Brookings: Series - Workbook for the President-Elect

What Now? Your Inaugural Speech

Stephen Hess — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:37:19 -0500

Mr. President, it would be wonderful if you deliver a great inaugural address. But if you don’t, take comfort: very few of your predecessors did. In fact, as the history books often point out, the inaugural address that had the most immediate effect was certainly one of the worst: 68 year-old William Henry Harrison spoke for nearly two hours (at 8,445 words, also the longest-ever address) on a snowy day in March 1841. He caught cold and died of pneumonia a month later.

William Safire, a former speechwriter for President Nixon and author of Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, writes that there have been four great inaugural addresses: Lincoln’s two, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first, and John F. Kennedy’s. Others make claims for Jefferson’s first and Wilson’s second.

Lincoln, elected on the eve of the Civil War, wanted to make clear that he was not going to let the South walk away from the Union. He was prepared to fight. Lincoln’s second, delivered four years later and thirty-seven days away from the end of the Civil War, was a sermon looking to reconciliation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech of March 4, 1933, also came in the midst of exceptional crisis. One out of every four workers was out of a job, and many banks in all forty-eight states were either closed or placed restrictions on how much money depositors could withdraw. Roosevelt’s “bold tone and buoyant delivery,” Safire writes, “encouraged people parched for hope.”

What is so remarkable about Kennedy’s speech is that 1961 was no more a moment of crisis than were any of the other inaugural years of the cold war from Truman through Reagan. Rather, what was instantly hailed was the sheer brilliance of the words, the flow of passion celebrating youth and idealism.

Inaugural addresses are not expected to be heavy on specifics, to detail legislative or administrative proposals. That is what your State of the Union message is for. But you can make an exception to this rule, if you choose, as President Truman did in 1949 when he used his inaugural address to outline four points of action for “world recovery and lasting peace.” His fourth point—which called for “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas”— quickly turned into a major U.S. foreign policy initiative.

Nor are inaugural addresses expected to sound like campaign speeches. Again, there are exceptions: Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address repackages the same themes—often using the same words— that he had been honing into a basic message since campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

As a member in good standing of the Judson Welliver Society, the collectivity of former presidential speechwriters, I offer here some advice to review with your own team of future Welliverians:

Length

You will not set the record for the shortest inaugural address. George Washington will always hold that one—a mere 135 words. The gold standard is now Kennedy’s twelve minutes. If you can stay around twelve minutes, the commentator class will take note with appreciation.

Style

Do not try to be a Kennedy clone. Clinton did—and while there were moments that were quite good in his first inaugural address, do you really want to be thought of as a weak carbon copy of someone else? Don’t worry about creating applause lines for the people facing you on the Mall. They are your devoted supporters; they already love you. Your primary audience is measured in millions, in the United States and abroad, curious for a first impression of the new president and willing to give you a few minutes in the midst of their busy lives. Humor rarely works. A catchphrase might work for Kennedy (“new frontier”), but how many remember which president created “new covenant” and “new spirit”?

Tone

George W. Bush’s first inaugural was a great speech—for some other president. Was a Texas “brush-whacker” supposed to sound that elegant? (Apparently he thought so.) Jimmy Carter—who is said to have written his own speech—did well by sounding like Jimmy Carter, even if there were some at the time who were disappointed. Be comfortable with your rhetorical self.

Theme

Refer back to worksheets in the first chapter in which you wrote down why you were elected and what you promised to accomplish as president. If you campaigned for “change” or “reform,” this is the moment to put those ideas in the context of how you plan to govern. Ask not what you can cram into twelve minutes, but rather what is the one thought—even the one word—that best describes what you want your presidency to stand for.

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? The Inauguration

Stephen Hess — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0500

The ceremony itself is fairly formulaic, but there is still room for individual touches. President Carter shed the usual morning coat and striped pants for a standard business suit. President Reagan moved the ceremony to the Capitol’s west front terrace from the traditional East Portico. (So you will now face the Mall and an audience of many thousands.)

Within patriotic limits, you can choose the musical selections. A chorus from Atlanta University sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at Carter’s inauguration. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang "This Is My Country" for President Nixon. The Marine Band performed Aaron Copland’s "Fanfare for the Common Man" at the inauguration of President Clinton. Pick a grand voice for "The Star- Spangled Banner." Past presidents chose the operatic voices of Dorothy Maynor (Eisenhower), Marian Anderson (Kennedy), and Marilyn Horne (Clinton). President Kennedy opened a new vein of creativity by asking Robert Frost to recite a poem; a second poet, Maya Angelou, read for Clinton.

