Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess
be insinuated between him and his principal advisers, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. His momentous decision to intervene in Korea was made without formally consulting with the NSC. (He did, of course, meet with his key officials, some of whom were council members.)
The war, however, convinced him that the NSC could be used to greater advantage. The council began to meet weekly, with the president in the chair. A senior staff of eight persons drawn from the departments was assembled—a precursor of Eisenhower’s Planning Board. The first executive secretary had been primarily a briefing officer; the second now became a staff director as well. NSC papers began to be developed in the Executive Office, rather than in the departments. Although Truman was not prepared to turn the NSC into a comprehensive policymaking system, he did discover that when molded to his terms it could serve him as a convenient way to get staff work done. Without fulfilling its congressional backers’ original expectation of defining broad national policy, it nonetheless had its uses. It provided the excuse for Truman to regroup his advisers into a sort of war cabinet with its own secretariat. Thus again Congress failed to bind a president to its intent; again a president chose to use or not use a body that Congress had unilaterally imposed on the institution of the presidency; and again, perhaps serendipitously, a president found functions for a staff to perform after it had been given to him.
The shape of the modern presidential organization that was beginning to be defined at the end of the Roosevelt administration started to come into sharper focus under Truman: the greater differentiation of staff functions; the building of staff to support chief presidential assistants; the moving of policy advocacy into the White House; a blurring of the distinction between the Executive Office and the White House Office in the use of Budget Bureau personnel by White House aides; and the grafting onto the White House of the CEA and the NSC. Most important was the public’s acceptance of the president as the locus of federal government responsibility.
In 1947 a Republican Congress, looking forward to the election of a Republican president the next year, approved a bill to set up the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government. One of its stated objectives was “defining and limiting executive functions.”26 While Truman might have viewed himself as the commission’s target, he was enthusiastic about the undertaking and promised and delivered the full cooperation of his administration to the commission’s chairman, Herbert Hoover. Hoover threw his prodigious energy into the assignment, serving as his own staff director and placing his personal imprint on all the commission’s work. The first of the nineteen reports of the Hoover Commission appeared in 1949, and its first recommendation was to give the president continuing powers to reorganize federal agencies unrestricted by limitations or exemptions. It also recommended that the Executive Office of the President should be strengthened, that the president should have stronger staff services, and that he should have complete discretion over how the augmented White House staff should be used.27 Newspapers such as the New York Herald Tribune and the Chicago Daily News, which had greeted Roosevelt’s efforts to implement the Brownlow report as a “dictator bill” and an “aggrandizement of the president’s constitutional powers,” now hailed the Hoover Commission’s recommendations and wrote of a strong, unified executive as “a prime requisite of republican institutions.”28 Herbert Hoover, the last president before the modern era, had come out of retirement to legitimate the Rooseveltian concept of the presidency. It was symbolism of some potency.
4
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
1953–1961
If a new administration appears to be a tabula rasa, it is not because the tablet is blank but because the writing is invisible. It is there. But it is best discerned after the fact, when those traits and experiences in a president’s background that are casual can be distinguished from those that are causal in that they determined the shape and the organization of his presidency.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected president in 1952, was a genial, shrewd, optimistic, confident, successful small-town American of sixty-two years. He had devoted his life to government service in the military, and although he was a newcomer to partisan politics, he was skilled at bureaucratic politics. He had spent much time abroad, which gave a somewhat anomalous internationalist cast to his otherwise conventional beliefs. His aspirations as president were limited to two overriding objectives: peace abroad and a balanced budget at home. In keeping with those aspirations, his view of the presidential role was circumscribed.
Eisenhower followed the pattern characteristic of the modern presidency by reacting to the style of the president who preceded him. As Roosevelt, the disorganization man, was followed by the tidy Harry Truman, so Eisenhower saw the purpose of his presidency as trying “to create an atmosphere of greater serenity and mutual confidence” in the wake of the cocky controversialist whose legacy, he felt, was “an unhappy state … bitterness … quarreling.”1 (Truman, of course, would have argued that presidential prestige is meant to be used to force desirable actions.) Later, the youthful Kennedy would react to the aging Eisenhower, and so on, back and forth in the whipsaw fashion that almost defines a principle of contrariness in presidential succession.
Confronted with the immediate problem of putting together a government—the first controlled by the Republican party in twenty years—Eisenhower turned not to his party’s leaders, whom he did not know well, but to an old friend, former general Lucius Clay, chairman of the board of Continental Can Company, and a new one, New York attorney Herbert Brownell. To them was left the initial screening of the cabinet. The job was made easier because no one declined the invitation to join Eisenhower’s cabinet, a statistic unique in the modern presidency. The cabinet then made the initial selection of the subcabinet. Other matters of personnel were handled by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams. An assistant to Adams estimated that the Governor, as Adams was called inside the administration, made 75 percent of the final decisions on personnel; the rest were made by the president from lists of candidates prepared by Adams.2 Eisenhower’s noninvolvement was partly a deliberate delegation of responsibilities, partly an expression of his distaste for the process of patronage, and partly a reflection of his limited circle of acquaintances outside the military, coupled with his strong belief in not appointing military people to civilian jobs if equally capable civilians were available.
The result was that Eisenhower picked a cabinet of strangers. Not one member could have been considered an old friend; most were barely known to him or not known at all. Only two of the ten initial department heads, Attorney General Brownell and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, had played major roles in the campaign. (Some others had more minor parts, and several had been opposed to Eisenhower’s nomination.)
The construction of the cabinet was not totally without attempts at balance. Following tradition, the position of interior secretary went to a westerner, Douglas McKay, the retiring governor of Oregon. Eisenhower wanted a woman in the cabinet, and Oveta Culp Hobby was made director of the Federal Security Agency with the promise that the agency would be quickly transformed into a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Hobby’s appointment also gave the cabinet a southerner and a registered Democrat).
In the president’s only eyebrow-raising selection, he named a trade unionist as secretary of labor. Picking Martin Durkin, head of the AFL Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union, had two justifications. First, Eisenhower was trying to rectify what he felt was Truman’s unwise practice of allowing the presidency to be drawn into labor-management relations. If the unions had their own person at the Labor Department, presumably they would not go over Durkin’s head to the White House.3 More conventionally, Eisenhower was seeking to broaden the perspective of the cabinet—“to help round out any debate,” as he put it. In choosing Durkin he unrealistically believed that he could get “an impartial adviser,” not a “special pleader for labor.”4 He did not, however, look upon his secretary of commerce, businessman Sinclair Weeks, as potentially being a special pleader for business. But Durkin resigned after nine months. Eisenhower then got the type of secretary he really wanted by going outside union ranks. In replacing Durkin with James Mitchell, a respected specialist in industrial relations, he was able to keep labor disputes away from the White House and add a more liberal voice to his cabinet. Mitchell remained in the post until the administration left office in 1961.
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