President’s Foreign Policy Technique Unpredictable

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 25

President’s Foreign Policy Technique Unpredictable

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) WASHINGTON, June 15. President Johnson’s technique for conducting foreign policy is highly personal and unpredictable, and even his principal assistants in this field are not sure that they can define accurately what it is, according to James Reston, of the “New York Times” News Service. Reston wrote:

In some ways he relies more on the State Department and the Defence Department than President Kennedy did, but in other ways he depends more on outsiders, special emissaries, ad hoc committees and personal friends. It would be wrong to say that he uses or does not use the National Security Council as an informing guide: sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t; that he counts on the State Department or doesn’t: he counts on it and complains about it all the time; that he is advised by a kitchen cabinet or private confidants: sometimes he is and sometimes he isn’t. Changes With Whims The system changes with his problems and his whims. Former Secretary of State, Mr Dean Acheson, headed a committee in the State Department that dealt with the

French crisis in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. It had the support of the Secretary of State, Mr Rusk, and it worked very well. Vietnam policy, however, which could use a little objective analysis by professionals uncommitted to past mistakes, is held closely within the State and Defence Departments. The President asks almost every visitor about it, but primarily his advisers in this field are Mr Rusk and Mr McNamara, the Defence Secretary. On the other hand, the decisions to launch the dramatic peace offensive on Vietnam in over a dozen capitals, to summon Premier Ky from Vietnam to the spectacular conference in Honolulu, to make a sudden trip to Mexico City and talk about a Latin American summit meeting in the coming months—all of these were primarily personal initiatives of the President. Casual Calls In the White House, as on Capitol Hill, he tends to rely on personal intervention and intuition. He carries on a large but intermittent, correspondence with other world leaders. He telephones the Prime Minister, Mr Wilson, in London, and the Chancellor, Dr. Erhard, in Bonn as casually as he used to call up committee chairmen in the Congress. Sometimes he will summon the members of the National Security Council to the Cabinet room and fill it up with so many staff aides that free discussion of critical questions is difficult, if not embarrassing. At other times he will be elaborately secretive on less sensitive matters.

If there is any calculation to all this it is hard to be clear about what it is. Staff experts on a subject will be invited to sit in on their specialty one week, but left out when the same subject comes up the next week. Some days he will dominate foreign policy discussions with long monologues: on others he will sit for an hour listening patiently and say nothing. On some day he will insist on careful agendas for his meetings, but on others there will be none. , Does It Work?

Yet this is not because he is unaware of the need for more order. Recently he set up a new system of co-ordinating policy in a series of interdepartmental meetings under Messrs Rusk and Ball and tried to turn his Tuesday lunch meeting into business sessions complete with topics for discussion and written reports on the agenda. Sometimes the meetings follow the plan and sometimes they do not.

Some of this, of course, is inevitable, and much of it is not new. Franklin Roosevelt's Cabinet meetings were usually bull sessions. Harry Tnman insisted on convening

his. Security Council, and committing all decisions in writing. Eisenhower ran the Presidency like a military headquarters, complete with a chief of staff, and Kennedy by-passed the departments even more than Johnson. The main difference now, however, is that President Johnson is in on everything. He is his own foreign secretary, press secretary, majority leader, bombing commander and campaign fund raiser, which is fine if it works. But does it? Two of his best friends, Eugene Black and Thomas Mann, have recently been saying publicly that the United States needs new ways of conducting foreign policy. Black wants us to do more through international agencies, Mann to give more authority to the assistant-secretaries of state, and with both Mann and under-secretary Ball leaving soon, there will be another chance to reappraise “the system.”