Choosing the "right" clergy will be noted, of course. Kennedy’s invocation was delivered by Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, a close family friend. Billy Graham was there for Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton. Almost as difficult as trying to select a cabinet that "looks like America" is trying to arrange a "four faiths" inaugural ceremony, in which your options include Catholic, Protestant (possibly one white, one African American), Jewish, and Greek Orthodox. There has not yet been a Muslim.

Immediately before you take the oath of office, your vice president will be sworn in. There is no set protocol for the vice presidential swearing-in. The oath of office was administered to Vice President Lyndon Johnson by his fellow Texan, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. Vice President Richard Nixon chose a fellow Californian, Senator William Knowland, and Vice President Dan Quayle chose Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The oath of office was administered to Vice President Al Gore by retired Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Once this is done, you will join the chief justice of the United States and place your hand on a Bible, opened to a passage if you wish. You will then repeat the thirty-five-word oath from Article II, Section I of the Constitution:

I, ________________ , do solemnly swear [or affirm] that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

You will probably also add the words "So help me God," as most of your predecessors have—a tradition that is said to date to the very first presidential inauguration. Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover are the only presidents to "affirm" the oath.

Now, for the first time, ruffles and flourishes and "Hail to the Chief" will be played for you. In the distance a twenty-one-gun salute will be fired from howitzers of the Military District of Washington. You will be given the card that unlocks the nuclear code.

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? The Oval Office

Stephen Hess — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0500

You are about to move into the Oval Office—one of the most dramatic, architecturally satisfying rooms in the world—and you are going to have to make a basic decision: do you wish to admire it or work in it?

Clearly, this is a great ceremonial place. You will call in members of the press pool to snap photos of you chatting with world leaders, with the marble mantel of the fireplace in the background, the presidential seal set in plaster on the ceiling, the flags of the United States and the president behind the desk. But is this really where you want to roll up your sleeves, spread out your papers, loosen your tie and work?

I have worked in the White House twice, for two very different people, and their answers were yes (Eisenhower) and no (Nixon). The Oval Office was where President Eisenhower chose to conduct the affairs of state. He didn’t even bother to change the green carpet and draperies from Harry Truman’s occupancy. Nixon, on the other hand, established his serious workspace across the gated West Executive Street and up a flight of stairs in Room 180 of the Executive Office Building (since renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building). It was here that Nixon probably had a hole drilled into his desk to secure the wires to the machine that was taping “Watergate” conversations. The Oval Office was relegated to the ceremonial place.

The president who made himself most at home in the Oval Office was John F. Kennedy. He brought in a rocking chair to ease his back pain; his collection of ship models; maritime paintings (instead of presidential portraits); a silver goblet from New Ross, Ireland, the town from which his great grand-father set off for America; a watercolor of the White House painted by his wife; a chair from his student days at Harvard; and a plaque, given to him by Admiral Hyman Rickover, inscribed with the words of the Breton fisherman’s prayer: “O, God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” On his desk, encased in plastic, sat the coconut shell carved with the message that led to his rescue after PT-109 was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands.

Other presidents added their own personal touches. Reagan gave the Oval Office a distinctly Western flavor with Remington cowboy sculptures and miniature bronze saddles. George H. W. Bush featured blue and white, the colors of Yale, his alma mater. His son hung scenes of Texas by Texan artists on loan from Texas museums.

In addition to deciding which portraits to hang in the Oval Office, you will have to choose which desk you will use there. The options, however, are limited to four historic desks—the Resolute Desk, the Theodore Roosevelt Desk, the Wilson Desk, and the C&O Desk—or bringing your own.

The Resolute Desk:

The Resolute Desk is a partner’s desk, meaning it was designed to accommodate a person sitting and working on either side. Franklin D.
Roosevelt, however, chose to add a center panel with a carved Seal of the President in order to hide his iron leg braces from view and to conceal a safe. While the desk has been used often by presidents since 1880, Kennedy was the first to put it in the Oval Office. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush also used the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Theodore Roosevelt Desk

This is the original West Wing desk, made in 1902 for Theodore Roosevelt, used in the Oval Office by Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower. Nixon chose this desk for his “working office,” Room 180 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and presumably the Watergate tapes were made by an apparatus concealed in its drawer. Its practicality is that it has a larger surface than the Resolute Desk.

