No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

2 HONEST BROKER

I’D GIVEN A LOT of thought to the type of organization that I wanted to form. The National Security Council was established by the National Security Act of 1947 when, after World War II, it became clear that the United States would be permanently and dominantly involved in world politics. There are four original statutory members of the National Security Council: the President, the Vice President, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. The only other statutory position created through the act is the executive secretary of the NSC, a largely administrative but very vital function. That person manages the paper flow, oversees the Situation Room, handles interagency communication, and often staffs the President during travel. The role requires a very good administrator who can “keep the trains running on time” internally and work seamlessly with the other agencies. But it also helps to have a seasoned foreign policy hand who can understand the context and meaning of the paper he’s seeing. Our executive secretaries, Bob Bradtke, Steve Biegun, and then Greg Schulte, possessed both sets of qualifications.

Because of a very capable career administrative staff that works for the executive secretary, there is a kind of bureaucratic continuity. This allows for smoother functioning on the national security side of the White House than on the domestic side, which has essentially no standing career apparatus. When I returned to Washington, I was struck by the degree to which the paperwork looked exactly as it had when I had left as special assistant for Soviet affairs on the NSC staff of George H. W. Bush in 1991.

Given the prominence today of the national security advisor, it is surprising that the role, officially known as the assistant to the President for national security affairs, is not even mentioned in the 1947 legislation. McGeorge Bundy, who served President John F. Kennedy, is widely regarded as the first person to hold the position. Since then, there have been many variations in how the role is played. Some, such as Henry Kissinger, have sought—successfully—to become independent power centers. Others, such as Brent Scowcroft, have been honest brokers in representing the views of the secretaries to the President but giving him advice privately, never publicly.

The national security advisor is staff—rarified staff, to be sure, but staff nonetheless. There’s no doubt that sitting a few feet from the Oval Office confers influence, but it is the reflected influence of the President and must be used sparingly. The national security advisor must find a way to get the secretaries to do what the President wants them to do. I once told the President that this was a bit like trying to execute policy with a remote control. You don’t own troops, diplomats, or a budget. You have only your relationship with the President. I felt confident in mine and was sure that I knew what kind of NSC I would run.

We are all captives of our earlier experiences, and mine had been a very good and successful one when I had worked for Brent Scowcroft. I patterned my role after Brent, as an honest broker, not a separate power center. There would be a small staff, dedicated to doing the work that the Cabinet departments could not but avoiding the tendency of the NSC staff to duplicate their efforts. And never would the NSC become involved in operational matters. The execution of policy was to be left to the Cabinet secretaries, who carried the authority that Senate confirmation conferred. The NSC staff, on the other hand, cannot be held accountable by Congress because it is part of the President’s personal staff. It is too small and too close to the President to actually act on behalf of the United States.

The imperative that secretaries (and their departments) handle operational matters was a conviction shared by everyone who’d studied the disasters that had befallen presidents when the NSC tried to be something more than a coordinating body. The most recent example had been the Iran-Contra affair, when the NSC staff had taken it upon itself to devise and then carry out a policy widely viewed as risky at best and likely illegal. As the facts emerged, it was clear that the plan to divert funds from covert Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan resistance (the Contras) had been cooked up secretly within the NSC staff—apparently without the knowledge of the secretary of state, let alone Congress. The fallout was disastrous; the affair almost brought down the Reagan presidency.

The counsel to the Tower Commission, which was chaired by former Texas Senator John Tower and investigated the affair on behalf of President Reagan, was none other than Steve Hadley, now the deputy national security advisor. He and I vowed that the NSC staff would play a limited but effective role, carrying out the agenda of the President through, not around, the Cabinet secretaries whom he’d appointed. As for my role in particular, I intended to keep a low public profile.

But if the NSC is to be an honest broker, it helps enormously to have Cabinet secretaries who work well together. The NSC should intervene when there is a policy disagreement among the departments or when they cannot coordinate among themselves. But the NSC cannot do so on every single issue every day, or the system would grind to a halt, wallowing in inefficiency. Most of the time the Department of Defense and the State Department need to find a way to work together—at all levels.

To be sure, tensions between Defense and State are almost endemic, and there have been some cases—Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz come to mind—where the two principals barely spoke to each other. That is not, as some might think, because State is from Venus and Defense from Mars. In fact, there are many times when the secretary of state is more willing to use force than the Pentagon, given the admirable conservatism of professional officers about the use of military power.

