The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (21 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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Page 63
By the summer of 1979, Carter was facing growing lines at gas stations, soaring inflation, and conflicts within his administration. He retired to Camp David to regroup. He restructured his office and installed Hamilton Jordan as the formal chief of staff. Loyalty rather than competence became the main criteria for evaluating department heads. Cabinet heads were instructed to complete "evaluation sheets on subcabinet officers, which Jordan later used to target about 50 for replacement." Carter demanded pro forma resignations from his entire cabinet and then fired five cabinet officers. This move, eerily reminiscent of Nixon's identical action in 1972, was to similar negative effect, as "the departing secretaries were generally considered among the most effective, making it seem as if Carter were blaming the cabinet for his own short-comings." As one observer uncharitably noted, "They're cutting down the biggest trees and keeping the monkeys" (ibid., 160).
Reagan followed a different, more focused, path than Carter. As discussed in chapter 2, he
was not interested in diversity and had two good reasons for seeking a cadre of distilled conservatives. The success of his hands-off management style would depend on trusted subordinates in tune with his policies. And his presidency was to be geared toward policy implementation instead of policy development, since the policies were to be those that he had spent two decades promoting. Diverse opinions would only get in the way. Personnel Director [Pendleton] James scrutinized resumes to find loyal and ideologically pure applicantsexpertise was a secondary consideration. (Ibid., 154)
There was a delicious irony to the Carter and Reagan appointments: "For two presidents who arrived in Washington speaking the language of insurgency, vowing to challenge the power of the Washington establishment, Carter and Reagan ended up appointing supremely conventional cabinets" (ibid., 155).
Reagan, like Truman, initially treated his cabinet as members of a board of directors of a corporation, which was fine with them, "since virtually all were successful businessmen, many of them epitomizing Reagan's ideal of a self-made man" (ibid., 161). Having made heavy use of his cabinet while governor of California, he was comfortable with his cabinet members as policy-level colleagues (Campbell 1991, 189). From the start, Reagan established a bond with his appointees so they would identify with him rather than with their agency. He made it clear that they were his representatives to the agencies and not vice versa.
 
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Reagan's long-term commitment to a particular agenda produced an initial emphasis on collegiality among his cabinet and with the EOP, using the same approach as Ford and Carter of a coordinating rather than a dictating chief of staff. However, when Don Regan took over in 1984, that approach was quickly dismissed in a return to hierarchical organization; the EOP gained power at the expense of the cabinet as, ''in the interests of agenda enforcement, teamwork was sought and, with conspicuous exceptions, significantly achieved. . . . [I]n the design of the official policy management apparatus, efforts [were] made to create coordinated but differentiated networking structures and processes" (Newland 1985, 142).
Regan resigned in the midst of the Iran-Contra scandal in early 1987 and Reagan, with more felicitous results, returned to the directing rather than dictating model under first Howard Baker and then Ken Duberstein (Campbell 1991, 188).
The early part of the Bush administration saw a change from the strict EOP control of the cabinet and agencies practiced in the Reagan White House, a downgrading of White House staff power in favor of cabinet leadership. Initially, George Bush was more likely to surround himself with technically competent staffers who would not seek to manage him too tightly or to dominate the cabinet. He was also more likely than Reagan to deal with his cabinet secretaries directly and individually, rather than using his staff as intermediaries, although he tended to use his monthly cabinet meetings for briefings rather than for policy deliberation (Pfiffner 1990, 67). "The use of the full cabinet as a deliberative body had greatly diminished since its effective use by President Eisenhower. This was due to its increased size (with 14 cabinet departments in 1989), but more importantly to the cross cutting nature of most presidential policy issues and the president's need for advice from a broader perspective than that of the individual department heads" (ibid., 67).
Taking sixty-five days to complete his cabinet, George Bush appointed highly experienced people with a cumulative one hundred years of government experience. He told them he wanted them to "think big" and "challenge the system." Roger Porter, Bush's assistant to the president for economic and domestic policy, had advanced the cabinet council in Gerald Ford's administration and had helped implement it in Ronald Reagan's. His influence was clearly seen in the system of three councils used by Reagan and continued by Bush (the councils were Economic Policy, Domestic Policy, and National Security) (ibid., 67).
Porter's influence was also present through the "multiple advocacy" he promoted "as a model for advising the president." To accommodate
 
