In 1968, US forces in Vietnam suffered 14,000 killed in action. The commander of US forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, recommended that the National Security Council (NSC) grant him an additional 206,000 troops. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) chair General Joseph Wheeler whole-heartedly endorsed Westmoreland’s request.

US president Lyndon Johnson called for a time out. He summoned a “council of wise men,” notably Dean Acheson and General Omar Bradley. The “wise men” recommended against further escalation and deployments to Vietnam. Westmoreland was offered an additional 13,500 troops, whereupon he resigned. Then President Johnson effectively resigned, bemoaning how the Vietnam War had prevented him from fulfilling his domestic agenda. Later, it was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s turn to fall upon his sword.

Peace talks between Washington and Hanoi began May 13, 1968 in Paris. The NSC called on Averell Harriman to negotiate them out of the war with some modicum of dignity. Harriman had been an “Ambassador at Large” prior to becoming head of the US peace conference in Paris. His main project had been trying to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

“From the outset of my administration,” Richard Nixon later recalled of his presidency, “I planned to direct foreign policy from the White House. Therefore, I regarded my choice of National Security Adviser as crucial.” He chose Henry Kissinger.

Nixon didn’t trust the State Department. Within days of his inauguration he signed National Security Memorandum 2 abolishing the only inter-departmental NSC group chaired by the State Department. He transferred NSC-report screening to Kissinger. The clearing of presidential directives to embassies was also transferred from State to the NSC. Nixon deliberately appointed an inexperienced William Rogers to run State and didn’t invite Rogers to important foreign visits and receptions.

By the early 1970s, Kissinger, with Nixon’s blessing, had bypassed State in formulating, implementing and enunciating US foreign policy. Nixon let others within the NSC know that Kissinger had been delegated broad powers and would be allowed to operate from the President’s office. Most infuriating to the State Department was Kissinger’s practice of meeting foreign ambassadors directly, including private meetings with key figures such as Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. With the assistance of CIA director Richard Helms, Kissinger created back channels whereby Nixon could confer with the likes of the ambassador from Israel or Chinese leader Chou en Lai without State Department consent or eavesdropping.

Kissinger expanded his personal staff from 12 to 34, positioning them antennae-like within relevant US federal government departments. Kissinger preferred the Eisenhower-style NSC. On average, it took 10 inter-departmental meetings to generate one report for the NSC staffers to look at. They, in turn, gave the report five goings over before presenting it to the NSC proper.

In February 1969, the secret war on Cambodia was approved by the president at a special Pentagon breakfast meeting attended by Nixon, Kissinger, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Operation Breakfast” began March 9, 1969 with 48 square miles of inhabited sovereign Cambodian territory bombed carpet flat by B-52s.

The war was “secret” only to Americans. The day following the bombing, the Royal Government of Cambodia issued a formal complaint detailing the destruction, including the names of some of the killed. This information was disbursed by news services around the world. JCS Chair Earle Wheeler instructed US military public relations people to merely repeat that the US Air Force was conducting operations near the Cambodian border, but not inside the country. They were instructed to appear to take the questions seriously and promise to look into the matter further. During the next few years, over 3,600 B-52 bombing sorties were flown over this defenceless country, with each plane dropping fifty 2,000 lb bombs.

In 1970, Nixon appointed a “Blue Ribbon Defence Panel” to review the nation’s defence system. The panel was sharply critical of the McNamara legacy. A small purge of McNamara’s men followed. They were replaced by brass hats from Army and Navy intelligence.

In September 1973, Nixon responded to establishment criticism about the NSA (and Kissinger) having usurped the State Department by simply appointing Kissinger to run the State Department as well. Even Kissinger disapproved of combining the NSA position with Secretary of State. He was required to formally “change hats” when dealing with the president, first making a State Department recommendation, and then doing an NSA critique thereof.

In late 1973, during the Watergate Crisis, Congress made a bold effort to reign in the “imperial presidency” with the War Powers Resolution. The Resolution required the President to consult with Congress prior to committing US forces abroad, report to Congress within 48 hours of any emergency deployment, and within 60 days of any such deployment with either a formal request for a declaration of war, or a deployment-extension. Nixon vetoed it. Congress re-passed it with sufficient support to over-rule the president’s veto. At the same time Congress explicitly cut off funding for the bombing of Cambodia. By this time, American forces were almost completely withdrawn from Vietnam.

The failure to stay the course in Indo-China was but one part of a parcel of “détente” policies that were Nixon’s undoing. The definitive history of the removal of Nixon from office, with its secret tapes and back-room blackmails, has yet to be written, but to many, “Watergate” appears to have been a silent coup orchestrated by anti-détente elements within the US oligarchy and military, particularly the US Navy. “Scoop journalist” Bob Woodward was indubitably an officer in Naval Intelligence. His bosses, Admiral’s Paul M Weyrich and Thomas H Moorer, and later the imperious, arch-conservative media heiress Katherine Graham (Washington Post and Newsweek), were no fans of “peaceful co-existence” with Red China or Stalinist Russia.

