Reassessing the NSC

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AFTER MORE THAN five years of relative obscurity, the National Security Council staff finds itself displayed prominently if not at all favorably. Who are these people and why this sudden prominence?

Created in 1947, the National Security Council (NSC)--composed of the President and Vice President together with the secretaries of state and defense--was designed to be the principal forum for deciding key foreign and defense policies. A small staff, headed by the sub-cabinet National Security Advisor--or, more formally, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs--was created to assist it.

Relatively weak under both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, the staff did not come into its own until the Kennedy-Johnson years, and reached its zenith under Richard Nixon, when Henry Kissinger and his aides reduced the State Department to near irrelevance.

The principal responsibility of the NSC staff is to coordinate the design and execution of U.S. foreign and defense policy. It referees among the powerful departments and agencies, when necessary playing the honest broker to ensure that issues are identified, options framed, arguments heard, decisions reached and tasks carried out.

A second role for the NSC staff is to provide independent counsel to the President; unlike the large executive departments, the small appointed staff can be expected to keep the President's interests central.

At times the staff has assumed a third role: secret diplomacy, such as Henry Kissinger's 1971 efforts to arrange through Pakistan the diplomatic breakthrough with the Peoples Republic of China.

UNTIL RECENTLY, the greatest controversy touching on the NSC staff was the widely held view that its members were often more interested in promoting their own policy preferences than in coordinating those of others. Now, however, this concern has been replaced by a new one: that the NSC staff has carved out a new and fundamentally different role for itself--the conduct of covert operations--and that it has done so in a way that exempts it from not only congressional oversight but that of the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA.

That this should be happening now is not without its irony. The need for a new covert channel is hardly obvious in an administration that has mounted large numbers of secret schemes under CIA auspices. The development is ironic in another sense, as this NSC staff has been widely faulted for not meeting its primary responsibility of effective policy coordination.

In Washington, as in nature, every action tends to elicit an opposite reaction; but unlike nature, political reactions may not be equal. Already there are reports that legislation is being readied to rein in the NSC advisor and his staff. One idea is to prohibit their carrying out covert operations; another would be to require that the NSC advisor and possibly his top aides be made subject to Senate confirmation and make themselves available for congressional hearings, requirements from which they have been exempt as members of the White House staff.

The panel established by President Reagan under the chairmanship of former Senator John Tower would be wise to eschew endorsing such steps. Although responsibility for covert operations properly belongs in normal intelligence channels, formal constraints on the activities of presidental staff could set an undesirable precedent. More important, legislation might have the effect of restricting secret diplomatic efforts that in some circumstances would be in the nation's interest.

Requiring confirmation and testimony would be even worse. Raising the visibility of the NSC advisor would only institutionalize the inevitable friction between this individual and cabinet secretaries, thereby increasing the likelihood the United States would speak with several voices. The capacity of the NSC to act as an honest broker of the policy process would be undermined. And the president would have lost an invaluable source of private advice in this critical policy area.

The Reagan White House can be fairly faulted for not taking these considerations into account before letting loose the NSC. Nevertheless, Congress ought to content itself with informal understandings as to limits upon the NSC's proper role. Public, media and congressional pressures together with the Tower Panel's scrutiny make it all but certain the NSC staff will have no alternative but to revert to its more traditional limited function. Hiring individuals for the staff who understand and accept this is obviously central. Legislating formal, explicit constraints should be avoided. Just as hard cases tend to make bad law, so specific abuses of public trust ought not necessarily prompt reactions either draconian or permanent.

Richard N. Haass is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government and a senior research associate at the Center for Science and International Affairs. He is a former official in the Departments of Defense and State.