Tales from the Top
Popkin, Samuel Kernell and Samuel
TALES FROM THE TOP INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE WITH EIGHT FORMER PRESIDENTIAL AIDES Last year, eight former senior members of the White House staff met at the University of California to discuss...
...In the infinite wisdom of the press commentators—the infinite wisdom was that the president had done a stupid thing and hadn't even thought about the fact that the mining might impinge upon the Soviet trip, which, of course, was the overriding consideration that had been Haig: And only one or two people told President Nixon that the Russians wanted the summit so badly that they would go ahead regardless of what he did...
...Rumsfeld: I think the phrase "cabinet government" is not a good one because it leaves people with the impression that it's possible today to allow cabinet officers to proceed semi-independently in their respective areas of jurisdiction...
...That was the lesson we all should have absorbed at the time anyway...
...President," and then bring up a totally unrelated subject, get a decision on it, and run with it...
...I want the cabinet to consider that...
...Special office for drug abuse, and the next thing you know, you have a whole bunch of people to deal with, a whole bunch of employees, and pretty soon, they are operating programs...
...and Jack Watson, from Jimmy Carter's...
...You mean you would have had a Don Regan in the Carter White House...
...Don't sink it...
...Rumsfeld: Exactly...
...Larry Berman: Over the last 30 years the swelling of the White House staff has been at the cost of cabinet government...
...It's what I called an "oh, by the way" decision...
...It's very easily found out after two or three times, and it seems to me that anybody who did that would quickly find himself going down the road...
...Communication was bad...
...That was the first news, and, of course, it was a part of the world where we have very few military assets...
...Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, from Gerald Ford's...
...They had to be put into the process, and the job of the chief of staff during that period was to assure that, in fact, the defense input got into the foreign policy and national security decision-making process...
...Chancellor: The mining was, what, four weeks before the visit...
...Sorensen: More important than who gets a White House parking permit or who eats in the White House Mess is who is able to invoke the president's name, who is using the president's telephone, and who is using the president's stationery...
...As is true of so many things, our pendulum swung too far in the other direction...
...He personally monitored the conduct of our armed forces during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it turned out it was a good thing he did because he and the chief of naval operations had a very fundamental difference, one on which a war might have hung in the balance...
...The president was delivering a major address where Patrick Henry had spoken 200 years before, and I was in the closet upstairs on the White House telephone with Pat Moynihan trying one more time to keep Pat from resigning because Henry had said something about him that had been printed in Scotty Reston's column...
...For example, that problem between you and Udall: I don't know what to do about that, but I sure wish you'd talk to him about it...
...Presidents make mistakes...
...I want the NSC to consider it ." That was part of his process of pushing operational decisions to the operating departments and agencies where he thought they belonged...
...and you said, "No, sir, I didn't...
...Your responsibility at that point was to say, "Well, we'll staff it out," and then take it and send it through the system...
...Well, I'm sure it is...
...Lasted about two days...
...Haldeman: Somebody screwed up again...
...He said, "I'm sure that some day, my luck being what it is, a guy is going to call me from the NSC staff at three in the morning and tell me that a navy pilot has dropped a bomb down the smokestack of a Russian freighter sitting in Hanoi Harbor...
...You carry a lot of information in to them...
...So it was his decision against a very strong consensus not to put the summit in jeopardy that I think ultimately brought that war to a conclusion, which ultimately Chancellor: Are there dynamics within certain decisions that require, even if the rest of the world knows, that you can't tell the Americans...
...It's goofy the way technology has put a president in that position...
...If the president decides he wants a national security adviser to be the focal point of our national security policy, then it will work...
...Next day, he saw Udall, and the matter was resolved...
...Watson: I'll make a suggestion, as a general proposition—and we were victims of this, so I'm speaking out of bitter experience here...
...I would call it professional staff work...
...I think here, again, however, it depends on the president and what he wishes...
...I said, "Well, Mr...
...He'd lay it on the president, and the president would take it...
...And he said, "I don't know...
...Let me see what I can do...
...We came back in a few days with a plan, and he said at that point, "I didn't think you would do it ." Chancellor: General Goodpaster, you worked for President Eisenhower...
...Watson: I agree...
...McPherson: This whole "spokes of the wheel" business, the whole approach to the president's business, is about information...
...And I said, "I don't intend to," and he ordered that it be done...
...Now, you asked about technology...
...Rumsfeld: I quite agree, you have to have a national security adviser to bring those threads up between the CIA and—but I do not think he ought to be making public pronouncements, and I do not think it's the responsibility of White House staff to conduct operations...
...He was concerned about the drug problem...
...Oftentimes, I think when you sit outside the White House, you assume the chief of staff is sitting there making these decisions to sort of keep information away from the president...
...And that navy pilot would have been born and raised in Johnson City, Texas...
...turned out the advice and the planning were bad...
...President Ford, I don't think enjoyed Jim Schlesinger, as opposed to respect—totally different...
...Haldeman, it has been written that when President Nixon would give you certain kinds of instructions, you'd say "Yes, sir," and then go off and start a process which didn't always result in that action being taken . . . . Wasn't there one time when he said to you, "Bob, you never did that, did you...
