I got to know Carter in the middle of the ’70s. At the time, I was director of the Trilateral Commission and in the process of establishing it. We the organizers decided to have at least two, maybe four—my recollection is two—Governors on it, one Republican and one Democrat. We chose the Republican from the far West because of the Japanese, and we were looking for a Democratic governor, and we thought it would not be interesting enough to have just a conventional Northeast Democrat, but to pick a bright Democrat from the South. I guess our first thought was [Reubin] Askew, and then someone mentioned that there was a Governor in Georgia who had opened up trade offices for the State of Georgia in Brussels and Tokyo. I remember saying, Well, he obviously is our man. He fits the trilateral concept, let’s invite him. And we did, and then discovered that it was his predecessor who opened up the trade offices. That’s just a minor footnote.

He got on the Commission. What I was describing was ’73, and then by ’75 I knew that Carter was running for the Presidency and we went over to a meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Japan, and Carter at one point came up to me and said, Would you come to a press conference with me, which I am having for my candidacy? I said, All right, I’ll go. I was curious. It occurred to me that he was taking me along to some extent to show the newspapermen that he had somebody to go with him because at the time he wasn’t being taken very seriously.

The American newspapermen gave him a very hard time, didn’t treat him very seriously and laughed at him, said his objective was to squeeze in maybe as a vice presidential candidate. I remember him first of all not being at all rattled, keeping his cool, very pleasant, even though he had lots of reason to get mad. And then he said to them, You know, the first caucus in the country is in the state of Iowa, and I have worked awfully hard in Iowa. I’m going to win in Iowa, and you fellows are going to ignore it. The first primary in our country is in New Hampshire, and I have campaigned as hard in New Hampshire as I have ever campaigned in Georgia. I have shaken as many hands and more than all of my rivals combined, and I’m going to win in New Hampshire, and then your headlines will say, Southerner wins the North.’ The next major primary after that is in Florida. I’m going to push Wallace down below 40 percent and thereby lift the scourge of Wallace from the Democratic Party— (and remember Wallace was a real threat at the time) —and I may even beat him. If I beat him in Florida, your headlines will say, ‘Carter, Front Runner.

Then I walked out and I said to myself, This fellow is not to be dismissed. Then at the Trilateral Commission meetings he spoke up on the Middle East and talked about American national interests there, being made to promote peace between the Arabs and Israel so that American interests are promoted; the need to focus in so doing on the Palestinian question. I remember speaking up because I was chairing this very large meeting, that it’s nice to hear a Democratic candidate for President with guts. He was saying things in the Middle East which were quite innovative for the time. I came back and told my wife about it, and she said, Well, you feel that way about it, why don’t you support him?

I wrote him a memo, not offering to support him but outlining things he ought to raise in foreign policy matters, and he wrote me a long personal letter back thanking me and then I heard he was going around the country saying I was his principal foreign policy adviser, and so I became one. That’s the situation.

After the campaign, after the election, when did he designate you for a position and what transition work followed from that?

After the election and during the election I did a lot of work for him. Once the process became more formal, in a sense that he was a nominee, I guess it was quite clear to all concerned that I was his number one foreign policy adviser. It was taken for granted that I was going to work for him. It wasn’t clear what I would get, and there was a lot of press speculation and a lot of maneuvering. Once the elections had been won, a lot of people who had worked together became rivals for jobs. Of course those who were out front were the ones upon whom both attention focused and objections focused. There was a lot of maneuvering and I wasn’t offered anything specific, I just was told you will be there, but I wasn’t offered anything specific, and Carter phoned me up a few times to ask me for my nominations for slots, and who do I think ought to be Secretary of Defense, who do I think ought to be National Security Assistant.

The job I wanted was that of National Security Assistant, and when he asked me, I remember wondering whether I should nominate some people for the slot who were obviously not suited for it or whether I should nominate people for the best possible slots. I decided it would be silly to play games, and I nominated people for that slot who I thought would be best, and I nominated two people, Henry Owen and Harold Brown, either of whom I thought would do a very good job as National Security Assistant. For Secretary of State actually I came up without explicitly nominating him, but in effect by describing different people, I came up nominating Vance. Towards the end he asked me. What would you like to be? I named a couple of slots that I would like to hold and I said either Deputy Secretary of State or Assistant for National Security Affairs. I never thought I was a serious candidate for Secretary of State. The press bandied me as such but I never thought I was.

He didn’t come back to me until the middle of December and he phoned me up and said, I’d like you to be my assistant for National Security Affairs, and then he says, You know, you were my number one choice for that slot all along, but I couldn’t tell you and I had to go through a routine of screening and searching for that slot as well, but there was no question in my mind that you would have that slot.

Now I don’t know if that’s true or not. That’s what he told me. My guess is, it’s probably true except that he probably had to go through a process of digesting a lot of opposition to me, the kind of rationalizing the reasons why he wouldn’t accept the arguments against me, and I heard there were quite a few.

He was interviewing other candidates, was he not?

Yes, but not for that slot exclusively, although he was interviewing people for foreign policy, defense, national security, so that any one of them could have gotten that slot, but he never talked to anyone else about that slot, whereas he did talk to people about the other slots. That gives some support to what he said, and therefore my judgment is he was planning to have me in that slot, he thought he needed that, but he had to do what he said, go through the processes. Second, I think much more importantly, he had to somehow or other think through the objections that had been raised to me.

Were you the only one of what were called the key actors that he did appoint who had an already developed personal relationship with him, already knew him, or vice versa?

Yes, I guess so, because Vance supported Sargent Shriver for President, which I always thought showed a certain eccentricity of judgment. Brown came on board, not having supported anybody once Carter was nominated, [Michael] Blumenthal professes now never to have been enthusiastic about Carter anyhow. The only person whom he knew well whom he appointed in the national security area was Stanfield Turner, whom he chose to be CIA chief, but in the second round, because his first choice was Ted Sorenson, actually, whom he didn’t know well either.

Was there an intellectual affinity between you and Carter by this time, and if so, how would you characterize it? What did you do for him, and what did he do for you?

He appointed me to his administration.

In terms of your mutual understanding of reality.

That’s very hard to answer. What I liked about Carter was my feeling that this was a person who I thought would be reasonably tough and realistic in foreign policy and yet would be guided by certain basic principles which he would project to the world; principles which I have always felt were America’s strength, namely the fact that this is a society founded in certain philosophical assumptions which have historical relevance. He therefore would conduct a foreign policy, which while realistic, would be derived from certain basic values. It would be an appealing foreign policy that would strengthen America’s impact in the world. This is what appealed to me about him. I can’t really say what he liked about me. I’m not a person to describe how the relationship with an intellectual affinity develops from his point of view. I imagine he needed me.

Would you accept a side comment on that?

...

It’s a very important relationship, and we’d like to understand it.

Carter really did not know the international scene in any kind of depth, and I think the things that appealed were Zbig’s intellectual clarity, crispness, and integrating strategic framework that he could bring to bear on the issues. The President may not have liked where they led him on some things, but I think they drove him to a conclusion that he expressed to you right after the election, which would tend to be evidence to support my judgment, wouldn’t you agree?

Which things?

Right after the election I remember you saying once that he had said that if there’s anyone who can crystallize a clear Democratic foreign policy in the future, it’s you.

I think it’s also the fact, and that sort of came on gradually, that I could communicate to him crisply, to the point, and quickly, because we did it during the campaigns all the time. There would be no waste of time; I’d get in the car and say, Look, four things you need to know, the things you need to do, the things you need to say,—like that, bang, bang, bang, that’s it, finish, okay, bye, that’s it. Whereas a lot of people had a tendency to kind of sit there and try to talk to him, get to know him, and I just think in balance in that respect that didn’t really appeal to him.

When you were chosen in December, I believe you said that was not much time.

It was the middle of December and I was getting real nervous.

When your nervousness ended, what kind of understandings were reached or what kind of guidance, if any, came from the President concerning the role of the Security Adviser, the kind of staff that should service that role? Or was that left to you entirely? Also, what kind of presidential guidance, if any, did you receive on what the agenda was in your area?

In terms of the concept of the National Security Adviser, I think there was an implicit understanding that we would try to avoid a situation in which he would predominate very evidently and notably, and I think Carter was also concerned about his own image. In his campaign speech or speeches he attacked the Lone Ranger style of foreign policy. I think there was some implicit feeling that we would try to low-key it if we could.

