356. Editorial Note
In the fall of 1967 the Bureau of the Budget asked government agencies to review interagency and advisory committees associated in some manner with the National Security Council. This review resulted in the NSC Staff identifying two “quiescent” committees that “should be formally terminated in line with the President’s wish that all unnecessary interagency committees and task forces be eliminated.” One of these was the Special Committee on Stockpile Objectives, established by NSAM No. 321, which was created as a temporary committee to do a specific job. NSC Executive Secretary Bromley K. Smith, with the concurrence of Charles E. Johnson, Edward Fried, and Joseph Califano, recommended the termination of this Special Committee. (Memorandum from Smith to Walt Rostow, November 16; Johnson Library, National Security File, National Security Action Memoranda, NSAM 321—Review of Strategic Stockpile Objectives, Box 6) On an undated note from Smith to Califano, Califano checked his approval of the “death sentence” of the Special Committee but wrote in the margin, “We are going to put together a new group.” (Ibid.) In a November 17 memorandum to holders of NSAM No. 321, Rostow wrote that because the Special Committee was “no longer the mechanism through which strategic stockpile objectives are currently being studied and reviewed,” he was formally terminating it, effective immediately. (Ibid.)