WHEN GEORGE HERBERT Walker Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 1989, as the forty-first president of the United States, many observers assumed that he would more or less continue the policies of the eight years of the Reagan administration. Instead, Bush and his advisers took office with a chip on their shoulder. They were determined not to be seen as mere stand-ins for a third-term Reagan presidency.
Like most presidents and vice presidents, Reagan and Bush had never been especially close. Bush wasn’t one of Reagan’s longtime California friends, and he was never invited to the presidential residence during their eight years together. Neither did Bush have the deepest respect for Reagan; according to one published account, Bush viewed Reagan as “kind of foolish and simplistic on many issues,” and as someone “who needed to be watched.” So the transition from President Reagan to his former vice president may have been a “friendly takeover,” but it was a takeover nonetheless.2
The newly appointed national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, went out of his way to make that point abundantly clear. He told Reagan’s national security advisor, General Colin Powell, to let everyone on the NSC staff know they shouldn’t plan on staying in office.3 The same went for other incumbent Reagan appointees. Scowcroft was at pains to demonstrate in “every way [he] could,” he said, that it was a new administration.
George H. W. Bush’s troubles with the Republican right started here, the historian Russell Riley suggests, with Bush’s dismissive treatment of Reagan’s appointees.4 The transition struck some as abrupt. Defense secretary Frank Carlucci and Secretary of State George Shultz, for instance, both thought they and their colleagues had been dismissed harshly and treated callously without proper recognition of their contributions, given that Carlucci and Powell had revived the NSC process after six years of neglect by Richard Allen and his successors.5
For his part, Scowcroft hadn’t appreciated Shultz’s handling of the MX ICBM deal. For these and other reasons, Scowcroft, Bush, and Baker treated Shultz with “remarkable frostiness” over their four years in office—and “frosty doesn’t begin to describe it,” Elliott Abrams commented. “They completely excluded Shultz,” even though he had served as President Reagan’s secretary of state for six and a half years.6
The Bush team wanted to reevaluate thoroughly what Shultz had done. Just as with other presidential transitions, even intraparty transitions like Kennedy-Johnson or Roosevelt-Truman, the new administration wanted to establish its own brand. So almost immediately after taking office, Scowcroft directed the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the CIA, and other relevant agencies to conduct thorough, independent reviews of US policies with respect to strategic weapons, arms control, conventional forces, economics, human rights, and areas such as South Asia, Arab-Israeli relations, the Persian Gulf, among others—especially the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
Little did anyone know that 1989 would turn out to be an extraordinary year in world history. If someone on the twentieth of January, 1989, had predicted that in just one year all of Eastern Europe would be liberated and the Warsaw Pact would be obsolete, Robert Gates later remarked, that “person would have been confined to a loony bin.”7 The fast-moving events in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, the progress in arms control, and the growing economic and financial challenges facing the Soviet Union created their own momentum, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Germany reunited less than a year later, and by Christmas Day, 1991, the Soviet Union no longer existed. But these events were still in the unforeseeable future when George Bush and his team set about making plans for a fresh approach to foreign affairs during the 1988–1989 presidential interregnum.
Bush began by assembling a high-powered team. His first action as president-elect, announced on November 8, 1988, the day after his election, was to choose Thomas Pickering as the UN ambassador, thus signaling the value the new administration placed on the United Nations and career foreign service officers.8
At the same time, he named James A. Baker III his secretary of state. Baker had been a US Marine, was an extraordinarily able and successful attorney, had managed Ford’s election campaign in 1976 and President Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984, and had served as the White House chief of staff and then as secretary of the treasury under Reagan. He’d been a close friend of George Bush’s for thirty years, ever since Bush had moved from Midland to Houston. Baker had been Bush’s campaign manager for his unsuccessful Senate bid in 1970, and Bush had been at Baker’s side later when Baker’s first wife died of cancer. Bush greatly appreciated Baker’s toughness, determination, and competitiveness. Peter Rodman, an adviser to several presidents from Nixon to George W. Bush, called him the “most colorful” member of the Bush 41 administration and “the only larger than life personality in the cabinet.”9
Bush and Baker had a relationship almost like that of brothers—including the competitiveness of brothers. When Baker became too self-assertive in the president’s view, his friend would take him down a notch by asking, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you president?”10 The same sense of competitiveness may have underlain some of Bush’s other appointments. He named John Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire, as chief of staff, even though Craig L. Fuller had been the chief of staff on the 1988 presidential campaign and Baker had wanted him to have the job. The same logic may also help to explain why Bush chose Indiana senator J. Danforth Quayle, who wasn’t among Baker’s top choices, as his running mate.11
Dennis Ross, director of policy planning at the State Department, called Baker the best instinctive negotiator he’d ever known. “He also had that talent, as a negotiator, of knowing what counts for the interlocutor, what is the issue at the end, and why does it matter,” Reginald Bartholomew, a top State Department official, said. “Baker commanded the issues, the essentials of the issues, he was dealing with.” And although he wasn’t a strategist in sense of a conceptualizer, he knew the importance of establishing priorities and setting strategy.12 Robert Gates called Baker “a master craftsman of the persuasive and backroom arts at the peak of his powers,” and although the two men would get cross-wise more than once, Gates “was glad [Baker] was on our side.”13
Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, who then covered the White House, offered a different perspective in an article in the New York Times Magazine:
When you sit across from Baker, it is like looking at a length of black silk. There is stillness, as Baker holds you locked in his gaze and Southern Comfort voice, occasionally flashing a rather wintry smile. He controls the conversation with perfect sentences, perfect paragraphs and perfect pages. He shifts from on-the-record to off-the-record to background in a single thought. He has a compelling presence, but he is such a fox that you feel the impulse to check your wallet when you leave his office.14
Baker had “a deep fear of ridicule,” Dowd and Friedman found. “[No] body got close to Baker,” Lawrence Eagleburger said; there was part of him that was “not available, except perhaps to his wife.” Bush, in contrast, was “willing to look a little foolish,” would transparently reveal his annoyance or amusement, and was warm and spontaneous. Bush’s wife, Barbara, did not especially take to Jim Baker.15