At the same time, I also very, very strongly remember, when going over different candidates for Secretary of State with him, describing a certain candidate and saying to him, He’s the kind of Secretary of State who’d like to make and run American foreign policy. And Carter made some comment to the effect, Well, he’s not my type, making it very clear that he wanted to make foreign policy, direct foreign policy, and the Secretary of State would execute his orders, which made it also clear to me that being an Assistant for National Security Affairs was the position to be with Carter. If the President is going to make and run foreign policy, then you want to be with him, rather than to be under the receiving end in the Department. That immediately conveyed to me the notion that the Assistant for National Security Affairs would be, at least to some extent, an initiator of policy as well as its coordinator.

As far as the staff is concerned, the only real guidance I got on that was that the staff was to be reduced from Kissinger’s size, and by some significant factor, though it wasn’t really made very clear by how much. In fact not so much initially but later, when we had to kind of juggle figures to satisfy his desire for cutting our operational needs, we reduced the full staff from about a 130 to 99, and the policy-making staff, that is to say, people like my colleagues here who came down in procession from Washington to approximately, if I’m not mistaken, 30 to 35, or less.

As we went on, we had to recruit people, to some extent, as detailees, because we found we couldn’t operate within these restrictions. We simply detailed and had people come over as detailees, but kept the staff officially small. We had also a discussion of how to organize the NSC, and this was a terribly important point. This is very well known here to everybody but not to many people who talked about the President more generally. Every President offers a special style, and that shapes the machinery. Carter wanted to reduce the number of committees and agencies, so we had to revamp the NSC machinery, and I spent some time with Carter, after my nomination and before the inaugural, drawing up a basic document on the organization of the NSC, and it went through a couple of revisions. He didn’t like my first version; he rejected it. Shall I go into that?

Please do.

Kissinger had certain committees under NSC, of which I believe he chaired four, and others chaired three. Is that right? Do any of you remember?

There were seven committees, but I don’t remember who chaired them.

Officially it was four to three. These were essentially undersecretaries’ committees, and Kissinger never chaired a Cabinet-level committee. Since the President said he wanted to be engaged, I proposed a scheme of seven committees at Cabinet level, three of which would be chaired by me. I wanted to chair a committee on crisis management, on arms control, on covert activities. The other four committees would be chaired by the Secretary of State, for foreign policy issues; the Secretary of Defense, defense; CIA, CIA; and Treasury on international economics. Carter rejected that out of hand, and said, That’s too complicated. I don’t want seven committees, the way Ford and Nixon had seven committees, I want something very simple.

I came back with a scheme for two committees. I sat down with him one evening and we worked on a formula for two committees. One committee would be called PRC—Policy Review Committee, which would deal with long-range policy issues and would be chaired by a Secretary. Prior to each meeting, the notion was that I would submit a memo to Carter informing him that a PRC is to be held on such and such a topic and that I recommend that the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense chair it. You approve it.

The other committee would be called SCC—Special Coordination Committee, and that would be for crosscutting interagency issues. I would chair that committee. The three crosscutting agency issues would be: covert activity, arms control, and price management. Carter loved that. I drew up with David Aaron, my deputy, a memorandum which we called presidential directive because we changed the names of the previous papers. I took it to the Kennedy Center, at the time of the presidential gala the evening before the inaugural, and during intermission got Carter out and had him sign it, and the next day at 3 p.m. right after the inaugural I had messengers deliver copies of it to Brown and to Vance and to whoever was acting before Turner to inform them of the new arrangements. They were surprised.

Was the President, so far as you knew, getting advice from anyone but you on the organization of the NSC?

I don’t think he was. He announced at the meeting with the Cabinet shortly afterwards that he had worked out a scheme with me, and he was very satisfied with it, so the Cabinet expressed its approval for it as well.

Were you given a free hand in—beyond those guidelines—in organizing and selecting your own staff?

Yes. Actually, this was one of his weaknesses, and maybe it was inherent in his relatively limited political contacts. He took very little interest in second echelon appointments. This was not only in terms of my own staff, but also in terms of the Departments. He took very little interest in who the deputies and undersecretaries were in the national security area. This was much to my regret, because it meant that every Department head had a free hand, and I think that created some problems later on. As far as my staff was concerned, I had a completely free hand.

Others besides you also thought that that was a mistake.

He didn’t fire people too much, so that was also a problem.

Another thing that has been said is that that choice by Carter to leave more or less to the Secretaries a free hand in their own subcabinet appointments was in pursuit of another guideline of Carter’s, and that was that so-called Cabinet government. Did he ever talk to you about that and what his concept of that was and how it might impinge on—?

No, not really. I’m not sure he had thought it through, unless it was something in his Georgia state Governor experience which he took for granted but that the rest of us, the non-Georgia people, didn’t know much about. The Cabinet government came to an end very quickly. We used to have Cabinet meetings once a week, and they were just awful. That was just two hours of wasted time. This was Monday mornings, I started bringing the Monday morning new issues of Time, Newsweek, the U.S. News and World Report to Cabinet meetings, and since he made me a Cabinet member, in the first Cabinet meeting that meant that I sat around the table, unlike previous assistants for national security affairs who sat against the wall. I had to be careful, so I always had these magazines on my knees—like this (demonstrates)—and I read the three magazines in these two hours because it was a waste of time. After a while we had Cabinet meetings every two weeks, and then after a while I think we had them on the average maybe once a month or so.

In the January 6, 1982, interview in the New York Times you complained that you were probably not given sufficient authority in terms of an ideal system, and in part this was Carter’s desire to avoid an appearance of the previous system. Would you explicate that a little bit?

That gets to the more basic question of how foreign policy can and should be made. What I was expressing there is the view that if you are going to have a system which is highly centralized in the White House under a very active President, it’s much better to be open about it and not to create the illusion that something else is operative, by references to the primacy of the Secretary of State, or first adviser, first spokesman, so forth, which then creates tension even if on a personal level there is no tension between a Secretary of State and the assistant, as there was not between me and Vance for most of the time. We can talk about that, but there really wasn’t. There certainly was between our staffs. In part because there was this conflict between illusion and reality.

I think it would be much better for the President to make it very clear he’s running this system and whoever speaks in his behalf does so from the center of things, the White House, and runs it for him, when he cannot do it. Then the President can decide whether the person is also a public spokesman or not. He wanted me to speak up. The reason I appeared on these shows is not because I was irresistibly drawn to the doors of television studios, but because the President would tell me to go, he would phone me up after the show and tell me whether I did well or not, and generally he approved what I said.

On the one hand I was made a spokesman; on the other hand, I was never designated as a spokesman and I was therefore attacked for speaking up. I think that created a lot of confusion. Now the other system, which I think is perfectly acceptable, perfectly reasonable, and has worked well, is that of a President who holds back, who says I’m only interested in the broad strategic issues, the commanding heights of policy, but otherwise it’s a Secretary of State who is my principal officer, he speaks for me, he articulates policy, he initiates it, and he dominates coordination. That was the case with [John Foster] Dulles and [Dwight] Eisenhower, [Dean] Acheson and [Harry] Truman, and for two years, Kissinger and Ford. It’s a very respectable system. The problem was that we never clarified that we didn’t have that system to the degree it was necessary. Under Reagan, I think the situation is even worse because I think we have neither the one nor the other at all now—it’s a more stalemated system.

Did the President indicate to you why he wanted you to become spokesman? Because if I remember correctly, this occurred somewhere along about halfway through the administration. In the early years you were not visible on talk shows.

A little earlier than that. It started, I would say, let me make an estimate and ask my colleagues—’77?

Did he indicate to you why?

He wasn’t satisfied with Vance’s ability to articulate and to present the case. I think, though he never said, that there was also some feeling that the nuances weren’t quite right. Even though Vance was saying what the President meant to say, somehow the tone and the nuance came out slightly different. In any case, he never explicitly said, he simply encouraged me and wanted me to do it, and he had me do it, not just publicly but he let me do it with the congressional leaders, he set special briefings in the White House to which he invited the congressional leaders, and I did the briefing. I think Vance was there once, but I gave the major briefing on American foreign policy strategy, and if I remember correctly, Vance talked about the policy in the Middle East or on Panama. It was something narrow.

He even had me set up a meeting in the Cabinet Room for his family. He had me do it for the Cabinet. I remember that very well because he first had me do it for his family, then he asked me to do it for the Cabinet, and after we did it for the Cabinet, I said to him, You’d better have a briefing by Vance so that there’s no hurt feelings. I was worried that Vance would be hurt, so he then set up a meeting at which Vance could give the briefing.

There was one part of my question that I think got lost, and that was in the initial period, talking with the President about the nature of the foreign policy agenda that he wished to emphasize, or the nature of the work. Did he have explicit ideas about that, definite ideas, or did he wait to be educated by you as to what should be done and what the issues were that should be immediately addressed?

