CHAPTER 24
Throughout my decades in public life, I have seen personalities come and go, but some degree of friction in the NSC’s processes has remained a constant. In the Nixon administration, I observed then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State Bill Rogers differ over foreign policy before Nixon concluded that the solution was for Kissinger to take Rogers’ place while keeping his post at the NSC. As White House chief of staff, I saw in the Ford administration how the President had to navigate between Kissinger’s détente policy on the one hand and Jim Schlesinger’s (and later, my) concerns about it on the other. The media covered clashes between National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance exhaustively during President Carter’s administration. I also observed the differences between Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger during the Reagan years.
The disagreements were not simply the result of their personalities, though there is generally no shortage of strong views among senior government officials. More often than not, the differences were the almost inevitable result of the differing statutory responsibilities and roles of the various federal departments. Add to those the influences and pressures of the many congressional committees and subcommittees that oversee the executive branch and jealously guard their jurisdictions, interests, and authorities, and friction is created.
Just as there is no single successful model of management in business, there is no single correct model or approach for a president to use to lead his NSC. The optimal system, of course, is the one that works best for each individual president. Some leaders (Ford and Kennedy, for example) preferred to hear discussions and debate personally. Some (Nixon and Reagan) relied somewhat more heavily on memos that set out various options together with arguments pro and con for each suggested approach. Some (Nixon and Clinton) had close relationships with trusted advisers and tended to disfavor larger meetings. Some presidents made a point of staying at the strategic level in policy discussions (Reagan), while others routinely drilled down into minute details (Carter).
Still, there are basic principles and good practices for NSC management that are applicable in most cases. Foremost among these is that the president’s senior advisers understand the National Security Council’s role as well as their duties as members or advisers. The NSC’s task is to mitigate problems that arise from the way our government is organized. Brilliant and farsighted as they were, the Founders of our country created a federal government structure suited to handle eighteenth-century international problems. They established cabinet departments for diplomacy (State), for defense and deterrence (War and Navy), and for finance (Treasury). That was sufficient two centuries ago, when problems in the world generally fell into one of those categories at any given time.
But by the end of World War II, America’s interests and activities around the world could not be categorized distinctly as diplomatic or military. Scholars invented the term “national security” to apply to matters that often combined diplomatic, military, financial, intelligence, law enforcement, and other considerations. In 1947, during the Truman administration, Congress approved the National Security Act, which among other things created the Department of Defense (by merging the War and Navy departments), the CIA, and the National Security Council.
The National Security Act, however, did not abolish the basic eighteenth-century structure of the U.S. government. It recognized that the president, before making decisions about world affairs, should hear not only from the secretaries of state or defense, or from the leadership of any other single department, but rather from the heads of all the relevant offices of the government. Though the National Security Act did not knock down the several major “stovepipes” of diplomatic, military, and financial policy in the U.S. government, it did bend them at the top so that the policy thoughts coming from each would come together in a committee known as the National Security Council. The NSC’s purpose was to help ensure that the president would be able to regularly look at all facets of a complex, multidimensional issue.
If anything, problems in the world since the mid-1940s have become even more intertwined. Most major national security challenges—from terrorism, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), arms proliferation, drug trafficking, piracy, ungoverned spaces to cyberwarfare and threats of and ongoing wars in general—represent intricately combined diplomatic, military, intelligence, economic, and other considerations. The State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice departments, with their distinct competencies and separate statutory responsibilities, are in most instances even less well suited to our national security requirements today than they were when the 1947 act was adopted. For American policy to succeed, multiple agencies of the government have to receive strategic guidance from the president and be required to work together to implement that guidance. This puts a premium on timely, clear instructions and continuous management of the government’s multiple, separate bureaucracies.
The interagency policy process is understandably bumpy in the early days of an administration. The president can make things better by active engagement and by bringing his own views and approaches to bear. The NSC of George W. Bush confronted many hard questions, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The NSC did work of which all its members can be proud. Its chief deficiency, in my view, was not that it sometimes produced imperfect approaches to challenging issues, though it sometimes did. That is to be expected. Rather, in my view the President did not always receive, and may not have insisted on, a timely consideration of his options before he made a decision, nor did he always receive effective implementation of the decisions he made.
