World Famous Comics: Running The World: the Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power
Running The World: the Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power
By: David J. Rothkopf Publisher: PublicAffairs Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Format: Bargain Price Label: PublicAffairs Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 554 Publication Date: May 10, 2005
Never before in the history of mankind have so few people had so much power over so many. The people at the top of the American national security establishment, the President and his principal advisors, the core team at the helm of the National Security Council, are without question the most powerful committee in the history of the world.Yet, in many respects, they are among the least understood.
A former senior official in the Clinton Administration himself, David Rothkopf served with and knows personally many of the NSC's key players of the past twenty-five years. In Running the World he pulls back the curtain on this shadowy world to explore its inner workings, its people, their relationships, their contributions and the occasions when they have gone wrong. He traces the group's evolution from the final days of the Second World War to the post-Cold War realities of global terror—exploring its triumphs, its human dramas and most recently, what many consider to be its breakdown at a time when we needed it most.
Drawing on an extraordinary series of insider interviews with policy makers including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, senior officials of the Bush Administration, and over 130 others, the book offers unprecedented insights into what must change if America is to maintain its unprecedented worldwide leadership in the decades ahead.
Wrong Jody David Rothkopf' The book does a good job of demonstrating that personality and proximity have more to do with the national security decisionmaking process than process and players. Meaning it does not matter if the Secretary of State is a respected, intelligent person who is the titular head of US foreign policy. What matters is who has access to the president and a good relationship with him (some day her).
Unfortunately, I did not pick up the book to learn that as any biography of Kissinger, and numerous books about the current Bush Administration have demonstrated that reality clearly. What I was hoping for, and barely found, was a book much more focused on the structure, budget, staffing, and so on of the NSC. The book sometimes found its way to those points, but spent more time on other, better known topics. Of course, reading about Iran-Contra or the war in Kosovo are interesting, but they can also be found in plenty of other books without an NSC focus. I did not feel the book really leveraged its topic well in its discussion of the major foreign policy and national security events since World War II.
The funniest error in the book is that at one point, the author refers to Jimmy Carter's press secretary as Jody Foster, not Jody Powell. How could not one catch that? The problem that creates, as other reviewers have noted, is that it calls into question everything else in the book.
Excellent Book on the National Security Council and its History. This book takes the reader from the beginning of the National Security Council (NSC) up through the Clinton administration.
It describes how the NSC has evolved over time and the nature of its functioning and how different Presidents utilized its advice.
As the NSC is instrumental in providing U.S. national security advice to the President, this book is an important one in the study of Presidential power, decisionmaking and the national security policymaking.
It describes the policymaking process and the inter-agency and bureaucratic formulation of policy and how different Presidents structured the functioning of the NSC differently to suit their needs or what they and their top advisors deemed to be the optimal national security policymaking structure.
I found the book to be excellent, engaging, and thorough study. I particularly was interested in learning about how Henry Kissinger and his numerous proteges that worked with him and eventually held their own top positions in government had a significant and substantive impact on U.S. national security policy for the last 30+ years.
This book is required reading for the student of U.S. national security policy formulation.
Useful, if over-enthusiastic, study of USA's ruling class David J. Rothkopf was a junior member of the Clinton administration. In this fascinating book, he studies the post-1947 record of the American foreign policy élite, the National Security Council and its staff, about 200 people. This exclusive establishment, which he actually calls an `aristocracy', is the part of the US ruling class that runs national policy across Republican and Democrat administrations.
He contrasts 1947 with post-2001, finding `a stunningly different set of conclusions about what to do with American power and prestige'. He supports the multilateralism of NATO, the Marshall Plan, the IMF, the World Bank and the UN, under the slogan of globalisation, and argues against Bush's unilateralism, which puts the USA `above and beyond the influence of global institutions or the rule of law'. He agrees with Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that terrorism is a tactic not an enemy.
He notes `the debacle in Iraq', yet misunderstands the region completely when he writes, "it is the decay of Middle Eastern civilisation that is the threat to us." Not the US state's unpopular alliances with the Saudi and Israeli states then!
He describes the USA's whole political system as suffering "an irresponsible separation between the will of the majority of America and the will of the representatives of the American people." But if the people's supposed representatives do not represent them, how can this be a democracy?
Finally, Rothkopf warns, "The real strategic threats come from those who would offer an alternative to our leadership." These "will argue that our system has exacerbated rather than resolved basic problems of inequity in the world." With some justice, since, as he admits, "the majority of the world's population are today effectively disenfranchised from reaping the benefit of the world we have been leading." If this US leadership, exercised through the institutions which he so admires, has not benefited the majority of the world's people, what good is it?
Generally an Impressive Effort - Lots of Detail on Kissinger For this new book by David J. Rothkopf, one can ignore the cover and title as sales hype for the book for this is a solid history and analysis of the NSC from around 1945 to the present day; it is a 550 page book in small font so it is fairly detailed and lengthy, generally an impressive book in terms of volume of information, detail, and scope; the book is mainly text and notes but it has a few pictures. It gives an up close look at the workings of the NSC for various administrations going back to approximately 1945 - 46, and The National Security Act of July 26, 1947, which was used to create the National Security Council under Truman. The early role of the NSC was to coordinate other departments and act mostly in an advisory role to the preseident.
