To the mind of President John F Kennedy, the need to restructure the National Security Council was obvious. During the Eisenhower administration, NSC meetings grew so large they lacked the confidentiality and collegiality the NSC architects had originally intended. Kennedy reduced the NSC staff to 49, of which only 12 were substantive positions. He also relaxed NSC supervision over inter-departmental working groups.

Kennedy named close associate and bureaucratic expert McGeorge Bundy his “National Security Advisor” (inaurgurating the first use of the “NSA” title). Bundy was scrupulously fair when presenting the views of others to the President even when he disagreed with them. He never offered unsolicited advice to the president. Kennedy made sure Bundy attended NSC meetings. He also revitalized the NSC's clandestine operations committee and made Bundy its chair. Bundy invigorated his highly professional NSC staff with an esprit d' corps. They perceived their mission to be to provide good information to the president and shield him from the bad information coming out of the Departments of State and Defence. They also followed-up on NSC meetings to see to it that recalcitrant bureaucracies adhered to the president's decisions.

The Bay of Pigs invasion led to the formation of the NSC's “situation room.” The first “sit-room” was located next to Bundy's office in the West Wing of the White House. The “sit-room” was like Eisenhower's “5412 Committee” crisis management centre, only more high-tech. The room was wired with direct telephone, and where possible television, in addition to hook-ups with the global communications networks of the CIA, State and Defence Departments. Critics complained, after the Bay of Pigs, that Bundy was using the NSC bureaucracy and the “sit-rooms” to create a “little State Department” of his own.

Kennedy only attended formal NSC meetings once a month. Much NSC work was done in various weekly meetings of department heads and guests chaired and organized by the State Department. Critics complained senior State Department officials were using the weekly meetings to form “a little NSC” of their own.

Over at the Defence Department, Robert McNamara, seeking to centralize military intelligence, created the “Defence Intelligence Agency” (DIA) in 1961, to give him a window on the sprawling US intelligence community. He later created the “Office of International Security Affairs” (ISA), answerable to himself, and staffed by heavyweights like Paul Warnke and Paul Nitze. Critics complained he was using the ISA and DIA to “create a little State department” of his own.

Kennedy relied on big names and point men. General Maxwell Taylor was selected to be his “Leahy”—that is, his presidential confidante, in-house military expert, and liaison between the president and the military elite. Averill Harriman was named special assistant for Far Eastern Affairs. Dean Acheson was “our-man-in-Berlin” during the Berlin Crisis. His choice for Defence Secretary (Robert McNamara) was formerly the Ford Motor Company President.

In 1961, General Taylor and Bundy's understudy, Walter Rostow, conducted a fact-finding mission to Vietnam, later recommending increased US presence in the region. In May 1961, Kennedy sent 400 Green Berets to assist Montanard tribesmen in Vietnam's central highlands. These troops supplemented a small force sent to Vietnam by the Eisenhower administration in the late 1950s. By late 1962, 9,000 US personnel were deployed in Vietnam.

The Cuban Missile Crisis spawned a new committee, “Excom”. Excom consisted of core, statutory NSC members who received presentations from only the CIA Director or the Treasury Secretary. Excom, basically a re-make of the 1949 NSC, met 42 times between October 1962 and March 1963. Excom's pre-occupation was with Cuba. Kennedy gave Excom a small budget that financed the writing of a prodigious 120 reports during the president's remaining months in office. However, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy disregarded advice from Excom (and from the formal NSC) when he agreed to remove missiles from Turkey to resolve the confrontation.

Kennedy's inability to stick to the program during the Cuban Missile Crisis and his reticence about escalating the Indo-China campaign, isolating as these decisions were, were not as egregious as was his calling off US Air Force support during the Bay of Pigs invasion which violated not only NSC-68 but also the generations-old Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and thus effectively signed his own death warrant. Probably several NSCers, contemporaries of Kennedy and later, either had foreknowledge of his assassination or participated in the subsequent cover-up.

Johnson didn't like NSC meetings but found use for the NSC bureaucracy and for Bundy. Johnson complained the NSC was “not a live institution, not suited for precise debate for the sake of decision.” He further complained that, regarding clandestine operations, NSC meetings were too large and “they leaked like sieves.” He said his key colleagues “never get into much discussion (at NSC meetings) with so many people sitting around the room.”

Johnson sought to de-bureaucratize policy-making and keep discussion private and informal. He discontinued Kennedy's National Security Action Memorandums and met the formal NSC once or twice a month and not at all near elections. He kept Bundy until 1966 before replacing him with Walter Rostow who continued the institution of “National Security Advisor”, that is, a multi-purpose foreign policy servant of the president. Johnson treated the NSC bureaucracy as his private intelligence fiefdom.

In February 1964, Johnson became so exasperated with the formal NSC process he invited key Department heads to lunch on Tuesdays to chat. Before long these meetings, famous for their collegiality and candor, were regularly attended by the CIA Director, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, and the Secretaries of State and Defence. LBJ must have choked on his chicken sandwich when he realized he had accidentally reconstituted the statutory NSC. The “Tuesday Lunch Club” met 160 times during his administration and became the principal forum where much official business of the world's dominant superpower was conducted.

Meanwhile, NSA Rostow began steering the NSC in a new direction. To Rostow's crowd, the president and the statutory NSC members were “the-crisis-of-the-month-club.” Like previous administrations, Johnson's became absorbed with putting out fires, the first being the Six Day War. Also, like previous administrations, Johnson's created an emergency committee for conducting presidential brinksmanship. For months, his emergency committee was narrowly focussed on the Middle East. To oppose this trend, Rostow wished to steer the formal NSC and its capable staff toward more “big picture,” long-range planning issues.

In June 1964, Johnson appointed West Point Commandant General William Westmoreland to take over military operations in Vietnam. On July 31, the US Navy shelled an island in Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf. On August 3, US warships returned to this Gulf and were confronted by hostile torpedo boats. On August 5, USS Maddox submitted a false report of an attack in the same area. Immediately, the US Navy bombarded several Vietnamese maritime facilities in retaliation. On August 7, the House of Representatives voted 416 to zero, and the Senate 98 to 2, to pass the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” giving Johnson a free military hand in Vietnam. By the end of 1964, Westmoreland had 23,000 troops in the theatre. A year later, there were 184,000. By December 1966, the number of US troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000. There was never a formal declaration of war.

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