Reagan’s NSC Policy: an Accident Waiting to Happen

The Iran- contra affair began on Inauguration Day, 1981. Then Ronald Reagan made the decisions that led to the bizarre White House behavior that now is being exposed. His difficulties today were an accident waiting to happen. Six years ago the only items in doubt were how severe the inevitable crisis would be, its precise subject and how long it would take for Reagan’s luck to run out.

As his Administration began, Reagan, like all Presidents, had to choose a system for managing the National Security Council. These matters are not prescribed by law, but must be tailored according to each new President’s strengths and weaknesses.

Reagan chose in terms of negatives. He would not be primarily a foreign-policy President, as Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter had been before him. He would not permit a Henry A. Kissinger or a Zbigniew Brzezinski to steal the limelight from the secretary of state or--worse--the President. And Reagan would not have a strong NSC staff second-guessing Cabinet officials and chiding the President to be more active in foreign affairs.

This negative approach to management was reinforced by a bid for power by the new secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr. As Kissinger and Brzezinski had done at the start of the Nixon and Carter administrations, Haig presented Reagan with documents to sign that set forth the basic lines of authority in foreign policy. In contrast, however, Haig had not worked out his draft charter with the President-elect to reflect the latter’s interests and ambitions. And it gave pride of place to the secretary of state, who was to become, in Haig’s word, the “vicar.”

Reagan then made his fateful mistake. He had not campaigned to become President just to delegate authority for foreign policy to one individual. Not unnaturally, Reagan refused to sign Haig’s charter. But he put nothing else in its place. This pattern also was evident in Haig’s public bid to gain control of crisis management. Bridling, the President instead gave authority, in theory, to Vice President George Bush. In practice, that meant putting the NSC adviser in charge, but with a murky mandate.

Thus for nearly the first year of this Administration there were no clear practices and procedures in national-security affairs other than those that different officials could cobble together as they struggled for personal ascendancy within a system that lacked formal structure.

By January, 1982, it had become clear that the President could not permit anarchy to reign in national-security policy-making. The result was the first of four new NSC advisers, plus the adoption of some management guidelines.

These guidelines set up a series of Senior Interdepartmental Groups (SIGs) in different sectors of policy, to meet in different parts of Washington under different chairmen. They were an improvement on anarchy, but left authority both fragmented and overlapping--in a word, unclear. The President did not want a vicar, but he created no substitute. In a major lapse, the President’s top-level advisers were not required to meet, in his absence, to thrash out policy differences before the issues were sent to the Oval Office.

This seems like a minor bureaucratic point. But it has proved to have crucial significance. The lack of such a top-level forum prevented development of a dependable means for coordinating national-security policy. With no agreed-on place for resolving most foreign-policy issues, policy was regularly made on an ad hoc basis, with constant struggle between Cabinet members to gain the President’s ear. To an unprecedented degree, White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan was able to intrude far beyond his competence. And various individuals found that they could carry out independent operations in secret, without bumping up against an effective management system that was recognized by all as having authority.

Lt. Col. Oliver L. North was a creature of this haphazard arrangement. For a President frustrated by a system that he had refused to master, North became “Mr. Can-Do.” Indeed, it is beside the point to search for a “smoking gun” to show that Reagan ordered the movement of money from Iran to the contras.

From what has been revealed thus far, it is clear that North acted within the compass of presidential authority. He did what he knew to be his master’s bidding --in design if not in detail. Unique to this White House, there was no provision in the policy-making system to ensure that North’s actions would be noted and, potentially, stopped.

The President may be shocked to learn what North, and presumably others, did in his name in order to achieve his stated goals. But the real shock is that Reagan ignored rules of government that are as old as the Constitution: the need for checks and balances to regulate the conduct of people who, by nature, are imperfect. Other administrations, Republican and Democratic, have had their Norths and their share of bad ideas. Other staff members have had the sole passion of pleasing the man in the Oval Office. But all other postwar Presidents have created some tried and true mechanisms “to just say no.” By failing to manage national-security policy, Reagan is both author and victim of his current troubles.