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Richard Nixon Presidential Library
White House Special Files Collection
Folder List
Box Number Folder Number Document Date Document Type
Document Description
39
12
11/01/1968
Report
Memorandum for Mr. Nixon - National
Security Organization, 27 pages.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Page 1 of 1
November 1, 1968
MEMORANDUM FOR MR. NIXON
NATIONAL SECURITY ORGANIZATION
Summary
On January 20 you will take charge of the immense apparatus guarding American
security. You will have to start making decisions on subjects ranging from the missile-
mix for the mid-seventies to tomorrow's instructions for a tariff negotiation. This
memorandum concerns ways in which you might most quickly gain control of the laby-
rinthine bureaucracies that handle diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign eco-
nomic affairs.
What you will want from these bureaucracies is obvious-full and timely advice
on problems you must face and ought to face; recommendations reflecting your own
policies and preferences and sense of priorities; and action carrying out your deci-
sions. You cannot, however, count on the government's automatically supplying your
needs. Every agency and subagency will have its own self-interested view of what is
best for the nation. Each will have its own priorities, and each will differ in the degree
of efficiency with which it operates. You will need arrangements for policy-making
that take account of these facts.
You need not, of course, build from the ground up. There exists a valuable body
of experience concerning White House policy coordination. A recently established
Senior Interdepartmental Group, with its subsidiary Interdepartmental Regional Groups,
(the SIG-IRG network) should be of continuing utility. The Defense Department is now
so organized that it can be much more helpful to you than it was to President Eisenhower,
and the intelligence community is somewhat better managed and disciplined. Facing you
during the transition will be, principally, the problem of how to make the rest of the
foreign affairs establishment more responsive to your needs and wishes.
1
After elaborating some of the points just mentioned, the body of this memorandum
puts forward five broad recommendations:
(1) Strengthen the Secretary of State. We assume that you will be your own Sec-
retary of State in the sense of retaining control over policy. We believe, however, that
you will be handicapped in doing so unless you have someone at State who can mobilize
and manage the diplomatic corps and related groups with effectiveness comparable to
that of the Secretaries of Defense and the Treasury. To this end, we suggest specif-
ically that you
(a) appoint a Secretary and Under Secretary who can work interchangeably;
(b) ensure that the Deputy Under Secretary for Administration and the head of the
Secretariat are chosen by and work for this team;
(c) allow the Secretary and Under Secretary a large voice in choosing Assistant
Secretaries and a few key ambassadors;
(d) urge the Secretary and Under Secretary to equip themselves with staff assis-
tance comparable to that of the Secretary of Defense; and
(e) seek from the foreign affairs community alternative proposals rather than
yes-or-no issues.
(2) Preserve centralized control of the military establishment but take pains to
display confidence in military professionals. You will face the difficult problem of
reassuring military professionals that their services and advice are valued without
at the same time committing yourself to accept their policy recommendations or ap-
prove their budget proposals. We suggest that, to meet this problem, you
(a) maintain without major changes the management power of the Office of the
Secretary of Defense;
(b) urge the Secretary of Defense to seek cordial relationships with the service
chiefs and other military professionals;
(c) acquaint yourself with the military chiefs; and
2
(d) ensure that your staff has some competence in the defense policy area.
(3) Give the SIC-IRG system a trial before instituting or reinstituting other formal
consultative machinery.
(4) Equip your staff with better resources. Specifically, we urge that you
(a) organize your staff so that it can cope expertly with the full range of national
security issues confronting you;
(b) ensure that your national security affairs staff has some sense of your domes-
tic concerns;
(c) create a small research staff in the Executive Office, working under the Cab-
inet Secretary, so that your staff can have access to background information and de-
partmental staff work not currently available to the White House;
(d) establish also in the Executive Office or perhaps in the Budget Bureau a pro-
gram evaluation facility, so that on occasion you can cross-check agency estimates of
the effectiveness of programs in their charge; and
(e) adjust the size and strength of your staff to take account of weaknesses in the
departments.
(5) Take pains to give your staff and principal agency heads understanding of your
wishes. Specifically, we would urge you to bear in mind the costs of always keeping as
many options as possible open until the last possible moment, to hold meetings with your
staff and otherwise keep them abreast of your thinking, and, within limits, to explain to
agency heads your reasons for accepting or rejecting their recommendations
NATIONAL SECURITY ORGANIZATION
1. Introduction
1. Little that is not self-evident can be said about your needs. Only four points
deserve emphasis. First, you can be relatively sure of the departments' putting
tomorrow's issues before you but not of their letting you know about problems that
3
may become critical six months or a year hence. You will need arrangements enabling
both agency heads and your staff to identify issues on which you ought to be informed.
Second, you want arrangements that protect your calendar, so that the minutes of
your day can go to matters really deserving presidential thought.
Third, you want further protection against having to make the same basic decisions
over and over. After you have adopted a policy, you want the bureaucracy to take that
policy into account when making recommendations on related matters. This point is
worth mentioning only because of the frustration of your predecessors. President
Eisenhower, for example, never persuaded the military to remember his concern about
the domestic effects of spending. While you will not want departments full of yes-men,
you will want some sensitivity to your preferences.
Fourth, you will want your decisions carried out. This obvious point, like the pre-
ceding, is worth mentioning only because so many past Presidents have discovered that
their express wishes were not translated into action. President Kennedy was embar-
rassed during the Cuban missile crisis by the presence of American JUPITER missiles
in Turkey though he had, in fact, ordered their removal some months earlier, and his
order had not been executed.
2. Whatever arrangements are adopted should take account of the fact that no part
of the national security apparatus-not even the White House staff or the Budget Bureau-
has quite the same interests and perspectives as the President. The Department of
Defense, in its nature, regards present and contingent military problems as more im-
portant than others, while the Department of State sees diplomatic problems in the
same light; and units within each department differ on the kinds of problems and re-
gions of the world that deserve most urgent attention. Recommendations from each
are apt to involve its doing what it can do best. Thus, in the Laotian crisis of 1961,
the Joint Chiefs advised large-scale use of U.S. ground and air power; the CIA saw a
solution in largely clandestine support of one political faction; and groups in the State
Department urged negotiation of one kind or another. When representatives of different
agencies sit down together, they rarely trade in exchangeable currencies. In the end,
4
only the President can decide in an important case which military or diplomatic or
economic interests outweigh others. Yet the President must expect to receive his
advice from, and have his decisions executed by, men who may often believe whole-
heartedly that they know better than he what the national interest really is.
