Putting the President Back Into Politics

...The only people he deals with in the government are his underlings...

...By turning up our noses at “politics” in the White House and urging the President to get on to his real business of guiding the nation, we set the two important conditions for the secrecy and duplicity with which we have recently become so familiar...

...the reader feels as if he is in the room listening to Larry O’Brien lay out the campaign plans, or watching George McGovern and Tom Eagleton talk things over...

...A more helpful approach to the recent failures of the presidency is to realize that Presidents have tried too hard to hold themselves above politics-or at least to give that appearance-rather than engaging in it deeply enough...

...It should also be noted that, by all normal journalis tic standards, White has done a fine job...

...Instead, White and the President sat back and chewed over the “larger duties” of the office, in a rambling discussion that always seemed to find its way back to foreign affairs: I wanted to turn the conversation to home affairs...

...As a result, both partisan leadership and controversial domestic policy decision-making are increasingly contracted out or down and, in any event, disassociated from the overt visible (and thus accountable) actions of a President...

...live in an atmosphere which will instill some degree of humility into even the most arrogant of men...

...The “if you knew what I know” explanation, applied to events as diverse as the Dominican Republic invasion and the Daniel Ellsberg break-in, is a difficult one to counter, because the public can never be confident that this time the President isn’t finally telling the truth...

...White set the tone for his treatment of the Presidents in his 1960 book, as he described the transformation of John Kennedy from candidate to President...

...None of the congressmen-or the labor leaders or foreign veterans’ groups-is individually the equal of the President, but many of them can resist on specific points...

...In the most memorable passage from the series, White described how Kennedy suddenly became “Mr...

...But nonetheless he is honorable and well-intentioned, grappling with problems far more trying than those any of the rest of us will ever face...

...George Reedy explained the techniques necessary for persuasion: The master practitioners of the Senate...

...Sunlight, they say, is the best of disinfectants, but bringing Presidents to heel will require attitudinal changes, party-building efforts on a grand scale, and harsh rebukes to any President who either unwittingly or deliberately tries to hide behind the disingenuous protective shield of being above politics...

...It is this same view of politics as a “jungle” that is reflected in the Harris poll and the President’s avoidance of domestic politics...

...From the President’s point of view, there are obvious attractions to having the public define “presidential tasks” on a global scale...

...Unlike Nixon, they loved politics, and they understood the multiple purposes for which the powers of the presidency are granted...

...The respect, even veneration, he accords his Presidents is the result not of sycophancy but of his books’ own logic: if the struggle, cutting across such expanses of space and time, involving so many brave men who sacrifice themselves in futile efforts, eventually produces one victor, he must, by the storyteller’s standards, be the hero...

...White makes deliberate attempts to tell the election story in a context of public concerns and social pressures...

...Liddy and others...

...not uniquely White’s...

...Above all, White creates a sense of saga, of national myth-making...

...and I said that I had once quoted him on the presidency and the nation in a conversation of 1967, in which he had said, “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President...

...The chess game of foreign policy has turned into a greased-pig contest...

...Since that, remark had been re-quoted and misinterpreted so often, what about it...

...From a management point of view it had the same advantages as secret diplomacy: everything was under control, the employees followed orders...

...In setting policy there are always differing opinions to take into account, objections to programs, needs that have not been detected...

...White on watergate White says that when he interviewed Nixon on March 17, 1973, questions about Watergate did not seem relevant...

...More important, the President can see his decisions carried out without resistance, debate, or the threat of publicity...

...We talked of his visit to China...

...A Harris poll released on August 6 shows that the creaking ploy has paid off once again: by a 54 to 38 per cent margin, a majority of the people agreed that “the President was right in saying it is more important for him to spend his time working for the country than to be trying to find out what happened in the Watergate affair...

...One senses that these books are popular with their subjects, that a President sitting down to read feels he has finally found a writer who understands the complexities and harassments of public life...

...Yet CREEP ended up committing exploits which the National Committee could never have accomplished...

...7) “Nixon campaign officials ‘were sending FBI agents on fishing expeditions to keep them from getting to the truth.’ ” Even for those who automatically suspect Nixon’s motives, part of the appeal works, for we share that same view of the political process as cheap and corrupt...

...They have their own pride, their own views, their own groups to represent...

...5) “Within 48 hours of a supposedly confidential interview with the FBI in its Watergate investigation, an employee of the Committee for the Re-election of the President was summoned by Nixon campaign officials to explain her actions, according to her own sworn affidavit...

