 So, again, let me thank you all for joining us today and please let's welcome our first panel, Organizing for National Security Policy, which will be moderated by Ambassador David Abshire, President of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. Thanks very much. My additional panelists would please join me if I don't want to feel lonely. I want to first congratulate Ambassador President Dick Solomon for his, as Max Campelman said, his splendid leadership of this institution. He's been a great institution builder and also on the very fine op-ed piece that timely indeed that he and Chet Crocker had in the morning paper. And of course, Max Campelman is the wisest of the wise men, no question about it. Now, passing the baton, how do we prepare ourselves strategically for the 21st century? You know, the last real strategic overhaul we had, basic overhaul, was when General Eisenhower became president because he thought strategically. He brought in George Marshall as his advisor and did the solarium exercise, a basic reassessment. And out of these things, he devised really a grand strategy, a conceptual framework, long haul, far more than military, even balanced budgets and trade. And the battle of ideas, the radios, USIA, it was a total concept. And we're still resting on part of that machinery. It's interesting, on the NSC he had a strategic planning board to be anticipatory that would not be sucked into the day-to-day prices. Today, it seems to me that a new revitalization is needed as we move into the 21st century. The resource challenge, the strategic resource challenge is enormous. And in a sense, the enemy, if you're going to net assess, is us, how we are organized or disorganized because of our great compartmentalization in the executive and legislative branches to meet these very different strategic challenges, I say, stealing from Asai Berlin. We've moved from the mind of the Hedgehog to the mind of the Fox. It's an entirely different, it's a strategic conversion. We're intervening four times more than during the Cold War. Congressional Budget Office says we've either got to cut our military forces 25% or increase 50 billion, which is more than a year, which is more than any candidate indicated. We're funding, and if we don't think the fire brigade is adequately agile, we're funding the fire brigade, 16 to 1, to the fire prevention, which is the State Department and Allied groups. That's inconceivable. The people in the Pentagon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others have made that observation to me. To complicate things more, although I has now or saw this, today's strategy is as much financial as it is political military, and the new technologies are driving the financial and are driving the political military. We can lose democracies overseas through a financial crisis quicker than a military crisis, and the financial can bring on the military. So we've got to be, strategy is synergistic, we've got to learn to relate these things and break down this compartmentalization. And fortunately for us, we have a brilliant experience panel this morning to address these minor questions. I'm not answering them, they are. We, I'm going to eliminate 90% of the introductions of these gentlemen because I would be introducing them all morning if I took everything that they have accomplished. I have a tremendous admiration for all of them as individuals, as thinkers and leaders. Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft is the only NSC advisor in history that has repeated it, and that is ably serving to presidents and being a leading light on more bipartisan commissions that have broken deadlocks than I would have the time to mention any co-authored with George Bush, that fine book of world transformed, and we're a little bit at the anniversary of the Gulf War Desert Storm, Brent, I think it was yesterday. And among other things, if you would, how you view this strategic integration and also the role of the president, now we've got a new president, a new vice president, a new team, the last president has been very involved as a negotiator in Northern Ireland, Middle East. How you view these roles, and thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you very much, Dave, it's a great pleasure to be here with you this morning and to kick off this day-long discussion about passing the baton. I wrestled with what I ought to talk about and decided I would not talk about substance but talk about process, and I'm going to look briefly at three different questions. First is, how does the NSC differ from the departments and agencies of the executive branch? What does it mean serving the president? And then just a word about organization and procedures. There's been a lot of discussion about the NSC and its many incarnations, and while it's still as many of the roots put in place by President Eisenhower and the first real national security advisor, Andy Goodpastor, sitting back there, it has changed and it's never exactly the same. But the kinds of things it does are similar. The role of the NSC, I think, can be described in one word, and that is integrate. As Dave mentioned, we have a stovepipe system of government. Each particular agency, be it geographical or functional, goes up through itself and ends in the president. And the president is, by our constitution, the integrator. He has a cabinet, but we have never had cabinet government in a manner that a parliamentary government does, and that's where the integration takes place in a parliamentary system. So what we have had to do with the press of the modern age on the presidency is to provide an informal means for national security, at least, of integrating the diplomatic, the military, the informational, so that the president can look at issues, the vital issues of life and death for the country as a whole. And that's fundamentally how the NSC differs from the agencies. His principal advisors, the presidents, are the secretary of state, the secretary of defense. The national security advisor is an advisor. He is the only one with no other responsibilities than his advice to the president. The cabinet officers have multiple responsibilities. They run great bureaucracies, and those bureaucracies have a life and soul of their own. And the secretary has to lead them, but also be responsive to them. And so there is an ethic, there's an ethic that goes with the state department, with