I think he himself was instinctively drawn toward and maybe to some extent gave the impetus for such issues as nonproliferation, where his own nuclear background was important to him, and in a way an electoral asset and to some extent, but less so, human rights. More generally, I think there are specific antecedents for the agenda, namely that during the campaign I asked Henry Owen and Richard Gardner to join me in drawing up the kind of basic foreign policy document for the President-elect, drawing on some of the campaign themes but trying to systematize what he ought to think about when he becomes President.

We drew up such a document. It wasn’t very long. He was sort of interested in it and used it as a basis for discussion at one of the post-electoral meetings with the emergent Cabinet, and I then suggested to him that before he becomes President he hold a meeting with the leadership of the Congress, on foreign policy, and use that document as a basis for his presentation, which he did. That’s in answer to your question, Dave. I went to that meeting deliberately intending not to speak, and I remember Vance made some comments and then all of a sudden the President calls upon me and says, Zbig, outline our objectives. That really surprised me. That was somewhere around the tenth or twelfth of January.

After the inaugural, he and I talked about it, and I told him it would be useful to use that document as the basis for something more formal that I would draw up, namely the foreign policy agenda for the administration. He says, That’s a very good idea, don’t tell anybody about it, just do it. I didn’t work very hard; I brought a colleague down from Harvard, Sam Huntington, to help me, and Sam worked on it and then I worked on it, some others here worked on it, Bill worked on it. And I gave the President a 40-page memorandum with a very brief cover note, two or three pages, in which I outlined ten major objectives for the administration to achieve in the course of the four years, and I broke up each of the ten objectives to the extent it was possible into annual substeps, indicating when roughly we would try to reach sublevels, so that there would be some cross cutting sense of balance as we moved forwards. Anybody would have a sense of how we were moving on the Middle East, how we were moving on the Far East, and so forth. For example, goal number four was normalization of relations with China, and the target date for that was 1979.

Carter liked the document very much, and he and I discussed it at some length and he told me to show it to, but not leave it with, Mondale and Vance, and I showed it to them and then he told me to get some comments from Vance on it, and I gave a copy to Vance to keep. Then later he told me to show it to Brown and to Turner, and I did. That emerged as a basic document and guided what we did, particularly in the initial phase. After a while events asserted themselves. But at the end of the administration I reviewed the document, and if I’m not mistaken my conclusion was that we by and large did what we wanted to do on seven of the ten goals, and three we didn’t.

The Middle East—did that figure in one of the goals?

Yes, but that was one that we didn’t achieve. We wanted to have a comprehensive settlement by the end of the administration, and we obviously didn’t. We obtained a partial settlement, and the framework of a comprehensive settlement, but not the comprehensive settlement, and there we changed course after one year. We discovered after one year that what we were doing was not practical, not attainable.

I must say this assertiveness of President Carter in foreign policy surprises me a little, particularly because I think you’re indicating it begins very early—even, as you say, inaugural eve this new system was presented without any consultation with Brown and Vance. Did he have reasons for this kind of assertion, for wanting to be his own Secretary of State? Also, were there reasons for trying to mask it behind some of these other appearances of consultations, cabinets, and so on? What was the rationale for this? Was it discontent with his predecessor’s performances in this area, or what? Or was it just personality?

I think he wanted to be an active, dominant-type President. I think he felt that Ford was too passive, and too dominated from the outside, probably by Kissinger. I think it was perhaps a reflection of his own personality and his concept of leadership. Apparently that was the kind of Governor of Georgia he was. I’m not sure of that; I wasn’t there, but that’s what his associates said, that he liked to make decisions himself, to involve himself in them. That was just his style of leadership, for better or for worse.

Following that up for a moment, would you in making a judgment, looking back on the four years, say it was for better or for worse in terms of assertiveness of this kind?

When I compare Carter’s foreign policy performance, let’s say in the course of his first year, to Reagan’s, I think it’s far better, because it did get the United States going on a number of issues which otherwise might have gotten out of hand—whether Panama or the Middle East, China normalization or revival of NATO, multinational trade negotiations, majority rule in Africa. Things didn’t drift the way they otherwise might have drifted, and the way they appear to have drifted lately. It seems to me that if you are going to have an activist foreign policy, then presidential leadership is very important. If you’re not, then I think it’s easier to maintain control and domination by someone other than the President.

When we have a presidential-NSC foreign policy system, as in the case of the Carter administration, what do you see as the proper role for the Secretary and the Department of State, and to what degree do you think that role was approximated in the Carter administration?

I would say institutional implementation more than anything else. I think it’s very difficult for the Department generally speaking to initiate and innovate, because of its size and complexity and style. I would say loyal execution of policy—and in a sense that was the case, by and large, except on two issues, about which in time significant divisions developed. Such major issues as in the Middle East or Africa, later the normalization of China, the Department worked very loyally, carried out instructions, and there was no friction or conflict.

The conflicts developed on two issues: How do we handle the relationship between arms control, SALT, and the effort to stabilize the American-Soviet relationship, and peripheral Soviet expansionism, which at least in the judgment of some of us, touched and potentially threatened our vital interests. On that we had a disagreement. The second, of course, in the latter phase of the administration, was Iran, and how do we handle that. There, I think, there were sort of basic differences of judgment and maybe even of values, and on these two issues the Secretary has strong feelings, and the Department contesting White House primacy I think also tried to assert itself.

How would you characterize the difference?

I don’t think I would have much to add to what is generally known. My view was that we should very early on make it very clear, both verbally and otherwise, to the Soviets that if there’s going to be serious movement towards detente, which we want, there’s got to be Soviet restraint and reciprocity in terms of the use of force and particularly the use of force in areas where our vital interests were involved, such as the Middle East. In Iran in view of the situation I favored a military coup before things fell apart.

During the 1970s, Foreign Policy magazine served as almost a Democratic government in exile in terms of the sorts of things that were being written there on foreign policy. You contributed a number of pieces, Tony Lake, Leslie Gelb, etc. Can you talk a bit about that Carl Gershwin article in Commentary a couple of years later talking about the rise and fall of the new foreign policy establishment and trying to link you with a number of other people in Foreign Policy magazine? Can you address yourself to this issue of Foreign Policy magazine, the outlook that you shared or did not share with a number of people who wrote for that magazine, and then later showed up in the Carter administration? People who knew or were rumored to have some conflicting views with—

I think that part of it is the people in the administration—

Yes, right—

I’m not sure that magazine had much to do with that, though. I’m really not sure how to answer you on the magazine because I’m not really sure what you’re asking me about the magazine.

There was an attempt on the part of your opponents in the administration to lump together all of those who had written for the magazine in the 1970s, meaning that they did not have much of a belief in the utility of military force, claiming that they had repudiated containment, claiming that we have fewer interests than we have—

That may be true of some of the people who wrote in that magazine, but I wrote for that magazine, I also wrote for Foreign Affairs, Encounter, and elsewhere, and I didn’t have those views. As far as people are concerned, the people you have mentioned I think by and large ended up in the Department of State, under Vance and Christopher, and I think they did represent a homogeneous perspective, shaped very much by the cumulative impact of Vietnam, maybe Watergate, on that particular generation, and I think you described it correctly in terms of its predisposition to eschew force and to be perhaps too optimistic about some aspects of the American-Soviet relationship.

Can I follow up by asking a different question? You’ve noted Carter’s views about his own role in foreign policy, and the models he wished to avoid. Was there any view that you ever got that he wished to have a system of competing advice with very different points of view, and that these were reflected in his appointments?

No, I don’t think that he deliberately sought that in his appointments. I think once he started getting conflicting advice, he might have found it useful. To some extent he rationalized it the way you have stated, namely that that is the thing that Presidents should have. I sort of said to him, Why be so worried about the press reports, why don’t you just say, It’s natural the people who advise you are bound to disagree, what’s so unusual about it? Obviously the press reports about dissension and so forth were disturbing; the question was, how to cope with it? One way to cope would be to fire half the people involved, which was the source of dissent or disagreement. And if you’re not ready to do that, the best way to do it is to say, Well, I’m not bothered, I’m getting conflicting advice, that’s what I want them for. If they were all saying the same thing, then perhaps I ought to fire all of them but one and save the taxpayers a lot of money. That was, I think, more of a rationalization. He certainly didn’t hire them to get conflicting advice.

After Camp David in ’79 he did fire some Cabinet members. Was this a step, do you think, he ever contemplated in the foreign policy field?

