Reporter’s Notebook
BY KYLE ANDREW BROWN
WASHINGTON, August 13 – Perhaps it is true that Secretary of State John Kerry was not formally told by the National Security Advisor Susan Rice about the sorta secret Iran Nuclear Talks he but White House and Fox News are scrambling to prepare their response to Karen deYoung’s explosive reporting in this morning’s Washington Post: How the White House runs foreign policy.
For Susan Rice it is going to be all out damage control.
For Fox News it is going to be crunch time preparing all the graphics and on air scripts ready for yet another ground breaking exposė on the secretive operations within the Obama White House.
Drawing upon her extensive interviews of both past and present officials of the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, Karen deYoung details in depth how the Obama White House runs foreign policy.
We provide here the full and complete Karen deYoung Reporter’s Notebook. One of our summer interns obtained the notebook after an exhaustive online search.
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Senior DOD official: “Sclerotic at best, constipated at worse. Time seems to be all this process produces. More time, more meetings, more discussions.”
Leon Panetta: “increasing centralization of power at the White House … penchant for control”
Robert M. Gates: “micromanagement drove me crazy.”
Recently departed high-level administration official: “Secretaries, deputy assistants, don’t have a sense of authorship and accountability, they tend to get beaten down. When large agencies — the DOD or State or others — don’t feel as much a part of the takeoff, implementation tends to suffer. It’s just human nature.”
Senior State Department official: “Any little twerp from the NSC can call a meeting and set the agenda.”
David Rothkopf: “I’ve never seen an administration that says it more and does it less.”
Rhodes: “I’m not saying there isn’t micromanagement at the NSC. There is sometimes I think the NSC just becomes kind of the boogeyman”
Obama: “This will likely piss everybody off.”
A senior official: “A lateral difference between principals” “Both are sets of issues where decisions have had to go directly to the president and where the decisions haven’t always been popular.”
“We’re working to fix it,” “It’s everybody’s problem. It frustrates everybody.”
One official: “It was like ‘Groundhog Day’ . . . with no progress, no refinement. In fairness, these are all tough questions. But eventually, you’ve got to make a choice.”
A former White House official: “The thing I think is fundamentally wrong with the NSC process is that there’s too much process. There’s too much airing of every agency’s view and recommendations, and not enough adjudicating. . . . Someone’s got to be the decision-maker, who’s just going to say, ‘We’re going to do this’ and ‘We’re not going to do that.’ ”
A senior DOD official: “Most items were seen as ‘too military. We were not sure how far Russia was going to go … and whether this would provoke them.”
“Things like that color moods and sour people,” the official said of the lengthy debates. “When you litigate all the small stuff, it makes the big stuff even worse.”
Scowcroft: “not to replace departments. . . . That’s always the instinctive thing — well, ‘These guys aren’t doing a good job on something, we’ll just do it ourselves.’ I tried not to do that.”
“It was a conscious decision to elevate the NSC’s role by having it chair those committees,” one said.
Susan Rice: “policy people.”
Susan Rice: U.S. response “wasn’t working until we sucked it into the White House and the president put his personal muscle behind it. Everyone’s got a hand in it’
A former White House official: “It used to be that State ran foreign policy. Now, everyone’s got a hand in it. Go around the table, and they’ve all got equities, they’ve all got personnel out in the field, and all that needs to be managed.”
A former official: “Benghazi is a good example, and . . . Ebola. That can’t just be left to CDC and State and others to manage. No. You have to have a czar and a whole team of people. And why is that? Because the politics on this issue have become so much more corrosive and challenging that it’s a natural instinct for the White House to say, ‘We’ve got to have an eye on this. On everything.’ ”
Antony J. Blinken: “The first thing I’m going to do is to stop all this micromanagement from the NSC.”
Former official: “When you look at it” from the White House’s perspective, another whose career has traveled much the same path said of micromanagement charges, “and you’re just constantly worried about something going wrong, and you’re wearing the shirt for it, you can understand how this happens.”
Susan Rice: “If you look at where we started in 2014, we had no Ukraine and Russia, no Ebola, and no ISIL as the next major counterterrorism. threat, she said in an interview at the time, referring to the Islamic State. In each of those instances of unforeseen crisis, on top of all the business we were having to do anyway, with some complexity and obviously not always with perfect form, we bent the curve.”
“Style points? Sure. Take some off at the margins. Substance? Managing an unprecedented array of complex crises and continuing at the same time to pursue the president’s long-term agenda on things that will matter when the music stops, like climate change and Cuba? I feel pretty good.”
White House Blog: “Mean, nimble, and policy-oriented … fewer, more focused meetings, less paper to produce and consume, and more communication that yields better policymaking.
Susan Rice: “But we’re going to do it in a thoughtful way. . . . We need to not compromise quality simply for the sake of structure.”