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The National Security Council as a Device for Interdepartmental Coordination: An Interpretation and Appraisal*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Paul Y. Hammond
Paul Y. Hammond*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

The National Security Council constitutes the most ambitious effort yet made to coordinate policy on the cabinet level in the American federal government. An examination of the experience of the NSC, together with the assumptions and expectations that went into proposing, establishing, and developing it, should help to clarify the problem of policy coordination under the President.

Various proposals for a special war cabinet in the United States, usually called a Council of National Defense, date back as far as 1911. The National Defense Act of 1916 established a body by such a name, headed by the Secretary of War. The statute was so watered down from the original proposals, however, that its uses were negligible, except later as a convenient peg for the National Defense Advisory Council (NDAC) and its subsidiaries that Roosevelt called into being in 1940. After World War I, both armed services revived the idea of a more powerful Council in an effort to find some base of support for their military policies, and as a counter to proposals for unification, proposals which they both opposed because these were founded on unrealistic expectations about the sums of money that could be saved through reorganization of the service departments.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , December 1960 , pp. 899 - 910
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1960

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Footnotes

*

This article draws on the author's forthcoming book, Organizing for Defense, to be published by the Princeton University Press.

References

1 Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Unification of the War and Navy Departments and Postwar Organization for National Security, Report to Hon. James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, Committee Print, 79th Cong., 1st sess. (1945)Google Scholar, [hereafter cited as Ebersladt Report], p. 55. See also, e.g., Forrestal's testimony, Senate Armed Services Committee, National Defense Establishment, Hearings, 80th Cong., 1st sess., p. 53.Google Scholar

2 Forrestal, for instance, could assert without qualification that the President has a right to choose his Cabinet members, at the same time that he was supporting a statutory determination of the membership of the NSC which he conceived to be a war cabinet. Ibid., pp. 40, 53.

3 Ebersladt Report, pp. 50, 55.

4 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

5 The clearest statement of this conception of the NSC as a substitute Secretary of Defense was provided by Rear Admiral Thomas Robbins, the chief witness on the Navy's reorganization plan. See Senate Military Affairs Committee, Department of the Armed Services, Department of Military Security, Hearings, 79th Cong., 1st Sess. (1945), pp. 588–89, 596.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 37.

7 Eberstadt Report, pp. 51–52. Eberstadt recommended that the participation of key Congressmen was preferable to formal committee reorganization. This would have left a Military Affairs and a Naval Affairs Committee in each house of Congress to consider the substantive legislation concerned with national security. Be yond the advantages to the Navy in this ap proach (particularly since the Eberstadt Report recommended the establishment of a separate Air Force Department), the weak position in which each of these committees would be placed when attempting to deal with “coordinated” military policies should be obvious. For comparison, see Cheever, D. S. and Haviland, H. F., American Foreign Policy and the Separation of Powers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Millis, Walter (ed.), The Forrestal Diaries (New York, 1951), p. 145 Google Scholar; Eberstadt Report, pp. 47–50.

9 The reason has been explained variously: He did not want to stifle free discussion in the NSC; he wanted to be free to accept or reject the outcome of its deliberations; or more generally, he was concerned that the NSC might encroach upon Presidential powers, and this was a device to keep it from doing so. Truman, mentions in his Memoirs, Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope 1946–1952 (Garden City, 1956), p. 60 Google Scholar, with disapproval that “there were times during the early days of the National Security Council when one or two of its members tried to change it into an operating super-cabinet on the British model … [by assuming] the authority of supervising other agencies of the government and seeing that the approved decisions of the Council were carried out.”

10 The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, Task Force Report on National Security Organization (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 38.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., pp. 37, 38, 42.

12 May, Ernest R., “The Development of Political-Military Consultation in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 70 (June 1955), p. 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Most of the foregoing description is based upon a paper prepared for delivery at the 1959 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association by Gray, Gordon, entitled “Role of the National Security Council in the Formulation of National Policy,” (mimeo.)Google Scholar, now published in Senate Government Operations Committee, Organizing for National Security: Selected Materials, 86th Cong., 2d sess., p. 62–71.Google Scholar

14 Cutler held the position from 1953 until 1955, and from January, 1957 to July, 1958. Anderson held it from 1955 until September, 1956. From September, 1956 until January, 1957, William H. Jackson occupied it. Since Cutler's second resignation, Gordon Gray has held it.

