Extraordinary Gathering : 6 Presidents’ Aides Tell of White House Pressures

Top advisers to six Presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Jimmy Carter assembled Friday for an extraordinary seminar on the inner workings of the White House, a session that dealt with, among other topics, the sticky question of what to do when the President comes up with a clunker of an idea.

Some would simply ignore the presidential notion and hope it would go away. H. R. Haldeman, who served as special assistant to Richard Nixon, recalled using that strategy once when Nixon demanded that all U.S. State Department employees around the world be given lie detector tests.

Donald Rumsfeld, who was one of Gerald Ford’s chiefs of staff, said he often resorted to a strategy he called “staffing it out.”

Did he mean stalling?

“No,” Rumsfeld said, “I’d call it professional staffing. Sometimes it would take very, very long.”

And Theodore Sorenson, a top adviser to President Kennedy, noted that there “was a long way and a short way” to dissuade the President from following a bad instinct. The long way, he said, was to stall.

“The short way was to say, ‘That sounded like something Dick Nixon would have suggested.’ ”

These former presidential advisers were among eight who participated in the first day of a two-day session at the University of California, San Diego. John Chancellor, the NBC television commentator who served as moderator Friday, said he believed it was the first time key representatives of so many modern administrations had gotten together to talk shop in public.

In addition to Haldeman, Rumsfeld and Sorenson, panelists were Andrew Goodpaster, secretary to President Eisenhower; Richard Cheney, a Ford Administration chief of staff; Alexander M. Haig, chief of staff for Richard Nixon and President Reagan’s first Secretary of State; Harry McPherson, Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant, and Jack H. Watson Jr., chief of staff for President Carter.

No present representative of the Reagan Administration was invited in order to prevent politics from pervading an attempt at sharing history, and also to prevent any current officials from being put on the spot.

The seminar, which will conclude today, was sponsored by the university as part of its 25th anniversary, in an effort at image-building that perhaps suffered a small setback when demonstrators gathered outside the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts to complain that there were hardly any students among those admitted to the largely invitation-only affair, although much of it was televised to schools in the area.

About 300 Demonstrators

Organizers of the so-called Rally for People’s History said 300 demonstrators participated, about the same number as gathered inside the center.

Those in attendance were treated to few fireworks among the panelists--although there were some snide remarks about President Ford inviting the press corps to record his morning consumption of English muffins, and President Carter’s confession that he had “lusted in his heart.” Mostly, the former aides avoided second-guessing their colleagues.

They did, however, offer some revealing anecdotes about the administrations they served, and were unanimous in their agreement that a strong White House chief of staff is preferable to a more decentralized system of access and decision-making within the inner sanctum.

Like Donald Regan?

“You would have had a Donald Regan in the Carter White House?” Chancellor asked Watson, who served as chief of staff under Reagan’s predecessor.

“Yes, I’m suggesting a strong, trusted, even-handed White House chief of staff,” said Watson, whose boss waited several years into his Administration before appointing a chief of staff.

“I think the President was involved to too great an extent in too many things. I think we put too many things on the agenda,” Watson said. He suggested that Carter worked “too hard,” and that a President should find a balance between Carter’s long days and Reagan’s short ones.

“I think you’ll find the strength and control of the chief of staff is in inverse proportion to the strength and control of the President in the area of ideas,” said McPherson, asked about the high visibility of Reagan’s chief of staff, Donald Regan. “. . . As someone said, ‘Let Regan be Reagan.’ ”

Technology Problem

Another shared viewpoint was that modern technology, for all its benefits, has served to distort crisis management and muddy White House decision-making. The proliferation of immediate information, zapped by satellites from distant trouble spots in seconds, often puts the President on the spot and forces premature action.

In the modern White House, there is little time for contemplation and human judgment during a crisis.

“We begin to downgrade human judgment,” Haig said, “and substitute for that the demand that a fact is not a fact unless you have a satellite photo of it and an electronic intercept of it.”

This, Haig added, makes Presidents “overly cautious” in making decisions, as they wait for technology to provide more evidence. Asked to cite an example, he did not hesitate. “Why sure,” Haig said. “With almost all of the terrorist actions the excuse has been, ‘We didn’t know exactly who is behind it.’ ”

Added Cheney, an assistant to Ford, “There is a real tendency to provide information to people who really aren’t equipped to evaluate it.”

Link With Pilot

Rumsfeld described how Ford and his advisers had a direct linkup with a U.S. pilot who flew over the scene of the capture of the American merchant ship Mayaguez by the Cambodian government. As they sat in the White House around a squawk box, the pilot described what he saw.

“I see people on it,” Rumsfeld recalled the pilot saying. “They look like Caucasians. They are halfway to shore.”

“Then everybody looked at the President” for his decision on whether to attempt to recapture the crew, or wait.

“It’s filthy the way technology has put a President in that position,” he concluded.

Ford eventually launched a military strike against the Cambodians who had seized the ship and the crew was rescued. Fifteen Marines died and 50 were wounded in the 1975 incident.

Some Reflections

There were some interesting reflections when the discussion turned to what the advisers might have done differently to help shepherd their Administrations through difficult moments in history.

McPherson, Johnson’s adviser, said that among other things he would have attempted to transform LBJ’s television image during the escalation of the Vietnam War into something more like Ronald Reagan--”a war leader instead of a Methodist bishop manque. “

Haldeman said the error with Watergate wasn’t that a “palace guard” attempted to protect Nixon, but that the White House’s management structure moved too slowly to come to grips with the issue of the burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters.

“Had we dealt with that matter in the way we were set up, we would have resolved it in a matter of weeks,” Haldeman said. “The fault was not that we had a bad system at all, but was that we didn’t use that system.”

Carter Too Involved

And Watson, Carter’s chief of staff, said Carter’s Administration team allowed the President to get too involved in everything.

“We were reacting,” he said, “to the idea that there had been a palace guard.”

McPherson characterized Presidents as either chiefs of state or chiefs of government--either up on the bridge of the ship with cape flying in the wind, or down in the engine room tinkering with the works.

“Democrats are likely to be involved, wanting to get their hands on the problems,” McPherson said, referring to Democrats’ interest in expanding government, “whereas Republicans are more likely to sit back and wait to speak from the mountaintop.”

Most of the panelists agreed that White House staffs have grown too large over the years--from the dozen men Sorenson remembered being photographed on the White House back steps to 600 people fueled by a $22-million annual budget, Chancellor said.

“The chief of staff is the grease,” said Rumsfeld, invoking the much discussed model of an Administration as the spokes of a wheel with the President as the hub. “All it does is get overheated and have to be replaced.”

Until then, however, they have the President’s ear. And sometimes he has theirs. McPherson recalled being telephoned at home by Johnson late one night. The President had just read a list of potential sites for peace talks to end the Vietnam War. McPherson had drafted the list and Johnson didn’t like it, vehemently.

“I let go,” the former aide said. “I yelled. I called him a lot of rough names. My wife ran downstairs in dismay because she thought I was talking to the plumber.” She was worried about losing his services.