Advice and dissent; what LBJ could have learned from Ike.

• Author: Schieffer, Bob
• Position: Lyndon B. Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower

ADVICE AND DISSENT

There is no real training program for becoming president, if we are to believe the men who have held the office, but this book should help a little.

By comparing the ways that Lyndon Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower organized and used their advisers to make key decisions on Vietnam, Burke and Greenstein have written (*1) what amount to an owner's manual for operating the National Security Council, the president's main in-house advisory group for defense and foreign policy.

This is a book Reagan's people could have used and George Bush ought to read: Bush because it points out the traps that a president can fall into when a mania for secrecy causes him to decide policy on the scattershot advice of only a few trusted advisers; the Reagan people because they would have learned that almost every idea they had about channeling foreign policy and defense advice to the president was wrong. (Having the national security adviser report to Ed Meese and putting advisers' recommendations in Meese's famous "bottomless briefcase" for safekeeping were not good ideas.)

In their very readable study, Burke and Greenstein set out to determine why Johnson and Eisenhower came to such different conclusions about what to do when American-backed forces in Vietnam appeared on the verge of collapse.

For Eisenhower in 1954 and Johnson in 1965, the challenge was the same: U.S.-backed forces were in imminent peril. There were high-level discussions about how to react. Ike, the old soldier, decided not to risk the use of American troops, even ruling out a surgical air strike. On the other hand, Johnson, the master politician, reversed what he had said in the 1964 campaign and dispatched American troops in force. Why? Because Ike based his decision on good advice and Johnson didn't, is the author's short answer. What concerns them is not whether either president made the "right" decision but the quality of the advice upon which the decisions were based.

Greenstein was among the first revisionist historians to conclude that Eisenhower's contemporaries were wrong in regarding him as a passive president who delegated most of the work to others while he spent afternoons and weekends on the golf course. In their short study, the authors show what a master organizer Eisenhower really was. A military planner for most of his career, Eisenhower had a professional's appreciation of staff and how to use it. As Greenstein and Burke reveal, this was his real...