the defense department, with the treasury department. The cabinet officer also has a responsibility to the congress, who has oversight over his department. He also has a public responsibility to explain what his department is doing, what the policies are, and so on. The national security advisor has none of those. His only responsibility is to serve the president. Now the difference here is very important, and the National Security Council has to remind itself that it is not a cabinet department. It is not an agency, it is a group of advisors who try to integrate the policies developed by the diplomatic, the military, the finance, and so on, and provide the president an integrated view. NFC's have tried to, in the past, to replace some of the executive departments. Indeed, Richard Nixon, who in fact is responsible for the general organization of the NSC, which has been fairly constant since then, didn't trust the state department. He wanted to run foreign policy from the White House, and he chose as secretary of state a dear friend who knew nothing about foreign policy, because he wanted his national security advisor to run the foreign policy. That is an aberration. The NSC should not try to replicate the departments. They shouldn't do the basic studies out of which policy comes. They should not execute the policies. The executive branch's executive means execute. And it is when you step over these lines that problems occur. Serving the president, one of the most valuable aspects of any presidency is his time. There is nothing more precious than the president's time. And there is no more important task that the national security advisor has than using that time wisely and as sparingly as necessary. Meetings. What kind of meetings does the president have to attend? How much work can be done beforehand to resolve the issue so that you don't have a three-hour meeting and you can have a 30-minute meeting? Visitors. Who gets to see the president? Everybody wants to see the president. Who should and on what kind of conditions? How much does the president need to read? How much does he need to take home at night, sitting in the Lincoln bedroom, his office, wherever he does his work? All those are very important, very important issues. And in it all, the national security advisor, if he's to be successful, has to be an honest broker. And that is he has to have the faith of the cabinet officers who do not see the president as often as a national security advisor, that he is giving them an honest shake and not trying to carve up the decisions in a way which the national security advisor feels is best. Because if he does not appear as the honest broker, the cabinet officers will insist on every issue to see the president personally and the whole system will grind to a halt. Now one of the recurring problems had been conflicts, especially among national security advisors and secretaries of state, although they have been among different members of the top team. Most of those conflicts come over the job of who should be the explicator of American foreign security policy. And with a few exceptions, they should be the president and the cabinet secretaries. And the national security advisor should be seen occasionally and heard even less. It is not his job to explain to the American people what foreign policy is, what military policy is. It is important that the American people know who this person is and how he thinks and how he looks and how he acts. But his job is to advise the president, basically not the American people. Operational aspects, should the NSC be involved in operations? I think the answer is clearly no, but there are some circumstances in which all profit by an operational role. If, for example, you have a very important mission and you wish to convey personally the president's views to a foreign leader, but you want it done very privately, the secretary of state, in fact, it is almost impossible for him to do it because the secretary of state cannot travel privately. The way you can convey the president personally and privately is the national security advisor and it has been used that way from time to time. But that is the exception. Seeing ambassadors is another kind of operational mission. Ordinarily, they should be seen at the State Department, but working together, the secretary of state and the national security advisor can use ambassadorial meetings to convey a different message back home. If you want to protest something, you call the ambassador in, the assistant secretary reads in the riot act in the State Department or the secretary maybe, but if you really want to convey something, invite him over to the White House, and his message back home is my golly, I got this, not from the assistant secretary, I got this right from the White House. Those are the kinds of things you can use to emphasize the majesty of the presidency and it should be used only for just a couple of words about organization. I think it's essential that it be loose and flexible to meet the president's habits. If you try to legislate a rigid structure and a president doesn't like it, he will ignore it and set up his own informal system to get the work done the way he wants to do it. The structure has remained relatively unchanged now for about 30 years, but it's never the same. It adjusts to each president and the people around him and the way they like to operate. Organizationally, there are two or three problems that have always been a problem. The first is the integration of economic affairs into a national security structure which was really organized to deal with the Cold War. We tried various ways of doing it. I'm not going to talk about it because my friend Bob has experimented I think with some success on that and the new group seems to have some other ideas. The other is the role of OMB. I think now in the post-Cold War world, we have a variety of agencies involved in foreign policy broadly, never were before. When we're working in Kosovo, for example, it's not just the State Department, it's not just defense, it's AID, it's all kinds of things that are involved in putting together a region that has been devastated. We're not used to doing that and it is an intricate melding of different agencies and different little pieces of their budget. Who should oversee this? Nowhere in the charter of the Office of Management and Budget, to my knowledge, is the word major policy and yet by default OMB is one of the major policy-making organizations of our government. I think it's time that the policy when it relates to interagency be supervised by the NSC, in other words that OMB in the sense work hand in hand with the NSC and these kinds of issues with the policy, not the execution being supervised by the NSC. Well, there are a lot of other things, but I think the final word is that we have to remember, as we look forward, the NSC system has a rich past, but there are no two administrations and no two presidents who are just alike. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Brent. We now turn to Anthony Leigh, Tony's distinguished professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He was the first NSC advisor, as you know, under President Clinton. He served in several administrations in Vietnam as a vice consul on his prep lines of time. You're still here. And also under Kissinger for the first year, and you're still here, and that took valor. And then under Carter, he ran the policy planning council. His latest of several books, I contributed to one some decades ago, I remember, is Six Nightmares. He rattles the cages of our national security thinking in a tremendous way, taking us into new areas, while the opponents will go for our weaknesses, not our strengths, and he's gotten into this. How better do we deal with strategic warning, advice, planning, contingency planning, kinds of crises you talked about, and we look forward to your views. Thank you very much, David. This is a day replete with once-in-future national security advisors, I see others in the room. And I think somewhere in each of, there are souls, lurks a model of this job that is modeled on a story I remember hearing about McGeorge Bundy, when it was my first day in Washington many, many years ago. And that was the story of a psychiatrist who, for some reason, ends up in heaven after dying and is confronted by St. Peter. And rather than the questions he was dreading, St. Peter says, please come in immediately, rushes him to an observation window, and they look in a room, and there in the room is a gentleman in a white robe and a white beard walking back and forth, saying, do this, do that, do this, now, do that. And the psychiatrist says, my God, what's this? And St. Peter says, oh, we're dreadfully worried. It's God, and he thinks he sees McGeorge Bundy. But for all of the reasons that Brent just said, we need to restrain those impulses. This means that there are many issues to be considered, some very specific, which I won't go into, perhaps we could discuss, of how, as Brent said, the National Security Advisor best can both be an honest broker and an advocate of the policies that he or she believes in. How do you make sure that real options get to the president, not the nuclear war on the one hand, or humiliating withdrawal on the other, or do what the State Department said in between, but to try to break down the middle one? How do you develop a strategic vision? What size should the NSE staff be? How do you make sure there's an institutional memory as we speak? Now the files are being cleaned out, and this is the files that have been cleaned out in every switching administration, something that I think is stupid or understandable. But I want to take a somewhat broader cut. Yes, certainly it is true, as Brent said, and I could not agree more, that every administration is different, every president is different, and the National Security Structure ought to be adapted to the needs and operating style of the president. But I think more profoundly, as Max and Dick and others were saying also, the structure simply has to fit the substance of a rapidly changing world. The conventional wisdom is that with globalization now, and so-called structural issues, economic issues, terrorism, proliferation, et cetera, are increasingly important. That is absolutely true. But it is not enough, therefore, to simply upgrade the offices that are dealing with them. Our task is to understand how, in fact, these issues are not separate issues, but are more and more deeply integrated with the classic diplomatic geopolitical issues that we are accustomed to dealing with. So we have to break down in our minds, conceptually, the distinction between those issues and classic issues of diplomacy, including even the distinction between foreign policy issues and domestic issues, which is becoming eroded. And we have to then break down the bureaucratic boxes in which we put those issues. And as Brent said, the fundamental role of the National Security Council staff is integrated. I would, however, while agreeing with Brent on those points, take a somewhat more expansive view of what the role of the National Security Advisor not just should be, but I believe in a very new era inevitably will be. What's new about this world is not only how the, as I said, the conceptual boxes are breaking down as issues become more integrated, but also the fact that with the communications revolution and with the democratic revolution of the past two decades, both very welcome revolutions, issues the business of governing has become more politicized. Those two trends, then, the integration of issues and the politicization of governing in democracies, have, I think, five implications for the subject at hand. Whenever I say there are five things of anything, my students always say, finally, he's getting organized. You can see them grabbing their pencils and writing one and waiting for the next 10, expectantly, and the problem is I always forget number four and five, but I'll try to do better today. First, I think it is inevitable that as these issues become more complex, only the White House can adjudicate among them. The notion that many presidents come in with the lead agencies can mean that a strong cabinet will actually dominate or be able to adjudicate those issues is illusory. Any lead agency will increasingly find it difficult to impose its will on the other agencies. If you decide at the beginning that this agency or that agency has control of this issue or that issue, you are prejudging in advance, largely the outcome of which agencies' interests are most important to your president. And if you wait and decide, as the Carter administration did, who will take the lead on each issue as the issue comes up, it is a recipe for a franchise warfare, as in the Carter administration. This