...As John Newhouse has illustrated in his superb new book, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT, in foreign policy the President may make the most crucial of decisions, take those steps that literally mean survival or extinction for most of the people on earth, without consulting anyone more closely in touch with the democratic pulse than Henry Kissinger...

...the openness of domestic politics has few compensating advantages...

...So the domestic field was where Presidents usually ran into trouble...

...But by calling the President more “presidential” whenever he ignores partisan politics, we encourage him to even greater isolation...

...Atheneum, $10...

...Suddenly the controlled world of the treaty-makers is replaced by the hurly-burly of people and politics...

...the GAO said its interest in the $350,000 was rekindled in light of the recent disclosures of the Vesco contribution and the testimony of Hugh W. Sloan, Jr., former finance committee treasurer, at the Watergate bugging trial...

...The way to do that, as has not so often been suggested, is to start regarding the President as a politician once more...

...To those in the White House, other parts of the political process may also start to look like a jungle: the courts, local political groups, the press, in short, anything that impedes the President’s progress between deciding he wants something done and seeing it happen...

...It will take new bait to lure Presidents out of this comfortable sanctuary and into the morass of open politics, for now the enticements are small...

...they must do what he tells them and keep quiet about it...

...The latest of these took place on March 17, 1973, by which time enough of the Watergate scandal had been aired to raise an unmistakable odor...

...Unless it touches them directly-hke busing-they don’t give a damn...

...What makes domestic politics so distasteful to Presidents-that it is full of groups to persuade and committees to inform-is precisely its virtue, for it is the major hope of retaining an open presidency, one neither bound by its own sources of information nor aloof to the point where it will no longer listen...

...But in domestic policy, there you have to deal with the whole jungle of home problems...

...Reality is never very far away...

...They did not, at the moment, seem relevant...

...Most of the men who have been effective Presidents have also been highly political-in an open, rather than covert, sense of that term...

...Presidential counsel Leonard Garment explained to White: In foreign policy, you get drama, triumph, resolution-crisis and resolution...

...National Committeemen from all over the country would have screamed bloody murder at $350,000 going to some non-candidate named Gordon Liddy while the friends back home weren’t able to pay their printing bills...

...Sloan testified that he had made ‘large, unaccounted-for disbursements to...

...We can no more take the politics out of the presidency than we can take the presidency out of politics...

...Then, having allowed Teddy White to join the entourage at Hyannis Port, Kennedy listened to the election night returns come in...

...Putting the President Back into Politics by Thomas E. Cronin The regrettable state of affairs today is that being President means never having to say you're sorry, wrong, and, perhaps more importantly, that you are being political...

...6) “Federal sources have told The Washington Post that throughout their investigation FBI agents continued to experience difficulty in obtaining information from both the White House and the Nixon reelection committee, even after Dean had become aware of the problem through the summary report...

...Of course, one cannot fault White for failing to produce an exhaustive critique of the Nixon presidency in a book that is supposed to be about the campaign...

...This was not so much because of different moral standards in the two groups, as because of the political theorists’ old principles of pluralism and mutually restricting greed...

...So that in foreign policy Nixon can give the sense of leadership...

...Thus, in foreign policy-the area in which the President is seen by the public to be a superman-his powers most nearly approximate those of superman...

...As George Reedy pointed out three years ago in The Twilight of the Presidency, a political philosophy which respects individuals and institutions only to the extent that they support the President’s decisions is the death of reality in the White House...

...One illustration from the last campaign may help clarify the point...

...People don’t respond in domestic affairs,” he said...

...A President cannot and should not avoid being openly political...

...Those he deals with outside the government may be most effectively handled with blanket secrecy...

...A deep popular sentiment rouses with indignation at the idea that a President is “playing politics” with an issue, or is neglecting the general welfare for any “partisan” cause...

...In the early days of the campaign Kennedy could joke with the staff men, overhear their discussion of the semi-dirty campaign tricks in West Virginia...

...In agreeing that the President becomes more “presidential” when he drifts above the compromise and negotiation that make up the political process, White is acquiescing in a general debasement of the value of politics...

...Since he began the series in 1960, White has made the presidential election process into a ritual of transition and ascension, an epic in which the many contenders are one by one eliminated until only the President himself remains...

...vent the notion of the apolitical statesman-President...

...They walk every day through an adversary atmosphere...

