MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Richard Clarke has thought a lot about how American national security decision-making can go wrong because he's been there when it went wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RICHARD CLARKE: To the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, to them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you.
KELLY: That is Clarke testifying in 2004 in a hearing of the 9/11 Commission, the official autopsy into the attacks of that day. He'd been a senior adviser on the National Security Council with the informal title of counterterrorism czar. In his testimony, which was backed up by memos, Clarke said he tried to impress upon President George W. Bush and his cabinet the urgency of the threat posed by al-Qaida.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CLARKE: My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, didn't either believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem.
KELLY: Clarke resigned in 2003. And in those 9/11 hearings and in a book published around the same time, Clarke argued that Bush's security advisers had failed to get the right information in front of the president at the right moment. He also described a president who was pressing for intelligence that confirmed his preexisting beliefs. You can hear it in this interview with WHYY's Fresh Air, as Clarke recounted a meeting with the president the day after 9/11.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
CLARKE: He spoke to me in very firm, almost angry tones about the need for me to write a paper about Iraq's role or links. And I said, well, there aren't any significant links between al-Qaida and Iraq.
KELLY: The Bush administration disputed Clarke's accounts at the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: Two decades later, President Trump has been reshaping the national security apparatus around him on a near-weekly basis. Last month, he fired the general in charge of the National Security Agency, a decision for which far-right activist Laura Loomer appeared to claim credit. On Friday, he slashed staffing at the National Security Council, the team of foreign policy experts who advise the president, and he has also made his political ally Marco Rubio the interim head of the council, normally a full-time job on its own. Rubio is now adding national security adviser to his responsibilities as secretary of state, acting head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and acting archivist of the United States. As Trump put it earlier this month...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Marco Rubio - unbelievable. Unbelievable, Marco. When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: CONSIDER THIS - the U.S. government has long relied on scores of intelligence officials across the government to keep America safe. Trump wants many of them gone. What could that mean for security at home and abroad?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. It's a classic Washington power move - the late-on-Friday news dump. This past Friday, at 4:30 p.m., start of a long holiday weekend, about half the staff of the National Security Council got emails asking them to leave by 5 p.m., dozens of people abruptly dismissed. This continues the trend in this second term for President Trump of radical downsizing.
Richard Clarke served more than three decades in the kinds of jobs being cut, 10 of those years on the NSC. I spoke to him about what this could mean for intelligence gathering, national security and the president's ability to make informed decisions.
As you have tracked some of these changes over the last few months, I'm curious what has struck you. And I wonder if you would start with the departure of Trump's initial national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and now Secretary of State Rubio stepping in to do that job as well as being secretary of state.
CLARKE: Well, I think the president has to have a personal relationship of trust with his national security adviser, and apparently, the president didn't have that with Mike Waltz. I think Mike was very well qualified to do the job, but if he didn't have that relationship, then he really couldn't do the job in the best way. So I understand the president asking him to leave. You can't be secretary of state and national security adviser. I know Henry Kissinger did that for a while.
KELLY: I was about to say, there is precedent.
CLARKE: Yeah.
KELLY: Yeah.
CLARKE: It wasn't a good precedent. They're two very different jobs, and in fact, one is meant to keep an eye on the other. And if you're the same person, that gives you a little bit of a problem. So I hope that doesn't continue.
KELLY: And then what about this purge over the weekend? Would you use that - is that the right word?
CLARKE: Well, it's a reduction in staff. I may surprise you by what I'm about to say. I have no problem with reducing the size of the NSC staff significantly, maybe even by half. It had grown over the course of the last two decades. It had grown out of all proportion. The question is really not how many people are on it. The question is what's its role. And when I heard that Rubio wants to change the role, change it to what? It performs a very essential role, and if you're going to change that, we're going to have problems in national security.
