ABSTRACT
In the 1960s and 1970s, the major institutional development in the presidency with relation to foreign affairs was the increased influence—and prominence—of the assistant for national security affairs. The National Security Council became in practice not the powerful senior advisory forum envisioned at its creation, but the senior aide and staff instituted under the council's name. National security assistants have frequently moved into the outside leadership tasks becoming prominent public spokesmen; diplomatic operators; and advocates pushing their own policy lines. The dismantling of formal structures, combined with Bundy's role as personal aide to Kennedy, meant that Bundy was performing, in practice, the national security job handled under Eisenhower by staff secretary Andrew Goodpaster: staffing the president's day-to-day foreign and defense business. The chapter focuses on "National Security Management, What Presidents Have Wrought," written as a background paper for the Panel on Presidential Management, National Academy of Public Administration, and published in the Winter 1980-1981 issue of Political Science Quarterly.