The presidential role is further complicated by pressures of time. A sudden event
abroad or at home will require a statement or an instruction. Sifting of facts and al-
ternatives has to take place quickly, and some individuals and agencies will respond
more efficiently than others. It is for this reason that President Johnson and his staff
have come to rely more on Defense than on State for urgently needed information and
recommendations.
II. The Apparatus You Will Inherit
3. At present, coordination of national security policy is centralized under a White
House Special Assistant. Under President Eisenhower, General Carroll and then Gen-
eral Goodpaster sorted relevant cables and memoranda, selecting those the President
needed to see and, to some extent, briefing him on upcoming issues. Goodpaster made
arrangements for all interested parties to be represented whenever a Secretary or
agency head was to present a recommendation, applying the principle, "each in the
presence of all." Cutler, Anderson, and then Gordon Gray shared this work and, in
addition, supervised NSC activity. The NSC then had, in addition to departmental
representatives, a comparatively large staff of its own. Kennedy transferred all these
functions to a Special Assistant. Bundy and then Rostow, with deputies who were prac-
tically Special Assistants in their own right (Kaysen, Komer, Bator, etc.), have han-
dled the Goodpaster and Gray tasks and also those of the NSC Planning Board and the
Operations Coordinating Board. Aided by a small staff divided among regional desks
counterpart to the regional bureaus in State, they have sorted incoming information
and advice, reached into departments to obtain additional information and recommenda-
tions, and kept check to ensure that real issues were not overlooked and that presiden-
tial decisions were being carried out.
4. Since 1966, White House coordination has been complemented by formal inter-
departmental consultation through a Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG) and
5
Interdepartmental Regional Groups (IRG). The SIG consists of the Deputy Secretary
of Defense, the Chairman of the JCS, the President's Special Assistant for National
Security Affairs, the heads of CIA, AID, and USIA, and, when appropriate, number-two
men from other departments and the Budget Director. The Under Secretary of State is
chairman, possessing "full powers of decision
unless a member who does not
concur requests the referral of a matter to the decision of the next higher authority."
The IRG, headed by regional Assistant Secretaries of State, consist of their counter-
parts from Defense, the Joint Staff, CIA, AID, and the White House staff. Under them
are still lower-level groups led to Country Directors from State.
During its first year or so, the SIG-IRG system seemed a total failure. Quite
recently, the picture has changed. Members of a small SIG staff, recruited by Under
Secretary Katzenbach, attribute this to an alteration in procedure. The SIG now asks
the IRG and lesser groups to define points of disagreement rather than try to work out
compromises. This speeds matters along. Not making concessions, departmental
representatives below the SIG do not have to seek clearances from other units in their
own agencies. Also, the SIG is presented with issues. As a result, the SIG can at
least do somewhat more to make clear to the Secretaries and the President what it is
that has to be decided.
5. Among executive agencies concerned with national security policy, the most
powerful and most effective is the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). McNamara
developed to the full the potential power latent in that Office. Some of what he did un-
doubtedly deserves criticism. In addition to making mistakes in some decisions, he
aroused in the services and in Congress hostility which proved costly not only to him
but to the Presidents whom he served. Nevertheless, consciousness of faults in
McNamara's performance should not blind one to his accomplishments, for a Secretary
of Defense can now do what he could never do before. He can advise the President as
to what the defense budget will buy and, to a large extent, ensure that the services carry
out the President's wishes.
Several innovations contributed to this result. The most important was acquisition
by the Secretary of some degree of budgetary control. None of McNamara's predecessors
6
had been able to do more than set ceilings for each service. Now, a Secretary has the
wherewithal to go over service requests item by item and decide rationally which to
disapprove and which to recommend to the President. Tools such as systems analysis
and program budgeting have helped him to do this. They were especially useful to
McNamara in his early days, before the services learned how to adapt the same tools
to their own purposes. In the long run, the Secretary achieved and preserved a mea-
sure of budgetary control not by gimmickry but by matching and excelling the services
in their own area of greatest strength-coordinated, detailed, and deep staff work.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense constituted in McNamara's time a manage-
ment team. Every Assistant Secretary and other major non-career appointee was
someone whom the Secretary trusted. By and large, none carried routine line responsi-
bilities. Each worked directly for the Secretary, answered to him alone, and, when
authorized to do so, acted for him. And each understood that his function was to enable
the Secretary to understand, evaluate, and pass judgment on defense policy. Whether
McNamara used his capabilities wisely or not is, of course, open to dispute. What-
ever the case, teamwork, with all members of the team sharing common objectives,
made him the most effective manager of bureaucracy that our government has ever
seen.
The part of the team equipping the Secretary of Defense to deal with broad issues
of national security policy has been the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA),
under an Assistant Secretary of Defense. It makes use of relevant organizations within
the services and also recruits for its own staff one hundred or so of their best and most
experienced officers. In addition, it contains another one hundred or so civilians in
career or appointive posts, representing regional and functional expertise easily equal
to that in the upper reaches of State or CIA. When even these resources are insuffi-
cient, it calls on RAND, the Institute of Defense Analyses, and other outside bodies.
The mixed military-civilian group in ISA has so far retained consistent high quality.
Owing to its smallness and flexibility, internal fighting has remained minimal. Above
all, it has been close enough to the Secretary so that its representatives have
7
characteristically spoken with more authority than their counterparts on interdepart-
mental committees. *
6. CIA remains comparatively efficient. Since several other groups are pre-
paring detailed studies of its organization and operations, we note here merely that it
possesses some of the ablest and most thoughtful foreign area experts within the govern-
ment and that your various advisers, when preparing recommendations for you, need to
be able to take into account its special operating capabilities.
