1. Let your principals really fight it out -- and send you their actual recommendations, not a fake consensus.
President Dwight Eisenhower's governing style relied on consensus. He ordered his staff members to confer and then present him with their shared recommendations on foreign-policy issues. Maybe it worked for the former Supreme Allied Commander, but it won't work for anyone else. If you don't even know when your top advisors are arguing, how will you be able to settle their disputes?
After Eisenhower left office, President John F. Kennedy saw the error of the demand for consensus and reversed it, ending the practice of having all agencies sign off on "agreed recommendations" that were then presented to him for ratification. He hoped instead to be offered "alternative courses of action which would allow real Presidential choice among them," as I.M. Destler describes in Presidents, Bureaucrats and Foreign Policy.
In the Bush years, the 2007 discovery of a secret Syrian nuclear reactor provided a prime example of why decisions -- and arguments -- should be preserved for the president. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates favored a diplomatic approach: Take this to the United Nations. Vice President Dick Cheney argued that the United States should bomb the reactor. My view was that Israel should bomb it. Scenarios for all options were carefully developed and argued out in front of the president, who then opted for the diplomatic path. I thought that was the wrong decision, but it was certainly the right process -- and the right person got to decide. (Well, almost: The Israelis thought the United Nations was hopeless, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert quickly told Bush that if we wouldn't bomb the reactor, they would. They did, and it worked.)
But too often, Reagan and Bush relied excessively on consensus recommendations from their staff that often obscured precisely this kind of cabinet disagreement. I well recall Bush's top White House aides interrupting arguments in the Situation Room to say, "We can't go to the president like this. Let's keep trying until we reach agreement." Agreement, of course, most often means that two or three clear choices become one homogenized policy mess.
Why is this point so important? Because the most difficult decisions are not technical but political and deserve presidential attention: How much risk shall we accept? What burdens are the American people prepared to bear? How will Congress react, and how much do we care about the views and interests of other world leaders?
Dean Acheson, President Harry Truman's last secretary of state, explained the need to bring decisions all the way up to the president: Staff, Acheson wrote in his great memoir, Grapes from Thorns, is indispensable for collecting information and implementing decisions, but should not be permitted to substitute for executive decision-making. "This can happen in a number of ways, but the most insidious, because it seems so highly efficient, is the 'agreed' staff paper sent up for 'action,' a euphemism for 'approval,'" Acheson wrote. "[A] chief who wants to perform his function of knowing the issues … and of deciding, needs, where there is any doubt at all, not agreed papers, but disagreed papers."
Acheson was right. A president should demand to know what his top officials are arguing about. "Disagreed papers" are a key to presidential control.
SUBJECTS:
