Powell inadvertently reinforced this impression, leading the New York Times to report that, “President-elect George W. Bush stood silently by as the general delivered a discourse on what is in store.”3 “Powell seemed to dominate the President-elect,” the Washington Post observed, “both physically and in the confidence he projected.”4 Columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “[Powell] so towered over the President-elect, who let him answer every question on foreign policy, that it was impossible to imagine Mr. Bush ever challenging or overruling Mr. Powell on any issue.”5
This perceived personal dynamic between the President-elect and the Secretary-designate had the effect, intended or otherwise, of reinforcing a deeper institutional dynamic. Throughout the twentieth century, presidents of both political parties have expressed concern that the State Department at times was less than responsive to guidance from the nation’s elected leadership. The Foreign Service was so mistrusted by President Nixon that he and Henry Kissinger often worked around it. President Reagan, too, faced resistance from within the State Department—often in the form of press leaks that denigrated Reagan’s hard-line and often highly successful policies toward the Soviet Union.6
Over time, I observed that Powell’s relationship with President Bush had its own unique dynamic. Bush had an easygoing manner as a rule, but it was less so in his dealings with Powell. Powell was valued as an adviser and respected as a man of considerable accomplishments, but his department seemed to remain skeptical about President Bush and less than eager to implement his policies.
Some of Powell’s actions fostered an impression that he saw his service in the cabinet as a means of representing the State Department to the President as much as he saw it as representing the President at the State Department. On his first day as secretary of state, Powell announced to the career diplomats of the Foreign Service that he would be their man and representative at the White House.7 One longtime observer of the interagency process was Peter Rodman, who served with me in the Bush administration Defense Department as an assistant secretary of defense. In his excellent book, Presidential Command, he noted, “Where Henry Kissinger and James Baker had come into the building with a determination to impose political direction on the career service, Powell chose to embrace the organization.”8 Though I never saw any firsthand evidence of it in NSC meetings, journalists reported that Powell felt Bush was not sufficiently taking the State Department’s positions into account on issues from North Korea to Iran.9 But, of course, it was also for the State Department, like all executive branch departments and agencies, to take into account the President’s views as well. This is a delicate balance for all cabinet officers. As I was learning at the Pentagon, it was much safer to win support within the department by subordinating one’s views or the views of the President to career officials than to try to reorient an entire department in line with the President’s thinking and his national security priorities.
Powell’s approach was welcomed by career foreign service officers and the media. Journalists from time to time duly characterized the Secretary of State as something of a maverick in the Bush administration, a voice of reason who often spoke out at NSC meetings against proposals favored by the President, the Vice President, and me. Many in Congress came to think this as well. I recall one newspaper article in June 2001 in which Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who worked with the secretary of state, characterized Powell as “the good guy” in the Bush administration and “the only man in America who doesn’t understand he’s a Democrat.” Biden then described me as a “unilateralist” and a “‘movement conservative’ who stands for everything liberal Democrats abhor.” Never sparing with his words, the future vice president declared that if Bush sided with me over Powell, “we’re in deep trouble.”10 Still, I could not resist sending Powell the article with a note attached: “You’ve got a new best friend!”11
The media image of Powell battling the forces of unilateralism and conservatism may have been beneficial to Powell in some circles, but it did not jibe with reality.* The reality was that Powell tended not to speak out at NSC or principals meetings in strong opposition to the views of the President or of his colleagues. This was regrettable since Powell had important experience as a leader in both military and civilian capacities, and headed a major element of America’s national security apparatus. Though the Washington Post among others referred to me as Powell’s “nemesis,” in fact our relationship was professional and cordial.13 Like most cabinet officers, Powell was protective of what he viewed as his department’s prerogatives.
Though Powell and the other members of the NSC received numerous policy memos from me, I rarely received memos from him suggesting approaches or providing insights into his thinking.* In preparation for an NSC meeting on a given topic, routine position papers from departments, including State, often would be made available for discussion. But those memos were largely process-oriented and rarely laid out concrete policy recommendations. I believe that the administration would have benefited had State more often proposed strategies for discussion with the President instead of the anonymous hindsight critiques that appeared from time to time in press accounts and books. Powell’s associates in the State Department seemed to suggest, in lower-level interagency meetings and in press interviews often attributed to “senior administration officials,” that he quite often did not favor the President’s course on a given subject.
The differing cultures of the institutions involved in the National Security Council, and the personalities of the heads who represent them, require deft management by the president and the national security adviser. As I see it, there are three main functions of the adviser: to identify where strategic and policy guidance from the president is necessary or desirable; to organize interagency deliberations so the president can make informed decisions and provide the necessary guidance to his administration; and to oversee the implementation of the president’s decisions, ensuring that they are carried out effectively. Among the core attendees of NSC meetings, only the national security adviser works in the White House and has routine daily access to the president. In that regard, Condoleezza Rice’s closeness to Bush was an asset. She knew the President far better than the rest of us and spent considerably more time with him than all of his other senior advisers on national security combined. Her personal access to and affinity for President Bush gave Rice substantial influence as a national security adviser and an unusually strong voice in matters under the purview of the NSC.
