Customer Reviews

Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush

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This book is a must read for anybody interested in United States foreign policy. It is gracefully written, and exudes a forthright integrity that can only come from deep, hands-on experience.

Peter Rodman served in senior posts in every Republican administration since Nixon, working at State, DoD, and the White House. He participated directly in many of the events that he analyzes. Despite this close personal association with the subject matter, throughout the book Rodman maintains a cold and penetrating objectivity.

Rodman does reveal his personal loyalties and policy preferences, but this book is utterly devoid of special pleading. Contrary to what some of the other reviewers have suggested, it does not attempt to sell this or that policy position or to glorify this or that personality. Its subject is the set of challenges that ALL presidents, Republican and Democratic, face when they try to set up an effective process for making national security policy.

I served in government with Rodman in the last administration. Having come from academia with no previous policy experience, his book has helped me enormously to make some sense out of what I learned on the inside. On the outside, policy analysis and debate is a purely intellectual activity. On the inside, the intellectual component is overshadowed by the interplay between personalities and bureaucracies that this book so deftly describes.

Peter Rodman passed away last August. He was a very gentle and intelligent man. While I am thankful that he managed to leave us this book (as well as his other work, MORE PRECIOUS THAN PEACE), its unique quality makes one sadly aware of how much more he had to offer as a scholar.

I highly recommend this book for people who are interested in foreign policy. Rodman presents our former presidents in action with a lot of details which are unkown to most of us.

The book make me think who is the most influential person in foreign policy in President Obama's Administration. The Secretary of State? The Secretary of Defense? The head of the Pentagon? The National Security Advisor?

I hope we do not have a headless chicken operation in foreign policy. As we learned from Peter Rodman's book, each president has a particular management style in foreign policy. Traditionaly,the key person who advice the president has a well rounded intelectual education in geopolitics; good management skills; without a personal agenda to advance his or her own interest, and above all, that person has the full trust of the president.

It is commonplace among Democrats to think that they are smarter than Republicans and so can ignore the experience of Republican Presidents and the advice of Republican intellectuals. This just lays the foundation for the impotence and incompetence of Democratic Administrations. Presidential Command should be on the top of President Obama's reading list, but because it was written by someone who served in a number of Republican Administrations, it will be ignored.

And that is unfortunate to all Americans (but especially Democrats who want their agenda to succeed), because the late Mr. Rodman's message is that all politicians, left or right (and, therefore, the people who elect them), have to control the bureaucracy - the "Permanent Government" - if they want to accomplish what they set out to do.

A good example of this is the recent series of protocol blunders in President Obama's meetings with the U.K.'s Queen and Prime Minister. This were embarrassing gaffs, made worse by the Daily Telegraph's interview with a State Department spokesman, all of which merely succeeded in alienating an old ally at a time when the new Administration needed to get its support on a variety of issues. What caused this? The State Department, after all, has an Office of Protocol designed specifically to prevent these unneccessary blunders from occurring. Is the President too arrogant to listen to advisors? Did Secretary Clinton deliberately undermine him? Perhaps, but it is more likely that the State Department aparatchiks just sat on their hands to put the new President in his place.

Mr. Rodman examines the foreign policy of every President between Nixon and Bush 2 - and more importantly, the way each Administration structures its advisors to implement its foreign policy. He has good things and bad things to say about each Administration, Democrat or Republican, and an unbiased observer would be hard put to determine the late Mr. Rodman's own sympathies, focused as he is on the effectiveness of elected officials getting the bureaucracy to follow orders (as an aside, Mr. Rodman's advice also applies to domestic policy, although he doesn't cover that subject).

