Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy
Jr, Alexander M. Haig
BOOK R E V I E W S _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....
...He tells a fine anecdote about the Falklands negotiations, on the occasion when he at last had the chance to meet the full junta...
...He argues that, after the president~l disasters of the seventies, when a hostile media turned into a blind juggernaut crushing successive administrations beneath its wheels, the Reagan team was determined to master the press and get it to serve their purposes...
...What I need is a good, smart robot...
...The expansion of the President's entourage came first...
...CIVIL RIGHTS: RHETORIC OR REALITY...
...Not so widely understood is what Sowell also shows: that Brown itself augured this shift in meaning...
...It should be settled by the few men, the President included, who carry the actual constitutional authority, and who have a mutual interest in keeping their discussions private...
...But under the American system of presidential government, where power radiates from a single source, personal relationships are allimportant...
...Or, occa, sionally, the President can form a close working relationship with a Secretary he learns to trust and like, as Johnson did with Dean Rusk...
...It is curious to me that Haig, almost as experienced in government as in military matters, does not put his finger on what is a primary cause of the confusions of American foreign policy: the sheer numbers of people who participate in its formation...
...Indeed, at one time he had presidential ambitions, and it is likely he would have made a fine chief executive...
...According to the Court, the wrong 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984...
...It is generally recognized that the meaning of the term has changed greatly since Brown, to require treatment on the basis of race and other irrelevant characteristics, and Sowell demonstrates how this change has occurred, briefly reviewing the court cases that led to Supreme Court approval of btising in 1971, and the administrative actions that ushered in government-imposed quotas and "goals" in employment...
...So he resigned, or was fired...
...That, it seems to me, is the real lesson for Mr...
...But he himself was not above shooting off his mouth at private sessions with his team, even allowing them to take notes at the time...
...His entourage was Babylonian, and designedly so, for he believed both in the prestige and the sheer weight of numbers, moving around the world in quasi-presidential state...
...But the fact is they didn't...
...Or even alone...
...He seems to have read too many newspapers and watched too many TV newscasts...
...Kissinger spread the disease of gigantism to the State Department when he moved there...
...Haig had the makings of a first-rate Secretary of State...
...Foreign policy is best conducted by a small group of very well-informed people...
...But there was no intrinsic reason why they should not have got on well together and become close colleagues, for Reagan is adept at using strongminded experts...
...A draft document, known as NSDDI, was in fact drawn up, but "the President's aides decided that he must not be given the opportunity to sign [it...
...Reagan to learn...
...Franklin Roosevelt got the first six "administrative assistants," on advice received, I regret to say, from Stanley _9 , _9 _9 Baldwin s eminence gnse, Tom Jones...
...As a result there was no description of duty, no rules, no expression of the essential authority of the President to guide his subordinates in their task...
...9 . . The document in its original form was never signed...
...The truth of the matter is that the American system o f conducting foreign policy, with power divided between the White House and the State Department, is unworkable except in three sets of circumstances...
...There have always been some confusions in American foreign policy, but they have been greatly magnified in recent decades by the gigantism of central government, both at the White House and in the Secretariat of State...
...His unique combination of talents has produced a unique book, a work of informed and deeply felt argument about Terry Eastland is co-author of Counting by Race: Equality from the Founding Fathers to Bakke and Weber...
...It certainly should not be shaped by seminar...
...It may be a necessary part of the Washington power game, under the Kissinger rules, for the Secretary of State to have a court...
...Hoover had difficulty persuading Congress to provide money for a third...
...they were the authentic voice of the government " Eventually, Haig found government by leak too much, reflecting as it did irreconcilable conflicts of policy and insoluble demarcation disputes...
...Haig places the blame squarely on the presidential staff, and in particular on their determination to exploit the media...
...Two months later he decided to cash in Britain's part of the deal and use the army to save Greece from the Communists --a move which gave the Mediterranean to the West for an entire generation...
...High policy is not a matter of collegiate endeavor...
...The point is unclear, but it is characteristic that the White House staff got the President to announce Haig's departure to the press while Haig was still drafting his letter of resignation_9 Most of Haig's grievances are undoubtedly genuine...
...CAVEAT: REALISM, REAGAN, AND FOREIGN POLICY Alexander M. Haig, Jr./Macmillan/S17.95 Paul Johnson A t the time, Reagan's choice of Haig as his Secretary of State seemed shrewd...
...Reagan knew Haig scarcely at all when he appointed him...
...What is not said or written cannot be leaked...
...Many of the "betrayals" by the White House staff were of no consequence and would THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 33 have been quickly forgotten had not Haig chosen to raise them into issues of principle...
...I am sure he is right in claiming that the systematic and deliberate leakings which militated against his interests came from the Reagan crew...
...Haig replied: "Let me assure you, Admiral, that you don't know the meaning of war until you see the corpses of young men being put into body bags...
...He caught the disease too...
...Why then should he be surprised and shocked to read it all in the Washington Post...
...Something," he writes, "needs to be said...
...There was another jump under Richard Nixon, who had 48 administrative assistants and 5,395 people in his executive office staff...
...The President can wholly delegate the responsibility, as Ford did with Kissinger...
...Originallymwhich is to say at the time of Brown--civil rights meant treating individuals without regard to race...
...But in practice, of course, good, smart robots are not to be had...
...This was excellent, in fact essential, advice, which Haig was unable to follow...
...They could only do this by supplying favored key reporters and editors with confidential government material...
...On the evidence of Caveat, he is by no means diffident in deploying the strength of the United States, but long experience has left him with no illusions about what the use of force actually means...
