National Security Adviser. Presidential Subject File, 1974-1977

The Presidential Subject File is one of many sub-collections that comprise the National Security Adviser Files. The provenance of the Ford National Security Adviser Files and an explanation of the designations “Presidential” and “Institutional” are provided in Appendix A.

This collection contains the originals of many documents addressed to President Ford and to National Security Advisers Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.  President Ford initialed and annotated many of the documents, as did both of his advisers.  These items relate to presidential policy decisions; meetings between the President and members of Congress, agency and departmental officials, and representatives from various organizations; and many foreign policy and national security issues in which the President was heavily involved.

Scope and Content
The Presidential Subject File contains a mix of routine and substantive materials on a wide range of foreign policy and national security issues.  International negotiations, White House-Congressional relations, foreign aid, energy, trade, and military training exercises are major topics of consideration.

A significant amount of the material relating to international negotiations pertains to arms control issues, especially the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).  These files include material on the SALT I treaty, Vladivostok agreements, negotiating strategy and instructions to the U.S. delegation, draft treaty language, compliance issues, State Department telegrams to and from the U.S. delegation regarding their discussions with Soviet counterparts, and congressional and general public reaction to the arms control process. 

Other arms control topics represented in the files include the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), Underground Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes Treaty (PNE), Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR), and nuclear nonproliferation. 

In addition to arms control, the files also contain materials relating to Law of the Sea, 200-mile fisheries limits, and treaties and trade agreements with the European Community.

Substantive materials document White House-Congressional relations on a number of issues including the defense budget, SALT II negotiations, assistance to Southeast Asia, Indochina refugees, Turkish arms embargo, and the intelligence investigations conducted by the House and Senate Select Committees.  Trade is also a major topic, especially liaison with Congress regarding the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and trade with the Soviet Union.

The materials on foreign aid focus primarily on military assistance and specific arms requests from other countries under the Military Assistance Service Fund (MASF) and requests for humanitarian and food aid.  The files of Presidential Determinations provide the administration’s justification for the President’s exercise of his authority to waive provisions of the Trade Act of 1974 to approve these requests when he believed it was in the national interest to do so.

Both domestic and international energy issues are addressed in the collection.  Representatives from the U.S., Great Britain, West Germany, France, and Japan met at Camp David in September 1974 to discuss the global impact of high energy prices and the potential threat of supply cutbacks or interruption.  The meeting materials provide a good overall look at the international scope of the energy crisis of the 1970s.  General domestic energy themes are U.S. relations with OPEC countries, energy supply and demand, energy conservation, domestic energy resources, and regulation of commercial nuclear energy.

Significant military training exercises that the U.S. planned, initiated, or participated in from June 1974 through January 1977 are documented in the files.  Information provided about the exercises includes code name, date, place, participants, purpose, and potential political implications of the activity.

An example of an issue which was not one of immediate international concern but one in which the President took a personal interest is the case of a missing U.S. Navy flight crew whose plane was downed over the Baltic Sea in 1950.  President Ford asked for a review of the investigation to make certain that every effort had been exhausted to determine whether any crew members had survived the crash and were being held captive.

Related Materials (October 2009)
Related materials are located in a number of other National Security Adviser collections and the U.S. National Security Council Institutional Files.  Researchers can identify the file locations of materials relevant to their interests from PRESNET search reports which are provided upon request.  New information is entered into the PRESNET database as collections become available for research.  Researchers are encouraged to consult the Ford Library website for announcements of collection openings and to view online collections and documents.