News Background : National Security Council: A New Role

The National Security Council, the center of a political storm over President Reagan’s policy toward Iran, was formed nearly four decades ago as a low-profile group with instructions to leave policy-making to others.

Now the White House says that the NSC, along with the CIA, conducted the “operational details” of Iranian contacts and arms deals, giving rise to demands in Congress for a greater role in overseeing the agency.

The members of the National Security Council are the President, vice president, secretary of state and secretary of defense. The CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are advisers.

The council meets infrequently, however, and most of the current controversy revolves around the activities of John M. Poindexter, President Reagan’s national security adviser, and some of Poindexter’s lower-level staff members.

The NSC held its first meeting Sept. 26, 1947. President Harry S. Truman “indicated that he regarded it as his council,” one that would be advisory only, Truman’s secretary of defense, James Forrestal, wrote in his diary.

Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, wrote of the council, “It was kept small; aides . . . were excluded, a practice . . . that made free and frank debate possible.”

The council remained a low-key operation during the Eisenhower Administration, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles dominated foreign policy.

Aides were gradually admitted, and the staff steadily grew. A current directory lists a professional staff of 53 people, with specialties ranging from intelligence programs to legislative affairs.

The post of national security adviser was created in the Truman Administration but remained out of the limelight until President John F. Kennedy appointed a high-profile Harvard professor, McGeorge Bundy, to the position.

President Richard M. Nixon stepped up the process, appointing Henry A. Kissinger to the post and combining the national security adviser’s staff with that of the NSC. Kissinger not only coordinated foreign and defense policy but also developed policy options, Nixon wrote in his memoirs. Under that system, Kissinger dominated and eventually succeeded Secretary of State William P. Rogers.

“You had under Kissinger and Nixon a change to a staff which not only gave advice to the President but actually conducted negotiations,” Morton Halperin, a former aide who feuded with Kissinger, said in an interview.

“Under Reagan, there is one more step, to a staff that actually conducts operational activities,” Halperin said.