Nation: The Question of Who's in Charge

Backstage rivalries trouble the foreign policy team

"Not good" was Ambassador Robert Strauss's verdict on his own mission to the Middle East. He openly complained about the instructions that had been given him and asked who was in charge of U.S. policy on the Middle East. It was an astonishing question for a U.S. diplomat to raise in public. TIME Washington Bureau Chief Robert Ajemian provides at least part of the answer in this report:

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 it.

The three advisers are an odd mix. Vance and Brzezinski have never really got along or understood each other. It has to do with temperament: Vance is more cool, methodical, even slogging, than the nimble, aggressive Brzezinski. 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.

The 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 and a reinforcement of his own.

Carter's chief reason for appointing Strauss was to have a high-level official primarily responsible for dealing with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. In the wake of the Camp David summit, the two leaders were constantly turning to Carter for counsel. The President had made up his mind that Vance was not strong enough to control the volatile peace negotiations, and he was not satisfied that Brzezinski was able to make decisions on his own. "Cy can't hold Begin and Sadat away from me," Carter complained to his 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.