KELLY: Rubio spoke to this a little bit - these were - in a statement to Axios, which was the first news organization to report the firings last week. And Rubio said, and I'm quoting, "the right-sizing of the NSC is in line with its original purpose and the president's vision." Dick Clarke, speak to the - that second thing, the president's vision. To what degree is the National Security Council supposed to reflect the president's vision, and to what extent are they supposed to challenge it?
CLARKE: They are his staff. They are to give him options, and they are to keep an eye on the vast national security bureaucracy. You know, the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA won't tell you everything that they're doing, and you need people that you trust on your staff who will keep an eye on them to make sure that they're implementing your directives. But the real job of the NSC is to identify issues that need presidential guidance and then to give the president options and to analyze and compare those options. And what I see not happening in this administration is the analysis part. As far as I can tell...
KELLY: Do you see...
CLARKE: ...Decisions are made...
KELLY: Do you see - and I understand you're on the outside now, but do you see them giving him options, or do you see...
CLARKE: No.
KELLY: ...Them being told, this is the plan; find a way to make it work?
CLARKE: No, I think it sounds like it's the latter.
KELLY: What have you seen that causes you to say that?
CLARKE: Well, everything. You know, they have no economic analysis of the implications of their tariff decisions. They have no analysis of their decisions with regard to Russia. It's all intuitive. It's all gut. It's all his gut. And his gut's frequently wrong because he doesn't have experience in this area. And a good NSC staff comes up with options and compare all three or four or five options against a set of evaluative criteria that everyone can agree on. If you don't do that, you will regret it because you'll get mush. And I think that's what's happening.
KELLY: Just to make this concrete, is there an incident, an example you would point me to from your time in government where there was debate, there was back-and-forth, the NSC came up with a menu of options, presented them, and the president maybe changed his mind?
CLARKE: Well, certainly. When Bill Clinton came into office, he wanted to not invade Haiti, not restore the democratically elected president. He wanted to keep the thousands of Haitian immigrants in various places around the Caribbean. And we pointed out to him over time that that wasn't going to work, and he had to reverse a campaign promise. And he did because the facts were the facts, but we presented him with the facts and with the analysis.
KELLY: I know that Marco Rubio, in his brief days so far running the NSC and the State Department, he's made the point that foreign policy - that the NSC is redundant in many ways and that foreign policy should be being conducted out of the State Department, where they already have all these in-house experts. What's wrong with that view?
CLARKE: Well, they're not the only one that have equities. The president has equities. The Treasury Department has equities. The Commerce Department has equities. The Defense Department, the intelligence community. Yeah, the State Department is the lead implementer and it should perhaps be the lead in developing an option, but there are a lot of other experts in the government and a lot of other interests that the State Department does not reflect.
KELLY: Just to read people in on your own history, Richard Clarke, you started on George H.W. Bush National Security Council. Bill Clinton came into office. He asked you to stay on a few months. I believe that became eight years (laughter).
CLARKE: (Laughter) It did. It did.
KELLY: Yeah. And then, the second President Bush - Bush 43 - asked you to stay on a few months. That became a couple of years. So in other words...
CLARKE: That's right.
KELLY: ...You have the long view on this. With the long view in mind, would you offer any advice to President Trump, to Marco Rubio as they try to figure this path out?
CLARKE: Well, first, get a national security adviser. Get a full-time national security adviser. Secondly, agree on the role of the NSC. The number of people there is a secondary issue. Agree on the role. And the role ought to be coming up with what issues deserve presidential decision, No.1. No. 2 - giving the president options and comparing them against a consistent set of evaluative criteria. And then, three, oversee the implementation because presidents make the mistake that they think a policy is over when they decide it. No, it's only just begun when you have a presidential decision. The bureaucracy - I know this will surprise you. The bureaucracy will do what it wants over time and will ignore presidential orders.
KELLY: Richard Clarke, who held quite a few jobs, as you just heard, in U.S. government policy roles across decades. He is also the author of several books, most recently "Artificial Intelligencia." Richard Clarke, thanks.
CLARKE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: This episode was produced by Connor Donevan with audio engineering by Ted Mebane. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
