The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (28 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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The president will bring with her or him a core of faithful followers who also most likely have had more experience in politics, that is, in running for office, than in governing. And, while the policy commitments of a candidate are known through campaign speeches, they are, of necessity, vague and generalized and can "in no sense be considered a presidential programa program has a price tag and relates to available resources" (ibid., 13). As a consequence, valuable "honeymoon" time is lost because the president is least likely to have a coherent program just when the Congress is most likely to accept one.
On the morning after his victory a president-elect is consumed with thoughts of choosing his cabinet and other matters of the transition. No shadow cabinet waits in the wings, and he suddenly discovers how few people he knows who are qualified to assume major posts in government. "People, people, people!" John Kennedy exclaimed three weeks after his election. "I don't know any
people.
I only know voters." (Ibid., 13) Presidents in the modern era have approached personnel in ways
characteristic of each. Roosevelt was "disdainful of formal chain-of-command structures, and he insisted on personally controlling the reins of the executive branch, including the personnel process. [His] 'staffing practices were primarily a haphazard blend of fortuity, friendship, obligation and pressure' . . .: 'there was neither a well-defined purpose nor an underlying principle' that guided Roosevelt" (Bonafede 1987a, 34).
Harry Truman continued the Rooseveltian reforms by creating the first personnel office in the White House that was separate from the party organization. Headed by Donald Dawson, it "functioned primarily as a clearinghouse of names of candidates and political referrals." Later, the office created a file of "prospective nonpatronage appointees, including some civil servants already in the government, and attempted to bring a sense of order to the process but did little evaluating or active recruiting" (ibid., 35).
President Eisenhower's reluctance to deal with personnel matters was well known. However, from his military background he adapted the command structure to the EOP and established a secretariat, naming Sherman Adams as chief of staff. Even before the 1952 election, Eisenhower's supporters hired a consulting firm "to study the appointment process, the nature of the positions available and lists of potential candidates . . . and interviewed candidates for the cabinetmostly businessmen who met their political and executive standards" (ibid., 35-36).
Presidents and their appointments secretaries from Kennedy onward have sought to professionalize the appointments process in order to
 
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broaden the base from which personnel were chosen, as well as to assess the skill level of appointees. Kennedy's personnel people were the first to establish a "contact network," an up-to-date talent bank of potential appointees from which he could draw. This gave him a recruiting capability independent of the political patronage system pressed on him by his party, Congress, and special interests. Unfortunately, the system never worked as well as it might have, due to Kennedy's inconsistency in using it (Macy et al. 1983, 30).
The Kennedy people paid scant attention to appointments until after the election and then did not really concentrate on them until midway through 1961, when Dan Fenn was brought in to head personnel.
Kennedy, like FDR, was uninterested in organizational charts or procedural methods, and his interest in personnel appointments was selective and sporadic. He was more concerned about individual quality and hopefully sought "new faces". . .. Kennedy was avidly involved in the selection of his cabinet and other high-ranking officials during the transition, but his interest waned with time, as other matters of state occupied him-a not unusual presidential trait. (Bonafede 1987a, 36)
Lyndon Johnson, not wanting to risk political suicide by appearing disloyal to the slain president who preceded him, asked all of JFK's appointees to remain in the cabinet and, in all, filled fewer than fifty major Senate-confirmed (PAS) positions during the transition year, most of them in the independent regulatory commissions (IRCs) and the Defense Department. Not only was he seeking to reassure the country and help heal the shock of the assassination, but he would have had trouble getting individuals to accept short-term positions with an election not far away. Also, some of JFK's appointees were already Johnson's trusted friends or long-term allies. Still, in his administration, seventeen of the twenty-five persons holding cabinet posts were originally chosen by Kennedy (Schott and Hamilton 1983, 10-11, 35).
After election in his own right, Johnson took a greater interest in the appointment process and used it to better advantage than did Kennedy. With his support the talent bank was expanded with new emphasis on professionalism, administrative efficiency, and specialization within the White House Personnel Office.
Johnson's interest in personnel, his search for "the best and the brightest" and his control over the process became almost legendary. He had a special interest in bringing in bright people under forty who had been at the
 
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top of their class, who were Phi Beta Kappa or had been Rhodes scholars . . had been in the Peace Corps and/or were women and minorities. . . . He felt that government was no better than the people you had around you. He even, on occasion, inquired about Schedule C positions. On major appointments he consulted with advisors both inside and outside of government, such as Clark Clifford, Abe Fortas, CBS president Frank Stanton, Joe Califano, Horace Busby, Bill Moyers, Harry McPherson and Jack Valenti. (Bonafede 1987a, 38)
Johnson's people under John Macy brought the computer age to the appointments process. By the end of his administration they had expanded the talent bank to thirty thousand names, all cross-referenced by skills and background characteristics (Macy et al. 1983, 32).
Johnson ran parallel appointment systems. One operated under Macy, who headed both the political hiring and the merit-based Civil Service Commission and remained in both positions at Johnson's insistence.
1
Macy's operation was housed in the Executive Office Building rather than in the White House. The fact that he was not part of the White House staff gave him and his office some neutrality and credibility in the appointments process (Schott and Hamilton 1983, 16).
Macy looked for professionalism and merit and at first had Johnson's full support.
Previous experience in governmental affairs was an important criterion in Johnson's mind . . . 50% came to PAS positions from service elsewhere in the federal government . . . ; he demonstrated a proclivity to appoint individuals of established competence rather than take a chance on persons from outside the governmental establishment. . . . When Johnson did reach beyond those with governmental experience to bring in appointees from the private sector as in the case of John Connor at Commerce, the appointment occasionally did not pan out as well as he had hoped. (Ibid., 204)
A second personnel process operated out of the White House. It was "based on a shifting constellation of personal relationships among Johnson, his White House aides, and his numerous confidants outside the executive branch and often outside government as well." It was run first by Jack Valenti and later by Marvin Watson (ibid., 18).
The above innovations aside, Johnson's administrative personnel strategy was clearly modest, relative to what was to follow in Nixon's administration.

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