Out to Make Enemies? Copy Sherman Adams--John Sununu Does : Politics: The White House chief of staff might have too much in common with the man who was Eisenhower’s arrogant senior aide.

Anybody remember Anne Burford? Richard V. Allen? The U.S. position on the Chad-Libya war? Hint: All were headline Washington controversies for extended periods during the last decade. If that seems like the dim past, you’re not alone. From political power broker to shrill talk-show pundit, few in Washington recollect the 1980s. As the writer Walter Shapiro observed, Washington is a city of such short attention spans, so obsessed with what’s happening this millisecond, that “anyone who can remember the Eisenhower Administration is viewed as grasping the full sweep of human history.”

One character from the Eisenhower Administration hardly anyone remembers is Sherman Adams. Adams quit as governor of New Hampshire to move to Washington as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff. He was conservative, intelligent, hard-working, self-made, sharp as a tack and arrogant: an aloof man few could stand. Adams created bad blood between the White House and Congress, between the White House and the GOP. Eventually he was humiliated by scandal and driven from Washington in disgrace.

Sound a little like the current White House chief of staff, John H. Sununu? Sununu also quit as governor of New Hampshire to come to Washington as a President’s chief of staff. Sununu is also conservative, smart, conscientious, self-made and quick-witted. And he is as arrogant: Sununu, like Adams, seems to consider it his birthright to lord it over congressmen and fellow Republicans.

It’s odd that the similarities between Sununu and Adams, so striking, seem to have left so little impression on institutional Washington--which often suffers from worse cultural illiteracy than the typical high-school student. But there is a certain well-placed Administration figure who knows the comparison in detail. Who? Sununu himself. Adams, it turns out, is one of Sununu’s heroes.

Sununu has been known to compare himself to Adams and to go on about how misunderstood was the late Granite State politician, who insisted on being called The Governor. Sununu, too, likes to be addressed as governor, but, with informality now chic in Washington, doesn’t always get his wish. Sununu obtained for himself the same license-plate number that Adams had--at what must have been considerable effort.

Maybe the weird parallels between their lives can explain some of Sununu’s fondness for the memory of Adams. (Attention Californians: Adams died after Sununu was born, so there is no past-life possibility.) Another parallel is that each went almost overnight from barely knowing their President to being his closest aide--chiefly because of New Hampshire’s peculiar status in U.S. nomination politics.

Adams ran Eisenhower’s 1952 New Hampshire presidential nomination campaign and produced an upset win when Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio was the clear front-runner. At the time, there was even a dispute over whether Eisenhower was a Republican. Adams conducted the entire campaign without ever meeting Ike face-to-face. Eisenhower was so impressed that he developed great affection for The Governor, making him his campaign manager and then, in Washington, his closest aide.

Sununu caught George Bush’s eye by managing Poppy’s solid 1988 New Hampshire primary victory at a time when there was no clear front-runner, but when the Washington pundit class was chortling that Bush had no chance whatsoever against Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas or such ballot-box colossi as Alexander M. Haig Jr. and Pierre DuPont. At the time of the victory, Sununu and Bush also did not know each other closely--but again the candidate’s gratitude was deep.

There is another weird parallel here in Bush’s frequent statements expressing fondness for Eisenhower. Bush sees much of himself reflected in Ike, politically and personally. There is enough here to form the basis of a Phil Donahue show about political forefather complexes. One hopeful note: If the comparison truly holds--in 1956, Eisenhower kept the United States out of war in the Middle East.

Yet, of all the role models for the embattled Sununu to pick, it is hard to think of one less promising than Adams.

Adams rapidly made himself unpopular in Washington for his high-handed attitude toward Congress. He considered members gnats on the windshields of Great Men like himself. Adams was brusque in his dealings with Hill leaders, issuing orders and asserting if they didn’t like it, they would incur the President’s wrath. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee condemned Adams for “contempt of Congress and its constitutional powers” for a case where Adams was channeling non-security-related Atomic Energy Commission business to favored contractors, then invoking executive privilege to refuse to testify about it.