...about “getting this [the Chappaquiddick investigation] over, so I can get back to my Senate duties...

...The perceived shame of politics and the indignities of sounding partisan have had grievous impact on the exercise of national leadership in America...

...Perhaps moTe important, to the extent the books have become official histories of the elections, the interpretations they offer enter the popular understanding with a stamp of legitimacy and approval, guaranteeing that this is what it all really meant...

...2) “The GAO report yesterday asked Justice for a second time to investigate a $350,000 cash fund that was kept in Stans’ safe...

...They have before them constant reminders of the swift penalties for failure to take into account the strong feelings of other men...

...When Presidents get the idea that only they know all the facts about the country’s safety, then they feel uniquely qualified to make the decisions about what is justified in the name of national defense...

...4) “A central issue that has developed in Gray’s confirmation hearings has been the FBI’s handling of the Watergate investigation and, particularly, the propriety of Gray’s agreement to turn over investigative reports to Dean...

...all you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home...

...And if the presidency is recognized as the highly political office it necessarily is, then we have to strive more rigorously to strengthen rival and alternative political institutions that can keep it accountable, pose alternative programs, offer alternative definitions of the national purpose, and let the sun shine in...

...The same phenomenon takes on more disturbing dimensions when the President’s foreign policy decisionsthose that add to his stature as Statesmanare contrasted to what he must actually do to get any domestic policy enacted...

...The President has no way to enforce the code of ornerta on themand no claim to a monopoly on relevant information...

...Yet the ease with which White accepts Nixon’s attempts to separate his “presidential tasks” of war- and peace-making from the thankless “loser’s” work of running the economy or passing education bills is perhaps the most revealing aspect of the book...

...They not only receive letters and telephone calls from their constituents, but run into them in the corridor daily...

...The very phrasing of this question -implying as it does that the President would be neglecting the country’s welfare if he cleaned out the Watergate gang rather than toasting the Shah of Iran-suggests the absurdity of the over-politicization diagnosis...

...The tactic of secrecy, so tempting to those who have it within their grasp, amounts to insulating the President from the normal checks and balances of the political system...

...The best of our Presidents have been those who understood the importance of political parties and who listened to the people, and did not condescendingly view the American common man as childlike and dependent on an omniscient President...

...The means for bringing him in touch with reality is the process of political bargaining-with the delays it requires, the necessary changes of course, the arguments, and the listening...

...Second, since the President will look “unpresidential” if he participates in normal party politics, his aides must go through grotesque contortions to prove that their boss never thought about anything except being President of All the People...

...His April 30 plea to be excused from thinking further about Watergate so that he could return to the "larger duties" of his office had its similarities to Adam Clayton Powell's "let me serve my people" and Teddy Kennedy's anxiety Thomas E. Cronin is the author of The Presidency, Reappraised and the State of the Presidency, both of which will be published in 1974...

...Theodore H. White...

...In the two weeks preceding White’s interview, the front page of The Washington Post had contained the following information: 1) “President Nixon’s personal attorney and his White House appointments secretary arranged for the payment of more than $30,000 in campaign funds to Donald H. Segretti, an alleged political saboteur, according to FBI records...

...The public attitudes toward the presidencythose mirrored in White’s book-encourage the President to feel contempt for the congressman...

...He may be a complex man-even a troubling or a confusing man, as White seems to find Nixon...

...No longer is the President talking to his own employees, who feel honored by his very presence and who can be relied on to try to please him...

...But on domestic policy, “Presidents are usually losers, because domestic affairs divide...

...The nation tended to unite behind a President on foreign policy...

...One wonders what it might have taken to excite his interest...

...For while White has written another excellent chronicle of the election process, by far his best since 1960 and perhaps the best of his entire series, one crucial failure in his understanding illuminates a larger failure in the way we judge our Presidents...

...When the President wants his goals accomplished in domestic legislation, he uses the tactics of secrecy and arrogance only at his peril...

...But when it comes to foreign affairs, everyone wants to be Secretary of State, every columnist, every commentator, every writer...

...A standard diagnosis of what's gone wrong in the White House is that the presidency has become too politicized...

...As a literal student of White’s earlier books, Nixon must have understood the advantage of running as “The President” rather than as candidate Dick Nixon, and of spending his time in foreign capitals rather than shaking hands with county political chairmen...

...The way to prevent future abuses, as has often been noted, is to make the White House more open...

...The timeless senators and congressmen he must flatter and win have seen him come and will see him go...

