Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess
Frankfurter, Hugh Johnson, Tugwell, Cohen, and Corcoran. The team of Cohen and Corcoran played a more important role after Moley broke with the administration. Rosenman, who had been Roosevelt’s draftsman in Albany, again emerged as chief speechwriter in 1936; Stanley High was active in the second presidential campaign; and Roosevelt’s last team, from 1940 until his death, consisted of Rosenman, Hopkins, and Robert Sherwood, with occasional help from Archibald MacLeish. Roosevelt’s distinct style of speaking seemed to be made to order for speechwriters, but that phrases from so many sources could have taken on a unitary character can be explained only by his involvement in the process. In the end, as Sherwood wrote of FDR’s martinis, the president “mixed the ingredients with the deliberation of an alchemist.”18
The speechwriting operation often also served as a mechanism for forcing decisions. Rosenman explained, for example, that in preparing a 1942 congressional message on economic stabilization, he first arranged a conference of the vice president, secretary of the treasury, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, director of the budget, and the price administrator, whose suggestions and disagreements were presented to the president in a memorandum, then fought out in various forums, and eventually resolved by Roosevelt under deadline pressure.”19
Despite their regular appearance on the president’s weekly agenda, cabinet meetings were not an important administrative mechanism. Roosevelt did not consider his department secretaries a collegial body whose collective wisdom should be applied to making high government policy. “Our Cabinet meetings are pleasant affairs,” Ickes wrote in his diary, “but we only skim the surface of routine affairs.” The chief value of the Friday sessions, Stimson felt, was their usefulness “as a way in which to get into the White House to have a word with the President in private after the meetings were over.”20
In relating to the cabinet members as individuals, Roosevelt had little respect for jurisdictional boundaries. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau was given assignments that rightly belonged to Secretary of State Hull and Secretary of War Harry Woodring. Cabinet members survived as best they could in this laissez-faire atmosphere, if not by implicit contract with their fellow department heads, then by conquest. At Interior, Ickes was tenacious in his quest for additional responsibilities, as when he attempted to snatch the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture. Hull, however, drew a narrow line around the State Department, even allowing himself to be excluded from wartime summit meetings on the grounds that they dealt with military planning and were not of diplomatic concern.
The president tried to stay above the interdepartmental battles. Typical of this approach was a memorandum he sent to Rosenman: “Get [budget director] Harold Smith, usually known as ‘Battling Smith,’ into a room with the Secretary of the Treasury, usually known as ‘Sailor Morgenthau,’ lock them in and let the survivor out.”21 Yet despite the president’s seemingly cold-blooded practice of management by combat, he was almost incapable of firing anyone for incompetence or even disloyalty. Rather, he devised ways to go around them, as when he chose to conduct War Department business with Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson instead of Woodring, who was too isolationist for the president.
When Roosevelt believed most strongly that a job was important, however, he often simply ignored the departments and created a new agency. Topsy-turvy was the patron saint of his administrative theory. As a deliberate policy, this implied one or more of the following: that a new function was to be undertaken for which there was no niche in the existing structure, that the costs of giving new duties to an ongoing agency were too high in terms of disrupting existing programs or disturbing the delicate relationship between departments, that a new agency symbolized a higher level of concern, that existing agencies either lacked capable personnel or were unable to move quickly enough, or that a new agency could circumvent existing regulations. James Rowe, a Roosevelt aide, thought that one reason the president frequently employed this device was that it was the best way to deliver on his patronage obligations.22 The result was an administrative monstrosity, proliferating the number of executives who had the right and obligation to report directly to the president.
Roosevelt made a short-lived attempt to coordinate the work of the new agencies with that of the old-line departments through the creation of the Emergency Council in 1934. At one time the coordinating involved 124 interdepartmental committees and 224 subcommittees. The enterprise ultimately collapsed under the weight of its apparatus, the unwieldy size of its meetings, the pro forma reading of mimeographed reports, and the president’s disenchantment with its director, Donald Richberg. General confusion may have been somewhat lessened, however, by government’s ability to attract experienced managers because of decreased employment opportunities in the private sector during the Depression.
By the time Roosevelt stood for reelection in 1936 his methods of running the government had become as controversial in some quarters as his goals. He therefore set up the Committee on Administrative Management, with Louis Brownlow as chairman and Charles Merriam and Luther Gulick as the other members. Their report, which he enthusiastically forwarded to Congress in January 1937, accepted as its premise that “the American Executive must be regarded as one of the very greatest contributions by our Nation to the development of modern democracy.” The need for reorganization was not based on potential savings to the taxpayers, as in past reports, but because “the President needs help.”23 The committee’s solution, as George Graham put it, was “a plan of salvation by staff.”24 The report recommended that the White House Office should be augmented by six administrative assistants, “possessed of high competence, great physical vigor, and a passion for anonymity.”25 In addition, there should be an Executive Office of the President consisting of “managerial arms” for personnel, fiscal affairs, and planning.
The reorganization bill became entwined in Roosevelt’s attempt to alter the composition of the Supreme Court and did not become law until 1939. But eventually he got what he asked for, with the exception of having the functions of the Civil Service Commission transferred to the White House. The Executive Office was physically located next door to the White House.26 Into it was placed the Bureau of the Budget and the National Resources Committee, renamed the National Resources Planning Board. Thus the president controlled two of the recommended three managerial arms, fiscal affairs and planning.27
The reorganization act did not measurably increase the size of Roosevelt’s White House staff; the more significant expansion had taken place in 1933–1934 as the president borrowed personnel from the departments. Although authorized to have six administrative assistants, Roosevelt chose to appoint only three in 1939. While the new aides—William McReynolds, James Rowe, and Lauchlin Currie—were largely generalists standing ready for whatever assignments were uppermost on the president’s mind, they also developed areas of special interest. McReynolds became liaison officer for personnel management, Rowe’s particular involvements were in politics and patronage, and Currie was concerned with economics. The importance of the Brownlow report was in legitimating what Roosevelt had been doing all along. It was a ringing manifesto for presidential supremacy, which had not been an accepted fact before the New Deal.
The National Resources Planning Board, charged with preparing long-range plans for public works, helping state and local planning bodies, and informing the president of trends in the economy, did not fare well and was abolished by a 1943 action of Congress, which further stipulated that its functions could not be transferred to any other agency. Sherwood claimed that “the N.R.P.B. was dear to Roosevelt’s heart, but to the conservative majority on Capitol Hill the very word ‘plan’ was considered a Communist invention and any planning must be part of a plot to disrupt the capitalist system of free enterprise.”28 At least one academic observer, however, could find no evidence “to support a claim that the research product of the Board ever influenced vital decisions of the President.”29 The legislators feared a long-term planning operation in the White House as an assault on their prerogatives; they were perfectly happy to create a planning operation of their own, as when the Senate set up the Special Committee on Post-War Planning shortly after cutting off funds to the NRPB. The collapse of the NRPB was the first of a series of unsuccessful attempts to graft long-range planning capacity onto the White House. Ultimately they have failed because of the character of presidents and the demands of the presidential office. The politicians who generally become presidents have had little experience with and patience for extended planning, and once