Maybe, but I never had any indication of it. I think he was quite dissatisfied with Vance towards the end, and I think Vance was quite dissatisfied with him. I think there was mutual disenchantment towards the end. I sensed the rupture coming quite independent of the rescue issue, somewhat earlier. I just had the feeling that that relationship was coming to an end. Maybe he thought of firing me, he never indicated that to me. I thought there would probably be a fight if he was reelected, and maybe pitting Mondale and Muskie against me. And I took that into account. On the whole I felt that I would win. I thought I knew pretty well where I stood with certain key people, but I thought there would be perhaps a rather difficult phase after the election, because I thought that he might then be forced to make a choice.

Muskie stood very high with the President, but at the same time I think there was some resentment on the part of the President, certainly his people, that there was at least the impression of a flirtation between Muskie and the possibility of nomination for the Presidency. That’s a thing that political leaders don’t easily forget. Maybe there would have been some kind of a showdown after the elections. I don’t think Carter ever really contemplated firing either me or Brown or Vance, as such. In fact, when that series of firings took place, there was an absolutely embarrassing episode in which everybody sort of resigned, and there were stories that the Cabinet resigned and the President gave instructions saying that the National Security people would stay put and in place to eliminate any ambiguity on that. Until then and in the early phases, Carter liked Vance very much, got along with him extremely well. He respected Brown. He had, particularly in the early phases, extremely high regard for Turner, who was number one in his class at Annapolis, and I guess that makes a difference in that very competitive military environment, so Carter thought extremely highly of his foreign policy appointees.

At some point I’m sure you’re going to be asked something about turning points, if there were any as you saw them in the administration, and also some more questions about—aside from the Mondale/Brzezinski/Muskie affair—what changes you might have seen taking place—

Let me just add on that last point that I don’t want to leave the impression here that there was some ongoing feud between me and Muskie and Mondale. I got along extremely well with Mondale. We were neighbors; we visited with each other several times a day. On a number of key issues we worked very closely together. For example, he was very instrumental in my going to China when Vance wanted to stop that. I think towards the end, when there was a split within the Democratic Party, between liberal and less liberal or more moderate groupings, that some people around Mondale saw me as an embarrassment, a source of political cost.

As far as Muskie’s concerned, I think his political advisers were really egging him on to make an issue of the primacy of the Secretary of State vs. the Security Adviser, and much to everybody’s embarrassment, particularly the President’s, he kept pumping up the issue in the middle of the campaign. Those stories saying Muskie’s unhappy, he’s been demanding changes, and so forth were leaked, deliberately leaked, from his office in the middle of the campaign, and that was another reason why I didn’t think I would lose in a showdown after the elections if we won. These stories were not very helpful.

This may be wrong, but somehow one gets the feeling that something happened in the first or second year that at least changed your emphasis on this inevitable conflict. Remember in the interviews you were asked when you came in if there would be a conflict between you and Vance, and you minimized that, and yet almost everything you’ve said today about showdowns and about these two models—having to choose one or the other—about the role of the Department as implementer, suggests that there was an inevitable conflict. Were you concealing something in your original answer to the questions on this issue, or were there things that you learned as you went along that led you to see that division as being more fundamental?

I think I was to some extent naive in the beginning. I genuinely believed that we could work as a team, and I derived a great deal of pleasure. You can see in some notes that I have taken of different stages that I derived some sense of satisfaction at that time that we were working well as a team. We were congenial. I thought we could perhaps maintain that during the four years. What happened was that first one, and then another, rather fundamental issue surfaced, and disagreements arose which were never personally unpleasant.

I cannot think of a single occasion in which there was anything unpleasant between Vance and me, and I cannot accuse him of a single untoward act, directly or indirectly. I know at least in my own conscience that seeing the President alone many times a day—and Carter will confirm this—that I never said anything about Vance that was personally derogatory. In fact when Vance was slipping very early in the press standings and so forth, I was the one who suggested to the President a couple of times that he go to the airport to greet him, to show his support for Vance and to give him a morale boost because he was taking such a beating.

I think once policy disagreements surfaced, then all of the institutional rivalries and resentments—which always are there, particularly when a small elite staff dominates a Department—also intensified, and that became sharper and sharper. The press got on to it, and I think the press pumped it up a great deal. Then gradually things began to get more competitive, and in a way, one was almost driven to keeping score to see who wins and who loses, and that’s probably never too good in a power setting, especially if you feel strongly that you are right. If there is something very important at stake, you feel you have to make sure that your point of view prevails, and on some issues I felt that way. I felt very strongly that way, that if we don’t become tougher sooner two things will happen: detente will fall apart because the American people won’t support it; and the President’s standing will fall apart, because the country won’t support a President it perceives as weak.

Aside from the change that you have expressed that is reflective of your changing relations with Mr. Vance, consequent upon these issues having arisen, how would you characterize the changes, if any, in the role he played in the White House in the course of time? Was it in fact uniform throughout the time, in particular in relation to the President? Or was there an evolution in the role?

That’s very hard for me to answer, Dave. I thought about that, and I don’t have a good answer. Let me grope for one, but it really isn’t very good, and I’d be interested in having Madeleine and Les, who were close to me, or Bill comment on it. Bill was there for four years. Madeleine, you were there for what? Three? Two and a half? Les, you were—

From almost the beginning.

You were there from the beginning almost, but you were closer to me particularly the last two years, right? I would hazard a guess that first of all, I started with a close personal relationship with him because he knew damn well I was one of the very few more visible people who endorsed him at a time when we had two percent national recognition. Secondly, I think he knew he learned a great deal from me. Even when I was being sworn in he made a speech to everybody which was along these lines, and I remember feeling kind of awkward because he was so explicit, and he’s learned everything from me, etc., etc. He kept referring to me as the eyes and the ears through which he sees the world, and I think that kind of lasted for about maybe six months or so after the inaugural.

Then there was a kind of leveling off in the sense that Vance became more established, more comfortable when they got to know each other, and Brown became more established, and then I became, I think, more a kind of prime interpreter but increasingly on par with the others in relationship to Carter. I’m talking about the evolution in my relationship to Carter now, since it’s very hard for me to generalize on it. I would like to hear Madeleine or you or Les comment on what I say or you give your impressions of my relationship with Carter.

Phase one would be, both closeness and predominance, and then there was also closeness in that sense that I would say things to him both privately and in a small group which were sometimes very sharp and very direct. I thought I should. After a while I stopped doing that because after a while he became more of a President, even to me. We once talked privately, he said to me, Privately, you can call me Jimmy. I never did. I just couldn’t do it somehow. Because after a while he became more and more of a President. After a while I felt that I really wasn’t quite as close to him, and that the others were closer than they used to be. I also decided very early on, and I have a note to myself on that, to maintain a very professional relationship to him, that is to say, go in, give my briefing, go out, that’s it. No chat, nothing personal. He sometimes initiated personal conversations, about children, family, his problems, and so on, but I wouldn’t.

The second phase was more one of equality and more balanced, and I think even in that phase maybe there was a time when Vance was maybe more primus than I. Then the fights started, and the disagreements, and I think Carter initially was inclined to be more empathetic to Vance’s line, or be uneasy with the line I was pursuing. Maybe there was even a period when I felt I was dipping with him, and particularly in the initial phases of the Iran problem. That was late ’78.

Then I think the normalization of relations with China, which I pulled off, impressed him a great deal, and he referred to it several times—that he got me to do something and it got done, whereas in other things it is endless litigations, the Middle East, he has to do it because otherwise they’re just going to be negotiating legal documents for the rest of his term, and he’s tired of this legalistic approach. Also, Soviet behavior, I think, had a great deal to do with my position rising and becoming closer to him. I think throughout he knew that he could trust me, and he could rely on me in a personal sense and he did, on a number of occasions, which I really can’t talk about. That remained the case. What has to be added to all of this, as we speak very frankly, and I take it there are real controls on the confidential nature of all of this.

Yes.

This really works?

Pardon?

This confidentiality? It really works?

Yes, it certainly does.

A very important factor in all this was Rosalynn’s [Carter] attitude towards me. She liked me, and in fact she told me when we were leaving the White House that I was her special person. That was not unimportant with him, so I had that additional relationship, and that had something to do with my earlier sense of confidence that if we ever had a fight with Mondale or Muskie I felt pretty confident that I would win.

As these little ups and downs occurred, were there any changes in actually what you did for him, or did that go along on an even keel?

