Picking the Critical 30: A Cautionary Tale : Transition: Poor selection, weak management of Cabinet and staff can doom a presidency.

Mismanagement has marred effective presidential policy-making in the 30 years since Dwight Eisenhower, now viewed as the great managerial President. No question looms larger in managing the executive branch than the relationship between the President and his top White House staff and Cabinet members.

Few rules of management are more clear than providing top executives with sufficient resources and flexibility to have a reasonable chance of effectively performing their assigned tasks. But that means giving up some presidential control and curbing power-hungry staff from imposing agency policy from the White House. In no area of governance have recent presidents failed so miserably.

In the Reagan years, the White House was highly centralized, with most of the power in the hands of a few top aides at the expense of the Cabinet secretaries. The White House controlled the key sub-Cabinet appointments and made the main criterion loyalty to the Reagan doctrine. University of Minnesota professor Paul Light observed that the White House-appointed sub-Cabinet “would cut their boss’s throat to please the President.” The clear message to a Cabinet member was, “We don’t trust you and our people are in the agency ready to catch you.”

The great appeal of White House centralization is political control. Democrats wring their hands over the loss of control by President Carter after he gave his Cabinet the power to appoint their sub-Cabinets. They point to the worst case: Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano, who defied Carter.

The problem in the Carter years, however, was not the management approach but inept management, which included both poor selection and a failure to exert discipline. In the case of Califano, his public record as President Johnson’s domestic policy chief made clear he would be a hard person to deal with. Carter’s great mistake was appointing Califano, not exerting a strong hand and letting him defy the President for three years before firing him. Any management approach will fail in the hands of a weak manager.

Eisenhower, the last elected President who fully understood how complex public organizations work, had the capacity to choose good people and use them effectively. His biographer, Stephen Ambrose, wrote that Eisenhower “wanted competent, proven administrators, men who thought big and acted big. Completely free of any need to boost his own ego, or to prove his decisiveness or leadership, he wanted to ‘build up’ the men who worked with him.” Eisenhower not only picked good people, but he could also assess each person’s strengths and weaknesses and put together a team of complementary skills and temperaments.

How did Eisenhower keep his Cabinet members on course? Dillon Anderson, an Eisenhower special assistant, pointed out that the President “invited a lot of give-and-take” from Cabinet representatives before making a decision. But after it was made, the department “damn well knew what it was and there’d be no fuzzing up as to what the President’s decision had been.” If the department was subverting Eisenhower’s decision, the secretary answered to the President. Clean lines of responsibility provide a base of action and a focus of praise or blame.

No presidential management task is as important as picking top White House aides and Cabinet members--no more than 30 people. Pick wrong and the presidency will be mismanaged; the difficulties will be compounded if the President puts White House staff between him and his secretaries. Pick capable people and sound management will not be an undue strain on a President. For the sub-Cabinet, use as the first criterion proved managerial and analytic capability and as the second, support of the President’s general goals. Give the secretaries authority, including appointment power for the sub-Cabinet, and flexibility to manage. Confront them if they defy you. Fire them if they continue to do so.

Good presidential management will not ensure a successful presidency. But bad management almost certainly brings disaster. If America is to prosper, President-elect Clinton must end the mismanaging of America and the accompanying economic decline and social decay.