A Surprise at State

Muskie takes over for Vance--but who really will run foreign policy?

"There has absolutely got to be an end to the confusion over who speaks for you."

--Cyrus Vance to President Carter, after resigning as Secretary of State

"It will be a much better relationship than people assume. I believe we will get along very well."

--National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to TIME, commenting on Vance's designated successor

"The President has left no doubt in my mind. I will be the foreign policy spokesman."

--The successor, Senator Edmund S. Muskie, to the press

At 6:30 on Monday morning, a tall, dignified man emerged from his home in Northwest Washington, D.C., and began to walk slowly through the rain toward the end of his career in Jimmy Carter's Administration. As he made his way, he leaned on a cane to ease the pain of gout in his right foot. A cluster of reporters were waiting, and while he said nothing of substance, he was polite--he is always polite. Then he climbed slowly into his limousine and began his final official trip to the Oval Office of President Carter. The two men talked for 17 minutes, but it was only a formality. The necessary letters had already been exchanged. Cyrus Vance, 63, no longer was Secretary of State.

Vance's resignation, which shocked the country, stemmed directly from Carter's decision to attempt a military rescue of the hostages in Iran. Vance had sharply opposed the venture, the last battle he was to fight and lose in the inner circle of the President's advisers. When he saw that Carter's course was set, he had tendered his written resignation--four days before the ill-starred mission.

If the resignation was a surprise, so was Carter's reaction to it. On Sunday night, while Vance was tossing sleepless in his bed, the White House phone operators tracked down the President's quarry in a hotel in Nashville. At first the tall, rumpled man with the familiar craggy features thought that Carter was calling to discuss the federal budget, or perhaps a fishing trip to Maine. But the President had a different subject in mind: he wanted Senator Edmund S. Muskie, 66, to become his new Secretary of State. Within 36 hours Muskie agreed.

The reasons behind Vance's quitting raised grave questions about nothing less than President Carter's methods and judgment in forming foreign policy. On one level, the resignation involved a personal struggle. As Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance had lost his duel with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, 52, over who was to be the chief architect of the Administration's foreign policy. Perhaps even more important, the resignation reflected the power that had accrued to the office of National Security Adviser, a post that was not even a part of the U.S. Government until 1953.

For Carter the week's events had still another implication. The departure of Vance, perhaps the most admired man in the Cabinet, the quintessential team player and a person of unimpeachable integrity, could only damage the President's re-election chances as Carter prepared to leave the Rose Garden and launch himself personally into his campaign for the presidency. Since November he had been saying that he could not properly run the nation's affairs while campaigning, particularly because it was necessary for him to give almost minute-by-minute attention to the plight of the hostages. "Times change," he announced last week, "and a lot of responsibility that was on my shoulders has now been alleviated to some degree." It was a conclusion that not everyone agreed with.

The strains that finally forced the resignation of Vance had been developing since virtually the start of the Carter Administration. Though they were never friends, Vance and Brzezinski hoped initially that they could work together. They recognized that they had different styles and strengths. Brzezinski was combative, intellectually pyrotechnic, a conceptualizer; Vance was conscientious, methodical, an implemented They thought they could complement each other.

But there were differences that went beyond style. The most fundamental was over the basic question of how to handle relations with the Soviet Union. Vance believed that the best way to make the Soviets behave was to engage them in a variety of mutually beneficial diplomatic, economic and arms-control deals so that they had a stake in avoiding conflict. Brzezinski thrived on policies of confrontation. As the tempo of world events seemed increasingly to vindicate Brzezinski's pessimistic readings of Soviet intentions, Vance lost more and more battles. The Secretary was especially depressed by the hawkish tone of Carter's State of the Union address in January, which was largely Brzezinski's work. Although he took care to hide his feelings publicly, Vance became embittered. Said one Vance aide: "It is safe to say that the Secretary despised Brzezinski." Commented another: "Vance found Brzezinski dangerous and erratic, a man who had no appreciation of the consequences of rhetoric." Brzezinski, for his part, came to view Vance as opposing any move that might offend the Soviets out of fear that it would jeopardize negotiation or ratification of the SALT II treaty, which to Brzezinski's way of thinking became a kind of obsession with Vance.