For his deputy secretary of state, Baker chose Eagleburger. Eagleburger would be the State Department’s chief operating officer, the person responsible for managing day-to-day business and attending meetings if Baker were out of town. Eagleburger—who told the best jokes among Baker’s top aides—also coordinated State Department operations with the White House and smoothed out any differences between the State Department and the NSC. Scowcroft recommended that Baker appoint Eagleburger, but he later said he was surprised Baker chose his close friend as his deputy, someone he regarded as Baker’s equal on foreign policy issues.16 That Baker would choose a career foreign service officer and a “Kissinger man” to this key position suggested the confidence Baker had in his own abilities and the trust he had in Scowcroft. Because of his relationship to Scowcroft, moreover, Eagleburger had a back channel to the president.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Bush asked Scowcroft to come down to the vice presidential residence for a morning cup of coffee with him and Baker. Bush then announced, “I’d like you to be my national security advisor.” Although Scowcroft said at the time that he would have preferred to be secretary of defense—since he had already served as national security advisor and knew he didn’t want to be the director of central intelligence—he readily agreed. Scowcroft later said he wasn’t aware of all the “advantages” of being national security advisor, and that he subsequently came to appreciate how much influence he was able to have.17
Scowcroft had been doing a lot of thinking about the NSC process. During the first several years of the Reagan administration, the NSC had been riven by fierce turf battles and vicious personal politics—“a veritable nightmare,” according to Brzezinski, or, as Baker described it, “a witches’ brew of intrigue, elbows, egos, and separate agendas.”18 But once Frank Carlucci took over the national security advisor position from John M. Poindexter, the NSC process greatly improved. Carlucci removed the NSC staff members from operations, reduced their numbers by 60 percent, and restored the focus of foreign policy making to the State Department. Later, when Carlucci succeeded Caspar Weinberger as secretary of defense and Colin Powell took over as national security advisor, the two of them and secretary of state George Shultz started holding daily meetings at 7:00 A.M., without any aides or set agendas, so as to coordinate policy and crisis management.19
Powell and Scowcroft were in some ways very similar, in others very different. “Powell, like Carlucci and Brent Scowcroft, lived up to the classical model of the honest broker in that job,” Peter Rodman observed. “Loyal first and foremost to his president, he conducted himself in a way that won the trust of the cabinet secretaries, who by law are the president’s principal advisers. He pushed no personal agenda; rather, he ensured that all the cabinet views were accurately reflected in the president’s deliberations,” Rodman commented. Powell “showed an extraordinary political savvy (in the best sense), tact, and personal integrity,” Rodman further noted, but he was powerless to break bureaucratic deadlocks if President Reagan was unwilling to do so—which was often frustrating for Shultz.20
Powell and Scowcroft worked well together during the Reagan and Bush administrations, although they didn’t always see eye to eye on issues. Scowcroft, though, didn’t put much stock in the NSC system that Carlucci and Powell had put in place, and he fundamentally disagreed with Powell on the role of the national security advisor. “In this administration,” Powell writes in his memoirs, “Shultz was the single minister of foreign policy, and I made sure the NSC staff understood that and backed him all the way.”21
That’s not how Scowcroft understood the position. For him, the job had two chief functions. First, the national security advisor had to make the policy process work efficiently by providing the president with appropriate options for and perspectives on US foreign policy (and by taking as little of the president’s time as possible while doing so). Second, he had to advise the president with views “unalloyed by department responsibilities and interests.” Whereas the secretary of state and secretary of defense had to represent their own departments and couldn’t stray too far or too often from their staff’s strongly held views, Scowcroft had no client other than the president. Whatever biases he might have, they weren’t institutional biases.
So Scowcroft couldn’t share Powell’s philosophy of deference to the secretary of state. If he was to be effective as an honest broker and the president’s personal adviser, Scowcroft knew, he had to have at least equal standing with the other foreign policy principals.
George Bush agreed. He later observed that by appointing Scowcroft to be his national security advisor, he was sending a “signal to my cabinet and to outside observers that the NSC’s function was to be critical in the decision-making process.”22 He appreciated the fact that Scowcroft would “give me his own experienced views on whatever problem might arise” by virtue of “his deep knowledge of foreign policy matters and his prior experience.” He was “the perfect honest broker,” Bush later wrote.23
What also made Scowcroft’s ideal role possible was his close relationship with Bush. The two were almost exactly the same age (the president was ten months older), and both had been pilots (Bush with the Navy). They had known each other since the Nixon White House, when Bush was US ambassador to the United Nations (1971–1973). Scowcroft’s first memory of George Bush was at a Nixon cabinet meeting in 1973 when Bush was about to leave his position as US ambassador to the UN to become the Republican National Committee chairman; Bush, Scowcroft recalled, was genial, warm, and extremely busy.24 They later became friends during the Ford administration, when Bush served as US liaison to China (1974–1975) and Scowcroft served as “interlocutor”—the word Scowcroft used to describe their relationship—between Bush and the Ford White House. And the two worked together on a daily basis over the thirteen months when Bush was director of central intelligence (1976–1977). They stayed in touch when Bush was vice president because of Scowcroft’s work with the Tower Commission, the Packard Commission, and the Scowcroft Commission.25
The two men shared the same worldview, one grounded in the history of World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam. They believed that the United States had the responsibility to lead other states, that Europe was the United States’ natural ally, that the United States should not appease aggressor states, and that when the United States used force it had to use it decisively. Both believed, too, in politics and diplomacy being best conducted through personal relationships, in the need for discretion in foreign relations, and in the indispensability of intelligence.
Both men also knew their ways around Washington and appreciated how things got done—how to give credit to others, how to avoid upsetting colleagues, and how to get others to cooperate. Neither one had patience for bureaucratic posturing, and both liked to figure out what needed to be done and then finding a way to do it.26 They had found that it was imperative that Congress—or at least key members of Congress—be brought along by the White House. Bush and Scowcroft believed, too, in the importance of national service, honor, courtesy, and self-discipline. Both were also well mannered, unassuming, gracious, and cordial—behavior today many would label “old-fashioned.”
