Organizing the Presidency. Stephen Hess

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СКАЧАТЬ and Conciliation Service reflected the seriousness with which the president viewed labor-management relations as a national problem (116 million days of work were lost because of strikes in 1945) and the ineffectuality of his secretary of labor, Lewis Schwellenbach. Negotiations in major disputes such as those in the railroad and steel industries were conducted in Steelman’s White House office. Steelman also acted as coordinator of federal agency programs and policies, which meant that he concerned himself with those cabinet-level problems that were beneath presidential attention, and he served as the route to the president for the minor agencies that were without direct access to the Oval Office.

      Special counsel (Clark Clifford). The office remained as defined by Samuel Rosenman: the most important position on the White House staff for domestic policy formulation. It also controlled the speechwriting process and was responsible for reviewing congressional bills and executive orders. In addition to his other duties, Clifford, who first joined the Truman White House as a naval officer, handled liaison with the Pentagon and the State Department.

      Administrative assistant (Charles Murphy). Unlike Roosevelt, who used troubleshooters to deal with Congress on an ad hoc basis, Truman gradually looked to Murphy as his coordinator of congressional messages. When Murphy replaced Clifford as special counsel in 1950, he continued his congressional liaison work but did not assume Clifford’s responsibility for coordinating national security. Some duties were a function of the office and others a function of the officeholder.

      Administrative assistant (Donald S. Dawson). As staff coordinator for personnel and patronage, Dawson maintained the files from which Truman made appointments, except for those in the customs houses and the federal courts system. He also handled the arrangements for the president’s trips and political appearances.

      Administrative assistant (David Niles). A holdover from Roosevelt’s staff, Niles had special responsibility for liaison with minority groups.

      Other administrative assistants had more generalized assignments and usually served as aides to Steelman, Clifford, or Murphy. The presence on the White House staff of such men as David Lloyd, David Bell, George Elsey, Richard Neustadt, and David Stowe was in itself a development of some note, the beginning of a cadre of supporting staff for senior presidential aides.

      Categorizing the duties of key staff members somewhat underestimates the extent to which Truman parceled out assignments “on the basis of who was available” (as Lloyd recalled the system).7 Nevertheless, functional divisions in the presidential office were now emerging in sharper form. No one on Roosevelt’s staff had had either labor-management responsibilities similar to Steelman’s or such a continuing involvement in congressional relations as Murphy.

      Equally important, a simple description of White House assignments veils what Clifford called “two forces fighting for the mind of the president,” a dynamic that was to have significant consequences for the balance of power in the Truman administration. The fight over what was to become known as the Fair Deal developed along classic liberal-conservative lines. The chief conservative advocates were Steelman and Treasury Secretary Snyder. The liberals, led by Clifford, included Murphy, Leon Keyserling of the Council of Economic Advisers, and several members of the subcabinet, such as Oscar (Jack) Ewing, director of the Federal Security Agency; Oscar Chapman, undersecretary of the interior; and David Morse, assistant secretary of labor.

      As Clifford remembered,

      I think it was Jack Ewing who first suggested the idea that a few of us get together from time to time to try to plot a coherent political course for the administration. Our interest was to be exclusively on domestic affairs, not foreign.… We wanted to create a set of goals that truly met the deepest and greatest needs of the people, and we wanted to build a liberal, forward-moving program around those goals that could be recognized as a Truman program.

      The idea was that the six or eight of us [meeting each Monday evening in Ewing’s apartment] would try to come to an understanding among ourselves on what direction we would like the president to take on any given issue. And then, quietly and unobtrusively each in his own way, we would try to steer the president in that direction.

      Naturally, we were up against tough competition. Most of the cabinet and the congressional leaders were urging Mr. Truman to go slow, to veer a little closer to the conservative line.…

      Well, it was two forces fighting for the mind of the president, that’s really what it was. It was completely unpublicized, and I don’t think Mr. Truman ever realized it was going on. But it was an unceasing struggle during those two years [1946–1948], and it got to the point where no quarter was asked and none was given.8

      Of his own role, Clifford said, “If I rendered any service to President Truman … it was as the representative of the liberal forces. I think our forces were generally successful. We had something of an advantage in the liberal-conservative fight because I was there all the time. I saw the president often, and if he wanted to discuss an issue, I was at hand.”9

      The liberal forces prevailed. For example, Truman vetoed a bill to extend the life of the wartime Office of Price Administration, which liberals felt was too weak, and the Taft-Hartley bill, which curbed union activities, both actions urged by Clifford and opposed by almost the entire cabinet. Clifford’s skills—vastly greater than his opponents’—well may have been a factor. But he also was pushing the president in a direction that was clearly in keeping with the president’s instincts.

      There is nothing unusual, of course, about struggles within an administration. They are inherent in a structure of government built on the separation of the departments along interest-group lines, and Roosevelt had designed his whole theory of management on conflict. Yet as a rule of thumb, there had always been a distinction between cabinet officers (policy advocates and managers) and White House aides (facilitators, mediators, and performers of personal and political services). This changed somewhat in the closing years of the Roosevelt administration when the president, preoccupied with the war and in ill health, allowed Rosenman and others greater leeway in shaping domestic programs. But Clifford’s performance during five years under Truman was of a different magnitude: since he acted primarily as a presidential adviser on policies and programs rather than on ways and means, the theoretical line between cabinet and White House staff began to blur. And as Clifford’s experiences illustrate, in any conflict between the two the law of propinquity is apt to govern.10

      Besides Steelman, Clifford, and their assistants, there were others, distinctly different characters, who shared administrative duties at the Truman White House. Ithiel de Sola Pool would later write, “Every president has felt the need to surround himself with a small group of mediocre men whose main qualification is loyalty.… In every administration they have gotten the president into trouble by their lack of moral perspective.… The president needs loyal personal assistants, yet they are dangerous.”11 Truman’s mediocre men included military aide Harry Vaughan, appointments secretary Matthew Connelly, Donald Dawson and George Schoeneman of the patronage operation, and Dr. Wallace Graham, the president’s physician. They were people Truman liked to have around. They were comfortable. They were fun. Some of them also were accepters of petty graft, mink coats, freezers, and free hotel rooms and were friends of fixers. Collectively their activities became known as “the mess in Washington” during the 1952 presidential election campaign.12 That Harry Truman, of unexcelled personal integrity, could have tolerated their presence says something about his background in machine politics, about his sentimentality and sense of loyalty, and about his deep-seated need for companionship. A president, even more than most, needs friends. The post of court jester has a long history. Indeed, the persistence with which court jesters have been found in the company of presidents seems to attest to some useful service that they perform—“yet they are dangerous.” Recent presidents have protected themselves by keeping their court jesters out of government or by making sure that their governmental duties were not substantial. Truman’s problems resulted from giving assignments СКАЧАТЬ