The Foreign Policy C1ub:They've Been Wrong Before and They'll Be Wrong Again

...But around Washington, no less than any county or state, a crowd of rezdy-made advisors has a history to go with its fancy titles and status...

...The moral of these stories for the incoming Carter regime is that much of our foreign policy is conducted in the same way and for the same reasons as plain old state politics...

...The way out of the old trap is there, if Carter wants to take it...

...But The Pentagon Papers documents a Warnke dissent so tame and bureaucratically cautious as to be insignificant...

...There have been no articles or speeches or testimony telling us that they now understand what was wrong with their old policies, though they often appear in The New York Times or on Capitol Hill...

...He should understand, too, that a major problem with these better-paid and better-educated bureaucrats is the same sort of conflict of interest one might run up against in Atlanta or Sacramento...

...He needs people who will always believe in what they are doing, and that necessarily means people who are free to dissent, to ask him “why not the best...

...It is not that men like Warnke and Vance are not intelligent and knowledgeable, because they are...

...A Narrow World All this contributes to the ultimate political irresponsibility of the foreign policy elite...

...Most Americans would not have recognized them-not yet, anyway...

...An elite presumably sophisticated and worldly is, in fact, completely isolated and provincial...

...It is hard to gauge the worst results of that isolation...

...Secretary,” a questioner once asked Stimson, “how on earth can we ever bring peace to the world...

...Another imposing briefer in Plains was Paul Nitze, now gray and distinguished, who in his younger years was a steady advocate of the war as a Pentagon official...

...Those are the realities of foreign policy, as much as summit meetings and lofty speeches...

...Because its members talk largely to themselves, the foreign policy establishment is almost entirely without a fresh or original idea...

...From the Gulf of Tonkin through the hidden plans for escalation to the costly myopia before Tet, Vance was one of the handful of men making policy...

...A Wav Out A new President will not find any of this easy to do...

...The Carter task forces have been selected very much as the elite would staff a new administration, through the discreet recommendation of patrons and proteges...

...And even with the proper balance, there’s a further, equally important problem of attitudes Back in May, an Evans and Novak column quoted Carter worrying over the composition of his foreign policy task force...

...Down from Washington and New York came the self-chosen few: men like Cyrus Vance, Paul Nitze, Paul Warnke, Zbigniew Brzezinski...

...And as soon as bureaucrats end up worrying about staying on their bosses’ good side at any cost, they end up forming enclosed, self-protective, unproductive cliques like the one that ran our foreign affairs in the sixties...

...If Carter can see the foreign policy elite as the affable but slightly shady courthouse crowd it so resembles, if he can approach national security with the same irreverence and common sense he’d apply to cleaning up a mess in the highway department, he has a chance to beat the foreign policy system that ensnarled all of his Democratic predecessors since 1945 and ultimately destroyed the most recent one...

...These are men who are well connected and well turned out, and their appeal is great to both insiders who are their kind of people and outsiders who are bothered that they aren’t...

...Seen for what they are-a parochial, p ens io n- hu s b a n ding b ureaucracy pretty much like any other, with career and institutional interests more influential than any policy from the top-the foreign affairs agencies can be given the jobs they do best, and spared the responsibilities they only mock...

...They have been there before, deputy secretaries and special assistants in the exotic places and acronymed agencies...

...Nowadays his peers speak glowingly of Lake’s “decency,” but when gossip matches names to jobs Tony Lake is put in AID, or perhaps something nice in human rights...

...The idea that loyalty extends to all situations is a perilous one...

...As a result of that climate, the ethic of staying around at any cost-and the subsidiary ethic of conning the boss into thinking you have an indispensible expertise-took over, and the vestiges of idealism shriveled and died...

...The shrunken sensibilities of the foreign policy elite helped destroy the last Democratic President...

...The predictable outcome is a homogenized set of views in men certifiably “sound,” that most valued of establishment cliches...

...Here, however, is where it gets tricky...

...Spurned by Nixon, eclipsed by Kissinger, they had delicately jockeyed in exile until another President came along in thrall to their apparent indispensability...

