Balancing consensus, consent, and competence: Richard Russell, the Senate Armed Services Committee & oversight of America's defense, 1955--1968

This study examines Congress's role in defense policy-making between 1955 and 1968, with particular focus on the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), its most prominent and influential members, and the evolving defense authorization process. The consensus view holds that, between World War II and the drawdown of the Vietnam War, the defense oversight committees showed acute deference to Defense Department legislative and budget requests. At the same time, they enforced closed oversight procedures that effectively blocked less "pro-defense" members from influencing the policy-making process. Although true at an aggregate level, this understanding is incomplete. It ignores the significant evolution to Armed Services Committee oversight practices that began in the latter half of 1950s, and it fails to adequately explore the motivations of the few members who decisively shaped the process. SASC chairman Richard Russell (D-GA) dominated Senate deliberations on defense policy. Relying only on input from a few key colleagues---particularly his protege and eventual successor, John Stennis (D-MS)---Russell for the better part of two decades decided almost in isolation how the Senate would act to oversee the nation?s defense. Russell's oversight concept weighed multiple competing considerations: the reality that modern presidential power was an outgrowth of the Congress's acknowledged inability to manage the expanded scope of government; the requirement that the Executive Branch demonstrate wisdom and managerial competence; the duty to conduct thorough oversight as a prerequisite for congressional consent to presidential proposals; and the Cold War imperative to buttress presidential leadership with at least the appearance of a broad governing consensus. While initially hesitant to craft a substantive policy role, perceived shortcomings in presidential wisdom and managerial competence steadily prompted Russell to insert himself and his committee more directly into the policy-making process. The principle vehicle became incremental expansion of the annual defense authorization bill, although in practice this impacted only at the margins of the defense program. In any case, Russell never fundamentally rejected the necessity for presidential leadership, nor the desirability of relatively closed congressional oversight procedures---both of which proved increasingly out of step with the emerging Senate majority of the late 1960s.