7. The State Department has remained ineffectual as compared with Defense, CIA,
or, in its sphere of interest, the Treasury. Dulles never tried to master the depart-
ment. If Rusk has tried, his effort has failed. As a result, the weaknesses of State in
both advisory and operating roles will constitute an immediate problem for your ad-
ministration. Some visible weaknesses are the following:
(a) The flow of written matter within the department is stupefying. Daily cable
traffic alone exceeds in wordage all that carried by all newspaper wire services. Most
officers stationed in the department occupy their time drafting responses to cables or
reading responses drafted by others in order to make sure that outgoing communications
are as nearly consistent with one another as possible. Important drafts are submitted to
Assistant Secretaries. The most important drafts go then to the Secretary or one or
more of his aides. The major departmental function falling to the Secretary therefore
is to approve, amend, or disapprove these drafts.
* Signs have begun to appear recently of a slight decline in the power of ISA and
the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Indications are that ISA representatives now
do not dominate interdepartmental committees so often as in the mid-1960's. One
reason undoubtedly is the hostility of the services toward the Secretary. Another is
recognition in other parts of the government of the estrangement between Defense and
the White House which was a factor in McNamara's departure. Probably, however,
another factor is a basic change in the terms of interdepartmental trade. Concern
over the danger of new Vietnams, expressed in Congress not only by "doves" but also,
recently, by Russell, Symington, and Stennis, has reduced the potential political appeal
of the kinds of arguments that Pentagon representatives are best equipped to advance.
The relative success of the SIG-IRG system probably bears witness to this change.
8
(b) The volume of traffic and pressures of time are such that the top officials
seldom receive explanations of the background or significance of what they are asked
to endorse. They do not have leisure to make independent inquiries. Since interbureau
clearance tends to produce compromises, the Secretary and his aides often will not
learn of disagreements at lower levels. They act, to be sure, as final monitors, and
bring to their reading of draft cables a broader view than that possessed by others,
but what they can do, important though it may be, is limited.
(c) The Secretary and his aides have relatively little power of initiative. They
can issue general directives-e.g., the United States should avoid the appearance of
supporting Argentina's military regime against its domestic opponents. They are not
equipped and could not be equipped to compose day to day instructions effectuating this
purpose. They can merely try to note whether communications from and to the country
team depart from this general principle. Past attempts to supply the top level of the
department with resources for exercising initiative have produced little result. The
Policy Planning Council and bodies such as the Deputy Under Secretary's Politico-
Military Affairs staff are helpful chiefly if individuals within them share the job of
scrutinizing cables.
(d) The Secretary of State has relatively little leverage within his department.
Unlike the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State has not found a means of com-
pelling career officials to explain and justify their recommendations. Members of his
department are less concerned than the armed services with budget shares. The total
budget is small. While the Secretary can increase or reduce requests presented to
Congress, he has almost no power to decide that funds should go to AID or USIA
instead of the diplomatic service. He has only minimal influence over matters of per-
sonal concern to members of the Foreign Service-promotions, assignments, and per-
quisites. Even that influence is less than it might be, because custom has given mem-
bers of the House Appropriations Committee a voice in choosing the Deputy Under
Secretary for Administration. Thus the presidential appointee who sits over the Direc-
tor General of the Foreign Service and the Foreign Service Inspection Corps is only
partially answerable to the Secretary.
9
To be sure, the apparent chain of command in the department runs from the Sec-
retary through Assistant Secretaries or other Bureau chiefs. With only the rarest
exceptions, however, the latter cannot function unless they identify themselves with
the regional or functional units over which they preside. They make it their mission
to secure the Secretary's OK on cables prepared or cleared by their subordinates. The
Secretary's single powerful source of leverage remains therefore his ability to amend
or disapprove cable drafts daily shovelled at him.
III. Recommendations
8. Strengthen the Secretary of State. For a President to be his own Secretary of
State no longer means, as in the days of Roosevelt and Hull, that he needs a weak or
submissive man heading the State Department. On the contrary, with the Pentagon,
CIA, and the Treasury as strong as they now are, the President will acquire more op-
portunity to exercise policy choices if he has a man heading State who can take a force-
ful part in debate. The President can also devote more time to policy-making if sure
that someone outside the White House can make the diplomatic, aid, and information
bureaucracies execute presidential decisions. We believe that it will be advantageous
to you to make the Secretary of State much stronger, especially as a departmental
manager. Accordingly, we would urge you to take the following steps:
(a) Appoint a Secretary and Under Secretary who can work interchangeably. In
State more than any other agency, the two top men must be interchangeable. Because
of international conferences as well as obligations to Congress, the Secretary is often
absent. It would seem imperative that the man acting for him be someone whom he is
willing to trust as his alter ego. Yet, strangely, this condition has obtained only once
in the past quarter century-when Marshall was Secretary and Lovett Under Secretary.
No other measure will strengthen the Secretary vis-a-vis the department unless he and
the Under Secretary have complete confidence in one another's judgments, possess vir-
tually identical understanding of what the President's policies require, and, perhaps
most important of all, agree as to what the Secretary's functions ought to be.
10
(b) Ensure that the Deputy Under Secretary for Administration and the head of the
Secretariat are chosen by and work for the Secretary and Under Secretary. Even if they
can work closely together, your Secretary and Under Secretary of State will need manage-
ment aides. One, crucial to their control of the department, is the Deputy Under Sec-
retary for Administration. At present, this official is in part the choice of members
of the House Appropriations Committee. Foreign Service officers oppose this custom
and advocate that, as was once the case, he be a career man. To us it seems of great
importance that he be neither a congressional nor a Foreign Service nominee but in-
stead that he be chosen by, and be exclusively responsible to, the Secretary and Under
Secretary. One consequence, to be sure, would be increased strain on the Secretary,
for he would have to spend more time on Capitol Hill, defending the department's bud-
get. Probably, he would be unable to obtain from the House some funds for missions
abroad which are now granted simply on the certification of a Deputy Under Secretary
trusted by key Congressmen. But we believe that these costs would be relatively minor
compared with the potential gains. The Secretary would gain much more freedom to
effect organizational changes. He would also acquire greater control over assignments,
promotions, perquisites, and other sources of influence over the career service.
