Reply #14: In 1947, Harry Truman signed the National Security Act to make

[Pithy Cherub]

national security apparatus report directly to the president of the United States. The group that was created is called the National Security Council or the NSC in Washington-ese. That group under law can be configured as the president chooses. The NSC has a group of people called principals. They are the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. This same Act created the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was amended two years later.

The NSC can exist of many groups or undersecretaries and other cabinet members. The NSC has staff(huge budget issue) appointed by the president. The National Security Advisor (NSA) is appointed by the president to run the staff and the principals meetings. The NSA's assistant works to head up the undersecretary and national security portfolios assigned to the staff. The NSC has ABSOLUTELY NO OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS as mandated by the 1947 Act.

Each president can remake the NSC ,once elected, in their own image with no fear of Congress. The president may choose who serves on which committees of the NSC and who receives which classified materials. Each president from 1947 has remade the NSC and the chief of staff of the president is sometimes also appointed onto the NSC.

To move from concept to real world, when you look at presidential power and its use, many of the dumbest mistakes from 1947 forward can be laid at the NSC's doorstep. Because it is insular there are many people who play a part in both Democratic or Republican presidencies. The club is small and has gotten into great historical debacles like: Iran Contra, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the most current WHIG, White House Iraq Group to put together Iraq response and crush opposition (Plame/Wilson), appointed by the president with no legal reason to share anything the group does with Congress.

To read more, the first book about the NSC is Running The World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, by David Rothkopf. He is the first to examine in a scholastic fashion the effects of the NSC on American foreign and national security policy. It is actually quite an excellent read and speaks to the clubby atmosphere and its relationships at the NSC.