Presidential transitions are awkward, and Cheney had been through his share. “There’s always a certain amount of hubris involved for the new crowd coming in: ‘Well, if you guys are so smart, why did we beat you?’ And so it can get a little tense at times, but you’ve got to overcome those things, because there aren’t very many people who’ve run the White House. And there are valuable lessons to be learned. You really do want to try to equip the new guy with whatever wisdom you’ve acquired during the course of your time in office.”
Never forget the extraordinary opportunity you’ve been given to serve, and the privilege and responsibility that it represents. You are sitting next to the most powerful person in the world. Remember to value and appreciate that fact every single day you’re here.
Without a great chief of staff, a president frankly doesn’t know what he is doing. One of the things I’ve learned is that the big breakthroughs are typically the result of a lot of grunt work-just a whole lot of blocking and tackling. Grunt work is what chiefs of staff do.
“All our presidents select for various positions cronies or political hangers-on or whatever. But every president knows when he’s picking his chief of staff, my God, he’d better get the right man in that job or he’ll be ruined.” Some of the great blunders of modern history have happened because a chief of staff failed to tell the president what he did not want to hear.
All might have been avoided if the chiefs of staff had put these decisions through the rigors of a system designed to avoid disasters.
People ask me if it’s like that television show The West Wing. But that doesn’t begin to capture the velocity. In an average day you would deal with Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the budget, taxation, the environment—and then you’d have lunch! And then on Friday you would say, “Thank God-only two more working days until Monday?”
Emanuel would discover just how relentless the job can be. Over the next twenty months, he would later tell me, there were no moments of peace: “You’re on the phone on the way home. You’re on the phone during dinner, you’re on the phone reading bedtime stories to your kids-and you fall asleep before the book ends. And then you’re woken up around three in the morning with something bad happening somewhere around the world.”
The executive branch of the United States is the largest corporation in the world. It has the most awesome responsibilities of any corporation in the world, the largest budget of any corporation in the world, and the largest number of employees. Yet the entire senior management structure and team have to be formed in a period of 75 days.
Having served as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon knew the presidency could be a “splendid misery,” as Jefferson put it, unresponsive even to the commands of the most celebrated general in modern history.
“Never bring me a sealed envelope!” Ike barked. Nothing, he decreed, should come to the president without first being screened by someone he trusted. Soon Adams was installed as the president’s gatekeeper-and the first White House chief of staff was born.
John Kennedy had rejected Ike’s model and decided he did not need a chief; he would be his own gatekeeper. A half-dozen senior aides would have direct access to the Oval Office. But then came calamity: Kennedy was gulled by the Pentagon and CIA into sending a ragtag army of anti-Castro mercenaries onto the beach at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. They were routed, and the new president humiliated. Deceived by his generals, Kennedy concluded that he needed someone he could trust to help him with the big decisions (and to filter conflicting advice). Bobby Kennedy became his de facto chief.
But Nixon wanted someone to keep them in line, to ensure that his agenda would be executed, giving him time and space to think. H. R. Haldeman would be that person. Eisenhower had told Nixon that every president has to have his own ‘SOB.’
It turned out, somewhat to my surprise, that I was a born advance man. This is one of the most demanding jobs in politics. It needs organizational ability, a passion for predictability and punctuality, and a strong enough character to counterbalance the demands of different political groups and personalities.
And Haldeman, the consummate advance man, would take an important lesson to the White House: The president’s time is his most valuable asset.
“Our job is not to do the work of government, but to get the work out to where it belongs-out to the Departments,” Haldeman began. He continued: “Nothing goes to the president that is not completely staffed out first, for accuracy and form, for lateral coordination, checked for related material, reviewed by competent staff concerned with that area-and all that is essential for Presidential attention.”
Haldeman then warned about what he called end running: “That is the principal occupation of 98 percent of the people in the bureaucracy. Do not permit anyone to end-run you or any of the rest of us. Don’t become a source of end-running yourself, or we’ll miss you at the White House.” (End running, as Haldeman defined it, is what happens when someone with his own agenda meets privately with the president without going through the chief of staff. The result? All too often, a presidential edict that has not been thought through-with unintended consequences.)
The key staff can always communicate with and see the President when necessary. The priorities will be weighed on the basis of what visit will accomplish most. We’ve got to preserve his time for the things that matter. Now, that does not mean that everything will be reduced for him to the lowest common denominator. The President wants to make decisions himself, not preside over decisions made by the staff. How we decide what is major and what is minor is the key to whether this is a good White House staff or a lousy one.
