Leaning Toward a Team Player

By KURT ANDERSEN

McFarlane is a pro, but mil he have Reagan's ear?

The President's National Security Adviser has an odd job: because there is no statutory description of the position, the duties are fluid and ambiguous, and appointments to the post are not subject to senatorial confirmation. As a result, the job can change drastically with each successive occupant. So although at week's end a successor to William Clark had not been officially named, the leading contender, Robert ("Bud") McFarlane, and the also-rans prompted distinct lines of speculation about the style and substance he--or she--would bring to a White House office that has become a hotspot.

The position was created in 1953 by President Eisenhower, six years after the National Security Council was formed. The President, Vice President, Secretaries of State and Defense, director of the CIA and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff make up the NSC. In effect, the National Security Adviser serves as the NSC's executive director, overseeing its dozens of staff analysts and managing the disparate flow of diplomatic and military data coming into the White House from various Government agencies. As an assistant to the President, the National Security Adviser has to produce coherent syntheses of this flood of information and opinion, and sometimes arbitrate interagency disputes, so that the Chief Executive can make informed, independent policy decisions. And of course the adviser must simply advise, telling the President what he thinks ought to be done.

How powerful is the National Security Adviser? It all depends on the officeholder and his President. Under President Nixon, Henry Kissinger built a powerful policymaking apparatus that eclipsed the State Department. When Kissinger became Secretary of State in 1973, he took power with him to Foggy Bottom: his hand-picked successor as National Security Adviser, retired Air Force Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, was strictly a scrupulous administrator. During the Carter Administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski in his turn built a Kissinger-style policy machine that competed for influence with State.

Last weekend the President contemplated what sort of adviser each candidate would make, and he was inclined to pick a cool-headed team player over a potential power grabber. Reagan's apparent favorite for the post, McFarlane, 46, was adept and unflamboyant as Clark's deputy. "When you finish adding up the objective qualities," a senior White House official says, "Bud McFarlane comes up with the most points." A graduate of the Naval Academy, he came to the White House to be an assistant first to President Nixon, then to Kissinger and later Scowcroft at the NSC. He has experience on Capitol Hill as a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and in the Reagan Administration worked as a counselor to Secretary of State Alexander Haig before becoming Clark's deputy.

McFarlane, a conservative but no ideologue, is diligent and has a great facility for detail, particularly in the arcane realm of nuclear arms control. Earlier this year he helped persuade Reagan to temper his arms-control stance to win congressional support for the MX missile. For the past twelve weeks he has performed ably as a special envoy to the Middle East, opening channels to Syria in the Lebanese negotiations. McFarlane is no theoretician in the Kissinger-Brzezinski mold, but he is intimate with the substance of national security. As a no-nonsense National Security Adviser, McFarlane would have a vastly better technical grounding than Clark and, perhaps as a result, devote less attention to White House infighting.

U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, 56, was the only serious alternative candidate. A former political science professor at Georgetown University, she was a longtime Democratic activist. Like her fellow neoconservatives, however, she was repelled by the dovish drift of the Democratic Party, which occurred as she was turning more resolutely antiCommunist. As a Reagan pet, she has had an unsual degree of influence in shaping policy. But as a prospective National Security Adviser, she had obvious drawbacks. In dealings with colleagues as well as adversaries, Kirkpatrick tends to be everything McFarlane is not: high-strung, argumentative, ideological, organizationally disheveled, and candid to a fault. At White House meetings, says one Reagan aide, "she doesn't give an inch. When she really gets going, she throws down her glasses on the table." Reagan's advisers surely knew that if she were picked, Kirkpatrick could be expected to exacerbate rather than mediate Administration turf and ideological disputes. Her hard-line views, held with sometimes evangelical fervor, can be bracing when aired in the U.N. hall, but might be too rigid in the pivotal White House foreign policy slot.

The principal long-shot candidate resembled the favorite: Scowcroft, 58, is a sort of McFarlane with a Ph.D. He is a West Pointer who came to the Nixon White House a year after McFarlane; both worked from 1973 to 1975 for Kissinger, and Scowcroft retained McFarlane as his deputy when he succeeded Kissinger as Ford's National Security Adviser. More recently Scowcroft has been chairman of Reagan's blue-ribbon MX-missile commission, an important role that the White House might be reluctant to muddle by asking him to serve once more as in-house adviser. Scowcroft's honest brokering between the Administration and Capitol Hill helped produce a more realistic U.S. position at the START negotiations. This, however, has not won him any friends on the right.

The right wing was reassured with Clark as National Security Adviser, believing he was a check on White House "pragmatists." The new appointee, hardliner or not, will not have the longstanding personal friendship and easy way with Reagan that Clark did, and thus is unlikely to have Clark's degree of influence.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Douglas Brew This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.