Thirteen Days (11 page)

As early as the National Security Act of 1947, we formally acknowledged the close ties of foreign, military, economic policy; these ties had been rendered very plain by World War II experience. But in pre-Korean War years when the Marshall Plan was on its own, when CIA was new, when military aid programs were hardly heard of, while atom bombs were ours alone, and military budgets stood at under $15 billion, a Secretary of Defense could forbid contacts between Pentagon and State at any level lower than his own, and, within limits, could enforce his ban. That happened no longer ago than 1949. In bureaucratic terms it is as remote as the Stone Age.

While operations now have been entangled inextricably, our formal organizations and their statutory powers and the jurisdictions of Congressional committees remain much as ever: distinct, disparate, dispersed. Our personnel systems are equally dispersed. In the national security complex alone, we have at least seven separate professional career systems—military included—along with the general civil service, which to most intents and purposes is departmentalized.

These days few staffs in any agency can do their work alone without active support or at least passive acquiescence from staffs outside, in other agencies, often many others. Yet no one agency, no personnel system is the effective boss of any other; no one staff owes effective loyalty to the others. By and large, the stakes which move men's loyalties—whether purpose, prestige, power, or promotion—run to one's own program, one's own career system, along agency lines, not across them.

These developments place premiums on interstaff negotiations, compromise, agreement in the course of everybody's action. This invokes the horrors of committee work: the wastes of time, the earstrain—and the eyestrain—the “papering over” of differences, the search for lowest common denominators of agreement. But given the realities of programming and operations, interagency negotiation cannot be avoided. To “kill” committees is at most to drive them underground. Officials have to find at best an informal equivalent. What else are they to do?

One other thing they can do is push their pet issues up for argument and settlement at higher levels. Once started on this course, there is no very satisfactory place to stop short of the White House. In logic and in law, only the Presidency stands somewhat above all agencies, all personnel systems, all staffs. Here one can hope to gain decisions as definitive as our system permits; Congressional committees may be able to supplant them, special pleaders may be able to reverse them, foot draggers may be able to subvert them—even so, they are the surest thing obtainable.

Accordingly, officials urged to show initiative, to quit logrolling in committee, to be vigorous in advocacy, firm in execution, turn toward the White House seeking from it regular, reliable, consistent service as a fixed and constant court
of arbitration for the national security complex. This means, of course, a court which knows how courts behave and does not enter cases prematurely.

Their need for such a service is unquestionable and legitimate. To flounder through the mush of “iffy” answers, or evasions; to struggle through the murk of many voices, few directives; to fight without assurance of a referee; to face Capitol Hill without assurance of a buffer; or on the other hand, to clean up after eager amateurs, to repair damage done by ex parte proceedings; to cope with happy thoughts in highest places—these are what officialdom complains of, and with reason. For the work of large-scale enterprises tends to be disrupted by such breaches of “good order” and routine. Not bureaucrats alone but also Presidents have stakes in the effectiveness of the Executive bureaucracy. From any point of view, officials surely are entitled to want White House service in support of their performance.

But if a President should give this service to their satisfaction, what becomes of him? While he sits as the judge of issues brought by others—keeping order, following procedure, filing decisions, clearing dockets—what happens to his personal initiative, his mastery of detail, his search for information, his reach for control? What happens to his own concerns outside the sphere of national security? In short, where is the flexibility he needs to make himself the master of decisions for which he alone remains politically accountable?

To a degree—a large degree—the needs of any President and those of “his” officialdom are incompatible. Rarely can both be served alike. Usually one suffers as the other benefits. The missile crisis seems a rarity in just this sense. But probably it would not seem so had it lasted for another week.
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Since World War II our government has often tried to square the circle of this incompatibility by tinkering with structure. Alternately, efforts have been made to tighten up procedures for official consultation and to loosen their constraints upon the White House. Sometimes efforts of both sorts have been made at once, with contradictory consequences. Each Administration has begun by altering the structure it inherited to cure a “weakness” in its predecessor's practice as observed from the outside or from below. The National Security Council, created by act of Congress in 1947, has been called Secretary of Defense James Forrestal's revenge on Franklin Roosevelt for the latter's quite incurable and sometimes costly tendency to keep all threads in his own hands, or anyway in no one else's. The subordinate committee structure Eisenhower later sponsored—the Planning Board and Operations Coordinating Board—was said to be a cure-all for alleged disorder under Truman. Kennedy's abrupt dismantling of that structure was regarded as essential to unleash the human energies locked up inside its “paper mill.” Nixon now “restores” a somewhat comparable structure, ending the “excesses” of the Johnson White House, but he ties it to a presidential staff more formidable in numbers and in jurisdiction than his predecessors ever had employed.

So goes the tinkering with structure. None of it thus far has obviated the uncomfortable fact that Presidents rarely are better served than when officials are frustrated, and vice versa.

In terms of structure, Kennedy's most sophisticated contribution was his refusal to continue the Ex Comm once the missile crisis passed its peak. Reportedly he saw it as an indispensable piece of machinery for a crisis-time, indispensable because so flexible and so removed from vested rights or
interests. Its use at any other time would vitiate those qualities. Thus he ordered it disbanded, to the dismay of some members, and the very term “Ex Comm” was barred from current use. In this, although not consciously, he followed Truman's practice at the outbreak of the Korean War.

