Download Evolving Modern Presidency: White House Organization & Presidential Cabinet Relations and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Social policy in PDF only on Docsity!
1
The Evolving Modern Presidency
The modern presidency began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his leadership of the United States through the Great Depression and World War II. Beginning with that extraordinary period, we will trace the evolution of the presidency from the perspective of how FDR and his successors have organized their administrations, with a focus on White House organization and presidential relations with the cabi- net. This is the fourth edition of Organizing the Presidency. The first edition, 1976, took the presidency from FDR (1933–1945) through the administration of Richard Nixon (1969–1974). The second edi- tion, 1988, continued the march of presidents through Ronald Rea- gan’s two terms (1981–1989). The third edition, 2002, ended with the reaction of George W. Bush to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This edition continues into Donald Trump’s first three years in office, as he sought to win the 2020 election. The past ninety years have transformed the White House from a small, personalized office to a set of centralized bureaucracies (with hundreds of people) in charge of the much larger bureaucracies (of millions of people) in the broader executive branch. FDR did not try
2 Organizing the Presidency
to run or manage the executive branch from the White House, at least not in the sense that a chief executive office runs or manages a corpo- ration. During Roosevelt’s first two terms, he structured the White House staff to serve his personal needs. His staff was considerably larger though not significantly different from that of his predecessors. Because Roosevelt, in the manner of his cousin Theodore, conceived the presidency as a “bully pulpit,” his assistants were mostly engaged in helping him try to shape public opinion. No National Security Council or National Economic Council ex- isted then with responsibilities for departmental oversight. There was no congressional relations office in the White House. Presidential as- sistants were considered utility infielders who were moved from one position to another as needed, or as the president’s fancy dictated. While Roosevelt did not seek collective counsel from his cabinet, cab- inet officers still had the major responsibility for running their depart- ments, drafting legislation, and lobbying it through Congress. At the same time, however, Roosevelt created myriad new agencies reporting directly to him, which impinged on the jurisdiction of the cabinet departments. According to Joseph Alsop, in FDR’s time:
There literally was no White House staff of the modern type, with policymaking functions. Two extremely pleasant, unassuming, and efficient men, Steve Early and Marvin McIntyre, handled the presi- dent’s day-to-day schedule and routine, the donkey-work of his press relations, and such like. There was a secretarial camarilla of highly competent and dedicated ladies who were led by “Missy” LeHand.
... There were also lesser figures to handle travel arrangements, the enormous flow of correspondence, and the like. But that was that; and national policy was strictly a problem for the president, his advisers of the moment (who had constant access to the president’s office but no office of their own in the White House), and his chosen chiefs of departments and agencies.^1
The increased number of governmental programs and the large number of agencies created during the New Deal resulted in a frag- mented system that FDR tried to rein in through the proposals of the Brownlow Committee, which declared, “The President needs help.”
4 Organizing the Presidency
that White House aides will go off on their own, doing what they imagine is in the president’s best interest. Without careful monitor- ing, this extended White House staff can lead to micromanaging the implementation of policy, to the frustration of cabinet secretaries, or to disaster, as it did in the Watergate (Nixon), the Iran-Contra deba- cle (Reagan), and presidential pressure on Ukraine in 2019 (Trump). When Dwight Eisenhower became president in 1953, he drew from his vast organizational experience during World War II to or- ganize the White House more formally than what he considered to be the haphazardly run White Houses of Roosevelt and Truman. He surrounded himself with a staff secretariat in charge of the flow of papers to and from the Oval Office and a secretariat in charge of the machinery of cabinet meetings. Experts rather than generalists advised on questions he felt were inadequately handled by the cabi- net departments. An elaborate apparatus was invented to coordinate national security affairs, and a full-scale congressional relations office was added to the White House. Eisenhower’s press secretary devised more sophisticated techniques for controlling the flow of news. A chief of staff was now responsible for the proper function of all these new offices, which had increased the size of the White House, but not operational capability. Eisenhower still expected cabinet officers to run their departments with a minimum of second-guessing from his staff. John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson scuttled much of the machin- ery they found in the White House because they were told that it was unsuited to the needs of an activist liberal administration, and because they, as senators, were not used to running large organizations. Nev- ertheless, each had activist goals involving increasing the role of the government in the economy and social life of the nation. Their activist agendas led them to begin to centralize control of public policy in the White House. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy learned to dis- trust the national security bureaucratic consensus. He moved one of his White House advisers, McGeorge Bundy, into a West Wing office and told him to create “a little state department” in the White House to provide independent advice to the president. Kennedy’s small group of advisers eventually developed into an expansive National Security
The Evolving Modern Presidency 5
Council staff (first established by Eisenhower), which grew to several hundred staffers in the twenty-first century. The Cuban Missile Crisis further reinforced Kennedy’s conviction that national security policy had to be tightly controlled in the White House. Lyndon Johnson did not want to entrust his Great Society and War on Poverty legislation to the departments and agencies of the executive branch, and he tasked Joseph Califano with developing and coordinating social policy development in the White House. Because of Kennedy and Johnson’s approach to the presidency as the moving force of government, presidential aides sometimes issued instructions to cabinet officers and their subordinates. The White House became for the first time the operational center of the executive branch. The offices and procedures that presidents created in the 1950s and 1960s soon became institutionalized. Elements of this include an elaborate and more centralized national security apparatus, an enhanced White House Office of Communications, a large legal counsel’s office, a professionalized Office of Presidential Personnel, a legislative liaison capacity, and others. This growth in capacity has occurred because presidents do not want to depend on the rest of the executive branch for advice. They want immediate response from people they trust implicitly, and they want that capacity available in the White House, not in cabinet departments. After the beginning of centralization of White House control in the 1960s, Richard Nixon sought even tighter political and organi- zational control. He distrusted the career bureaucrats of the execu- tive branch, considering them holdovers from the activist years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who were “dug-in establish- mentarians fighting for the status quo.” 2 In seeking personal central control Nixon created, in effect, a counter-bureaucracy in the White House in his Domestic Policy Council and National Security Coun- cil staffs. He increased political control of the Bureau of the Budget by transforming it into the Office of Management and Budget and giving it more political appointees and greater authority to enforce his budgetary decisions. Although presidents after Nixon have had discretion to organize their staffs however they wish, they cannot escape what Hugh Heclo
The Evolving Modern Presidency 7
oped in domestic departments, such as Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Labor, and Transportation, is now dominated by the do- mestic policy staff in the White House. Foreign policy is now directed by the National Security Council staff rather than the Departments of State and of Defense. The following chapters will explore the details and dynamics of the gradual transformation of the presidency and will conclude with lessons abstracted from the fourteen modern presidents.