...If indeed there is any mystery in national security, it is what any of these men really know or believe as Carter pre-pares to hand over power to them...

...In addition to Vietnam, he was heavily involved in the Dominican Republic intervention and in the early promotion of the Pentagon arms trade, a scandal that Carter himself now deplores...

...In the CIA, another of many possible examples, the African intelligence branch vastly improved its output when all its stations were reduced because of demands elsewhere to one-man posts...

...It is mostly made up of middle-aged white men, but it is suitably sprinkled with younger proteges in the same mold, and even a black or a woman here and there...

...If a new President expects to reform foreign policy and control its abuses, he will have to treat the foreign affairs bureaucracies with the heavy hand he would apply to any other wasteful agency...

...It’s far worse not to hire new people at all, to put the old destructive premium on expertise...

...Nor, for that matter, do we know much about their current views...

...Several journalistic accounts of the closing Johnson years have praised Warnke for his relative opposition to the war policy as an assistant secretary of Defense...

...Cyrus Vance, reportedly the leading candidate for Secretary of State in a Carter administration, was Deputy Secretary of Defense under Robert McNamara from 1964 to 1967 and a major participant in, and apologist for, many of the most disastrous and deceptive decisions of the Vietnam war...

...Both the foreign service and the CIA have long-cultivated friends in the Washington press and the Congress who will almost certainly oppose personnel cuts or new agencies...

...No nonsense has been more pernicious in recent American history...

...Yet for all that national trauma, not one of these men has come forward with the candid story of what happened to us, and why...

...all government tends to go on doing what it is designed to do, whether it is dispensing welfare checks or building highways, largely because it is there...

...Though the vast majority of the elite served in the key foreign policy jobs over the past 15 years, only one of the Carter advisors has the distinction of having resigned over policy-Anthony Lake, who left the Kissinger National Security Council staff on the eve of the Cambodian invasion...

...This public furtiveness of the elite goes to the heart of who and what they are...

...The old man reportedly answered without hesitation, “You begin by bringing to Washington a small handful of able men who believe that the achievement of peace is possible...

...Perhaps worst of all, the mystique has saddled Presidents with a self-contained, self-promoted establishment of foreign policy experts whose main expertise is in their own Roger Morris writes about foreign affairs and formerly worked for the Mtional Security Co un ciL bureaucratic survival amid the debris of flawed and failed policies...

...The club’s usual punishment for “going public” in resignation is to take the offender off the rolls-no more calls, no more government offices...

...It’s doubtful that members of the establishment would conscioudy try to favor some special interest-but if your friends are all Wall Street lawyers, it’s hard to think thoughts that Wall Street lawyers don’t think...

...The paralysis of the Johnson Administrq: tion in all the areas Kissinger unlocked so dramatically-SALT, the Middle East, China, Southern Africa, international economics-wps no accident...

...Lake has managed to survive with the patronage of Warnke and others, but one wonders if it will ever be quite the same...

...men like Wamke have a sheer competence that it would be a shame to lose...

...But ask the same people about foreign policy and you are suddenly in a different realm, where eyes may glaze, voices lower to statesmanlike depths, and thoughts run to what Henry Kissinger knows that they don’t...

...that could only hurt...

...It’s no surprise that the people on Carter’s foreign policy task force aren’t talking openly about their views...

...Much of the experience that is supposed to be the group’s selling point turns out to be a record of questionable judgment in many cases, some downright failures, and consistently shifty politics to escape responsibility for the mess it created...

...When Carter held court this summer in Plains, it was just like old times for many in the foreign policy club...

...If he doesn’t see through the phony mystique, he could discover, as Lyndon Johnson did, that no popular majority or domestic achievements can save him from the consequences of letting the foreign policy club run its own show...

...That is only a sampling of the shadows in Vance’s past, and he is only the most conspicuous of the group...

...The war is gone, but the sterile intellectual quality of the establishment that fed it is still there...

...To be impressive as an elite group, of course, the foreign policy establishment has to function as one, and that it does quite well...

