TN: I'm ready, okay. Thank you. Yes, mine is, and there
it is telling me that thank you very much HS: I'm thinking I should be
looking at... TN: Yes at me. TN: Hi, I'm Tim Naftali. I'm director of the Richard
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.
It's March 27, 2009. We're in Washington, DC and I have the honor and privilege to
be interviewing Harold Saunders for the Nixon Oral History Program. Mr. Saunders,
thank you for doing this. HS: Thank you for inviting me.
TN: Just to set context of your career, how did you, how and when did you enter
government? HS: I entered government in the summer of 1956 after I got a PhD in
American Civilization at Yale, and almost immediately, I went came in through the
CIA junior officer trainee program. They had a deal with the Air Force
whereby, since I needed to do my military service, I was twenty five and a half
years old, I could go I could enlist in the Air Force, go to basic training,
Officer Candidate School, and then do a year of Air Force service, and then be
detailed back to CIA for my training as a junior officer. So, I did all that, came
back to CIA after my year of Air Force training in the summer of '58. I came out
of that training and got it. My first job was as a staff assistant to the man who
ran the analytical side of the Agency, the Deputy Director for Intelligence, Bob
Amory, and was a staff assistant to him for a year. We serviced the office of
Allen Dulles who was the director of Central Intelligence, and I went to work
in the Office of Current Intelligence for a couple of years, but when I was in
the Deputy Director's office, one of the men working there was a man named Bob
Komer, who was the Agency's representative on the Eisenhower
National Security Council staff planning board, and he also,
being part of CIA, knew William Bundy, and when the Kennedy Administration came in,
William Bundy's brother McGeorge Bundy became Kennedy's National Security
Adviser, and invited Bob Komer to go and work on the National Security Council
staff, and in September, Bob invited me to come and work with him as his assistant.
So, my entry into the intelligence community through the Air Force and so
on was a sort of indoctrination that government broadly, but my introduction
into the policy world really happened in in September 1961, when I worked
went to work on the Kennedy National Security Council staff, and I stayed
there until 1974. TN: Did you work on Middle Eastern issues at the Agency ? HS: No, I did not. I worked, of all things, on East Asian issues particularly Japan about which I had known nothing. I guess what I was hired for was a PhD and the research
capabilities that went with that. TN: Did you study under Ralph Gabriel? HS: He was my dissertation adviser, along with David Potter. TN: What is your dissertation on? HS: It was titled the Group Concept of Social and Political Organization in American Thought from 1880 to 1930. TN: And then
you've worked on Japan. HS: Yeah TN: You come into the Kennedy NSC. What tasks are you given? Do you work on the Middle East at that point? HS: Bob Komer was working on a very
broad agenda. The staff was only, if I recall, maybe nine, nine people at the time, [coughs] excuse me, and he had the Middle East, South Asia, military assistance
worldwide, and Africa on some occasions, but I was working mainly on the Near
East-South Asia part of that portfolio. So, yes, I, uh, that's where I learned
something about the Middle East, and I can the kind of learning experience one
has as a young person in that situation was, I can remember,
his coming back from the West Wing one day and say saying, "Draft a letter for
the President to send the President Nasser of Egypt on..." whatever the subject
was, and I'd never written a letter for a President or to a President before. So,
that required a little bit of thinking, and I finally decided well, I'm gonna try
my best to put myself into President Kennedy's mind, and speak like him
and write like him, knowing what he knows and what Nasser knows about this subject.
That was my, that's the first task I remember that really made an impression on me. TN: Um, scholars will be interested in knowing that the U.S. the U.S.
government's impression of Nasser, and its efforts to perhaps bring him over to
our side at various times. Can you, it's been a long time ago, but can you, can you lay out for us a little bit about the sort of the evolution of our policy that you saw starting in the Kennedy period? HS: Yes, and I think Bob Komer,
for whom I was working, played a significant role in this.