There was considerable media and Congressional pressure on President Gerald Ford to sack Kissinger and return to a State Department-led NSC process. Ford bided his time because of concerns of a rough transition and due to his own inexperience in foreign affairs. He kept Kissinger on as Secretary of State but replaced him as NSA with Air Force Lt General Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger had a train of professional underlings follow him over to State where they carried on as before. Kissinger was winning the ear of Ford, and Scowcroft never challenged anything Kissinger did.

Ford chose Donald Rumsfeld as his Chief of Staff. Hence “Rummy” was part of the famous “Halloween massacre” (October 31, 1975) when the heads of the Defence Department and the CIA were suddenly fired, followed by a purge of 1,000 foreign policy-involved US federal government employees. But détente still was not dead.

Finally, on January 21 1976, a NSC meeting was called while Kissinger was in Moscow finalizing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Rumsfeld, then Defence Secretary, helped organize the meeting but didn’t attend. Scowcroft described the atmosphere as “surreal.” The JCS Chair, Air Force General Stanford E Brown, told Ford bluntly that all military services and the Defence Department were forthwith publicly withdrawing support from the SALT process. Ford was furious, angrier than anyone had seen him get. To make matters worse, Brown then marched out to a media scrum where he stuck both combat boots in his mouth rambling at length about what a “burden” Israel had become, about what an ambitious “imperialist” the Shah of Iran was, about how “pathetic” the British military was, and on and on. Rumsfeld didn’t fire Brown, as many thought he was obliged to do, but he did force him to read an apology. Brown kept his job. Kissinger didn’t.

Kissinger’s reflection on the NSC process is that the president becomes encircled by “self-serving bastards” who fight for the president’s ear so as to advance their constituency’s interests. What matters is not any administrative protocol within the NSC system nor what title the “bastard” holds. “Influence” according to Kissinger “derives almost exclusively from the confidence of the president.”

Rookie NSCer Rumsfeld was a “highly-organized, highly political personality and master bureaucrat who pushed hard for spending increases, advocated a military hard-line against the Soviets, and was quick to give unvarnished opinion to the president.” As one deputy NSA recalled, “ The more Rumsfeld took hold, the more he turned hard right.” Rumsfeld focused on increasing defence spending, particularly on the Air Force and Navy wish list (B-1 bombers, cruise missiles, and ship-building). Conversely, he angered the Army by using bureaucratic manipulation to delay tank production. Rumsfeld persuaded Ford to hold a series of White House luncheons for church and labour leaders pitching the virtues of increased defence spending.

In 1977, Rumsfeld clashed repeatedly with CIA Director George Bush Sr at NSC meetings. At issue were conflicting intelligence estimates as to Soviet military strength. Rumsfeld went to bat for more defence spending by favouring estimates exaggerating the Soviet threat. The CIA’s more scientific estimates arrived at lesser numbers.

US President Jimmy Carter believed the NSC had grown too powerful and was shielding the president from the necessary range of competing foreign policy options. Carter was quick to cut the NSC staff by half and reduce the number of standing committees from eight to two. In Carter’s four years he attended only ten NSC meetings.

The NSC’s main policy committee met irregularly under a regime whereby the chairperson was chosen from whichever Department had the greatest expertise on the meeting’s main agenda item. However, another group, the “Special Coordinating Committee” (SCC), met religiously every week and pressed the president’s agenda. Carter chose Trilateral Commission director Zbigniew Brzezinski as his NSA. Brzezinski chaired the SCC meetings and used this position to steer the NSC. The principal concern of both Carter and his NSA was arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. As such, the SCC, even though it was primarily attended by deputies, became the main cabal behind Carter’s foreign policy.

Carter resurrected the “classic” NSC as the “Friday Breakfast Club.” This group, consisting of the president, the vice president, NSA, and Secretaries of State and Defence, met for breakfast every Friday for informal chats. Brzezinski kept notes at these meetings and 159 times converted the table talk into acted-upon foreign policy directives. One Friday, the Breakfast Club table banter became so confused and animated they sent the diametrically wrong voting instructions to the US Ambassador to the UN, leading to an embarrassing retraction.

Carter’s NSC was a house divided. Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State, tangled relentlessly with Brzezinski. Brzezinski, like Kissinger, developed a close working relationship with his Soviet counterpart, circumventing diplomatic protocol. Brzezinski was quick to elbow his way onto the talking-head television circuit and, like Kissinger, usurped the president’s role as US foreign policy enunciator. He traveled to China as a Presidential Emissary. Brzezinski had all outgoing State Department cables re-routed through his office for screening.

More substantively, Brzezinski was insistent on linking arms control negotiations with issues such as human rights in the Soviet bloc while Vance wanted no such linkage. Regarding Iran, Brzezinski thought Carter should have done more to thwart Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini’s consolidation of power, while Vance argued for a quick coming to terms with the new regime.

They blamed each other for the loss of Afghanistan, with Vance saying Brzezinski’s insistence on linkage drove the Soviets out of the discussion room, while Brzezinski complained the NSA’s efforts to warn of the impending invasion were checked by the State Department.

After repeated clashes, Brzezinski browbeat Vance from the room. Vance resigned at an embarrassing time for Carter, who then publicly despaired his arms control efforts as a waste. Appearing completely adrift in foreign policy, Carter confronted the “NSC-68-and-beyond” Reaganauts in the 1980 election, with predictable results.

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