An Insider's Guide to U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract

An Insider's Guide to U.S. Foreign Policy * David C. Engerman (bio) Peter W. Rodman . Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. New York: Knopf, 2009. iiix + 334 pp. Introduction by Henry Kissinger, notes and index. 27.95. Presidential Command is a book by, for, and about the much maligned Washington insiders, especially those interested in foreign policy. Peter W. Rodman's account of the mechanisms of foreign-policy formulation draws extensively but not exclusively on his own experiences, from his start as an aide to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration to his final official role, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the George W. Bush administration. (Rodman, who joined the Brookings Institution as a Senior Fellow after his Pentagon stint, died in late 2008.) The book closely follows how different presidents managed the key institutions that made foreign policy, primarily the National Security Council and the departments of State and Defense. The characters here are familiar from historical accounts and contemporary journalism: the back-channel maneuvers of Henry Kissinger against Nixon's secretary of state William P. Rogers; the rise of the Richard Cheney–Donald Rumsfeld team in the Ford interregnum; the battles between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance for the heart of Jimmy Carter (or at least his foreign policy); the arrangements of Ronald Reagan's White House that led to the illegalities of Iran-Contra; the incomplete victory of George H. W. Bush's Gulf War; the lurches from humanitarian intervention to withdrawal in the Clinton years; and the isolation and eventual humiliation of George W. Bush's secretary of state, Colin Powell, at the hands of Cheney and Rumsfeld while Condoleezza Rice looked on. For a book covering such exciting and controversial events, such colorful personalities (at least by the standards of Washington insiders), and such momentous foreign-policy events, though, the tone is flat and the pace slow. Rodman is well aware that his readers are looking for insider dope on the great conflicts of the day—not just Vietnam and Iraq, but Kissinger vs. Rogers, Brzezinski vs. Vance, and Powell vs. Rumsfeld—but [End Page 285] he is determined to tell a story about institutions, not individuals. Rodman's account is something like a detailed excursus on the playbook and personnel policy of a hockey team to an audience of fans cheering for fights and (occasionally) on-ice finesse. He traces the institutions of foreign policy, organized differently under each president, assessing the effectiveness and drawing lessons from each administration's experience. The book opens with a brief chapter laying out the basic structures of American foreign policymaking since World War II. It contains more references to old Washington adages and BBC shows (Yes, Minister) than to the Constitution and the National Security Act of 1947, thus revealing a book organized more around Rodman's government experience and television habits than deep research. A second chapter provides an overview of the organization of the foreign-policy apparatus under presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Rodman emphasizes the ways in which each president sought to reverse what he saw as the failings of the previous one: Eisenhower built an ornate apparatus with various boards reporting to the National Security Council as a response to what he saw as Truman's less structured approach; Kennedy streamlined the process and invested more power in his national security advisor than in administrative units, making the National Security Council more purely a "presidential instrument," in the words of advisor McGeorge Bundy (p. 30); Johnson kept the same personnel but dispensed with the formality, meeting with the members of the National Security Council as his "Tuesday lunch group." The chapter moves too quickly to analyze significant efforts to reform national-security policymaking, such as the Senate's Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery (chaired by Senator Henry J. "Scoop" Jackson), or to discuss in depth exciting moments like the "ExComm" convened during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Rodman gets to the heart of his story—the national security apparatus since Nixon—his intentions and perspective become clearer. The chapter on Richard Nixon is the longest and...