...The cabinet officer comes to the chief of staff and says, "I've got to be at that dinner...
...It will look like I'm downgraded!' And the chief of staff says, "You've got a point...
...President, it isn't quite that clear...
...But you make certain he understands when you are giving him your own opinion and when you are passing on the opinions of those in the administration with whom he wants to consult before he makes a decision...
...as it was his making some kind of offhand decision that hadn't been carefully thought about, and then people took it and ran with it...
...How much turmoil goes down below and ends up disrupting things depends on how skillful a manager he is...
...Cheney: It also has a depressing effect upon the initiative of all those people in the organization between the president and that pilot out there over the ocean...
...It just coincided that Johnson got tired of reading all these memoranda, and Kintner said, "Why don't I be chief of staff...
...Cheney: I would argue, too, that the NSC adviser performs a very useful role in part because everybody else—with one or two exceptions, the chief of staff and one or two others—everybody in the White House, everybody in the administration, is a specialist...
...I believe that devoutly...
...How about your intelligence...
...I don't know what it was, some minor piece of business...
...The way a White House chief of staff performs his or her function is in itself going to depend on the individual...
...If I go over here and I leak something to Broder and it will run here and this guy will react!' The press has a major weakness: it can't cover very effectively policy differences...
...Turned out to be the right decision, but it was basically just dumb luck...
...Say you've got a grain embargo issue, or let's say you have an issue on the farm bill or I was the SOB...
...It didn't happen just because some megalomaniac like Lyndon Johnson said, "Let's add them all up...
...Our first crisis involving Cuba was the Bay of Pigs, and that was a fiasco handled badly from beginning to end...
...He didn't actually appoint a chief of staff until late in the summer of 1979...
...To have a similar group picture now, you would need Yankee Stadium...
...Rumsfeld: The president wants everyone to like him...
...Should he and his staff be conducting operations the way the present national security staff has conducted operations in Nicaragua...
...Three days later, the cabinet officer's in there and and says, "Oh, by the way, Mr...
...But repeatedly after that, at his regular Wednesday afternoon meetings, the vicepresident would come in with a new policy proposal for the president, new health insurance scheme or new economic policy initiative of some kind...
...Haldeman: I've seen it only from the White House side, and I completely agree with Al, and I completely agree that the White House staff should be an operational unit, not a policymaking or policy-executing unit...
...Theodore Sorensen: The short way was to say, "That sounds like something Dick Nixon would have suggested...
...Had the president shared with the Congress and the American people the fact that a dialogue had begun, a very tentative one, with Beijing, I can assure you the opposition on the Hill would have been so vehement that there never would have been an opening to the People's Republic of China...
...The ultimate result is great personal hostility between, in my case, myself and the vice-president...
...But, Harry, my answer to your question is yes, I am suggesting a strong, trusted, even-handed White House chief of staff...
...He didn't have to call on the secretary of the treasury or energy or any of them...
...We had a series of meetings all during that week, and the president felt it important to keep up his normal schedule so that there would be no leak to the Soviets that we were aware of the missiles in Cuba...
...I believe, in fact, that one of Carter's central problems was that in so many key ways, he was not a good politician...
...I've got to make some plans...
...Chancellor: I'd like to ask you all now to move on to something that is more serious: crisis management...
...But the problem, in fact, was created by the president...
...President, that really isn't the policy...
...What the press is dealing out all the time is cheapening the dialogue and the debate that takes place over fundamental differences of policy...
...That was an easy order not to carry out because it was physically impossible to do...
...I remember a very sharp question that he addressed to members of the staff on occasion, or a comment, and it ran like this, "Now, wait a minute, boys...
...Rockefeller finally told Ford the only way he would serve in a second Ford administration as vice president was if he could also be chief of staff...
...Now, does that mean that the defense views and Jim Schlesinger's views ought to be cut out of that process...
...It happened because the whole notion of a broad-scale attack on poverty involved education, employment, and training of all kinds, juvenile delinquency prevention, and so on...
...he's involved in too many things...
...One of Carter's greatest weaknesses, I think, which was the flip side of one of his greatest strengths, was deciding some of the most important things that needed to be done in the interest of the country and then wanting to get them all done at once...
...They had to...
...There was a substantial difference within the very highest levels of the president's advisers, and this was a totally secret activity...
...You go in to the president and say, "Look, this guy needs it to do his job effectively, to be on it ." He says "Look, Betty just came up with this list...
...And Foster Dulles, bless him, said, "Well, Mr...
...President Ford put the vice-president in charge of all domestic policy making, put him in charge of the Domestic Council, gave him the assignment of creating new policy, and let him staff the operation out...
...All he wants is for the ultimate product to accomplish what the president intended...
...As I recall, he formed the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency...
...Alexander Haig: The most important thing, I think, is the evolution of technology and its impact on crisis management...
...If you have been involved in the bureaucratic in-fighting, try to decide that...
...It's obviously a congressional issue...
...Tip O'Neill puts his arm around him and says, "Come to my birthday party...
...Also, what's your criteria for limiting information that reaches the president...
