of the White House. In logic and in law only
the Presidency stands somewhat above all agencies, all personnel systems, all
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12: CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
staffs. Here one can hope to gain decisions as definitive as our system
permits; congressional committees may be able to supplant them, special-pleaders
may be able to reverse them, foot-draggers may be able to subvert them -- even
so, they are the surest thing obtainable.
Accordingly, officials urged to show initiative, to quit logrolling in
committee, to be vigorous in advocacy, firm in execution turn toward the White
House seeking from it regular, reliable, consistent service as a fixed and
constant Court of Arbitration for the national security complex. This means, of
course, a Court which knows how courts behave and does not enter cases
"prematurely." Your staff report rightly describes the sort of service wanted;
in the circumstances of officials they do well to want it.
Their need for such a service is unquestionable, and legitimate. To
flounder through the mush of "iffy" answers, or evasions; to struggle through
the murk of many voices, few directives; to fight without assurance of a
referee; to face the Hill without assurance of a buffer; or on the other hand,
to clean up after eager "amateurs," to repair damage done by ex-parte proceed-
ings; to cope with "happy thoughts" in highest places -- these are what
officialdom complains of, and with reason. For the work of large-scale enter-
prises tends to be disrupted by such breaches of "good order" and routine.
Not bureaucrats alone but also Presidents have stakes in the effectiveness of
the Executive bureaucracy. From any point of view, officials surely are entitled
to want White House service in support of their performance.
But if a President should give this service to their satisfaction, what
becomes of him? While he sits as the judge of issues brought by others --
keeping order, following procedure, filing decisions, clearing dockets -- what
happens to his personal initiative, his search for information, his reach for
control, his mastery of detail? What happens to his own concerns outside the
sphere of national security? In short, where is his flexibility? The answers
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/l~6CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
I think are plain. Thus the dilemma with which I began: to a degree -- a
large degree -- his needs and theirs are incompatible.
Help from, the Secretary , of State?
It is tempting to assert that this dilemma could be resolved at a stroke
by the appointment of a "Czar," a presidential Deputy, to serve as court-of-
first-resort for all disputes within the national security complex except the
ones the President preempted out of interest to himself or to the nation. The
"solution" is tempting but I find it quite unreal. I do not see how this role
can be built into our system. I share the reservations put on record by the
reports of your predecessor Subcommittee.
Setting aside grandiose "solutions," what might be done to ease the
tension between Presidential and official needs, to keep the pains of this
dilemma within bounds? The answer I believe -- insofar as one exists -- lies
in careful and selective augmentation of the Presidency's staff resources. A
President may not need Deputies, writ large, to keep decisions from him but he
certainly needs ready and responsive staff work in the preparatory phases of
decision-making and follow-up. The better he is served thereby, the better will
officialdom be served as well. In this their needs run parallel: effective
staff work for him cannot help but put some firm procedure under foot for them;
such staff work promises that bases will be touched, standpoints explored (with
rocks turned over and the worms revealed), positions traced, appeals arranged,
compromises tested. When this prospect is seen ahead official hearts are glad.
In the nature of the case, a President's assistants at the White House
cannot do that sort of staff work by themselves except -- they hope and so does
he -- on issues having top priority for him in his own mind and schedule,
day-to-day. Preparatory work on issues not yet in that class and follow-up
on issues which have left it must be done, if done at all, at one-remove through
staff facilities less dominated by the President's immediate requirements.
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
-11-
Hence the distinction introduced a quarter-century ago between personal staff
at the White House and "institutional" staff, mainly career staff, in the
Executive Offices across the street, of which the longest-lived example is the
Bureau of the Budget,
But in the sphere of national security there is no Budget Bureau. Its
nearest counterpart remains the Office of the Secretary of State. This is the
traditional source of "institutional" assistance for a President in what was
once the peacetime sum of "foreign relations:" diplomacy. And while the Office
has not kept pace with the meaning of that term, no full-scale substitute has
been built in its stead. I hope none will be. I hope, rather, that the
Secretary's Office can be rebuilt on a scale commensurate with the contemporary
reach of "foreign relations."
Reliance on the Secretary's Office as an "institutional" staff resource
seems to have been envisaged at the start of Mr. Kennedy's Administration, On
the White House side Mr. Bundy was named to the necessary personal assistant-
ship, filling a post established in the previous Administration: "Special
Assistant for National Security Affairs." But formalized committee structures
and secretariats built up around his post during the Nineteen-fifties were
scaled down or disestablished by the new Administration. This was done with
the expressed intent of improving staff performance by transferring staff
functions to the Office of the Secretary of State. OCB is a case in point.
As Mr. Bundy wrote your Chairman on September 4, 1961:
"It was and is our belief that there is much to be done that the OCB
could not do, and that the things it did do can be done as well or
better in other ways.
"The most important of these other ways is an increased reliance
on the leadership of the Department of State...the President has
made it very clear that he does not want a large separate organiza-
tion between him and his Secretary of State. Neither does he wish
any question to arise as to the clear authority and responsibility
of the Secretary of State, not only in his own Department, and not
only in such large-scale related areas as foreign aid and
information policy, but also as the agent of coordination in all
our major policies toward other nations."
