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Who's in Charge

For that man in the White House, it's a two-front war.

Feb 16, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 21 • By STEVEN F. HAYWARD
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Presidential Command

Power, Leadership and the Making of Foreign Policy
from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush

by Peter W. Rodman

Knopf, 368 pp., $27.95

Peter Rodman, who died last summer at the too early age of 64, has left us an invaluable study of the institutional problems of foreign policy in the executive branch. A protégé of Henry Kissinger, Rodman served in the national security apparatus for four Republican presidents and, as such, had a wealth of experience to draw upon in framing lessons for how to make foreign policy more effectively, and with less counter-
productive friction among the usual factions. But at its heart this book is about more than foreign policy. In the end, Presidential Command is about the central problem of democratic government today in all fields of policy.

"Political control over the bureaucracy," Rodman writes in the opening pages, "may be one of the most significant challenges to modern democratic government in the 20th and 21st centuries."

This is not mere boilerplate from which to deplore the often recalcitrant culture of the careerists at the State Department that frequently undermines presidential policy through highly refined bureaucratic arts. Rodman returns to this problem throughout the book, taking note of the frustrations and dilemmas of different attempts to control the bureaucracy. While Rodman makes a number of specific recommendations for improving the foreign policy process so as to increase the president's effectiveness and the bureaucracy's accountability, in the end he is compelled to reaffirm the centrality of the judgment and engagement of the president himself in making the system work.

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