Presidential politics 165hierarchy. President Ford returned to the pre-Nixon relationship between
the cabinet and the White House Office, and soon after taking office Presi-
dent Carter stressed that he intended to strengthen the working of ‘Cabinet
government’. He was, he said, ‘very much opposed to having a concentration
of large numbers of people in authority in the White House Staff. I much
prefer that Cabinet officers make their own decisions, manage their own
departments, and that the co-ordinating effort rests with me.’ The Domes-
tic Council was abolished and replaced with a Domestic Policy Staff in the
White House Office. As a result of the Watergate affair, therefore, the con-
cept of a ‘strong’ cabinet was reasserted as a reaction to the abuse of power
by Nixon and the arrangements that he made to strengthen his control over
the administration. Nevertheless, the problem of coordinating the work of
the American government remains, and it cannot be done by one individual.
In 1985 President Reagan reiterated his commitment to cabinet government
when creating two new cabinet-level bodies, the Economic Policy Council and
the Domestic Policy Council, to work alongside the National Security Coun-
cil in the coordination of policy in their respective fields. As with the earlier
attempts to create effective coordinating machinery, these new councils were
to consist of a mixture of the heads of executive departments and members
of the White House Staff.
The National Security Council
The conduct of defence policy presents special problems for the American ad-
ministration. The president is commander-in-chief, and as in other fields the
final decisions are the president’s, but the unity of command implicit in this
constitutional principle must be translated into reality in an extremely large
and diffuse government machine. The cabinet, as we have seen, is of no use
for this purpose, and as a result Congress created a special ‘defence cabinet’
in 1947, the National Security Council. The Council has the duty to ‘consider
policies on matters of common interest to the departments and agencies of
the government concerned with the national security and to make recom-
mendations to the President’. The National Security Council is chaired by
the president. Its regular members (both statutory and non-statutory) are
the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the
Secretary of Defense, and the Assistant to the President for National Securi-
ty Affairs. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the statutory military
adviser to the Council, and the Director of Central Intelligence is the intel-
ligence adviser. The Chief of Staff to the President, Counsel to the President,
and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy are invited to attend
any NSC meeting. Under President Eisenhower the Council met frequently
to discuss current problems of foreign policy; the staff prepared policy pa-
pers to keep the members of the Council abreast of new developments in
matters such as weapon technology; and there was a complete substructure