Senator JACKSON. You do not find any problems of excessive reporting?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. Back here, perhaps, some people might feel that way.

Senator JACKSON. I mean from your end.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. No; not from our end. Not from our end at all.

There is this flood of paper, and one wonders whether it is all necessary, but I think one finds that there are ways in which one can keep on top of it, and then it all proves valuable.

In fact, we are always asking for more information on certain things; and Washington is, too, the other way around. If there is any danger, it is sometimes that we do not get the details back and forth to each other fast enough.

Senator JACKSON. What methods have you used to better utilize the information that flows in? You have a good, competent staff, I take it. And are you able to delegate your work sufficiently?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. Yes; I think so. I mean that is the whole point in having an organization of this sort, to be sure that the important thing comes to the top, and that the people at the top do not get flooded by it.

I should say there is one problem in messages going back and forth: at what level do you need clearance? This is a problem you always have to keep watching, because every now and then people down the line will send out a message expressing the view of the Embassy, and I think if we express a view on something rather than just reporting, you need fairly high clearance. There are problems of this sort.

Going the other way, I think there is sometimes difficulty in knowing who is actually speaking to you in a message. They are all signed "Rusk," let us say, but sometimes you know it did not come within several ranks of the Secretary.

Senator JACKSON. There needs to be a code within a code.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. And you can tell by the code this was only cleared at a relatively low level, and therefore you should understand it in that way, and that this is not necessarily the personal opinion of an Under Secretary or the Secretary.

I think that maybe some codes within a code would be useful, as you say.

Senator MILLER. Could I ask a question?

How much of the time of your staff would you say is dedicated to reporting?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. It probably would vary with the different types of people.

You mean reporting in the sense of just getting information back that might be useful in Washington?

Senator MILLER. Preparation of a report to be sent back to Washington.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. Telegrams and reports, and so on? Senator MILLER. Yes; to meet the requirements of reporting on the State Department end.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. It would be very hard to say. Between a quarter and a half of the time, perhaps.

But, you see, much of this reporting is really their own research work in keeping up with the field that they are following.

You take the man that is our contact man with the Government Party. He is constantly trying to learn as much as he can about the leaders of this Government Party, what they are thinking. He is talking with them all the time. And every once in a while, when he thinks he has enough information to be of value to Washington, he writes it up as a report.

But he has done this basically for his own knowledge.

Senator MILLER. Yes. Well, I would want to distinguish between what one does for his own knowledge and his own competence in carrying on his assigned duties there and the work that goes into getting that information back to Washington.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. Well, there is a third category. There are, you know, these routine requests for reporting on certain types of things, that you do fairly routinely. I should say in the economic field there is more of that than there would be in the political field. I think the very fact of drafting it up into a message is itself a valuable exercise for the reporting officer, because sometimes a person can have a rather vague impression of the whole thing, but until he is forced to put it in good format, he has not thought it through himself. Senator MILLER. You do not think a certain amount of that crystallization of his thinking could have already been gone through in the course of the staff meetings that are held? I would imagine that at one of his staff meetings or your own staff meetings, for this thing to be articulated properly, it would require some thinking through.

I would hope by the time it got around to a staff meeting with you he would have thought it through pretty well, and that anything beyond that for the purposes of Washington would not be required. I am trying to come up with your idea on how this can be improved, because those of us who have served in the military at both the headquarters level and at the field level know that this thing can get out of hand.

And there have been time checks and all kinds of efficiency systems evolved to try to cope with this problem. But I must say that I was shocked when I first came across the information regarding the flood of paper that descends on Washington.

That means somebody out in the field has to do something. And I can see where you can even get bogged down. Sometimes these things can be eliminated, and sometimes they can be streamlined and sometimes there can be summaries rather than full reports.

There are a lot of those things that we have found in the military that can be eliminated. Somebody back here has to shuffle them around. And when you eliminate just one, there can be a chain reaction which can cut down a lot of time and overhead.

I just wonder if you have had occasion to review some of the reporting required of you and your staff. Have you tried to eliminate some of it, or streamline it?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. I am not aware of any large bulk of material that is not of value to ourselves in the drafting process. Of course, the staff meeting tends to be a fairly informal thing, with us. I try to get people to express their views and discuss them back and forth, rather than having canned reports, and so it serves a somewhat different function. It is an exchange of views, primarily.

I find, myself, the more routine reports of my staff are very useful to me. I keep them on my desk, and when I have a little time, I catch

up on them and read them, because there are lots of things I cannot follow in as much detail as they are following.

They are often eager to write these, actually, because it is their way of presenting the thing that they have discovered to the rest of us there, as well as back in Washington.

In almost every case where there has been a real attempt to cut down on this flow, there is somebody back in Washington that screams in agony when it does not come in any more.

Now, mighty often these are people down at the research level, who are doing the day-to-day work. I think it is very valuable to have a research backup in Washington as well as with us, where the papers are pretty well in detail.

Senator MILLER. In reporting to you, do you have them summarize their topics?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. Almost all of our longer reports come in with a summary statement at the beginning, and you can glance at that and decide whether you want to read the rest of the report. With my time as tight as it is, I must admit I often let the thing go by with just the reading of the summary.

Senator MILLER. Would it be feasible, in lieu of some of these reports that go back to Washington, to merely indicate a summary, let's say, of a few points of what is contained in some of these studies, so that the people back here could then determine whether to ask you to send the whole report on or forget about it?

Ambasador REISCHAUER. Actually, as long as you have a pouch going back and forth all the time, it in itself is not a real problem. It is a problem of who is going to read it when it gets to this side.