Most important, Bush fully trusted Scowcroft, and everyone understood that Scowcroft spoke for the president. As Bush would repeatedly tell people, “Brent doesn’t want anything.” No one, with the exception of Barbara, had better access to the president—and Bush probably spent more time with Scowcroft than he did Barbara. Bush treated Scowcroft like “a beloved older brother,” even though Bush was slightly older.27
Over the next few years Scowcroft would be “the short balding figure at Bush’s side, on the golf course, on the speedboat, in the Oval Office, the ever-present adviser, the confidant,” one reporter wrote. He was the president’s “close and constant confidant.” He was “the closest friend in all things,” Bush told two scholars of the National Security Council—as close as one could be and not be related by blood.28
Bush and Scowcroft had a shared appreciation for the importance of personnel selection and of clearly defined administrative procedures; as Scowcroft emphasized repeatedly, the NSC process was principally about personalities.29 So from late November 1988 until the inauguration, the two met nearly every day to work on personnel issues, often over long walks around the perimeter of Camp David. They discussed not only the NSC staff but also other appointments, such as ambassadorships. They also spent some of their time during the transition period mulling over their priorities and how they’d proceed once in office.30 Bush “came in knowing the way,” Scowcroft remarked, and he was “very explicit” about how he wanted to run the NSC process. There was little of the presidency or the US government that wasn’t familiar to the president-elect, and he had clear ideas about how he wanted his administration to operate.31
Scowcroft had already seen firsthand instances where the NSC process didn’t work. He had witnessed at close range the control Kissinger exercised on foreign policy, which had cut Secretary of State Rogers out of high-level decision making. He had lived through the rivalry between Kissinger and defense secretary James R. Schlesinger in the Ford administration; observed the clashes between national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and secretary of state Cyrus Vance under President Jimmy Carter; and as a member of the Tower Commission, he had had to help clean up the damage done to the presidency by an out-of-control NSC process.32 He knew that acrimonious rivalries among the foreign policy principals was a recipe for incoherent and poorly managed national security policy, something that Bush and Scowcroft both wanted to avoid.33
A potentially complicating factor in the NSC process, for Scowcroft, was Bush’s exceptionally close friendship with Baker, who regarded his own position as being preeminent: “I had a great advantage as Secretary of State, because I’d been a thirty-five-year friend with the president. I was his political adviser. Nobody was going to get in between me and my President. And, when I would go out and speak, I could go out and speak with authority ‘cause everybody knew how close I was to President Bush 41.”34
Yet Scowcroft was every bit as secure in his relationship with the president, as the historian and former NSC staff member Philip Zelikow observes. Scowcroft’s thinking “was, if anything, even closer than Baker’s to the point that there were times at which I thought Bush and Scowcroft were almost like two dimensions of one person,” Zelikow said. “He was almost a kind of doppelganger for Bush.” Or as Elliott Abrams, a critic of the administration, remarked, it would “take thirty years to figure . . . out” the differences between Scowcroft and Bush and how much of the decision making can be attributed Bush and how much to Scowcroft.35 Baker himself writes of the “enormous personal affection” Bush had for Scowcroft.”36
Fortunately, Scowcroft and Baker had been acquainted since they worked on Ford’s reelection campaign together in 1976, and they got along well. Scowcroft refused to take advantage of Baker’s relative inexperience in foreign policy. Because Baker was “not deeply versed in foreign policy,” Scowcroft observed, he was somewhat “ill at ease” when he first took office. But Scowcroft reassured Baker that there would be no repetition of the Kissinger-Rogers conflict or the Brzezinski-Vance history. He wouldn’t speak to the press or go on television without letting Baker know beforehand. Neither would he nor any other NSC staff member meet with or visit foreign leaders without first notifying the secretary of state. Scowcroft also said he’d let Bush and Baker serve as the administration’s principal spokes-people. “I bent over backwards not to appear to be repeating, frankly, what Henry Kissinger did,” Scowcroft recalled. Three months into the administration, Baker simply “told Brent just to do what he thought correct.”37
Baker, for his part, was careful not to exploit his access to the president. Arnold Kanter, who was on Scowcroft’s NSC staff and served on several important committees, remarked that he couldn’t recall any time Baker went to the president himself in order to air a disagreement with Scowcroft.38 Instead, Baker kept to his regularly scheduled twice-weekly meetings with the president, which they usually used as occasions for catching up. They also talked on the telephone every day, often several times a day. It’s also true that Baker, unlike Scowcroft, would sometimes take the initiative and act on his own authority without first checking with Bush. Nonetheless, despite what some people thought, Baker was far from the dominant partner in the Bush-Baker friendship. “Bush always had the upper hand,” Vice President Dan Quayle notes, because “George and Barbara had consoled Baker after the death of his first wife, and Bush had brought Baker around, not vice versa.”39
Given these complex dynamics, although “Brent and Jim did get moderately crosswise,” Bush later wrote, it happened “very rarely.” And almost never did it play out in the press.40 Because Baker and Scowcroft both wanted to avoid situations where Bush would have to choose between them, they worked hard at settling their differences so they didn’t have to take them to the president and force Bush to choose between their positions. They found, moreover, that they were much more successful at resolving any differences than either of them expected.41
Scowcroft characterized their differences as follows: “I was primarily concerned with strategy, Baker was much more concerned with tactics. When, for example, we would discuss issues of arms control and what we should propose to the president, Baker would almost always home in on negotiability of what we wanted to do. And I didn’t care much about that.” On the contrary, “I was interested in what we could change and improve the balance. Our differences didn’t go to the heart of things, not like Brzezinski and Vance with different philosophies about how to deal with Soviet Union.”42
“Scowcroft himself was a tenacious in-fighter, very turf-conscious, and as the years went on he became closer than anyone else in the administration to the President,” Quayle observes. “In fact, they eventually developed the best working relationship I have seen between any two people in all my years in politics. They saw each other constantly, and the advice that Scowcroft gave the President was unvarnished. Scowcroft knew how to win his battles with Jim Baker,” Quayle adds. “He kept them from breaking out into the open, and he used his time with the President in a subtle way, moving Bush toward his own position and away from Baker’s.”43 The vice president points out that “during the four years of the administration [Baker] lost most of his turf battles with Brent Scowcroft.”44 Scowcroft “was the quintessential inside bureaucrat who really knew the game.” And if Scowcroft “didn’t have confidence in someone he could cut him out real easily. Not that he would do it with the blessing of the President, but he could just cut you out.”45
Quayle knew about that from firsthand experience. Soon after taking office, Scowcroft discovered that someone on the vice president’s staff was leaking information to the press—chief of staff Carnes “Cary” Lord and William Kristol being the principal suspects—so he simply froze the Office of the Vice President out of the NSC process. Neither did Bush interfere. But as soon as Quayle hired one of Scowcroft’s assistants as his national security advisor, their relationship improved. Karl Jackson, who had headed the Asia desk, “had great interface with Brent and that whole team,” and the relationship between the two offices “changed dramatically.”46
The first step Scowcroft took to gain control of the NSC process was to hire Robert Gates as his deputy. Bob Gates had served in the Air Force, had followed the development of the Soviet Union’s strategic weapons program, had worked under Scowcroft as a young NSC staffer in the Ford White House, and most recently had been deputy DCI under Reagan. Scowcroft knew Gates well, had followed his career, and thought he would make an ideal deputy. The fact that Gates had withdrawn his name as a nominee for DCI in 1987 revealed the quality of his character, in Scowcroft’s view, since the act of taking himself out of consideration protected President Reagan and the White House from (further) public attacks and political embarrassment. (Baker, by contrast, considered Gates to be coming in as “damaged goods” by not having been approved as DCI.)47
As Scowcroft’s right-hand man, “Gates was the executor” of Scowcroft’s goal that everyone have an honest shot on policy, the national security advisor later said. Gates helped Scowcroft protect the president’s time by seeing to it that memoranda were not only “clear” but also “concise.” He had “been doing this [his] whole career,” Gates said. Scowcroft and Gates also had their area directors read the cables going out from the State and Defense Departments so as to keep an eye on what was happening around the rest of the government, “because that’s where policy is made.” Otherwise, the actual policy on the ground could easily get out of sync with the president’s decisions.48 “Everybody tries to slip their stuff through without sharing it with anyone else,” Gates noted; they all tried to play “games.” What he and Scowcroft were able to do, then, was to “put a discipline in the process that after a few months . . . became less and less necessary because they understood it wasn’t going through if it hadn’t been properly coordinated.” The staff thereby developed “a good sense of what [Scowcroft] wanted, and if preparing a letter or briefing book we knew the tone and substance of things. He was a great delegator and not a micromanager,” as R. Nicholas Burns, who came to the NSC from the State Department, commented. “He was a big picture guy.”49
By hiring Gates, Scowcroft had someone who could, when needed, step into his shoes for a meeting with the president or other chief policy makers. The two men essentially formed a partnership for running the NSC (not unlike Scowcroft’s relationship with Kissinger from September 1973 through October 1975), and rarely did Scowcroft know something Gates didn’t. “Gates had this fantastic capacity to process paper at a fairly high level of quality control,” which complemented Scowcroft’s strengths, Philip Zelikow noted, because “Brent was very much almost at the level of the president in terms of the breadth of vision he had to have and the things that were reaching him. And Brent also really felt the burden of decision.” Gates helped ensure the quality of the NSC process, then, by knowing “which memos had to be acted on and which could wait” until Scowcroft got to them.50 Further helping matters was Gates’s rapport with Bush. They got along well personally and shared, with Scowcroft, a professional interest in the collection and assessment of intelligence as well as the oversight of CIA operations.51
“Gates and Scowcroft absolutely trusted each other, always watching each others’ back,” one of their NSC staff members noted. “They were complementary,” the head of the international economics directorate, Timothy Deal, said, with their offices located just fifteen feet from each other—“and they were always in and out of each other’s offices.”52 As Gates said, the national security advisor “could count on me to keep the trains running.” (Scowcroft kept the same institutional arrangement when Adm. Jonathan Howe replaced Gates in 1991, although the latter two didn’t have the same kind of relationship.)53
Making Gates virtually his equal was an unusual step for Scowcroft to take. “The first thing that Brent arranged that conveyed a different sort of status for me at the deputy assistant to the president level that was unique was that I would have portal-to-portal secure transportation,” Gates remarked. A White House car picked Gates up in the morning and took him home at night—an unprecedented step for a deputy assistant.54 Then, less than two months into the Bush presidency, Scowcroft appointed Gates “assistant to the president,” thereby making Gates his equal in seniority. Gates now officially outranked all of the president’s deputy assistants, special assistants, and most other White House officials. Gates could thus sit in the front of Air Force One with chief of staff John Sununu, for example, and be on hand should the president need him for any reason. “These little status things conveyed a message within the White House and throughout the government that this was a different sort of arrangement than had ever existed before,” Gates commented.55 The “little status things” weren’t so little.
