In a recent Sunday NY Times, Henry Kissinger reviewed a new book about former Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Dean Acheson, A Life in the Cold War by Robert Beisner): Cold Warrior (New York Times, October 15, 2006).
The book sounds good ("sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure").
Kissinger says that the Secretary of State has five important tasks:
...Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of any secretary of state: the identification of the challenge; the development of a strategy to deal with it; organizing and motivating the bureaucracy in the State Department and in other agencies; persuading the American public; and conducting American diplomacy toward other countries.
The job requires a conceptual framework or vision, if you are going to make sense of and exploit overwhelming information inputs...
Its scope is global; ultimately it rests on almost philosophical assumptions as to the nature of world order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest. Lacking such a conceptual framework, incoherence looms in the face of the daily task of redefining America’s relationship to the world via the thousands of messages from nearly 200 diplomatic posts and the constant flow of communication from the Executive Department — all this against the backdrop of Congressional liaison and press inquiry.
...and a close relationship with the President.
These tasks require the closest collaboration between the president and the secretary of state; secretaries of state who seek to base their influence on the prerogatives of the office invariably become marginalized. Presidents cannot be constrained by administrative flowcharts; for a secretary of state to be effective, he or she has to get into the president’s head, so to speak. This is why Acheson made it a point to see Truman almost every day they were in town together and why their friendship was so crucial to the achievements of the Truman years...
...Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of any secretary of state [see above - Ben]... These tasks require the closest collaboration between the president and the secretary of state; secretaries of state who seek to base their influence on the prerogatives of the office invariably become marginalized. Presidents cannot be constrained by administrative flowcharts; for a secretary of state to be effective, he or she has to get into the president’s head, so to speak. This is why Acheson made it a point to see Truman almost every day they were in town together and why their friendship was so crucial to the achievements of the Truman years.
All of this would apply to any cabinet officer, including a USTR.
Acheson and George Kennan:
... Acheson turned Kennan’s seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” into the operating principle of American foreign policy. He interpreted it to mean that the task of foreign policy was to create situations of strength around the Soviet periphery to deter any temptation for aggression. Negotiation with the Soviet Union was to be deferred until these situations of strength had come into being; any attempt to begin diplomacy prematurely would undermine the primary task.
Kennan represented the other strand of American thinking. He rejected what he considered the militarization of his own views, inaugurating a debate that has not ended to this day. Acheson implicitly believed that situations of strength would be self-enforcing, and he played down the importance of diplomatic engagement with the adversary. Kennan raised the question of how to gain Soviet acquiescence in the process and urged negotiation, even while the ultimate structure was being built. Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement. How to merge the two strands so that military force and diplomacy are mutually supportive and so that national strategy becomes a seamless web is the essence of a continuing national controversy.
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