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Of last week's appointments, the most important is Allen, though he insists that he wants to be the least conspicuous of all. On the day Haig was announced as Secretary of State, Allen declared: "Take a good look at me because I am about to submerge." He agreed with Reagan that his appointment should not be announced publicly for a week so that it would be unmistakably clear who would run foreign policy: the Secretary of State. Earlier, Allen was one of the advisers who recommended a more subordinate role for the National Security Adviser. "The NSC," Allen says, "is not charged with formulating or implementing policy. It is charged with coordinating policy."
That is where Allen's strength lies. He does not appear to entertain the grand strategic notions of previous National Security Advisers such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Says Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who as a close aide to Kissinger worked with Allen on the NSC: "He has never claimed to be a great theorist of foreign policy. He has a quick mind and can grasp issues very rapidly, but he is most skilled on the operational side. He is an expediter—in terms of getting staff work organized and of dealing with personalities." Allen demonstrated that skill when he patched up quarrels among bickering members of the transition team. His aim is to create a smooth-functioning foreign policy team in the White House that will be more concerned with real enemies abroad than putative ones at home.
Allen, 44, who grew up in Collingswood, N.J., early developed a fascination, though hardly a sympathy, for Communism in its various manifestations. After earning his bachelor's and master's degrees at Notre Dame, he went to the University of Munich in West Germany to work on a doctoral dissertation. In 1962 he helped found the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. When Nixon was elected President, Allen was appointed to the NSC, but he quickly ran afoul of the man in charge: Kissinger. Relegated to lackluster assignments, Allen quit in ten months, and he and Kissinger have been sniping at each other ever since.
On leaving the NSC, Allen became an international business consultant, a career that enabled him to live comfortably in Arlington; Va., with his wife Patricia and their seven children. But he provoked some bitter criticism for using his Government contacts to advance his private interests. One charge is that he passed along inside information to a Japanese businessman with the aim of developing lucrative contracts for himself. He received some $60,000 from fugitive Financier Robert Vesco as a "verbal consultant." Allen also introduced Vesco's attorney to William Casey, then Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, at a time when Vesco was under investigation by that agency. Allen claims, not too persuasively, that he was unaware of the probe when he was working for Vesco. Most serious of all was a charge made by an executive of Grumman Corp., who told a Senate investigating committee that Allen once asked him for a $1 million contribution to the Nixon campaign in return for the President's helping the company land an airplane contract in Japan. Allen denied the allegation to the same committee.