Gates’s most important function was chairing the Deputies Committee, which included representatives from state (Under Secretary of State Robert Kimmitt or, less frequently, Director of Policy Planning Dennis Ross or Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs Reginald Bartholomew); defense (Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz); the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Air Force Gen. Robert Herres and later Adm. David Jeremiah); and the CIA (Richard Kerr and later William Studeman). Gates and Kimmitt had worked for the NSC under presidents Ford and Carter, and Kimmitt and Wolfowitz had been colleagues during the two terms of the Reagan administration. The result, Kimmitt said, was that the deputies committee was “highly collegial compared to past administration in which I worked where bureaucratic in-fighting between State, Defense, Intelligence, and the NSC was more serious.”56
Previous administrations had relied on a Deputies Committee or an equivalent, but from October 1989 onward, the Deputies Committee developed into the Bush administration’s workhorse for making national security policy—able to address issues and resolve problems before they reached the principals and, if need be, ultimately the president. If a problem needed further study, the deputies would create a working group to address that issue. Any member could call a meeting, and when meetings were called, nearly every member attended. Because of the committee’s effectiveness and the implicit trust it enjoyed from the principals, full NSC meetings were infrequent after the administration’s first few months (with the several held in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait being among the exceptions).
In the year 1990 alone, the committee met more than 150 times—often more than once in a day.57 The cumulative effect of the frequent, intense meetings was to forge close, cordial ties among the members of the Deputies Committee. They got to know one another well and also socialized together with their spouses. And if they were at loggerheads, Gates simply had to say, “Well, let me talk to the President and see how things work out. You only had to do that once for people to understand how things ran.”58
Scowcroft’s second hire was Condoleezza Rice. Scowcroft had been Rice’s mentor since he first met her in the spring of 1984 during a talk he gave at Stanford University and the dinner that followed. He found that Rice, only thirty years old at the time and the youngest at the dinner, was able to talk knowledgably about the MX missile, nuclear arms control, and the Soviet Union. Scowcroft said Rice asked “a brilliant question” about international law and “absolutely captivated” him.59
He also found her to be unemotional, analytical, and nonideological. A PhD student of Professor Josef Korbel—the father of Madeleine Albright, a future secretary of state—at the University of Denver, Rice was a realist in the tradition of Hans Morgenthau. He appreciated that she viewed the Soviet Union more in shades of gray rather than in black and white, and that she spoke Russian.60 She was prepared, very articulate, self-confident, and impressive. Although she was a “slip of a girl,” Scowcroft thought that she was “just outstanding.” “She was charming and affable,” he writes in A World Transformed, “but could be tough as nails when the situation required.”61
Rice had grown up in Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama, had a school classmate killed by a bomb, and had great-grandparents who’d been slaves. As a young African American woman, a Republican, and a Sovietologist, she was a novelty, as Ivo Daalder points out: a black woman in the boys’ club of security experts. As Rice’s father himself remarked, “Blacks didn’t do political science.”62
She had a way of making a quick impression, and Scowcroft would not be the last to be taken with her.63 He proceeded to help her career by introducing her to the larger national security community, inviting her to participate in and become a member the Aspen Strategy Group beginning in the summer of 1986, and then bringing her into the Bush 41 administration.64 The fact that she held strong conservative positions on social and moral issues—she’d previously supported Ronald Reagan and would later be closely identified with George W. Bush—never came into play.
As for the others on the NSC staff, some Scowcroft and Gates personally knew, others they knew by reputation or came recommended. They wanted self-starters who didn’t require much supervision. Significantly, none of their personnel decisions was based on party affiliation and none was made as a result of a personal request of President Bush. Scowcroft selected Bob Blackwill as the head of the European desk and Philip Zelikow, who was detailed from the State Department, as the director for European security affairs. Two areas were particularly sensitive: the Middle East, where Scowcroft chose Richard Haass, and defense policy and arms control, where he selected Arnold Kanter.
The resultant NSC staff was about 20 percent smaller than Reagan’s NSC; more important, it required minimal supervision and caused few bureaucratic headaches for either Scowcroft or Gates.65
By virtue of the fact that Scowcroft hired very bright and strong-minded aides and because of his own self-effacing personality, those on the NSC—Gates included—often differed from Scowcroft on the issues. They would “forcefully debate policies” among themselves and argue “things out.” Meanwhile, Scowcroft would take it all in. He “was a great listener,” according to one of his staff members, R. Nicholas Burns. “He was a man of few words” and would soak up what people said without revealing a lot about his own position. “It was memorable and effective.” The result was that Gates, Blackwill, Haass, Rice, Zelikow, and others on his staff were sometimes able to persuade him to adopt policies he otherwise wouldn’t have.66
Staff members found Scowcroft supportive and felt motivated by his presence. He created an environment that kept their enthusiasm going. He didn’t yell; Arnold Kanter said he never heard him raise his voice. He rarely got upset or angry at people, and when he did he was “very composed” and, at the same time, “demonstrative”: “He let you know where things stood, and you needed to get things right.” So when one staff member didn’t fully communicate the Treasury Department’s position on an issue, he was out of a job. And on the occasions when Scowcroft showed “flashes of anger,” it was not about what was being said, but about “not being kept updated.”67
Scowcroft also led through kindliness and consideration. When NSC staff member Ed A. Hewitt was diagnosed with cancer in February 1992 and died within the year, on January 15, 1993, “Brent handled this with great compassion,” Burns remarked. He “was very solicitous of Ed’s family, and held a memorial in the White House the day after Ed died. Ed’s wife, his in-laws, and the staff were all there, and Brent gave a wonderful extemporaneous speech. He handled this difficult time as well as it could have been handled.”68
The careful selection of personnel and attention to personal chemistry extended to two later additions to the Bush White House: Dick Cheney, who became secretary of defense two months into the administration, and Colin Powell, who succeeded Adm. William Crowe as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 30, 1989.