And I suspect what happens here is what happens with us. The busier people will glance at summaries and put it aside, whereas the people who have the backup research function are the ones who are going to read it and appreciate it.

So I doubt very much if this does cut into your time very seriously, on this side, any more than it does with me there.

That is what I mean. It is a pragmatically worked out system, but I do not think we waste much time reading things that are not necessary to be read.

Senator MILLER. That certainly is one of our problems here, to figure out what to read. And I know that commanders have a time problem.

And granted that staff people love to write reports, because this is a good way of impressing the commander with your knowledge on something, I would hope they would save their time by writing summaries. If you want to dig in, you can get them to give you the details. A nutshell approach saves time.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. We always have a summary on the front of a report there. In fact, in some cases the title is enough for you. You know you will not want to read the rest of it.

Senator JACKSON. Mr. Engberg?

Professor ENGBERG. I was much interested in your formal statement, about how you prepare for these staff meetings. I recalled, after reading that, an article Ambassador Matthews had put in the Foreign Service Journal about coordination, and I was wondering what you might give us as to your procedure.

Ambassador Matthews pointed out that there is serious danger in consulting with the top agencies, that you may not have coordination throughout the lower areas. And he suggested that the ambassador's task was finding out what was happening on all the lower levels, and coordinating. This gets into the area that we talked about once before the danger of each agency giving its own view only.

What is your thinking as to the lower level type of coordination, so that you get the true picture when you have your top staff meeting? Ambassador REISCHAUER. Yes. Of course, through the meetings of the sections, which bring together all these agencies that might have a somewhat related interest, we do have coordination at that level, and some of these agencies go to more than one of the staff meetings, as you can see in this paper.

So the problem is: How can I keep in touch with all of this? And it is a problem I felt very much.

When I first went there, I found that there was such a tendency for all authority to stem from the top down that if the Ambassador spoke, then no one else would speak. And this went away on down the line. If I got the political counselor's views, I did not find out the view of the man who had argued with him at a lower level.

I have done my best to make everything go the other way around. In my own staff meetings, I never speak first. I always start with them, to bring up all the problems they want, and get them all talking, and I keep the Deputy Chief of Mission and myself to the very end, to pick up the points that have not been brought up.

This is just exactly a reversal of the procedure that I had found there. And I insisted I wanted to get the divergent views and not just the view of the economic or political section as decided at the very top. I wanted to have something of the argumentation that had gone on below on the very same thing.

This does not assure me that it always does come through, and I still have a feeling that I wish I had closer contact with the people down the line. But I think this is a problem, and would be a problem, in any large organization.

Senator JACKSON. I wanted to turn, if I might, to the matter of longrange planning in the embassies.

We have found that for one reason or another, generally speaking, the embassies have not been able to do this. Do you have the staff for this purpose?

First of all, do you see a need for a planning staff or planning group within the Embassy?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. I am not sure that I see a use for a separate planning staff here. I feel very strongly that the Ambassador and the top officers should themselves be thinking in long-range terms.

I just do not see how you could do a job of this sort if you do not have a sort of philosophy of history, of where this all fits in. You have to think in those terms, or you do not make any sense out of what you are doing from day to day.

I do not see how you can give this to another group who are going to be your philosophers, while you are the do-ers.

Senator JACKSON. You feel the operators should be the planners? Ambassador REISCHAUER. I feel that way, and that is the reason I am very happy when I find some of our best officers writing long-term

think-pieces. What is happening in Japanese politics? We have had some very good papers of that sort.

Some of these may seem awfully far away from immediate administration. But I believe thinking of this sort is important. I did a paper last summer myself, trying to think through the whole thing, what we were really dealing with in roughly a 10-year period.

And one of our chief political officers did an extremely good analyti cal piece on the nature of the development of the Japanese parties, as to what was happening there long term, and so what we were going to have to deal with in the future.

The men who have the chief responsibility and the chief contact are the ones that are best able to do this, and I think we just have to reserve our own time to do this thing, as well as do the day-to-day work.

Senator JACKSON. Do you have the backup staff you need to help you in formulating long-term policies as you see them develop in your day-to-day operating experience?

In other words, you are at the top of the Embassy with your key people, and you sit around, and you are confronted daily with the host of problems that you have to meet.

Do you find the time to really sit down as a planning staff, as a planning group, with your key people?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. To get it on paper, you have to find some special time.

I did a big piece last summer, when I took myself a little vacation. I went away for about 10 days, and I sat down and did this. It was the only way you could do a job of that kind-come up with a long paper.

But actually I think we use our staff meeting very much for that purpose, because quite often we get away from the immediate issue to talk about the long-range implications of it and where we are going, and so I think there is a sort of oral tradition of this sort.

Here we are talking about this big problem, and where we stand in it, and our staff meeting does not therefore just stick to, "Well, here is a document, and how do we answer it?" I am very happy to get away from that and talk about the bigger issues.

Senator MILLER. What happens to that report when it comes back here? How long are the think-pieces?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. We get very interesting reactions here. Senator MILLER. Where does it go? Does it go to a long-range planning staff?

Ambassador REISCHAUER. I presume the long-range planning staff looks at that.

I am very much interested to see that all up and down the line the officers over here will have read it, if it is something of real interest. It goes around to CINCPAC. People like that come back and say, "That was interesting. We think this is fine." And so on.

Senator JACKSON. I think we ought to point out that Ambassador Reischauer is rather unique. He is a scholar on all matters relating to the Far East, and Japan in particular.

Ambassador REISCHAUER. I come with a long-range interest in this particular area and problem; and therefore look at it in those terms. Senator MILLER. But is there a long-range planning officer over here at State that would take something from someone in the Philippines and southwest Asia?