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/1: CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
For a variety of reasons, some of them beyond my range of observation,
this staffing pattern has not been set firmly up to now: the White House side,
the "personal" side, seems firm enough but not the other side, the "institutional'
side. So far as I can Judge, the State Department has not yet found means to
take the proffered role and play it vigorously across-the-board of national
security affairs. The difficulties here m be endemic; the role MI ask too
much of one department among others. But I think it is decidedly too soon to
tell. State, I conceive, should have the benefit of every doubt and more time
for experiment.
This seems to be the view of the Administration. It is striking that in
all these months the White House staff has set up no procedures or "machimry"
which would interfere in any way with building up the Secretary's Office as a
presidential "agent of coordination." It is striking also that the Secretary
has moved toward enhancement of his Office by equipping it with a strong
number-three position in the person of Mr. Harriman, who preceded me at your
hearings. The burdens of advice-giving and of negotiation weigh heavily these
days not only on the Secretary but also on the Undersecretary: this position
thus comes into play as in effect their common deputyship. Mr. Harriman, I take
it, with his new authority as second Undersecretary has more opportunity than
they to be a source of guidance and of-stiffening -- and interference-running --
for careerists in the State Department, as they deal with one another and with
staffs outside. If he actually can do this, if he too is not weighed down by
other duties, then the ground may be prepared now for substantial further
movement toward development of central staff work in the national security
sphere.
Until now, I gather, no one has had time to make himself consistently an
energizer, catalyst, connective for the several sorts of planners, secretariats,
"task forces," and action officers now scattered through the upper floors of our
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
-1-_
vast New State Building. The Secretary may sit at the center of this vastness,
but his Office has almost no staff which he can call his own. To weld together
such a staff out of these scattered pieces, to imbue it with cohesion and a
government-wide outlook, to implant it as a presidential agent of coordination
for the sweep of national security affairs: all this is far from done. I need
not tell you why I think the doing will take time!
The Secretary versus the Others
But I must not mislead you. What I offer here is "conventional wisdom,"
my hopes are conventional hopes. To call for augmentation of the Presidency's
staff resources is to echo what has been prescribed for almost every govern-
mental ailment these past thirty years. To fasten on the Secretary's Office as
the means is to follow the footsteps of innumerable study-groups intent upon
improving something-in-particular within the range of foreign operations. The
Herter Committee very recently, concerned for personnel in foreign service,
charged the Secretary's Office with coordination of civilian career systems.
Now I come along to charge the Office with coordinative staff work in the realm
of policy. Such unanimity is dangerous,
The danger is that as we try to make the Secretary's Office serve the
needs of personnel directors, or of action-officers, or White House aides, or
Presidents, we may forget the Secretary's needs. The danger is that as we try
to make him a strong instrument for other people's purposes we may forget that
he will have some purpose of his own. The modern Secretaryship of State is not
merely a presidential staff resource -- or a personnel agency for that matter --
nor can it be used simply to bridge differences between the President and
officialdom. This Office has its own compelling and divergent needs apart from
theirs; it has its own dilemma differing from theirs. To seek the best of both
worlds from the Secretary's Office, to intend effective staff work for both
President and Secretary, is to present as delicate a task of institution-building
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12-1:?CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
as the Executive has faced in modern times. Because it is so delicate the
outcome is uncertain. The danger is that in our advocacy we forget the delicacy,
the uncertainty, or both.
Consider for a moment the responsibilities of any modern Secretary of
State. Always in form, usually in fact, the man becomes a very senior personal
adviser to the President, a source of brainpower and judgment for him both as
one man to another and at working sessions of his chosen "inner circle"
(currently the "Executive Committee" of the National Security Council).
Perhaps this was not Mr. Bryan's role -- to reach far back -- or Mr. Hull's,
but certainly it was the role of Messrs. Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, among
others. Under conditions of cold war, this role is sharpened, rendered more
intense by emergence of the Secretary of Defense, an officer with roughly equal
claim but necessarily different focus, as a source of judgment in the foreign
relations sphere. Balance of advice becomes important on each issue every day.
The Secretary of State is much more than a personal adviser. He also is
our ranking Diplomat-at -Large for sensitive negotiations just short of the
"Summit." Furthermore, he serves as an Administration "voice" to Congress,
to the country, and abroad whose public word is weighty in proportion to his
rank. At the same time he is actively in charge of a complex administrative
entity. He is "Mr. State Department" -- and 'dlr. Foreign Service" -- leader
of officials, spokesman for their causes, guardian of their interests, judge of
their disputes, superintendent of their work, master of their careers.
The Secretary of State has a dilemma all his own. These roles are
mutually reinforcing: his advice gains weight because he represents the whole
department; his public statements and internal orders gain in potency because
he is so often at the White House. But these roles are also mutually
antagonistic: fronting for officials strains his credit as an adviser;
advising keeps his mind off management; negotiating preempts energy and time.