The president and vice president wanted to appoint former senator John Tower secretary of defense. Scowcroft wasn’t quite so sure. He recognized Tower’s knowledge of defense issues, appreciated the fact he was “very, very smart,” and liked the fact that Tower had been “open and collegiate” as chairman of the special review board, “not dictatorial or dirigiste.” Tower worked closely with military contractors—from 1986 to 1988 he earned over a million dollars as a defense-industry consultant—but he had also made remarks critical of SDI. More significantly for the purposes of his confirmation, Scowcroft knew that Tower’s “imperious management of the Armed Services Committee” had created antagonisms and that nominating him might cause problems.69 Though Tower had been “one of the most senior and powerful members of the Senate” before he retired in 1984, he was also “one of the least liked” and had a reputation for being high-handed and arrogant, according to treasury secretary Nicholas Brady, as well as “boorish” and “autocratic” in his handling of his Democratic colleagues.70 Members of Congress and their staff wouldn’t forget.
Scowcroft and Brady’s concerns—shared by White House counsel Boyden Gray, Craig Fuller, and others—were borne out. Although Bush and Quayle put Tower’s name forward, their nominee faced stiff resistance from many of his former Democratic colleagues and congressional staffers. Tower also became vulnerable to charges of excessive drinking, womanizing, and excessively close ties to military contractors. Senator Sam Nunn called Tower’s drinking “a serious problem,” and insisted it was the drinking, not the womanizing, that was at “the heart of the issue.” And even Dick Cheney disagreed with the selection, according to CBS’s Bob Schieffer. “We just want you to know that some of us on the other side of the aisle” think that denying Tower the nomination “is the right thing to do,” Cheney told Senator Nunn (who then told Schieffer).71 Meanwhile, former president Nixon spread the word that Tower was “bedding down” with “a beautiful and well-connected Chinese woman despite [Tower’s] third marriage.”72
Loyal to a fault, Bush stood by his nominee. The president and Barbara Bush thought the attacks were motivated by partisanship and that the rumors and innuendoes were a “disgrace,” nothing more than “character assassination” achieved through unproven allegations.73
But the result was that for almost two months the administration was without a secretary of defense. Finally, on the morning of March 9—with the vote scheduled for that afternoon—Bush accepted the fact that Tower didn’t have the votes to be approved (he would be defeated, 47–53). So the president met with Scowcroft and Sununu and the three of them decided to ask the House minority whip, Dick Cheney, to come to the White House at four o’clock that same afternoon.74
Scowcroft asked Cheney for his advice, and he suggested Don Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. Rumsfeld was a nonstarter, of course. He was Bush’s old rival, had tried to undermine Kissinger during the Ford administration, and had endorsed Bush’s rival, Senator Bob Dole, in the 1988 New Hampshire Republican primary. Scowcroft then asked Cheney if he’d be willing to serve, and Cheney accepted.
Although he hadn’t chaired any important House committees dealing with national security issues, Cheney “had a reputation for integrity and for standing up to principles, and, at the same time, for getting along with people”; Bush thought him to be “strong, tough, and fair.” Cheney was “the smartest guy in the room,” in the description of one NSC staff member—and this wasn’t to take anything away from Baker or Scowcroft. For his part, Cheney looked forward to working with Baker and Scowcroft, both of whom he regarded as “enormously talented individuals.”75 Cheney was quickly confirmed.
Scowcroft also had reservations about appointing Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Not only had Powell had previously held Scowcroft’s position of national security advisor, but while serving under President Reagan, had chosen to stay in the Army.76 Too, Powell had leapfrogged over more than a dozen highly qualified, more senior general officers in the promotion process and hadn’t had any true joint force experience, such as commanding a large-scale military operation (although he had commanded the US Army’s V Corps in Germany) or serving as the NATO supreme commander. But both Bush and Cheney wanted Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Scowcroft went along. “I need not have worried,” he later remarked. “Powell was unfailingly imperturbable, even when the situation became tense. He managed brilliantly the sometimes awkward relationship between the secretary of defense and the chairman in NSC discussions with the president, serving as an NSC principal alongside his own immediate boss.”77 And when Scowcroft disagreed, Powell recalls, “Scowcroft would say, ‘You know you got your head up your butt.’ In front of the president of the United States!”78 But this sort of ridicule was standard among those in Bush’s inner circle.
