As Presidents Cross Paths, Interval Is Often Awkward : Politics: Despite traditional promises of harmony, the move into the Oval Office is rarely a smooth one.

When the newly elected Dwight D. Eisenhower dropped by the Oval Office one late-November day four decades ago as he was preparing to assume power, President Harry S. Truman made a cursory effort to be polite.

“I offered to leave . . . the pictures of San Martin, given to me by the Argentine government, and Bolivar, given to me by the Venezuelan government, in the President’s office,” Truman wrote. “I was informed very curtly that I’d do well to take them with me--that the governments of these countries would, no doubt, give the new President the same pictures!”

Truman also volunteered to Eisenhower some bits of advice about organizing the White House staff, but the feisty Democratic President wrote in a memo soon afterward: “I think all this went into one ear and out the other.”

Their icy encounter was hardly unique. Over the next two months, America will witness an old pageant, the presidential transition--the awkward period in which an outgoing Administration is still in power but has lost its political mandate, and an incoming President with popular backing lacks the legal authority or the personnel necessary to govern.

If history is any guide, chances are the transition will not be entirely smooth, quiet or trouble-free.

From the earliest days of the Republic, when outgoing President John Adams preempted his successor, Thomas Jefferson, by appointing a series of “midnight judges” (and then went home to Massachusetts without attending Jefferson’s inaugural), relations between the outgoing and incoming administrations have often been rocky.

Some of the most tumultuous events in American history have occurred during transitions too.

Between the time Abraham Lincoln was elected and the day he took office, seven Southern states withdrew from the Union and formed a Confederate government, setting the stage for the Civil War. In 1981, in the final hours of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the United States reached a deal with Iran for the release of American hostages in Tehran, and the hostages were freed minutes after his successor, Ronald Reagan, took the oath of office.

Already, following past tradition, President-elect Bill Clinton and President Bush are publicly proclaiming their desire for a smooth and harmonious changeover in power. Last Wednesday, Bush promised he would “cooperate fully with a new Administration.” And Clinton declared that “America has only one President at a time,” in effect signaling to both this nation and foreign governments that Bush is in charge until Jan. 20.

Yet despite the outward displays of conciliation, it usually isn’t that simple.

The incoming and outgoing chief executives have vastly different interests. An outgoing President is usually interested in vindication of his role in history, continuity of his policies and, sometimes, delivering a final few favors for the friends and faithful. The newly elected President is preoccupied with staffing a new Administration, developing new policies and making sure no options are foreclosed before he is sworn in.

It is a situation made for conflict--and in past presidential transitions, the incoming and outgoing administrations have clashed and maneuvered over everything from the future of American foreign policy to the White House maids and living arrangements. (Departing President William Howard Taft urged President Woodrow Wilson to keep the housekeeping staff).

Alexander M. Haig, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s deputy national security adviser and later chief of staff, recently wrote of the plight in which the Nixon Administration found itself when it took office in 1969. “The White House files were virtually empty, the (Lyndon B.) Johnson staff having packed up and carried away nearly every scrap of paper generated by the outgoing Administration.”

In many transfers of power, including the current Bush-Clinton transition, these inherent tensions are compounded by some nasty politics as an outgoing President or his preferred successor has just been defeated at the polls by a candidate who ran against the sitting President and claimed that his Administration has been a failure.

What especially galled Truman about Eisenhower, for example, was that during the 1952 campaign, the general criticized Truman’s policies and pledged to go to Korea to try to bring the war to an end.

On the morning after the election, Truman sent Eisenhower a telegram, telling him that the presidential plane Independence “will be at your disposal if you still desire to go to Korea”--a hint that he thought Eisenhower’s campaign pledge wasn’t serious. In fact, Eisenhower journeyed on his own to Korea during the transition, on a three-day trip that, for security reasons, was kept secret until his return.

For good reason, outgoing presidents often suspect the new occupants of the White House will try to establish themselves by emphasizing the negative aspects of the outgoing Administration.

“To reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor is very often considered by a successor as the best proof he can give of his own capacity,” wrote Alexander Hamilton nearly two centuries ago.

This principle applies even during amicable transitions, and it covers not only the presidents but their spouses as well. Four years ago, First Lady Barbara Bush wasted no time showing the world that her down-to-earth manner contrasted dramatically with that of fashion-conscious Nancy Reagan.

“New presidents frequently overreact to a perceived flaw in their predecessors,” wrote scholar Carl M. Brauer in his book “Presidential Transitions.” “In reaction to Truman, Eisenhower was too anti-political. In reaction to Eisenhower, Kennedy was too anti-organizational. In reaction to Nixon, Carter was too ‘anti-imperial.’ In reaction to Carter, Reagan was too ideological.”

The most dramatic and, in some ways, the bitterest of all transitions was in March of 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office from Herbert Hoover in the crisis-filled nadir of the Great Depression.

With banks closing across the nation, and as many as 15 million of the nation’s labor force of 50 million people unemployed, Hoover in his final days in office repeatedly appealed to Roosevelt for joint actions, such as an emergency proclamation to limit bank withdrawals. Roosevelt, eager to show that his Administration would be a dramatic break with Hoover’s, refused to cooperate.

