Procedures established during the Truman administration set the basic bureaucratic pattern which lasted through the Dwight Eisenhower administration: draft NSC papers written primarily by State's Policy Planning Staff, discussion at the NSC meeting, approval by the President resulting in an NSC Action, and dissemination to relevant parts of the bureaucracy.

Initially sidestepping formal NSC channels, State won approval of an ad hoc interdepartmental committee under its Policy Planning head, Paul Nitze.

These draft NSC papers went up the hill through the Planning Board, created to review and refine the recommendations before passing them on for full NSC consideration.

The Senior Interdepartment Group ( SIG ) of the Johnson White House was replaced by an NSC Review Group ( somewhat similar to the Eisenhower-era NSC Planning Group ) together with an NSC Under Secretary's Committee.

Managing the Policy Review Group and the National Security Planning Group that Poindexter had so favored in preparing the NSC for discussions, Powell conducted an NSC process that was efficient but low key.

The Operation Coordination Board was abolished, and the NSC was, at the President's insistence, pulled back from monitoring the implementation of policies.

Hundreds of hours were spent by the Board reviewing and reconstructing proposed papers for the NSC.

The President, who participated in the discussion, normally endorsed the NSC Action, and the decision went down the hill for implementation to the Operations Coordinating Board.

President Eisenhower created the Operations Coordinating Board ( OCB ) to follow up on all NSC decisions.

Investigations in 1987 and thereafter by a Presidential Review Board ( the Tower Board ), the Congress, and a Special Prosecutor examined in great detail the activities of the NSC staff, as well as the actions and responsibilities of the President, the National Security Adviser, and the heads of agencies.

The Tower Board, headed by Senator John Tower and including former Senator Edmund Muskie and former National Security Adviser Scowcroft, not only reviewed the events of Iran-Contra but made a body of recommendations for the reform of the NSC.

Scowcroft had served in the Kissinger NSC, had been National Security Adviser in the last years of the Ford administration, and had chaired the President's Board examining the Iran-Contra affair.

NSC is governed by a Board of Directors and a Board of Delegates.

During Truman's last year, the Council and the Senior Staff met less frequently and NSC activity abated.

The top of the foreign policy-making hill was the NSC itself, chaired by the President, which met regularly on Thursday mornings.

In fact, Eisenhower was actively in command of his administration's foreign policy, and the established NSC system met his instincts and requirements to the extent he used them.

Following the outbreak of the Six Day War, for example, he established an NSC Special Committee, modeled on the NSC Executive Committee that met during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to coordinate U. S. policy in the Middle East for several weeks.

This group met weekly with the President and shaped policy prior to formal meetings of the NSC.

Carter believed that by making the NSA chairman of only one of the two committees, he would prevent the NSC from being the overwhelming influence on foreign policy decisions it had been under Kissinger's chairmanship during the Nixon administration.

An NSC working group on Afghanistan wrote several reports on the deteriorating situation in 1979, but President Carter ignored them until the Soviet intervention destroyed his illusions.

The function of the NSC as outlined in the 1947 act was to advise the President on integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security and to facilitate interagency cooperation.

The NSC did, however, serve other purposes beyond its stated goal of advising on policy formulation.

He attended the first session of the NSC on September 26, 1947, and then stayed away from all but 10 of the next 55 meetings.

The NSC staff consisted of three groups: the Executive Secretary and his staff who managed the paper flow ; a staff, made up of personnel on detail, whose role was to develop studies and policy recommendations ( headed by the Coordinator from the Department of State ); and the Consultants to the Executive Secretary who acted as chief policy and operational planners for each department or agency represented on the NSC.

He insisted on going outside NSC channels for national security advice, relying directly on his Secretaries of State and Defense, and increasingly on the Bureau of the Budget.

Nonetheless, Truman still looked outside the formal NSC mechanism for advice and recommendations, relying on the NSC as much for staffing and coordination of interdepartmental views as for primary recommendations.

Much interdepartmental planning on the NSC books was never completed by the end of the Truman administration.

The NSC meetings, including prior briefings and subsequent review of NSC Actions, constituted the largest single item on his weekly agenda.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, on the other hand, had reservations about the NSC system.

Focusing on Johnson's Presidency alone, however, some of his advisers, including Secretary of State Rusk and Walt Rostow, insisted that the Council's advisory role was actually performed principally by another institution, the Tuesday Lunch Group, and that those lunch meetings were in effect regular NSC meetings.

The small, informal, Tuesday luncheon meetings were much more to Johnson's liking than formal NSC meetings and quickly gained a prominent place in the decision-making process.

" Clearly intended to complement rather than challenge the primary advisory roles of the Tuesday luncheons and the National Security Adviser and his staff, NSC meetings for the balance of the administration considered a broad range of anticipated rather than pressing issues and gave little attention to Vietnam.

The close of the Johnson administration brought an end to several of the adaptations it had made to manage foreign policy: Tuesday luncheons, anticipatory-type NSC meetings, and the SIG / IRG structure.

Instead, Carter used frequent, informal meetings as a decision-making device, typically his Friday breakfasts, usually attended by the Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, the NSC Adviser, and the chief domestic adviser.

Brzezinski was careful, in managing his own weekly luncheons with secretaries Vance and Brown in preparation for NSC discussions, to maintain a complete set of notes.

President John F. Kennedy, who was strongly influenced by the report of the Jackson Subcommittee and its severe critique of the Eisenhower NSC system, moved quickly at the beginning of his administration to deconstruct the NSC process and simplify the foreign policy-making process and make it more intimate.

This small NSC coordinating panel was chaired by the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and included the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Bundy.

While the new Central Intelligence Agency was to report to the NSC, the Director of Central Intelligence was not a member, although he attended meetings as an observer and resident adviser.

During its initial years, the NSC suffered from haphazard staffing and irregular meetings and was sometimes bypassed entirely.

In 1949, the NSC was reorganized.

Their report, NSC-68, was submitted directly to Truman in February 1950, who sent it to the NSC for a cost analysis.

Truman reiterated that the NSC was to be the channel for all important national security recommendations.

The formal institutionalization of covert actions was established as NSC 4 in December 1947, and NSC 10 / 2 of June 1948.

Where Harry S. Truman was uncomfortable with the NSC system and only made regular use of it under the pressure of the Korean War, Eisenhower embraced the NSC concept and created a structured system of integrated policy review.

The genesis of the new NSC system was a report prepared for the President in March 1953 by Robert Cutler, who became the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs.

The OCB was the coordinating and implementing arm of the NSC for all aspects of the implementation of national security policy.

The strength of the NSC system under Eisenhower was that it provided for regular, fully staffed, interagency review of major foreign and national security issues, culminating in discussion and decision at the highest level of government.