...How does he get a sense of what's important and how does he get a sense of whom to listen to...
...No:' And I say, "Fine...
...Richard Cheney: The biggest problem was the decision that didn't receive attention...
...In this case, President Ford made the decision to let the boat proceed...
...Theodore Sorensen ceived, and really should have been done by somebody else...
...You know that's our policy, and I want action to be initiated on that...
...It's incomplete...
...And it's interesting because it's been repeated not too far back in time now...
...That kind of an operation...
...When he came back from one of those meetings, having been away, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and I said to him, "To tell you the truth, in one sense, the meetings went very well without you...
...Those are legitimate interests...
...He really wanted to know the particulars...
...The staff's job is not to make the decisions, but by the same token, the staff has to avoid letting the president be blindsided by allowing a single cabinet officer to go out and make a decision like that...
...of California Press, 1986...
...You're going to have a cabinet meeting next week...
...I think at the Gulf of Tonkin, President Johnson was engaged much too early, when we had just very fuzzy intelligence reports...
...I got in shouting matches with the vice president...
...You can have a very good speechwriter who is a very close friend of the president's, and has written a couple of spectacular speeches...
...You have all these threads, and the White House staff's function is to see that those threads get through the needle's eye in a reasonably coherent way...
...Cheney: That's a key point...
...You meet with him five times...
...The way our world works, it's rare when you find an issue that is the jurisdiction of only one cabinet officer...
...But Udall said Swidler wouldn't talk to him because Swidler said he was the chairman of an independent agency, and all the political science books say that independent agencies don't have to kowtow to executive management...
...President, I've heard a wonderful _saying, I don't recall where it came from, but 'Let's not make our mistakes in a hurry: " And he would take that well...
...It would have been inconceivable to imagine Lyndon Johnson as a Harvard Business School CEO coming in— imagine Lyndon Johnson with a computer, with his PC...
...From the standpoint of the vice-president, you are a bad guy, an obstacle to his opportunity to have a significant impact on policy...
...And I said no, and he said, "Aren't you going to...
...So I go back in to the president and I said, "Lookit, I'm not so all fired sure you ought to go to that party...
...That is a fatal mistake...
...The reason President Johnson did it was not because he was stupid or a bad manager...
...He isn't having a fight with the speechwriter...
...President Kennedy remarked often that he was damned if the question of war with the Soviet Union over Berlin was going to be decided by some sergeant on the border making a decision with respect to a tank or troop movement...
...Rumsfeld: There's no question...
...In reading your biographies, I found a wide range of moments when your stomachs must have churned, when you must have been scared...
...Jack Kennedy, to a large extent, gave his brother, the attorney general of the United States, amazing authority to coordinate the conduct of foreign policy...
...That's when you really got into big trouble...
...At the bottom, he would write either yes, no, see me, or something or other...
...You say, "Pat, the president would like to see you afterwards:' and you get him in for a 15- or 20-minute chat in the Oval Office, and the president tells him how important he is to the policy of his administration...
...Samuel Popkin: What were you allowed to do for Pat...
...President Kennedy was concerned about poverty...
...But finally, you know, you work your way out of it and pretty soon, he doesn't go to the party...
...Sorensen: The most controversial issue in White House staffing is the role of the national security adviser...
...It's conditioned in this way...
...And Bob—I didn't walk in his shoes, but I was an assistant to President Nixon, a member of the cabinet, a White House official, and I watched it, and I know, just as sure as we are sitting here, that he ran around figuring out ways that Paul McCracken and Herb Stein and George Shultz and all these other people who had input in the economic area, found their way— and Arthur Burns—found their way into these meetings and that their memos found their way into the president...
...It's a fair question, Harry, and I'm not necessarily saying that...
...It also results in a lack of cohesion, a lack of organization and cutting in on decision-making before it reaches the presidential level...
...Haig: Having come from the White House staff, I was very sensitive to the tendency for the White House staff to assume authority and responsibility which, by the confirmation process, belongs quite rightly in the hands of the cabinet officers and the cabinet departments...
...Rumsfeld: A lot depends on how good a manager the president is...
...He's the hub...
...That was believed to be in danger of impinging upon the president's planned visit to the Soviet Union...
...I watched Bob Haldeman with President Nixon, who was terribly enamored of John Connally, do just the opposite, struggle to get the other views in because the president enjoyed being with John Connally...
...For him to take that on during the first year of his presidency, at the same time that he was doing everything else—economic policy and employment programs, energy and government reorganization, and all the rest—was folly because it exacerbated his political problem in the West, widened that breach, and cut away his congressional support...
...I recall on occasion telling him, "Mr...
...Watson: There are about 1,500 people in the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the executive office of the president...
...What's he do...
...Now here you have two or three thousand employees in the executive office of the president in an operating agency that doesn't belong there...
...Well, every now and then, this would get to be too much for him...
...Yours unfortunately is at the bottom of the pile...
...There are other ways of dealing with this problem at this point, and we will be back to you with a plan for doing that...
...But he hasn't been thinking about parks at all...
...So part of what we were doing was a reaction against that...
