Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess

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СКАЧАТЬ (Truman, of course, would have argued that presidential prestige is meant to be used to force desirable actions.) Later, the youthful Kennedy would react to the aging Eisenhower, and so on, back and forth in the whipsaw fashion that almost defines a principle of contrariness in presidential succession.

      Confronted with the immediate problem of putting together a government—the first controlled by the Republican party in twenty years—Eisenhower turned not to his party’s leaders, whom he did not know well, but to an old friend, former general Lucius Clay, chairman of the board of Continental Can Company, and a new one, New York attorney Herbert Brownell. To them was left the initial screening of the cabinet. The job was made easier because no one declined the invitation to join Eisenhower’s cabinet, a statistic unique in the modern presidency. The cabinet then made the initial selection of the subcabinet. Other matters of personnel were handled by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams. An assistant to Adams estimated that the Governor, as Adams was called inside the administration, made 75 percent of the final decisions on personnel; the rest were made by the president from lists of candidates prepared by Adams.2 Eisenhower’s noninvolvement was partly a deliberate delegation of responsibilities, partly an expression of his distaste for the process of patronage, and partly a reflection of his limited circle of acquaintances outside the military, coupled with his strong belief in not appointing military people to civilian jobs if equally capable civilians were available.

      The result was that Eisenhower picked a cabinet of strangers. Not one member could have been considered an old friend; most were barely known to him or not known at all. Only two of the ten initial department heads, Attorney General Brownell and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, had played major roles in the campaign. (Some others had more minor parts, and several had been opposed to Eisenhower’s nomination.)

      The construction of the cabinet was not totally without attempts at balance. Following tradition, the position of interior secretary went to a westerner, Douglas McKay, the retiring governor of Oregon. Eisenhower wanted a woman in the cabinet, and Oveta Culp Hobby was made director of the Federal Security Agency with the promise that the agency would be quickly transformed into a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Hobby’s appointment also gave the cabinet a southerner and a registered Democrat).

      In the president’s only eyebrow-raising selection, he named a trade unionist as secretary of labor. Picking Martin Durkin, head of the AFL Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union, had two justifications. First, Eisenhower was trying to rectify what he felt was Truman’s unwise practice of allowing the presidency to be drawn into labor-management relations. If the unions had their own person at the Labor Department, presumably they would not go over Durkin’s head to the White House.3 More conventionally, Eisenhower was seeking to broaden the perspective of the cabinet—“to help round out any debate,” as he put it. In choosing Durkin he unrealistically believed that he could get “an impartial adviser,” not a “special pleader for labor.”4 He did not, however, look upon his secretary of commerce, businessman Sinclair Weeks, as potentially being a special pleader for business. But Durkin resigned after nine months. Eisenhower then got the type of secretary he really wanted by going outside union ranks. In replacing Durkin with James Mitchell, a respected specialist in industrial relations, he was able to keep labor disputes away from the White House and add a more liberal voice to his cabinet. Mitchell remained in the post until the administration left office in 1961.

      More than any other president, Eisenhower was looking for types rather than merely weighing the competing merits of individuals. “Eight millionaires and one plumber” was how the New Republic described the cabinet.5 But Eisenhower was not impressed by money per se—Truman’s administration had more men of wealth. What impressed Eisenhower was the ability to succeed (money was simply the unit in which success was measured). He believed that a successful person, someone who had already proved he could run something big, would be best able to tame a government department. It was a view shaped by his conception of what a government department does (namely manage something) and honed by campaign promises and the business-oriented philosophy of his party. The only two members of the cabinet (except of course for Durkin) who did not have backgrounds in management, attorneys John Foster Dulles and Brownell, were put in charge of the State and Justice departments, which from a presidential perspective can be considered more analytical than operational. Moreover, Eisenhower wrote in his diary on January 5, 1953, that to seek a government position is “clear evidence of unsuitability. I feel that anyone who can, without great personal sacrifice, come to Washington to accept an important government post, is not fit to hold that post.”6 He would hire people who were above chiseling, or not in need of it. As the representative of a party that placed its faith in the private enterprise system, who better than a business executive could ferret out waste and recognize reckless spending?

      This proclivity for bringing in the successful outsider also held true in the selection of undersecretaries (later renamed deputy secretaries). Before Eisenhower the standard practice had been to divide the work in a department between the two top political appointees along “outside” and “inside” lines—with the secretary being the spokesman to the outer world, the undersecretary managing the bureaucracy. Yet most of the Republican undersecretaries were carbon copies of their superiors.

      Eisenhower’s business executives joined the government in the same spirit that one contributes to the United Way, not joyously but because it is what civic-minded citizens ought to do. What was remarkable was that they stayed, held by the magnetism of Ike’s personality more than by any other force. Seven of his original cabinet members were still in place at the end of the first term; most stayed much longer. One died in office, the acting secretary of commerce left because he failed to win Senate confirmation, and two lasted the full eight years. With only one exception, replacements came from the ranks of the subcabinet or the White House staff.

      The kind of person the president chose was the kind of person he was. Dwight D. Eisenhower of Denison, Texas, and Abilene, Kansas, born October 14, 1890, surrounded himself with people of similar background. Only Dulles was older—by two years. George Humphrey, secretary of the treasury, and Charles E. Wilson, secretary of defense, were born in 1890. Thirteen of the twenty-one cabinet officers were within a decade or so of the president’s age. Their places of birth read like a gazetteer of small-town America—Killeen and Burleson, Texas; McRae, Georgia; Whitney, Idaho; Minerva and Berea, Ohio; Pinconning and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Charleston, West Virginia; Kingston, New York. Their personalities also matched the president’s. Cheerful and confident, they were not the dour conservatives buried in the stuffed chairs of the Union League Club. While Dulles or Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson could not be mistaken for the life of the party, they were the exceptions that Eisenhower made in the name of expertise. “Foster has been in training for this job all his life,” he often said.7

      They were decidedly not politicians. The three cabinet members who had been in the U.S. Senate—Dulles, Weeks, and Eisenhower’s second secretary of the interior, Fred Seaton—had held interim appointments. The only elected senator to whom the president gave cabinet status was UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, his earliest supporter. Legislator-politicians were difficult for Eisenhower to fathom. They seemed consumed with concerns such as headlines and patronage that did not concern him. He was much more comfortable with executive-politicians, and five former governors were to serve on his White House staff.

      Under the Eisenhower system the cabinet officers were expected to run the daily operations of their departments without presidential interference. They had the right to come to Eisenhower when their problems were big enough, which was left for them to decide. But the president was impatient if they sought his counsel too often on matters that he felt were strictly operational. Defense Secretary Wilson infuriated him by constantly wanting to discuss the internal workings of the Pentagon, problems that the president considered unpresidential. Cabinet officers also were to come to the White House—meaning Sherman Adams—when they disagreed among themselves. Adams “spent many hours,” for example, with Commerce Secretary Weeks and Labor Secretary Mitchell “sitting across the table from each other while they ironed out their differences.”8 СКАЧАТЬ