Kennedy's decision to disband the Ex Comm is expressive of the underlying dilemma. There appear to be no ways whereby a President can be assured routinely, at all times and places, of the information and control he needs while simultaneously assuring to officials the hearings, the due process, the appeals, and the forbearance they require of the White House. Even at the farthest remove from routine, the missile crisis above all, these two assurances seem barely, temporarily compatible. Yet risks of rule lie quite as much in bureaucratic momentum as in presidential misjudgment. Frustrated, uncomprehending bureaucrats can be as much a danger to us all, and to a President, as faults in his own knowledge, or his judgment, or his temperament. The check and balance system we encounter in the Missile Age does not appear to check or balance its destructive hazards. Rather, it may readily enlarge them. For this there is no help in sight from any source except the human qualities of prudence, luck, and fortitude displayed in 1962 by fourteen men for thirteen days.

A C
ONSTITUTIONAL
I
SSUE
?

Our Constitution is a product of the eighteenth century. Its authors were men of the Enlightenment and also men of action: political philosophers—mostly at secondhand—with firsthand practical experience. They were intensely conscious of the
paradox of rulership
as manifested by the course of history up to their time. On the one hand, the common good
required that political power be placed in some human hands. Only by yielding considerable discretion to a central public authority could citizens secure the common defense, law, order, or personal liberties. But on the other hand, to establish a powerful public authority was to create enormous risks of the misuse of power. As so often before, the rulers, being human and thus fallible, might choose unwisely, or might implement their choices clumsily, at awful cost. Our Constitution makers aimed at an effective central government, else they would not have come to Philadelphia. But they sought to minimize the risks.

The product of their work had four distinctive features. One of these was limited authority: the federal Bill of Rights and its state counterparts were meant to wall off civil liberties, including private property, from arbitrary governmental action. A second feature was shared powers: federal and state governments had overlapping functions, and within the federal structure, so did President, House, Senate, Supreme Court. A third feature was separated institutions: each power-sharing body had a separate base of political accountability, hence constituency, and these were kept distinct from one another. A fourth feature was legitimation by the symbols of popular sovereignty: the people replaced the monarchy, and this was done in such a way as to clothe institutions with their status, while yielding little to direct democracy.

Throughout, the underlying theme was checks and balances: rights hedging authority, powers checking powers, separate institutions in enforced collaboration, with political accountability divided and legitimacy dispersed. No man was entrusted with unlimited prerogatives; neither was the mob. Instead, a goodly group of men, each with a piece of power, backed by a constituency, would scrutinize each other, bal
ancing each other, as they tried to fit their pieces into governance. Thus human failings might be cancelled out.

Then as now the ultimate expression of authority was war, and there this general pattern was applied with special care. The model evidently was the English royal prerogative as modified by Parliament's control over the purse. Our Constitution-makers modified it further. Congress as a substitute for Parliament would also declare war. The Senate as a parliamentary body was to share in making treaties of alliance or of peace. Our President, as substitute for King, had no prerogative to do these things alone. What he retained, alone, was actual command of such armed forces as Congressional enactments gave him leave to raise and keep. It thus was the intention that recourse to war required a
collaborative
judgment by the whole body of men in national elective office. Presidents could not declare war, congressmen could not deploy the troops. On this as on all lesser issues, these men were to check and balance one another.

Yet from the start of our development under the Constitution, Presidents have sent troops into battle without declarations of war. This has occurred quite regularly since Thomas Jefferson dispatched marines against the Barbary pirates.
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Moreover, of the conflicts known to us as “wars,”
three of the four most costly—measured by both life and money—have been undeclared: the Civil War, the Korean War, and now Vietnam. Had war begun in October 1962, its aftermath, perforce, would also have been undeclared.

The Civil War began, in Northern eyes, as a rebellion. In 1861, when South Carolina seized Fort Sumter, Congress was out of session with its Southerners beyond recall. Korea and Vietnam, however, are another matter: both were foreign wars and both began when Congress was in session. In 1950 and in 1965 the Presidents concerned did not apply to Congress. Instead they used their own command authority to send forces into war without a declaration. So did Nixon when our forces crossed the border of Cambodia. So would Kennedy have done, it seems, had there been a third week of crisis over Cuba.

Thirteen Days
affords us many clues as to why modern Presidents have shied away from Congress in making decisions about war. One clue is
secrecy
. Before announcing the first step in his response, Kennedy could not disclose to anyone who lacked a rigid “need to know” what the U-2 had discovered. Had the discovery been widely known within the government, it would have leaked out. Had it leaked; the Administration's diplomatic initiative, achieved by making a countermove when unmasking Soviet duplicity, would have been lost. As it turned out, this was perhaps the best kept secret in American history. But only barely. By Saturday, James Reston of the
New York Times
had the story. A phone call from the President to his editor was necessary to delay the story until after the White House announcement.

A second clue is
flexibility
. It took extraordinary care and subtlety to find the “right” first-step response to Soviet mis
siles. Equal care was needed to design that step so that it signaled our intention to the Soviets, specified clearly what we wanted of Khrushchev, and left Kennedy poised for the next round. In that process, he could not commit himself to anyone without forfeiting maneuver room in dealing with Khrushchev.

Third, flexibility is compounded by
uncertainty
. Soviet intentions were the riddle to be read. These did not declare themselves with any blinding light like the Japanese attack in 1941. Uncertainty is compounded by
complexity
. To marshall our own forces and deploy them, and control them, to persuade our allies; to inform a hundred other governments through the United Nations; to say enough, but not too much in public; meanwhile trying to communicate effectually with Moscow—all this was to load a staggering burden on men already encumbered by innumerable governmental tasks. Finally, everything is compounded by
time
. Everything had to be done almost at once, under the relentless pressure of contemporary technology. Dispatch was of the essence.