...And he can take the time to find new and fresh people to manage his foreign self-serving establishment...

...Things are unlikely to change, in fact, precisely because the club’s remoteness and secrecy are what have traditionally kept it in power...

...It’s obviously a waste to send the foreign policy club packing in its entirety...

...To the plain and vital questions of foreign policy-the balance between detente and security, covert intervention, the power of multinational corporations, the arms trade, the control of our own bureaucratic monsters in Washington, and on and on-there is just no direct response in the careful, vacuous prose of the establishment’s writings...

...At work, of course, is the mystique of foreign affairs, the curiously indestructible notion that our relations with the world are somehow too complex for ordinary folks, including otherwise shrewd politicians, to deal with...

...It could well be saving advice to a Carter presidency...

...Even one of the liberal favorites in the club, Washington lawyer Paul Warnke, who is widely touted as the next Secretary of Defense, has his share of embarrassing skeletons...

...Speaking Their Minds It’s impossible to wipe out the self-preservative urge completely, but there is a way to avoid the disastrous unanimity and stagnation of opinion that springs from it: by genuinely encouraging people in the government to speak their minds...

...they did just that for Jimmy Carter...

...The problem is that both the candidate and the country are still left with many of the same people and much the same mentality that have made our foreign policy the all-toomysterious mess the next administration will inherit...

...There is the pull, too, of their social prestige...

...The briefers get a splendid start on the run for jobs in the new regime...

...It’s as if all the country roads had buckled and the bridges had collapsed: the clerks and the contractors responsible aren’t talking about what happened or how to fix it, and we’re about to hire them again for some major highway projects...

...Those daily pressures raise the most serious questions about the ability of such men to run American foreign policy without a chronic conflict of interest...

...Presidents Johnson and Nixon only encouraged the worst qualities of the foreign policy establishment by making it plain that there was no freedom to dissent...

...Its members talk, after all, with an easy familiarity and authority about well-remembered events and figures...

...In cool, manly tones they talk about strategic arms and alliances and terms of trade...

...The nominee gets a cachet of big names to soothe his own assumed ignorance and anxieties (which, being their ultimate job insurance, the big names do as little as possible to dispel...

...Of the 23 names on the Carter foreign and defense policy task force, all but a token few belong to the same tiny, incestuous worldBrookings, the magazines Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, the foundations, the investment and law firms-it is a seamless web in which perhaps a hundred people circulate, talking to each other, reading each other’s articles (as much, one suspects, to keep track of rivals as to learn), promoting each other, and of course positioning themselves for calls from the Jimmy Carters...

...All witnessed the fall of LBJ and the loss of a large part of public trust in the conduct of foreign affairs...

...When a foreign service officer is expected to find human rights outrages or mishandling of aid money in a client regime on whose favor he relies for his own status and performance, it’s like entrusting mass transit funds to the highway lobby...

...What is most wrong about the briefers in Plains is that they have long since ceased to believe in anything but themselves...

...it is that their experience has been so confined to the narrowest of possible worlds-a constantly self-reducing group of similarly intelligent and informed and like-minded people-that they never take seriously the broad range of opinion...

...The pressures in its world are not from public opinion or congressional debate, but from the gentlemanly cooptation that lubricates the establishment’s dealings both in and out of government...

...Mr...

...Theirs is precisely the kind of ingrown mentality in which the myths of Vietnam survived for so long despite the stark reality...

...And they know how to arrange for the struggling presidential candidate a small, discreet Washington dinner party to show their interest, even though it’s still early in the primaries, before anyone need commit himself publicly...

...At best wary of public debate, at worst contemptuous of a country from which its members are physically and intellectually isolated, it is truly unaccountable...

...The Sullied Record It is without question an impressive group, one that includes gifted and serious men...

...It explains much of the disaster in Vietnam and the sirriilar abuses of power and secrecy elsewhere in foreign policy...

...If the boss doesn’t want criticism, recoils in horror at people who quit over honest disagreements, he ends up with an officialdom whose primary goal is not ruffling that particular feather...