I think Kennedy came in, as you'll recall, when after the whole Aswan Dam affair
with Egypt, and the sense that the Egypt was moving into the Soviet orbit, and of
course, Nasser was one of the major figures in the non-aligned movement, and
which, again, was not always that positive about the United States. So, but on the
other hand, he was a major leader in the Middle East, and Egypt was a, the major
country in Middle Eastern politics. So, the thought, that I know Bob Komer
brought in, and Kennedy was quite receptive to that, was the notion that
let's see if we can't wean him away, or at least partially away, from the Soviet
orbit, and could we begin to create a, at least, a working relationship with him. So,
that that was the genesis, and there were a lot of small things
that went on and a lot of very big things too. The whole business of food
assistance, our surplus wheat, P.L. 480 food assistance to Egypt, and even right
on down to, I can remember, Jacqueline Kennedy doing writing a handwritten note
to Nasser, on her personal stationery, about the Abu Simbel temples that were
about to be inundated by the Aswan Dam, and became, of course, a the object of a
UN a UNESCO effort to save them and lift them up, restore them, replace them on
higher ground. So, there were a lot of little things, big and little things that
were done to try to bring Nasser in our direction. Not not with any feeling that
you could cause him to do a complete flip and walk away from Soviet backers,
or give up his position as a non-aligned leader but maybe modulate the rhetoric a
bit. Maybe, potentially, in the Arab-Israeli context, get somebody who might be more amenable to reason or negotiation. TN: Even in this early period,
'60, '61, I mean '61, '62, there is a real tension between the
Iraqis and the Egyptians, which would remain an interesting tension for us, for
which we could you, I mean, we would use it to develop better relations with
Egypt not with Iraq. HS: Well, the Iraqis, I think, always regarded
themselves, and do to this day in 2009, as the center of civilization, the origins
of civilization, and the idea that the Egypt should pretend to leadership in
the Arab world was obviously offensive to them. And so,
hence the rivalry was very deep-seated. TN: Compare and contrast, please, the Kennedy NSC to the Johnson NSC. HS: Very interesting comparison. One of those
memories that I never, have never forgotten them to this day, and often quote,
is a statement that was made to me by a senior colleague. I believe, if I remember
correctly, it was somebody who was in the one of the top two or three in the
Office of Management and Budget, to which the NSC staff related closely, but this
gentleman said to me one time, "Remember, policy is never made on paper. It's a
continuously changing mix of people and ideas. It's a direction not a decision."
Mm-hmm. You stop to think about the import of that for the way political
scientists, for instance, have studied this presidential policymaking, it's it's,
the import of it is is profound, but that being the, uh, the case, I think we
were part of the continuously changing mix of people and ideas, but the
principled person, of course, was the President himself, and in that...
Now, given that approach or way of thinking about policymaking, the Kennedy
NSC operation was a very loose one. As I said, the senior people in the NSC staff
were maybe eight or nine people and they were interacting, often directly, with the
President, certainly very closely through McBundy, but it was all very loose and
inchoate but vibrant. A lot of things got done and,
of course, even the President was described in the press as calling up
desk officers in the State Department to get their views and so on. So, that was the
atmosphere in the Kennedy period. Now, when Johnson came to office he was suspicious
of this loose arrangement and began to introduce some discipline into it, and he
moved in the direction of moving the principal review of policy
recommendations from the NSC staff to the State Department. Just
parenthetically, to note, that the NSC system operates on three levels. The
first is the Assistant Secretary level and the relevant departments, given a
particular policy issue. Their job is to lay out all reasonable options and I
think, actually, that's a quote from Nixon not from the Kennedy/Johnson period, but
the idea was to lay out all reasonable options. Then those were passed up to the
middle level of the NSC system, a review committee of some kind, went by different
names in different administrations, and in the Kennedy period that review was
done by the NSC staff and what Johnson did was to move that review process over
to the State Department under the direction of the what we would today
call the Deputy Secretary, the number two in the State Department, and his counterpart in the Defense Department. I sort of pictured Johnson
saying to Secretary Rusk and Secretary McNamara 'You guys are smart fellows and
but you've got a lot of people working for you who are naturally
committed to certain approaches to international affairs. So, I want you
to get their options and I want the two of you to put yourself in my shoes and
come to me with a recommendation that you have worked out,' and that's indeed
the way the system went. The recommendation came from that review
committee, situated in the State Department, to the National Security
Council itself where the President, of course, would be present and would
have open discussion, and so on. So, Johnson injected more order in it. He was more confident in that, and he wanted the forces, lieutenants, so to speak, to help
him figure out how to bridge some of the gaps that the bureaucratically produced options would hinge on. If I could just take it a step
farther then into the into the Nixon period, Nixon, following Johnson, came in
and said, 'Look. If I just get one recommendation from the bureaucracy, I'm not gonna have any choice because all the energy of the bureaucracy will have
gone into producing that one recommendation. I want choices.' So, the
review process was has moved back to the White House in the committee chaired by
the National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and then the options would go
to Nixon in the NSC meeting itself, and there are a couple of marvelous examples of that, which I'll leave 'til later not to disrupt your line of thought. TN: Well, no, while they're in your mind, please tell us now. HS: One of the most dramatic, and I think best organized National Security
Council meetings took place on a Friday a week before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War
broke out. Abba Eban, the Foreign Minister of Israel, had been sent by his
government to Washington to find out what the United States planned to do about Nasser's closure of the Strait of Tehran, and an NSC meeting took place in the morning of that Friday.