The care with which Bush and Scowcroft selected personnel resulted in a foreign policy team of unusual loyalty, capability, and coherence. “Bush was probably the first president since Franklin Roosevelt or even before who was acquainted with all of the members of his cabinet before he named them,” Bush’s personnel director, Chase Untermeyer, remarked. “Various presidents, famously John F. Kennedy, or Bill Clinton, were given names of people who on paper looked good and either proved to be great winners, like McNamara was for Kennedy, or losers in more cases.”79
PRESIDENT BUSH CARED about foreign policy. He liked reading intelligence briefings, enjoyed diplomacy, and personally knew many foreign officials and most heads of state and government. “It wasn’t just the head of state” Bush was acquainted with, Vice President Quayle remarked. “He knew the Foreign Ministers, he knew Finance Ministers. He knew the Ambassadors because of his days at the United Nations. He knew all these people and he knew how to massage their egos, to work around them, and he was always, always in control.” Bush knew “every foreign leader in the world,” Sununu observed when they visited Tokyo in February 1989. “Not only did he know the Education Minister and the Economic Minister and he knew their . . . wives and children and what schools the children were in and what careers they were in or if somebody was in trouble with drugs or whatever, he knew it all. And he had a relationship.”80 Bush also knew well that many very small countries “have very influential representatives.” As a former UN representative himself, the president understood that “when you needed votes,” the size of a country “didn’t matter.” And the United States was particularly “effective, because we were the host country,” UN Ambassador Thomas Pickering pointed out. “We had a special cachet, especially in New York.”81
Bush was the “best-prepared president” ever to take the job, in Scowcroft’s judgment. He had a warm disposition and was personally self-assured (unlike LBJ or Richard Nixon), and he had extensive experience in US foreign policy and international relations (unlike Ford, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, or Obama). And if he was sometimes awkward in public, Bush was gregarious with his top advisers, other heads of state, members of Congress, and business leaders, as well as very effective in one-on-one meetings and small groups. He was patient and considerate of his foreign counterparts, moreover, as well as with members of Congress.82 And he was relaxed in his dealings with the US armed forces and always happy to be with the troops. He “couldn’t have been a better Commander in Chief,” Cheney remarked, adding that Bush was “a hell of a boss.”83 Whereas Bush would sometimes “say ‘I hadn’t really thought about that’” with respect to domestic policy, Quayle pointed out that he “never heard [the president] say that in foreign policy. He always knew.”84
Because of the priority Bush assigned to foreign policy and national security, he and Scowcroft agreed that either Gates or Scowcroft should be available at all times—the same policy Scowcroft had implemented in the Ford administration. So Scowcroft generally traveled with Bush when he went overseas, and Gates accompanied him on domestic trips.85
Scowcroft was also determined to avoid problems like those that had plagued past administrations. George Shultz, for example, had felt “burned” by the NSC as a result of the Iran-Contra affair and therefore had “wanted to reduce the NSC to an executive secretariat,” according to defense secretary Frank Carlucci.86 So now Scowcroft wanted to use his position as national security advisor to design an NSC system that could maximize the chances of success.87
The first thing that had to be established among principals, Scowcroft said, was trust. He and Bush were together able to establish that trust among the president’s senior advisers.88 There “was an element of trust that made it a delight to go to work every day,” Cheney said. “You never had to worry that the Secretary of State or the NSC Advisor was going to take something you said, use it out of context, leak it to the press, or take advantage somehow in the bureaucratic wars. There was the concept that it was a team.” Not only did the people at the subcabinet level know and like each other, Kimmitt remarked, they “worked very, very effectively to make our bosses successful.”89
The Bush presidency was the most collegial of any of the four administrations in which Richard Haass had served; working there “was actually fun,” he said. “It sounds bizarre, but it was by far the most enjoyable experience a lot of us had had before or since in government. There was a lot of camaraderie and kidding around . . . it was very relaxed.” The principals “laughed a lot together,” writer and analyst David Rothkopf observed. “Successful administrations, like successful baseball teams, are loose, relaxed.” And with the “twelve- or fourteen-hour days, often six or seven days a week . . . humor [was] a critical ally.”90 The levity shared among the principals, their deputies, and assistant secretaries helped deflate tensions in times of crisis and eased the handling of the inevitable disagreements and conflicts.
The president himself liked practical jokes, such as subjecting his guests to exploding golf balls. He also liked dirty jokes (as long as women weren’t present) and Baker’s bawdy limericks. One of his favorite games was to bestow the “Scowcroft award” on any official who could fall asleep and then awaken without missing a beat. This was a talent Scowcroft himself had perfected. “He can fall asleep anywhere from the Oval Office to state dinners, cleverly masking the respite by striking the pose of ‘The Thinker,’ with chin in hand and eyes downcast,” White House correspondent Maureen Dowd reported. “But he always wakes up before he topples off the couch and in good time to answer a query from the President.”91
Despite his playfulness—or perhaps because of it—Bush could be secretive. Part of this was tactical: he wanted to surprise the Soviets, the Congress, and the press so as to gain a positional advantage. But he also delighted in misleading the press and confounding expectations—which could include surprising those in the administration who were not in his inner circle.92
Relations among the members of that inner circle were largely collegial and positive. Though some in the administration had trouble with Chief of Staff Sununu, Scowcroft and he generally worked together, and the two men even enjoyed playfully insulting each other. Sununu respected Scowcroft’s knowledge of foreign policy and was happy to leave foreign policy to Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft, while he and budget director Richard Darman ran domestic policy. The one time Sununu trod on the secretary of state’s turf, Baker exploded in anger and chewed him out—with President Bush and Gates taking it all in, embarrassed.93
Scowcroft didn’t worry about being upstaged. He “did not feel the need to promote himself in meetings,” one of his staff observed; instead, he delegated. “There was a sense that he didn’t need to prove himself, that he was supremely confident of himself and his role with President Bush,” Nicholas Burns said. “He would ask questions and let you speak, which is not always the norm in Washington. He impressed by his personality.”94
In contrast to Brzezinski, who “had no hesitancy saying things critical of other cabinet members” and writing memos against other cabinet members, “that would never happen with Brent Scowcroft,” Timothy Deal noted. “If he disagreed he would say it in person to the president and not in writing.”95
Scowcroft had explicitly spelled out the role of the national security advisor in part five of the Tower Commission report (the section he had drafted). The national security advisor’s responsibility, he wrote, was to “ensure that matters submitted for consideration by the [National Security] Council covered the full range of issues on which review was required; that those issues were fully analyzed; that a full range of options was considered; that the prospects and risks of each were examined; that all relevant intelligence and other information was available to the principals; that legal considerations were addressed; and that difficulties in implementation were confronted.”
Scowcroft appreciated that it was of critical importance that he not guide the president’s thinking by how he structured the decision-making process, because a “lot of times you can get the answer you want by the way you ask the question.” This, he believed, was how the Iran-Contra affair had developed. He also realized he could steer Bush’s thinking by how he interpreted the president’s guidance. If he had any doubt after a meeting as to what Bush had decided, he’d write down his understanding of the conversation and take it back to the Oval Office to ensure “that this [was] exactly what [the president] had in mind.” He found miscommunication to be surprisingly common. It was “like that game of telephone with kids in a room,” he said; frequently after NSC meetings “he would write up the decision and others would say, no that’s not what happened.”96
Scowcroft also had to be able to serve as a check on and as an extra resource for the president. As a practical matter, this meant that he might have to supplement the advice of the other foreign policy principals by questioning the options that Baker, Cheney, or Powell (earlier, Admiral Crowe) offered the president. Or he might have to persuade Bush to consider the long-term implications of policies being recommended by other administration officials. His job thus went beyond brokering; he had to be responsible for the quality of the political choices and policy options being given to the president.97
With his cordial and self-effacing manner, Scowcroft made things easy. He was “as abrasive as a silk scarf,” in the words of Fred McClure, Bush’s assistant for congressional relations.98 He was thereby able to at once create an efficient, informal, and remarkably cordial atmosphere within the NSC and to get the other chief foreign policy advisers—Baker, Cheney, Powell, and others, such as US trade representative Carla Hills and DCI William Webster—to accept his vision of how the NSC process was to be managed. In 1987, just after Poindexter was replaced by Carlucci, the NSC was voted the “worst agency in the U.S. government” by the Retired Federal Employees Association; two years later, it was voted the best.99
Scowcroft also recognized the need to cultivate good relationships with key members of Congress and members of the news media, including individual reporters, columnists, and news analysts. He had already applied some of these lessons as chairman of the Scowcroft Commission and then as a member of the Tower Commission, and he would continue to apply them as Bush’s national security advisor.
Scowcroft brought in Roman Popadiuk to assist with his and the NSC’s media relations (although he stationed Popadiuk in the White House press office, along with two domestic policy press officers). He had Popadiuk (and his successor, Walter Kansteiner) sit in on NSC meetings so each was fully informed about NSC policy and could brief the press accurately and appropriately.100 Scowcroft also gave regular backgrounders to small groups of reporters.
