When I was assistant to Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger, one of my duties was to help the receptionists move about a dozen chairs into his office for the morning staff meeting. When it was over we moved the chairs back out.
The meeting was called the “LA/PA” meeting. Mr. Weinberger wanted to start the day hearing about hot media stories and Capitol Hill mischief from his legislative affairs and public affairs assistant secretaries. The other assistant secretaries of defense also attended, to listen to what was going on and to raise other pressing issues. The meeting lasted about thirty minutes. It was a very useful way to start the day.
Once or twice a month, Secretary Weinberger chaired a meeting of the Armed Forces Policy Council, a more formal body that assembled in his conference room. All the service secretaries, senior military leaders, and the Secretary’s top staff members attended. This meeting had zero substance. It was absolutely useless. Well, not quite. The attendees could report to their staff and family that they had actually seen the Secretary that month. Because it was formal, infrequent, and had no real purpose, we had to struggle the day before the meeting to come up with issues for Weinberger to talk about. He barely scanned our paper before he headed in. During the meetings, people scribbled furiously as he droned on about the issues we had given him to drone on about.
Presidential cabinet meetings are no different. I attended cabinet meetings in four administrations. They were all the same. I’d be shocked to learn that they have changed.
For obvious reasons, they are not held on any particular schedule. The cabinet assembles in the Cabinet Room. Media come in, listen to the President discuss whatever subject interests them that day, and then leave. The President gives a pep talk to the cabinet. Designated cabinet members do a departmental show-and-tell or discuss a particular timely issue. People chat. After an hour they all depart. In the United States we don’t really have cabinet government.
When I was National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State, I used a variation of the Weinberger LA/PA model—an early morning meeting of my direct reports and principal aides that I called “Morning Prayers” . . . just starting the day together. It was a large meeting; as many as forty people attended. I had very strict rules:
“My morning meeting will never run longer than thirty minutes, usually less, so we can all get to work.
“This is the way we start the day as a team. I want you all to see me and check my morale and whether I seem okay. I want to look around the room at each of you and discern any subtle signals suggesting something I need to probe.
“This is not a show-and-tell meeting. If you have nothing to say, don’t speak.
“No one gets reamed out here. We are sharing with each other, talking about the needs of the day and what we need to do, discussing how to fix problems. If anyone has really screwed up and needs counseling, we’ll do it later, alone, in my office.
“You will leave the meeting knowing what is on my mind and, therefore, had better be on your mind. I want each of you to meet with your staff to share with them what we have discussed. We need to connect from top to bottom.
“And oh by the way, you can tell your spouse and relatives that you see the Secretary every day.”
I told them not to be surprised if I poke fun at them or get a little goofy sometimes, too.
One Tuesday morning I came in and asked if anyone had seen Monday Night Raw wrestling with Hulk Hogan and the Undertaker. I was met with blank stares and bewilderment from the assembled ambassadors, senior Foreign Service officers, and other intellectual types. I described the match. It was a heavily choreographed ballet, I had to admit, yet the wrestlers showed considerable athletic skill and training as they bounced each other on the mat.
The bewilderment remained until I told them why the match interested me. Thirty thousand people had come out on a Monday night in a mid-sized city in the Midwest to watch it. This is what average Americans do. They also love NASCAR and Walmart. These are the folks we really work for. We can’t forget that.
One of my jobs as Deputy National Security Advisor under Frank Carlucci was to convene interagency committees to resolve issues for the cabinet and the President. These meetings were more formal and serious than LA/PA-type meetings, with very senior attendees. Out of them came advice for presidential decisions. Thus their name—“Decision Meetings,” because they had to end in a recommendation to take to the President for his decision. Attendance was at the deputy and undersecretary levels from the State, Defense, Treasury, and Commerce departments. The CIA was there, the Attorney General’s office, the National Security Council staff expert, and White House experts. I had the Chair.
We had a lot going on in those days, with lots of meetings. We had to keep the trains moving on time. Meetings needed a tight structure.
An agenda was always set and briefing papers provided to each attendee well in advance. If you haven’t had time to read the paper, send someone who has. Don’t waste our time.
I would open the meeting with a five-minute description of the issue and the current state of play. For the next twenty-five minutes each agency with a position on the issue gave its presentation without interruption. For the next twenty minutes we had a food fight. Anyone could jump in and disagree and support or attack whoever they wanted. Strong language, passionate views, fight for your position. “Nothing personal, Sonny, just business.”
At fifty minutes, I took over the meeting and made everyone shut up, summarizing the merits and demerits of the arguments and reaching a tentative conclusion that I would recommend to the President for his decision. This took five minutes. The attendees then got five minutes to object and clarify. If my recommendation still seemed right, I would confirm that. The meeting was over. They returned to their departments and briefed their Secretaries. If a Secretary strongly disagreed, he or she would call me that night. The next day the decision paper—with concurrences, nonconcurrences, and options—went to the President.
The paper reflected all the edges of our debate. Everyone present had their say. We didn’t want to round the issue into a small beach pebble that might roll in any direction. Any cabinet Secretary who still strongly disagreed could go to the President.
I don’t recall a single instance when a Secretary did that. We had made sure every view had been presented, considered, and reflected in the paper.
As with so many issues, we could often whittle a problem down to a series of alternatives, each of which should work. We then tried to pick the best of breed.
The full NSC worked the same way, with the President in the Chair. Cabinet officers presented their views, while either Frank or I served as the master of ceremonies, laying out the issue and guiding the discussion. The President usually asked questions, but seldom made a decision during the meeting. After it was over we prepared a decision paper for him. When he reached his decision, a written confirmation was disseminated.
Because some NSC staff members had gone rogue during the Iran-Contra period, we made sure the process was formal and documented. We succeeded in restoring credibility to the NSC system.
I’ve run many other kinds of meetings.
Informational or briefing meetings simply inform attendees about a subject of immediate interest. I kept a time limit on these meetings to keep them from wandering all over and to prevent spring butts from popping up mostly to hear themselves talking.
The principal official meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was called a “Tank Meeting,” so called because the original room where the World War II Joint Chiefs met was located in the basement of the Commerce Department and was reached through a tunnel-like entrance. In later years the meeting was normally held in a special room in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. The chiefs, their operations officers, and lots of backbenchers and note takers attended. There was a formal agenda.
I found it more useful to have the Chiefs meet in my office without assistants or agenda. This relieved them of their bureaucratic veneer, and we could talk openly—the most senior and experienced military guys in the armed forces and not just the leaders of large organizations whose interests the service Chiefs were expected to defend at all costs. Those meetings worked beautifully, as we dealt with the most fundamental issues of war and peace.
Not all my meetings were structured. I liked to end the day, for example, with a freewheeling get-together where three or four of my closest associates could sit around my office, feet up, and review how things were going. It was an unhurried time when we could prepare ourselves for the challenges and opportunities of the next day.
Humans are not by nature solitary. They need to connect with other human beings to share dreams and fears, to lean on each other, to enhance each other.
Two people together are a meeting. As organizations become larger, ever more people need to meet formally and informally. I have always tried to conduct meetings, no matter how large, with the intimacy and respect two longtime close friends show each other when reminiscing about their shared past.