Abstract

When the National Security Act of 1947 created a “National Security Council” to advise the president on issues of foreign and military policy, few of the authors of that legislation imagined that they were laying the foundation for an institution that would dramatically increase the president’s ability to manage national security policy from the White House. Just as the National Security Council (NSC) staff and the assistant to the president for national security affairs (the national security adviser) eventually came to play a dominant role in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy, scholarship in this field also turned to an examination of why this has happened and the consequences of this development for the practice of American foreign policy.