I had been looking forward to working with Rice, having been impressed with her for years. As we came to work together in the Bush administration, however, our differing backgrounds became clear. Rice came from academia. She was a polished, poised, and elegant presence. I decidedly was not. One time Rice and I were sitting together in an NSC meeting, and I was wearing a pinstripe suit—one that I very well might have owned since the Ford administration. The suit was so well used that the pinstripes on the right leg above the knee were worn off. Rice noticed this, frowned, and pointed discreetly at my leg.
Looking down at my suit, I noticed for the first time the missing pinstripes. “Gee,” I whispered to her with a smile, “maybe Joyce can sew them back on.” Condi’s eyes widened.
As encouraged as I was that Rice seemed to enjoy Bush’s trust and confidence, I knew the burdens of the job of national security adviser were taxing for even the most seasoned foreign policy specialist and could be particularly so for someone with modest experience in the federal government and management. Rice was something of an outlier in the Bush NSC in that she had not served in multiple agencies of the government, and while she had served on the NSC staff in the earlier Bush administration, she had not had senior-level experience. But Rice was intelligent, had good academic credentials, and brought a younger person’s perspective to the process. I considered those all qualities from which the administration could benefit.
Rice’s first months in office were a lea
rning experience, however, and foreshadowed challenges for the new administration’s interagency process. Rice seemed keen on setting new precedents as national security adviser. She and her staff did not seem to understand that they were not in the chain of command and therefore could not issue orders, provide guidance, or give tasks to combatant commanders.14 Rice also suggested that she be allowed to personally interview candidates for the combatant commands and the chiefs before the President saw them, and that she approve my official travel. I had no objection to Rice’s attending the President’s interviews with combatant commanders if that was his choice, and I certainly kept the national security adviser and secretary of state informed of my travel plans. I did not, however, accede to either suggestion.
The most notable feature of Rice’s management of the interagency policy process was her commitment, whenever possible, to “bridging” differences between the agencies, rather than bringing those differences to the President for decisions. It’s possible that Rice had developed this approach from her time as a university administrator—as provost at Stanford University—where seeking consensus and mollifying faculty members by trying to find a middle ground are not uncommon. Rice seemed to believe that it was a personal shortcoming on her part if she had to ask the President to resolve an interagency difference. She studiously avoided forcing clear-cut decisions that might result in one cabinet officer emerging as a “winner” and another as a “loser.” By taking elements from the positions of the different agencies and trying to combine them into one approach, she seemed to think she could make each agency a winner in policy discussions.
It may also be that Rice put a premium on harmony among the principals because her exposure to interagency policy making came during the administration of George H. W. Bush. As vice president, the senior Bush had watched as President Reagan’s top national security officials clashed over issues, requiring Reagan to adjudicate their disputes. As president, the senior Bush presided over a smoother interagency process. When she became national security adviser for George W. Bush, I suspect Rice may have been trying to re-create that dynamic.
After a president has made a decision, a senior official has the responsibility to implement it faithfully. The president, after all, has the task of making the call as the elected representative of the American people. If a senior official cannot in good conscience carry out a presidential decision for whatever reason, he or she has the option of resigning.
Lower-level executive branch officials are in a similar situation regarding the heads of their agencies. I expected Defense Department officials to tell me their views, debate with me, and try to persuade me when they believed I might be wrong or misinformed about important matters—right up until a decision was made and it was time to implement. I have always felt that if officials were in the room when substantive issues are discussed, they were there for a reason. I considered it their duty, whether military or civilian, to speak up and voice opinions, even if—especially if—they disagreed with me or with others taking part in the discussion. Even after I made a decision on a matter, I remained open to people in the Department asking me to reconsider, so long as the decision was being implemented in the meantime.
While disharmony is a word that can have a negative connotation, the fact is that a vigorous debate about policy options can be healthy. Out of the occasionally contentious Reagan NSC, for example, came some of the truly important national security decisions produced by a recent U.S. administration. I did not think that any president’s decisions should be taken by his cabinet officials as wins or losses. Interagency deliberations were not like a season of baseball, with the various agencies competing as rival teams and individual scores are kept.
