Who's at the Helm?

• Author: Morris, Roger

Who's At The Helm?

Raymond Tanter. Westview Press, $24.95. In the rotten morganatic marriage between government and entertainment, metaphors are always instructive. The Reagan foreign policy, for instance, can be understood as the "Twin Peaks" of American diplomatic history, if not Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, complete with dancing dwarf, unaccountable casualties, crazed officers, and dazed citizenry. The government archetype was racy, unplotted, and a bit perverse in real life long before the show-biz version appeared in prime time.

Like the television creation of director David Lynch, the Reagan policy seems to have been without lasting purpose, its expectant audience now baffled, now exploited, mistaking contrivance for design, effect for achievement. If only the Washington show had been merely a matter of ratings, reviews, and network fortunes, instead of blood and chaos.

Raymond Tanter, who saw it from the inside as a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff in the early eighties, writes about one of the more obscure and fateful episodes of the prolonged drama--U.S. policy toward the recurrent Middle East crises of 1981-1983, including the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, seminal events that set the stage for so much to come, from Iran-contra to the current Punic expedition in the Persian Gulf.

From relatively modest beginnings as a White House foreign affairs staff under Eisenhower and Kennedy, the NSC has borned the mark and steady bloat of its successive masters. To Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, it was the praetorian guard of their expanding bureaucratic empire. Under Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski mistook it for some Danubian foreign ministry from the 1930s, with growth and titles to match. With the inimitable Reagan quartet of Richard V. Allen, William Clark, Robert McFarlane, and John Poindexter, it grew still larger and more powerful, sometimes confused with a drug or arms cartel, dabbling occasionally in snow tires for Oliver North or furtive White House tours for right-wing contributors.

Over the past two decades, literally hundreds of eager staff members have passed through the gingerbread portals of the old Executive Office Building into the inner sanctum of NSC power. There they were usually stripped of ideology or illusion and soon learned the ultimate little secret of national security politics--that regardless of president or party, the real enemy is not some foreign power but rather the omnipresent...