Vance's relations with Carter deteriorated also. Initially, the two men--Carter an engineer, Vance a lawyer--saw each other as problem-solving managers, and got along well. But Carter prizes a quality that he calls aggressiveness, which he found overflowing in Brzezinski and lacking in Vance. "That goddam Vance," the President said to aides one day early this year, had failed to denounce Ted Kennedy sufficiently when Kennedy tried to take credit for an Administration plan to free the hostages.

When confusion between the White House and the State Department resulted in the badly bungled U.N. vote against Israel, a vote that Vance gamely took full responsibility for, the President was livid. Said one congressional leader who attended a meeting at which Carter cut loose about Vance: "I never heard him run down anyone so sharply, certainly not a Cabinet member. He repeated it all a couple of times."

Worried and isolated, Vance began to show the strain. Increasingly in private he would burst out with uncharacteristic obscenities, and he drank more than usual. But for the most part, as the loyal soldier, he held his tongue--until the affair of the Iranian rescue mission.

Brzezinski was one of three officials entrusted by Carter last November, immediately after the hostages were seized, with formulating a rescue plan. Much refined and scaled down, the scheme was presented at a meeting of the National Security Council on April 11. Carter presided; Brzezinski drew up the agenda. Vance was absent on a four-day vacation in Florida. He did not know the plan would come up. Carter told the group his preliminary decision was to go ahead. Vance was represented by Warren Christopher, his deputy, who had not been fully briefed on the secret plan and did not know Vance disapproved of it. Therefore he said nothing.

On returning to Washington on Monday, April 14, Vance learned to his dismay that the plan had been approved. He asked to see Carter immediately, and did the next morning. The President, while not changing his mind, agreed to let Vance present his objections at a follow-up meeting of the National Security Council. Vance did--without mentioning resignation, which was already in his mind --but persuaded no one. He repeated his objections in at least three private meetings with the President during that week, but again got nowhere.

Vance was opposed to the mission on a number of grounds. To begin with, he thought--correctly, as events turned out --that the mission was poorly conceived in strictly military terms. Vance had had a good deal of experience to help him make that judgment: during the Viet Nam War, he had been both Secretary of the Army and Deputy Secretary of Defense. He had seen far simpler operations fail, and he was convinced that this one was much too complex. Those years in the Pentagon, said an aide, had given him "a healthy distrust for what those wonderful guys with their flying machines can really do."

That, however, was a secondary objection. Even if the mission succeeded, Vance was worried about the consequences. Iran could round up Americans remaining in the country--perhaps 200 all told--and hold them hostage, leaving the U.S. in a worse position than ever. He feared there would be anti-American riots that might topple the regime of Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr--a weak one, but the only U.S. hope for relative moderation. The mission could inflame the Muslim world, and give the Soviet Union new possibilities of exacerbating tension throughout the Persian Gulf region.

At one of his private meetings with Carter, Vance finally said he would resign if the rescue mission went through. Carter asked him to stay. Vance said he would continue in office if he could dissent publicly about the mission. Carter reluctantly agreed, and Vance left the Oval Office. But after a few minutes he returned. "Forget I said that," he told the President, and then explained that he felt it would be wrong for him to make public his lack of support for such an important venture.

Finally, on Monday, April 21, Vance retreated to his private office on the seventh floor of the State Department building to write out a letter of resignation in longhand on official stationery. He asked his wife Grace to drive in from their home to lunch with him, and he read her the letter. After making a few changes, he carefully copied it over in his tight, slanting script. That afternoon--as the C-130s were being readied and the Nimitz was steaming into position--Vance delivered the message to Carter in an eight-minute private session in the White House Map Room.

The President kept the letter, but left open his invitation that Vance reconsider. The Secretary agonized about the decision throughout the week, going over the pros and cons of resignation with Aides Peter Tarnoff and Anthony Lake. Meanwhile, the raid had occurred--and failed.

It was not until noon Sunday that Vance phoned the President to confirm his determination to quit. His move incensed some of the President's aides, who had no idea it was coming. Said one: "It's a terrible thing to do. He could have stayed around long enough for Carter to repair himself." On Monday morning the formalities were completed; this time Carter did not request Vance to reconsider. During their final talk, Vance recommended that he be succeeded by Deputy Secretary Christopher.

Carter, however, had his own candidate in mind: Muskie. Vice President Walter Mondale also favored Muskie. He doubted that the reserved Christopher could accomplish a necessary job: moving Brzezinski back into the shadows a bit. Mondale and a number of White House staffers believed that the National Security Adviser was hurting Carter by acting so flamboyantly. Muskie, they felt, could handle Brzezinski: he was well known for his self-confidence and his hair-trigger temper.