Nonetheless, secretaries of state find the Pentagon all too willing to exert influence in foreign policy. With a budget nearly forty times that of the State Department, the Defense Department possesses an awe-inspiring logistical capacity, and State sometimes finds itself dependent on and resentful of the military’s reach. No U.S. response to a humanitarian crisis, such as the 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, is possible without the extraordinary capabilities of the Pentagon. The military undertakes humanitarian work around the world through, for example, the USNS Mercy hospital ship. In the best of circumstances, those capabilities merge seamlessly with the diplomatic expertise of the ambassador and his embassy, producing a unified U.S. response to a crisis or opportunity.

But that’s not always the case. Combatant commanders exist for each region of the world, and they sometimes act quite independently, developing their own relationships with foreign leaders and bringing their influence to bear on issues that at best cross and at worst shatter the lines between diplomacy and security policy. Those commanders have enormous assets. For example, the commander in the Pacific (USPACOM) lives in Hawaii and travels on dedicated military aircraft across the Pacific and in Asia. By contrast, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs will often find himself in a web of connecting commercial flights that can take more than twenty-four hours to deliver him to the region.

There is also, of course, the tendency of civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to have many different opinions about how diplomacy ought to be carried out. State Department officials must politely remind them that getting other countries to do what you want is no easy task. It is State that must deliver, but everyone has views about how to get it done, and often those individuals are vocally critical of how State is doing its work. It isn’t surprising that the relationship between the two departments is sometimes a bit tense.

In the case of Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld, it went beyond such almost inescapable tensions. The two men had known each other for years, and there was a good deal of personal respect. There was an equal measure of distrust, however. The two did not confront each other face-to-face, let alone in front of the President. Rather, Don would send memos (snowflakes, we called them) that implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—criticized what State or the NSC was doing. Often those memos reflected discussions that had already taken place, but they left the impression that it was Don imparting new wisdom or making an important recommendation. In meetings, he would ask Socratic questions rather than take a position. This led to tensions with and frustrations for Colin.

In addition, Colin had to battle the perception that State was not always on the same page with the White House. There is a tendency of Foreign Service officers to regard the President and his political advisors as a passing phenomenon without the deep expertise that they, the professionals, bring to diplomacy. That sometimes led State to tell the world “What the President meant to say,” usually in some leak to the Washington Post or the New York Times. The inclination of some in State to display what they regard as their superior expertise was especially strong in the first turbulent years of the Bush administration, but former Secretary of State Dean Acheson had talked about the appearance of the phenomenon decades before. As Acheson put it in his memoir Present at the Creation, “The attitude that presidents and secretaries may come and go but the Department goes on forever has led many presidents to distrust and dislike the Department of State.”

The national security advisor is left to sort out those tensions. In general, I got along well with my colleagues. The Vice President had direct access to the President, and he used it. After those conversations, though, the President would fill me in on the Vice President’s thinking, so that I was rarely blindsided. Often the Vice President and I talked directly about what was on his mind. Later, when I became secretary of state, he and I often disagreed and argued vociferously in front of the President. But it was never personal.

That was not always true of the Vice President’s staff. At the start, there had even been one attempt to alter a long-standing tradition by having the Vice President chair the powerful Principals Committee, made up of the Cabinet secretaries, in place of the national security advisor. I went to the President and said, “Mr. President, this is what the NSA does: convene the national security principles to make recommendations to you.” He agreed, and that was the end of that. Later, Steve Hadley told me that he’d spoken to the Vice President who’d acknowledged that it was a stupid idea.

The problem was that the Vice President’s staff, which seemed very much of one ultra-hawkish mind, was determined to act as a power center of its own. Many things were done “in the name of the Vice President,” whether he had directed them to be done or not. To be sure, he shared his staff members’ views; they were not substantively out of line with his thinking. But some of the bureaucratic games that the Office of the Vice President played were not characteristic of my dealings with their boss.

