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The President's Inner Foreign Policy Team

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Elmer Plischke
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Extract

As Chief of State and head of government, the President is the epicenter of the management of American external relations and the formulation of foreign policy. Not only does he welcome the leaders of other countries who come on summit visits, receive personally the diplomatic emissaries of foreign governments accredited to the United States, and participate in many other formal diplomatic functions, but he also is responsible for executing those segments of the law that pertain to international affairs, for appointing United States diplomats and communicating with other governments, for making treaties, and for initiating and enunciating foreign policy. Addressing himself to the last of these, President Truman cryptically declared: “The President makes foreign policy.” Dean Rusk later commented that this “is not the whole story,” but “it serves very well if one wishes to deal with the matter in five words.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 1968 , pp. 292 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1968

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References

1 “The President,” Foreign Affairs, XXXVIII (04, 1960), 355.Google Scholar

2 Senate, , Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, Organizing for National Security (Washington; 1961), II, 282.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., I, 14.

4 Attwood, William, “A Visit with Walter Lippmann,” Look, XXV (04 25, 1961), 105.Google Scholar

5 Mentor Classics, The New American Library (1952), p. 114.Google Scholar

6 (New York, 1963), p. 87.Google Scholar

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8 White, Leonard D., Introduction to the Study of Public Administration (New York, 1948), p. 52.Google Scholar

9 Washington Post, 03 1, 1966.Google Scholar

10 For the annual depiction of this staff, see the issues of the United States Government Organization Manual. For a graphic depiction of top-level “Executive Organization for Foreign Relations,” see Plischke, Elmer, Conduct of American Diplomacy, (3rd ed., Princeton, 1967), p. 130.Google Scholar

11 Kennedy, , (New York, 1965), p. 258, 259, 262.Google Scholar

12 The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, provided for by law in 1947, which filed its report in 1949

13 Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Committee on Government Operations, Organizing for National Security (Washington, 1961), 3 vols.; especially Vol. III, 4–5.Google Scholar

14 See, for example, Heinlein, J. C., Presidential Staff and National Security Policy, Occasional Papers–No. 2 (Center for the Study of United States Foreign Policy, Department of Political Science, University of Cincinnati, 1963), pp. 26ff., 43ff., 56ff.Google Scholar

15 “Staffing the Presidency: The Role of White House Agencies,” Lecture at Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, 01 13, 1962Google Scholar, in Senate, , Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations, Administration of National Security: Selected Papers (Washington, 1962), p. 133.Google Scholar