But will President Obama listen before it's too late for him to make his mark, whatever that may be? It seems doubtful. Just looking at the two negative reviews on Amazon to date, for instance, it is clear that at least one, and possibly both, of the critics either didn't read the book or didn't understand it. Mr. Rodman was a protege of Henry Kissinger, but the Nixon Kissinger structure of foreign policy comes into criticism which is quite harsh for the soft spoken, always gentlemanly author. Several times in the book, he clearly argues that the Nixon model, while effective, is a failure. In fact, my feelings toward Henry Kissinger were improved by the fact that he wrote a generous preface to someone who criticizes him so strongly.

I hope someone updates this book twenty years down the road because we are going to be in for an interesting ride and we will need someone with as clear and objective a vision as the late Mr. Rodman to offer guidance.

The late national security expert, Peter W. Rodman, wrote a book just before he died that should be essential reading for every serious U.S. Presidential candidate.

Rodman, who was a protégé of Henry Kissinger, offers useful insights into the conduct of American foreign policy from 1968 through 2007. He covers the national security history of the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. A lot of mistakes were made during those administrations, and Rodman provides an acute sense of analysis to what went right and what went wrong in each of those administrations. In an author's note, Rodman writes:

"The book conveys a few simple points - lessons if you will - about how presidents can best maintain their personal control and policy direction. They are summed up in the last chapter, but the themes are threads that run throughout the book. They have to do with the inescapable necessity for presidents to be personally and systematically engaged, lest feuds between cabinet agencies fester or bureaucracies remain unresponsive to presidential preferences. These may seem obvious points, yet the account of seven presidencies that follows includes a perhaps surprising number of negative examples that demonstrate the price that is paid when their importance is not understood."

Rodman then proceeds to critique the American foreign policy from 1969 through 2008, the year the author died.

The author was a statesman with a conservative outlook, to be sure, but his observations generally rise above politics. He critiques both Republican and Democratic administrations with perceptive analysis.

Richard Nixon, according to Rodman, lost control the American foreign policy apparatus. "...the uproar over Watergate (and Vietnam) spawned a generational of institutional changes that weakened the presidency and strengthened the checks on it. Since then we have lived in an age of legally protected whistle-blowers, a vast expansion of what some would call congressional micromanagement of policy in every field, a web of legislative restrictions on presidential discretion, a strengthened Freedom of Information Act, war power legislation and the virtual institutional of leaking, including of classified documents. This is Richard Nixon's ironic legacy."

Rodman is most critical of Jimmy Carter. Carter was overwhelmed by the bureaucracy of the U.S State Department, according to Rodman, and watched his presidency decline into the morass of revolutionary Iran (the decline of the Shah and the rise of the Muslim extremists) who held American diplomats hostage until the end of the Carter Administration.

Ronald Reagan received mixed grades from Rodman:

"The paradox of Ronald Reagan is that he was one of the most important presidents of the modern era, who left his bold imprint on his administration and on history, yet on issues on which he was less engaged, his management of government has to be rate among the weakest...but both sides of this paradox deserve their proper respect."

Reagan was an idealist who had "a moral mission to be the `shining city on a hill,'" writes Rodman. But Reagan was also a poor manager, who was perhaps to aloof from his duties. Thus we see Al Haig trying to hijack American policy, and the rise of the Iran-Contra scandal where Reagan's staff tried to sell Iran weapons to fund the defense of Nicaragua from a communist takeover.

Bill Clinton demonstrated a lack of real interest in national security and foreign policy issues (focusing on domestic and economic issues), and his lack of interest was buttressed by his first Secretary of State, the cautious Warren Christopher. But Clinton did redeem himself when he finally took decisive action in the Balkan states as they crumbled and then, with America's help, restored equilibrium between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.

Finally, Rodman takes on the administration of George W. Bush. Rodman admired Bush 43's decisiveness and confidence, but he questioned some of the advice that he received, including the intelligence on Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In particular, Rodman is critical of what he alls "the politicization of our intelligence professions (which) is a serious matter for the longer term."