My relationship with Don Rumsfeld was considerably more complicated, though not in the ways that accorded with common wisdom in Washington. Don and I had been friends for a number of years. I first met him when we participated in a three-day “continuity of government” exercise to prepare for nuclear war. (The Cold War was not yet over.) He played the President, and I was his chief of staff. Over the years we remained in contact, and Don and his wife, Joyce, gave dinners for me or joined me for a meal when Stanford business took me to Chicago. Don tried to recruit me to a couple of corporate boards on which he served, and it was I who helped recruit Don to George W. Bush’s cause in 1999. What’s more, when initial secretary of defense candidates fell by the wayside during the transition, I recommended to the President-elect that he choose Don, pointing out that he was known to be a tough bureaucratic infighter but that he “knew where the bodies were buried in the Pentagon” and would be able to carry out the much-needed post–Cold War transformation of our military forces.

Throughout the ups and downs of the term, our relationship remained cordial. Don would come to my Christmas party and heartily sing “We Three Kings.” For a long time I saved a letter that Don sent me in 2006 offering me his weekend home on Maryland’s eastern shore should I want to get away from Washington. I knew that without proof no one would believe it. In other words, the tension that did build between us was not a problem of personal animosity but rather of professional conflict.

I am convinced that Don simply resented the role I had to play as national security advisor. He would become frustrated when my staff would reach out to military officers in the Pentagon to coordinate the particulars of a policy among the agencies. This was a routine responsibility for the NSC, but for some reason Don interpreted such actions as a violation of his authority.

In December 2002 he sent me a “snowflake” saying that I “was not in the chain of command”—a fact I well understood—and that if my staff and I did not stop “giving tasks and guidance” to the combatant commanders and the joint staff, he would take his objections to the President. I found the tirade amusing if slightly condescending and wished he had taken it to the President. I am confident that the President too would have found it bizarre.

This animosity toward my role resulted in complaints about the NSC process. Don wasn’t party to my conversations with the President about matters before the NSC and assumed that I was substituting my own preferences for the views of the principals. He complained that I kept seeking consensus when the President should have been given a decision memo—so that he could just decide. Sometimes the President directed me to try one more time to find common ground. Sometimes he listened to the debate in the NSC and then told me what he wanted to do. George W. Bush had no trouble making decisions when the search for consensus failed. Often, though, it is preferable for the national security advisor to deliver the news that a Cabinet secretary has been overruled than to have the President do it. And sometimes a decision memo where the President checks a box fails to reflect the complexity of the reasoning that led to that decision—and, should it be leaked to the press, is sure to be misrepresented as a victory for one Cabinet secretary and a loss for another in the policy debate.

It is also not true as the press once reported that Don ever refused to return my phone calls. I would not have put up with that, and neither would the President. Don, Colin, and I spoke almost every morning, our travel schedules permitting. Don did dislike NSC Principals meetings, letting it be known that they were an unwelcome distraction from his day job of running the Pentagon, but our lines of communication were never closed.

Ironically, I came to have some sympathy with this view when I became secretary of state. The national security advisor’s work is to coordinate various departments and to staff the President. The NSC staff numbers about a hundred people. The job is demanding but very different from the line responsibilities of the Cabinet secretaries, who must manage huge organizations (State has fifty-seven thousand employees worldwide, the Pentagon seven hundred thousand civilians alone) that are constantly in need of oversight, attention, and decision making. There is always some surprise landing on the secretary’s desk, and frequently it is already public and largely beyond resolution. Big organizations are just difficult to manage, and as Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and I used to say to each other, only half jokingly, “You never know what your building is doing until it’s too late.”

Cabinet secretaries, as constitutional officers, also have responsibilities to Congress. Members of Congress expect a secretary to direct his or her attention to a host of issues ranging from the plight of individual constituents to major policy choices. There are constant reporting requirements, briefings, and sometimes hearings. Add to that press demands, ceremonial functions, and a demanding travel schedule, and there is never enough time. A two-hour NSC Principals meeting is core to the national security advisor’s mission but a drain on the time of a secretary, who can end up making the trip to the White House two or three times a day.

The truth is that we would have had fewer Principals meetings had the distrust between Don and Colin not made the levels below the secretaries largely incapable of taking decisions. The two had dissimilar styles: Colin was a cautious consensus builder in international politics, and Don was confrontational. Don rarely saw shades of gray on an issue, while Colin almost always saw nuances. This, of course, reflected their different roles, but it was more than that; it was a matter of personality and worldview as well. Don’s more black-and-white view of the world sometimes accorded more closely with that of the President in the early days, particularly after 9/11.