Ebon was arriving and would see President Johnson that evening. So, uh, Johnson had invited into the
Cabinet Room for the NSC meeting several people from outside the government: Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford and maybe Abe Fortas, I'm not sure about that,
but, and I am still back in the Johnson administration I haven't moved to Nixon, but he heard, it was set up, the meeting was set up so that the Assistant
Secretary for the Middle East presented the Arab point of view, and Assistant
Secretary for nternational organizations affairs presented the
Israeli point of view, and then, of course, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff gave a military analysis and tone. After hearing all the the pros and cons,
and Dean Rusk had just come from Capitol Hill where he talked to the
Congress, came in with his assessment of what the Congress was willing to do.
We're at war, of course, in the middle of the Vietnam War,
and the idea of another war in the Middle East, in which we are a part, was not
attractive to the Congress or anybody else, but any case, when at the end of the
meeting Johnson went around the table, and said, he started out by saying, "At the
end of the day, this evening, I'm gonna, I'm the one who's going to have to bail
this cat," that was his Texas phrase talking about Abba Edan, "I'm going to
have to tell him what the United States is going to do, and I want each one of
you to tell me what you would say to Eban." I realized at that point that
Johnson wasn't collecting pros and cons for decisions, he was collecting the
judgments of minds whose people, whose minds, he understood, and trusted, and
valued. So, it's that kind of decision making. Then, if you forward into
the Nixon NSC, there was much more a sense that Nixon preferred not to make
decisions in that kind of interaction among people. He wanted to hear arguments
and then he would go off himself, with his yellow pad, and do
his list of pros and cons, and do his thinking on his own. Johnson, of course,
not only preferred to make decisions by talking with people, after this rather
systematic working out of options, and that, of course, was captured in with
Johnson and the the Tuesday lunch meetings during the Vietnam War, which
became more informal, but that's just all a preface to say that, as I've often
told people who asked me about the NSC system, that there's no right way or
wrong way to organize presidential decision making. It's the
boss's way, it's the way the President chooses to use people to learn from them,
and it's the way he, by nature, tends to make up his own mind.
So, you get three, four Presidents there who are who are perfect examples of
systems working in... TN: There's another important personality, though not as important as the President, and that's the personality of these Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs, um, McGeorge Bundy, Rostow, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Scowcroft, perhaps. Did you say you've worked under five?
HS: Well, I worked with Brandt. TN: Yes. HS: When Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State-- TN: Yes. HS: September, I guess, of '73. TN: '73. HS: Brent, Henry was still the National
Security Adviser by name, so Brent but Brent was the head of our staff and I
worked with him until July of '74 when I moved over to the State Department.
TN: Compare and contrast, please, these five different gentlemen.
HS: McBundy was, had a piercing intellect and was the one who, and of course, he was
working with a President who had a piercing intellect. So, his emphasis was
on clear, rigid analysis, not in any formalistic sense of the word but, in the
two-page memo, you needed to be totally rational and lay it out, raise the
questions, answer them, and so on. Rostow was more the conceptualize, ah, not so much that intellectual rigor, but more the the person who looked at the
big picture, tried to see things in that context, and to lay out arguments that
way. I would say that whereas Bundy was working for a
President who did want to be the principal policy maker,
Rostow regarded himself as a person to get the best out of, work with, the
Secretaries, the Cabinet officers who were involved in foreign affairs on behalf of
the President. So, he used to say, "I'm just a messenger."
