The most intense criticisms of the presidential branch in the post- Roosevelt era are directed toward the national security staff. When institutionalizing a national security bureaucracy, critics charge, presidents are tempted to obtain foreign policy objectives by circumventing domestic political constraints, thus laying the groundwork for an “imperial Presidency.” The long-term impact, they claim, is an erosion not just of the presidents' national security bargaining influence, but of the constitutional system of checks and balances more generally.

Charges of presidential “imperialism” are not new, of course; recall that FDR's 1937 reorganization plan was characterized by some as a “dictator bill.” However, neither the Brownlow Report nor the legislation it spawned mentions a national security council or staff. Indeed, as this chapter tries to demonstrate, FDR's administrative instincts, as embodied by the Brownlow Report, precluded the development of both. In the words of former Brownlow Committee research assistant James Fesler: “The charge that the Brownlow Committee set in train the development of ‘the imperial presidency’ can only be advanced by those who have not read the Committee's report.”

In fact, the National Security Council's (NSC) origins are traced to Congress' postwar rejection of FDR's wartime administrative strategy. As Mark Lowenthal points out, Roosevelt's seemingly ad hoc management approach was judged too personalized and thus dangerously antiquated in a nuclear weapons-dominated Cold War era: