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I was aware of the tendency among the President-elect's men to sing from different sheets of music, but I put it down to the exhilaration produced by the freshness of the candidate's triumph at the polls. I assumed that Reagan would control the garrulity. Still, I discussed with him at length the importance of speaking with a single voice on foreign policy, and agreed that Allen and his colleagues at the NSC would have no independent contact with the press and that contacts with visiting foreign dignitaries should be the sole province of the Department of State. If Allen had any quibble with this concept, he said nothing about it.
Every Secretary since the redoubtable Dulles, with the exception of Kissinger, had to some degree been a bystander. State had increasingly become a housekeeping agency, charged with the errands of foreign policy rather than the creation of foreign policy. To a degree even Kissinger had made bystanders of the Foreign Service. As Secretary of State, he had run things with a personal staff, largely excluding the wider bureaucracy from the romance of important issues.
Under Reagan, I believed, all this was going to change. The problem was how to make the Foreign Service and the rest of the department's staff believe this too. The most difficult management problem faced by any incoming Administration is the inertia of the bureaucracy. It is like an asteroid, spinning in an eccentric orbit, captured by the gravity of its procedures and its self-interest, deeply suspicious of politicians who threaten its stability by changing its work habits. This is a greater problem for Republicans than for Democrats. The civil service is not infected by Republican sentiment. Perhaps because they believe more fervently than Republicans in the power of bureaucracy to perfect the human condition, more young Democrats tend to make careers of federal service.
Moreover, the fear was abroad that a legion of right-wing activists was going to march in and start conducting American diplomacy according to the rules of a political rally. Some early nominations—that of the neoconservative Mrs. [Jeane] Kirkpatrick as Ambassador to the United Nations, for example—had been read as signs of a trend in this direction. This was unjust, but the perception existed.
Some of my own nominations encountered delays at the White House. Lawrence Eagleburger, an old colleague from the NSC staff, whom I wanted as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, found disfavor because he was regarded as a Kissingerite; he had been Kissinger's executive assistant both at the White House and at State. There was a certain determination to exclude those who had been closely associated with Kissinger from the foreign policy apparatus under Reagan. There should have been no problem. Eagleburger was a thoroughgoing professional and a strong-minded individual unlikely to have been brainwashed even by so powerful an intellect as Kissinger's. As these and other appointments were stalled, I asked Meese and Baker who, exactly, was opposing them. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, they replied. Oddly, I never heard directly from Helms. Thoroughly puzzled and somewhat frustrated, I finally got through to Helms on the telephone. To my surprise, the Senator said he had no