I worked to understand Rice’s approach and to cooperate in her efforts to resolve differences in the principals committee. On some occasions, however, the management of the interagency process created problems that outweighed any benefits that might have come from a bridging approach. On a number of issues—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, China, Arab-Israeli peace talks, and others—Rice would craft policy briefings for the President that seemed to endorse conceptual points one department had advanced, but also would endorse proposals for the way ahead that came from a different department. In other words, one department might “win” on strategy while another might “win” on tactics. For example, in the wake of the Iraq war, those of us in the Defense Department argued that the best way to get Syria to change its sponsorship of terrorists, pursuit of WMD, and sending jihadists into Iraq was to pressure the regime diplomatically. The President agreed to this recommendation. However, the process and tactics were delegated to the State Department, which organized high-level American delegations to Damascus that had a quite different and less than successful result.
This bridging approach could temporarily mollify the NSC principals, but it also led to discontent, since fundamental differences remained unaddressed and unresolved by the President. Indeed, an unfortunate consequence was that when important and controversial issues did not get resolved in a timely manner, they sometimes ended up being argued in the press by unnamed, unhappy lower-level officials. I doubt this would have been the case had the President been asked to make a clear-cut decision. If given an order from the President, most Department officials would have then saluted and carried it out, even if it had not been their recommendation.
I had other issues with Rice’s management of the NSC process. Often meetings were not well organized. Frequent last-minute changes to the times of meetings and to the subject matter made it difficult for the participants to prepare, and even more difficult, with departments of their own to manage, to rearrange their full schedules. The NSC staff often was late in sending participants papers for meetings that set out the issues to be discussed. At the conclusion of NSC meetings when decisions were taken, members of the NSC staff were theoretically supposed to write a summary of conclusions. When I saw them, they were often sketchy and didn’t always fit with my recollections. Ever since the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, NSC staffs have been sensitive to written notes and records that could implicate a president or his advisers. Rice and her colleagues seemed concerned about avoiding detailed records that others might exploit. This came at the expense of enabling the relevant executive agencies to know precisely what had been discussed and decided at the NSC meetings. Attendees from time to time left meetings with differing views of what was decided and what the next steps should be, which freed CIA, State, or Defense officials to go back and do what they thought best.
In one August 2002 memo to Rice, I raised this lack of resolution. “It sometimes happens that a matter mentioned at a meeting is said to have been ‘decided’ because it elicited no objection,” I wrote. “That is not a good practice. Nothing should be deemed decided unless we expressly agree to decide it.”15 Rice started putting a note at the bottom of draft decision memos: “If no objections are raised by a specific deadline, the memo will be considered approved by the principals.” That, too, was impractical. Powell and I were frequently traveling. I did not want to have others assume I agreed with something simply because I missed an arbitrary deadline.16
From 2001 to 2005, I sent Rice a series of memos suggesting ways I thought the NSC process might be strengthened.17 “As we have discussed, the interagency process could be improved to help all of us better manage the high volume of work we have,” I wrote to Rice in August 2002. “I’ve talked with my folks about it to see if we could come up with some ideas that might be helpful.”18 Some of the problems I raised in my memos were administrative and relatively minor but could have resulted in an improvement in efficiency. For example, I noted that we had principals committee meetings on a weekly basis, sometimes two to three meetings a week, at the White House. Unlike the national security adviser, the rest of us—the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, and I—had departments we needed to run. Going to the White House so often was time consuming. If the NSC’s performa
nce was improved, many hours of time each week would be freed up, we would be better prepared, and more meetings would end with concrete decisions.*
No one likes to have his or her style of management questioned. Rice was a person whose general performance over the years had undoubtedly been seen as above reproach. She seemed unaccustomed to constructive suggestions, and not much changed for the better. The core problems the NSC faced resulted from the effort to paper over differences of views.
In his book, Peter Rodman wrote: “[I]t is no small task to provide psychological support to the person on whose shoulders rests the heaviest burden of decision in the world.”20 Throughout the Bush administration, Rice was a regular presence at Camp David and in Crawford, and was almost always the last person the President talked to on any given national security issue. She used that proximity and authority to press for action in the President’s name. But it was not always clear to me when she had been directed by the President to do something or when she simply believed she was acting in the President’s best interest—one could not check every question with the President himself. And one could certainly not fault Rice for being disloyal to the President. I thought it unlikely that Rice was managing the NSC as she did without Bush’s awareness and agreement.
Nonetheless, I always found that in one-on-one situations, Bush was perfectly willing to make a decision even when presented with vexing choices. The bridging approach Rice favored did not take advantage of Bush’s demonstrated willingness to engage in the candid, open, and fair hearing of views I knew he was fully capable of managing. I believe that kind of engagement would have resulted in a more effective NSC process.
This aversion to decisions in favor of one course of action or another—and sometimes in favor of one department or agency over another—ironically led to more disharmony than would have been the case if the President had had an opportunity to make the decisions himself. Rice’s emphasis on bridging and consensus concealed misgivings that were later manifested in leaks to the press. This conveyed to the world an NSC often in less than good order.
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