...I was the SOB, and on a number of occasions, got involved in shouting matches with the vicepresident...
...He comes back down to the White House...
...I'm going to that party...
...The answer is to make the departments and agencies do that which you believe they ought to be doing...
...I've got a couple of political guys I want to add in there...
...He was opposed to a lot of the water projects in the West because he thought they were budget-busters, and there were great questions about whether or not they should be funded...
...I looked around that semicircle and I saw some people who, in other times, in other places, had discussed in guarded terms the political plots in which they were engaged, plots against Congress to get it to do what they wanted it to do, plots against the cabinet, corporate or individual, to thwart some of their goals or help them carry them forward, plots against the bureaucracy, constant efforts to try to get them to behave, and from time to time, plots against the president himself to get him to do or not do something that those staff people thought he should or should not be doing...
...McPherson: Which is why you need a substantial White House staff...
...There's going to be equal access . . . . He's going to have X number of advisers, six or eight or ten...
...If there's been a subject that has caused fights in Washington over the last two dozen years, it has been the question of whether there should be one and what his role should be...
...In this case, it came through a civilian merchant shipping line that heard some radio call...
...Take a grain embargo with Poland for example...
...Of course not...
...Or that you had some scheme or something...
...He glared at me, and he said, "I've got Foster Dulles coming over here today, and I'm going to have him straighten you out on this...
...Here's an example...
...John Chancellor: Presidents are human...
...A couple of them, I'm not quite sure what they did, to tell you the truth...
...He's convinced that you tried to cut him out...
...In the Ford administration, we had major problems in managing the vice-presidential relationship...
...H. R. Haldeman: Yes, there was...
...Cabinet officer is not on it...
...Should he be making declarations of national policy the way Brzezinski did when Vance was secretary of state...
...It's a lot harder, takes more time, and it takes ultimately some cooperation with the Congress, but in the last analysis, we would just sink if we kept adding special offices in the executive office of the president, even for good reason...
...Ted Sorensen is quite right, and Don is quite right talking about the nature of the fellow, the kind of man he is...
...David Broder: To be candid, I was somewhat skeptical about some of the denial that I thought I was hearing yesterday...
...Sorensen, did you ever go in to President Kennedy and say, "This idea that you are circulating is a bad one...
...Cheney: The technology now makes it possible for the president to make a decision in a case involving military force that really ought to be made maybe by the commander of the aircraft carrier [as] in the Tonkin Gulf or, in the case of the Mayaguez, off Cambodia...
...And if you wanted all of it to cohere, you had to put somebody above it...
...President, it isn't quite our policy...
...President, I'm not on the list ." The president says, "you're kidding...
...Now that's, in fact, bad management...
...They had their discussion, and as the cabinet member was leaving, he'd turn around and he'd say, "Oh, by the way, Mr...
...I'd like to know about how you folks dealt with the strong cabinet members in your time...
...Bob didn't really have a function around the White House for a while...
...It's going to create conflict!' But the president is the president...
...He said, "Now boys, let's not make our mistakes in a hurry:' One of the great moments, going back to the initial question, was when he would propose something and be a little assertive and anxious to get on with it...
...Johnson got furious and that was the end of Kintner...
...McPherson: President Johnson wanted to be called every time something happened in the Vietnam war era...
...He hardly knew them, having just begun the presidency...
...What runs the numbers of presidential staffers up higher are the Council of Economic Advisers, the Council on Environmental Quality, and other such groups that are in the executive office...
...If you've got a strong secretary of state who wants to go one way and a strong secretary of defense who wants to go the other way, it's reported as a Weinberger-Shultz conflict, instead of an analysis of whatever merit there might be in the two policy positions...
...Of course, the speechwriter knows that you are going to do that, so the speech comes in late...
...He did it because the department's agencies weren't doing things the way he wanted, so he decided he had to have it in the White House...
...Let me give some quick yes-or-no answers...
...You cannot eliminate or ignore the personal touch of how a particular individual performs a particular job...
...It's because we have people in the White House, as Jack Watson says, who aren't there representing the president to the country...
...Cheney: I can't count the number of times I would get a phone call, probably about once a month, and it would be a situation in which Pat Moynihan was calling threatening to resign or Henry Kissinger was threatening to resign because they didn't like each other...
...Watson: No...
...The president says, "I'll be there...
...Having agents throughout the system who want to help you out becomes a very essential part and a non-organizational part of a successful presidency...
...In fact, there was a time when the president of the United States was in the Cabinet Room . . . with the National Security Council, and he was receiving reports from the next room that were the actual words of the pilot who was flying over the Mayaguez and over the straits and over a boat that was taking people from the island to the mainland...
...Someone will cancel and we'll jam him in" You go out of the office...
...He regarded some of them—I won't debate the wisdom of our judgment here—but he regarded some of them as real boondoggles...
...Should there be a national security adviser to the president even though we have secretaries of state and defense...
...You'll kill them if it is...
...We were reacting...
...They are representing the country to the president...
...Haldeman and Alexander Haig from Richard Nixon's...
...It's that kind of operation more than the byzantine plotting, "Well, let's see...
