 | | handicap. Those who ascended to the presidency because of the interrupted terms of their predecessors were compelled to accept, at least in the beginning, inherited political appointees.
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| | Those who succeeded presidents of the opposing party felt obliged to build their own organizational and operational structure distinctive from that of the previous administration. A mutually cooperative transition could possibly have averted errors of the past and ensured a legacy of proved techniques and practices, but mutually cooperative transitions have not been commonplace in modern government. (Ibid., 54-55)
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The quality of the selection process for political appointees is a source of much debate and study, as is the quality of its product, the appointees, themselves. Selection holds a central place in the functioning of government. The country needs an "appointment process that is able consistently to identify and recruit government leaders with expertise, integrity, creativity, and political sensitivity. . . . We cannot have good government in the United States without good people making and implementing the important decisions" (Macy et al. 1983, 3).
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In the dance of bureaucracy, selection is key to the appointee partner, much more so than to the career partner. This is because the majority of appointees emerge with the advent of a new administration (most are chosen within the first few months), receive only cursory pre-appointment examination, stay for a relatively short time, and soon leave government or recycle into another agency. The career executives, on the other hand, spend years preparing for their positions, undergo periodic review and evaluation, and will generally be in place long after the appointees are part of agency history.
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"Nine Enemies and One Ingrate": Presidential Approaches to Political Appointments
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In the modern milieu of expanded government size and jurisdiction, the responsibility of the president to name political appointees has also grown. It is not a task he can delegate to others and still expect felicitous results from, because "presidential involvement and identification with the appointments process is indispensable in attracting qualified people who combine professional competence and political compatibility" (Bonafede 1987a, 55). Yet, the past several decades have seen a generally growing antipathy toward the federal bureaucracy, viewing it as the nemesis on which to blame the nation's problems. Eisenhower was deter-
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