Running the World Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - The Committee in Charge of Running the World

  Stardust in Our Eyes

  Two Degrees of Henry Kissinger

  Chapter 2 - Washington’s Choice

  General George Washington: One Individual’s Choice

  The Choices Confronting Washington’s Political Heirs

  Chapter 3 - Greatness Thrust Upon Them

  Chapter 4 - Gulliver Embarks: Leaders, Leadership, and the Difference Between ...

  Chapter 5 - Bound in Lilliput

  Chapter 6 - America in Decline, the NSC Ascendant

  Chapter 7 - A Superpower in Search of Itself

  Chapter 8 - Morning in America, Twilight at the NSC

  Chapter 9 - Across a Bright Line in History

  Chapter 10 - The New, Improved, Post–Cold War, Information-Age, Indispensable Nation

  Chapter 11 - The Beginning of the End of the End of History

  Chapter 12 - A Thumb on the Scales: Tipping the Balance in the Battle Between ...

  Chapter 13 - U.S. Foreign Policy in the Age of Ambiguity

  Adapting the System to the New Environment

  Beyond Process: The Biases within the System

  Does Philosophy Matter Anymore?

  A Guide to Abbreviations and Acronyms

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR RUNNING THE WORLD

  “[Rothkopf ’s] insider status . . . serves him well; he seems to know everyone in the foreign policy world and had interviewed most of the former national security advisers, as well as various other heavyweights.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “[A]nyone interested in the process of foreign policymaking will want this book on his or her shelf.”

  —Foreign Affairs

  “[A]n outstanding history of the NSC. . . . the insights into how this secretive panel operates are authoritative and revealing.”

  —International Affairs

  “Running the World does a masterful job of telling the story of our modern Presidents and their inner circles, using meticulous research, lively writing and his extraordinary access to the key players to bring critical events in recent world history alive. The book offers penetrating analysis, valuable perspectives on where we are headed and the equally important human side of the story, providing an unprecedented view of the relationships, partnerships and rivalries that have shaped and driven the National Security Council for the past 60 years. It is likely to be seen as the definitive history of the NSC.”

  —Samuel R. Berger, former U.S. National Security Advisor

  “Running the World is not only an outstanding history of the NSC, it uniquely portrays the personal chemistry among each president’s most senior advisers and between those advisers and the presidents they served. . . . [T]his is the best—and most readable—book on the history of the NSC I have seen.”

  —Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence

  Agency, former Deputy National Security Advisor

  “An impressively comprehensive, revealing, and insightful examination of the most powerful foreign policy making institution in the U.S. Government and of the key individuals who made it so. Invaluable to scholars, practitioners and concerned citizens.”

  —Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor

  “Rothkopf expertly captures how the skills and shortcomings of the NSC Staff have over the years translated into America’s successes and failures, with real consequences for people around the world.”

  —Richard A. Clarke, author, Against All Enemies,

  former U.S. Counter-Terrorism Czar and senior official

  in the administrations of four U.S. Presidents

  “At last, a real history of the National Security Council, from its origins after World War II through its transformative Nixon-Kissinger era to its present role at the center of American national security policy-making. As an insider, Rothkopf knows how it works; as a skilled storyteller and historian, he brings it to life, in a book rich with new insights and new information.”

  —Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

  For Adrean, Joanna and Laura,

  the committee in charge of running my world

  Good government obtains when those who are near are made happy and those who are far off are attracted.

  —Confucius

  I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded . . . it is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never wish to aggrandize ourselves in some way or other . . . we may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

  —Edmund Burke

  Introduction

  WE WERE IN a maharajah’s garden in Jodhpur. It was a warm January afternoon. Great purple flowers hung over the walls of the garden and filled the air with their fragrance.

  My father and I had come a long way across India during the preceding three weeks, laughing and arguing, eating prodigious amounts of delicious but, in one instance, rather toxic food, and hoping against hope that our driver’s almost impossible luck would hold. He was a slight young man who was undistinguished by anything other than a single long red fingernail and an astonishing lack of aptitude for his chosen profession. We sped in our small beige Ambassador car at mind-numbing speeds down narrow Indian highways that were marked more often by wrecks and wayward cattle than by signs. Every destination was therefore enthusiastically welcomed with one or more Kingfisher beers, a few silent prayers of thanks, and then the kind of animated discussions that come only with survivor’s rush, alcohol, or both.

