In October 2019, newly appointed National Security Advisor (NSA) Robert O’Brien announced plans to shift his efforts and the organization of the National Security Council (NSC) toward its traditional coordinating role. The stated goal is to remake the staff organization less an independent author of foreign policy and instead focus on bringing to the President options developed in collaboration across the interagency. The vision is far from new. Much of that redefinition harkens back to the original structure of the NSC when formed in 1947 and the leadership of its executive secretary Sidney Souers—one of the most unheralded authors of the nation’s postwar national security structure.
An Unlikely Intelligence Official
The modern national security system began to take shape on 23 January 1946. At a private White House lunch, President Harry Truman appointed Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, U.S. Naval Reserve, as the first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Given its purpose, the gathering was a remarkably lighthearted event. Admiral Souers was presented with a black hat and coat and was anointed by the President as the “Director of Central Snooping.” The role placed the new admiral in charge of a newly formed Central Intelligence Group responsible for much of the nation’s intelligence operations that had continued on after the war.
The frivolity of the short ceremony masked its role initiating a far wider transition taking place. The executive branch was grappling with the shift away from the amorphous and ad hoc wartime administration and the need for a permanent peacetime security structure. Souers himself had provided much of the advice that led to the creation of the new position, which was intended to bring integration to the disparate intelligence operations that had grown exponentially during the war.
A mobilized reservist, he did not expect to be tapped to fill the new role himself and had been anxious to return to private life at the conclusion of the war. He had only accepted the position on the condition that it was an interim appointment until a permanent director could be chosen. In one of the few media interviews he gave at the time, his response to a question of what his priorities were as the new DCI was not an institutional perspective but more a personal plea: “I want to go home.”
Souers’ brief tour as DCI lasted less than five months but it was far from the end of his federal career. In September 1947, he took on wider responsibilities when he was appointed executive secretary of the newly formed NSC. Serving in that role until 1950, he continued as a special advisor to President Truman through the end of his administration. For seven years, few sustained such a prominent insider role during the era that saw the escalation of the Cold War, the creation of the Department of Defense, and the onset of the Korean War. Souers not only envisioned how a new interagency apparatus would work, but had an active, and vastly underappreciated, role in implementing the nation’s postwar national security organization.
Sidney Souers was an unlikely member of a Washington intelligence establishment that had formed around a cadre of professionals with pedigrees from East Coast schools and Wall Street financial careers. Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1892, he was raised in southeastern Missouri. Graduating from Miami University of Ohio in 1914, he had a successful career in banking and finance throughout the Midwest in subsequent decades. By 1920 he was president of the Mortgage & Securities Company in New Orleans and then founded the First Joint Stock Land Bank while he also served as president of the Piggly Wiggly grocery chain based in Memphis. His association with the Navy only began while he was a member of the New Orleans Port Authority when he was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve as an intelligence officer in 1929. As a career reservist, he had spent most of his military service on inactive status until mobilized to active duty in July 1940. While he had spent most of his wartime service in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he was never a part of the core Office of Strategic Services (OSS) organization.
Intelligence Community Reorganization
The newly created position of DCI reflected President Truman’s guidance in a high-level debate over the future of the nation’s intelligence organization. In 1944, OSS director Major General William J. Donovan proposed the creation of a civilian intelligence organization that would report directly to the President, an idea that both the Army and State Department pushed back on. The future of the nation’s intelligence operations remained uncertain at the time of President Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Upon taking office, the only priority that President Truman was known to have about the existing intelligence establishment was that it was time for it to be dismantled. By the fall of 1945, parts of the OSS had been transferred to the State Department, and most field operations transferred into a new independent Strategic Services Unit (SSU) with an uncertain future.
A postwar Army proposal advocated for a unified military organization to assume responsibility for strategic intelligence collection and analysis. The State Department, historically the nation’s primary source of foreign intelligence, opposed the Army plan as did the Navy, which viewed it as giving the Army preeminence among the military services.
Reorganization of national intelligence operations was part of a wider debate over the future structure of the nation’s entire national security organization and emerging plans to unify military service under a single federal department. In 1945, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal commissioned a lifelong friend and Chairman of the Wartime Munitions Board, Ferdinand Eberstadt, to chair the task force charged with making proposals on postwar national security organization. As Assistant Director for Plans and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Souers was a “committee of one” assigned to write the intelligence section of what became known as the Eberstadt Report of 1945.Souers advocated for the creation of central intelligence organization under civilian control. The competing visions, along with a third proposal from the State Department, remained at odds through the end of 1945, but Souers’ proposal raised him from the obscurity of the Navy’s vast wartime bureaucracy.
Concerned about the flow of information he received after succeeding President Roosevelt, President Truman took an active interest in the structure of the nation’s intelligence services. He later recalled that on taking office, there had been “no concentration of information for the benefit of the President. Each Department and each organization had its own information service, and that information service was walled off from every other service.” Admiral Souers was tasked to work with presidential aide Clark Clifford to resolve the differences between the competing intelligence plans. Together they crafted the directive the President signed on 22 January 1946, which directed the creation of a new National Intelligence Authority made up of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Navy, along with Fleet Admiral William Leahy serving as the President’s personal representative. The result closely aligned with the recommendations of Souers’ section of the Eberstadt report. In addition, the directive established new a Central Intelligence Group (CIG), tasked with coordinating, planning, evaluating, and disseminating intelligence and overtly collected information and designated Admiral Sidney Souers as the first DCI.
