Word: states
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is a dangerous disarray these days in the management of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy. When the State Department was compelled to deny formally that there was any split among Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and Middle East Ambassador Robert Strauss, the statement only confirmed the continuing struggle among the three men. White House senior aides have been troubled for months about the infighting, but the President has helped both to create the problem and to nourish...
...Though the Secretary in the past has been bitterly opposed to Brzezinski's hard-line approaches, he has remained curiously passive, allowing Brzezinski to acquire more and more power. The President has been accused (as Nixon was in the early days of Henry Kissinger) of creating a mini-State Department in the figure of his Security Adviser...
...introduction of Newcomer Strauss into the Middle East summitry shook the State Department to its foundations. That Carter would reach around Vance and Brzezinski and pick the glad-handing Texan, a lawyer, politician and trade negotiator relatively inexperienced in diplomatic affairs, stunned the department professionals. The move further diminished Vance's standing, removing a principal foreign policy area from his direction. It not only disillusioned the whole State Department but also aggravated the long-term power struggle between State and the National Security Council. Brzezinski saw Strauss's appointment as both a weakening of Vance's authority...
...closest White House confidants, "and Zbig is into my office every 15 minutes." The President told his aides somewhat gloomily that he believed he could not be re-elected if the peace talks collapsed. He first considered Henry Kissinger for the job but decided that the former Secretary of State could not be trusted to protect Carter's interests...
...Vance insisted that he had already yielded too much to Brzezinski in the past couple of years, as Vance put it, to protect Brzezinski against his own large insecurities. "It's not personal, it's institutional," maintained the Secretary. "It will be a terrible blow for the State Department." Mondale tried to be the peacemaker. The group stayed up until 3 o'clock in the morning with the distraught Vance refusing to budge. Strauss periodically left the room while Jordan and Mondale tried to persuade the Secretary to see it the President's way. Vance...