Oh yes, always on an even keel. There were two major attempts, one by Muskie and one by Vance, to alter the actual patterns, and particularly my control over the system, because not only did I chair that one committee with three functions, but I also controlled the flow to the President for the committees that Vance had. That is to say, any minutes from Vance’s meeting were written up by my staff, sent in to the President by me, without Vance seeing them, with a cover note by me. Both Vance and Muskie tried to change the system, and Muskie eventually succeeded, only to the extent that he was able to see the minutes of the meetings he chaired before we sent them to the President, and could make changes in them. He still couldn’t see my cover note, and when he sometimes made changes in there, I wrote in a covering note saying, Mr. President, the Secretary of State has amended the minutes to read as follows. I want you to know that these emendations reflect changes of mind since the meeting, since the original minutes of the meeting said the following. He gained nothing from it.

The procedural part didn’t change at all. I think that, by and large, Carter felt that he stood preeminent, which he very much wanted to be. He wanted to be President. I don’t know whom he modeled himself on. He used to say increasingly Truman was his model, but I think it was more a combination of Kennedy and FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt]. He needed someone like me to do what I was doing. That was important. Of course he could have found somebody else to do it for him, but until he had somebody else to do what I was doing, he needed someone like me. He didn’t want to share his power with Brown or Vance. Let me just ask Madeleine or Bill or Les about whether what I said deviates from their understandings. I’d be interested in their perceptions.

I would say that I agree completely, and one of the additional things that I think Carter felt very strongly about Zbig was that Zbig’s loyalty was very important and that he had stuck his neck out for him. I know that during the Medal of Freedom ceremonies, where all three were given a Medal of Freedom, Muskie and Brown and Brzezinski, Carter did make a specific point of saying that Zbig had been subjected to a certain amount of abuse on his account, and that he appreciated that.

He was rather moved.

Those were all extemporaneous remarks, and I think very important. I also think there’s no doubt in my mind that other members of the White House staff did say to the President that Zbig was a liability to him and that, as I said earlier, had he wanted to get rid of Zbig he would have done it at a different period. I think I am in a different position having worked both for Muskie and for Brzezinski and liking them both.

I think that in a lot of ways Carter, when he appointed Muskie Secretary of State, was horrified at what he’d done. He’d recreated a political figure that had in fact been quiescent, and I will never forget the look on Carter’s face when Muskie had his own press conference immediately after having been appointed, and Muskie, in contrast to Carter, was good with the press, and all of a sudden Carter and all his people were there and thought, God, what have we just done? Zbig was not a threat in that particular way. Plus, I do think that the President was very, very dependent on the ways Zbig presented material to him.

Yes, because very often I’d say something to him and he would repeat it in the same words the next day. He had a fantastic memory, and I’m not sure he even did it consciously, but I would talk to him before a press conference and then he would stand up before the press conference and say word for word the same thing.

I’m amazed at the number of similar points we’re making. Very critical is that Carter statement at the Medal of Freedom ceremony. I remember it in much more detail because I was really struck by it. He said, A lot of people have criticized Dr. Brzezinski, criticized him for speaking out. I just want to say that he has never spoken out without my permission, and anything he said I have approved. Given the context in Washington, that was a statement demonstrating a kind of loyalty that went beyond anything a President has to make. If anybody had any doubts about the solidness of the relationship, that should have removed them. The other point that Madeleine didn’t make—if you could see the TV film of Muskie’s acceptance statement— when he was appointed Secretary of State, he just upstaged Carter, walked up there and delivered not an acceptance of being appointed Secretary. He delivered a presidential inaugural and it was clear the people in the room were almost amused by it.

We were all in the Cabinet Room.

I remember very consciously, I walked out of that room and I said, Muskie and the President are already at odds.

Let me comment on this because it’s really pertinent and tells you something about my relationship with Vance. When Muskie was holding forth there, upstaging the President, Vance and I went to my office together. We sat in my office together, laughing, and saying, Gee, when is this guy going to get off? Look what he’s doing to his relationship with Carter. Both Vance and I—and this was at Muskie’s inaugural.

Zbig, I said earlier, before you came in, that I think your tight conceptualizations brought a sense of structure into the departmental materials that became crucial. Nobody in the administration was doing it, and Zbig was doing it with incredible speed, incredible accuracy, and as time went on, Soviet behavior tended to vindicate his views on the issues. Those two factors, it seems to me, pinned the President to Zbig’s position.

Yes, I think so. I sensed his intellectual interest. Here I ought mention something, namely that Ham and Jody and I were increasingly very close.

That’s another thing.

Jody from the very beginning felt the President was too soft, and Ham has said to me, What’s the matter with him? I don’t recognize him. He wasn’t like this in Georgia. What’s the matter with him? He very much supported me when I wanted to see some people fired. We got them fired, in the end. He generally wanted the President to take a tougher line, so Jody and Ham became very important. Also [Robert] Strauss, to some extent.

I know less about that.

This was after Camp David?

Ham and Jody used to—

This was from the very beginning, but we wanted him to be more assertive by ’78, ’79, and ’80.

There were two points I would have made. One was the Medal of Freedom episode which I think is singular, and the second is, and Bill has made this point before on other occasions, that there was some element of this during some part of the middle when you might have dipped. There was some part of this shooting the messenger. You were bringing bad news and he began to internalize and realize that. Much of what he had held out for the administration was not going to come to pass, and there were some really serious problems, that in fact events were dictating policy. It took him a while to come to grips with that. You, in a sense, bore the brunt of that.

I’d like to say another thing, as far as it bears on my relationship with Zbig, and also I think his relations with the whole White House. I can say no matter what the fights were, how much tough infighting there was, I never felt once compelled to do something that I thought was wrong. There was basic integrity that I could stand up and live with. I think that very much characterized your relationship with the President and the whole relationship with NSC staff, so I think there was a kind of integrity and moral underpinning to the relationship that gave it balance and cohesion that perhaps other people don’t perceive. It’s hard to assess from the outside.

When we said goodbye to Carter, he said, You know, in the four years neither you nor anyone close to you did anything unethical. And it’s quite true, and there was no insistence on unethical conduct. This ranged from even such little things as not wanting to tape people’s conversations—not just not taping them, but not having the secretaries listen in, take notes. He just couldn’t do it; he just considered it unethical.

Going back if I may to the question I was going to ask you, you talked earlier about having taken a more public role as advocate at the President’s suggestion and request.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was fighting it.

No, no, I know you well enough to know that. What I was going to ask though was whether you or the President at any time when this was occurring thought of this as perhaps inviting the possibility of forcing the President’s National Security Adviser to become senatorially confirmed, and if so whether that would have any negative impact and injure his relationship with the President.

It gave him [Vance] certain statutory powers vis-à-vis the Secretary of the Treasury and others which were helpful in asserting himself. Since I wasn’t going to be affected by it, and didn’t feel strongly about it either way, I saw in it actually possibilities of enhancing my role and letting me do more openly what I felt that I should be doing.

I have a follow-up question to Mr. Truman’s earlier question about the relations with the President. I was wondering if you could tell us something about your routine contacts with Carter. Did you typically meet with him alone? In groups? Was he interested in brief, businesslike discussions of the day’s agenda? Or did he want long, far- ranging conversations? And generally is there something you can tell us about the character of his thought and work habits on foreign policy problems?

Of course it varied from time to time. There were periods of very intense and frequent contacts and there were periods of more limited contacts, but there probably wasn’t a day in the four years in which I didn’t have some kind of contact with him, maybe not always at Camp David. Even then I talked with him on the phone. But the usual routine was that I would come my office fairly early and it could be any time from six to seven on—seven would be late, and I would brief him. The earliest time I briefed him would be 6:45, and the latest would be 7:30. Sometimes 8:00, that was very rare.

I had a half hour allotted for me to brief him in the morning, and I would therefore prepare myself before coming in, look at the intelligence statements, decide what was important, write out a few sheets of paper, three or four points that I would orally mention to him, and these points would be either to highlight some intelligence information I felt he as President ought to take note of, or to tell him about some meeting that would come up that day involving me or the NSC or the Secretaries of State and Defense, to tell him what line I intended to take or what I would push. Or I would take the opportunity to say, Here is a policy dilemma, you have to really think about it, and this is the way I would perceive it and approach it. I would typically take some five to fifteen minutes to brief him. I would rarely take a full half hour. I felt to be brief and to the point was to his advantage and to my advantage.

When I found him particularly relaxed and feeling he wanted to talk, then I would make conversation. I found the best way to engage in conversation would be to tell him something he didn’t know. Then his real craving for education would assert itself. Or alternatively to ask him to explain something to me because he loves to teach, and he welcomed an opportunity to explain something to me. Then he would talk for a long time. Sometimes we talked about music, occasionally about people, but not too much, and I never gossiped about our team, I just stayed out of that.

