A president’s prime responsibility, of course, is to ensure the safety and well-being of the American people. The vast array of resources engaged to protect the United States — military forces, intelligence agencies, federal law-enforcement bureaus — are, ultimately, at the president’s disposal. Together, these entities confront a virtual galaxy of domestic and foreign flashpoints. Yet the Army, CIA and FBI, to name but a few, have widely varying missions, agendas and philosophies in dealing with these national security concerns. For a president to personally ride herd on it all would be impossible. In the modern White House, it is essential to provide its tenant with a master gatekeeper: an expert in military-political matters who can whittle the ideas of multiple bureaucracies down to just what the president should know -- and what he should do. This critical broker of information and strategy is the National Security Adviser.

In the wake of the Second World War, President Harry Truman recognized that the global order had been greatly altered and complicated by nuclear technologies, communism’s rise, and England’s decline as a world power. Acting on the policies of his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947, which sought to better coordinate the nation’s military, law enforcement, intelligence, and economic leaderships. By making the president — not his cabinet or Congress — the direct overseer of all these, the National Security Act marked a profound broadening of presidential power. The National Security Council, which integrates domestic, foreign, and military policy, is directed by the National Security Adviser. With the varying philosophies of each president, the duties and powers of each NSA have changed with each administration. Truman’s successor, former Army general Dwight Eisenhower, set up the National Security Council with a rigidly constructed military-command model. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson opted for less formal NSC structure, but Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s former vice president, returned the Council to a strictly delineated bureaucracy headed by a powerful NSA, Henry Kissinger. Because a president can name his NSA without the congressional confirmation process that ambassadors or Cabinet officials must clear, appointments are often controversial.

Given the range of potential security concerns for the United States, at home and overseas, the National Security Adviser’s duties are extremely broad. In theory, the responsibility for handling anything under the national-security umbrella, from riots in Chicago to terrorism in Beirut, might end up on the NSA’s desk. Much of the job involves the laborious filtering of ideas through vast bureaucracy, but crises that flare up demand the opposite -- instant, hard decisions that almost always involve great risk of human life.

A trio of former National Security Advisers spoke with THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT about this critical component of the modern presidential administration. GENERAL COLIN POWELL -- who provides the voice for William Howard Taft on the "Presidents" broadcast -- was Ronald Reagan’s last NSA, serving from 1987 until 1989. The child of immigrants from Jamaica, Powell attended the City College of New York as a member of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). He served in Vietnam and a wide variety of Army duties before his work in the Reagan administration. When George Bush took over the White House in 1989, Powell was promoted to four-star general and, in October of that year, became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- the most senior person in the Armed Forces of the United States. He oversaw United States forces in the Persian Gulf War two years later, then retired from the Army early in the Clinton era and wrote his autobiography, My American Journey. When Powell began a national tour to promote the book shortly before the 1996 presidential primaries, some pundits speculated that the tour was a precursor to a White House bid. Powell, however, proved them wrong and, while he continues to rebuff Republican overtures, he remains at the top of the party’s vice-presidential wish list for 2000. DR. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI served as Jimmy Carter’s NSA from 1977 to 1981, where he urged a hard-line stance in dealings with the Soviet Union in the later stages of the Cold War. Born in Poland, he received a doctoral degree from Harvard University in 1953. Brzezinski (pronounced breh-ZIN-skee) taught at Columbia University from 1960 until Carter took office, and returned there after Carter left the White House. In 1981 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts to better relations between the United States and China. Today he works for the Center for Strategic International Studies, and teaches at The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. Brzezinski writes and speaks on international affairs and chairs several commissions pertaining to them. He occasionally gives advice — "solicited or unsolicited," he says, lightly — to government officials, writes editorial pieces, and appears on political television programs. Brzezinski has proved a highly prolific author of books on world affairs, a few of which include Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981, The Fragile Blossom: Crisis and Change in Japan, Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century, In Quest of National Security, Out of Control: Global Turmoil On the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, and, most recently, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. GENERAL BRENT SCOWCROFT attended West Point, and later attained graduate degrees at Columbia University. He served as National Security Adviser to two presidents -- Ford and Bush. Prior to this, he was the assistant NSA (understudying NSA Henry Kissinger) for Nixon and Ford. Scowcroft also held senior positions in the U.S. Air Force and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and served on top-level presidential advisory boards for national security issues. Today, he heads a Washington company known as The Scowcroft Group. He tells Presidents, "It’s a consulting company that advises firms who want to invest overseas, or are doing business there, and have particular problems of one kind or another. We do risk assessment, advisory work, and so on." Scowcroft also serves on the corporate boards of Pennzoil-Quaker State, Devon Energy, and Qualcomm.

