THE BUREAURRAT'S TEN COMMANDMENTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000100010025-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: November 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 24, 2000
• Sequence Number: 25
• Publication Date: August 6, 1972
• Content Type: NSPR

CPYRGHT
THE AVERAGE newspaper reader
in the 1950s must have asked:
Why don't we take some of our troops
gut of Europe? Ike himself said we didn't
need them all Ihei.?e. Later, in 1961,
after the tragicomic Bay of Pigs inva-
tcion, the reader asked: Dow did Presi-
dent Kennedy ever decide to do such
a damn fool thing? Or later, about
Vietnam: Why does President John-
so~n keep on, bombing North Vietnam
when the bombing prevents negotia-
tions and (loesn't get Hanoi to stop
the fighting?
Sometimes the answer to these ques-
tions is simple. It can be attributed
.squarely to the President. He thinks
:it's right. Or he believes he has no
choice. As often as not, though, the an-
swer lies elsewhere-in the special in-
terests and procedures of the burcau-
cracy and time convictions of the
bureaucrats.
If. you look at. foreign policy -as a
largely rational process of gathering. in-
formation, setting the alternatives, de-
finint; the national interest. and mak,
ing decisions, then much of whaf the
.-President. Goes will not make sense.
But if you look at, foreign policy as bu-
reaucrats pursuing prganizational,
personal and domestic political inter-
ests, as well as their own beliefs about
what is right, you can explain much of
the inexplicable.
In pursuing these interests and be. '
liefs, bureaucrats (and that means ev-
eryone from Cabinet officials to politi-
cal appointees to career civil serv-
ants) usually follow their own version
of the Ten Commandments:
DON'T DISCUSS domestic politics
on issues involving war and peace.
On May 11, 1948, President Truman
held a meeting in the White house to
discuss recognition of the new state of
Israel. Secretary of State George Mar-
shall and Under Secretary Robert
Lovett spoke first. They were against
it., It would unnecessarily alienate
401. million Arabs. Truman next
asked Clark Clifford then special coun-
sel, to the President, to speak. Arguing
far: the moral element of U.S. policy
argd,the need to contain communism in
the Middle Fast, Clifford favored rec-
innGenesis lei l~ x i ~ aS~ ` b
out 0
FOIAb3b
"tions of domestic politics to screen in-
formation from the President or to
eliri.inate options from his considera-
tion.
SAY what will convince, not what
F'c you believe.
in the early months of the Kennedy
administration, CIA officials responsi-
ble; for covert operations faced a diffi-
cu)t challenge. President Eisenhower
had permitted them to begin trainin,, a
group of Cuban refugees for an Ameri-
can-supported invasion of Castro',
Cuba. In order to carry out the pla;l,
they then had to will approval horn a
skeptical new President whose entou-
rage included some "liberals" likely to
appose A.'
'The CIA director, Alien Dulles, and
his assistant, L ichard Blissrll, both vet-
eran bureaucrats, moved effectively to
isolate the opposition. By highlighting
the extreme sensitivity of the opera-
t.iion, they persuaded Kennedy to ex-
clude from deliberations most of the
experts id State and the CIA itself,
and many of the Kennedy men in the
-White -House. They reduced time effec-
tiveness of others by refusing to leave
any papers behind to be analyzed; they
swept in, presented their case and
swept out, taking everything with
them.
But there remained the problem of
the, skeptical President. Kennedy
feared that if the operation was a com-
plete failure lie would look very bad.
Dulles and Bissell assured him that
complete failure was impossible. If the
invasion force could not establish a
beachhead, the refugees, well-trained
in guerrilla warfare, would head for
the nearby mountains. The assurances
were persuasive, the only difficulty
being that they were false. Less than a
third of the force had had any guer-
rilla training; the nearby mountains
were separated from the landing beach
by an almost impenetrable swamp; and
none of the invasion leaders was in-
structed to head for the hills if the in-
vasion failed (the CIA had promised
them American intervention).
s"'Td. &.W-0 mw_hnnnl Rnnn1 nnn1 nn2s_A
n'il. President, this is not a matter to hi,,-n-,ilerais, in Their ignorance of pros-
be, determined on the basis of politics. jrirht-r-l views- will use their own no
I #Q'~W-hDP'75-00001 R00
Approved For Release 20d1/
1, G
By Leslie H. Gelb rijr(l ;MMUrtoit. H. Halperin
Unless politics were involved, Mr. Clif-
ford would not even he at this confer-
ence. This is a serious matter of for-
eign policy determination . . ." Clif-
ford remained at the mee(ing and,
after some hesitation, the United States
recognized Israel.
The moral merits of U.S. support of
.Israel notwithstanding, Imo one doubts.
Jewish influence on Washington's pol-
icy toward the Middle East. And yet,
years later, in their memoirs, both Tru-
man and ])can Acheson denied at
great length that the-decision to recog-
nize Israel was in any way affected by
U.S. domestic politics.
A powerful myth is at work here. It
holds that national security is too im-
portant., too sacred, to be tainted by
crass domestic political considerations.
It is a matter of lives and the safety of
the nation. Votes and influence at
home should count for nothing. Bight?
Wrong. National security and domestic
reactions are inseparable; What could
be clearer than the fact. that President
Nixon's Vietnam troop reductions are
geared more to American public opin-
ion than to the readiness of the Saigon}
forces to defend themselves? Yet the
myth makes it bad form. for govern-
ment officials to talk about domestic
politics (except to friends and to re-
porters off the record) or even to write
about politics later in their memoirs.
And what is bad form on the inside
would be. politically disastrous if -it
were leaked to the outside. Imagine
the press getting hold of a secret gov-
ernment document that said: "Presi-
dent Nixon has decided to visit China
to capture the peace issue for the '72
elections. Ile does not intend or expect
anything of substance to be achieved
by his trip-except to scare the Rus-
sians a little." Few things are mu e se-
rious that the charge of playing poli-
tics with security. .
Nevertheless, the President pays a
price for the silence imposed by the
myth. One cost is that the President's
assumption about what public opin-
ion will and will not support,are never
questioned. No official, for example,
ever ' dared to write a scenario for
President Johnson showing him how to
fore stall the right-wing McCarthyite
T
continuo
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