...He dismissed all the Foreign Office drafts with contempt, packed Anthony Eden (the Foreign Secretary) off to bed, and then, according to an eyewitness, settled down all night to issue his instructions to the British generals and diplomats, "sitting gyrating in his armchair and dictating on the machine to Miss Layton, who did not bat an eyelid at the many blasphemies with which the old man interspersed his official phrases...
...These trends have focused Sowell's mind and determined that he write this bookma book about "what has been done, and is being done," in the name of civil rights...
...Haig first came to prominence as a colonel on Kissinger's staff, when Kissinger was still Nixon's security assistant...
...a subject that is one of the nation's most important, yet most confused...
...The President can conduct his own foreign policy, as Kennedy tried to do, and Nixon undoubtedly did...
...It is a cogent, wellargued, and single-minded book, crisply written and often illuminated by a telling phrase...
...He seems to have conceived his famous "percentage deal" with Stalin, which settled spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in October 1944, entirely by himself...
...But there is, too, an element of paranoia...
...He tells us, first, that the lines of demarcation governing responsibility for foreign policy were never formally defined...
...What Sowell says in the space of these 140 pages--six chapters and an epilogue--needs to be said, and not only because this is an anniversary year for civil rights...
...A growing number of these people wanted and got a finger in foreign policy, always the most glamorous aspect of government activity...
...Yet the cost of such a masterpiece can be measured in the Court's failure to articulate a principled justification for its decision, and in its use instead of social science--the findings of so-called "modern authority...
...More than a century later, Winston Churchill's methods were not much different...
...By Lyndon Johnson's day, the staff in the White House and the Executive Building had jumped to 1,600, some forty times the size of Hoover's...
...He asserted: "My son is ready to die for the Malvinas, and it is my family's point of view that we would be proud to know his blood had mingled with this sacred soil...
...When he, in turn, became Secretary of State, he surrounded himself with large numbers of assistants and advisers...
...And if the President and the Secretary do not draw closer together, they are certain to drift further apart...
...Thirty years have passed since the decision in Brown v. Board o f Education, and twenty since enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and yet the races increasingly are polarized, the plight of the truly disadvantaged worsens, and the evolution of civil rights, especially through the courts, is embittering the nation...
...Lincoln had to pay for a secretary out of his own pocket...
...He, like Reagan, wished to see a reassertion of American power and influence in the world after the disastrous Carter years, and Haig, unlike Reagan, was immensely experienced and knowledgeable with a nice sense of the unity of geopolitics and the need to have a clear order of priorities in the allocation of effort and resources...
...One is tempted to recall the methods of Lord Palmerston, perhaps the most consistently successful foreign minister in history...
...Paul Johnson's most recent book is Modern Times (Harper & Row...
...Brown, as Sowell writes, was "a political masterpiece," a decision that repudiated Supreme Court precedent and Southern custom without appearing to point an accusatory finger...
...Broadly, the theme of General Haig's account of his stewardship as Secretary of State is his political destruction at the hands of President Reagan's assistants, James Baker, Michael Deaver, and Edwin Meese, and their innumerable acolytes and hangers-on...
...What is more, some of the most damaging leaks--because they were plainly unmalicious--came from Haig's own staff...
...Admiral Anaya, the man primarily responsible for the Falklands invasion, but whose fleet turned ignominiously for home after its first taste of action, boasted about his son, an army helicopter pilot serving in the islands...
...Instead, one gets smart humans, not necessarily very sensitive either, but with big ears, wagging tongues, the itch to acquire power for themselves and to take it away from others...
...But courtiers are notoriously idle people, and officials with not enough to do will always intrigue and leak...
...Sir George Shee, one of the under-secretaries, wrote to a colleague in 1832: "Lord Palmerston, you know, never consults an Under-Secretary...
...He merely sends out questions to be answered or papers to be copied when he is here in the evenings, and our only business is to obtain from the clerks the information that is wanted...
...So, while General Haig has written a valuable book, full of pith and not without some fine lapidary observations, it seems to me he has not quite hit the nail on the head...
...When Haig first took office, Richard Nixon, the wisest of all American professionals, phoned him and "advnsed" me to resist" on frequent personal contact with the new President...
...Haig is an impatient man, with a short fuse and a sensitive skin...
...Having once got the media hooked and dependent, they could and did obtain favors in return_9 It was a case of bribery by secrets, and it worked_9 In no time, as Haig puts it, "the Times and the Post and the networks and the news magazines had let themselves be converted into White House bulletin boards_9 The victims were senior government officials outside the White House, a long list headed by himself_9 If he delivered "a sensitive memorandum for the President's eyes only in the early afternoon," he was likely to "hear line-byline quotations from it on the evening news_9 Leaks had been a problem in the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations, but under Reagan "they were not merely a problem, they were a way of life, and in the end I concluded that they were a way of governing_9 Leaks constituted policy...
...Soweil is an economist who writes well, understands law and the courts, knows history and social science, and, not least of all, cares about his country and its future...
...was written not for pleasure but from necessity...
...Like the best kind of educated soldier, he is highly selfdisciplined, with an orderly, systematic mind, and a keen sense of both the possibilities and the limitations of power...
...BOOK R E V I E W S _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I n his brilliant book Before the Fall, William Satire quotes Henry Kissinger as saying: "I don't need an intelligent, sensitive human being for an assistant...
...It stays just this side of bitterness, but it is a book with a grievance, and it is addressed personally (as it were) to Reagan, in the hope that during his second administration he will rectify some of the mistakes Haig identifies in the first...
...Secondly, Haig believes that the President's assistants, having successfully resisted specific foreign policy guidelines, deliberately undermined his authority in their efforts to manipulate the media...
...Thomas Sowell/William Morrow/S11.95 Terry Eastland Thomas Sowell notes in the preface that Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