Then, during the day, he’d phone me up several times, and sometimes the relationship was so jocular and so relaxed that he would pick up the phone and say, Zbig isn’t here. And he was always out loafing or playing tennis or whatever. He would come into his office or we would talk on the phone. I was one of three people, I think, who practiced the right, and it was not even formally granted, of walking into his office any time we wanted unannounced, if we needed to. Obviously if there was a meeting you stuck your head in and pulled it out. However there were several times when I thought it was important enough that I interrupted his meeting. I would go and see him during the day in his office. I would say on the average probably I had four or five contacts with him a day, including personal or telephone conversations.

He would never see the Secretary of Defense or State or the head of CIA without me present, except on very special occasions, particularly when the relationship with Vance became difficult, mutually, and there were times when they needed to talk, but I think essentially to huddle and to almost repair the relationship, or at least to maintain it. Then there were a few times when Vance saw him alone, and I guess a couple of times when Vance went in to complain about me and saw him alone. Other than that the practice was always for me to be present. The practice was also for me to be present whenever he saw any foreign visitor or any visitor dealing with foreign policy. A couple of times he saw some of them without me and I complained to him. I said, Look, you reach a decision with somebody else, a foreigner, unless I know about it, and implement it, it’s not a decision. So what’s the good of you talking to him? You can’t write minutes of your meetings. Since we didn’t tape these meetings, where is the record? and so forth.

I would meet him in those settings. Then we would play tennis occasionally, and that, you know, provided a social setting, and from time to time he wanted me to jog with him, once he took up jogging, although I didn’t think too much of that. I jog with Les and Bill, who jog two miles, and he sort of worked himself up to a frenzy jogging eight and ten miles, and he wanted me to come along. So he offered me as an incentive the opportunity of jogging with Rosalynn who jogged, he said, two miles, but I think she was keeping up with him and I once jogged with the two of them in Cairo and found it difficult to keep up with them. I didn’t pick that one up too often.

The Korean story.

Oh yes, in Korea. In Korea he insisted I jog with him. As we were flying to Korea he said, would I like to jog with him? I said I would love to, but I didn’t have any trunks with me. And he says he has an extra pair. I say, Gee, it would be nice if we could do it, but I didn’t bring any running shoes. He said that’s no problem. I went back to my quarters and in a few minutes an officer appears with a pair of trunks, shoes, from the President. The next morning at 5:30 a.m. he was out there. He had a company of Marines or something, a General in an outfit, all ready to jog, and I had my press secretary with me.

So I started jogging and went on a 10-mile jog with movie cameras and television cameras parked on the side of the damn thing. And so, increasingly, Chet and I faded behind, and Carter made a point of running ahead of the entire military and came back to leading first with his General behind him and the Marines and then the female Marines and then in the end me and my press secretary—all this being filmed. I made a point, as I ran by the cameras, by raising my hands like this and announcing to everybody that my press secretary and I had done an extra lap.

I’m citing all this because the relationship most of the time was a very easy-going relationship, while at the same time very frequent. I would send in papers to him, and that’s probably much more important, directly. I could decide which of my papers would go through the system in the White House, which means that someone sat there and decided whether the paper to the President from me should also be shared with Mondale, Jordan, Eizenstat, domestic affairs, or maybe even someone in the Department for concurrence or comment. Or it would go directly from me to him and no one would see it.

That was my decision. I made it a point of course to send the routine papers the other way, but anything I felt strongly about I took myself to the President and made sure he saw it. He would send it back to me with his comments. I would also send him periodically commentaries on the state of the world, the state of our foreign policy, his own performance, criticisms of things he had said or done. These were very, very candid personal papers, which just went from me to him and came back straight to me. What else can I tell you about the relationship with the President?

Did he ever talk politics with you or you with him?

Yes, we did. We did, for example, when [Ted] Kennedy challenged him. We talked about that. We talked about Reagan. On trips we talked a lot, but it varied. There were times when I felt that the relationship was quite distant, and I think Bill put it quite well, there were periods when I was coming in with nothing but bad news, and there was a kind of distance for a while occasionally.

Was your foreign birth an asset to that relationship?

I suspect it was. In a way I think we were both kind of strange birds. He was a Georgian and very conscious of the fact that he was a Georgian, and he was the first southern President in a long, long time, and very conscious of the real or sensed hostility of others toward him as a Southerner and Georgian. And maybe my sort of strange origins and mixture was kind of curious and interesting to him. I once gave him a page from Sophie’s Choice by [William] Styron. I don’t know how many of you have read the book, but the book is about a love triangle in New York involving a kind of mixed-up terribly assertive sexually charged Jewish guy, then a more reticent Southerner who comes north and then goes back south, and a Polish refugee girl right after World War II in New York.

In it he has a marvelous page—Styron writing the book spent some time in Poland—describing the similarity between Polish history and Polish values and the values of the South, in the sense of tragedy, of victory being unvanquished in defeat, defeat being more often the reality than victory, the curious cult of male chivalry towards women and at the same time a certain degree of insistence on physical domination of the women, and also the love of the horse and things of that sort. I once read it and I was really struck about how much it told me about the relationship, and I gave the book to him and Rosalynn to read and they both found it very interesting. In a speech one day in Mississippi I read that to the audience and I was struck by how that Southern audience reacted to it, very kind of warm and understanding. Maybe there was something to that, you know, you can never tell. I may be reading much more into all of this than it deserves, but the relationship certainly wasn’t a usual one.

You have to take into account something else. It often struck me that Carter had no peers in the White House. He had subordinates, who were to some extent vicarious sons, Jody Powell and Ham could say things to him, four-letter words and things like that, which I would never use. They were sons. I could say things to him without four-letter words, which they could never say, and I did. I have to say this: I’ve heard him really get mad at Vance and Brown. I’ve heard him be mad, personally. I’ve heard him be terribly mad at Ham and Jody. He never once was nasty to me, never said anything unpleasant. Once he wrote me a note which is slightly unpleasant, but that was the most he ever did, and that was actually something to do with handling the papers on his desk. I was struck by that, that in the four years he never once either raised his voice or growled at me.

He was once very concerned that I had said something about the American-Soviet relationship which threatened the relationship, and it got into the press. Vance went to complain, and he was very upset about it, especially since the Washington Post has a huge headline, Brzezinski Draws the Line. A huge headline. I came into the office and he was sitting there with a big smile on his face and I could tell the big smile was the I’m really pissed off as hell kind of smile. But it was still a smile, and he said, Well, you have really done it. I wonder whether you should have said it that way, put it that way, all with a big smile. I said, Well, if you feel that way, let’s talk it out, because I thought I was saying what you were thinking. Obviously you don’t feel that way. He said, I don’t want you to feel bad about it, but perhaps you went a little too far. Then the next day he said to me, I thought about it further, I think you were right. That got washed away.

I’m sure he was just furious at me at times, because I would insist on things. Once Vance was very worried that the Shah was going to go to Egypt. Vance wanted to get rid of the Shah, but Vance at the same time had to sound concerned for our national security, and he said this would be the wrong time to go to Egypt, and he told me the President needs to be told that, but I should be very careful because the President’s furious. I said, That doesn’t matter. I phoned him up and he really got mad at me and I said, Well, it’s too bad, I have to tell you that. He finally got so mad he slammed the receiver on me, but that was the most, even then he didn’t really hit me. In the four years I never had one unpleasant exchange with him. And I think that is somewhat unusual, and that was related to the fact that I was the only peer he had. That was the central point I was going to make. Everybody else, Stu Eizenstat, Ham, Jody, Moore, were not really peers, and the Cabinet members were always at a distance.

Zbig, do you think if Bert Lance had stayed he would have been a peer?

Absolutely. I should have mentioned him. Bert was the only other peer. We used to play tennis together, and it was very interesting to watch them together. They were very close and Bert was certainly closer than I, much closer. Carter lost a lot losing him.

Yes, that would be my guess.

You’re absolutely right. I should have mentioned that. He was his peer and losing him he lost a peer and a real friend, a real friend, someone who was really very close to him in a way that I certainly wasn’t.

Somebody who apparently was looking very good in Washington politics.

Yes, and who was right on inflation. The rest, the President and Mondale and Stu Eizenstat and [Charles] Schultze were wrong.

I just wanted to ask a little bit about this diversity of your own staff. A number of your assistants mentioned that you were self-consciously desirous of maintaining as diverse a staff as possible in outlook and priorities, etc. Were you able to maintain that diversity throughout the four years? Or did you find that despite personnel you found yourself listening more and more to certain people, and less and less to others? And did the messages that you were listening to become perhaps more homogeneous than they were earlier in the administration?

