The Oxford Companion to American Military History

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National Security Council Memoranda

National Security Council Memoranda.
Soon after President Harry S. Truman established the National Security Council (NSC), its participants developed an extended series of memoranda recording basic policy on diplomatic, intelligence, and military issues. Most comprehensive and ambitious was NSC 68, 14 April 1950, “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” which called for massive increases in military spending to support the U.S. position in Europe and East Asia. Besides the policy papers, Truman's NSC institutionalized National Security Intelligence Directives (NSIDs) that specified tasks for the intelligence establishment. For the most part, NSC memoranda had high security classifications—often top secret—a practice that Truman's successors carefully followed.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's NSC apparatus continued...

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