The NSC was started under Truman but became much more important under Eisenhower, who as a former general, appreciated good preparation, research, and security planning of foreign policy. The NSC included the President who was the chairman, the Vice President, Secretaries of State and Defense, and Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. Also, other cabinet members participated including the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the JCS, and the Director of Central Intelligence. This form of the NSC, refined by Ike, has continued through to the present day, with the formality and impact of the NSC rising and falling, from one administration to the next, depending on the president and how he viewed and utilized his advisers. Kennedy did water down Eisenhower's NSC a bit and changed the NSC to permit the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to in effect run the committe, but the overall impotance of the NSC was restored somewhat by Kissinger working for Nixon.
I guess what I found interesting about the book was the idea that the author belives that Kissinger, especially in the time just before the Nixon resignation, changed the importance of the NSC as a body. It is generally well know Kissinger was involved in both policy-making and implementation. In the early days of the Nixon administration, Kissinger kept a low public profile at the NSC - before the Nixon visit to China - but he emerged after that trip as a media star - and continued that during his famous Middle East shuttle diplomacy. In a very interesting section of the book, we learn how Kissinger convened a meeting of the NSC while Nixon slept prior to his resignation and Kissinger on his own, but chairing the NSC as an assistant to the president or in effect acting as the president, put the US armed forces on a high DEFCON alert status - something that normally only the president would do. Similarly, after Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford was not comfortable with Kissinger but opted to keep him on for the sake of continuity. In addition, and as an example, the author gives us some insight into the Kissinger - Arthur Schlesinger rivavlry, that was won out by Kissinger, but Kissiger was sometimes outmanoeuvered by Rumsfeld in the Ford administration.
The book goes on to outline the long Kissinger legacity at the NSC where many subsequent advisers and members had direct and indirect ties to Kissinger. It chronicles the changes under Carter and the use of the NSC by Clinton, but Kissinger dominates a large central section of the book. The importance of the NSC rose and fell with subsequent administrations including the Reagan and Bush Republican administrations, but the ghost of Kissiger lingered on through people such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, and other advisers, who have direct and indirect links back to the Kissinger era.
This is an impressive and a detailed look into the workings, the history, the people, the internal politics, the accomplishments, and the mistakes made by the National Security Council. Most readers of American history and politics will enjoy and appreciate the book. Incidentally, the author himself has ties to Kissinger through Kissinger Associates. Also, he is a well known author of five other books, and has lectured at Columbia. pixel
Global Crisis Management David J Rothkopf has written a valuable book about a government agency that one hears very little about in the daily news. "Running the World" is an insider's account of the inner workings of the National Security Council (created by the National Security Act of 1947). The National Security Council is an executive body within the White House that includes cabinet level officials involved in diplomacy and defense. Rothkopf's account is about the key players that were responsible for the successes and failures of the National Security Council's management of America's foreign policy since the end of World War II.
Rothkopf's insider credentials are impressive: he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he was under-secretary of commerce during the Clinton Administration, he served as managing director of Kissinger and Associates, he also served as Chairman and CEO of Intellibridge, and he is currently visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
There is an interesting section in this book called "Two Degrees of Henry Kissinger," which shows that the 13 national security advisors (NSAs) that followed Kissinger have either worked with him, for him, or worked with or for one of the members of his staff.
After Nixon was elected President, Kissinger was appointed NSA. Kissinger not only assembled one of the most talented teams in the history of the NSC (Lawrence Eagleberger, Anthony Lake, Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft, and Robert MacFarlane), he also took control, either directly or indirectly, of all the interagency policy groups. Kissinger was Nixon's entire inner circle in matters of foreign policy.
When the Watergate scandel broke, Nixon became distracted and virtually left Kissinger to his own devices. As a result, Kissinger may have been the most powerful non-elected official in American history and certainly every NSA since has operated in his shadow.
The title of this book "Running the World" is more than a little pretentious. As has been noted by other reviewers, it is an account of the old boys network written by an old boy and tends toward self-importance. A more accurate and humble title would have been the one I chose for this review: "Global Crisis Management." The NSC does not run the world. The NSC, which consists of the senior cabinet members and White House staff members, is more than likely trying to control crises as they occur than trying to direct the course of events. And as Rothkopf makes clear, the response to a given crisis depends very much on the personalities of the members who are in the president's favor at the given moment.
Rothkopf is very critical of the current Bush Administration's track record. He argues that they have lost sight of the liberal internationalist values set forth by Truman at the end of World War II when the council was founded. At the time, the US enjoyed a position of power that was not unlike its position after 9/11. The Truman Adminsistration established international institutions that deferred America's power to the good of international system. The Bush Administration, under the sway of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other neoconservatives, decided to reassert American national interest through the use of military force, the consequences of which we are still suffering today.
Critics of this book have called Rothkopf an apologist for the Clinton administration. Far from it, Rothkopf has enumerated the foreign policy disasters that occured during Clinton's watch: namely, the failures in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Rwanda. The picture that Rothkopf paints of the NSC is not one that runs the world but rather one that tries to maintain the status quo in the face of an ever-changing world.
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