1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

staff work, that had been done. It was bruising because it was a politically charged issue.
Q: Speaking of national intelligence, I’ve been interviewing, over a period of time,
somebody who was involved – the assistant secretary for European affairs, one named
Roz Ridgeway. She’s quite dismissive of the National Intelligence Estimate by saying,
“This is a series of compromises.”
MILLER: I would dispute that. Of course, having been forced – as one of my tasks I read
all of the estimates on the Soviet Union from day one to – well, certainly through 1981 –
and carefully. I think they’re very good, very helpful, particularly if you are involved in
the process. If you were working on having to know what the status of forces was,
between, particularly, nuclear forces, there’s nothing better. If you really studied the
material and read the reports carefully, all the foot-noting, it’s a form of art – a necessary
form of art, – you would learn knew quite a bit. They were very high value. But having
said that, it also implies a base of knowledge of the part of all the readers. So you could
not take a document like this in the abstract, suddenly, a man from Mars reads this and
knows the full story, without having lived through the making of these documents and
really knew how to read them. If footnotes were suppressed, it would be a different story.
They were not, the footnotes were there. If the directors conclusion did not meet
particular policy preferences, there was a problem of accepting the NIE as valuable by
many occasional readers.
Q: In a way, this is also the problem. Here you are, the expert – you, and others of your
ilk know what these things are, who’s saying what, and how to read it, and yet a
policymaker is up there having to make rather instantaneous judgments, with no time to
get enmeshed in all this.
MILLER: Then you get to the question of what is necessary for policymakers to know
when they presume to head a government as complicated as ours, in a world so dangerous
as the one we live in. Can we afford to have people lead us who have not been schooled,
at least in part, in these matters? And I would say we are taking a huge risk if we elect
people as our president who can’t do these things. It really is a huge risk. The fallback is
to have staff, including your vice-president and secretaries, who do know, and who can
bring you up to speed. The president would have to have the personal characteristics of
allowing himself to be tutored by his subordinates.
Jimmy Carter had that. Of the presidents I’ve observed, at first hand, in these kinds of
situations – Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton – Carter – Bush – Jerry Ford
was too busy with other things, but he allowed his subordinates to do what was necessary;
he was there too short a time to really judge. Certainly Clinton – Clinton just ate it up. He
had this enormous, voracious appetite for knowledge of all kinds, as we know.
Q: Looking at two things – one, it was on your watch when the whole Iranian revolution
happened. How good were – looking at it now, how do you feel we were doing,
intelligence-wise, with that?
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