In the Corridors of Power

...George W. Bush’s Presidency was crippled from the outset by his picking Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary, much as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were illserved by Robert S. McNamara in that post...

...As Rodman recounts, he first became interested in the subject in the early 1960s at Harvard, where he studied with Henry Kissinger and imbibed the principles of realpolitik...

...The volume by Rodman, who died in August, takes the long historical view...

...It traces the rise of the national security state from Harry S. Truman’s White House years down to the present...

...But Goldstein does not explore the idea that Vietnam was a logical outcome of the Cold War...

...To seize the initiative, Rodman reports, Kennedy hired a group later dubbed “action intellectuals” to ensure that bold policies were rammed past the ossified bureaucrats...

...Scholars like Thomas Schwartz have defended the decision to fight there as understandable in the larger context of the Cold War...

...They provide a valuable reminder of the contingent nature of events while Presidents scramble from one crisis to the next...

...As Goldstein tells it, "the legend of McGeorge Bundy— first in his class, the editor in chief of the monthly Grotonian, president of the drama society, and captain of the debating team—begins at Groton...

...Johnson, despite his outward confidence, was palpably anxious about the conflict...

...He went on to work for Kissinger at the National Security Council (NSC) and helped draft his memoirs...

...Whether Kennedy would have stuck to his position is, of course, unknowable...

...prompted the former national security adviser to conclude 30 years later that America's role in the Vietnam War could have been averted...

...It was clear from the beginning," Goldstein writes, "that Bundy was distinctly uninterested in the topics of Vietnamese nationalism and the origins of the Communist insurgency...

...But these intrusive inquiries have not deterred many office-seekers...

...Kennedy was deter mined to avoid what he perceived as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s mistake: becoming a captive of the bureaucracy...

...As A. J.P Taylor once said the only lesson of history is that there is no lesson of history...

...Two new books, Peter W. Rodman’s Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush (Knopf, 368 pp., $26.95), and Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (Times/Holt, 300 pp., $25.00), offer a sharp picture of the extent to which advisers and the government bureaucracy shape Presidencies...

...Goldstein notes that "the clarity of Kennedy's decision...

...The nominees themselves are now subjected to unprecedented scrutiny...

...Thus he voices the hope that Obama will not go blindly in the very opposite direction from Bush, thereby producing his own catastrophic errors...

...Having served under Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes, the author was a veteran Washington hand, as familiar with the world of think tanks as he was with government...

...Nixon loathed the striped-pants set in the State Department and allowed Kissinger to bypass Secretary of State William P. Rogers on everything from relations with Russia to negotiations with North Vietnam...

...Goldstein treats the Vietnam War as an absurdity...

...they are required to divulge the most intimate details about their personal and financial lives to a team of vetters who try to shield the incoming President from any potentially embarrassing findings...

...He urged Kennedy to adopt a resolute course in Vietnam, but the President adhered to a no-combat-troops policy...

...But Obama himself appears to be free of the reckless self-confidence of more than a few previous Oval Office occupants...

...initiate a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam...

...The chance to work in the corridors of power and influence the President seems to have lost little of its allure, perhaps because the new Obama Administration is predicated on the notion of sweeping change rather than continuity with the past...

...In the spring of 1964 he told Bundy, "I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think that we can get out...

...When the neoconservatives sought to banish its specter, their talk about bringing democracy overnight to backward Arab despotisms seemed reminiscent of the illusions that permeated the Johnson Administration, which touted a second New Deal on the Mekong...

...Now, as Obama assembles a largely Ivy League crew for his Cabinet, New York Times columnist Frank Rich and others are pointing to the potential perils of a new version of the best and the brightest...

...They also opposed the sort of crusading moralism Bundy exemplified...

...Mild-mannered and affable, he was a conservative in the best sense of the word—the opposite, that is, of an ideological zealot...