The CIG took over responsibility for intelligence field operations, which had been transferred to the SSU a few months earlier. President Truman previously had dismissed General Donovan’s recommendations for a civilian intelligence organization out of hand and set the goal of liquidating in their entirety the intelligence field operations left over from the OSS. Under Souers, not only did the CIG continue its work, but he recommended it be codified as a permanent civilian agency.
The most lasting legacy of Souers’ brief tenure as DCI may be the initiation of the daily intelligence summary it soon began compiling for the President. Issued just a month after being appointed DCI, National Intelligence Authority Directive Number 2 directed the CIG to give priority to the “production of daily summaries containing factual statements of the significant developments in the field of intelligence and operations related to the national security and to foreign events for the use of the President.” The daily summary was sent over to the President in the afternoon and typically read later in the day followed up by discussion the following morning. Souers became the President’s “first caller” on most days. The format of the daily briefing has evolved over the decades but endures today as the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB).
From DCI to NSC
Admiral Souers was relieved as DCI by Army Air Corps General Hoyt Vandenberg and released from active duty by the end of 1946. He likely expected to return to his civilian career permanently. In 1947 the National Security Act created both new Department of Defense but also mandated the creation of the NSC. James Forrestal was selected to be the first Secretary of Defense, and he persuaded President Truman to appoint Souers as the NSC’s first executive secretary.
Though he assiduously avoided the public profile of some later national security advisors, Souers’ tenure with the NSC was far more than a transitional period. The low profile matched his, and President Truman’s vision for the new position. He never wanted to be seen as advocating for specific policies, instead describing his role as a broker of ideas more than a proponent of any one side of an issue. As a result, he was viewed as a neutral arbiter of information, one of the factors that gave the NSC much of its initial credibility and legitimacy, and ensuring its continuing role.
Navigating tensions within the executive branch was not a trivial concern in the formative years of the NSC. Both the Department of State and the newly formed Department of Defense angled to exercise control over the new NSC as a means to influence the President. An early memo prepared by Souers and his assistant James Lay made clear that the NSC reported to the President and was “not to be used as an instrumentality for reaching interdepartmental decisions or supervising interdepartmental agencies.”
Souers saw his role, indeed the role of the NSC, as facilitating executive decisions to be made by the President and not to become yet another constituency with independent positions. His efforts clearly gained the trust of the President and gave Souers far greater influence than was apparent to the public. Though the Secretary of State was designated to chair the NSC in the absence of the President, an early CIA historian believed that President Truman wanted Souers himself to chair the NSC in his absence, a role that would become codified for future National Security Advisors.
The small scale of the NSC staff has been identified as a major weakness limiting its effectiveness during its early years. The initial NSC was indeed a fraction of its future size, which peaked six decades in the future with a staff of nearly 400 early in the Obama administration. In 1949 the entire budget of the NSC was $200,000, and it had a total staff numbering 31, half of whom were seconded from other departments or agencies. Yet a larger initial organization likely would have raised greater hackles from the multiple organizations that thought the new NSC was impinging on their historic prerogatives.
The future more expansive role of the NSC was enabled because Souers had “established an institutional structure for the NSC without creating a center of power to threaten either the Secretary of State or the White House staff.” By minimizing the threat the new organization posed to key stakeholders in its early years, the NSC ensured its future role at the nexus of national security decision-making.
The Scowcroft Model
Indeed, the role of the executive secretary morphed immediately after the Truman administration departed, as it has continued to evolve to match the requirements of each future administration. President Dwight Eisenhower formally designated Robert Cutler as the first National Security Advisor with authority over the NSC. That transition was less a slight to the role played by Souers as executive secretary, but a recognition of how central a role the NSC had taken in the national security process. Henry Kissinger later eclipsed all who came before when he held the same position and simultaneously served as Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford administrations. But the high-profile role of Kissinger, or that of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s NSA, did not redefine the role of NSA permanently. In the George H. W. Bush administration, the NSA followed what became known as the “Scowcroft model” (after then-NSA Brent Scowcroft), described by later NSA Stephen Hadley thusly:
Be an “Honest Broker,” running a fair, transparent, and inclusive process for bringing issues to the President; maintain the confidence of your national security colleagues; keep a low public profile, operating largely off stage; and give your advice privately to the President.
The principles of the Scowcroft model easily could have reflected Sidney Souers’ priorities four decades earlier. In many ways, the continuing evolution of the NSC, and especially the role of the NSA, has edged back toward the original mold defined by Souers. In particular, the staff size has not risen monotonically but had been contracting since before the most recent plans were announced to downsize further. The recent announcement of changes by NSA O’Brien anticipates further cuts of nearly a third and a future staff size of 117, still larger than the NSC’s initial staffing, but far closer to its original size than its more recent peak.
Admiral Souers stepped aside as executive secretary of the NSC in January 1950, but through the end of the Truman administration he remained a special consultant to the President on military and foreign affairs and regularly attended the daily intelligence briefings he initiated.
Reflecting his bipartisan reputation, in 1956 Admiral Souers was appointed by President Eisenhower as one of the first members of the newly established Presidential Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. Few have been as impactful over what was a relatively short career in active federal service.
