Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan's Foreign Policy.

Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan's Foreign Policy, by Constantine C Menges (Simon & Schuster 418 pp., $19.95)

LET REAGAN BE Reagan" was one of the most popular, and ultimately one of the most bitter, conservative slogans during the last eight years. Particularly in the area of foreign policy, conservatives kept telling each other, the Reagan revolution was being subverted by "pragmatists" and "career bureaucrats" obsessed with reaching "negotiated settlements," whether with congressmen or Communists.

As time wore on, to this indignation was added the frustration of self-doubt: Perhaps Reagan really wanted to do it the pragmatists' way? Or perhaps the pros and the pragmatists shared Reaganite goals but pursued them by skills and arts incomprehensible to inexperienced ideologues? Maybe the Reaganites were just in the way?

Constantine Menges's shocking, detailed account of his years as a senior policy staffer at the National Security Council unfortunately seems to put most of these doubts to rest. It is possible to imagine other plausible interpretations, but if Menges is right, the good news/bad news breaks down about like this: Reagan was a Reaganite and the Reaganitesweren't paranoid. On the other hand, there was a conscious conspiracy led by senior State Department officials (mostly career professionals but including the Secretary of State) to undermine the Reagan strategy in Central America and elsewhere, In this they seemed to have had the frequent, effective cooperation of White House Chief of Staff James Baker and of presidential advisor Michael Deaver, though neither their motives nor the consistency of their cooperation could be counted on.

In essence, the State-Shultz policy in Central America, Menges's area of expertise, was to concede the inevitability of Communist rule in Nicaragua, and to accept and even assist the Sandinista regime in exchange for unenforceable promises not to spread the revolution to El Salvador and the rest of Central America. The ShultzState conspiracy, according to Menges, included deliberate and protracted efforts to deceive the President; unauthorized dismissal of presidential appointees, including U.S. ambassadors; unauthorized negotiations witb the Sandinistas; and a plot to impose on the President a Central American peace treaty based on principles the President had repeatedly, insistently, and even angrily vetoed at full meetings of the National Security Council.

I served briefly in the Reagan White House writing speeches and position papers on Central America. It was not an experience I would recommend. I once spent much of one full month trying to get through the "interagency clearance process" (i.e., State) a sentence describing the Salvadoran guerrillas as "Communists." Previous policy had been to describe them as "leftists," as if the people of El Salvador were being terrorized by roving bands of McGovernites.

Thus I knew Menges (and North and many of the other players slightly) and was involved in a minor way in the conflicts over policy. Nevertheless, I was shocked by Menges's book. In his chapters on Central American policy, for instance, he identifies seven individual attempts by Shultz and the State Department to substitute State's policy for Reagan's.

On one occasion, Reagan, seeking to bolster the morale of the four Central American presidents and keep them publicly committed to the hardline position, sent each of them a letter, by way of UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, affirming that his own position on Nicaragua had not changed and would not waver. In response, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders sent a diplomatic cable to all the American ambassadors in the region telling them to disregard the Reagan letter in their dealings with host governments because a change of policy was imminent.

In late 1983 and early 1984, the State strategy took the shape of a four-point peace plan that, among other provisions, would have placed unprecedented restrictions on the U.S. military (including naval) presence throughout the region, while requiring no verifiable reciprocal action from the Sandinistas. Reagan quashed this plan every time it surfaced.

Yet in early 1984, according to Menges, State Department personnel presented this very plan to Sandinista negotiators at a secret, bilateral negotiating session in Mexico. This was done not only over Reagan's veto of the plan but in defiance of repeated promises to our Central American allies that we would not enter bilateral negotiations and would not, having asked them to incur the displeasure of the Sandinistas, allow a peace agreement that would leave an unregenerate and unrestrained Sandinista regime in power.

Just a few months later, if Menges is correct. State had prepared a sixtypage draft peace treaty along the lines of the four-point plan, a treaty assiduously hidden ftom officials in the Defense Department, the CIA, and the NSC who were legally entitled to review it. State's intention, it seems probable, was to get the Sandinistas to agree to the treaty just days before the 1984 U.S. presidential election and then, after the inevitable leaks, present it to Reagan as a fait accompli, a victory he could not refuse. Thisplan, like many, though not all the others, was foiled by Reagan himself, though as usual the perpetrators went unpunished.

Menges was no longer in the government by the time the Contras accepted the inevitable (or State's version thereof) and signed their separate truce with the Sandinistas, essentially terminating the Reagan strategy. So this book does not tell us exactly what events inside the Administration may have prompted the Contras' resignation. We only know that State got its way in the end.

There are no more tired conservative cliches than the ones about "those sellouts at State." The postwar conservative movement was built largely on anxieties about misdeeds at Foggy Bottom. Sheer originality would have made a book proving that we have been imagining it all along much cheerier reading. But if Menges is right -and his assertions are very specific and should be relatively easy to check -we haven't been imagining it and even under Reagan we weren't able to do anything about it. They won hands down simply by defying the President of the United States.

Finally, Menges argues that without the conspiracy, the Iranamok scandal would have been impossible. Few of the conspirators were involved in the Contra-funding side of that debacle, and most of them opposed the arms sales to Iran. But by the beginning of the second Reagan term, the conspiracy had all but destroyed the White House foreign-policy-making process.

After harassing Judge Clark out of the chairmanship of the NSC, the State-Shultz-and-sometimes-Baker axis installed Bud McFarlane in his place, made it a condition of his tenure that he kow-tow to State (which is exactly what the NSC is not supposed to do), and purged candid or Reaganite NSC staffers. By capturing the NSC, the axis achieved substantial control of the information that got to the President, an essential move if it was to be allowed to run a private foreign policy.

But in going around the system they not only violated its rules but subverted its essential ethic, which is that differences on policy are to be settled by a relatively fair and open campaign for the President's vote. Set up a system in which the only way to win is to deny others fair access to the President, or deny the President himself vital information, or even lie to him, and soon everyone will be playing. But not all the players will be staid WASP pessimists from. Groton. Some of them will be semi-crazed Catholic Marine colonels and con-men with messiah complexes, who will take the prevailing chaos as a license to play James Bond. But Menges's fascinating account of Ollie North I will reserve for those who buy the book.