Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess
than merely weighing the competing merits of individuals. “Eight millionaires and one plumber” was how the New Republic described the cabinet.5 But Eisenhower was not impressed by money per se—Truman’s administration had more men of wealth. What impressed Eisenhower was the ability to succeed (money was simply the unit in which success was measured). He believed that a successful person, someone who had already proved he could run something big, would be best able to tame a government department. It was a view shaped by his conception of what a government department does (namely manage something) and honed by campaign promises and the business-oriented philosophy of his party. The only two members of the cabinet (except of course for Durkin) who did not have backgrounds in management, attorneys John Foster Dulles and Brownell, were put in charge of the State and Justice departments, which from a presidential perspective can be considered more analytical than operational. Moreover, Eisenhower wrote in his diary on January 5, 1953, that to seek a government position is “clear evidence of unsuitability. I feel that anyone who can, without great personal sacrifice, come to Washington to accept an important government post, is not fit to hold that post.”6 He would hire people who were above chiseling, or not in need of it. As the representative of a party that placed its faith in the private enterprise system, who better than a business executive could ferret out waste and recognize reckless spending?
This proclivity for bringing in the successful outsider also held true in the selection of undersecretaries (later renamed deputy secretaries). Before Eisenhower the standard practice had been to divide the work in a department between the two top political appointees along “outside” and “inside” lines—with the secretary being the spokesman to the outer world, the undersecretary managing the bureaucracy. Yet most of the Republican undersecretaries were carbon copies of their superiors.
Eisenhower’s business executives joined the government in the same spirit that one contributes to the United Way, not joyously but because it is what civic-minded citizens ought to do. What was remarkable was that they stayed, held by the magnetism of Ike’s personality more than by any other force. Seven of his original cabinet members were still in place at the end of the first term; most stayed much longer. One died in office, the acting secretary of commerce left because he failed to win Senate confirmation, and two lasted the full eight years. With only one exception, replacements came from the ranks of the subcabinet or the White House staff.
The kind of person the president chose was the kind of person he was. Dwight D. Eisenhower of Denison, Texas, and Abilene, Kansas, born October 14, 1890, surrounded himself with people of similar background. Only Dulles was older—by two years. George Humphrey, secretary of the treasury, and Charles E. Wilson, secretary of defense, were born in 1890. Thirteen of the twenty-one cabinet officers were within a decade or so of the president’s age. Their places of birth read like a gazetteer of small-town America—Killeen and Burleson, Texas; McRae, Georgia; Whitney, Idaho; Minerva and Berea, Ohio; Pinconning and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Charleston, West Virginia; Kingston, New York. Their personalities also matched the president’s. Cheerful and confident, they were not the dour conservatives buried in the stuffed chairs of the Union League Club. While Dulles or Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson could not be mistaken for the life of the party, they were the exceptions that Eisenhower made in the name of expertise. “Foster has been in training for this job all his life,” he often said.7
They were decidedly not politicians. The three cabinet members who had been in the U.S. Senate—Dulles, Weeks, and Eisenhower’s second secretary of the interior, Fred Seaton—had held interim appointments. The only elected senator to whom the president gave cabinet status was UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, his earliest supporter. Legislator-politicians were difficult for Eisenhower to fathom. They seemed consumed with concerns such as headlines and patronage that did not concern him. He was much more comfortable with executive-politicians, and five former governors were to serve on his White House staff.
Under the Eisenhower system the cabinet officers were expected to run the daily operations of their departments without presidential interference. They had the right to come to Eisenhower when their problems were big enough, which was left for them to decide. But the president was impatient if they sought his counsel too often on matters that he felt were strictly operational. Defense Secretary Wilson infuriated him by constantly wanting to discuss the internal workings of the Pentagon, problems that the president considered unpresidential. Cabinet officers also were to come to the White House—meaning Sherman Adams—when they disagreed among themselves. Adams “spent many hours,” for example, with Commerce Secretary Weeks and Labor Secretary Mitchell “sitting across the table from each other while they ironed out their differences.”8 It was hard for the press to accept the fact that someone as powerful as Adams was not making policy, but he saw his role otherwise and largely resisted the temptation to overrule the department heads, although he was equally willing to take the blame for doing so when the decision really had been made by the president.9
Of course, basic differences within the cabinet were minimal, at least by the standards of the preceding administrations. The like-mindedness of the department heads ensured it. Nevertheless, the Eisenhower cabinet was composed of very strong personalities. A body that included John Foster Dulles, Charles E. Wilson, George Humphrey, Ezra Taft Benson, and Harold Stassen must rate high for sheer tenacity. The feuds smoldered, but they rarely surfaced, and the president effectively used his weekly cabinet meetings to give what historian Stephen Ambrose called “his standard pitch for teamwork.”10
Eisenhower’s conception of the cabinet differed markedly from the conceptions of the other White House occupants during the modern era. In an effort to convert the cabinet into a major deliberative mechanism, he expanded meetings to include such key aides as the UN ambassador, the budget director, the director of defense mobilization, the mutual security administrator, and the White House chief of staff. He thought it useful to gather the views of all cabinet members even if their departments were not directly involved. This practice did not, however, mean that all members were equal. George Humphrey and his successor, Robert B. Anderson, were more-than-equal voices in domestic affairs, the predictable role of the Treasury in a conservative government; and Dulles jealously guarded his position as chief adviser on foreign policy.
Eisenhower got his information from listening; he formed his opinions by talking with others. This preference, perhaps more than theory, accounted for the heightened role of the cabinet and the National Security Council. He concentrated on discussion around the table, and then if he had reached a conclusion he would announce it on the spot, thus making sure that all his subordinates heard what he had decided. This was not collective government, any more than it had been with other presidents; Eisenhower accepted the fact that the decisions were his alone to make. The job of the White House was to ensure that important matters were placed on the cabinet agenda, that department heads were prepared to state their positions, and that they were periodically reminded of their responsibilities in implementing decisions the president had made.
That department heads, competing as they must for scarce resources and answerable to constituents beyond the administration, would freely put their most cherished proposals up for grabs was not an entirely workable notion. Despite the prodding of the cabinet secretariat in the White House, the trivial often substituted for the controversial. Douglas Dillon, the undersecretary of state, later recalled that at one meeting, “We sat around looking at the plans for Dulles Airport. They had a model and everything, and we would say why don’t you put a door there, and they would explain why they didn’t.”11
Eisenhower’s doctrine of delegation had a number of consequences. It may have helped to keep his appointees on the job longer than they planned. It contributed to their comfort (some said complacency), for they knew the outer limits of their assignments and had no fear of poachers. It removed burdens from the president, which added to an impression that he was not on top of his job. (He would have argued that no presidential decisions were made by anyone except the president and as few as possible nonpresidential decisions were made by the president.) And according to the power equations by which presidents are often measured, Eisenhower gave himself considerable freedom of action by giving his subordinates considerable latitude to act.
What Eisenhower artfully constructed was an elaborate system of buffer zones.12 Press secretary James Hagerty later recalled, “President Eisenhower