The Secretariat, which is at present a servant of the Secretary, should remain so.
(c) Give the Secretary and Under Secretary a voice in choosing Assistant Sec-
retaries and a few key Ambassadors. Obviously you will not want to relinquish all
responsibility for choosing Assistant Secretaries and Ambassadors. On the other hand,
you will not want to reproduce the situation that existed in 1961, when many holders of
such posts regarded the President as their immediate supervisor.
At present, the department's roster includes a second Under Secretary, a Deputy
Under Secretary for Political Affairs, and, in addition to the head of the Secretariat,
thirteen other Assistant Secretaries or equivalents. Given the way the department
works, the key figures are the five Assistant Secretaries in charge of regional bureaus
(Europe, the Far East, the Near East and South Asia, Inter-American Affairs, and
Africa-in that order), plus the head of Economic Affairs. The second Under Secretary
and the Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs (the latter customarily a Foreign
11
Service officer) have not, as a rule, had clearly defined function. The remaining
Assistant Secretaries or equivalents (the Counselor, the Legal Adviser, and the men
heading up Congressional Relations, Intelligence and Research, Public Affairs, Scien-
tific Affairs, Cultural Affairs, and International Organization Affairs) have usually not
played key roles.
If your Secretary and Under Secretary are to gain management control of the de-
partment, they will need to have men responsible to them heading the regional bureaus
and Economic Affairs. This will be particularly necessary if the SIG-IRG system is
preserved. In addition, they should control the second Under Secretaryship and Deputy
Under Secretaryship so that they may redefine both and use them as posts for key staff
assistants. Perhaps they will also need the Legal Adviser in order to make freer
use of the noncareer talent that flows from law firms into that office. The remaining
Assistant Secretaries or equivalents would not need to be equally close to the Secretary
and Under Secretary if the organization of the department remains unchanged. In fact,
however, the other bureaus do not have to be headed by men of such high rank. The
relevant legislation empowers the Secretary to "prescribe duties for the Assistant
Secretaries
and
make changes and transfers
when, in his judgment, it
becomes necessary." We would recommend that some lesser bureaus be placed at
least temporarily under men below the rank of Assistant Secretary while your ap-
pointees take time to consider the organizational arrangements that will work best
for them.
Proposals for the key Assistant Secretaryships could, of course, come from your
staff or any other source. Ultimately, you have to make the decisions and send recom-
mendations to Congress. We would urge, however, that the selection process not consist
of nominations from the White House subject to veto by the Secretary and Under Sec-
retary, for, whatever the actual process, those chosen should not be simply men with
whom the Secretary and Under Secretary feel satisfied but men in whom they repose
a high degree of confidence.
As for ambassadorships, only a few will be really important to your State Depart-
ment team. We feel that you should give the Secretary and Under Secretary a large
12
voice in choosing those who will represent you in Moscow, Paris, Bonn, London, Tokyo,
New Delhi, and Warsaw, if it continues to be the point of contact with Red China. They
should also have some say with regard to the major international organization posts,
the UN, NATO, and the OAS, and potential trouble points. Saigon is a clear case.
Others are Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok, Karachi, Teheran, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Athens,
Belgrade, Bucharest, Prague, Madrid, Johannesburg, Rio, and Buenos Aires. There are
doubtless a few others about which your Secretary and Under Secretary ought to be con-
sulted. Most remaining ninety-odd embassies, however, could be used by you to reward
political supporters or to gratify the Foreign Service, without harm to the ability of
your Secretary and Under Secretary to manage their department effectively for you.
We recognize, of course, the immediate costs to you of following our recommenda-
tion. Second-level posts in State and major embassies are among the most coveted
prizes in the gift of a new President. You will disappoint some friends and supporters
if you turn aside their claims in favor of appointees more agreeable to your Secretary
and Under Secretary. You will give up a certain amount of your potential ability to
satisfy or conciliate congressional and other blocs particularly interested in certain
areas or policies. And you may well feel that, in doing so, you are ceding some of
your potential leverage within the Department of State.
We would not argue that you should pay these costs were we not convinced that the
benefits to you would outweigh them. We believe that you can score more net gain in
public and congressional support, even in the short term, by establishing mastery over
the State Department than by gratifying immediate wishes of office seekers and pres-
sure groups. We believe equally that you can achieve such mastery only if you install
a powerful managerial team in the Department. And we would add that, if past experi-
ence is a guide, you could not attain the same end by putting your own men into key
posts in the department hierarchy, for, like Roosevelt and Kennedy, you would soon
find most of them to be neither your agents nor the Secretary of State's but rather
spokesmen for the bureaucratic interests they had taken in charge.
To offset loss of patronage at the top level, you might well make a larger number
of political appointments at secondary embassies. This, too, would have its costs, for
13
Foreign Service morale would be hurt, and you would encounter criticism from friends
of the Foreign Service, especially in the Eastern Establishment. We are persuaded,
however, that Foreign Service professionals do not necessarily make the best am-
bassadors. There are obvious exceptions, such as Martin in Buenos Aires and Thomp-
son in Moscow. But, since embassy staffs are dominated by Foreign Service officers,
the points of view of the professionals will be influential in any case. Well-qualified
non-professionals can ensure that other perspectives are represented.
(d) Urge your Secretary and Under Secretary of State to equip themselves with
adequate staff. As the State Department is now organized, most second-level men are
relatively independent of the Secretary. Each Assistant Secretary and Bureau Director
manages a cluster of country desks. Undoubtedly, this grouping of desks is necessary.
Some filter must exist between the country director or division chief and the Secretary.
