Trump adopts Nixon security model, except worse: Column

President Trump, who traveled to the CIA on his second day in office to say there is "nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump," undercut that pledge a week later with a memorandum that made the intelligence community subordinate members of the National Security Council.

Not only is CIA Director Mike Pompeo not included in the organization described in Trump's memorandum, the Director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs are not full members of the NSC. Instead, the White House's chief strategist, white nationalist Steve Bannon, outranks all three in the NSC and its powerful Principals Committee.

Trump is often compared with Richard Nixon, and with good reason. This latest move invites another valid comparison.

Like Trump, whom intelligence officials presented with a dossier of embarrassing information about himself, Nixon had real and imagined gripes with the nation's intelligence community. He believed the Eastern elitists in the CIA looked down on him and cost him the 1960 election against John F. Kennedy.

After he won the 1968 presidential election, in part by sabotaging the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War, Nixon tried to put the CIA in its place. He ordered a restructuring of the NSC that ran all critical national security decisions through the White House. That plan would have left the CIA director, then Richard Helms, out of the NSC completely.

It took Melvin Laird, the Defense secretary and a canny former House member, to talk Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser, out of it. Kissinger persuaded Nixon to include Helms in the NSC. Nixon, however, had one condition: Helms could brief the council at the top of its meetings but then would have to leave.

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That condition was deemed too counterproductive and humiliating, and Nixon soon let Helms brief and stay in the meetings. He never trusted the CIA and often ignored its work, most prominently in the days before the 1970 invasion of Cambodia and the disastrous U.S.-backed Lam Son 719 operation in which South Vietnamese troops invaded Laos in 1971. After Lam Son, Nixon tried to blame the CIA when it was Nixon himself who had ignored their advice.

Now Trump has put on paper what Nixon had only tried to do. Saturday's memorandum sidelines three of the nation's top security officials. It's possible all three will participate in all critical meetings, but they will only do so at the explicit invitation of the president or his national security adviser. That shows the intelligence community that its leaders are considered optional, not integral, as the United States copes with the demands of an ever-changing world.

Even more problematic is that they rank below someone whose previous job was running a website that featured bigoted, xenophobic and misogynistic headlines and drew an alt-right readership prone to falling for conspiracy theories. Bannon is reportedly behind some of Trump's most controversial moves, including the inclusion of Green Card holders in the restrictions on visas for visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

So far, Trump has trumpeted his belief in imaginary voter fraud that he believes cost him the popular vote in last year's election. He cites the so far invisible proof of an app maker that traffics in false voter fraud claims. This president, perhaps more than any other, needs the advice and counsel of our intelligence community and military leaders.

Nixon's fate provides a valuable lesson. His order restructuring the NSC created multiple political and policy disputes. It spurred a series of leaks to the press that led Nixon to spy on his own staff and journalists. Eventually the top officers of the military set up a spy ring inside the White House to learn what Nixon was hiding from them. Nixon was covering up all these skeletons when the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17, 1972, and started an even larger cover-up that eventually forced him to resign two years later.

That fate, which Nixon could have avoided, was triggered by a fateful reorganization of the NSC and a disregard for intelligence. Trump, with his order, is following the same path. A few edits and additions to the organizational chart could change that. The new president, however, has already sent a message to the intelligence community and the world about what he really values.

Ray Locker is the Washington enterprise editor of USA TODAY and author of Nixon's Gamble: How a President's Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration.

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