  By the time we got to Jodhpur, several of those discussions blended together to form a kind of intellectual leitmotif for this father-son bonding trip. The central issue: whether men could make a difference in shaping the course of history or whether we were all essentially surfers, riding the tides of our times, acting like we were in charge because we were on top but all the while aware that we could be swept under by any of a countless number of forces beyond our control.

  There are a number of reasons why this topic came to dominate our trip. One was that I was relatively young, thirty-three, and my father was sixty-three. I was full of hubris and hope that a chance would come around for me to influence history, to make a mark. My father, an exceptionally accomplished scientist and teacher, had been chastened somewhat by experiences that seemed elemental rather than driven by human choice. He had escaped the Nazis in late 1939 and four years later returned to Europe as a lieutenant in the U.S. field artillery. There he combed through the wreckage of a battered continent, looking for signs of the almost three dozen relatives who had died in the concentration camps. Back in the United States, he conducted scientific research on how we learn, and over the years the course of his research was buffeted by the fads and fashions of the times and the changing funding priorities of the military or of Bell Laboratories, where he worked.

  Our India trip also took place during a period of considerable change globally. It was January 1989, the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The first stirrings and demonstrations of Czechoslovakia’s velvet revolution had begun. The Berlin Wall would fall only eleven months later. The Soviet Union was tottering.

  Although around us were the trappings of the Raj, we were in an India that
was warming to globalization. Two decades earlier, my father had been part of a project to put a television satellite above Gujarat in an effort to bring new channels of education to the impoverished students of that province. By 1989, investment bankers had begun to root around, agitating for reforms that would come over the ensuing decade and help India position itself as a player to be reckoned with in the information age.

  Our rambling, trans-India debate was thus in character and in step with the times. And so we jousted, with heat, vindaloo, mysterious ingredients, and East Coast Jewish intellectual dinner battle intensity bringing beads of sweat to our foreheads: Was Gorbachev driving Russian reform or were the exigencies of ruling a faltering empire driving Gorbachev to reform? Were the charming playwright Vaclav Havel or the rough-around-the-edges shipyard worker Lech Walesa people who could actually mobilize a nation or redirect destiny, or were they selected by circumstance—active, visible, contributing—but far less important than greater forces that were harder to put a face on? What about Napoleon, I would ask, or Newton, or Einstein? Wasn’t Napoleon simply a reaction to the French Revolution, just another vainglorious Frenchman seeking to reclaim the crown of Charlemagne? Wasn’t Leibniz inventing the calculus at the same time as Newton? Did Einstein’s wife write his papers? And wasn’t he himself just a symptom of a global cultural movement toward relativism made possible by increased technological capabilities that allowed us to measure things more precisely, see greater distances, see smaller objects, tie theories of the unseen to evidence of what really was?

  I fought with a kind of existential intensity on these issues, feeling that if human beings couldn’t really affect history, then we were doomed not only to effective passivity but also to knowledge of our own helplessness, which was even worse.

  To this day, I’m not really sure where my father stands on this question, whether he was just baiting me or whether he was really convinced that we’re merely passengers who can perhaps choose the fish or the meat main course but otherwise have to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.

  My own feeling that you can make a difference ultimately brought me to Washington, a city full of people who share this belief (or delusion) despite all its history and pathologies, which inevitably confound the efforts of the best intentioned. The question has arisen again and again: In this day and age, can any one individual or any small group of individuals alter the course of history, shape great outcomes, or make a difference?

  If any one individual could claim to have decisive impact it ought to be the president of the United States. History has given the United States awesome power and resources, and the U.S. Constitution has given the president an enormous array of rights, privileges, and responsibilities when it comes to wielding that power or drawing on those resources. In a number of areas, of course, the president’s power is constrained by congressional or judiciary checks and balances. But in one area in particular, the management of U.S. foreign policy, the president’s power has always been great, and it has grown over time.

  During the Cold War, the power of the United States to act internationally was constrained by the countervailing interests and strengths of the Soviet Union. We could act, but we always had to anticipate and compensate for a reaction from our large adversary. With the demise of the Soviet Union—a historical trend that was unfolding unbeknownst to my father and me as we sat in that maharajah’s garden—the global power of the United States and its leaders grew to unprecedented heights.