...Like good old boys clustered around a courthouse square, the foreign policy establishment exerts a natural gravity on the new politician in town...

...Some of the foreign policy elite were at the very center of one of the most divisive and scarring chapters in the history of the nation...

...YOU work them to the bone until they no longer believe that it’s possible...

...Hampshire, and millions of other Americans saw rather more clearly the national interest...

...He can pause to reflect on how much he already knows about the government he will inherit in Washington...

...I ’ I The Real Mystery But more disturbing than any of the past sins of men like Vance or Nitze (and the list could go on with other names) is that all of their records, bad policy and good, remap shrouded not only in official secrecy, but in a covenant of silence among the establishment...

...The worst trait of bureaucrats is their primary instinct toward self-preservation, and its worst specific manifestation is in telling the boss only what he wants to hear...

...The result of the establishment’s return will be a return to the bureaucratic anarchy in Washington that Henry Kissinger has suppressed...

...They are used to hearing the same kinds of things over and over, from the people they respect mostand even though they would in principle abhor close-mindedness, closeminded is what they become...

...In the end, he helped draft the famous post-Tet Pentagon memo to LBJ (described in the final chapter of The Pentagon Papers) that actually recommended more troops and bombing without any reference to peace negotiations-all at a time when Eugene McCarthy, the voters of Ne...

...The efficiency and morale of our diplomacy-as the late ambassador Ellis Briggs discovered when the Czechs expelled half his mission in the late 40s-usually increases in direct proportion to personnel cuts...

...Ironically, the best answer to that problem, and to much of the foreign policy malaise, came from one of the elder statesmen of the establishment, Henry Stimson...

...The ritual of the foreign policy briefing of the candidate makes everybody feel better...

...It was the inevitable result of the style and substance of the Democratic elite, which behaved, after all, a lot like bureaucrats everywhere behave-in a way that makes purpose get lost in a morass of procedure...

...Later, under Nixon, he stayed on as a SALT negotiator to champion hardsite installations for the U. S. missile force, a dubious precedent for the first-strike nuclear strategy Carter now disavows...

...The Foreign Policy C1ub:Theywe Been Wrong Before and They’l1 Be Wrong Again by Roger Morris Ask most politicians about welfare or farm subsidies or the intricate maneuvering on the latest tax bill, and they tend to answer with a natural self-confidence...

...And the rest of the country, not least the nominee himself, may think they are really discussing how foreign policy works...

...These men are public spirited and don’t forget to invite upandcoming local leaders to attend their conferences and sit on their commissions...

...Now there are signs that it could all be happening again-this time to Jimmy Carter, who can’t seem to figure out that foreign policy is not all that different from dealing with the Georgia highway department...

...Theirs is a life lived mainly in carpeted offices and quiet boardrooms, well insulated from the rest of the country...

...At last came the expected call from Jimmy Carter...

...he was particularly worried about Tony Lake, who was fixed in Carter’s mind as “the one who quit Kissinger . ” It is this mindless distrust of employee disloyalty-admittedly just a faint glimmer in Carter at this pointthat lies at the root of so many mistakes in foreign policy and the rest of government...

...If they aren’t always right, they at least seem on comfortable ground, ready and able to apply independent judgment (and occasionally even common sense) to the personalities and politics at hand...

...Carter will find at the State Department a career service that makes featherbedding in the Georgia goveqment look mild...

...Then you throw them out, and bring in a new bunch who do believe it's possioble...

...It is, after all, the same story with the vested interests in Atlanta...

...Carter ought to make it clear to his foreign policy advisors that they are working for something far bigger than Jimmy Carter and his administration, and that they should not hesitate to criticize, even quit, if they think he is wrong, if they think in some important way he’s not being true to his best self...

...But in the sequestered world of lawyers and ambitious academics, bankers and foundation viceroys who have glided discreetly in and out of government to run foreign policy since World War 11, their names were resonant of status and authority, and presumably of future high office in a Carter Administration...

...Government employees should be loyal to their bosses, but only when the bosses are loyal to principle and the public interest...