THE 'CHAOS' IN THE DEPTHS OF FOGGY BOTTOM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605670001-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: June 23, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/04/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605670001-0
ARTI"LE AUEARED
ON PAG , PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
. 23 June 1985
The 'chaos' in the depths
of Foggy Bottom
SECRETS OF STATE
The State Department and the
Struggle Over U.S. Foreign Policy
Barry Rubin
Oxford University Press. 33S pp. $25
Reviewed by
Nils H. Wessell
Barry Rubin, a respected young scholar at
Georgetown University before becoming a fel-
low at the Council on Foreign Relations, ar-
gues that the greatest secret of state is how
decisions are made and implemented. He con-
tends that the policymaking process, mysteri-
ous to the public but familiar to insiders,
conceals a crisis in both the form and sub-
stance of American foreign policy.
Rubin sketches a policymaking process dom-
inated by chaos since the Franklin D. Roose-
velt era. We have experienced distracted presi-
dents, backbiting within administrations,
institutional rivalries among State and De-
fense Departments, the CIA and the White
House staff, and constant interference by con-
gressional interlopers, the latter determined
not to be burned by another foreign interven-
tion and committed to making the news out of
a deep conviction that the national interest
requires their re-election. Mixed into the proc-
ess is a public that wants a strong America but
disapproves of economic ties and military as-
sistance to unsavory but friendly regimes.
It is to calm this whirling vortex of political
confusion that most presidents since Dwight
D. Eisenhower have increasingly bolstered the
authority of their national security advisers.
As Rubin sees it, the result has been a series o1
international traumas that make Little Big-
horn look like a triumph for Gen. George
Custer.
Aside from ritual (and mutually exclusive,
appeals for the president to % Ad disputes"
while conducting "free-wheeling discussions,"
Rubin himself seems to be of two minds as to a
solution. One is to elevate the StateFDepert-
ment to the role of Primus inter pares (first
reaucratic cookie-pushing. Worst of all, the
State Department's natural "constituency" of
foreigners lacks clout. Unlike the potent clien-
tele of farmers who undergird the Department
of Agriculture, State's foreigners don't vote.
At other points in his balanced narrative, the
author stresses that any organizational frame-
work has its shortcomings and that structure
must "correspond to the needs and abilities of
different presidents and subordinates." Presi-
dents since FDR have almost always stressed
their need for direct White House leadership
in foreign affairs. FDR himself humiliated
Secretary of State Cordell Hull for 11 years and
relied on Hull's deputy and his own aide, Harry
Hopkins.
But the decisive question, I think, is whether
greater reliance on the career professionals in
the State Department is the right antidote to
bureaucratic chaos and bad policy. For one
thing, State's preoccupation with the daily rou-
tine of diplomacy ill equips it for the principal
task of American foreign policy: the definition
and pursuit of a national strategy to advance
this country's interests and values in the
world.
Nor can Foreign Service officers, who spend
much of their careers abroad, mobilize the
domestic support that any overall national
strategy requires. It is not accidental that the
White House, its national security affairs staff
and political appointees throughout the agen-
cies are better positioned to establish the presi-
dent's political priorities and to implement
them in accord with the electoral mandate that
any president's incumbency represents. You
can rely on the bureaucracy for advice and
warning, but priorities must flow downward
from elected leaders and their trusted political
confidants.
Certainly the familiar debacles of the last 2S
years, from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion to
the fall of Saigon in 1975, paint a dismal por-
trait. But ignoring the success of American
foreign policy invites fascination with failure.
The same government that brought us the
prolonged humiliation of the Iranian hostage
among equals) in the policymaking process. crisis and the Marines as sitting ducks in
For President Reagan, as for Jimmy Carter, Lebanon also led to the successful resolution
Rubin seems to think that what has been of the Cuban missile crisis and the restoration
needed is a heavy dose of State Department of freedom to the grateful citizens of an in.
primacy - for Carter because he was indeci- creasingly Cubanized Grenada. While these
sive, and for Reagan because he is uninvolved. failures were not exclusively those of the State
But for decades, as Rubin's account makes Department, the successes were the result of
clear, the Foreign Service officers at Foggy. presidential leadership, a juxtaposition that
Bottom have been bogged down in a morass Of suggests just how tenuous a brief for State
position papers, committee meetings and bn Department primacy may be.
In politics, as in love, timing is everything.
Perhaps it is the misfortune of this book.
detailing the inside story of how policy is
made, that it follows hard on the heels of two
blockbusters published in recent months.
Strobe Talbott's Deadly Gambits is a tenden-
tious indictment of the Reagan administra.
tion's arms-control policymaking; Arkady
Shevchenko's Breaking With Moscow provides
an inside look at the byzantine process of
Soviet foreign policymaking.
For academic readers familiar with the older
works of Morton Halperin, Graham Allison,
1. M. Destler and various prominent memoir
writers, the present volume, for all its scope in
surveying secrets of state from FDR to Reagan,
will' add little new. Like an oft-told tale that
improves in the telling but excites barely
suppressed yawns from loyal family listeners,
Secrets of State earns our respect as an exam-
ple of the genre but fails to break new ground.
Mls IL Wes" Is director of the Foreign
Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia The
insdWe i Orbis, a quarterly journal of
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/04/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605670001-0