Undoubtedly, too, the men so placed must be politically responsible. The regional
Assistant Secretary of State, it has been said, is the first man who can commit the
United States. But, as line rather than staff officers, Assistant Secretaries carry to
the Secretary recommendations formulated within their bureaus. They argue for
adoption of these recommendations. They do not give detached advice about pros and
cons. And this is likely to remain true, even if the Secretary and Under Secretary have
a large hand in choosing the regional Assistant Secretaries.
The Secretary and Under Secretary must therefore acquire assistance in under-
standing and evaluating recommendations from the bureaus. How they should arrange
for such assistance presents complex questions probably requiring some trial-and-
error experimentation. By redefining the second Under Secretaryship and the Deputy
Under Secretaryship for Political Affairs, they could provide themselves with two
high-level aides. They could also redefine some existing Assistant Secretaryships or
equivalents so that these posts did not involve heading up bureaus. Men so situated
might work as high-level staff for the Secretary. Not handling any category of business
as a matter of routine, they could deal with problems which the Secretary assigned
them. The Office of Politico-Military Affairs, currently under the Deptuy Under Secre-
tary for Political Affairs, provides a nucleus for a staff that could serve the Secretary
as ISA serves the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary and Under Secretary would
14
have to make a systematic effort to add to it a small number of the very best career
men to be found in the bureaus and in AID, ACDA, CIA, and the military services.
9. Preserve centralized civilian control of the military establishment but take
pains to display confidence in military professionals. Relations with the military
establishment present delicate and difficult problems. Senior officers in all the ser-
vices feel that during recent years their professional judgment has been ignored or
overridden. They are resentful of the extent to which the civilian Secretary of Defense
has acquired control over budgetary decisions and has become, in fact as well as by
statute, the President's principal adviser on military matters. They command much
sympathy in Congress and elsewhere.
As President, you will, on the one hand, want the assistance and cooperation of
the professional military and the benefit of their wisdom on matters within their com-
petence. On the other hand, you will not want to be bound by their judgment of military
requirements, for you must keep spending within some bounds. Neither will you want
to give the military a determining voice in policy. During the transition and afterward,
you will need means of accomplishing three objectives which are hard to reconcile:
to meet the legitimate desire of the military to be consulted about matters involving
the national security; to maintain at the same time firm budgetary and policy control;
and, insofar as possible, to prevent the military from appealing against you to their
powerful friends on the Hill. As possible means of achieving these ends, we suggest
the following.
(a) Maintain without major changes the management power of the Office of the
Secretary of Defense. Without a Secretary of Defense possessing a full panoply of
management tools, you will be unable to discover the objectives of defense expenditures
and to appraise the relative merits of service proposals. You could well find yourself
doing the work now done by the Defense Secretary. Like President Eisenhower, you
might have to adjudicate even petty disputes among the services, ferret out their log-
rolling, and stand as the principal target for public and congressional criticism of
defense policy decisions. Only a Secretary of Defense equipped for intensive analysis
of research, development, procurement, planning, and deployment issues will be able
to identify for you the problems deserving your attention and the alternatives open to you.
15
We would recommend that in Defense, as in State, second-level appointments be
made with a view to giving the Secretary a team he can trust. Because the travel
schedule of the Secretary of Defense is less demanding, he need not have a Deputy
Secretary who can act as alter ego. He does, however, need a Deputy to whom he can
confidently delegate large responsibilities. He also needs men who he can regard as
staff aides in at least seven of the department's nine Assistant Secretaryships or
equivalents.
Though we believe that your Secretary-designate should probably reduce the rela-
tively swollen civilian staff now attached to his Office, we would advise against arbi-
trary personnel ceilings. We would also advise against dismantling the two largest
organizations now under the Secretary, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense
Supply Agency. The former is of great value in enabling the Secretary and his aides
to match the services in staff work on policy issues. The latter effects savings in
money.
The service Secretaries and other civilians in the service departments perform
important administrative duties. Rarely, however, do they have much to do with either
policy issues or budgets.
(b) Urge the Secretary of Defense to seek cordial relationships with the service
chiefs and other military professionals. Some resentments among the uniformed ser-
vices are simply products of tactless and insensitive behavior on the part of civilians.
We believe that much ill-feeling would dissolve if your Secretary and his aides take
pains simply to indicate respect for the uniformed services and the dedicated and ex-
perienced men who lead them. Among other things, they could meet more frequently,
informally as well as formally, with the Joint Chiefs and senior staff officers. They
could spend more time both listening to military recommendations and explaining their
decisions or yours. They could avoid forcing unwanted decisions on the services when
the policy or budgetary consequences are minimal (as was the case in the early
McNamara effort to unify military education). Equally, they could exercise some judg-
ment such as was not displayed in the TFX case, as to whether marginal savings are
not better achieved by enlisting enthusiastic cooperation from the services than by
imposing civilian judgment.
16
(c) Acquaint yourself with the military chiefs. It is widely believed that in recent
years the chiefs of staff have been denied access to the President. The facts probably
are exactly the reverse. Members of Johnson's staff tell us that the Chairman and
service chiefs obtain appointments relatively easily and sometimes without the fact
being known to the Secretary of Defense or even to the President's Special Assistant
for National Security Affairs. It was President Eisenhower who had it made law that a
civilian Secretary should be his principal military adviser and who made it a private
rule not to see members of the JCS except in the presence of the Secretary and, where
appropriate, all other interested parties.
We believe that President Eisenhower's practice had great merit, and would have
had even more if his Defense Secretaries had been better equipped to perform the role
he desired them to perform. Though you will, of course, want to give the Chairman
and individual service chiefs a hearing when they request it, you will not want them to
consider you a court of appeal against your Secretary of Defense. Neither will you
want to give the professional military-any more than the professional foreign service-
an impression that they are entitled to a voice in policy equal to that of your high-level
appointees. At the same time, you will want to do something to counteract any impres-
sion that the professional military are denied adequate hearing.
We would suggest the following moves. First, we would urge that you find several
early occasions to see all the Joint Chiefs, in company with the Defense Secretary.