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/0112 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
No modern Secretary has performea the miracle of playing all these roles at once
so skillfully and carefully that he obtains the benefits of all and pays no
penalties. Presumably there is no way to do it.
A Secretary cannot wriggle out of this dilemma by ditching his department
and retreating to the White House, although at least one Secretary may have
wished he could. His job cannot be done from there, nor is he needed there.
Another man can serve, and does, as White House aide for national security
affairs; like others of his kind the aide stays close at hand to deal with
action-issues on the President's agenda when and how the President's own mind,
interests, and work habits require as he meets his own time-pressures and
priorities. No doubt this personal assistantship includes a role as personal
adviser. The Secretary also is a personal adviser. But this coincidence does
not make them the same, nor would it help the President to have two such
assistants and no Secretary.
The Secretary's usefulness as an adviser lies precisely in the fact that
he is more than just another aide whose work is tied entirely to the President's.
The Secretary has work of his own, resources of his own, vistas of his own. He
is in business under his own name and in his name powers are exercised, decisions
taken. Therefore he can press his personal authority, his own opinion, his
adviser's role, wherever he sees fit across the whole contemporary reach of
"foreign relations," never mind the organization charts. He cannot hope to win
all arguments in such a sphere, nor is he in position to contest them
indiscriminately. But his status and the tasks of his department give him every
right to raise his voice where, when and as he chooses. To abandon his
department in an effort to escape its burdens and distractions is to cloud his
title as adviser.
Yet to concentrate on running his department -- combatting weaknesses,
asserting jurisdictions, adjudicating feuds -- is no better solution for a
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
Secretary's problem. With the President absorbed., as Presidents must be, in
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
foreign operations, in diplomacy, defense, no Secretary worth his salt would
spend much time on management while others drafted cables in the Cabinet Room.
And if he did he would not lord; rewath effective as a personal adviser.
The modern Secretary of State, whoever he may be, deserves more sympathy
than most receive. He lives with his dilemma but he cannot take the comfort
which officials, facing theirs, draw from longevity: "this too shall pass."
Nor can he take the comfort which a President derives from being, for a fixed
term, "Number One." The Secretary's only consolation is to share with Gilbert's
Gondoliers "the satisfying feeling that our duty has been done." But "duty"
is exceedingly ambiguous for him. What about the duties he has slighted?
Two Notes of Caution
Under these circumstances it would add insult to injury if this man
were asked to serve in any simple sense as the Director of a presidential staff
facility on the model of the Bureau of the Budget. For self-protection he
would have to shirk the task if it were his. Otherwise he would be kept so
busy checking on the work of his resentful Cabinet colleagues that every present
role might suffer more than it does now. What is the gain from that? But if
we simply move the upper reaches of the State Department out from under him and
tie them to the Presidency apart from him, where does he get his staff work
done, who bulwarks his initiatives, supports his roles? Yet if we leave his
departmental aides to serve him only and turn elsewhere for the Presidency's
service -- if, as some have urged, we simply set up a new "Office of National
Security Affairs" in the Executive Offices beside the Budget Bureau -- what
happens to the Secretary's status and utility in doing what he now does for our
government?
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
I pose these questions to be cautious, not equivocal. I hope that through
the Secretary's Office wean build an institution seeing both the Presidency
and, the Secretary himself. I hope thereby that we can ease the tension between
President and officialdom, and at the same time ease the Secretary's own
dilemma. In my opinion we should try to realize these hopes. But I would not
pretend to you that such a course is either safe or certain. And assuredly it
is not simple.
In closing let me add a second caution: even with time, even with good
use of it, even if we master complex institution-building, we can expect no
miracles from policy ? Even if the Secretary's Office should become a partner
with the White House in the Presidency's business while the Secretary's business
is protected and enhanced, even then both sorts of business would be botched on
numerous occasions. For methods and procedures at their best cannot abolish the
deep difficulties of perception, of analysis, of Judgment, of persuasion which
confront our policy-makers now and in the future. Organizational arrangements
at their most ingenious cannot rub out the underlying differences of duty,
interest, role, perspective, separating Presidency from officialdom -- and
separating both from Congress, for that matter.
These difficulties, differences lie at the root of most "botched business"
we have witnessed in the past and will experience in future. Machinery may
confine the damage, or enlarge it, but to see the source of damage as the
vehicle in use is to ignore the drive rand his passengers, and road-conditions
and the other drivers. To claim that it could be made "damage-proof" by re-
design is to divert attention from the human condition. I would make no such
claim. Machinery is important; our President and our Executive officials need
the most effective mechanisms they can get. Still, this remains emphatically
a government of men who face in national security affairs unprecedented
problems mostly not of their own making.
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
 Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1
-18-
They dare not hope for too much from machinery, nor should we. To do so
is to court unnecessary disappointment. As the world goes these days I see
no need for that. There seems to be quite enough necessar disappointment.
Approved For Release 2004/05/12 : CIA-RDP65B00383R000200010028-1