The other major challenge with Don was his secretiveness in running the Pentagon. He claimed to delegate decision making to lower levels, but then didn’t always ratify what his lieutenants had done. The people who worked for him were fearful of his wrath. The atmosphere in the Pentagon was one where nothing was really settled until the secretary had opined. That handicapped the Deputies Committee (the number twos in the departments) that Steve chaired and made necessary the very Principals meetings that Don detested.

For the most part we managed the tensions between us. But we did clash with increasing frequency as time went on. It’s always uncomfortable, particularly for the President, for a member of the President’s staff to challenge a Cabinet secretary. Still, on a few occasions, Don and I did tangle in front of others. After one such episode, the two of us were walking side by side through the Rose Garden portico. I turned to Don and asked, “What’s wrong between us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We always got along. You’re obviously bright and committed, but it just doesn’t work.”

Bright? That, I thought to myself, is part of the problem. Don had been more comfortable in the old days, when he was the senior statesman championing my career. A relationship between equals was much harder for him.

Colin, on the other hand, always seemed very comfortable with my role and our personal relationship. I’d first met him in 1987, when he was deputy national security advisor and I was on a one-year fellowship with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He invited me to a pleasant lunch, and we conversed about my future. He and his wife, Alma, became my friends. Alma and I shared familial ties in Birmingham, Alabama. My father had worked for Alma’s uncle, who was the principal of the second largest black high school. Alma’s father, Mr. R. C. Johnson, was the principal of the largest, Parker High, and was a legend in our middle-class, segregated community.

Colin knew how hard the NSA job was, and he tried to be supportive. But he also, I believe, thought that I was not strong enough in my support of him and the State Department agenda. He asked me many times why I didn’t go to the President to “discipline” Defense for any number of sins of omission or commission, some imagined, some not. He probably didn’t realize how often I took State’s case to the President sympathetically.

But truthfully, I wondered why he did not take greater advantage of his extraordinary stature. Sometimes I would go to the President and suggest that it was time for him to sit down with Colin over dinner; the relationship between the two men was always better after they did. I often told the President before one of those sessions that Colin was very unhappy and would tell him so. He didn’t, and the President sometimes had difficulty gauging the extent of Colin’s dissatisfaction. I hate pop psychoanalysis, but I did sometimes wonder what held Colin back; perhaps the “soldier” felt constrained, and, of course, he had to be aware that he probably would have been President had he chosen to run. The relationship between George W. Bush and Colin Powell was thus respectful—genuinely so—but complicated.

In short, the President knew that Don and Colin did not get along, and decision making was difficult. My task was to work around the personal distrust between the two men, a task that became harder as the problems became more difficult. In the final analysis, Colin was probably right when he asked me one day, “Why doesn’t the President just square the circle? One of us needs to go.” I should have gone to the President and asked him exactly that. The President might have made a change, but where? Colin was essential to dealing with foreign governments, and the Pentagon was in the middle of a war under Don’s leadership. I thought it was better to try to make it work. Despite the challenges, I learned important lessons from those bureaucratic struggles that I would take with me to State a few years later.

In the end we kept going, with Don complaining to the Vice President that I was slanting decision making toward State and Colin complaining to me that Defense was in league with the Vice President’s office to undermine State’s positions. And, mirroring what was going on at the top, the relationship between those at lower ranks grew increasingly unworkable. Sometimes the lower levels at Foggy Bottom (where the State Department is located) would, inexplicably, leak to the press that State was being outmaneuvered by Defense. Leaks are debilitating, sowing distrust among the officials who have to work together and coloring the President’s options. People do it to show that they are in the know or to advance a position. But for the life of me, I could never understand why it was career-enhancing for State to tell the press that Colin was losing every bureaucratic battle. In fact, State was winning its share.

I’ve asked myself many times how I might have broken this cycle of distrust and dysfunction. Steve Hadley and I managed to make the creaky system work most of the time. We were able to do so in fighting the war in Afghanistan, helping to liberate Liberia, pushing a transformational agenda through NATO, sustaining peace in the Balkans, managing crises between India and Pakistan, launching the President’s compassion agenda, and restructuring our approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But in the taxing issue of Iraq, the stress on the NSC system brought it—and our personal relationships—nearly to the breaking point.