It helped that Scowcroft had no ambition to steal the spotlight. Since the national security advisor wasn’t subject to Senate confirmation or being called to testify before Congress, Scowcroft didn’t think it was appropriate for him to be the face of the administration. Happily, the “passion for anonymity” Scowcroft recommended in the Tower Commission report suited his own disposition, so he typically worked with reporters and other media personnel on background. Whenever possible, he deflected attention to Baker, Cheney, Powell, or others, such as CENTCOM commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
Working with reporters and columnists didn’t come naturally for him; Scowcroft admitted he “had a psychological aversion to the press.” He found he had “to be very careful” around reporters and that they “could just bring trouble.”101 Part of this was that he felt he’d been burned by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Final Days (their book on Watergate and the Nixon presidency). “What [Woodward] does is all basically gossip,” Scowcroft said, and write “his [own] story of personal relationships.” So he didn’t want to speak to Woodward for the reporter’s book on the Bush administration’s military policies, which would turn into The Commanders.102
Scowcroft didn’t like doing television interviews, calling television “too personal” a medium. And while in office, he didn’t have the time to write op-ed pieces, so a speechwriter would draft the op-ed pieces going out under his name (as with Bush’s other senior advisers). Scowcroft nonetheless excelled at press relations. He was very good at briefing newspaper and magazine reporters, at providing background, and at doing prerecorded video in advance of the president’s trips abroad. He had a “special relationship” with Maureen Dowd, the press secretary reported. He also worked closely with the New York Times’ Michael Gordon (who would sometimes call him at home in the evening), Ken Walsh of U.S. News & World Report, Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal, and a handful of other leading reporters.103
Scowcroft deliberately kept discussions and decisions close to the vest, an attitude that press secretary Marlin Fitzwater attributed to the serious nature of national security policy and to Scowcroft’s belief in the “loose lips sink ships” mentality of the World War II generation. But it also fit the president’s own approach to policymaking. NSC staff member Robert Blackwill described the Bush 41 administration as “the most secretive since Nixon.”104 Bush himself had a “deep animosity” toward the press, Fitzwater later explained. Not only did he regard reporters as untrustworthy and indiscreet, but the president took “everything personally.” And with all the ridicule that George Bush suffered in the press, it is little surprise he wanted to keep the media at bay.105
But those outside the White House’s inner circles found the withholding of information and compartmentalizing frustrating. Nicholas Rostow, who was the NSC’s legal counsel, said he felt as though he were “the kid with his nose pressed up against the candy store window a lot of the time.” It was also true, however, that Scowcroft and Gates had little use for lawyers when making policy—Rostow and White House counsel Boyden Gray both—and that Scowcroft was “a very good, a pretty good international lawyer on his own,” Rostow observed.106
BUSH, BAKER, SCOWCROFT and other senior administration officials were able to establish relationships based on trust. “One of the reasons why the system worked was that Baker and Cheney totally trusted Brent to keep them informed and to fairly represent their views to the president,” Gates said. “He was the only national security advisor in my view that was ever so trusted by the other two principals”—and Gates had served under six US presidents at the time he wrote the above, before his time as defense secretary under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Scowcroft’s management of the NSC process also worked well because of his creation of other interagency groups to expedite decision making. One of his key innovations (retained by subsequent presidential administrations) was the formation of the Principals Committee, which included the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the director of central intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House chief of staff, and the national security advisor—all meeting without the president.
Scowcroft had noticed that in President Reagan’s NSC meetings, a lot of time had been wasted on debates over issues that did not involve presidential-level decisions. He therefore wanted to establish a smaller decision-making body that would provide a forum in which to discuss issues and clarify positions with the other foreign policy principals without taking up the president’s time. Although a Principals Committee had been set up in the Reagan administration under national security advisor Colin Powell, it had never convened because Secretary of State George Schultz refused to attend any meeting of principals chaired by the national security advisor.107 It was therefore “with temerity” that Scowcroft proposed the idea to Secretary Baker, who was well aware of Shultz’s well-defined views on the matter. But Baker said, “Fine, let’s do it.”108
The Principals Committee made it possible for Scowcroft to present Bush with “crisp positions” about any significant policy matter. The president, for his part, appreciated Scowcroft’s ability to “knock heads” so as to resolve disagreements “before he let them in my door.” As a practical matter, the Principals Committee meetings quickly became unnecessary in areas other than arms control, Robert Kimmitt said. “When the president learned his senior advisers were meeting just down hall without him, he made clear to Brent Scowcroft that he wanted to be involved in such discussions.”109 However, Scowcroft himself regarded the Principals Committee (which met dozens of time during the administration) and the Deputies Committee (which met hundreds of times) as his two most important innovations.
In March 1989 Scowcroft created another decision-making body—the Core Group, which consisted of the foreign policy principals plus the president—essentially the National Security Council as originally designed in 1947 with the addition of the national security advisor. It originated during policy reviews for reappraising US foreign relations, especially those with respect to Europe and the Soviet Union. Scowcroft decided to convene an open session among the principals so as to promote candid discussion. The meeting, which took place without notes, without debriefings, and without any prepared remarks, was highly productive. Afterward Bush said, “Gee, I liked that,” and the format stuck.110
The advantage of the Core Group setting was that each official could have his say, uninhibited by the presence of hangers-on (regular NSC meetings might number as many as thirty participants) who might constrain open discussion, leak self-serving information, or provoke a backlash by later telling someone, “Oh boy, you should have heard what X said” (as Scowcroft put it). Exemplifying the effectiveness of the Core Group was a series of three meetings held in January 1990 to discuss the INF treaty and troop reductions in Europe. The Defense and State Departments opposed the troop reductions and worried about how the United States’ European allies would respond, while Scowcroft and others supported both the treaty and the force reductions (which were Scowcroft’s idea). With the principals at an impasse, Scowcroft proposed that they simply ask the Europeans. The Europeans agreed to the reductions, which were then implemented.111
Other small, informal meetings also proved to be particularly productive. During weekly lunches, Scowcroft talked things over with the president and the secretary of state, and in their Wednesday breakfast meetings Scowcroft sorted things out with Baker and Cheney (and sometimes Powell) in his West Wing corner office. Because of these weekly meetings, relatively few issues—“four or five,” Baker reports—had to be taken up to the president for his resolution. Instead, they “work[ed] them out in Brent’s office.” In Cheney’s description, “The three of us could talk about virtually anything and know that your colleague wasn’t going to go out and dump a load in the Washington Post the next day based on what you said. . . . I might show up with eight or ten issues that needed to be resolved, and it became a very efficient and very effective way to coordinate policy.”112 Other administrations had used other informal meetings to make decisions, to be sure—such as LBJ’s Tuesday lunches with Walt Rostow—but what distinguished those of the Bush administration was the degree to which the informal meetings succeeded at settling interagency differences.
Scowcroft also continued to employ several lower-level NSC policy coordinating committees for the purpose of sharing information and coordinating action in particular regions of the world (e.g., Europe, Latin America, and East Asia) and in different functional areas (e.g., defense, international economics, and arms control).