Well, that wasn't entirely true because he introduced a lot of his thinking and
conceptual thought but he, there was no antagonism between him and Rusk and
McNamara, nor was there, I think, between those two gentlemen. Kissinger came in, and
you can almost describe the evolution of the NSC staff, I don't want to say year
by year, but in certain stages. When Henry came in, he insisted on rigorous analysis,
more than the the Bundy style, but not in the the terse one-pager, but in the well,
worked out policy paper style, and he was absolutely scrupulous and pushing you as hard as he could to make sure that the argument that maybe you didn't believe
in was as well stated as the argument that you might have believed
in. I think that if you went back to the NSC files that first year President
Nixon was in office, you probably would find some of the best staff work in the
files of any government anywhere in the world at any time. It was really very,
very good analytical work. Now, as time evolved, Henry got his feet on the ground and issues came up where he had more of a sense of a policy or a strategy that
he recommended. He began to get involved more in the bureaucratic, I'm going to
use the word manipulation. I think that's probably a little bit too devious in
its sound at the initial stage, but he began to use the system a little bit
more to deal with the President's questions. Then, as as time went on, certain things
became his policy babies. I mean, there was the back channel with the Dobrynin, there were the feelers through various
back channels that led to the opening with China, and ultimately, we had
a similar effort with the Egyptians. And so, it, but for instance, in Middle
East policy which I, which is where I was involved, Henry came to the
NSC staff and saying 'I knew very little about Middle East policy,' and of course,
the State Department was right there with new initiatives and and so on,
and he was suspicious of those but really did not choose to insert himself
other than through occasional memos to the President on strategy, but he was
really playing it quite straight, and then Secretary Rogers was given, by the President, the lead in Middle East policy, and Kissinger did not initially meddle
with that, but as time went on and he got more and more into it and and so on.
Brzezinski, I would say, was... He did a an effective job of running the NSC staff
and producing options for the President and so on, but he also was more of the the producer of flashy ideas. He a mile a minute come up with sparkle, with new insights, different insights and so on, but in the Middle
East Middle East policy, where I obviously worked very closely with
Secretary Vance and with President Carter. I think Carter, in that instance
anyway, tended to rely on the very steady and sound judgment of Secretary Vance rather than the more sparkly ideas of Brzezinski. TN: I want to pick up on
something you said about the evolution of Kissinger's willingness to engage in bureaucratic politics. In the case of his, uh, contentious relationship with Secretary
Rogers in the on Middle East policy, would you say the turning point was Secretary
Rogers' December 1969 speech that uh... HS: The Rogers plan? TN: The Rogers plan that made Israel so angry. HS: That was certainly a significant event and even Henry would
say that that had been approved by the President, which was the case, and Henry
of course, had been part of that, I think reluctantly so, but so he, I don't
think the would have, he did not accuse Rogers of going off and doing this on
his own. It was approved by the President. The problem though was Henry's notion,
okay how do we, how do we now work our way beyond this to something that
we can do, and of course, remember there was, there came to be very soon something
else that was involved in it, that was that the the Soviets became even more obviously involved as the war of attrition on
the Suez Canal unfolded, and that, of course, is a saga of its own, but it was
when the Soviets, as the Soviets moved into the the picture, and they had been
part of it even before the, while the Rogers plan was still in gestation, but I
think it was a combination of circumstances that led to Henry's
gradually taking charge and ultimately taking charge of the dialogue with the
Soviets over the Middle East and so on. TN: Can you recall, do you recall the missions that
Len Garment was sent on? HS: Very vaguely but I couldn't resurrect them. TN: My impression
from interviewing him was that he was sent to tell, uh, he was sent to Israel to tell them to not to worry about Secretary Rogers. I wondered if you
recall how those those missions came about. Given that you've had this
sweep of, you've had this sweep of experience in various NSCs, I'd like to look at
a few issue areas that will become important in the Nixon period but which
have antecedents. Israel and the bomb. Is this an issue for President Kennedy?
Did you work on that problem at all? HS: Well, it was during that period that the inspections of the nuclear facility of Dimona were instigated. And so, yes, we were involved
in promoting those inspections which, of course,
went on for a while, and then gradually became fewer and fewer and
drifted off. TN: In the summer of '69, this becomes a big issue again and there was a
question of whether to sell Phantom F, F-6, F-4s, I guess. HS: F-4s TN: F-4s, and whether to do that despite the fact Israel hadn't signed the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty]. Do you recall that debate at all in the summer? HS: Oh yeah. There was a the centerpiece of the whole exercise was
a series of conversations in-between then-Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin and, I
think, Townsend Hoopes in the Defense Department. Anyway, somebody at sort of the senior assistant secretary or undersecretary
level at Defense trying to get the Israelis to sign some agreement that
would permit us to say that the aircraft would not be used to carry a nuclear
weapon, and the phrase that we wanted the Israelis to agree to was that they would
not be the first to introduce the nuclear weapons into the Middle East.
I can remember very well, I don't remember all the details of the discussions, they
went on for several months, but I remember coming down to what was
referred to in the bureaucracy as the 'last wire argument.' Rabin said, "What does
it mean to introduce a nuclear weapon into the Middle East? What if you have
all the components of it and you just haven't hooked up the last wire. Does
that mean you've introduced weapons or or not?" They were obviously...