I never intend to send another memorandum like this to the President and I don’t intend to tolerate this kind of total failure on the part of our staff ever again.
I’m not interested in any explanation, excuse, or discussion of this one, and I’m especially not interested in any more B.S. in the form of reports that tell me something has been done when in fact, it hasn’t….
Nixon saw the White House as a Fortune 500 company, with the Oval Office as the corner office, and Haldeman as chief operating officer. “Policy was going to be decided in the White House,” says Higby. “And it was the job of the cabinet to execute. And there were mechanisms put in place to make sure that follow-up and execution did take place.”
One of those mechanisms was a “tickler system.” Staffers were assigned to follow up on presidential edicts at specific intervals to be sure they were being carried out.
From the start, Gerald Ford’s White House resembled a kids’ soccer game, everyone running toward the ball. Ford had announced that he would govern with eight or nine principal advisers reporting directly to the president—a circle, with Ford at the center. He called it “the spokes of the wheel.” But the result was chaos and dysfunction.
“I told Ford that his approach-known as the spokes of the wheel, where everyone would report to him-was fine for a minority leader in the House of Representatives,” said Rums-feld. “But it would prove to be totally dysfunctional as president of the United States. It would not work. And I would not be a party to anything like it.” But Ford was adamant. First, it was the way he had run his congressional office. Second, he wanted a clean break from the tarnished image of Nixon and his imperial presidency, personified by the glowering Haldeman. The humble, plain-spoken president, a vivid contrast to the conniving Nixon, enjoyed an approval rating of 71 percent. He would run the White House his way.
The ‘spokes of the wheel’ approach wasn’t working. Without a strong decision-maker who could help me set my priorities, l’d be hounded to death by gnats and fleas. I wouldn’t have time to reflect on basic strategy or the fundamental direction of my presidency.
To keep meetings moving, he installed a standing desk in his office. Greenspan, plagued by a bad back, lay flat on the carpet. Everyone else stayed on their feet. “You could have a lot of meetings standing up that don’t last very long,” Rumsfeld explains. “Once you sit down, have a cup of coffee, let people get comfortable, then time goes. When you’re White House chief of staff, you don’t have a lot of leisure time that you can just be visiting.”
With his deputy in place, Ford’s new chief set out to execute the president’s agenda. In Rumsfeld’s view, decisions were dead on arrival unless they were translated to every relevant department. “There are very few problems in the federal government that are solely the jurisdiction of a single department,” he explains. “They almost always have legal implications, so the justice system has to be involved. They almost always have congressional implications, so that part has to be connected. They almost always are blurred between defense and intelligence and diplomacy, so that has to be done.
“Well, who does all of that connecting? It has to be the chief of staff.”
You’ve got other people who see the president once a week, once a month, once a year. Even though they may have been good friends before, they don’t have the ability to pick the right moment to talk to him and tell him what he does not want to hear. Because the chief of staff is with him day in and day out, he has the ability to select moments when he can look at a president and tell him something with the bark off. He is the one person besides his wife who can do that-who can look him right in the eye and say, ‘This is not right. You simply can’t go down that road. Believe me, it’s not going to work, it’s a mistake.’
Not everyone welcomed Rumsfeld’s ironfisted style. “There’s some hostility when you have a tough guy who is not dancing around issues and is returning a paper and saying, ‘This is not presidential, this is not ready for the big leagues,’ “ says Terry O’Donnell. “But Rumsfeld was firm and did not mince words. That was what Ford needed and he delivered it.”
The vice president was about to get a master class in bureaucratic infighting from the chief of staff.
“President Ford would say, ‘Gee, Nelson, why don’t you come in with some ideas on energy?’ “ recalls Rumsfeld. “And Rockefeller would take a group of people, fashion a major program, take it to the president, and expect him to send it up to the Hill. So the president would say to me, ‘Well, what should I do with it?’ And I said, You have to staff it out: give it to the Department of Energy, the Office of Management and Budget, economic advisers, secretary of the Treasury, and the like.’” Staffing out his proposals was an almost certain way to kill Rockefeller’s big-spending agenda. And sure enough, nearly all the vice president’s plans were DOA.
“The vice president got it in his mind that Henry Kissinger was in charge of foreign policy and Nelson Rockefeller was in charge of domestic policy, which means we didn’t need the president,” Rumsfeld recalls. “I can remember explaining to him that ‘heading up’ domestic policy did not mean overriding cabinet officers who had statutory responsibilities on those subjects. And in that stage of his career he didn’t take advice-or no—graciously.”
