National Security Council

National Security Council. Since its origins in 1947, the interagency, cabinet‐level National Security Council (NSC) has played major roles, ranging from advising the president and coordinating various strands of policy to formulating and ratifying policy decisions. Because it is primarily an instrument of presidential power, each president has employed the NSC as he has seen fit. Since the 1960s, however, presidents have made sporadic use of the council itself but have assigned its White House–based staff important roles in policymaking not anticipated by the NSC's inventors. Moreover, the president's national security adviser, a position unforeseen in 1947, has become central to national policymaking.

The NSC was part of a compromise, fashioned in 1947, in postwar decisions over armed services unification. The council as a mechanism to coordinate foreign and military policy was first proposed in the Eberstadt Report (1946), sponsored by Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal. Seeking an American version of the British Committee of Imperial Defence, Forrestal saw an NSC as a way to ensure timely and unified action in time of crisis, avoid the organizational confusion of World War II, and check the authority of a president—Harry S. Truman—in whom he had little confidence. In particular, Forrestal and the navy saw the council as an alternative to the strong secretary of defense favored by proponents of unification because it would provide a decentralized military structure and preserve the navy's autonomy. Though the navy could not stop the plan for a secretary of defense, its proposal for an NSC endured, if in watered‐down form; Truman's advisers altered early proposals granting the council statutory authority and ensured that the legislative language provided for advisory functions.

In the 1947 National Security Act, Congress declared that the NSC's purpose would be to “advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies” so as to ensure more effective cooperation in national security policy. Moreover, the council would supervise the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The council's members would be the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the three service secretaries, the chairman of the National Security Resources Board, and other such officials as the president chose to designate. The director of Central Intelligence would be an adviser, not a member. In a 1949 amendment, Congress removed the service secretaries and the National Security Resources Board, added the vice president, and designated the director of Central Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as statutory advisers. The amendment also provided for a small staff with an executive secretary.

During the first few years of the council's existence, in order to preserve his freedom of action and avoid pressure to make decisions on the spot, Truman seldom attended meetings. Nevertheless, he approved a number of policy papers that the council had generated to provide guidance to the agencies. After the Korean War broke out, Truman raised the council's status by routinely presiding over its meetings. In 1950, he also designated an NSC senior staff, under the direction of the council's executive secretary, and enhanced the council by integrating it into the executive office of the president. The senior staff met frequently for policy coordination purposes but had little impact on NSC policy papers, which were generated primarily by the State Department and the Department of Defense. Although Truman had resisted suggestions that he appoint a national security assistant to help him coordinate policy, in 1950 he partially conceded by designating W. Averell Harriman as a special assistant, charged with monitoring the implementation of national security policy.

Of all Cold War presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower made the fullest use of the NSC, often meeting with its members on a weekly basis throughout his eight years in office. Those meetings provided agency chiefs with a forum to debate the issues and a means for them to ascertain presidential thinking. Significantly, Eisenhower tapped Robert Cutler, Dillon Anderson, and Gordon Gray to serve, at various times, as special assistant to the president for national security affairs, a position not specified in the National Security Act. He made great use of the assistant to keep abreast of current problems, to plan meetings, and to follow up decisions. He also authorized auxiliary NSC planning and coordinating boards, based upon agency representation, for policy coordination and for developing the position papers that provided guidelines for official policy on many issues. Although some Democratic critics charged Eisenhower with constructing a cumbersome decision‐making process, he seldom relied on the NSC structure for decisions during crises; those he reserved for the flexibility of smaller meetings in his private office.

After Eisenhower, the council fell into relative eclipse as a means for policy guidance. Under President John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower's elaborate NSC structure was torn down and the council met infrequently. Moreover, Kennedy's national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, became an adviser as well as a policy coordinator. Dissatisfied with advice from the State Department, Kennedy encouraged Bundy to turn the NSC staff into an instrument that could work quickly and secretly at the president's command and develop a “White House” perspective that was not restricted by the bureaucracy's recommendations. Lyndon B. Johnson followed suit; he virtually did away with council meetings, developing his own mechanisms, primarily the “Tuesday lunch,” for policy discussion and coordination.

The council as a forum for policy discussion and advice continued its decline during the Nixon‐Ford period, while the council's staff and the national security adviser acquired an unprecedented level of prestige and prominence. Richard M. Nixon declared that he was restoring the Eisenhower system, but his deep suspicion of the State Department and his desire to centralize command over policy worked against that purpose. To strengthen presidential control, Nixon and his ambitious national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, created new advisory and decision‐making mechanisms such as the Washington Special Action Group. Moreover, circumventing the State Department, Nixon and Kissinger established secret communications (“backchannels”) with key allies and adversaries, e.g., with the Soviet Union, for arms control talks, and with the People's Republic of China, for normalizing relations. The unparalleled secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War symbolized the extent to which Kissinger and the NSC staff had developed operational control over national security policy in this period.

Kissinger's use of “backchannels” and secret missions had mixed results—by leaving agency heads out of the picture and by confusing negotiators working in regular channels, an outcome that Jimmy Carter criticized during his 1976 campaign. But like Nixon and Ford, President Carter established specific structures for policy advice and coordination as well as for crisis management. Moreover, Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the NSC staff played central roles in offering policy advice, sometimes to the discomfort of agency heads, especially Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Although Brzezinski operated in a less Byzantine fashion than his predecessor, Carter sustained the trend toward a strong national security adviser and prominent NSC staff. This development led to an inconclusive debate over whether the president's choice for national security adviser should require the Senate's consent.

When Ronald Reagan came to power, he pledged that cabinet members, not national security advisers, would have a dominant role in policymaking, a procedure that was consistent with his lack of interest in the details of foreign policy. Though the council met more frequently, Reagan followed his predecessors by approving new structures for discussion and decision making. No powerful national security adviser emerged, but activism in policymaking and implementation at the NSC staff level reached its apogee in the “Iran‐Contra” activities of national security advisers Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter and their assistant, Lt. Col. Oliver North. Ignoring congressional restrictions, they secretly provided aid to the anti‐Sandinista Contras with funds raised through arms sales to Iran and other sources. When the scandal broke in late 1986, Reagan claimed that his management style had precluded tight control over the NSC staff. But declassified documents and his own public statements suggest that Reagan provided overall direction, and that several of the covert operations had his approval, if not the wholehearted support of some cabinet members.

Since the Iran‐Contra Affair, presidents have avoided the excesses of the Reagan system but have continued to supplant the council with other advisory and decision‐making mechanisms. For example, President George Bush made modest use of the council, relying instead on regular meetings of deputies' committees for policy development. The national security adviser and NSC staff have remained central for coordinating the strands of diplomatic, military, economic, and intelligence policy; for serving as sources of policy advice; and for managing important initiatives.
[See also Cold War: Domestic Course; Commander in Chief, President as; National Security Council Memoranda.]

Bibliography

Mark M. Lowenthal , The National Security Council: Organizational History, 1978.
Anna K. Nelson , President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council, Journal of American History, 71 (September 1985), pp. 360–78.
John Prados , Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush, 1991.
Christopher Shoemaker , The NSC Staff: Counseling the President, 1991.
Anna K. Nelson , The Importance of Foreign Policy Process: Eisenhower and the National Security Council, in Gunter Bischof and Stephen Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower: A Centenary Assessment, 1995.

William Burr