As chief of staff, Adams perfected the dreadful idea of asserting complete control over the flow of paper going to the President’s desk, and over appointments to see the President. For example, Adams arranged that all Cabinet secretaries report to Sherman Adams, not Eisenhower. This kind of arrangement is guaranteed to make messages for the President garbled, or subtly altered by the bearer to reflect his convenience. The main purpose of the arrangement was to make Adams feel more important. Because he rarely granted anyone other than himself an audience with the President, Adams earned the nickname “the abominable no man.” The principle of access control has since been copied by many top aides--it’s among the worst features of Washington hierarchical culture.

Early in the Eisenhower Administration, Adams’ hard-ball tactics worked. But eventually congressmen reasserted themselves. GOP senators and representatives were especially peeved because their party had just retaken majority status in Congress for the first time in many moons. They expected the White House to help them consolidate control; instead Adams seemed bent on treating them like nuisances, which eventually seemed to voters a reason they might as well pull the Democrat lever.

Sununu also has been haughty and condescending to Congress. For a while this worked for him, too. But now he is on the defensive, his position eroding. Sununu seems to have mistaken the early honeymoon period--when Presidents traditionally get much of what they ask for from Congress--for evidence of the brilliance of his own political tactics. With the honeymoon over, Sununu-Adams tactics are getting on people’s nerves.

Adams’ undoing came just before the 1958 congressional elections, when it was revealed that he had asked government agencies to back off investigations of Bernard Goldfine, a low-rent Michael Milken-type who later served time for tax fraud. Adams had taken an expensive vicuna coat (trendy then--trust me) from Goldfine and also allowed him to pick up $3,097 in hotel bills, an amount equal to nearly $15,000 in today’s dollars.

Not only did the Goldfine affair embarrass Eisenhower, it became a key issue in the 1958 elections. Adams’ explanation was essentially the Keating Five defense--he would place phone calls for any constituent, not just rich, sleazy ones.

Indeed, at the time, most of the evidence against Adams amounted to little more than innuendo. But because Adams had been so autocratic when he was up, Washington delighted to see him squirm when down. And because Adams had demanded obsequiousness from the GOP as well, his own party couldn’t wait to see him dumped. Nearly every Republican up for reelection in 1958 called for Adams to resign.

Adams did, returning to New Hampshire where he later used a federally guaranteed loan to found a successful ski resort at a place called Loon Mountain. Till his death in 1986, Adams was as haughty as ever, refusing to discuss his Washington days even in appearances at his beloved Dartmouth.

Over the years, evidence has surfaced that the Internal Revenue Service believed Adams failed to report at least $300,000 in income received during his White House days. The Republican columnist William Safire has charged that Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson covered up the Adams investigation because they wanted to curry favor with Eisenhower. If Adams actually did take $300,000 under the table in the 1950s--nearly $1.5 million in today’s money--he was guilty of an offense far more serious than many committed by well-known names more recently run out of Washington on a rail.

Here the uncanny parallels between Adams and Sununu may end. Recently, Sununu has gotten in Dutch with the GOP, too, but in his case for a policy reason--the Right-Wing Dreamworld faction led by Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia cannot stand the fact that Sununu fought for the recent budget compromise, with its inclusion of new taxes. That the White House finally made some hard choices on the deficit is one of the best things that could be said in Sununu’s favor. Nor has Sununu ever been accused of anything remotely like taking a payoff--in coats or any form of tender. Though there have been allegations he gave improper advice on beating federal environmental regulations to the present owner of a certain ski development--at Loon Mountain. Sununu denies this.

But several decades removed from the Eisenhower interregnum, even modest indiscretions can trigger political dishonor. If there is anything in Sununu’s past, present or future that sets off a firestorm, he may find, like his icon Adams, that there is a price to be paid for considering yourself too important to give others the time of day.

Few people in Washington like Sununu personally. For that matter, the number who can stand to be in the same room with him is diminishing. Leadership should not be about making friends, of course; any good White House chief of staff is bound to step on toes. But neither should leadership be about taking one’s own ego for a walk and letting it bark at passersby. In repeatedly treating others with disdain, Sununu may be setting himself up for an Adams-like fall.