Cabinet government, competent government:

...I do not know if Mr...

...We need not amend the Constitution to allow for cabinet government...

...under President Carter, should have sent Mr...

...He made his campaign director (and brother) not Postmaster General and head of the Democratic party, but Attorney General and chief law enforcement officer of the land-a practice followed, with disastrous effect, by Richard M.Nixon...

...He has been a congressman, Ambassador to the UN and to China, head of the Republican Party and the CIA-but none for more than two years...

...The Senate, following the precedent of their rejection of Theodore Sorenson to head the C.I.A...

...George Bush is an able man or not...

...But President Reagan shares the common presidential preference for weak and politically dependent men heading the departments and sycophants at The White Palace...

...The president's worst appointment: William Casey, his campaign chairman, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency...

...Ruckelshaus knows the job because he held it previously, his record is good and he is a man of independent reputation...

...Both presidents have gone the external special-government route: Carter continued the Nixon practice of appointing "tsars" or ministers of special and vague portfolio...

...Though "revisionists" are now saying Ike was secretly omnicompetent, the militarization of foreign policy and the loss of executive lines of accountability began in the fifties...

...We are no longer talking about the president's five pals gathered around a kitchen table, but about selection of management for a vast labyrinth of procedures, funds, regulations, and guarantees-that Leviathan we know as modern government...

...So, it is fair to say we are still in the process of assimilating the age of bureaucracy and administration...

...any man the president wants for any job is pretty much acceptable unless he is a bigot or a crook...

...REAGAN deserves special blame for cronyism in appointments, rivaling only Warren G. Harding...

...Reagan's best appointment was of William Ruckelshaus to head the Environmental Protection Agency...

...Under Eisenhower, the National Security Council and the White House staff became major power sources...

...In that decade, the Defense Department and the military industrial complex the president later warned us about began to balloon...

...President Carter fired the most independent and able of his team, reportedly because of tension between them and the White House (read campaign) staff...

...Kennedy shifted power decisively from the cabinet and what until Eisenhower had been the orderly and accountable growth of an entire branch of administrative government, to the White House staff and his own confidential apparatus...

...Nor ought we to tinker with the separation of powers by gutting presidential appointment power or over-politicizing the appointment process...

...The history of LBJ and Nixon is well known but, except for the Ford interlude which included competent appointees like Carla Hills, William Coleman, and James Schlesinger, the trend toward weak and often unqualified or interchangeable cabinet officers has continued...

...I would prefer that he had been in one job for ten years instead of five for two...

...Our system does not build in "cabinet government," nor does it constitutionally define executive branch advisory and administrative power...

...Under Eisenhower, the idea of extra-constitutional, non-treaty foreign policy arrangements ("doctrines" and "resolutions") began to take hold...

...Mr.Casey would have made a fine Secretary of Commerce...

...As Eugene McCarthy wrote, JFK personalized the presidency...

...or Health and Human Services, but I do not think he was qualified to head our delegation to the UN...

...Before it was imperialized, the office had to be personalized...

...Experience, knowledge, and commitment to a given issue, program, or field are not taken seriously as qualifications for the top management positions in the government...

...Both bureaucratic largess and budget began to slip under Dwight Eisenhower...

...Kennedy appointed a weak Secretary of State so, he said, he might act as his own...

...Moreover, the growth of the executive branch has been cancerous in almost every sense of the word...

...Eisenhower may have left the country in better shape than he found it, but he helped to unleash amorphous and unchained energy in the executive branch...

...Reagan likes commissioners and special emissaries...

...Advisors...

...I think Mr...

...And the man who ran on a platform of containing government ought to be abashed for his fox-guarding-the-henhouse mode of regulation...

...Great presidents (Lincoln, F.D.R...

...we might then have a record to assess...

...John Connally was an able White House advisor for President Nixon, but he was not a very good Secretary of the Treasury...

...he is not qualified for the C.I.A...

...We may allow ourselves to be "unrealistic" about the expansive quality of democratic administration, but we cannot afford to be careless about its tendency to be arrogant and unaccountable...

...But confirmation should be a process, and a process grounded in probity, not congressional good fellowship, partisan ardor, or the love of hot television light...

...Similarly, I am of the opinion that Andrew Young would have made a credible Secretary of H.U.D...

...Under Eisenhower, the CIA and the Department of State became adventurous...

...President Reagan has been through two Secretaries of State and three N.S.C...

...APPOINTMENTS & ABILITIES Cabinet government, competent government KEITH BURRIS MUSICAL CHAIRS at the White House in the cabinet and in the higher circles of statecraft, has become, in the last twenty years, almost routine...

...Clark's jobs at State, N.S.C, and now Interior, illustrate merely the extremity of a clumsy notion of government we have gradually come to accept...

...you do not limit government by discrediting it...

...Able presidents allow cabinet officers a degree of authority and autonomy, and grant them tenure enough to learn their jobs and accomplish something...

...The Senate should assume less responsibility for the generation of legislation (much of it superfluous or poorly written), and more for the quality and qualifications of the cabinet...

...One may argue that career or super-bureaucrats lend stability to the continually changing executive departments, but policy and direction are generated from above not below, and the point of keeping cabinet officers political is that in a democracy, bureaucratic power is to be held responsible...

...In a presidential election year, the media should press prospective candidates for information on their possible cabinets...

...Cabinet power and responsibility were further eroded under President Kennedy...

...But the recent Watt-Clark escapade deserves special note as well as historical perspective...

...Nonetheless, as recently as Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the federal executive branch seemed to be under control (or essentially under control) in both budgets and management...

...I do know he is experienced...

...He appointed a non-political mathematician/businessman to head the Department of Defense...

...post...

...KEITH BURRIS teaches political science at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania...

...appoint strong persons as cabinet members, sometimes even political enemies...

...And so forth...

...We may have set some bounds here in the era of Andy Jackson...

...Casey's name back on the grounds that the nomination was inappropriate...

...In foreign policy for the last seven years, we've had not only the State and Security Council changes, but four Middle East Envoys, one Central American "Envoy for Peace," the Kissinger panel, numerous advisory tours by Vice Presidents Mondale and Bush, Ambassador Kirkpatrick and company at the United Nations threatening withdrawal, preceded by Donald McHenry and Andrew Young...

...The Senate may be the ultimate culprit...