...President, East Wing, sends down the list for the state dinner for Helmut Schmidt, the West German chancellor...
...I was ordered by the president unequivocally and immediately to commence lie detector tests of every employee of the State Department because there had been a series of leaks which were seriously damaging our negotiations in Vietnam...
...Watson: Let me give a couple of examples, but on the political point, I want to add—and I think this is a paraphrase, not a quote—President Truman said that only a good politician can be a good president, words to that effect...
...But I do not think you need to have a special assistant to the president for every legitimate special interest in the country...
...Sometimes presidents want to do damn fool things they have to be talked out of, and so my question to all of you to begin this panel today is: How do you talk a president out of a damn fool idea...
...An initiative that might have made all the sense in the world to Nelson Rockefeller was shot down...
...Give him a ride on Air Force One, use of the White House Mess, I mean, tennis lessons...
...Are you sure...
...The chief of staff has to heave his body in the middle and try to figure a way for the substantive portions of the speech to finally reach the substantive people so they have a chance to look at it, so the president knows that when he finally gets the speech that, in fact, the substantive people have commented on it...
...He eventually is going to say to somebody, "Stop it, sink it, don't let them get there...
...The panel included General Andrew Goodpaster, from Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration...
...I think that the way that Jim Baker, to use recent history, performed his role as White House chief of staff for Mr...
...He picked Nelson Rockefeller because he was the kind of man of stature that he needed as an unelected president in his own right...
...He went ahead and made the decision to do it anyway...
...I have hanging on my wall a picture which shows a dozen individuals, roughly a dozen, standing on the back steps of the White House...
...We just sent stuff to Johnson as always...
...Pretty soon, in the executive office of the president under Lyndon Johnson came the Office of Economic Opportunity, which Sargent Shriver ran, and whom I succeeded...
...I can't remember what the issue was, but it was a battle over jurisdiction of some kind with the chairman of the Federal Power Commission, Joe Swidler...
...President, this really is a mistake...
...Everybody on staff said, "Mr...
...I'll give you an example of a couple of "saves" that are minor...
...I've got so many other things I'm trying to work out...
...It comes in pieces...
...It's in seven or eight days ." So I come back with a note and I give it to my deputy, Dick Cheney, and Cheney gives it to Jerry Jones or somebody, and they start figuring out where the hell it is and what time it is and who's going to be there and how did they manage that...
...McPherson: Really...
...Suddenly he's president...
...You've got four-star generals and admirals and people who have spent their entire lives dealing with these kinds of forces, and all of a sudden, you've placed the emphasis upon them passing the buck up the chain...
...Did you ever have a comparable experience with him...
...In other words, taking this idea and putting it into the staff system—the people that he had hired and brought aboard, who in some cases had statutory authority over that area of government—and letting them then provide their advice and allowing some time so that he could have the benefit of their views...
...I said, "Well, that's unfortunate...
...That doesn't happen...
...The secretary of state—maybe Al would disagree with me—the secretary of state has parochial interests...
...Speechwriting...
...General Andrew Goodpaster: Somewhat comparable, I think...
...We will make you the boss ." Well, none of us believed it...
...If you have hundreds of people doing that, there is no way you can keep them out of mischief...
...The leaner and meaner you are, the more effective your White House will be...
...And because they are all important to him and his friends and counselors and people whose judgment and loyalty he trusts and values, he wants all of them reporting directly to him...
...TALES FROM THE TOP INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE WITH EIGHT FORMER PRESIDENTIAL AIDES Last year, eight former senior members of the White House staff met at the University of California to discuss the last 25 years of the presidency...
...Cheney: I think there's a tendency—at least our experience was, thinking back on it now—that oftentimes when these crises develop, that you end up sucking decisions into the White House that perhaps ought to be made someplace else...
...After a period of time passed, Joe Swidler called me and he said, "Gee, my request for a budget for next year has been sitting on your desk for a very long time...
...Should he make policy...
...What would you do for him...
...He called me back ten days later and said, "What about that budget request...
...I did nothing whatsoever...
...Goodpaster: I have to say I agree...
...So Johnson said fine...
...It wasn't so much a matter of his making a damn fool decision...
...Richard Cheney an issue on Vietnam or whatever...
...As I understand it, General Haig, when you were secretary of state, the frustration seemed quite different from when you worked in the White House...
...I think all of us had that experience at one time or another, probably all with Moynihan...
...I again didn't do it on the first round that time, then went back to him later that day, and after that time—Al is smirking over here, because Haig remembers this perhaps more vividly than I do—I went back and said, "Mr...
...He finally told Ford at one point that the only way he would serve in a second Ford administration as vice-president was if he could also be chief of staff...
...It was the kind of thing that would happen when somebody was cleared to go into the Oval Office, a cabinet member, to talk about a subject...
...You may carry in a package of memos that he will read before he vetoes or signs a bill, before he makes a key decision...
...So that night, last thing you know, it comes on a napkin and he's got a little note...
...I would prefer that it not be that way...
