The Nixon Administration National Security Council

The Nixon administration brought far-reaching changes to the National Security Council. Building on a strong mandate from (and a strong policy relationship with) the President, National Security Assistant Henry A. Kissinger achieved operational policy dominance greater than any predecessor or successor. His role and methods generated enormous controversy. They were also tied to substantial policy achievements: an opening to China, arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and eventually an historic, albeit flawed, Vietnam peace accord.

One means of gaining insight into how the Nixon NSC actually worked is to ask those who were there. This was the purpose of the Nixon NSC Oral History Roundtable, conducted on December 8, 1998, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Thirty years almost to the day after Kissinger and other Nixon transition planners developed a blueprint for a new system, we brought together a group of ten veteran practitioners and observers of American foreign policy who were directly involved in the Nixon process to share their recollections with us. The participants drew on their experiences as advisers in the Nixon transition; as members of President Nixon's NSC staff; and as officials who dealt with the Nixon NSC from important vantage points in other agencies. For over three hours, they spoke informally about how and why the new system was established, how it operated, and how it evolved over time. The discussion confirmed much that is already in the public domain, but it also brought to light new facts and insights. We hope students of the Nixon administration and of the modern foreign policy process and its institutions will find it useful.

Participants in the Roundtable were provided an agenda, appearing here as Appendix A, and a set of documents from the Nixon Presidential Materials in the National Archives, which are listed in Appendix B. These served as the jumping-off point for the discussion. Once it began, however, the participants energetically pursued their own thoughts about what aspects of their experiences were most significant, and the moderators encouraged them to do so. Therefore, the reader will find a general congruence between most of the themes identified in the agenda and the subjects dissected at the Roundtable, along with intermittent references to specific agenda items and documents, but not answers to each and every question posed in advance by the moderators.

The publication of the record of the proceedings represents the first fruit of a broader project, sponsored by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland and the Brookings Institution, to research and analyze the history of the NSC and its role in U.S. foreign policymaking. We aim to publish a volume on the subject next year. We also expect to conduct and publish subsequent roundtables: two, concerning the NSC and international economic policy, and the NSC during the Bush administration, have already taken place.

We are grateful to the participants for their attendance and for their thoughtful and open discussion. We would also like to thank our sponsors; Holly Plank and Karla Nieting, who helped organize the Nixon Roundtable, and above all Josh Pollack, who worked assiduously with us and with the participants to bring this edited version of the Roundtable to publication. Responsibility for any errors in the transcript is ours.