Crisis Attributed to Reagan’s Inattention, Rapid NSC Turnover

Richard V. Allen lasted less than a year. Then in quick succession, William P. Clark and Robert C. McFarlane came and went. Now Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter has departed after only 11 months.

That makes four national security advisers to President Reagan in six years, the fastest rate of attrition for that post under any President. And that high turnover rate in a key job may explain the fragmentation and inexperience of the White House foreign policy apparatus. It also may help explain why Reagan now finds himself in the deepest crisis of his presidency.

It was a member of Poindexter’s staff, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, who allegedly arranged the secret sale of U.S.-made arms to Iran at the same time that American hostages were released by terrorists in Lebanon. And it was North, according to Justice Department investigators, who diverted the profits from the arms sales to the contras, the rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government.

But the White House national security staff does not deserve all the blame, according to national security experts. Reagan’s inattention to his own foreign policy, they say, is equally responsible.

Not Up to Speed

“The President can have a State Department-oriented foreign policy or a White House-oriented foreign policy,” Prof. Joseph Nye of Harvard University said. “But if it’s run from the White House, you need a President who is up to speed on these matters. The evidence is that this President is not.”

The consensus is that the National Security Council staff--the national security adviser and the 20 to 30 people who work for him--has not been up to speed either. With notable exceptions, the staff that has served under Reagan is widely regarded as the weakest in modern times. Possibly excluding Allen, none of the President’s national security advisers has been an acknowledged expert in the field, and none has served in the post long enough to establish himself as such.

The last two--McFarlane, a former Marine, and Poindexter, an admiral--have displayed a penchant for secret programs, as if to compensate for their lack of impact on the Administration’s grand strategy. This, combined with the Reagan White House’s penchant for covert operations over standard diplomacy, took the staff far deeper than ever before into programs such as the Iran arms sales and the diversion of up to $30 million of the profits to the contras.

Instead of advising the President and coordinating his foreign policy, as the NSC’s 1947 charter mandates, the agency undertook secret operations that were not scrutinized by others for pitfalls, not subjected to the normal checks and balances of the bureaucracy and Congress. Even programs run by the CIA are subject to such constraints.

Unanswered Question

Only the President or his chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, was in position to oversee such programs. One of the great unanswered questions about the Iranian arms scandal is whether such oversight actually occurred or whether White House superiors of the NSC were ignorant of what their subordinates were doing.

Bypassing other agencies and other branches of government in this way may not have been standard operating procedure for President Reagan. But he has often voiced disdain for Washington’s traditional ways of doing business, several authorities pointed out. His NSC staff, at least to some degree, appeared to reflect this approach.

“The President was so popular that his subordinates thought they could do almost anything and he could cover it for them with his enormous popularity,” said Henry A. Kissinger, who served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the Richard M. Nixon Administration.

A State Department official who asked not to be named put it more bluntly.

‘Deadly Combinations’

“The NSC staff has been loaded with ideologues who combine weakness with activism, arrogance with ignorance,” he said. “Deadly combinations. But it’s the President’s staff. He chose it, he was apparently comfortable with the people and their attitudes and level of expertise, at least until now. He’s responsible for them.”

From the outset of his presidency, Reagan refused to let Alexander M. Haig Jr., his first secretary of state, run foreign policy, according to Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution. Yet “Reagan never defined the role of the NSC or the other agencies in foreign policy,” he said.

“It all starts from there,” added Sonnenfeldt, who was a senior national security official in the Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations.

The National Security Council, consisting of the President, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, the CIA director, the attorney general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was created after World War II. Its purpose was “to advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of the government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving national security.”

Tower Commission

In the wake of the disclosures about secret NSC staff operations, Reagan has now ordered a three-man commission led by former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.) to examine the “role and procedures” of the staff.

The NSC at times has been a high-visibility agency wielding extraordinary influence. One such period occurred when Kissinger, as Nixon’s chief national security adviser, was the head of the NSC’s staff.

In his memoirs, “White House Years,” Kissinger wrote that presidential decision-making machinery must meet several criteria, including compatibility with the President’s personality and style and a format that leads to action rather than just conversation. “Above all,” Kissinger wrote, “it must be sensitive to the psychological relationship between the President and his close advisers.”

The NSC procedures under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in Kissinger’s view, were too undisciplined and informal, while those of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration were too rigid and secretarial.

Took Middle Road

In the Nixon Administration, Kissinger said, he attempted to walk between the two extremes, imposing discipline and order on the making of foreign policy but offering the President viable options. But in practice, he often ran roughshod over the State Department, as when he made his secret overtures to China and conducted arms negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser in the Jimmy Carter Administration, also tried to dominate foreign policy from the White House, clashing both with the State and Defense departments in the process.

But both Kissinger and Brzezinski were recognized authorities on national security affairs and worked for Presidents who were knowledgeable and interested in the field, Harvard’s Nye noted. The Reagan Administration, he added, has had the benefit of neither that kind of national security aide nor that kind of President.

As a result, Nye said, Reagan “seems to have fallen between stools” of neither giving the State Department control over foreign policy--which would fit the President’s preference for Cabinet government--nor managing it effectively from the White House.

Over the last two decades, Congress has considered requiring that the national security adviser be required to attain Senate confirmation. That would mean that he would have to defend the Administration’s foreign policy during congressional hearings.

Confidential Advice

So far, Congress has avoided that course because, as Nye pointed out, it would compromise the confidentiality of the advice the national security adviser provides to his President.

Other proposals have sought to provide continuity in the NSC staff from administration to administration. One would create the post of permanent executive director, to be filled by a career government official rather than a political appointee, while another would establish a permanent cadre of six officials who would survive any change of administration.

But the machinery must fit the needs and personality of the President or he will not use it. And, of course, he is responsible for his White House staff, even when it misbehaves.