new national security team is a very strong one. I hope they are all confirmed as rapidly as possible. But for the reasons I said, only the national security advisor, working in this case with the vice president, can pull the issues together. And only the national security advisor can do this on a day-to-day basis with the vice president occupied. It appears elsewhere. And the national security advisor, therefore, in my view, must have the formal authority in the committee structure to do so. If not, our structure will be at war with the substance, and there will be a price to be paid. Secondly, because of these global realities, this trend is true not only in the United States, but in other governments as well. And power is gravitating and crumbling. And that is why it is increasingly necessary to get work done for national security advisors to be in touch almost on a daily basis with their counterparts in other countries. I inherited a bank of telephones from Brent to his colleagues, and passed them along to Sandy. He will be passing them along to Condi. To get the job done, then, national security advisors have to be engaged in diplomacy in a way that was unimaginable 20 years ago. But, as Brent said, they must do so privately, so as not to undercut the Secretary of State, and so as to preserve as much harmony as possible with the Secretary of State. Third, because of the communications revolution, there is an increasing demand by the press on multiple television stations, especially for explanations of any foreign policy initiative or crisis. And that law simply has to be fed. And it is inevitable that national security advisors will have to do that and do that more than I did. Fourth, with the politicization of everything for good or ill, I underlined the latter, in Washington, it is increasingly necessary for the national security advisor to spend a lot of time dealing with the crisis. And to do so not only to help the Secretaries of State and Defense and Treasury and others to explain our policies, but also to try to develop the kind of trust that will lead to a diminution of the overwhelming workload that comes from the many, many congressional, not just requests, but demands for documents, for explanations. The NSEE staff is highly overburdened by this now. And in my view, you cannot cut that staff significantly, although it should be cut as an ideal until you have done something about the problem of these congressional demands. And the NSEE staff is highly overburdened by this now. And in my view, you cannot cut that staff significantly, because it is not the best way to deal with these demands. And finally, fifth, because of this politicization, it is increasingly necessary that the national security advisor find ways to develop fire breaks between his or her own work and the work of the White House political staff. I didn't have long philosophical discussions with Dick Morris when he was in the White House, because I tried to, for this reason, see as little of him as possible. But I suspect he never understood that this is not only the right thing, but it is good politics as well. Because if we increasingly get that foreign policy decisions are being made for reasons of domestic politics, it will hurt the president not only in substance, but politically as well. Finally, just two brief points about, in such a world, particular demands on the national security advisor. One is that it is increasingly important that the national security advisor help the director of central intelligence to focus and to place increasing resources on early warning and dealing with this wide range of new security threats, such as terrorism, transnational crime, et cetera, et cetera, and as George Tennant is trying to do. As well as to enhance his capacity to deal with economic issues. My own view is that CIA will never do a better job at at least immediate economic forecasting than the Treasury Department or city group, or others on Wall Street, but it can do a much better job and it is a vital job of taking economic forecasting and seeing the consequences for geopolitical issues and helping to integrate then economic and political policies. And secondly, it is vital, and this is much harder than it sounds, that the national security advisor take the time. We try to do it Sunday mornings and Saturdays to step back from the Augean inbox that will fill just as fast as you scoop it out and in which the immediate memo always goes on top of the important memo. And to step back and think through strategic planning and to try to develop, help the president and the vice president and other colleagues to develop clear strategic goals. I am very skeptical that any administration in this new world can or in fact should develop one bumper sticker strategy that we can all say yes now, everything is clear. It would create a kind of rigidity that is long, although I confess I have a residual affection for a bumper sticker that says democracy and open markets. But a national security advisor can and must help to define central purposes and clear priorities and then make sure, as much as possible, that those priorities and purposes are brought to every policy discussion that the president has. I saw in yesterday's New York Times, a piece by David Sanger, that the new administration is working on new ways to integrate the work of the Treasury department and the National Security Council staff, something of course that we did perfectly. I'm just, while you're still nodding, I want to see how long you're nodding. We certainly did it. I remember clearly when Bob Rubin, the new head of the National Economic Council, which I thought was a very good thing, both Bob Rubin and the National Economic Council, and I tried to figure out how to integrate the work of the National Security Council and based on the precedent from previous administrations, we invented a system together of sharing staff, which would ensure, unless you had schizoid staff members, that each of us would always be included on every memo on international economic issues. I remember saying to Bob at the end that nobody's ever gotten this right, probably nobody ever will. It's very difficult to do, but it's the best we can do. Bob and Sunday graduate students will write dissertations on how we got it wrong. And I look forward now to hearing from Bob about how we did. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Tony.