First of all, you’re right, I did very deliberately want to have a very catholic staff. That was very deliberate, it’s to some extent part of my intellectual tradition, I always did that in the institute that I directed, it never bothered me to have people disagree with me. Therefore I wanted a staff in which I had people to the left of me, to the right of me, as well as people sort of in the middle, and I had such a staff. I never had any problem throughout the four years of what I would consider to be serious personal indiscretion or serious personal disloyalty, not to my knowledge, at least. If there was, I didn’t know about it. In that case it must have been masked.

I made a point of sharing with staff a great deal about my relationship with the President, as I knew that this staff was working extremely hard. People were really working extraordinarily hard. I don’t think anybody can have an idea what hard work is like until they work in the White House, especially when people are motivated. People worked extraordinary hours and not all of them had the kind of contact with the President that I had, and I wanted them to feel that they were the President’s elite. I tell them, You are the praetorian guard, you are working for the President. You are special. I wanted them to feel involved with the President, because I know that in Washington being with the President is part of the reward, it’s part of the status symbol, and even if they couldn’t be with the President I wanted them to feel that they were partaking of the relationship. I would tell them anecdotes, accounts, my discussions with the President, the President’s mood, the President’s interests, the President’s policy preferences and in the four years I never had any indiscretion on the subject. Nor did I ever have any leak from the NSC which I could consider to be personally, disloyally directed at me. That’s part of the answer.

Now obviously over time I think there did develop a more homogeneous group within the staff with whom I would meet more often, with whom I had more personal relationships, with whom I would consult on some of my own personal vicissitudes when I became very much a target, and these were people who were not only colleagues but personal friends. In a sense they were political allies, in that there was a certain shared philosophical communion. That didn’t mean that the others became irrelevant. They just didn’t become part of this inner core.

Did you feel that that later system was more or less effective than the earlier one?

I don’t think I can make that judgment. The circumstances really were different. To some extent it was a function of experience, to some extent a function of policy battles, to some extent a function of my own embattlement.

What’s it like being a target? Did that affect you in your work?

I don’t know. Maybe the others would like to comment. I don’t think so. I don’t think it did. I didn’t like it in the beginning, but over the years I discovered after a while that press attacks don’t bother me so much. They did initially, but after a while they stopped bothering me. I don’t know, you can’t tell. I don’t think it bothered me much.

I used to think about that a lot, and I was amazed. I think they did bother you for a while although you did a pretty good job of concealing it, and I do think maybe they began to bother you less. There was one period in which I thought you were very seriously hurt by the press. That was the Sally Quinn piece.

Yes, that was more because of its rather vicious impact on my family.

Yes, that wasn’t a policy attack.

It was a kind of smear.

It must be at that point that the stability of your staff operation becomes very important.

It was also at that point that I discovered all of a sudden that I had very good friends, and I will always remember that. Various people knocked themselves out, including some that I hadn’t expected. For example, Jody Powell just absolutely knocked himself out to browbeat [Benjamin] Bradlee into getting over to the White House and, Get your ass over here, and stuff like that. We’re going to show you things that are going to make your hair stand up, and some others as well. That was of course very gratifying.

Let me ask my original question then. Did the President have other sources of foreign policy advice in the White House?

In the White House? No.

Turner, for example.

...

Mondale?

A couple tried.

Back to Carter’s assertiveness, or maybe aloofness, to some extent. He was his own foreign policy adviser, that is to say he was on certain tracks that in policy terms seemed to be rather steady tracks, for example the SALT process or this meeting in Vienna of the Austria Treaty celebration. There also was a rather strong arms control position, was there not, which was present throughout?

He was very involved in nonproliferation. Absolutely.

In those areas, do you have a sense that he was also sort of communing with himself?

I think also in those areas he and Vance shared very much some of these aspirations, and that helped to reinforce the relationship between them. I think Cy was very much committed to nonproliferation, very much committed to the SALT process, and saw in it the central area of American-Soviet relationship. I think the President to some extent shared that view. In that respect, the relationship between them was cemented.

One of the many unchanging portraits of Carter that became fond to the press was that he was an indecisive person. Did you see that, or did you see something very different?

I certainly didn’t see that.

How did that arise?

I don’t know, frankly, and maybe it was because of the dichotomy perceived or exaggerated between Vance and me. If you look at his policies in the area of foreign policy, he was as steadfast as any President in personally pursuing a Mideast settlement. He was steadfast in obtaining normalization of relations with China. He was absolutely steadfast and sacrificial in getting the Panama Canal treaties ratified. This was at some expense of relations with the more domestically oriented associates. I would say ranging from Mondale through Stu Eizenstat to others, he was prepared to go for a high defense budget at a time of stringency. I think in these sort of larger issues of foreign policy he was quite decisive, and maybe it was Iran and the enormous complexity of that issue and the absence of any good choices that contributed to that inaction, because I didn’t find him waffling.

We’ve been told somewhere along the way that you saw your role not as personal advocate but institutional mediator. Some of this has come out a moment ago when you talked about different points of view in the NSC and willingness to hear different views. Is that too neat a distinction? It’s a little hard to understand how within a group which has a fairly evident point of view that we’ve listened to most of the day, that there could be a total absence of advocacy in that group. And it’s equally a little difficult to think that you on every issue would be an advocate, as in the memorandum summary kind of thing you referred to, but that is a distinction that we’ve heard.

I wasn’t an advocate on every issue. I took a position on every issue, because it was my job to take a position. On nonproliferation I tended not to be involved—supportive but uninvolved. Even in passing a recommendation on nonproliferation I have to say the Secretary of State recommends the following, I concur, or I disagree, so the President will know where I stand, because he would ask me. That, in a way, is advocacy. There were times when I said, I disagree. I suppose that is an advocate. Beyond that I think it’s important to realize that I spent a great deal of time making sure that there was a great deal of coordination and smoothness in the relationship between Vance and Brown and Turner, so that the President wouldn’t have to adjudicate, so that a lot of issues would be disposed by us, and I would call meetings with them very frequently.

One thing that’s missing in the system nowadays is this systematic adjudication of issues on a Cabinet level, not pushing them up to the President. That required both advocacy and some willingness to compromise or shift sides occasionally—siding with Brown, occasionally Vance, when to lose Vance or Vance wouldn’t see me, adjudicating always by creating a majority against him. That was a very important role.

Were the two roles equally easy for you to perform?

I can’t judge that. I don’t know. I think the system worked reasonably well, at least that’s what other people seem to have said about it. I was told by some people in the JCS that the system worked well.

One last follow-up: Do you think if you had not been a personal advocate, then you would have been given more credit in the public and within the government for this mediation role with Brown and—

Yes.

I had a point with the distinction between advocacy and coordinator. It seems to me that each of the Departments inherently has a parochial departmental view. When issues come up, they are referred to the Departments. They are returned with a Department bias. There’s a kind of viewpoint, which requires some policy perspective, advocacy, or articulation that you’re not going to get bubbling up when you have three or four major Departments interacting. I thought it was the crystallization of that presidential view, which integrates, but is also advocacy because it transcends each one of the Departments. Now that was the way I’d describe the advocacy role; it adds another dimension that just simply isn’t found by summing up the whole of the parts. Is that right?

I think it’s fair.

The Department heads are also synthesizing those views, like Kissinger’s describing [Melvin] Laird as representative of the bureaucracy, he’s more politicized than anyone else in the Nixon Cabinet, basically, and already the Cabinet Secretaries are in a sense in some cases transcending their own departmental views, aren’t they, on behalf of the President?

Sure.

They may on occasion. There’d be many occasions on which they do not.

Zbig, in some of the testimony we’ve had from people outside your area, in the domestic policy area, they suggested there was a real problem on many occasions with too much detail getting in to the President, the President being called on to decide matters that should not have been decided at the presidential level. This relates to their felt need for a Chief of Staff in the White House.

One of the difficulties they saw in this was that the President was the sort of person who welcomed detailed information, and he had the kind of mind or working style that invited that. I’m understanding from the way you described your role and your relationship with the President, and the systematic adjudication of certain issues, that this was not a problem in the NSC. Between honest advocate and honest broker advocate, you were also performing something comparable to a Chief of Staff role in the National Security area.

That is certainly the case, but it doesn’t mean therefore that the President was free from a great deal of tactical involvement, nor that he was prevented from injecting himself into it. He liked that; he wanted it. For example, when he found that I was making decisions on his behalf on other issues, he wanted to know why I did that. This meant that all the time saved was wasted because he had to be told that I decided this, I decided that. In most cases he approved, but the whole purpose of relieving him was to some extent undermined. In order to devise a system of informing him in writing what decisions were taken on his behalf was even worse, because then you were asked for details. Then we went back to the old system of taking decisions and not telling him. He’d discover it was done.

