Baker, Cheney, Scowcroft: Government Between Friends

If personal friendships were the key to conducting a successful foreign policy, George Bush should be lining up soon for a Nobel Prize. Not since Harry S. Truman has any President assembled a team of top advisers so closely knit by trust, temperament and philosophy as the triumvirate Bush finally has in place: James A. Baker III at State, Brent Scowcroft at the National Security Council and Richard B. Cheney at Defense.

Their appointments mark the return to power of “Fordites,” GOP moderates who gathered around Gerald R. Ford in the mid-’70s and, in some ways, never found a home under Ronald Reagan. Bush himself served as CIA director under Ford and was long identified with that wing of the party. A growing number of other “Ford people” are signing on with the new Administration. But if the moderates are back, their old policies are not. Precisely because of their experiences in the Ford days, the new foreign-policy team may prove more cautious and even hard-line than the conservatives under Reagan.

Baker, Scowcroft and Cheney all enjoy reminiscing about their past together, and it is clear that one attraction in joining Bush was the chance to work with old friends. In separate conversations last week, both Cheney and Scowcroft recalled that their relationship blossomed when Ford promoted them to top positions on the same day--Cheney as chief of staff and Scowcroft as NSC adviser, only a few doors away in the West Wing.

They went with Ford to Helsinki and Vladivostok as he negotiated arms control with the Soviets. After Ford left office, they remained close--Scowcroft brought Cheney into a series of national-security study groups. “I saw him as a coming power in the Republican party, and he was damn smart,” said Scowcroft. “Dick’s like an old shoe now, and we will get along beautifully in our new positions.”

In those same days, Baker came to know both men. He and Scowcroft linked up on the Ford campaign plane, during the fall of 1976, when Baker was Ford’s campaign manager. Another frequent flyer was Alan Greenspan, then Ford’s chief economist and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and a continuing confidant of all three men. Baker and Scowcroft quickly developed a mutual respect and were allies in the Bush campaigns of 1980 and 1988. “I realized on day one of the 1988 campaign, when Brent began helping out, that George would probably like to have him as NSC adviser if he won the election,” said Baker.

From the first, the Bush team has been trying to stay close. During the transition, Baker and Scowcroft reached an understanding that Baker would have the lead on foreign policy while Scowcroft and the NSC would have no operational role, and Scowcroft himself would be a low-profile “honest broker” within the Administration. In this way, they would avoid niggling disagreements over public speeches, TV interviews, ambassadorial visits and the like. For Baker, it was a welcome change from the day that Reagan’s new secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., apparently misled by Reagan about his role, came calling with a paper claiming far more turf than the White House wanted to relinquish.

But if Baker is close to Scowcroft, Cheney is his real buddy--just as Cheney is also closer to Scowcroft. “I’m the guy who named Jim campaign manager for Ford,” Cheney proudly remembered. The two became fast friends--so when Baker was Reagan’s chief of staff and Cheney was in Congress, they talked frequently, Cheney tipping Baker off to the latest twists on Capitol Hill. Both love the backwoods, and two years ago Cheney took Baker to his native Wyoming for a week of riding and fishing. They were to go again last summer, but Cheney had a mild heart attack and Baker took Bush instead. The two had made plans for an August trip before Cheney was named defense secretary--and last week Cheney penned a private note saying the invitation was “still valid.”

To observers such as Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, the three are “uniquely men of good will, a combination that is remarkable in the corridors of power.” Each sees the others as team players, self-confident and independent but not hungering for power or the limelight. All have also signed up for the duration, four years, or longer if Bush is reelected. Cheney, youngest of the trio at 48, would have a career beyond that, but for Baker, 58, and Scowcroft, 64, these jobs are probably the culmination of their public service. Thus all have a stake in their mutual success.

It may not be smooth riding, however. Only Scowcroft has the extensive experience in foreign affairs normally associated with his job. In addition, like-mindedness has its problems: It can stifle healthy disagreement. Scowcroft, for example, has long been eager to discard plans from the Reagan Administration for a rail-based MX missile, while Cheney apparently leans toward a rail garrison. The Administration might be better served to have a full, open debate than to smother dissent in the interests of internal peace.