By statute, there are four members of the National Security Council: the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense.1 Though not a member of the NSC, the national security adviser and the NSC staff have the role of managing the entire process for the president. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of the CIA also generally serve as advisers to the NSC.* And, of course, at the president’s invitation, others may sit in periodically as well, such as the secretary of the treasury, the attorney general, the director of the FBI, or the White House chief of staff.
During the George W. Bush administration, the NSC generally met in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing. We sat at a wood table, with the President presiding; the national security adviser would chair the committee of principals meetings, which included the same participants as the NSC but without the President. At seats along the walls of the Situation Room were senior NSC staff and often staff members supporting the principals at the table, who would take notes, and on occasion provide support for their principals during the discussions. The small room would often be quite full. One NSC meeting was so brimming with staff along the walls that we joked, “Why don’t we just have our meeting at Sam’s Club?”
George W. Bush conducted NSC meetings without pretension. Though he always demonstrated respect for the office he occupied, he was not formal or officious. He led the discussion, asked questions frequently, sometimes aggressively, often kept his own opinions and views to himself during the discussion, and, when he gave guidance to his team, did so with confidence and authority. He didn’t take kindly to latecomers to his meetings, which, at his insistence, began and ended on time.
Presidents often are caricatured in ways that belie their true qualities. In the case of George W. Bush, he was a far more formidable president than his popular image, which was of a somewhat awkward and less than articulate man. That image was shaped by critics and by satirists, but also by his aw-shucks public personality and his periodic self-deprecation, which he engaged in even in private. His willingness to laugh at himself—and especially to poke at his occasional unsuccessful wrestling bouts with the English language—was a sign of inner comfort and confidence. Bush used humor to ease underlying tensions and was effective at it. In our meetings, I found Bush incisive. He showed insight into human character and, I found, often had an impressive read of the nature and intentions of foreign officials. He was firm without being unfriendly. He asked excellent questions and deftly managed the discussion. Still, NSC meetings with the President did not always end with clear conclusions and instructions.
Vice President Cheney was a thoughtful and influential presence—far more influential than other vice presidents I had observed up close. In contrast to other members of the NSC, the embedded power of the office of the vice president is modest at best. A vice president is not bolstered by a large senior staff and bureaucracy. He does not command a major instrument such as the diplomatic corps or the U.S. armed forces. He does not issue formal intelligence analyses and does not control the law enforcement apparatus of the federal government. He cannot award multimillion-dollar contracts. But Dick Cheney was uniquely influential as a vice president because he thought systematically, did his homework, and presented his ideas with skill, credibility, and timelines.
In general, Cheney tended to keep his counsel during NSC meetings, taking notes quietly. He was the opposite of the often boisterous Nelson Rockefeller and the seemingly disinterested Spiro Agnew. A careful listener, he would sharpen the discussion by asking questions to provide the President and others with additional information or a perspective that had not yet been discussed or possibly considered. His broad experience added considerable value around the conference table.
In meetings, Cheney would not differ with the President, even when he might not have been entirely in agreement. He attached high importance to preserving the President’s options. That argued for keeping any difference of view he might have with the President a private matter between the two of them. Dick did not share with me his private conversations with the President. Nor did I ask about them. The combination of keeping his opinions to himself, and yet being influential, gave Cheney an air of mystery. And for people who concluded that they did not like the substance of his views—or concluded they did not like the views attributed to him by others—this could make him seem to be a negative influence.
I realize that it is hard to overcome a personal bias about a friend I’ve known for more than four decades. But the caricature of Cheney as the man wielding the reins of power, playing his colleagues and even the President as marionettes, is utter nonsense. Perhaps to his detriment, Cheney seemed not to feel a compelling need to rebut the criticism or improve his popularity. In part this was because he was the rare vice president who did not aspire to his boss’ job or seek glory for himself. But what he gave up in not clarifying his views or correcting misinterpretations publicly, he made up for with outsized influence. President Bush knew he could trust Cheney to give him advice that wasn’t colored with any personal or political ambition.
The third full member of the NSC in George W. Bush’s first term was Secretary of State Colin Powell. I had met then Colonel Powell twenty-five years earlier, when as secretary of defense I visited the army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. In the early 1970s, the Army’s officer corps was overwhelmingly white, and Powell proved himself to be a barrier breaker. His poise, confidence, and leadership skills made him one of the Army’s most promising younger officers. I followed his career with interest through the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Powell was reported to have considered the idea of running for president himself in 1996. By that time, he was admired by a great many Americans. I counted myself among them.*
Because of his popularity, Powell brought political heft to a new administration led by a relatively young and untested president. I felt that Powell, with his stature and bipartisan support, might be in a unique position to lead the State Department to serve the President, as Shultz had for Reagan and Kissinger had for Nixon and Ford.