When Roosevelt made the customary visit to the White House on March 3, 1933, he turned down one last Hoover request for a joint proclamation--and then told the President that with things so busy, he would understand if Hoover did not pay him a return visit.

“Mr. Roosevelt,” Hoover shot back, “when you have been in Washington as long as I have been, you will learn that the President of the United States calls on nobody.” The following day, Roosevelt took office with what was probably America’s most famous Inaugural Address, declaring that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

That year, 1933, was the last time the changeover in power took place on March 4, a date set nearly two centuries ago at a time when incoming presidents and their appointees needed time to come to Washington by horse. Ratification of the 20th (“Lame Duck”) Amendment moved up Inauguration Day to Jan. 20, starting in 1937.

Not every transition has been as contentious as those from Hoover to Roosevelt and from Truman to Eisenhower. A few, in fact, have been surprisingly friendly. Soon after John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election, he went to see Eisenhower in the White House for a session notable for its warmth.

“I must confess to considerable gratification in this visit with the young man who was to be successor,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs. “Throughout the entire proceedings, he conducted himself with unusual good taste. Resisting any temptation to flood the White House with his own retinue, he came riding in the back seat of an automobile completely by himself.”

On the other hand, a harmonious transition does not necessarily lead to a good first year as President.

Many historians believe that the Bay of Pigs fiasco--that is, the failed invasion of Cuba in April, 1961--stemmed directly from Kennedy’s failure to take control of the planning that was started by the outgoing Administration, and by Kennedy’s decision to keep Eisenhower’s appointee Allen Dulles on the job as CIA director.

By contrast, the acrimonious transition of 1933 was followed by Roosevelt’s “hundred days,” the most famous start-up in presidential history.

Ever since John Adams appointed his “midnight judges,” lame-duck presidents have wielded power right up to their last moments in office--sometimes taking actions bolder or more controversial than they were willing to beforehand, granting presidential pardons, filing antitrust suits and killing troublesome investigations.

“Sometimes, they (lame-duck presidents) are doing a favor for their successors,” observes Brookings Institution presidential scholar Stephen Hess.

During the presidential transition four years ago, for example, President Reagan opened a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization, an act that might have been too politically risky for a new President facing reelection. Similarly, it is possible that Bush, as lame duck, may take some steps over the next few weeks toward normalization of ties with Vietnam.

Presidents-elect usually spend much of the transition struggling to decide whom to appoint to their new administrations. “Every time I make an appointment,” griped President Taft, “I create nine enemies and one ingrate.”

Throughout American history, the same appointment questions crop up again and again: Should the incoming President pick a few members of the opposition party? How much priority should be placed on diversity in gender, race, age, ethnicity and regional origin? Should he choose close friends and supporters, whom he already knows well, or outsiders with whom he might not be so comfortable?

Sometimes, reaching out beyond the inner circle of the presidential campaign works out remarkably well.

Soon after the 1968 election, New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller was having lunch in New York with his staff to talk about what job he might want in the new Nixon Administration when the meal was interrupted by a phone call from Nixon’s entourage at the Hotel Pierre. The call was not for Rockefeller but for his aide Henry A. Kissinger, who eventually became Nixon’s national security adviser and an integral part of his Administration.

Nixon’s aides told Rockefeller soon afterward that they wanted him to stay on the job in Albany.

By contrast, Kennedy’s selection of an outsider was a flop. In December, 1960, Kennedy interviewed Dean Rusk, then head of the Rockefeller Foundation, for the job of secretary of state.

“Kennedy and I could not communicate,” Rusk afterward told his friend Chester Bowles. “. . . If the idea of making me secretary ever entered his mind, I am sure it is now dead.”

Yet Rusk had powerful patrons, like former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and the next day, to Rusk’s surprise, Kennedy offered him the job. One part of Rusk’s initial impression turned out to be correct: Over the following three years, the two men found that they couldn’t communicate.

Presidential transitions also provide the setting for epic turf wars and power grabs, once the appointments are made.

As Nixon’s national security adviser, Kissinger won his boss’s approval for rules that gave the White House, and Kissinger, immense power over the foreign-policy apparatus. In 1981, on the eve of Reagan’s inaugural, incoming Secretary of State Haig tried to do essentially the same thing. But his power-grab was shot down by the White House, and Haig never really recovered.

Sometimes when the President-elect qualifies as an outsider--to Washington, that is--he has come to the nation’s capital to meet, greet, stroke and reassure Washington’s powerbrokers. Those sessions make for a ritual display of testy politesse.

Both President-elect Carter and later his successor, Reagan, paid visits to the office of House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. Both men carried versions of the same message: They expected good relations with Congress.

“Reagan told me that he expected to get along with Congress because he had been on good terms with the California Legislature,” O’Neill recalled in his memoirs. “But where Jimmy Carter had expressed disdain for the state representatives of Georgia, Reagan was proud that he, a Republican, had worked harmoniously with the Democratic state Assembly.

“That was the minor leagues,” O’Neill recalls telling Reagan. “You’re in the big leagues now.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Stanley Meisler contributed to this story.