Then, too, the White House wanted Muskie because he could do a job that Vance could not. Says one top Carter aide: "We wanted someone with a stronger inclination toward recognizing and using the press and presenting and explaining U.S. foreign policy. We had a vacuum there, where someone with Zbig's natural inclinations just moved right in."

Muskie also had superb political credentials. He was both a staunch supporter of a President who values loyalty highly, and a respected member of the chamber that must confirm him. Muskie's confirmation hearings are unlikely to turn into a Senate inquisition of the Administration's foreign policy.

Carter needed no urging about Muskie. He has long admired the Senator and briefly considered him as a vice-presidential running mate in 1976. As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Muskie had worked hard on behalf of the President's programs. The two men developed a personal rapport, something that the President has found hard to establish with many of the leading Senators. Said Campaign Director Robert Strauss, who wanted the job himself: "Muskie was Carter's first and only choice. The President felt Muskie's judgment was good, his mind tough, and he thought Muskie could balance his team."

The immediate White House problem turned out to be finding Muskie to ask him to take the job. The Senator was on his way to Nashville to deliver a speech to the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies. Eventually the President located him in Nashville on Sunday and asked him to become Secretary of State. "You really like to deal in blockbusters, Mr. President," said Muskie. Replied Carter: "You're my first choice, and the only one I've talked to."

Muskie promised to think it over and get back to Carter on Monday. Before he could, the President phoned again to press him to take the job. That night the pair talked. Says Muskie: "I wanted to be clear in my own mind what role he wanted me to play. I thought if I had any value to him, it would only be if I had the significant, substantive role as his foreign policy spokesman. That's what he wanted: a strong Secretary of State, aggressive in assuming that role. He knew well enough what kind of person I was."

Muskie will start with some grave handicaps. Although he has served for six years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he is no expert on U.S. policy abroad. Last week officials overseas were trying desperately to learn more about him. The Japanese Foreign Ministry hastily put together a two-page background memo on Muskie, but, admitted one official, "it only contained what has been in the newspapers."

Muskie will unquestionably have support from the foreign offices of America's allies. Vance was tremendously respected abroad, and his loss made the allies anxious. Said a British official of Vance: "A wise head, an experienced and accomplished diplomat and a fine professional." Said a senior chancellery official in Bonn: "What apparently concerned Vance about the rescue mission is exactly what worried us. And that he stood alone in the closest councils of the President only proves that our worries about the Administration are sound." A Foreign Minister returning from the summit meeting of the European Community cited European fears that Vance's departure would leave an opening at the top that would quickly be filled by Brzezinski, who was mistrusted. Said a Quai d'Orsay diplomat: "It's not just Brzezinski's rabidly anti-Soviet line that galled, it was his erratic personality. In negotiations, we found him intellectually undisciplined." Dominique Moisy, an analyst at the French Institute of International Relations, observed: "Some Europeans believe that Carter and Brzezinski negatively complement each other--the natural vagueness of Carter and the adventurousness of Brzezinski." Moscow was greatly relieved that the job would not go to Brzezinski, a man who they feel is a Soviet-hater by nature and who is often attacked in the Soviet press as a peddler of "slander and obvious lies."

Muskie's immediate and overriding problem will be to work out a modus vivendi with Brzezinski that fully establishes the Secretary of State's position. It will not be an easy task. The National Security Adviser is a man of strong views directly put. Brzezinski likes to say, "In life you must take risks," and he shapes his policy thoughts accordingly. His favorite historical figure is Napoleon. He often quotes a phrase he attributes to the Emperor: "On s'engage et puis on voit" (roughly, "You act and then you see"). A less favored and not yet historical figure in Brzezinski's pantheon is Henry Kissinger; it has been a career-long ambition of Brzezinski to outshine Kissinger. He is still annoyed that when both were teaching at Harvard, Kissinger was granted tenure and he was not. Princeton Professor Richard Falk recalls a dinner held by journalists toward the end of the Ford Administration at which someone showed up wearing a rubber mask grotesquely caricaturing Kissinger's features. Brzezinski put it on and laughed and laughed. "He couldn't stop," recalls Falk. "It was surreal."