This interview was moderated by Dan Sanders.

COLIN POWELL: By giving the leaders of each of those agendas a full and open access to the process so that everybody got their agenda onto the table. We would reconcile them all, debate the points of agreement and disagreement, and make sure they all fit the president’s agenda. The only agenda that counted was the president’s agenda; all the other agendas had to fit into his. Each department and agency has a slightly different view of how to best support the president’s objectives. So it’s the National Security Adviser’s role to bring them all into the open where they can be seen, where everybody gets a chance to take a shot at everybody else’s ideas, then organize the resulting work in such a way that fairly presents the issues, in all of their guts and glory, to the president for a decision.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: It takes a lot of time, and the way I did it was to work up, starting from the level of Assistant Secretary (of State), with drafts of things we wanted to do, then to a deputies’ committee, then a principals’ committee, which was the National Security Council without the president. We’d sharpen, refine and highlight all the differences, and then bring them to the president for a decision. It’s a time-consuming process.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Absolutely. Give everybody a chance to express his view, and make sure that all the dissenting views are presented to the president.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: There’s no simple formula for it. At each instance, one has to decide how important the issue is, and which of the factors involved, including the different constituencies, are to be given priority. Part of the juggling involves interaction with other people. Ultimately, the president himself has to make the determination as to whether foreign policy concerns, or domestic concerns, political concerns, or strategic concerns should preponderate. What I think is more difficult is trying to prioritize all of the national security issues that tend to converge on the White House, all at the same time.

COLIN POWELL: It’s to serve as an assistant to the president; it comes from the true title -- the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. To be on his personal staff, not representing any bureaucratic interests. The person who gets such a job should have broad experience in political-military issues. An understanding of the role the president plays, both as head of state and as commander in chief. A good understanding of the political process. And a good grasp of foreign-military issues. He or she should be someone who can resolve problems and conflicts without hiding things under the rug. And who, at the end of the day, will be seen as an honest broker of the various issues.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I would put it this way: the individual should have some sense of strategic priorities. He should have a broad knowledge of international affairs, and he should have a degree of basic consensus with the president’s predispositions regarding these issues. One allows for the possibility, even the probability, that the president will not be as well versed in these issues as his National Security Adviser. That’s why he needs one. Nonetheless, the point of departure has to be some basic agreement regarding premises and purposes. Secondly, the individual has to fit himself — congenially — into the president’s working habits and management style. It is the president who sets the tone, and it is the president who ultimately defines the degree of influence that the National Security Adviser exercises on the overall national security policy.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I think he has two roles. The first is to manage the system, to make sure the president gets the highest quality intelligence, background, and views of his advisers. The second is to provide a separate source of advice for the president, a source without any institutional affiliation, other than the president. The National Security Adviser is the only one who doesn’t run an agency or department. Each agency or department has its own wish list, and so on, and they look at things from their own point of view. The only one who has the president’s point of view, not an agency’s, is the National Security Adviser.

COLIN POWELL: No, I don’t think there’s any reason for it. I just think it’s serendipitous, accidental. I don’t think we go around looking for first or second generation Americans to be National Security Advisers, it’s just — a wonderful country (laughs).