Moreover, as Scowcroft recognized, it may not be as smooth as it sounds. There is still a residue of suspicion and back-biting from years of internal struggle between their respective institutions. Scowcroft and Cheney had ringside seats for the bitter feuds between Henry A. Kissinger, Ford’s first NSC adviser, and James R. Schlesinger at Defense. From the Reagan years, Baker has memories of the continuing battles between Caspar W. Weinberger at Defense and first Haig, then George P. Shultz at State. The sniping between Zbigniew Brzezinski at the NSC and Cyrus R. Vance at State during the Carter years, the distance between Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s exasperation with Charles E. Wilson at Defense--all left indelible impressions. More often than not, infighting got in the way of policy-making.

The Bush trio all say they hope to set a pattern of cooperation early on and see it seep down into their bureaucracies. Baker said the system is already producing benefits: He was able to work closely with Scowcroft and Bush in devising a new Central American plan and then negotiate on Capitol Hill without the plan leaking to the press--and possibly derailing. By nature, Baker is impatient with bureaucratic wrangling.

The procedural danger is that, by working from “top down,” some good ideas and refinements may be lost from the experts closer to the bottom. Foreign Service officers are already openly criticizing Baker for ignoring them. Baker’s defenders say that he will gradually bring them into his circle, but before he went to state, he was warned not to be “captured” by the bureaucracy as Shultz was.

The more interesting question is whether the three men will get along as well with the world as they do with each other. Their common memories have shaped a remarkably similar outlook. Cheney and Scowcroft were both at the Ford White House when detente crumbled as the Soviets built up their military and their empire. They remember how U.S. soldiers were lifted from rooftops in Saigon and the North Vietnamese obliterated the peace agreements. And Baker has vivid memories of a conservative Reagan almost pushing Ford aside for the GOP nomination by attacking detente so sharply that Ford had to drop the word.

Not surprisingly, all three men--along with Bush--come to office determined not to be swept away by changes in the Kremlin. “You can’t look back upon the experience of the 1970s without being a bit skeptical about the prospect of long-term change in the Soviet Union,” observed Cheney. In a speech he wrote for his Pentagon inauguration, Cheney said, “There are those who want to declare the Cold War ended . . . . But I believe caution is in order.” In a passage Mikhail S. Gorbachev must have found striking, Cheney stated: “To date, there’s been no reduction in the strategic systems targeted against the United States.”

Reagan and some of his team came to Washington with traditional Cold War views of the Soviets--but because they had not personally presided over the souring of detente in the 1970s, they found it easier to change their minds. Persuaded that Gorbachev represented a break with the past, Reagan swung from the pessimism of his “evil empire” speech to the optimism of Reykjavik. Cheney was troubled by the outcome of Reykjavik, and has vowed to steer a straighter course. Scowcroft is on the record as being bitingly critical of the negotiations.

Whether their caution will encourage the kind of imagination and daring that the times require is the question--one all three are now pondering. Certainly they recognize that postwar structures are shifting beneath their feet as the perception of a Soviet threat recedes in public minds and the United States finds old partners in Europe and Asia becoming economic competitors. Bush has repeatedly said the United States has major opportunities to reshape the world. Baker echoed him, “Our risk is that we’ll let an opportunity go by from an excess of caution. It’s a line you’ve got to be able to walk with great care.”

None of these three men sees himself as a grand strategist in the Kissinger mold, and some critics argue they are not strong conceptualizers. “This is a government of incrementalists,” said one GOP authority. Some who have dealt directly with him think Bush may be the best foreign-policy thinker, while Scowcroft is an excellent judge of others’ ideas and Baker a superb tactician. In truth, it is early to tell much about their capacities in the new roles.

It won’t be long, however, before the press and foreign governments begin to make judgments, for the Administration will soon complete its national-security and foreign-policy reviews. Below top levels, officials are already trying to lower expectations, saying most of the studies are bottom-up summaries of conventional wisdom. In the end, as Kissinger found during a similar exercise in the Nixon years, the reports are likely to leave the big questions to the big players: Bush and his triumvirate.

Friendships do matter. The last Administration to have so many friends at the top saw a burst of creative brilliance, as George C. Marshall, Henry L. Stimson, Dean G. Acheson and others helped Truman erect the postwar system of alliances and policies. Those men had the advantage, however, of coming through a great war together. When the war ended, they knew they were “Present at the Creation,” as Acheson wrote, and they were prepared for it. The Bush advisers know they, too, are living through a watershed period and they are counting on friendship to help. Whether they can also summon the wisdom of the Truman years is perhaps their biggest test.