The Wilson Desk

The Wilson Desk was used in the Oval Office by Presidents Nixon and Ford. This was Nixon’s desk in the Capitol when he was vice president, and he requested it for the White House. His attachment stemmed from his belief that the desk once belonged to Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately the following footnote in the 1969 edition of Public Papers of the Presidents noted: “Later research indicated that the desk had not been President Woodrow Wilson’s as had long been assumed but was used by Vice President Henry Wilson during President Grant’s administration.”

C&O Desk

The C&O Desk was used in the Oval Office by George H. W. Bush, who moved it from his vice presidential office in the Capitol. It is a handsome reproduction of an eighteenth-century English double pedestal desk, with a full set of drawers on each side, made around 1920 for the owners of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. It was later donated to the White House and used by Ford, Carter, and Reagan in the West Wing Study.

Your Own Desk

You can, of course, bring your own desk with you to the Oval Office, as did Lyndon Johnson. The Johnson desk is now in the replica Oval
Office at the LBJ museum in Austin, and, I am reliably told, the retired president sometimes sat at the desk to surprise unsuspecting museum visitors.

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Confirmation Battles

Stephen Hess — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:53:33 -0500

Although confirmation hearings are conducted by different Senate committees filled with different interests and egos, you have probably noticed something holistic about the way senators deal with a new president’s initial slate of appointments. Perhaps the energy expended in fighting one nominee cannot be recycled. Perhaps there is a point past which opposition is perceived as obstructionism and becomes politically counterproductive.

The result is that you will get a lot of brushfires, but only one truly horrendous conflagration. Senators seem to demand that there always be one. Perhaps you should designate one of your appointees to be the sacrificial lamb so that the others can survive unscathed. (Just joking!)

This is the way it worked for two of George W. Bush’s nominees. His choice for attorney general, Senator John Ashcroft, had well-documented, deeply controversial views on abortion, gun control and the death penalty. The nomination produced weeks of anguished debate before he was finally confirmed, 58 to 42, on February 1. The brouhaha probably eased the confirmation of Bush’s candidate for interior secretary, Gail Norton, who should have been equally controversial. Environmentalists waged a fierce fight, but it had little effect on the Senate and Norton was comfortably approved, 75 to 24.

The experiences of cabinet appointees Ashcroft and Norton—being challenged on the basis of their policy beliefs rather than personal behavior—is a relatively new phenomenon, going back no further perhaps than Richard Nixon’s appointment of interior secretary Walter Hickel, a business-oriented governor of Alaska who was accused of being insensitive to conservation. The rule of thumb for that earlier time was that, given minimum ethical standards, a president was entitled to his choice, since the appointee served only at his pleasure and would not be passed on to the next president. Those were the good old days.

In response to more and more confirmation fights, a group has emerged in Washington known as the sherpas, who have turned steering nominees through the confirmation progress into a fine art. There are Republican sherpas and Democratic sherpas. It’s not exactly a club, but they are known to each other. Sign up the ones you need early.

Life would be much easier for presidents-in-transition if only their personnel selection process could test for the five criteria laid out by Pendleton James, a corporate headhunter who was in charge of recruitment for President-elect Reagan:

Commitment to the president’s philosophy and program.
The highest integrity and personal qualifications.
Experience and skills that fit the task.
No personal agenda that conflicts with being a member of the president’s team.
The toughness needed to withstand the pressures and inducements of Washington and to accomplish the changes sought by the president.

So you follow this prescription, you think you have the person you want, and suddenly there’s a problem. Why? Most likely one of two things has happened.

Inadequate Vetting

Inadequate vetting—the failure to dig deep enough to get the troubling information—was what caused problems for President Carter (in the case of Kennedy administration veteran Ted Sorensen); President Clinton (in the case of Lani Guinier); and President George W. Bush (in the case of Linda Chavez). Nominated to be CIA director, Sorensen’s offense was that he took classified material with him when he left the White House after Kennedy’s assassination to write a book. Guinier, nominated to be assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division, had expressed views in her writings that were, Clinton wrote in his memoirs, “in conflict with my support for affirmative action and opposition to quotas.” He withdrew the nomination, saying he had not been aware of her views.

Chavez, nominated to be secretary of labor, had taken a battered woman into her home, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, who did occasional chores and had been given at least $1,500. Chavez had not provided this information to Bush’s vetters or the FBI. After her name was withdrawn, Bush announced a replacement nominee just two days later. In Washington he was given more credit for acting expeditiously than blame for making a flawed appointment. It probably also helped that the new nominee (Elaine Chao) was married to a prominent Republican senator.