"Politicization can come from either of two directions - form the leadership of an administration, or from an impulse to oppose the leadership of an administration. The latter is no more desirable than the former. Future presidents of whatever party will come to regret the bureaucratic indiscipline, even if it has been indulged lately in some quarters because partisan temptations were too hard to resist. When it happens, it is not only the political leadership of an administration that suffers. It is decidedly unhealthy for the intelligence professional to expose themselves to such political pressures; they risk losing credibility if they let themselves in drawn into positions of political advocacy."

Rodman's final chapter, "Lessons Learned," is a short summary of the leadership issues that the author raises. It provides invaluable advice to anyone who aspires to a leadership position in Washington.

This is an excellent book. Well written, it is born from first-hand experience during the last 40 years - a period which did not especially distinguish the conduct of American foreign policy.

Peter Rodman spent his formative years as an adoring assistant to Henry Kissinger, and apparently remained that way throughout his life. In Rodman's view, everything that Kissinger (and Nixon) did in the exercise of foreign policy is to be admired: for instance, he writes approvingly of the Nixon/Kissinger strategy (it's hard to really tell whose it was) to try to link negotiations with Russia into the settlement of the Vietnam war and to bomb Cambodia and Laos. Rodman writes as if this strategy, which started in 1968, was successful, ignoring the fact that it took more than five years to finally reach a settlement during which time tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel were killed or wounded (along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese). He seems to approve of the Nixon/Kissinger policy to ignore the views of both the Secretary of Defense (Laird) and Secretary of State (Rogers). And does anyone recall what the result of all of this strategic thinking was? Clearly, the settlement reached in 1973 was no better than any settlement that could have been obtained in 1968.
Rodman's recommendations for how a President should deal with the bureaucracy is that the President should do everything he can to undermine it, go around it and ignore it, except when Kissinger is Secretary of State; in this latter event the proper thing for the President to do is to support the Secretary and to make sure that everyone understands that the Secretary has the full support of the President. Confusing advice at best, and Presidents deserve better, especially from a man who spent so many years in the bureaucracy.

Author Rodman takes readers through the past 40 years of U.S. statecraft formulation. The era was (and continues to be) complicated by the lack of the moral consensus and unambiguous objectives that had aided decision-making in WWII.

Rodham's focus is on how decisions were made, and the underlying tension between the State Department and the National Security Advisers. His ideal model is a strong president with a strategic vision served by self-­confident cabinet officers working collegially to produce an imaginative range of policy options that are then imposed on the bureauc­racy and saluted by a acquiescent Congress (Gary Hart).

The bigger underlying problem, however, is that American bureaucracy is far too large. I have no idea how its nearly 12,000 or so Washington-area employees, aided by thousands more in the Washington area Defense Dept. and CIA, presumably almost all involved in analysis, recommendations and other forms of paper-shuffling, could possibly produce coherent and timely material, or reliably implement results in the manner desired by the president. (There are about 36,000 State Dept. employees worldwide, along with thousands of other U.S. government paper-people.) This undoubtedly has led to the creation of a shadow-government (aka NSC) that duplicates much of the Department of State's (and others) functions while demoralizing their career employees. Government tenure only acerbates the problem.

My recommendation would be to start by reducing staff by a large percentage - perhaps 90%, similar to what corporations have done with their formerly bloated and largely useless administrative staffs. Rodman, however, does not address this issue.

Another major problem with "Presidential Command" is that it lacks objectivity, as evidenced by Rodman's sliding over Bush's (and presumably others') penchant for surrounding himself with those who agree with him, lack of intellectual curiosity, allowing philosophy to trounce pragmatism (eg. we won't negotiate with you until you give us what we want - Iran, Iraq, N. Korea, and Russia), and just plain stupidity - taking our eye off Afghanistan to invade Iraq..

(I realize that the author recently died, and regret criticizing him posthumously.)

I ordered the book on April 2, and as of May 4, I have not received it. Because it is far past the delivery range, I was told that I will receive a full refund. But I had to get in contact with the company and received unsatisfactory service.