Such sessions would not only demonstrate your interest in their views but would also
enable you to get to know better the three chiefs (Army, Navy, and Marine Corps) whose
terms run beyond the transition period. Second, you could take an active part, along
with your Secretary of Defense, in considering replacements for the two members of
the JCS whose terms expire during 1969, the Chairman and the Air Force Chief of
Staff. Third, you could make a point of occasionally joining your Defense Secretary for
a briefing given in the Pentagon by the Joint Staff. Fourth, you could indicate your own
interest in and respect for the military profession by visiting the National War College
and, if possible, some of the service War Colleges and academies. If appropriately
handled by your press secretary, these relatively simple steps could affect not only
opinion within the services but public and congressional opinion as well.
17
(d) Ensure that your staff has some competence in the defense policy area.
Though we recommend that you have a strong Secretary of Defense, we feel that your
staff should have some ability to cross-check his recommendations, for, in seeking
harmony within the Pentagon, he may well accept budgetary or other compromises
which you would be reluctant to endorse. We would not urge that, for this purpose,
you place a senior military man on your staff. The precedent of Maxwell Taylor sug-
gests how difficult it may be for even a retired senior officer to see issues from the
President's rather than the Pentagon's point of view. Nor would we urge that you equip
yourself for elaborate staff review of defense policy. You would lose thereby many
of the advantages of having a strong Secretary of Defense. But at least one man on
your White House staff should know the ins and outs of the Pentagon, or at least be able
to exploit defense policy expertise in the Budget Bureau, well enough to explore for
you opinions within the service staffs and the Joint Staff about issues on which you must
pass final judgment. One advantage to you of taking careful interest in the appointment
of a new Chairman is that a good man in that post could be an excellent point of contact
for your staff.
10. Give the SIG-IRG system a trial before reinstituting NSC or other formal
consultative machinery; rely on ad hoc groups to deal with issues not suitable for
SIG-IRG processing. Aware of the Bay of Pigs and the faulty handling of Vietnam and
recognizing also the weaknesses of the State Department, you may feel a strong temp-
tation to restore the more comprehensive and seemingly more orderly NSC-Planning
Board-OCB structure that Kennedy dismantled. We recommend that you not do so at
least during the early months of your administration. One reason is that it would be
easier for you to take such action later than to do away with a formal structure, if
you set it up soon after taking office and then decided that it did not work satisfactorily.
A more important reason is that we believe you will find it, in practice, more satis-
factory to let the SIG-IRG network serve as your basic instrument for interdepart-
mental coordination.
At the country desk level, the SIG-IRG system standardizes a kind of exchange
which is going to take place anyway. The Pakistan specialists, for example, in State,
Defense, CIA, AID, and USIA would maintain contact in any case. More efficiently
18
than the NSC Planning Board, and without an extra layer of staff, the SIG-IRG format
makes it difficult for any clique among specialists to disregard an important minority
view. It also lays on one State Department man the responsibility for reporting dif-
ferences of view to those at the next higher level. To an extent, the same is true for
the IRG's and the SIG itself.
Obviously, interdepartmental consultation must occur outside this system. Some
issues do not lend themselves to country-by-country or even region-by-region handling.
Balance of payments is an example. Other issues may be distorted if so handled,
especially if the core problem is not what to do in a given place but whether doing any-
thing at all may lead to diversion of resources more needed elsewhere. And really hot
issues will inevitably be handled by principals rather than deputies.
We believe, however, that your interests would be best served by dealing with such
matters not through an additional formal apparatus but through temporary ad hoc
committees. The advantages we see are the following. First, ad hoc committees will
be your creations. They will exist only because you want some work done. They will
not, like NSC committees of the 1950's, be making work for you. Second, they can be
small, and composed only of people essential to business in hand. There need not be
present, as on NSC committees, representatives with irrelevant interests to espouse.
Third, they can sometimes accomplish their mission without the press getting word
even of their existence. Fixed committees, on the other hand, always have reporters
near at hand. Finally, they will come into being whether you authorize them or not,
for in fixed committees, certain members will always caucus. You and your staff will
get more feed-in and have more control over policy-making, we believe, if your primary
reliance is on the SIG-IRG system and, outside it, on informal consultation and small
ad hoc committees with specific mandates.
11. Equip your staff with better resources for appraising agency recommendations.
We deal with a number of related issues in a separate memorandum, "Staffing the
White House." Here we wish to suggest specifically that you:
(a) Organize your staff so that it can cope expertly with the full range of national
security issues confronting you. The design of your White House will depend on your
19
interests and work habits and individual qualities of your staffers. It is difficult there-
fore for us to suggest anything more than very broad guidelines.
Having already urged that you not reinstitute elaborate formal machinery, we
should caution here against the other extreme-concentration of the coordinating
function under a single Special Assistant. In fact, neither Bundy nor Rostow ever
monopolized this function. Not only was each under some obligation to cross-check
with other Special Assistants, such as Sorenson, Moyers, and Califano, but each had
to delegate large responsibilities to deputies. In October, 1962, Bundy dealt with no-
thing except the Cuban missile crisis. All other national security business was
handled directly for the President by Kaysen. Later, Bator dealt with European and
international economic affairs, simply keeping Bundy and Rostow informed of what
he was doing.
If you follow the Kennedy-Johnson precedent, you will have one Special Assistant
as, in effect, chief of staff for national security affairs, with others holding the title of
Deputy Special Assistant. This has both the advantages and the drawbacks, elaborated
in our other memorandum, of any-chief-of-staff system. Alternatively, you could divide
the national security portfolio among two or more Special Assistants.
In either case but especially in the latter, you should take two precautions. First,
you should ensure that no Special Assistant is handling primarily the business of one
department, for he could too easily turn into a departmental spokesman. Despite need
for military expertise somewhere on your staff, we believe it would be a mistake to
have a man dealing only with military affairs. Equally, it would be undesirable to have
a man only for economic affairs. Second, you should ensure that each man's assign-
ment is relatively well-defined. Otherwise, they could get in each other's way. Worse
still, departmental officials could turn to one rather than another, depending on their
judgment of which would be more helpful to them.
