Page 187 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

to China. McFarlane was involved in every facet of U.S. policy in the
Middle East and the Soviet Union, including arms control issues. When
Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency after Richard Nixon’s
resignation, he appointed McFarlane to be his special assistant for national
security affairs. McFarlane served in that capacity until 1976, when he
returned to the Marine Corps. After accepting a series of additional con-
gressional and presidential appointments, McFarlane became President
Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor, a position in which he helped
design and carry out a course of action that led to the end of the Cold War
and the reduction of nuclear weapons.
Throughout the Cold War, the Americans and Soviets had engaged in
a dangerous game of one-upmanship when it came to accumulating nuclear
weapons. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) had deterred
the launch of any catastrophic weapons from either side, but President
Reagan did not think the offensive strategy of hoarding more arms was
sustainable. He wanted to explore a different policy, a switch to a defensive
mode. “Reagan didn’t believe in deterrence through massive offensive
power, but his Defense Department didn’t agree with him for the first
couple years of his presidency,” McFarlane recalled. “Indeed, they never
enthusiastically went along with the idea of shifting from offense to
defense, but Reagan said that he didn’t think it was moral to base our
stability in the world on the ability to destroy everybody, because the chaos
theory tells you that at some point an accident is going to happen as you
keep building more and more and more. From my point of view and
Reagan’s, we were militarily in an unsustainable position. So what were we
going to do? Well, if we couldn’t build up our own side and deploy them,
and we couldn’t get the Russians to unilaterally reduce, our only choice was
really to go to defense.”
McFarlane’s opinion was based in part on something he discovered dur-
ing his Fellowship year: The Russians had enormous respect for and fear
of American technology. McFarlane had long been a student of military
strategy, and he often thought about the role economics plays in defense.
He came to the conclusion that if the United States was to develop a way
to deter a ballistic missile launch, the Soviets would be both financially and
scientifically unable to match it.
McFarlane queried the country’s leading scientists engaged in national
security research and development, including Edward Teller, the creator of

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