Thread by @DavidPriess

Has a cabal of appointees ever before decided that it (using NYT op-ed words) was “steady state” and “knew better” than POTUS?

Yep, e.g.: SecDef Frank Carlucci, SecState George Shultz, & NatSecAdvisor Colin Powell basically ran foreign policy in Reagan’s last year.

THREAD:

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Carlucci said in a revealing interview after Reagan left office why & how—under very different circumstances than now—the Carlucci/Shultz/Powell triumvirate did it:

“When Colin succeeded me, and George and I had buried the hatchet, the three of us made a conscious decision.”

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“George said, ‘Ronald Reagan has had the landing lights on and the flaps down for the last year. Now we’re going to have to step up to the plate on foreign policy. The only way it’s going to work is for the three of us to agree.’”

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”That’s when we had seven o’clock meetings every day. It was just the three of us, no agenda, no substitutes. We worked through the day’s events, trying to forge agreement.”

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”George and I changed positions a number of times in those meetings because we decided if the three of us agreed, we knew we had Ronald Reagan. . . .”

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“Colin would simply brief him ‘Sir, this is what we’re doing, if you have no objections.’ Invariably, he wouldn’t. The concept was to try and keep the issues off his desk.”

(From UVA Miller Center Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, at millercenter.org/president/reag….)

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