SANDERS: (to Brent Scowcroft) Talk about strategies surrounding administration’s central crises during your tenures under Ford and Bush — what were the real headaches that you can talk about? With Ford, the tests were early and severe. Before he’d been in office a year, South Vietnam fell. Just two weeks after that, Cambodia seized a U.S. merchant ship, the Mayaguez, on the high seas; the Navy and Marines had to carry out a difficult, bloody rescue mission.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Certainly, the Mayaguez incident was a kind of "instant crisis," where we didn’t have time for any of the kinds of studies or reviews that I talked about. The whole operation was run by the National Security Council itself, by the principals. There were no U.S. forces in the region; we had to assemble forces, gather them together from around Asia, forces that had never worked together. It was a really tough operation. Another was the exit from Vietnam, a very traumatic operation for which, I think, President Ford deserves high marks for his courage in keeping our forces there as long as possible, to get the maximum number of our Vietnamese friends out before the North Vietnamese came in.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: My role was the same in that as in any other issue: I coordinated for the President the recommendations that came in from the different departments, most notably State and Defense. Then, in addition to that, I would make my own recommendations, indicating explicitly where I agreed or disagreed. These issues would then be discussed either at formal sessions of the NSC, presided by the president, or the weekly informal breakfast meetings.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Quite a number of them. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a major challenge. Determining how to respond to that was a major preoccupation. The Soviet threat to invade Poland in December of 1980, which President Carter deterred by a very active response, was another, potentially, very destabilizing danger. There was the complex process of how to normalize relations with China. There was the never-ending quest for peace in the Middle East, leading ultimately to the Camp David Accords. There was the Panama Canal problem. There were the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitations Talks) negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the related issues of human rights and Soviet expansionism, particularly in the Third World. I could go on for a long time, but that gives you some sense of the conflicting pools and of the complex agenda one confronted almost every day.

COLIN POWELL: The difficult challenges were Iran-Contra — we pretty much came in at the tail end of that, but continuing to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, so that eventually they could cause a change in the government. That eventually did happen. The deteriorating situation in the Persian Gulf, which required us to re-flag Kuwaiti vessels (ships) as American vessels, to protect them from Iraqi and Iranian aggression, was another.

COLIN POWELL: Yes. But most of that time was not a time of challenges as much as it was a time of opportunities, with the beginning of the end of the Cold War. So most of my time and energy was spent on arms-control agreements with the Soviets, and with responding to the ideas coming from this new leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Ultimately, the result was the collapse of the Soviet Union, shortly after we left office.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, that was probably the hardest, because that was a very disparate coalition, with different points of view. Keeping it together required daily -- daily -- efforts, and hand-holding and explanations. And I think, also, the domestic situation was very complicated. The vote in Congress to authorize the operation was a very, very close vote. And we had to work awfully hard to convince enough crossovers from the Democrats.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: We didn’t ordinarily get into those kinds of domestic crises. Only when they had a national security aspect to them. Marginally, in calling up reserves and the National Guard, but most of our domestic stuff related to FBI matters and coordination between the FBI and CIA, and so on.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: First of all, I don’t agree with your premise. I don’t think the two jobs create, in effect, inevitable enemies. In fact, contrary to a myth -- widely disseminated by the mass media -- (Carter Secretary of State) Cyrus Vance and I got along extremely well. On a lot of issues, we were very much in agreement, and worked as partners. There were two issues in which we did disagree; we never hid that, and the president decided them. One issue was how to handle the Iranian Crisis. The other was how to deal more generally with Soviet assertiveness. Although, for example, on the SALT negotiations, we worked in tandem.

COLIN POWELL: No, I got along fine with Secretary of State (George) Schultz. We sometimes disagreed on things. When you have strong people with strong views that are not always in agreement, you will get these clashes.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: There is a natural friction, because they deal, importantly, with the same matters. The National Security Adviser has a broader mandate than State, in that he also deals with Defense and CIA. But they do deal with the same issues, and I think when the National Security Adviser takes on the role of public explainer of public policy, for example, in the press, to the exclusion of the Secretary of State, then that creates a lot of friction. We didn’t have that much of it, because I worked very closely with (Secretary of State) Jim Baker, and we coordinated on things. I made sure he wasn’t cut out of anything. I tried very hard, because I watched (Nixon NSA and Secretary of State) Kissinger and Rogers, and, from a distance, (Carter NSA and Secretary of State) Brzezinski and Vance. And so I was aware that conflicts like that waste a lot of energy in the Executive Branch.