...Gordon Goldstein, a former international security adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General's Strategic Planning Unit, conducted a number of uniquely penetrating interviews with Bundy, who grew up in Boston, epitomized the WASP establishment, and became famous for his arrogance and intellectual acuity...

...Barack Obama’s choices, including naming Hillary Rodham Clinton secretary of state and retaining Robert M. Gates at the Pentagon, have evoked visions of a new “team of rivals” he will have to master or else witness the descent of his Administration into squabbling factions...

...It is true that Walter Lippmann, George F. Kennan, George W Ball, and Hans J. Morgenthau took a very dim view of the Vietnam War early on...

...Rodman might have added that the danger of failing to have checks and balances became most apparent during the run-up to the Iraq War, when Bush essentially ignored the cautionary voices in the State Department...

...The prospect of being savaged by the Republican Right for having "lost" Vietnam might have induced him to abandon the notion that the U.S...

...It's just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw...

...Like Kennedy, Kissinger and Nixon wanted to outflank the bureaucracy...

...But that is no real demerit...

...Peter Rodman stresses that it is the President who has to remain actively engaged rather than a passive consumer of intelligence and advice from the bureaucracy...

...Kissinger has said Bundy treated him with a special Brahmin condescension because of his Jewish heritage...

...Maybe so, but flaunting that conviction would help undo American foreign policy, most notably in Vietnam...

...At Harvard he was a member of the Society of Fellows, coauthored Henry L. Stimson's 1948 memoir On Active Service in Peace and War, and by age 34 was appointed Dean of the college...

...He rejected however, David Halberstam's contention that Kennedy and Johnson were victims of their advisers, who he insisted were merely supporting players...

...Rodman observes that it did not really become an independent power center until McGeorge Bundy was appointed Kennedy’s national security adviser...

...Yet for all their study of the past and cogent observations, neither Rodman nor Goldstein is really able to produce very many lessons for the present...

...should not fight directly on behalf of South Vietnam...

...commitments abroad...

...Next came Yale, where he was inducted into Skull and Bones and was a standout student...

...In the final analysis," he declared in 1965, "the United States is the locomotive at the head of mankind and the restoftheworldthecaboose...

...One of the most valuable parts of Rodman’s discussion is his analysis of the NSC’s development...

...It is easy to envision a scenario that has Obama becoming tied down in an Afghan quagmire and the flood of books decrying the hubris of his advisers...

...He recalls that Bundy himself seemed to believe better analysis would have prevented the Johnson Administration from straying into the jungles of Vietnam...

...What united them was that all were realists who advocated limited U.S...

...As Illuminating as Presidential Command is, because of its fairly dry treatment of the subject it lacks some of the sheer narrative drive thai Les sons in Disaster possesses...

...Every President makes his selections partly on the basis of perceived merit and partly to placate various constituencies, among them big business, women’s organizations and ethnic groups...

...Jacob Heilbrunn, a longtime NL contributor, is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons...

...In retrospect, Rodman says, Kissinger himself voiced reservations about according so much importance to the NSC...

...His hubris extended to the United States itself...

...He approached foreign policy in a spirit of detached inquiry...

...He also has been steeping himself in studies of the Presidency, presumably to avoid past perils...

...Truman, who had approved its creation, realized some sort of organization was necessary to coordinate the various agencies that had arisen during and immediately after World War II...

...Yet Bundy, as Goldstein reminds us, would recommend that the U.S...

...In addition, he cautions that Presidents have had a tendency to overcompensate for the flaws of their immediate predecessor, whether it was Kennedy trying to substitute for what he viewed as Eisenhower's lassitude or Bush II attempting to replace the supposed incoherence of Bill Clinton's foreign policy team with a unified top-down approach...

...There is no denying, though, the disastrous consequences of Vietnam for American foreign policy...

...Rodman also points out that under Bundy’s erstwhile protégé, Kissinger, the NSC reached the apogee of its strength...

...His absorbing and informative book should be required reading for both students of foreign policy and government officials...