He got off to a fast start in his remarks in Crawford on December 16, 2000, when Bush named him as his nominee for secretary of state. Powell took clear aim at what I believed was one of the most critical national security issues facing the country: the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction.
As much as I applauded Bush’s choice of Powell and Powell’s comments during their first appearance together that December, there was an uneasy subtext to the announcement. The appointment brought to my mind an event that had occurred twenty-six years earlier. In August 1974, hours after Richard Nixon had told the country he would resign the following day, Vice President Gerald Ford went out on the lawn of his Alexandria, Virginia, home and announced that Henry Kissinger would stay on as secretary of state and national security adviser. Like George W. Bush, Ford was facing questions about who he was, the breadth of his foreign policy experience, and even his legitimacy. In Bush’s case, the long circus that was the Florida vote recount had made him the victor of a controversial—and in the eyes of some, an illegitimate—election.
I’m sure Ford and Bush each intended the announcements of their secretaries of state to provide reassurance to the country and to the world. Still, I was concerned that Ford’s announcement made him seem as if he might be dependent on Kissinger, who was much better known. I wondered if Bush might have left a similar impression in the manner he had introduced his nominee for secretary of state. Stressing how impressed he was with Powell’s prominence and prestige, Bush may unintentionally have signaled that he not only wanted Powell, but needed him.
Powell inadvertently reinforced this impression, leading the New York Times to report that, “President-elect George W. Bush stood silently by as the general delivered a discourse on what is in store.”3 “Powell seemed to dominate the President-elect,” the Washington Post observed, “both physically and in the confidence he projected.”4 Columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “[Powell] so towered over the President-elect, who let him answer every question on foreign policy, that it was impossible to imagine Mr. Bush ever challenging or overruling Mr. Powell on any issue.”5
This perceived personal dynamic between the President-elect and the Secretary-designate had the effect, intended or otherwise, of reinforcing a deeper institutional dynamic. Throughout the twentieth century, presidents of both political parties have expressed concern that the State Department at times was less than responsive to guidance from the nation’s elected leadership. The Foreign Service was so mistrusted by President Nixon that he and Henry Kissinger often worked around it. President Reagan, too, faced resistance from within the State Department—often in the form of press leaks that denigrated Reagan’s hard-line and often highly successful policies toward the Soviet Union.6
Over time, I observed that Powell’s relationship with President Bush had its own unique dynamic. Bush had an easygoing manner as a rule, but it was less so in his dealings with Powell. Powell was valued as an adviser and respected as a man of considerable accomplishments, but his department seemed to remain skeptical about President Bush and less than eager to implement his policies.
Some of Powell’s actions fostered an impression that he saw his service in the cabinet as a means of representing the State Department to the President as much as he saw it as representing the President at the State Department. On his first day as secretary of state, Powell announced to the career diplomats of the Foreign Service that he would be their man and representative at the White House.7 One longtime observer of the interagency process was Peter Rodman, who served with me in the Bush administration Defense Department as an assistant secretary of defense. In his excellent book, Presidential Command, he noted, “Where Henry Kissinger and James Baker had come into the building with a determination to impose political direction on the career service, Powell chose to embrace the organization.”8 Though I never saw any firsthand evidence of it in NSC meetings, journalists reported that Powell felt Bush was not sufficiently taking the State Department’s positions into account on issues from North Korea to Iran.9 But, of course, it was also for the State Department, like all executive branch departments and agencies, to take into account the President’s views as well. This is a delicate balance for all cabinet officers. As I was learning at the Pentagon, it was much safer to win support within the department by subordinating one’s views or the views of the President to career officials than to try to reorient an entire department in line with the President’s thinking and his national security priorities.