Within your White House national security team, however organized, certain
competencies will have to be represented. Not only will someone have to know the
inner workings of the military establishment; someone will also have to possess mas-
tery of international economic issues; someone should further have intimate under-
20
standing of the intelligence community. Though no member of your staff needs to be
a regional expert, all those dealing with national security affairs should have in their
backgrounds experience or education enabling them quickly to become skeptical judges
of assessments offered by diplomats and regional experts from State, CIA, and ISA.
How many specialties will have to be represented in the national security team
depends on the total composition of the White House Staff. You and your Special As-
sistants can draw on the Council of Economic Advisers and the Science Advisory
Council. You might find it advisable to appoint an intelligence aide who would not serve
as a Special Assistant but who would be able to speak on the relative capabilities of
elements within the intelligence community.
Your national security aides will, and must, have staff assistance of their own. A
small group, consisting mostly of regional experts, now works under Rostow. We believe
that your Special Assistant(s) should have a similar group, supplemented by the small
research staff proposed below. The reasons are three. First, your Special Assistant(s)
will need to sit astride an immense volume of cable traffic. The White House Situation
Room receives information copies of all important State, Defense, and CIA communica-
tions. It is desirable that this flow continue. Otherwise, your staff might not receive
advance warning of crises or complicated issues, and you would have many fewer
opportunities for timely presidential intervention. But men working directly for you
will not be able to sift this mass of paper. Others will have to select what they must
read so that they can select what you must read. Second, your Special Assistant(s)
must not have to depend on departmental representatives to explain contexts and tech-
nicalities of issues. On any important matter, they should be able to acquire almost
as much knowledge as the operating specialist. Third, your Special Assistant(s) can
use aides taken from the departments to inform them about internal politics within
their former agencies and to provide contacts with informants at middle and lower
levels of the bureaucracy.
(b) Ensure that your national security affairs staff has some sense of your
domestic concerns. One weakness in the present system, as in President Eisenhower's
NSC organization, is that domestic aspects of national security issues are apt to be
21
overlooked. The President himself has to bring them into the picture in the final stage
of decision. Under pressure of time, especially if all national security agencies and
the Special Assistant are in concurrence, even the President may not do so. Such was
the case with President Johnson's decision to initiate bombing in North Vietnam.
Almost all the civilians around him recommended the measure as a temporary ex-
pedient, the purpose being to elicit from Hanoi signals of willingness to move toward
tacitly agreed mutual de-escalation. No one lingered long enough on the domestic
problems that would be involved in cutting back the bombing if such signals actually
came, or if they did not.
In Kennedy's time, after several early mistakes, cooperation among Bundy,
Sorenson, and the Budget Bureau Director helped to bridge this gap. If you have in
the White House someone who completely understands your mind and your congres-
sional and other political concerns, you could partially protect yourself by having him
keep in close touch with your national security Assistant or Assistants. There is
danger, however, of his becoming a bottleneck, as Sorenson sometimes did.
(c) Establish in the executive office a small research staff. In the past, new
Presidents and presidential staffs have always been at a temporary disadvantage in
the national security area because of their relative lack of information as compared
with departments and executive agencies. Department and agency heads inherit per-
manent staffs and, in most cases, well-organized files, including the results of past
in-house and contract research. New men entering the White House by contrast can call
at most on the few civil servants remaining with the NSC and on the few records and
studies which the Budget Bureau possesses. They have, in regard to national security
problems nothing comparable to the files regarding legislation preserved by the Budget
Bureau's Legislative Reference Service. On many current issues, they cannot even
look up back papers for most have been crated for the outgoing President's archives.
Remedying this deficiency would be sufficiently demanding to require, at least at
the outset, a staff assistant not only with energy and imagination but also with under-
standing of your interests and needs. To provide him with requisite status, we would
suggest that he have the title, Secretary to the Cabinet, and perform in addition the not
very onerous duties of that post.
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Though an Executive Office research staff need not itself be large or costly, it
must be able to use for your purposes and those of your White House staff the vast
resources of the departments. Its head should have free access to those resources.
He should define what he wants to include in a central register of records and studies.
He will then have to identify all subagencies that must be tapped for information. (Units
within Defense, for example, make a practice of keeping from other units knowledge
of staff reports or contract studies prepared for them; your research chief would
therefore have to demand direct responses at least from each service chief, the Direc-
tor of the Joint Staff, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.) Third, your research
chief should spot-audit reports submitted. Though costs in money and manpower to the
departments would run high and the pain to departments of yielding up their secrets
to a presidential representative would run even higher, the results for you should
justify the expense and the ordeal. You could effect significant savings by becoming
able to warn departments of overlapping or repetitive research activity. More
important still, your assistants should be enabled to enter meetings with departmental
spokesmen measurably better equipped to ask the right questions and to appraise the
answers given.
Obviously, the time of your Special Assistants is too valuable for much of it to be
spent poring over long papers or studies extracted from departments by means of a
central register. Most often, quick briefings would have to suffice. Given the urgency
for action usually present, these briefings would, moreover, have to be prepared on
short notice. This means that an Executive Office staff would have to include men who
maintained familiarity with the materials on which the briefings would be based.
We suggest that the research staff be made up of twelve to fifteen permanent
people and outside consultants. The total number in the national security area should
be roughly equal to the staff handling current national security affairs for your Special
Assistant(s) and Deputy Special Assistants. The more the two staffs are counterpart,
the more efficiently the research staff could be used. Had it been in existence in the
mid-1960's, for example, it could have included a Southeast Asian specialist. Whether
a career man, an academic commuting on some regular basis, or a man based at
RAND or some similar place, he would have been familiar with past Defense, State,
23
CIA, and other files and studies relating to the area. He could have worked in tandem
with Michael Forrestal, Bundy's man for current Southeast Asian affairs. Neither
Bundy nor the President would have suffered any loss of time, and briefings that orig-
inated with Forrestal could have taken account of at least some of the by-then-forgotten
thinking which had taken place during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
(d) Establish in the Executive Office a program evaluation group. The basic
problem is easily stated. At present, the President gets most of his information about
the effectiveness of programs from the agencies carrying them out. The military
provide the only appraisals of how effectively military operations have been conducted
in Vietnam. To be sure, the Budget Bureau performs some evaluation. Normally,
however, it is in terms of effective use of funds. You need, in addition, some group to
audit for you programs in which you take special interest. Whether such a group
should be part of the Budget Bureau or separate from it, you could best judge after
assessing the Bureau's current capabilities and appointing a new Director. Presum-
ably, such a group would limit its reviews to a relatively few vital programs. Its size
and composition would depend on the missions you decided to assign it.