  Indeed, in the new global environment, not only was the power of the U.S. leadership unprecedented, it was also unanticipated. In a system in which the legitimacy of the leaders derives from the consent of the governed, American leaders were effectively making decisions affecting the lives and fortunes of tens and hundreds of millions, of billions, who did not choose them, did not understand what they were doing or how they were doing it, did not, in many cases, even know who they were. We were the de facto leaders of the global community, crowned by history and circumstances but lacking the confirmation of any global referendum on the matter.

  Here in the United States, the president and the small group around him who helped make foreign policy decisions had a unique status in the U.S. government. Even though our national security apparatus had been devised after the Second World War to help ensure that power was not too concentrated around the president and that it was wielded via a transparent, measured process, even though the Constitution gave Congress the powers to ratify treaties and to declare war, even though the War Powers Act attempted to constrain the president’s ability to undertake hostile actions without congressional approval, even though Congress had budget-approval power and attempted to increase its role in almost every aspect of federal operations—despite all this, the national security advisor and his or her staff remain among the most influential entities in the federal bureaucracy that are not subject to direct congressional oversight. They were part of the Office of the President. The president’s decisions with regard to their policies and actions were considered privileged, part of the authority granted him by the Constitution.

  This group also operated, even in the midst of the information age, beyond the understanding of many Americans. The world of the National Security Council is a shadowy one, shrouded in mystery and mystique, the inner sanctum of the most powerful ruler the world has ever known. It is home to some of the president’s most influential partners and collaborators, yet perhaps fewer books have been written about it than any other of the major components of the U.S. government. National security advisors have rivaled secretaries of state and defense in influence for decades, and yet few have been profiled or examined.

  Indeed, the term National Security Council itself can be misleading. To some, it is the body created by statute in 1947 to manage U.S. national security policy; this advisory body consists of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of central intelligence as observers. To others, it is the larger group of agency heads sometimes called to NSC meetings. To still others, it is the staff of the NSC—once a tiny support team, now a force unto itself—the organization by which the various views and capabilities of the U.S. government are reconciled, harmonized, and, ideally, knit together to create effective action. To the most knowledgeable, the National Security Council is all these things and it is also the de facto NSC, which is the group of officials and friends of the president, those close to him from family, politics, or other walks of life who are his decision-making collaborators and the implementers of decisions that are made.

  This little-understood group is perhaps in the best position of any group of a few human beings anywhere to influence history, to shape our times and our future. The ever-shifting “committee” is the most powerful the world has known—and yet, paradoxically, to most it is unknown, and even to those who know of it, it is misunderstood. Many of those who participate in it, including notably many presidents, don’t fully understand its importance or know how to make the best use of it, and this failing has had disastrous consequences both domestically and internationally.

  I had written about the NSC as a journalist even before my trip with my father to India. Four years later, I found myself invited to Washington to join the Clinton administration and began to have the chance to view it more closely. Indeed, I began to participate in its actions, not as a member of its inner circles, but as someone active at the edges of those circles.

  Initially I came to Washington to serve as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Policy Development—a mouthful, to be sure. As a result of having such a wonderful title, I quickly learned that the longer your title in Washington, the less important you were likely to be.

  My first full day on the job, I settled into the very large chair at my very large desk in my very large office in the very large and dusty Commerce Department and waited for the action to come to me. Nothing happe
ned. I looked around the huge office—its drab wood paneling and the two flags that hung limply behind my desk—and I knew that I had really arrived. Still, for a little while nothing happened. Flies buzzed. The lights on the phone did not blink on. And then, a staffer appeared at the door and asked to speak with me.

  I beckoned him in and said, “How can I help you?”

  “I have a matter that needs your attention, Secretary Rothkopf,” he said. Or at least I recall he said that. As a deputy under secretary I was technically entitled to be addressed as Secretary Rothkopf by staffers but seldom was unless they were really trying to butter me up or we were in some public setting in which they felt it made them look more important. So maybe I just hope he said that. Or maybe I was just hallucinating. But, in any event, he went on: “We have some documents you need to sign.”

  I inquired as to what matter of global significance I would now be asked to weigh in on, feeling certain that in just moments I could call my father to tell him that, indeed, I was one of those who would be moving history around, at least in small increments.

  “It is a trade sanction issue, Sir,” he said, which sounded good, important, worthy of a big office with flags in it.

  “Really?” I intoned because in such situations one intones rather than merely reply. “Give me the background . . .” I said this because it seemed businesslike and because it could be very helpful, since I had absolutely zero experience with trade sanction issues of any type.