That’s a very old system.

We should talk a little bit about the informal kinds of ways like VBB [Vance, Brown, Brzezinski] luncheons and that kind of way that you all worked together, that most people don’t know about.

That’s right, a lot of those decisions were also disposed, so to speak, in a trio. That is to say, Vance, Brown, and I. I think it was my initiative that we set up the lunch. It wasn’t particularly an invention because I think others before us had done it, but I proposed it, and then a few weeks after, we started it. We did it regularly. At first we just met and talked. Then we quickly discovered that a lot of things could be resolved, so we started resolving issues. Then we discovered that it would be better to formalize it, and if I’m not mistaken, we were the center. We would send a memorandum, didn’t we, telling them what we decided at lunch? It was my duty after lunch to come back and say to Brown and to Vance, The following decisions were reached by us, and this is for your information, so you will have it on file. It was my duty to do it that I would word it, and that’s very important how you word it, and I would then tell the President about it, once a week, I think. Didn’t I? He more or less tolerated that.

We got to the point where we worked up an agenda.

That became quite an important mechanism, relieving us of the obligation to hold special PRC or SCC meetings, which always took more time. Also, if you didn’t have your associates with you it was easier to resolve disputes because personal prestige wasn’t involved. In a group we would argue too often.

I gather that you don’t think the fact that you were controversial impaired the credibility of your staff in working with agencies, and their need for credibility with the people they worked with.

Why don’t you ask them? I don’t know. I don’t think it did. I suppose it did to an extent, because probably at times it stimulated resistance, but I’m not sure.

Two things make an NSC staffer powerful. First, he’s got to be able to hold a meeting which he chairs at the working level, and because of a control system for getting into the 17 acres, he can control who attends. At the open meetings of the State Department and Defense Department, people are chasing them like they chase fire engines, crowds show up, and you don’t have much control over the door. In the NSC you can control who comes in, and you can say what the meeting’s about.

There’s an incident with the JCS Chief of Staff standing at the gate, saying, I’m the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, I’m invited to this meeting. The policeman said, You’re not on the list.

That’s the first procedural element, and the second thing you have as an NSC staffer is meeting results. The attendees have got to see that the issues that you raise and discuss are likely to get to the President for decision, that it is likely something will happen as a consequence of the meeting. After you’ve held a meeting or two, and things happen as a result, they really want to come to your meetings; they want you to come to theirs. There is no problem with authority, and the fact that the NSC is attacked by the press is wholly irrelevant because they know there’s going to be decisions.

Nor is there a problem of cooperation in terms of your hearing from them.

Right.

They want to educate you.

They can’t wait to get to you.

A question I wanted to ask: Did Carter think about foreign policy politically? Did he think of his political resources when he was ready to take initiatives, his stakes?

Probably not enough. Towards the end obviously he had to because events were forcing him to, but not enough early enough. Ham Jordan worried about it, I think Mondale worried about it, but Carter was not sensitive enough to it. Or at least acted and talked as if he wasn’t.

Would you cite any mistakes that were made early on?

On foreign policy—

Foreign policy decisions that were taken because he thought—

I know they’re debatable, but you could say he could have saved himself a lot of capital by not trying to get the Panama Canal treaties ratified. It cost him a great deal. He probably didn’t have to get into a fight with the Jewish community by calling for a comprehensive settlement, which he did. That reoccurred in a different way in the fourth year, and with others. Other things he did were controversial. I suppose even China normalization, which is accepted as a great achievement, cost him something with some people. By and large most of the successes were politically costly. Camp David was a political benefit. That’s almost the only one.

Hamilton Jordan has been with us also, some time ago, and he talked about some of the things he was doing with respect to Panama, his relations with [Herrara Omar] Torrijos, and without the specifics, of course, his involvement during the campaign with the Iranian business. What did you think of this role? Was it a troubleshooting role? Was it helpful?

Ham’s? I thought it was helpful. It didn’t bother me in the least. For one thing, I never thought he would in any way diminish my responsibilities and authority, or my standing with the President. I had no anxieties generated by his—

Were these assignments generated principally by the President for him?

Usually in conjunction with me, though. I knew about them. We were talking about them. When Ham reported, he reported to the President and me. I thought it was useful. I have some personal reservations about some aspects of these activities. I wasn’t sure that, particularly in the Iranian case, the effort was going to get anywhere, and I was worried that if it did, it could result in arrangements that could prove humiliating to the United States. I had substantive worries about that, but not because Ham was doing it. With Torrijos, he was awfully good. He and Torrijos struck a personal relationship, a buddy-buddy relationship, which was extremely useful to us, and so I didn’t have any problems with that at all.

Can you say something on Carter as a President thoroughly embattled, how he reacted to deep difficulties in terms of his relations with staff? I’m thinking of the Iranian hostage situation, for example, the effects this must have had on him and upon his work.

I must say he reacted with extraordinary serenity. That impressed me enormously. He was always extremely conscious of the feelings of other people and very balanced, didn’t go up or down, didn’t show excitement. He was quite willing to say, This is my fault. I’m responsible. I have to say that I can’t recall an incident in which he was really crushed or upset, demoralized. Obviously, there were times he was very disappointed. The rescue mission was the prime example, and then of course there were the elections.

What always struck me about him was this quality that I have described with the word serenity, and I have wondered at times what is the root of it. I suspect that it must be religion, because he really is a religious person. I wondered about that initially when I was getting to know him, I wondered whether the religiosity wasn’t to some extent external because it was politically useful at times when Americans were again seeking some particular roots for themselves. The more I got to know him, the more I became impressed by the fact that this is a genuinely religious person who is extremely serious in a thoughtful way about his religion.

He wasn’t simplistic, either. We once had a discussion about what does it mean to believe in God and what is the difference between feeling one has found God or feeling that religion is a search for God, and that the search itself is a definition of religion. He compared that argument to Kele and identified himself with it to some extent, and I was struck as I got to know him that religion is a genuine part of his make-up and that it is a source of genuine strength.

Secondly, I think his relationship to Rosalynn was a very important source of reassurance. She was terribly important to him in a personal sense. They clearly were very close, very close, and she was a very strong person. I suspect, I’ve never seen it, but I suspect that in moments of particular difficulty and pain she probably gave him a lot of sustenance, made it easier for him to do what he was doing externally vis-à-vis the rest of us. I recall some occasions in which he showed real emotion and including disappointment, but those were one-on-one occasions, I’m not going to talk about them because they are personal. Even there, it was dignified; it wasn’t like some other incidents involving other Presidents. I have very great respect for the man. I think he is not only an extremely intelligent person, but fundamentally a very decent person, a genuinely decent person.

When you work for someone that closely for four years you get to learn a person’s shortcomings as well as strengths. He really is a decent person, and I think that decency perhaps was too strong. For example, I think he would still be President if he was willing to take a position that at stake in the Iranian hostage issue is national honor, national security, and not lives, and therefore we will preserve national security and national honor, but not lives, and at some point bomb the hell out of Tehran and have the hostages killed. There would have been such a surge of patriotism and support for an embattled President; he would have been elected. But he wouldn’t do that. I think he knew he was losing the election in part because of that. He wouldn’t do anything of that sort in order to win, even though he was very ambitious and wanted to win very much.

Now obviously he had shortcomings. He wasn’t, in a curious way, political enough. He didn’t want to subordinate certain central objectives to political tactics. He may not also have had a good sense of the difference between strategy and tactics. He believed in moving on a broad front, massive attack, with all your forces all of your objectives at the same time. I think that dissipated a lot of his resources.

Last, he didn’t use people well at times, and certainly didn’t know how to discipline them. I felt for example in my area you would do much better by purging a number of people, and I was quite prepared both to identify them and to propose alternative arrangements. He just wouldn’t do it. In some cases it was even a matter of my saying to him, Look, the guy’s disloyal to you, you’d better get rid of him, and he would say, Well, you prove to me he’s politically disloyal. I’d say to him, We are not a court of justice, and I’m not in a position to provide evidence.

I’m giving a political judgment and recommending a political action, not a judicial sentence. Why this request for evidence? Is it politically necessary to do it? Then don’t do it, it would be unjust. I remember there were relatively few people that I managed to get fired. I managed to ease out four or five people, and each time it was quite a battle to get it done. To some extent, that is a shortcoming, I think. But by and large these shortcomings in my judgment are very much outweighed by the positive qualities of the man, and I think he demonstrated that on a number of critical foreign policy issues.

Our time has come to an end. Thank you very much.

Thank you, I enjoyed it.