Powell’s approach was welcomed by career foreign service officers and the media. Journalists from time to time duly characterized the Secretary of State as something of a maverick in the Bush administration, a voice of reason who often spoke out at NSC meetings against proposals favored by the President, the Vice President, and me. Many in Congress came to think this as well. I recall one newspaper article in June 2001 in which Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who worked with the secretary of state, characterized Powell as “the good guy” in the Bush administration and “the only man in America who doesn’t understand he’s a Democrat.” Biden then described me as a “unilateralist” and a “‘movement conservative’ who stands for everything liberal Democrats abhor.” Never sparing with his words, the future vice president declared that if Bush sided with me over Powell, “we’re in deep trouble.”10 Still, I could not resist sending Powell the article with a note attached: “You’ve got a new best friend!”11
The media image of Powell battling the forces of unilateralism and conservatism may have been beneficial to Powell in some circles, but it did not jibe with reality.* The reality was that Powell tended not to speak out at NSC or principals meetings in strong opposition to the views of the President or of his colleagues. This was regrettable since Powell had important experience as a leader in both military and civilian capacities, and headed a major element of America’s national security apparatus. Though the Washington Post among others referred to me as Powell’s “nemesis,” in fact our relationship was professional and cordial.13 Like most cabinet officers, Powell was protective of what he viewed as his department’s prerogatives.
Though Powell and the other members of the NSC received numerous policy memos from me, I rarely received memos from him suggesting approaches or providing insights into his thinking.* In preparation for an NSC meeting on a given topic, routine position papers from departments, including State, often would be made available for discussion. But those memos were largely process-oriented and rarely laid out concrete policy recommendations. I believe that the administration would have benefited had State more often proposed strategies for discussion with the President instead of the anonymous hindsight critiques that appeared from time to time in press accounts and books. Powell’s associates in the State Department seemed to suggest, in lower-level interagency meetings and in press interviews often attributed to “senior administration officials,” that he quite often did not favor the President’s course on a given subject.
The differing cultures of the institutions involved in the National Security Council, and the personalities of the heads who represent them, require deft management by the president and the national security adviser. As I see it, there are three main functions of the adviser: to identify where strategic and policy guidance from the president is necessary or desirable; to organize interagency deliberations so the president can make informed decisions and provide the necessary guidance to his administration; and to oversee the implementation of the president’s decisions, ensuring that they are carried out effectively. Among the core attendees of NSC meetings, only the national security adviser works in the White House and has routine daily access to the president. In that regard, Condoleezza Rice’s closeness to Bush was an asset. She knew the President far better than the rest of us and spent considerably more time with him than all of his other senior advisers on national security combined. Her personal access to and affinity for President Bush gave Rice substantial influence as a national security adviser and an unusually strong voice in matters under the purview of the NSC.
I had been looking forward to working with Rice, having been impressed with her for years. As we came to work together in the Bush administration, however, our differing backgrounds became clear. Rice came from academia. She was a polished, poised, and elegant presence. I decidedly was not. One time Rice and I were sitting together in an NSC meeting, and I was wearing a pinstripe suit—one that I very well might have owned since the Ford administration. The suit was so well used that the pinstripes on the right leg above the knee were worn off. Rice noticed this, frowned, and pointed discreetly at my leg.
Looking down at my suit, I noticed for the first time the missing pinstripes. “Gee,” I whispered to her with a smile, “maybe Joyce can sew them back on.” Condi’s eyes widened.
As encouraged as I was that Rice seemed to enjoy Bush’s trust and confidence, I knew the burdens of the job of national security adviser were taxing for even the most seasoned foreign policy specialist and could be particularly so for someone with modest experience in the federal government and management. Rice was something of an outlier in the Bush NSC in that she had not served in multiple agencies of the government, and while she had served on the NSC staff in the earlier Bush administration, she had not had senior-level experience. But Rice was intelligent, had good academic credentials, and brought a younger person’s perspective to the process. I considered those all qualities from which the administration could benefit.
Rice’s first months in office were a learning experience, however, and foreshadowed challenges for the new administration’s interagency process. Rice seemed keen on setting new precedents as national security adviser. She and her staff did not seem to understand that they were not in the chain of command and therefore could not issue orders, provide guidance, or give tasks to combatant commanders.14 Rice also suggested that she be allowed to personally interview candidates for the combatant commands and the chiefs before the President saw them, and that she approve my official travel. I had no objection to Rice’s attending the President’s interviews with combatant commanders if that was his choice, and I certainly kept the national security adviser and secretary of state informed of my travel plans. I did not, however, accede to either suggestion.