(e) Adjust the size and strength of your White House staff to take account of
weaknesses in departments. The more you find it possible to reinforce the Secretary
of State and preserve the power of the Secretary of Defense, the more your staff can
confine itself to your business. If your Secretary of State cannot achieve effective con-
trol over his department, men working for you will have to keep a much closer eye
on cable traffic. As at present, they will often have to alert the Secretary of State
as well as the President to matters requiring high-level attention, and they will neces-
sarily take a larger hand in cable-drafting. They will also have to keep closer watch
over the SIG-IRG network, perhaps even posting observers at the country desk level.
And they will take on more operational assignments, including some outside the country,
like Bundy's in Santo Domingo or Komer's in Vietnam.
Similarly, weakness in the Defense Department would call for strength in the White
House. You would need on your staff or accessible in the Executive Office specialists
able to analyze in detail the long-term budgetary implications of weapons system
24
choices, the relative merits of competing weapons, and the adequacy of actual and
planned deployments to meet foreseeable contingencies.
We do not dwell on such requirements, for it is our view that your interests would
be better served by strong departments. Realizing that your judgment may run in the
other direction regarding one department or another, we merely urge here that, if so,
you take into account the probable need to compensate by reinforcing the White House.
12. Take pains to give your staff and principal agency heads understanding of your
wishes, preferences, and inclinations. The stress in most recommendations concerning
national security organization falls on means by which decision-makers can obtain in-
formation and advice. We have been equally concerned in this memorandum with the
problem of how you get your government to execute the decisions you make. As we
read the history of the Presidency in the last quarter-century, it contains many fewer
examples of decisions unsoundly based than of decisions misinterpreted, misunder-
stood, or accidentally or deliberately not carried out.
The organizational arrangements recommended earlier should enable you to have
diplomatic and military establishments potentially more responsive to your wishes
and a staff better equipped to see that this potential is realized. No arrangements
will work effectively, however, unless you see to it that they do. At the risk of seem-
ing presumptuous, we conclude this memorandum with some suggestions as to how you
may provide leadership within your administration.
First of all, we feel that you would be well advised not to adhere too closely to the
often-stated rule that a President should keep as many options as possible open for
as long a time as he can. Your immediate predecessors had this rule urged upon them,
with the example of FDR cited in support. They applied it, we believe, to excess.
By maintaining till the last moment an impression that they might choose any one
of a number of courses, they encouraged the build-up of bureaucratic lobbies. Some
lobbies that might have withered away, if discouraged early, acquired such strength
and determination and such support in Congress and the press as to remain active
despite the decisions finally made. The "bombing pause" lobby is one recent ex-
ample. The lobby advocating a multilateral nuclear force is another from a slightly
25
earlier period. We recognize, of course, that a President will usually refrain from
committing himself until he has to. All we counsel is that you bear in mind the possible
costs of committing yourself too late.
As you are in process of making up your mind, you would be well advised to com-
municate as clearly as possible to your staff exactly what direction your thought is
taking. The staff exists to help you and to represent you. If its members do not know
your mind, they could easily waste time analyzing the pros and cons of a course of
action which you already know you will not adopt. Equally easily, they could fail to
analyse adequately courses of action toward which you were inclined, with the result
possibly of failing to call to your attention unsuspected perils. And they could lose
opportunities to steer the departmental bureaucracies toward recommendations in line
with your fundamental purposes. We believe that you should, insofar as possible, take
your staff into your confidence.
Though recognizing the truth of Vice-President Dawes' observation, "The members
of the Cabinet are a President's natural enemies," we also believe that you would gain
by being more candid than were Kennedy and Johnson in your dealings with agency
heads. Excessive reticence can weaken rather than strengthen the President's position.
Some interdepartmental and intradepartmental bickering over Vietnam could have
been curbed had Johnson disclosed to his Secretaries of State and Defense his own rea-
sons for such moves as the Johns Hopkins speech, the 37-day bombing pause, the
Honolulu meeting with Ky, and the partial bombing suspension of last March 31.
In recommending that you be more open with your department heads, we are not
urging a new departure but rather a return to past practice. The custom of a President's
writing out for cabinet officers the reasons for his decisions was followed by most
Presidents prior to Andrew Jackson and, more recently, by Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson.
It would be unrealistic to urge you to imitate Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson.
Your schedule will be too crowded to permit such letter-writing. Moreover, with
cabinet officers' staffs as large as they are and copying machines everywhere, written
communications cannot be kept secure. We do urge, however, that you try to give
26
your principal agency heads oral explanations of your more important decisions. You
are much more likely thus to obtain their cooperation even when your decisions and
the reasons for them are not to their liking. When Wilson was President and William
Jennings Bryan Secretary of State, the two did not see eye to eye about issues rising
out of World War I, and Wilson overruled Bryan time after time. By candidly ex-
plaining his decisions, the President succeeded in postponing Bryan's resignation until
a time when it was less politically harmful. He also succeeded throughout in having
the actions of the Secretary conform to his wishes.
Also, it will be useful to you to articulate some of the reasons for decisions you
reach. The great statesmen of nineteenth century Europe-Metternich, Castlereagh,
Palmerston, Bismarck, Salisbury-all had to write out explanations of their actions
because they were responsible to monarchs. You face a similar necessity, of course,
in having to respond to press conference questions and deliver messages to Congress
and the public, but, in statements which all the world can hear, you can seldom be as
explicit and as candid as you might be in camera. And for the next four years you have
as great a stake in winning understanding among the managers of your bureaucracy as
among the electorate.
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