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He may know that history is the foe of permanence; but no leader is entitled to resignation. He owes it to his people to strive, to create, and to resist the decay that besets all human institutions.
A large bureaucracy, however organized, tends to stifle creativity. It confuses wise policy with smooth administration. In the modern state, more time is often spent in running bureaucracies than in defining their purposes. A complex bureaucracy favors the status quo, because short of an unambiguous catastrophe, the status quo has the advantage of familiarity, and it is never possible to prove that another course would yield superior results. It seemed no accident that most great statesmen had been locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices, for the scope of the statesman's conception challenges the inclination of the expert toward minimum risk.
Despite lip service to planning, there is a strong bias in the State Department toward making policy in response to cables and in the form of cables. The novice Secretary finds on his desk not policy analyses or options but stacks of dispatches which he is asked to initial and urgently, if you please. Even if he asserts himself and rejects a draft, it is likely to come back with a modification so minor that only a legal scholar could tell the difference. When I became Secretary I found it was a herculean effort even for someone who had made foreign policy his life's work to dominate the Department's cable machine. Woe to the uninitiated at the mercy of that band of experts.
The State Department, when it receives an order of which its bureaucracy approves, is a wondrously efficient institution. When it wishes to exhaust recalcitrant superiors, drafts of memoranda wander through its labyrinthine channels for weeks and months. But when it receives an instruction it considers wise, paperwork is suddenly completed in a matter of hours.
Backchannels and Backbiting
Essentially, a backchannel is a communication system that seeks to circumvent normal procedures; it requires, however, somebody's facilities. Usually the excluded party was the State Department, which had victimized itself by technology and habit: by technology because its computers automatically distribute even the most sensitive cables by pre-established criteria; by habit because diplomats live on trading information and are infinitely ingenious in getting around formal restrictions. This is why even the State Department has set up its own internal back-channels and why almost every modern President has sought to evade State's formal communications machinery.
The Nixon method of government worked well when a military problem was relatively straightforward and could be carried out in one daring move, as in Cambodia. It was effective also for purposeful solitary diplomacy such as in the opening to China, the Viet Nam negotiations and various moves toward the Soviet Union. Difficulties arose when a sustained military effort was need or when the diplomacy was too complex to be handled by the Security Adviser's office, as in the India-Pakistan crisis. Then the absence of consensus or even understanding inhibited coherence and commitment. When only a very small group knew