The most notable feature of Rice’s management of the interagency policy process was her commitment, whenever possible, to “bridging” differences between the agencies, rather than bringing those differences to the President for decisions. It’s possible that Rice had developed this approach from her time as a university administrator—as provost at Stanford University—where seeking consensus and mollifying faculty members by trying to find a middle ground are not uncommon. Rice seemed to believe that it was a personal shortcoming on her part if she had to ask the President to resolve an interagency difference. She studiously avoided forcing clear-cut decisions that might result in one cabinet officer emerging as a “winner” and another as a “loser.” By taking elements from the positions of the different agencies and trying to combine them into one approach, she seemed to think she could make each agency a winner in policy discussions.
It may also be that Rice put a premium on harmony among the principals because her exposure to interagency policy making came during the administration of George H. W. Bush. As vice president, the senior Bush had watched as President Reagan’s top national security officials clashed over issues, requiring Reagan to adjudicate their disputes. As president, the senior Bush presided over a smoother interagency process. When she became national security adviser for George W. Bush, I suspect Rice may have been trying to re-create that dynamic.
After a president has made a decision, a senior official has the responsibility to implement it faithfully. The president, after all, has the task of making the call as the elected representative of the American people. If a senior official cannot in good conscience carry out a presidential decision for whatever reason, he or she has the option of resigning.
Lower-level executive branch officials are in a similar situation regarding the heads of their agencies. I expected Defense Department officials to tell me their views, debate with me, and try to persuade me when they believed I might be wrong or misinformed about important matters—right up until a decision was made and it was time to implement. I have always felt that if officials were in the room when substantive issues are discussed, they were there for a reason. I considered it their duty, whether military or civilian, to speak up and voice opinions, even if—especially if—they disagreed with me or with others taking part in the discussion. Even after I made a decision on a matter, I remained open to people in the Department asking me to reconsider, so long as the decision was being implemented in the meantime.
While disharmony is a word that can have a negative connotation, the fact is that a vigorous debate about policy options can be healthy. Out of the occasionally contentious Reagan NSC, for example, came some of the truly important national security decisions produced by a recent U.S. administration. I did not think that any president’s decisions should be taken by his cabinet officials as wins or losses. Interagency deliberations were not like a season of baseball, with the various agencies competing as rival teams and individual scores are kept.
I worked to understand Rice’s approach and to cooperate in her efforts to resolve differences in the principals committee. On some occasions, however, the management of the interagency process created problems that outweighed any benefits that might have come from a bridging approach. On a number of issues—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, China, Arab-Israeli peace talks, and others—Rice would craft policy briefings for the President that seemed to endorse conceptual points one department had advanced, but also would endorse proposals for the way ahead that came from a different department. In other words, one department might “win” on strategy while another might “win” on tactics. For example, in the wake of the Iraq war, those of us in the Defense Department argued that the best way to get Syria to change its sponsorship of terrorists, pursuit of WMD, and sending jihadists into Iraq was to pressure the regime diplomatically. The President agreed to this recommendation. However, the process and tactics were delegated to the State Department, which organized high-level American delegations to Damascus that had a quite different and less than successful result.
This bridging approach could temporarily mollify the NSC principals, but it also led to discontent, since fundamental differences remained unaddressed and unresolved by the President. Indeed, an unfortunate consequence was that when important and controversial issues did not get resolved in a timely manner, they sometimes ended up being argued in the press by unnamed, unhappy lower-level officials. I doubt this would have been the case had the President been asked to make a clear-cut decision. If given an order from the President, most Department officials would have then saluted and carried it out, even if it had not been their recommendation.
I had other issues with Rice’s management of the NSC process. Often meetings were not well organized. Frequent last-minute changes to the times of meetings and to the subject matter made it difficult for the participants to prepare, and even more difficult, with departments of their own to manage, to rearrange their full schedules. The NSC staff often was late in sending participants papers for meetings that set out the issues to be discussed. At the conclusion of NSC meetings when decisions were taken, members of the NSC staff were theoretically supposed to write a summary of conclusions. When I saw them, they were often sketchy and didn’t always fit with my recollections. Ever since the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, NSC staffs have been sensitive to written notes and records that could implicate a president or his advisers. Rice and her colleagues seemed concerned about avoiding detailed records that others might exploit. This came at the expense of enabling the relevant executive agencies to know precisely what had been discussed and decided at the NSC meetings. Attendees from time to time left meetings with differing views of what was decided and what the next steps should be, which freed CIA, State, or Defense officials to go back and do what they thought best.