In a kind of shakedown cruise, Rumsfeld sent Cheney on a presidential trip to Mexico, where he impressed Ford with his low-key, no-drama efficiency. “I said, ‘How did he do?” “ recalls Rumsfeld. “And the president said, ‘Terrific. He comes in, has his business to talk about, talks about it, and gets out. And goes about it and takes care of the business. He’s a fine person and I’m happy to work with him, so rotate him in whenever you want.’”
“Rumsfeld did not take advice or even think about anybody else,” recalled Gail Raiman, a White House secretary. “Frankly, he was going to do X, Y, or Z, and just do it. And not in the kindest way.” By contrast, Cheney was collegial, collaborative, and considerate-the antithesis of the Darth Vader character he would become decades later as George W. Bush’s vice president. “Cheney was very different,” recalls Scowcroft. “The difference between Rumsfeld and Cheney was the difference between night and day. Cheney was very relaxed, not uptight, not overbearing. His attitude was We all have to pull together to make the presidency work.’”
Genial and self-effacing, Cheney was a good listener with a gift for defusing outsized egos; his Secret Service name was “Backseat.”
We got it down to a schedule and we got time for him to think, and do some of the things that Haldeman found so very important. Papers were organized, scheduling issues were carefully thought out before they were put on his plate. Rumsfeld and Cheney strengthened that framework, making sure that the president was well served by the staff.
There were forty or fifty initiatives that were bouncing around!” Eizenstat sensed that their agenda was spinning out of control: “It doesn’t take but about twenty-four hours in the White House for all the problems to converge— to know that you’ve got to have someone to sort through this thick-et, to try to make sense of it. What priority do you set-when you’re trying to get your energy policy done, when you’re trying to get your stimulus package passed, when you’ve got tax reform coming up at the very same time? Everything in Washington is connected. Everything. You step on their toes on one thing, they’re going to remember on the next thing.”
The former one-term governor was learning by total immersion. “I’ll never forget one time I was talking to Brzezinski about Carter,” recalls Brent Scowcroft. “And he said, ‘He’s wonderful. I can give him 150 pages to read at night-and he reads it. He makes marginal comments.’ And I said, ‘Zbig, that’s a terrible thing for you to do. Because he doesn’t have time for that.’” No detail of governing was too trivial for the president’s attention.
The president looked haggard and aged. “It’s become obvious to me,” Carter wrote in his diaries, “that we’ve had too much of my own involvement in different matters simultaneously. I need to concentrate on energy and fight for passage of an acceptable plan.” But instead of focusing, Carter’s response was to work harder across the board. “We probably had two hundred people and all of them horses, all of ‘em passionate, all of ‘em hardworking,” says Butler. “So somebody had to set an agenda. Somebody had to set the tone and say, this is important, and this isn’t. And that wasn’t easy to do.”
“Every president looks fifty years older when leaving office,” says Fallows, “be-cause even somebody who figures out how to win the office can’t really imagine the demands it brings and the complexity. And so it’s difficult to have the tragic imagination of how hard it’s going to be-especially if, like Carter, he had had a high estimate of his own abilities.”
Fallows pauses, as he considers Carter’s successor. “And maybe that’s the strength of presidents like Reagan-who don’t think they’re the smartest person around.”
Carter and Reagan were opposites: the former a compulsive micromanager, the latter a gifted performer trained at hitting marks set by others. “Not because Reagan didn’t have any skills or anything, but I watched him as governor,” says Spencer. “Reagan was, ‘I’ve got a role to play, I’ve got a script to learn-and you’re a producer, you’re a director, and you’re a cameraman: Now you do your job and I’m gonna do mine.’”
Carter was arguably the most intelligent president of the twentieth century, whereas Reagan had once been called, unfairly, “an amiable dunce.” Yet in choosing Baker, Reagan had intuited something his predecessor did not grasp. As kea-gan’s biographer Lou Cannon wrote: “He did not know one missile system from another and could not explain the simplest procedures of the federal govern-ment, but he understood that the political process of his presidency would be closely linked to his acceptance in Washington. In this he was the opposite of Jimmy Carter, who knew far more and understood far less.”
Orderly schedule & orderly paper flow is way you protect the Pres.
Well designed system. Got to be brutal in scheduling decisions.
Most valuable asset in D.C. is time of RR
Need to have discipline & order & be discriminating