Of course, other decisions were made by Bush and Scowcroft themselves. There was nothing Bush did in foreign policy, and little in domestic matters, that he did without first talking to Brent. Defense secretary Dick Cheney describes President Bush’s style of decision making during crises, such as the Persian Gulf War:
Much decision making took place around the fireplace in the Oval Office, might be upstairs in his residence, in his office up there. He was comfortable in that kind of a setting. It was not a formal sort of arrangement. It would involve Baker and me, Powell and Scowcroft, Quayle, Sununu usually. Sometimes Bill Webster, Bob Gates—Bob Gates would be usually involved. That’s where a lot of the management of a crisis would actually take place. . . . Separate, apart from that, if you move off that to more normal peacetime operation, he did an awful lot in the diplomatic arena and the State Department arena, between himself and Jim and Brent, that I wouldn’t be directly involved and didn’t need to be directly involved [in].113
These informal decision-making processes allowed for close, sustained, and confidential interactions among the principals on sensitive and important issues. This is why it is often possible to write about the thinking of “Scowcroft, Bush, and Baker” or “Scowcroft and Bush” without distinguishing among the president, the secretary of state, and the national security advisor.
The NSC organizations and processes established by Scowcroft and approved by the president were designed to facilitate flexibility and creativity. The NSC staff consisted of about forty-five people divided into ten directorates, with four or five people in each. It was thus a very flat and compact organization (compared to the two hundred people or so the NSC had as of 2009), and they all met once a month for informational exchanges. Tellingly, the structural organization of the NSC process established under Scowcroft and Bush 41 has been used by every succeeding presidential administration.114
But the NSC process crucially depended on there being only one message coming from the White House, notwithstanding the inevitability of internal divisions within the administration. On military issues, discussions with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff first had to be cleared with the secretary of defense—just as Scowcroft had insisted during the Ford administration. Scowcroft was similarly careful about meeting independently with foreign ambassadors. Whereas “Shultz forbade it” and “Kissinger did it all the time,” Scowcroft “only did it when,” in his mind, “it served a larger purpose.” Here, Lawrence Eagleburger’s joint role as Baker’s right-hand man and as Scowcroft’s friend and political ally made him invaluable.115
Message discipline was strictly enforced. When one of the members of Scowcroft’s NSC staff was found to be the source of a news leak, he was out of a job. Similarly, when Cheney in early 1989 publicly stated that “Gorbachev’s going to fail,” Baker called his friend, and the president “cut the ground out from Dick quicker than you can imagine,” Baker said.116 And when Gen. Michael Dugan, the Air Force chief of staff, made unapproved statements in September 1990 about the Pentagon’s plans for its air war against Iraq, Cheney immediately asked for his resignation.
With examples such as these, other officials were loath to make statements or release information without being cleared to do so. Leaks on national security issues were, as a result, relatively few.
Scowcroft’s normal routine was to get into the office before seven, read the Washington Post, government-based news, and intelligence reports while at his desk, and then meet with the president and Bob Gates for the daily intelligence briefing at 7:30 A.M. At the briefing, Scowcroft and Gates “would often disagree with the pieces” and grill the intelligence officer on his report, asking questions like, “Why do you think that? Do you have any evidence for that?” (Gates noted it must have been little daunting for the GS-14 or GS-15 intelligence analyst to come to the White House and have to brief a former deputy director of central intelligence, the national security advisor to two presidents, and a former DCI who happened to be the president.)117
After the intelligence briefing, the president and Scowcroft would go over the day’s agenda, and the rest of Scowcroft’s day was typically spent in meetings. Unlike most narratives of important foreign policy crises, in which presidents and their advisers focus on a single issue, Scowcroft and his NSC staff were always juggling several balls at once. Scowcroft’s day was therefore chock-full of meetings with foreign visitors, ambassadors, businesspeople (especially from the defense industry), other interest-group representatives, and members of his own staff and others in the White House. He also had direct secure telephone lines to his counterparts in London, Paris, and Bonn. And most days he’d drop in on the president three or four times.118
Rarely would a day go by without a telephone call or a meeting with one or more members of Congress on military affairs, foreign policy issue, or other matters. Scowcroft often invited important congressional leaders to his office for breakfast or lunch, one-on-one, to chat over key issues. For Scowcroft, these meetings with members of Congress were a “very important part” part of his job and a “very important part” of his responsibilities as national security advisor. He appointed Virginia Lampley as the NSC’s congressional liaison.119
Once the business day ended at about 6:00 P.M., Scowcroft would catch up on paperwork. He’d then go home at around 9:30 or 10:00 P.M. He was “unbelievably hardworking,” in the words of one of the members of his NSC staff.120 And he expected his staff to work equally hard. Whereas Carlucci and Powell believed in the national security advisor and NSC staff taking evenings and weekends off (barring a crisis), Scowcroft thought that the seriousness of the national security advisor position demanded that he give the job everything he had. Working in the NSC was “a horrible job, long hours,” as Gates characterized it, involving “lots of game playing and intrigue, a lot of bureaucratic problems and sorting things through.” But Gates realized that he and Scowcroft would have to keep on top of “all of the backbiting and interagency rivalries and everything and all of that” if they were “to make things happen.”121
Florence Gantt, who had worked with Scowcroft when he was a deputy under Kissinger, when he was national security advisor, and when he returned as national security advisor under Bush, spoke of “doing everything” for him: running his calendar, moving paper, traveling with him, handling his correspondence, making his schedule, “anything.” But even though she “ran his life,” Gantt said, “he never relaxed.” He never slept in, not even on Sundays. And he didn’t have any recreation or outside interests aside from occasionally watching a ballgame on television.122
Despite the brutal work schedule and his preference for doing business verbally Scowcroft was usually well behind on his paperwork. Gates described how his boss handled the paper:
Scowcroft, when he left at the end of the Ford administration there were two file drawers of action items in his safe, all marked “urgent action.” Some of them were two years old which is an object lesson of its own, in terms of the way government perceives urgency and how some of these situations unfolded. Let’s just say that managing paper flow was not one of Brent’s strengths. And so, it fell to me. The stuff would come through me. A lot of stuff I would sign off on myself. And then the policy-oriented papers, a lot of the more important decision papers, I would send on to Brent. Then, what I would usually do at the end of the day is to go into his office, rifle his in-box, pull out the stuff that had to be acted on, make him sit down and sign them, or read them. One deputy national security advisor that I worked for referred to this process as the Strasbourg Goose Process, as I shoved this stuff down his throat.123
Behind his back, the NSC staff would joke about how “notoriously slow” Scowcroft was at moving paper, Nicholas Rostow reported. “You know, when [Scowcroft] leaves,” he quipped, “I’ll find something from 1975.”124
Nonetheless, Scowcroft’s apprenticeships in the Nixon and Ford administrations, along with the research, analysis, and reflection occasioned by his work on the Scowcroft and Tower Commissions, had equipped him exceedingly well for his role as national security advisor for the Bush White House. That proved to be very fortunate, since the next few years would be among the most unpredictable and consequential in the history of American foreign policy.