Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess
to focus on projections beyond their terms of office.
The Bureau of the Budget, however, blossomed in the Executive Office, and under the directorship of Harold Smith (1939–1945) it rapidly expanded from a staff of forty to one of more than 500. It retained its position as the primary agency for reviewing the budget and vastly increased its other powers. For instance, while the departments had previously had to clear legislative requests with the bureau only if they cost money, now all proposed legislation went through its clearance process. A similar system was instituted for the preparation of executive orders and proclamations, and recommendations for presidential vetoes also were funneled through the Budget Bureau. It became the coordinator of statistical services and drafted reorganization plans. Survey teams recommended management improvements in the departments, and as particularly competent young professionals were attracted to the bureau in the early 1940s, the president relied on it more and more to represent him on interdepartmental committees and to perform other odd jobs. In short, the augmented Bureau of the Budget provided a significant presidential presence throughout the executive branch.
So now Roosevelt had two types of staffs: the one in the White House whose services were to the president and were of a personal, public relations, and political nature; and the one in the Executive Office whose responsibilities were to the presidency and were institutional in nature. But policy and program initiatives still flowed up to the president through the departments and agencies. The president’s men were not involved in operations; as the Brownlow report recommended, they issued no orders.
The pressures of World War II, however, brought measurable changes to this system. Except for sporadic periods, presidents had in the past spent most of their time concerned with domestic matters. The ushering in of world responsibility meant that from the 1940s forward they would become more and more consumed by international affairs.
During the war, Harry Hopkins, who lived at the White House, often acted as a direct link between Roosevelt and allied governments; the State Department was informed of arrangements after they had been concluded. Admiral William Leahy, also operating out of the White House, presided over meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Roosevelt’s representative and daily briefed the president on military matters. Rosenman, now a full-time drafter of presidential messages and public documents, assumed responsibility for creating domestic policy. The addition of these three White House advisers markedly altered the direction of decisionmaking. In particular, Rosenman’s domestic duties expanded to fill the void left by the president’s preoccupation with the war. Policies of the utmost importance were devised in his office at the White House and moved out from there, thus reversing the traditional flow. Moreover, as Roosevelt’s health declined, all his aides assumed added responsibilities.
The president mobilized the civilian side of the government for war in much the same manner he had earlier organized for the economic emergency, through the creation of numerous ad hoc agencies in response to problems as they arose or were called to his attention. But while he had been given to picking the leadership of the New Deal agencies from a free-floating body of lawyers, professors, social workers, and state and local administrators, he chose representatives of economic groups (corporate executives, union leaders, and farm organization officials) to head the new war agencies. The Office of Production Management, for example, was placed under the joint direction of William Knudsen of General Motors and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Scientists, recruited by Vannevar Bush, for the first time began to play an important role in government, developing an atom bomb being only the most obvious example.
Roosevelt also became the first president to give major executive responsibilities to the vice president. Henry Wallace, his second vice president, was made chairman of the Economic Defense Board, the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board, and the Board of Economic Warfare. This was in sharp contrast to the job description for the vice presidency under John Nance Garner, whose primary assistance to Roosevelt had been as a bridge to Congress, at least until the ideological gulf between the president and the vice president became unbridgeable. The liabilities of giving a vice president responsibility for implementing policies became apparent, however, when Wallace and Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones clashed over policy and jurisdictional questions, exchanged public insults, and had to be relieved of their assignments. Less controversial was Roosevelt’s novel use of the vice president as an envoy extraordinary on missions to South America, China, and the Soviet Union.
Roosevelt’s war government has been described as a collection of action agencies—dealing with such matters as the allocation of rubber, drafting men into the armed forces, and price controls—and coordinating agencies “to keep the action agencies from getting in each other’s way.”30 Coordination was arranged in a series of layers with first-step coordinators such as the National Housing Agency, regional coordinators like the Plant Site Board, second-step coordinators such as the Office of War Information and, at the White House, the supercoordinator of them all, the Office of War Mobilization (OWM).31
To head the OWM, the president lured James Byrnes from the Supreme Court. It was undoubtedly a difficult decision for Roosevelt to give one person so much authority to act in his name, but in picking Byrnes there was little cause for concern. A cautious southern politician long comfortable in the folkways of Washington, Byrnes was not about to handle hot coals if he could help it. He deliberately was not an empire builder; he worked out of tiny cluttered offices in the east wing of the White House, with a staff never exceeding ten and with the unassuming Ben Cohen as his chief deputy. The OWM chose to deal with issues only if they could not be resolved at lower levels and interpreted its role narrowly as one of adjudicating controversies rather than planning and commanding the home front from its elevated perch.
But Roosevelt’s management techniques were better suited to the needs of the Depression than the wartime 1940s. When the New Deal groped its way toward economic solutions that had never before been considered within government’s province, the heady clash of ideas and the heavy emphasis on experimentation proved highly productive. The needs of massive warfare were not as well served by improvisation and redundancy. The president’s administrative juggling sometimes caused vital military messages to be delayed for days or weeks, and there were even times when the Pentagon first learned about a White House decision from the British.32
Franklin Roosevelt’s methods of organizing the presidency illustrate the intensely personal nature of the office. Even before the 1939 Reorganization Act gave him congressional sanction, he had reshaped his staff to suit his style and needs. Despite his domination of the government, the White House staff during Roosevelt’s first two terms was primarily a personal services unit, considerably bigger but not essentially different from that of past presidents. His strong desire to mold public opinion called especially for aides who could assist in such symbolic and informational duties as speechwriting and press relations.
Only during Roosevelt’s last years did new powers begin to shift to the staff. This coincided with the war and the president’s failing health. A vigorous Roosevelt, one suspects, would have been much more hesitant to delegate duties that he considered presidential. And what delegation did take place would have been more carefully limited. As it was, Hopkins’s diplomacy impinged on the prerogatives of the secretary of state, and Rosenman’s initiation of domestic policies invaded what had been the exclusive domain of the departments and agencies.
The accretion of White House staff functions was not part of a deliberate plan. The creation of the Executive Office of the President, however, had a theoretical base in the Brownlow report and in effect produced a quantum jump in staff available to a president. Although Roosevelt was relatively meticulous, for instance, in using the Bureau of the Budget for institutional purposes, there were signs by the end of the administration that it was slipping into a more personal role. Late in the war Harold Smith reportedly told a friend, “Roger, I am afraid I am becoming Mr. Fixit for the President, and this is bad for the Bureau of the Budget.”33
While the cabinet failed to serve Roosevelt as a mechanism for gathering collective advice—as it had failed previous presidents—cabinet officers continued to be responsible for running their departments and proposing legislation. However, Roosevelt’s habit of creating agencies outside the departmental framework diffused power throughout the executive branch, diminished the standing of some