Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess

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СКАЧАТЬ explain to Perkins. “It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too.”6 In practice, the balancing of opposites sharpened internal policy debates, but the price paid was that frictions often carried over into program implementation.

      Appointments to the subcabinet—undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, general counsels—were of superior quality. Dean Acheson, Jerome Frank, Charles Wyzanski, James Landis, and many others were generally in their late thirties and early forties, which was younger than the cabinet members, and they were more ideological. They also were technicians and academicians who, in the opinion of Vice President John Nance Garner, had never worked a precinct. As the supreme mixmaster of his administration, Roosevelt made the secondary selections himself. His cabinet members acquiesced with forbearance or veiled distaste. Observing the blend of disparate ingredients from within the Agriculture Department, Russell Lord reported “national figures using the same washroom, shoulder to shoulder, and pretending not to see each other.”7

      The presidential staff, those on the White House payroll, were noted primarily for their dedication to Roosevelt. “Those who were closest to him for the longest time,” thought Rexford Tugwell, “were kept there because they did not probe or try to understand but rather because they gave an unquestioning service.”8 McIntyre, Early, military aide Edwin (Pa) Watson, and Roosevelt’s personal secretaries, Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, provided the president with a comfortable, good-humored core around which the New Deal revolved. That the core did not become a cocoon was due mostly to Roosevelt’s insatiable appetite for information and his immediate staff’s recognition of its own role and limitations. Primus inter pares of this original group was Louis Howe, who, like the other members of the inner circle, was little interested in policy questions other than for their political ramifications. He was more hair shirt than comforter to the president, however. “Howe was the only one who dared to talk to him frankly and fearlessly,” Ickes remembered. “He not only could tell him what he believed to be the truth, but he could hang on like a pup to the root until he got results.”9 After Howe’s death, there was never to be another intimate with the same willingness to tell the president to go to hell, as Howe was known to have done.

      Roosevelt placed other personal aides in the departments. When they also had departmental duties—as did Assistant Secretary of State Moley and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Tugwell—they were eventually drawn into conflicts with the cabinet officers to whom they supposedly reported. But others, such as Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen, were more like detailees, essentially presidential assistants who were carried on payrolls other than the White House’s, a duplicitous though harmless budgeting arrangement.

      The president also relied heavily on volunteers outside government to perform duties that would later become regular White House operations. This was often true of speechwriting. But outsiders were not always available when needed. Rosenman, for instance, was a justice of the New York Supreme Court and could be in Washington only on weekends and during summer recesses. The physical strain finally led to his resignation from the court in 1943, at which time he was given the title counsel to the president.

      Dividing the Roosevelt staff into those on the White House payroll, department officials with special presidential assignments, those in the departments who were on loan to the White House, and outside volunteers still leaves out one important member of the president’s establishment. Eleanor Roosevelt was “essentially a presidential aide.”10 Her special responsibilities were twofold: she was an experienced fact finder who traveled widely and reported to her husband, and she was an in-house advocate for liberal causes, social welfare programs, minority groups, and youth. In tracing the organization of the modern presidency, those chief executives who relied on members of their families (usually wives or brothers) to carry out formal assignments or to offer advice would sometimes, but not always, benefit from this familial support. FDR certainly did.

      Although there was never anyone resembling a chief of staff to the president, Roosevelt played favorites at least to the degree that the press was constantly bestowing the title of assistant president on someone or other. Over the course of three terms those who received this appellation included Moley, Donald Richberg, Tugwell, Corcoran, Hopkins, and James Byrnes. All except Byrnes worked on presidential speeches, although none did so exclusively. Tugwell and Moley were involved in different aspects of economics; Corcoran, more than the others, drafted bills and handled congressional relations; Richberg and Byrnes were coordinators; and Hopkins was given a broad but fairly random variety of assignments, including diplomatic missions. None performed duties similar to those later given to Sherman Adams by Dwight Eisenhower or to H. R. Haldeman by Richard Nixon.

      The White House staff’s relations with Roosevelt were informal. There were no staff meetings with the president. Staff members, singly or in combination, would appear while the president was having breakfast to discuss the day’s work. They could then see him in his office if necessary—if not by going through the office of appointments secretary McIntyre, then through the more accessible door of Missy LeHand. Roosevelt also was usually available during the daily cocktail hour. And the evenings were reserved for drafting sessions with his speechwriters.

      The official members of his administration formed only the first line of the president’s information network. Unlike some presidents whose careers have been on a single track, often legislative or military, Roosevelt’s earlier years in national politics and state and federal government and simply as a Roosevelt had given him broad and diverse acquaintances throughout the country whose opinions and observations he now used to supplement or challenge the advice he received from his subordinates. He also sought ancillary information by expanding the device known as the presidential commission. One study covering the Roosevelt years through 1940 mentions more than one hundred advisory bodies.11

      What the president chose to do, and where he needed assistance, is reflected in the pattern of his week. Although always subject to change, the schedule revolved around three events: sessions with the congressional leadership on Mondays or Tuesdays, press conferences on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, and cabinet meetings on Friday afternoons.

      There was no organized congressional liaison office in the White House. Roosevelt handled this chore himself with the assistance of ad hoc troubleshooters such as Corcoran. The president’s dealings with Capitol Hill were conducted almost exclusively with the House Speaker, majority leaders, and committee chairmen, a system that created some dissatisfaction among the less privileged legislators. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin, about seventy-five in number, as well as a number of other progressives, not classed as Democrats,” wrote Representative Kent Keller of Illinois in 1938, “and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group in consultation as to administration policies.”12 Still, in an era of ironbound congressional seniority, this was a grumble more than a problem.

      The press conferences were held in the Oval Office with the reporters crowded around the president’s desk. The frequency of these sessions meant that Roosevelt, rather than his press secretary, was the chief White House spokesman. The president prided himself on his detailed mastery of government operations and needed little advance preparation; as a rule, press secretary Steve Early merely reminded him of topics on which inquiries were expected. Roosevelt broke with tradition by abolishing written questions, but he established three ground rules: no reporters could quote him directly unless granted permission; his answers could be given for background, meaning that the reporters must not identify their source; and he could speak off the record, that is, strictly for information. Nearly half the meetings began with a statement by the president, ensuring in these cases that he controlled at least part of the session’s substance. On occasion, moreover, the press secretary planted questions with friendly reporters.

      Thus, Roosevelt tailored the format of the press conference into an instrument of considerable utility. The flexibility of responding without quotation or sometimes even without attribution allowed him to meet the press with hardly any fear of error—political, СКАЧАТЬ