"Peter W. Rodman’s posthumously published study of seven presidents’ struggles to manage foreign and national security policy brings to mind an incident when the Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher started a rookie in center field. After the rookie misjudged several high flies and screaming liners, Durocher jerked him out and took the position himself, but then misplayed several easy chances. Durocher charged into the dugout, grabbed the rookie by the shirt and yelled, “Kid, you’ve got center field so screwed up, now no one can play it.”
For those who find comfort in believing their nation’s role in the world is being guided by sober, thoughtful, wise and judicious men and women, this book is not to be recommended. Indeed, its look at behind-the-scenes policy-making may give America’s enemies considerable comfort. And a skeptical reader may conclude that foreign policy is a field so messed up no one can manage it. But “Presidential Command” should be on the short list of readings for members of the Barack Obama administration — as much for its pointing out the mistakes to avoid as for illustrating the procedures to emulate.
For those who find comfort in believing their nation’s role in the world is being guided by sober, thoughtful, wise and judicious men and women, this book is not to be recommended. Indeed, its look at behind-the-scenes policy-making may give America’s enemies considerable comfort. And a skeptical reader may conclude that foreign policy is a field so messed up no one can manage it. But “Presidential Command” should be on the short list of readings for members of the Barack Obama administration — as much for its pointing out the mistakes to avoid as for illustrating the procedures to emulate.
From Richard Nixon through George W. Bush, our foreign and defense policies, like sausages, have been produced by processes of chopping, grinding, churning and smashing. Secretaries of state and defense contest for influence, with national security advisers of varying talents brokering between the two or pushing their own agendas. Meanwhile, the president and his cabinet are perpetually at war with the military and diplomatic bureaucracies over the formulation and conduct of security affairs.
Rodman, who died at age 64 shortly after completing this book, served in advisory capacities in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations and was an aide to Henry Kissinger on most of his breakthrough initiatives. He thus had an insider’s view of the sausage factory for more than two decades. During the Carter and Clinton administrations he more or less had a front-row seat.
The Rodman ideal is a strong president with a strategic vision served by self-confident cabinet officers who work collegially to produce an imaginative range of policy options that are then imposed on the “permanent government” bureaucracy and saluted by a quiescent Congress. It goes without saying that none of the seven successive administrations analyzed here met this standard. Nixon receives high marks for using his secretive partnership with Kissinger to outfox his own administration. George H. W. Bush benefited greatly from fortuitous cabinet collegiality and is complimented for adroit management of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Gerald Ford was handcuffed by post-Watergate assertions of Congressional oversight. Ronald Reagan possessed a remarkably clear, and highly idealistic, picture of a world he wished to create, but could not bring himself to negotiate peace between his defense and state secretaries. Carter and Clinton suffered from having well-intentioned and talented but indecisive policy advisers. And George W. Bush is notable for bringing to office an intelligent, cleareyed worldview but then getting sidetracked by a number of high-minded, honest mistakes about Iraq.
Rodman’s “lessons learned” include these: the president must be forceful, engaged and dominant; his (or her) secretary of state, not the national security adviser, should be the leader in developing foreign policy; cabinet secretaries should represent the president’s views to their respective departments, not the reverse; and policy consensus should be facilitated by groups of subordinates like the Principals Committee, which was instituted by the elder Bush under his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and consisted of key cabinet secretaries.
Though a committed Republican conservative, Rodman (whose advice assisted the United States Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, on which I served) passes a general test of balance. He cites positive attributes of Carter and Clinton, and weaknesses of each Republican president. But proximity and ideology shade his judgment. In Rodman’s view, Kissinger and James A. Baker, a secretary of state under the first Bush, are considerably superior to Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, secretaries of state in Democratic administrations. Ronald Reagan struggled with “duality,” while Jimmy Carter had “schizophrenia.”
There are more consequential matters, however, in Rodman’s analysis. The first has to do with the abuse of presidential authority, which was systematic in the cases of both Nixon and George W. Bush. Rodman largely excuses such abuse as the result of excessive zeal in sidestepping the loathed permanent government and a balky or recalcitrant Congress. Constitutional requirements of Congressional oversight and Bill of Rights protections are not mentioned or are brushed aside.
Rodman accurately attributes the younger Bush’s excessive zeal to long-harbored beliefs by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that presidential authority had been dangerously eroded by post-Watergate reforms, and that it had to be restored if foreign and national security policies were to be adequately pursued. He does not dwell on troublesome issues like telecommunications surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, extraordinary rendition and a range of other quasi-imperial presidential excesses, all justified by the declaration of a “war on terror.”
Rodman also neglects the influence of ideology on policy, especially the role of neoconservatives with regard to Iraq and the greater Middle East. Confusion and conflict in Republican administrations is attributed to personalities and bureaucracies rather than to tensions within the Republican Party between traditional conservatives, cautious about foreign entanglements, and neoconservative interventionists, whose Wilsonian idealism often cloaked imperialist designs. This division caused Bush I advisers like Scowcroft to dissent from Bush II’s Iraq adventure.
Finally, and most disconcertingly, Rodman succumbs to the fantasy that the much-maligned permanent government, frustrated at being systematically marginalized by the Nixon-Kissinger duo, colluded to bring down the Nixon presidency. Other presidents may have been “rogues and miscreants,” but Rodman finds “intriguing” the theory that “the demise of Nixon was due to no less than the revolt of the bureaucracy whose power he had striven so assiduously to break in every sphere.”
This kind of nonsense seriously undermines an otherwise worthwhile and instructive book and, by implication, excuses many troublesome abuses in the current administration. It is one thing to insist on presidential authority in foreign policy. It is quite another to casually accept violations of the Constitution in executing that policy."
PRESIDENTIAL COMMAND
Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush
By Peter W. Rodman
351 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95