...But you've got the fact that the speech is going to say something about something, and you've got all these advisers, the Bill Simons and Henry Kissingers and the Schlesingers of the world, who are milling around in the substance every day, and you have to take the speech to them so they can look at it and comment on it...
...One of the greatest examples in the Nixon administration was the initiative toward the People's Republic of China...
...Sorensen: On the other hand, presidents also sometimes reach out for decisions that they don't have to reach out for because they deliberately want to be involved...
...McPherson: I wish I could say otherwise, but I agree...
...Let's put that fellow back on!' What does the guy think...
...I said, "Well, that's the goal that's stated—to work down to the long-term strength—but it's conditioned on the ability of the Europeans to fill the gap that's there, the gap we created ." "No," he said, "that's not right...
...It may be a Department of Labor issue because in some cases the unions have refused to load...
...What are you talking about, Rummy...
...But what happens when you do that...
...Chancellor: But he used you as an agent...
...The order to solve the problem was that every member of the State Department staff worldwide was to be submitted immediately to lie detector tests...
...What's happened...
...There's a limit...
...Tip's my buddy...
...I share Don Rumsfeld's view very, very vigorously...
...Clockwise from top left: Richard Cheney, Harry McPherson, Donald Rumsfeld, Andrew Goodpaster, Jack Watson, Alexander Haig, Chancellor, H.R...
...Chancellor: Isn't that called stalling...
...It was a very difficult situation...
...It didn't happen that way at all...
...He can pick the doorman at the White House, as a matter of fact...
...meeting privately with one of his senior officials in the administration and, in effect, coming away with an agreement that he would put forward to the Congress a proposal which had not been staffed out at all and which, in my view, was not very wise—and that is a massive understatement...
...He doesn't have, whatever you might think, the FBI doing that...
...He was an old friend of Johnson, and Johnson thought the world of him...
...Donald Rumsfeld: I can recall President Ford *Excerpted from Chief of Staff: 25 Years of Managing the Presidency...
...Johnson, in the evening, would have a navy guy come in and give him a rubdown and then he'd start reading about 150 memoranda...
...Everybody with a little fiefdom out there, all the GS-15s and 16s, and maybe the politicians who got appointed to be cabinet officers, wanted to have their own ballgame...
...Sorensen: Here's an example that was not a policy battle or a personality battle, but a turf battle, and those are the most fierce in Washington...
...But President Ford came in and, because he'd been vice-president, wanted to have substantive responsibility assigned to the vicepresident...
...I think the key thing is to separate out the two roles...
...He begins to believe that the speechwriting process is better if the speech isn't written by a committee, and he's right...
...We went in together, and the president looked up and he said, "Foster, I want you to straighten Andy out on this once and for all...
...Chancellor: How about the technology...
...it's inadequate...
...All of you have been there at the center of the storm when either domestic or international crises have come...
...Reagan, under an organization which was exactly as I'm describing, was very different than the way that Don Regan perform[ed] the same role with the same structure...
...Our policy is to make that reduction and I want to get that started ." I said, "Well, Mr...
...Sorensen: That is correct...
...Haig: What's material is who gets in the White House Mess, who gets a parking place...
...The other gimmick, which Bob Haldeman will remember, is that administrations that want to show they are lean and mean merely keep the fellows they have but charge them to the departments...
...Questioners included John Chancellor, David Broder, Samuel Popkin and Larry Berman, professors of political science, and Doug Newhart, a student...
...I remember the bicentennial celebration at the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, Virginia...
...Haig: Are there things that presidents must keep secret...
...Well, you know, I've been thinking about the National Park Service, not about Vietnam ." "Dean Rusk, what do you think about the Park Service...
...Nobody is willing to take responsibility for making a decision that under other circumstances they would...
...Some president may not enjoy a cabinet officer, may not like to be with him...
...Just keep it in the back of your mind...
...Please, don't misunderstand my point, I'm not saying that the president and the policies that the president endorses and promotes from the White House ought not to be sensitive and responsive to that enormously wide array of interests...
...I think that many of our problems on the Hill, many of our congressional relationships, difficulties, who's speaking for the president, would have been solved had we started from the very beginning with a strong chief of staff...
...It may very well be a Defense Department issue...
...Haig: I agree with all the observations that have been made, but I do make a point that it can work either way...
...And that, to me, is the answer to Fred's question about how the staff can help make things better...
...Johnson said, "Well, okay...
...I would postulate, a brilliant man, but not a good politician...
...Hell, he's president...
...So I think it can be done...
...Inconceivable...
...The president, regarding that crisis, met with a very small group because of their office...
...Reprinted by permission...
...Should he make policy to the extent, say, that Henry Kissinger did when Bill Rogers was secretary of state...
...He will often ask you what you think on that issue and you tell him...
...He looks at the globe and looks at it from the standpoint of State, not Civil Defense, or CIA, or one of the other agencies...
...He did it because President Kennedy was assassinated...
...I'd like to know whether you would really maintain that you were simply honest brokers when it came to carrying forward the wishes of weak cabinet members...
...It is our policy to reduce those forces in Europe...
...It's clearly a Treasury issue on the balance of payments...