In one August 2002 memo to Rice, I raised this lack of resolution. “It sometimes happens that a matter mentioned at a meeting is said to have been ‘decided’ because it elicited no objection,” I wrote. “That is not a good practice. Nothing should be deemed decided unless we expressly agree to decide it.”15 Rice started putting a note at the bottom of draft decision memos: “If no objections are raised by a specific deadline, the memo will be considered approved by the principals.” That, too, was impractical. Powell and I were frequently traveling. I did not want to have others assume I agreed with something simply because I missed an arbitrary deadline.16
From 2001 to 2005, I sent Rice a series of memos suggesting ways I thought the NSC process might be strengthened.17 “As we have discussed, the interagency process could be improved to help all of us better manage the high volume of work we have,” I wrote to Rice in August 2002. “I’ve talked with my folks about it to see if we could come up with some ideas that might be helpful.”18 Some of the problems I raised in my memos were administrative and relatively minor but could have resulted in an improvement in efficiency. For example, I noted that we had principals committee meetings on a weekly basis, sometimes two to three meetings a week, at the White House. Unlike the national security adviser, the rest of us—the secretary of state, the director of the CIA, and I—had departments we needed to run. Going to the White House so often was time consuming. If the NSC’s performance was improved, many hours of time each week would be freed up, we would be better prepared, and more meetings would end with concrete decisions.*
No one likes to have his or her style of management questioned. Rice was a person whose general performance over the years had undoubtedly been seen as above reproach. She seemed unaccustomed to constructive suggestions, and not much changed for the better. The core problems the NSC faced resulted from the effort to paper over differences of views.
In his book, Peter Rodman wrote: “[I]t is no small task to provide psychological support to the person on whose shoulders rests the heaviest burden of decision in the world.”20 Throughout the Bush administration, Rice was a regular presence at Camp David and in Crawford, and was almost always the last person the President talked to on any given national security issue. She used that proximity and authority to press for action in the President’s name. But it was not always clear to me when she had been directed by the President to do something or when she simply believed she was acting in the President’s best interest—one could not check every question with the President himself. And one could certainly not fault Rice for being disloyal to the President. I thought it unlikely that Rice was managing the NSC as she did without Bush’s awareness and agreement.
Nonetheless, I always found that in one-on-one situations, Bush was perfectly willing to make a decision even when presented with vexing choices. The bridging approach Rice favored did not take advantage of Bush’s demonstrated willingness to engage in the candid, open, and fair hearing of views I knew he was fully capable of managing. I believe that kind of engagement would have resulted in a more effective NSC process.
This aversion to decisions in favor of one course of action or another—and sometimes in favor of one department or agency over another—ironically led to more disharmony than would have been the case if the President had had an opportunity to make the decisions himself. Rice’s emphasis on bridging and consensus concealed misgivings that were later manifested in leaks to the press. This conveyed to the world an NSC often in less than good order.
Outside observers in the press and partisans have always taken note of and hyped differences within every administration. NSC meetings, some observers wanted to believe, were epic clashes of larger than life characters divided neatly into heroes and villains. Often news stories were reduced to fit the recognizable story line of an opera, a plot with winners and losers, no matter the facts. Our NSC discussions were nothing like what was described by the book chroniclers and so-called experts, none of whom had ever attended an NSC meeting.
In the Bush administration there were some differences over complex, difficult issues, to be sure. This is always how it has been, how it will be, and how it should be. But they were largely substantive differences. Instead of trying to understand the nuances behind the differences, it is considerably easier for nonparticipant observers, pundits, and lower-level staff to try to personalize disagreements that are otherwise abstract and to pigeonhole the cast of characters into a familiar story line. That approach doesn’t require much research, time, or thought—just a vivid imagination. But once the conventional wisdom hardens and the characters are defined in the popular press as good or bad, winners or losers, it is nearly impossible to change it.
The personalities were no more pronounced and the debates were no more epic or intractable in the Bush administration than I had seen in previous administrations. Indeed, if anything, the tensions were noticeably less.
Fashioning national security policies, corralling interagency interests, and ensuring that the departments and agencies responsible for implementing President Bush’s national security policies had clearly defined missions was not an easy task. Surely any inability to achieve this could be tolerable in times of peace. But, as I periodically wondered, could we be quite so tolerant if the United States again faced serious threats to its security? We would soon find out.