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the president's "preference for oral briefings White House aides set up 'scheduled train wrecks,' policy free-for-alls in which administration officials would engage in policy disagreements and answer questions from the president." He told them he wanted frank and open discussion and advocacy for particular positions, but when a decision was made they were expected to support it. Those closest to the president were given significant latitude in policy development in the early months of the administration, to the extent that some secretaries initiated policy without prior White House approval. This administration was characterized by the president's team values and the familiarity of colleagues who had long worked together, many of them (e.g., Brent Scowcroft, Richard Cheney, and James Baker) veterans of the Reagan administrations (ibid., 67).
By the summer of 1989 it appeared that President Bush might have formed the most influential cabinet since President Eisenhower in terms of the willingness of the president to give cabinet secretaries the latitude within which to operate in their jurisdictions. It is ironic that President Bush, one of the few recent presidents who did not talk about "cabinet government," may have come closest to implementing it. (Ibid., 67)
The relative power of the EOP and the cabinet would change over the course of the administration, as discussed in later chapters. For now, two examples of EOP muscle flexing give evidence of the reversion of power to that office. Both occurred in the pretesting stage of the General Accounting Office (GAO)-sponsored Bush PAS Survey for this book. In April 1992, when the deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development casually mentioned to the White House political staff that he was going to pretest the survey, they told him he could not do so. Somewhat baffled, he backed out of the pretest, saying, "I don't have any problem with it, I'm happy to do itbut I work for them." He referred the author to a member of the Office of the White House Counsel for further discussion. (In the Department of Veterans Affairs, however, the assistant deputy secretary discussed participation with the secretary who gave him the go-ahead, and the assistant deputy secretary then pretested the survey.)
The second example of centralized White House control occurred when the head of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), Constance Horner, directed the head of OPM, Constance Berry Newman, not to cooperate with the PAS study by withholding a mailing list of PAS executives. The mailing list for the survey was subsequently sought through other, more laborious, expensive, and ultimately fruitless means. Then,
 
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after a delay of some two months, the White House mysteriously agreed to cooperate with the GAO to the extent that it would mail the surveys to the PASs. Citing the Privacy Act, however, it refused to let any GAO staff even see (let alone have) the list of political executives to whom it was sending the survey.
2
Four features characterize the modern presidency, according to Hess. First, tremendous growth has occurred in the size of the White House staff. In the fifty years from Roosevelt to Reagan, it grew from thirty-seven to more than nine hundred individuals, the Executive Office of the President from zero to thousands (Hess 1988, 5). Exact numbers, however, are very difficult to obtain because the White House does not make public the numbers of employees from the various agencies who are detailed to the White House and work for it alone or on a shared-time basis. A recent study by the GAO found 116 detailees in three of the fourteen offices of the EOP it studied (the White House Office, the Office of Policy Development, and the Office of the Vice President). An additional twenty-eight persons, called nondetailees, who seemed to have no formal status, were also found to work in these three offices (see chapter 4 for details on the White House staff).
3
A second feature of the modern presidency is that blaming the permanent government for the problems of the country has led to the proliferation of special and functional offices in the White House itself by presidents who do not trust the bureaucracy to carry out their policies (ibid., 5).
A third feature is that "the rising influence of White House staff members on the president and the corresponding decline in cabinet influence has meant a serious separation of policy formulation from policy implementation." This shift of balance may also have an effect on the type and feasibility of proposed policy as White House aides, being more isolated from the pressures of implementation, have fewer bureaucratic restraints and reality testers than cabinet officers (ibid., 5).
Fourth, White House aides have "increasingly become special pleaders. . . . When Truman gave an aide responsibility for minority affairs" he established the precedent whereby an increasing number of groups felt the need for an inside person looking out for their interests in the White House. This further moved the action away from the agencies to the EOP to the point "where once the White House had been a mediator of interests, it now had become a collection of interests" (ibid., 6).
These features have led to what is termed "the bureaucratization of the presidency" and mean that "ultimately the modern presidency has moved toward creating all policy at the White House, overseeing the operations of government from the White House, using White House staff to

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