...he hands you a couple of napkins where he wrote a note or something, and you look at it and he says, "I've agreed to go to Tip O'Neill's birthday party...
...Imposing an embargo or terminating one obviously is a foreign policy issue...
...I don't think you have a situation where a chief of staff survives very long if he, in effect, warps the flow of information to suit his own bias with respect to policy...
...Theodore Sorensen, from John F Kennedy's...
...But we didn't do it, and the president said the next day, "Have you gotten a lie detector program started...
...He came over one morning rather exasperated and said, "I've said that I want to start reducing our forces in Europe...
...That was the senior professional staff, the professional staff of the White House at that time...
...Now, what's the chief of staffs job...
...That's a policy matter, and if I'm going to consider that, I want the secretary of state here...
...The White House staff is about 350 or less, generally speaking, and is just one of the components of the executive office...
...So he decided to have a chief of staff, and he picked Bob Kintner, who had been the NBC chairman and had lost his job...
...Our president, unlike the general secretary of the Soviet Union or, well, I guess, a lot of other leaders in the world, does not have an intelligence network throughout the country...
...It's late in the day...
...Cheney: There's another function in there, in addition to trying to help do something positive, which is to be the cushion that takes the pain and the heat, oftentimes not only externally but also internally...
...I didn't hear very many people acknowledging that it was really a political function that they were playing in the White House staff...
...President Ford came out of the Congress...
...He was formerly a network chief of staff...
...It isn't personal...
...Haldeman, Ted Sorensen...
...Okay...
...Popkin: He thinks you never told the president...
...Outside of being the smartest man I've ever known, he had 25 or 30 years of profound and far-reaching political connections in Washington, which even the smartest president, maybe in just sheer IQ points, Jimmy Carter, did not have...
...There was a tendency between 1965, I'd say, and 1980 for that to happen more and more, and that's one of the things that made the White House staff grow...
...The national security adviser is in a position to bring to all the internal debate and controversy that's bound to reign between those departments the kind of a broad, generalist view that only the president shares, and it is vital to have...
...He can decide where he wants to go...
...Everybody was writing, everybody must have been telling you, "Well, the Russians will disinvite him ." Haldeman: Yes...
...Cheney: Sometimes it would be a matter of "it's time for a little presidential stroking," okay...
...Chancellor: Mr...
...That's throwing sand in the gears and it gets grindy, and pretty soon, out come news stories that Cheney is having a fight with the speechwriter or something...
...Doug Newhart: How much influence do you believe your personal opinions had on the president, especially in policy decision-making in urgent matters where he doesn't have a lot of time or a lot of people to consult...
...On the other hand, he had something that many presidents, many CEOs don't have...
...And I said, "Gee, Joe, yours is still at the bottom of the pile...
...But sometimes it takes very, very long...
...The answer is not to substitute and layer in the White House...
...Rumsfeld: One of the tasks of the chief of staff is to see that the president gets views, and presidents have preferences and idiosyncracies and biases and areas of ignorance, just like all of us do...
...There began a tendency, I suspect under President Johnson, but we took it to its full flower, of bringing into the White House what's called a special assistant to the president for Hispanic affairs, for women's affairs, for consumer affairs, for elderly affairs, for minority affairs...
...That's why it developed...
...Let's say it's Vietnam, and you turn to the secretary of interior and you say, "Stu Udall, what do you think about it...
...Taxes, all of it...
...In 1977, Carter developed that great energy program and tried to put it into effect...
...Rumsfeld: I want to add something that I think hits something quite important about the problem of the president...
...the president was prepared...
...Jack Watson: In terms of organization, if I had to change one thing—and this seems to be a problem that almost every president, though not President Eisenhower, suffers from...
...They are likely to be wanting to get their hands on the throttles, whereas the successful Republican presidents in the polls, Eisenhower and Reagan, particularly, have been much more inclined to sit back and let the staff deal with it until some moment at which they can speak, rather, from the mountaintop...
...An under secretary of state or assistant secretary of state will never contradict the secretary in front of you, but they did it very frankly when you were goner The president said, "I think I'll stay away from some more meetings ?' Haldeman: We had one major decision which related to the Hanoi bombing activity and mining of Haiphong...
...It pulls the president into too much...
...That's because we have people in the White House who are operating and administering programs without ever having been confirmed by the Senate...
...A White House has to respond to that behemoth, and therefore it's a natural contributor to this growth...
...It is a very, very dangerous, pernicious reality today...
...Well, I didn't know what the decision would be...
...Rumsfeld: No...
...Let me see what I can do...
...Was it any good...
...Haig: The simple facts are that this horrendous growth in the White House staff has been paralleled by an even more horrendous growth in the congressional staffs, where today I think you are looking at a figure of about 20,000...
...McPherson: That's why he has a staff around him of people who have big ears and listen and meet with people all the time and will send him memoranda and will talk to him on the phone and tell him what they think is going on...
...Same thing with President Nixon...
...It's nicer anyway, because the department has to pay and those fellows are counted on the department's books and not counted by the White House press who are looking for this growth...
...That's not a staff matter...
...It's certainly going to be a press issue...