...As a nation, we must mature to the recognition that Presidents have to be political and they ought to be vigorously partisan leaders as well...

...Since the impediments are minimal in foreign affairs, Presidents turn more of their atten tion there...

...He manages to re-tell the familiar events in a vivid, novelistic way...

...He was easy this afternoon, and toyed with the question as if trying to find a shape to the answer...

...Those were presidential tasks...

...In deciding to do what most people lauded-keeping himself “above politics” and miles away from the Republican Party-Nixon was able to ignore the local politicians and set up his own Committee to Re-elect the President...

...Nowhere is this more evident than in the three interviews with Nixon that White describes in the book...

...Richard Nixon may lack some of the glamor of that era, but in him White finds the same properties of nobility and elevation...

...The intention is to propel himself above the tawdry concerns of ordinary “politicians” and emerge, isolated and pure, as statesman and national leader...

...It can be small wonder that a man who has seen alliances formed and villages destroyed at his whim will have little patience for the elderly committee chairman who demands a respectful hearing before he will do the Administration-a favor...

...FDR had an emergency at home, the Depression, which united people behind him-but it was sad that so many of our great Presidents had to have a war to unite people behind them...

...First, with all the apparatus for secret statesmanship at hand, it is much easier for the President to ring up the plumbers when something needs fixing than to persuade the public or Congress to his point of view...

...Consider the same President, having spent the morning working on a missile treaty with the Russians and sending a fleet of bombers to Asia, as he summons Gerald Ford and Carl Albert to the Oval Office...

...The Ervin committee, even by the most cynical evaluation, has at least demonstrated the willingness to listen that has been so strikingly absent from the White House...

...In their most manifest form, they prompt a President to say piously that he is above politics and that he acts solely as President for all the people...

...I asked none of those questions [about Watergate] that Saturday afternoon,” White writes in preface to his interview...

...This is just the feeling that Nixon appeals to with his “larger duties” speeches...

...Theodore White’s new book, The Making of the President 1972, * is an important document for understanding these developments...

...When he deals with the President, White often verges on the romantic...

...3) “Robert H. Allen, a Texas oilman who gave $89,000 which was later traced to the bank account of a man convicted in the Watergate break-in, has requested and received his entire $100,000 contribution back from President Nixon’s reelection committee...

...He captures his characters and makes them live in compelling portraits...

...Foreign policy is more fun, and besides, you can win the Nobel Peace Prize...

...Because the structure of the White House staff makes it unlikely that the President will ever hear these dissenting opinions from his own advisers, it becomes all the more important that he is forced to take part in political negotiation...

...It was clear where his heart and attention still lay as we came back to talk of foreign affairs...

...He must cajole, persuade, compromise, entice-and above all, listen, for otherwise he will not understand how he can persuade...

...Theodore White and Richard Nixon didn’t in...

...rather, it is an indication of how well, both by accident and by design, he has come to mirror popular attitudes toward the presidency...

...While some such autonomy is probably necessary for effective negotiations, it is also subject to abuse...

...All he wants is a minor change in the public works laws, or a new educational program...

...Domestic questions, he felt, just weren’t that exciting...

...To obtain even small concessions, the President must practice the art of politics in its finest sense...

...Certainly there are dishonest men in politics, but we have come in danger of forgetting that there is a clean politics, and that it is the only way a democracy can work...

...Take a question like revenue-sharing-only the specialists wanted to probe that one...

...A President in a democracy has to act politically in regard to controversial issues if we are to have any semblance of government by the consent of the governed-that is, he must negotiate and mediate between groups, compromise polar differences, and find acceptable alternatives...

...It is a very political office, and political and partisan leadership are as much needed as foreign policy statesmanship and symbolic leadership...

...See box...

...President,” moving onto a plane several removes from his former colleagues, in a realm none of them could ever know...

...The White House "enemies" list adds substance to this impression, as have President Nixon's attempts to use the classic above-politics defense of politicians in trouble...

...The contempt expressed in John Ehrlichman’s remarks about alcoholism on the Senate floor was unusual only in its bitterness...

...of his May 8th decision to mine Haiphong and bomb Hanoi...

...It has been so long since anyone has been able to use terms like “free democracy” or “legislative deliberation” seriously that we find it hard to imagine they represent any actual processes...

...Yet this sense of saga, so welcome as a narrative device, provides a clue to what White has done wrong...

...The failure is *The Making of the President 1972...