Page 232 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS LEAD THROUGH EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCE

counseled his White House Fellow never to elevate the function of the
National Security Council at the expense of other departments, because he
expected everyone on his staff to respect and uphold the roles played by
all the department secretaries. “That was a big lesson for me right from the
start,” De Luca remarked. “Just because I was there at the White House
and just because I could call a general and have something done didn’t
mean that I had a superior position. To be effective I would have to enlist
others. I would have to become part of a network in which they would
respect what I was saying on an independent basis rather than on a chain-of-
command basis. That was very important. In fact, it forged for me the rest
of my entire career.”
The National Security Council offered a hands-on learning environ-
ment for De Luca, and one instance in particular tested his collaboration
skills in a profound and meaningful way. In normal circumstances, the
Vietnamese not only were able to grow enough rice to feed themselves but
typically had enough left over for export. However, the war put a damper
on the country’s agriculture system, and the Vietnamese were running out
of rice. “This loomed as a great crisis. Senior staff at the National Security
Council was called upon to get rice to Vietnam,” De Luca explained. “I was
enlisted in the effort to use rice surpluses, which required U.S. Department
of Agriculture cooperation, Defense Department merchant ship carriers,
military protection of the ports, and sufficient trucking capabilities. Time
was of the essence, and success was only accomplished through a collegial
network that understood the gravity of the situation.”
The lesson of building a collegial network was reinforced when Walt
Rostow became national security advisor midway through De Luca’s
Fellowship. Like Bundy, Rostow was a holdover from the Kennedy White
House, an eminent scholar who had written highly regarded books on
economics and political theory. Rostow was a consensus builder and a
diplomat. He would not tolerate staffers who threw their weight around.
He encouraged his team to form personal ties with their counterparts
around the world and also with the media. He dramatically expanded De
Luca’s role beyond Vietnam and allowed him to deal with issues connected
to the Vatican, Europe, and Indonesia.
De Luca saw how foreign policy formulation flowed and how it passed
through the National Security Council and touched all the other departments
in the course of its development, along with how it took a coordinated

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