...When Carter explained it, a Republican congressman whom I respected a lot came back from a meeting up there and said, "That fellow really knows everything about his energy program...
...His relationship with the vice-president was excellent...
...Kintner stopped something...
...I think it's imperative that that be the case and it's essential, in order to do that, that virtually all the staff members, except perhaps the press secretary and one or two other designated spokesmen, be people with a "passion for anonymity!' Goodpaster: I don't think it's all that difficult, because I saw President Eisenhower, in fact, operate along these lines...
...I think the Carter administration and Reagan administration subsequently have done much better...
...Chancellor: Was [the Pueblo] in your mind when you people were dealing with the Mayaguez...
...And the next thing you hear is him saying, "They look like Caucasians, and they are halfway to the shore:' And then everyone looks at the president...
...Kintner got mad and asked that they all be sent to him...
...The way it was finally accomplished was simply by staffing it out...
...But it ends up right smack on the president's desk, and he ultimately is going to have to make that decision about whether or not the pilot goes forward and sinks the boat...
...These interdepartmental committees, the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was put in the White House staff for a very long time, didn't happen just because Johnson thought that was a swell idea, getting kind of bored with cabinet government and that sort of thing...
...Runs out one of the Koreans who's under investigation by the Justice Department is paying for the party...
...He could do it all ." I was bowled over and I said, "Is he going to get it through...
...That's not what the White House staff should be...
...And the decision actually goes all the way up the chain, not only to CINCPAC [Commander-in-chief, Pacific] in Hawaii and the secretary of defense and the NSC, but ultimately ends up on the president's desk, and he makes a relatively small decision that can have an enormous impact upon how he's perShould there be a national security adviser...
...What do you mean...
...That's serious...
...Sorensen: I think that everyone up here could testify to one important lesson a president learns about crisis management in the course of his presidency, and that is who should be in the room...
...The secretary of interior, Stewart Udall, came to see me...
...Well, I didn't say a word to Secretary Dulles when he came over...
...We always have put that condition on it, that the Europeans have to be able to fill that gap:" The president looked up at Foster Dulles and he said, "Foster, I've lost my last friend ?' Chancellor: Mr...
...I didn't know who was in the right and so on...
...Harry McPherson: Well, very gingerly—if your president is Lyndon Johnson...
...Then he's not serving the interest of the president...
...They go in with an idea that they are going to have a spokes-ofthewheel staff...
...Goodpaster: Eisenhower had a saying that he used a number of times...
...I'll give you an example...
...The subordinates are more willing to contradict their superiors when you are not there...
...President, you shouldn't do that...
...And my generalization is that perhaps Democratic presidents, being more governmentoriented, being more oriented toward the use of government than the Republican presidents we have had in the last 25 years, that is, shaping government), starting these big programs that everybody sooner or later wrings their hands over and so on—Democrats are likely to be involved...
...If you ask President Ford today why that relationship was strained, it was always the staff problem with the vice-president...
...to at least a public perception that there had been a kind of palace guard, to quote a colleague of yours, and that there hadn't been a free flow of diverse ideas and information to the president, that it had been too rigidly controlled, too tight a ship...
...Send them through Kintner first ." We did that...
...It should be there to assist the president in the management of the executive branch and in the office of the president, and it should exist at and operate at the will and direction of the president...
...There's only so many slots for a state dinner...
...And the answer to that is: of course...
...Of course, Pat was ambassador to the UN and Henry was at State...
...He goes up to the Hill...
...Samuel Kernel!, Samuel L. Popkin, editors...
...The answer would always come back—it never failed—it always came back exactly the same way, "This new policy proposal is totally inconsistent with the basic policy of the Ford administration ." So in effect then, you'd end up having been, as Don said, the sand in the gears...
...It's very easy to cover personality conflicts, which you guys are guilty of all the time...
...Rumsfeld: It's funny...
...Ultimately nothing that the staff could do politically could save him, if you will, from his determination to do it all, because he felt that it ought to be done...
...How does he find out what's going on in the country...
...And he gets down over this boat that's chugging from the island to the mainland, and he says, "I see people on there...
...The White House can't operate that way...
...Chancellor: Wasn't there a point [during the Cuban Missile Crisis] at which someone asked the president to leave the Excom meetings because his presence there was inhibiting debate...
...That was, in my judgment, a mistake that President Carter made in the first two years of his administration...
...But for a time there was, though I think it's been cut back now because, in my judgment, it was so clearly the wrong way to go...
...I'm secretary of X. I deal with them all the time on this...
...I said, "Gee, Joe, I've got a stack of them on my desk...
...He doesn't tell you anything about it...
...You have a cabinet meeting, and I've tried to think, ever since I observed them, how to hold a good one...
...Harry McPherson, from Lyndon Johnson's...
...Should he be conducting operations in Nicaragua...
...At the end of the day, you'd go down for the final close-out session, and the president would hand it to you and say, "What the hell do we do with this...
...If I get that off my desk, I might have time to get back to the pile!' He said, "Well, no, no, that's a question of the rights of an independent agency...
...The guy's been at the last four straight...
Vol. 19 • April 1987 • No. 3