15 Anderson, Dillon, “The President and National Security,” Atlantic Monthly, CXCVII (January 1956), 2–3 Google Scholar; Cutler, Robert, “The Seamless Web,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, LVII, No. 16 (June 4, 1955), 449–51.Google Scholar More recent (though no more revealing) statements by Cutler and Anderson appear in Senate Committee on Government Operations, Organizing for National Security, Hearings, Pt. IV, op. cit., pp. 577–603 and 608–18Google Scholar, respectively.

16 Anderson, op. cit., p. 3.

17 Cutler, op. cit., p. 444.

18 Ibid., p. 443.

19 Task Force on Procurement, Defense Procurement: The Vital Roles of the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (mimeo., 1955), p. A–13.Google Scholar This and several other criticisms of NSC operations have been dealt with in Gray, op. cit. The larger setting of the problem as part of the policy-making process, which lends greatest credence to the criticism of the NSC, is given only passing consideration in this paper.

20 Much of the documentation is summarized in Fenno's, Richard J. study of the cabinet since Taft: The President's Cabinet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a summary analysis in a similar vein see Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, Vol. II of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston, 1959), pp. 518–20 and 522ff.Google Scholar

21 So, “The President has determined that he will not assign an area of national security policy formulation permanently as the responsibility of a department, agency, or individual outside the NSC mechanism or make decisions on national security policy—except in special cases or urgency—outside the framework of the Council.” Gray, op. cit. (mimeo), p. 4.

22 Leviero, Anthony J., “Untouchable and Unquotable,” New York Times Magazine, January 30, 1955, p. 62.Google Scholar

23 With this in mind it may be worth speculating about the way the NSC deals with foreign aid matters. The State Department's dominance in the making of policy has statutory origins. Its relations with its major potential rival in policy-making are of a particular character. The office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA) is in this area something of a State Department outpost in the Defense Department. ISA also happens to represent the Defense Department on the Planning Board. It is doubtful that in the Planning Board either the State or the Defense Department is much interested in exploring in front of other officials, in particular normally hostile ones like the Bureau of the Budget or the Treasury Department, the merits of the foreign aid programs in anything like a candid or searching way. If this is true, then consideration of foreign aid matters in the Council itself would be severely limited in its value by the inadequacy of the staff work upon which the Council undoubtedly relies so heavily.

24 Morgenthau, Hans J., In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (New York, 1951), pp. 22–39, 91–112Google Scholar; Kennan, George F., American Diplomacy 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 95–103.Google Scholar

25 Cf. Eden, Anthony, Full Circle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), pp. 72–80, 98, 99.Google Scholar

26 The speech was printed in the New York Times, January 13, 1954. The article revising the massive retaliation doctrine is Dulles, John Foster, “Policy for Security and Peace,” Foreign Affairs, XXXII (April, 1954), 353–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Other Dulles pronouncements during this period bearing on massive retaliation are summarized and criticized in Kaufmann, William W., “The Requirements of Deterrence,” published as ch. I in Military Policy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956)Google Scholar, which he edited; and in Brodie, Bernard, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 248–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Osgood, Robert E., Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 201–33Google Scholar, is a summary and appraisal set in a broader context. The literature of criticism of reliance on massive retaliation is itself massive. In addition to the foregoing, the most prominent are Kissinger, Henry A., “Military Policy and Defense of the ‘Grey Areas,’” Foreign Affairs, XXXIII (April 1955), 416–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kissinger, , Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York, 1957), pp. 86–136.Google Scholar For background on Dulles' views on strategy, on NSC and on JCS action see Snyder, Glenn H., The Military “New Look” of 1953 (mimeo., Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University, 1958), pp. 8–43 Google Scholar and passim.

27 Roberts, Chalmers M., “The Day We Didn't Go To War,” The Reporter, XI (September 14, 1954), 31–35.Google Scholar The NSC deliberations are described in Childs, Marquis, The Ragged Edge: The Diary of a Crisis (Garden City, 1955), pp. 153–58.Google Scholar

28 “Before the end of President Eisenhower's first administration, virtually every policy of the previous administration had been reviewed and revised by the new members of the Council, in some cases by developing substantially new policies. Since that time, most of the policy statements approved by the President during his first term have undergone at least one revision and, in many cases, more than two.” Gray, op. cit. (mimeo), p. 10.

29 E.g., Anderson, op. cit.; Cutler, op cit.

30 E.g., Morgenthau, Hans J., “Can We Entrust Defense to a Committee?,” New York Times Magazine, June 7, 1959, pp. 9, 62 ff.Google Scholar Morgenthau did not specifically suggest its abolition, but, instead, that some one other than the President be made responsible for what the NSC is now supposed to accomplish.

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