COLIN POWELL: It’s happened in the past. But, it didn’t on my watch, because you can only have one Secretary of State at a time; and while I was there, his name was George Schultz.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: There were a number of them. The Arab-Israeli War, in ‘73, and how we could go about getting supplies to Israel, which was close to being overrun by the Egyptians and the Syrians. I spent two nights without sleep on that one. Another one, frankly, was the vote on the Gulf War, because I knew the president was determined to use force. And if we got a negative vote, it would have thrown the country into a real turmoil if he’d gone ahead and done it anyway. And of course the withdrawal from Vietnam, sending those helicopters in to pull our people off the roof of the embassy.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: It was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking.

COLIN POWELL: I never do ‘single hardest’ or ‘single best’ or ‘single worst.’ It always fails to capture the nature of the job. Every day had its own adventures and misadventures and great moments and weak moments. And it doesn’t do justice to all the things that happened to try and single out one as the best or worst.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: There was one day in particular, and that was the failure of the (Iranian hostage) rescue mission. That was, of course, disappointing, although I did recommend to the president that the mission should be part of a larger package, in which the punitive action would dominate.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: None of it is true. And the Israeli record, while good, also entailed some significant failures.

COLIN POWELL: I don’t know. (laughs) Probably harder in one way, because you have so many more people you have to deal with, and countries that have to be tended to. Easier in one way, because you’re not dealing with thermonuclear war and the end of life as we know it. So, every National Security Adviser faces a different environment that, in ways, is more difficult than the previous one, and in other ways is easier.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I don’t think it’s easier or harder. It’s different in focus, but I think it’s also become different because the interplay between the president and the National Security Adviser, in the Clinton Administration, is primarily focused on domestic politics. Everything else flows from that, and that is a significant departure from the pattern set by previous presidents.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I think it’s probably harder. It’s not harder in the crucial things, because there we were working to prevent a war which could destroy us all. But it was a more orderly and regular world that we dealt with. Now, we can’t tell who are the good guys, who are the bad guys. What kind of conflicts the U.S. interests demand we get engaged in, what we ought to stay out of — there’s not the pressures of the Soviet threat to keep us close to our allies, and so on. I think it’s more complicated.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, it’s very, very tough. But, you know, it’s not nearly as tough on an adviser as it is on the president himself. I mean, I tell him I think it ought to be done. But he’s the one who has to actually sign the order. He’s the one, personally, who is responsible for the lives of the troops. He’s the one who takes the rap if things go wrong. An adviser — it’s an awesome and very disagreeable thing to have to do, for an adviser. But he’s not the bottom line — the president is.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: It presented no difficulties for me whatsoever. My view was that the use of power is a necessary ingredient of world affairs, and that a major power like the United States would lose its credibility if it deprived itself of that option. So I took that as part of the job. From the moment I stepped into that job, I said to myself, "The only thing that’s going to motivate me is the national interest of the United States. I will not care for personal safety for myself, and I will not hesitate to make recommendations which may, in fact, require some extremely decisive acts."

COLIN POWELL: No new books. I’m really spending the bulk of my energy on my youth programs, most significantly America’s Promise -- the Alliance for Youth, the organization I chair. It’s a program that seeks to serve as a catalyst and a crusade throughout the country, to get more and more companies and religious institutions and non-profit organizations and the government to do more for young people. Giving them more opportunities for education, all of our kids getting a healthy start in life, creating more safe places for our youngsters, more Boys and Girls Clubs, expand Scouting programs, and getting more people to serve as mentors for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and other agencies of the National Mentoring Partnership.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I think we’ve spending our capital around the world at a pretty rapid rate. Things are deteriorating significantly. The obvious ones are China, Russia. But also, in my mind, Europe. Our relations with Europe are getting more and more complicated, and there’s just an enormous amount of repair work that needs to be done.