Brzezinski's policy views, many colleagues contend, have been molded largely by a background of Polish intelligentsia and exile. Born into a moderately wealthy family in Warsaw, he was taken to Canada at the age often when his diplomat father was posted to Montreal before World War II. When the Soviets installed a Communist government in Poland after the war, the family was cut off from its homeland for good. Says one Columbia professor: "Brzezinski thinks like a Pole. With hundreds of years of Polish history behind him, he is pathologically opposed to Russia and its modern-day successor, the U.S.S.R." Recently a ranking Soviet official summed up Brzezinski as follows: "Once a Pole, always a Pole. And we know about Poles."

As National Security Adviser, Brzezinski has impressive strengths. "He is the best briefer in the U.S. Government," says a White House staffer, and even opponents concede his talent for summing up a wide range of policy views quickly and cogently. It was Brzezinski who coined the term arc of crisis to describe the area stretching from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa, the crucial crescent where U.S. and Soviet influence now clash.

But Brzezinski's brilliance, claim many colleagues, is flawed. His critics bristle at his flamboyant wooing of the press and his talent for the extravagant gesture. Visiting China, he led his hosts in a race at the Great Wall, declaring: "Last one to the top gets to fight the Russians in Ethiopia!" In Pakistan, he visited the Afghanistan border and brandished a rifle in the general direction of Kabul.

Says one Columbia professor who knows him well: "He is too quick. He does not let his thoughts mature. Zbig produces ideas like sausages, one after another. It is a contradiction, I know, but Brzezinski is brilliant and shallow at the same time." In the White House, Brzezinski has shown a distressing propensity to shift his views mercurially--partly, say his critics, to rationalize failure. For example, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Brzezinski argued passionately that Pakistan had to be built up as a bulwark against further Soviet expansionism. When Pakistan rejected U.S. aid, he downplayed the problem. Such oscillation is especially dangerous, Brzezinski's critics charge, because it reinforces a similar tendency in Carter.

What especially worries domestic critics of Brzezinski is that he is the top staff man for what has become one of the most powerful bodies in the U.S. Government, the National Security Council. The council is composed of the President, the Vice President and the Secretaries of Defense and State. Its advisers are the Director of Central Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The job of the National Security Adviser and his staff is to identify problems that should be brought to the President, to collect information and recommendations on issues and to lay out the policy choices. When a decision is reached, the NSC communicates it to the agencies involved and sees that it is put into effect. These functions cannot be performed adequately by the State Department, which, in the bureaucratic world of Washington, would have trouble coordinating other agencies.

The NSC has developed other powers and prerogatives. Foreign policy papers for the President from various agencies are funneled through the NSC. The staff notes the pros and cons and sends them to Carter. Says one presidential assistant: "Most are fairly presented."

If a memo on foreign policy comes into the White House from a Cabinet officer, Brzezinski's staff attaches a covering note, summarizing the issue and presenting other possible courses of action. Sometimes Brzezinski adds his own thoughts. Vance became so disconcerted by this procedure that he began discussing matters with the President privately rather than putting his ideas down on paper so they could be topped by Brzezinski's.

But Brzezinski's influence over Carter's decisions on foreign policy go far beyond the control of paperwork. He has taken thorough advantage of his opportunity to present his recommendations directly to Carter. Every morning the first appointment on the President's schedule is with Brzezinski. Sometimes they meet for only a few minutes, sometimes 15 or 20, and the session sets the tone for foreign policy discussions during the day. Every evening Vance used to send a letter to the President, which Brzezinski did not see. But the final phone call of the day usually came from Brzezinski.

In Washington, proximity can be vital in exerting influence: the Department of State is half a mile from the Oval Office; Brzezinski is about 75 feet away. The National Security Adviser frequently sees Carter half a dozen times a day, often more than Vance did in a week, though the Secretary always had free access.

When Muskie becomes Secretary of State, he will have to cope with the NSC's well-entrenched system and Brzezinski's well-established routine of speaking directly and often to Carter. The Maine Senator is convinced that he will have no trouble, and Brzezinski claims to see no problems ahead. Says he: "The President's line is set. The policy is defined. Muskie is a centrist. I'm largely a centrist. I don't want to fight. He doesn't want to fight." And Brzezinski quips: "Senator Muskie's view of the world and mine are bipolar."

Perhaps. The expressions of good will are reminiscent of the mood of optimism when Vance and Brzezinski were setting out at the beginning of Carter's Administration. Muskie will probably have to exert the full force of his formidable personality if the Secretary of State is once again to assume his proper role as the principal spokesman for U.S. foreign policy.

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