Assembling a Global Picture

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Every night, in the strange chamber that John Kennedy named the Situation Room, anonymous clerks, secretaries and experts in the rites of secrecy assemble a picture of the globe from the preceding 24 hours. It comes, in fragments, from thousands of sources: satellites that scan China, spies watching Warsaw Pact maneuvers near Poland, diplomats who read the Moscow papers and walk in Red Square studying the people.

The Situation Room is in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. The low ceiling, dark walls and functional appointments give it the charm of a courthouse conference room. Machines clack away. Top Secret signs festoon the forbidding steel cabinets. Elaborate locks guard the doors and windows. The man who presides over this scene, Richard Allen, is something of an enigma himself. His public image is overshadowed by those of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who preceded him as National Security Adviser. They resided upstairs in grander style and dominated foreign policy. Allen has shrunk the adviser's job to the stature it had with McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy) and Walt Rostow (Johnson); indeed, he is back in their old basement office, in one corner of the supersecure complex. It is a modest command post for the task: giving Ronald Reagan the full facts of a dangerous world. On these gleanings hangs our future.

The President's intelligence briefing is assembled in a black leather folder, hand-carried upstairs and placed on the desk in the Oval Office to await Reagan's arrival around 9 a.m. When his top aides and Secretary of State Alexander Haig assemble at 9:15, the President will have been through the folder and have his questions and impressions ready.

In the four months of the Reagan presidency, patterns have emerged from the information in the folder that have in some instances hardened prior convictions and at other times produced subtle changes in the President's beliefs. He is certain that the Soviet Union is conducting the most awesome military buildup in history. If at times there seems to be an excess of anti-Soviet exhortation in the President's rhetoric, it may spring from the kaleidoscopic picture of world events that Allen and his aides produce every day. Terse paragraphs tell the story in words. Satellite pictures lay it out in stunning detail: tanks, planes, missiles, submarines, divisional cantonments carved out of wilderness areas in Siberia. It is a buildup of potential death that goes beyond all reason, and our cameras do not lie. (Once, the story goes, they even defined a Soviet sun worshiper with her bikini top down.)

But there is another side. The troubles facing the Kremlin leadership loom large to the men who pore over the morning findings. U.S. capabilities, both military and economic, may be a bit battered and rusted, but they are basically intact, and it will be possible to catch up. Meanwhile, Moscow has to worry about 'crop failures in the Ukraine and the impact of Pope John Paul in Eastern Europe. The Soviet surge in alcoholism is also in the equation. It is more debilitating than our drug culture. It portends deep discouragement with a faltering system. Vodka has become more consoling than Communism. And the Soviet armies, for all their vaunted firepower, still have not digested Afghanistan.

Sometimes the deskside discussion about the briefing book is over in 15 minutes; often it lasts much longer. Reagan has his pet concerns, like Soviet behavior, which he ponders and brings up as events roll on.

Essentially, Reagan marches to the same drummer he did before becoming President. But he is more cautious. He is also more determined that America must lead the world.

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