Insufficient Understanding of Political Risks

Not realizing or understanding the political risks of a particular nominee is what caused problems for Nixon (in the case of Dr. John Knowles, who was to be nominated as assistant secretary for health until the American Medical Association, which disliked Knowles’s support for universal health care, opposed him); President George H. W. Bush (in the case of John Tower); and Clinton (in the case of Zoë Baird).

Remember Zoë Baird, the candidate for attorney general who had employed illegal aliens as household help? Surely this belongs in the category of inadequate vetting. Not so, according to Clinton: “The employment of illegal immigrants was not that uncommon then,” he wrote in his memoirs, and Baird had not tried to conceal the information. “We had simply underestimated its significance.”

The most significant failed nomination is that of John Tower, the former senator from Texas, whom George H. W. Bush nominated to be secretary of defense. He would not fold. His nomination was not defeated until March, causing three other cabinet confirmations to be delayed.

NEXT WEEK: GETTING GOOD PRESS, AVOIDING BAD PRESS

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Choosing Your Cabinet

Stephen Hess — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:00:00 -0500

You have designed and staffed your White House, so you can now effectively move on to choosing your cabinet members and other key officials. You will need to consider the diversity, political and talent requirements that go into making these choices, including whether you want to reach out to the opposition party. Where are the best pools of talent available to you? What lessons can you learn from the failures of other presidents? And what must be done to get your nominees confirmed by the Senate? These are the questions to which I now turn.

Talent Hunt
Now comes the moment when you must find the people to head the fifteen departments and the major agencies of the federal government.

Look at what you are asking executives to manage: the smallest department (in terms of budget) is Commerce, which will be authorized to spend nearly $9 billion a year during your presidency; the largest, Health and Human Services, will have budget authority of more than $765 billion. You have only a four-year contract, once renewable, so you will want leaders who can get things done in a hurry. Yet the Congress— from which your departments receive their money—also has ideas about how the departments should be run, as has the civil service, which can wait out the appointed officials. Meanwhile, the media are poised to enjoy any false step.

Almost everyone you ask to serve is making a lot more money than the $191,300 salary a cabinet officer gets. Yet you will usually get the people you want for the “inner cabinet”—State, Treasury, Defense, and Justice. Beyond that, it can be difficult: President Reagan was turned down by six of his first choices—five for “outer cabinet” jobs. President Nixon endured four rejections (Kissinger says there was a fifth). If your choices turn you down, don’t twist arms: those who say no usually have a good reason for not taking the job, even if it may not sound like a good reason to you.

As you proceed with your talent hunt, powerful groups will take a keen interest in which way you appear to be leaning. When it became known that President-elect Carter was weighing the merits of Harold Brown or James Schlesinger for secretary of defense, there was a sudden campaign for Paul Warnke. Its purpose was to position Brown, who had been deputy secretary of defense in the Johnson administration, as a moderate compromise between the liberal Warnke and conservative Schlesinger, who had held the secretary of defense position under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Washington games such as this can provide you with hints of candidates’ strengths and weaknesses.

Here are five suggestions on where to look for the kinds of officials who have been productive in the past.

University and College Presidents
The job of university president closely resembles that of running a government department. As with cabinet officers, these administrators have more responsibility than authority. (You might find a way of asking them and other candidates for your cabinet, “What have you accomplished without formal authority?”) They have learned how to deal with ambiguity, which corporate executives often find disquieting. They have also learned to deal with competing constituencies (trustees, faculty, students, administrators, alumni, the local community, and, in the case of public institutions, legislative bodies).

Governors
All incoming presidents since Eisenhower have picked at least one governor (Kennedy and Nixon each picked three), but hardly ever for the inner cabinet. Western governors have been popular choices for interior secretary. The record of governors as cabinet secretaries is a mixed bag: Orville Freeman of Minnesota, secretary of agriculture for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Richard Riley of South Carolina, Clinton’s secretary of education, were outstanding. Another South Carolina governor, James Edwards, barely lasted a year as Reagan’s secretary of energy; and Nixon had to fire Alaskan Walter Hickel, another western governor at interior.

Members of Congress
Watch out for members of Congress: management is rarely their forte. Although some may have had business experience before arriving in Washington, law is more likely their occupation. Their skill is in lobbying former colleagues (defense secretaries Mel Laird and Dick Cheney were notably effective in this manner). If you go with legislators, be sure to pair them with talented managers as their deputies. You will be much better off if you select the deputies yourself—as long as the cabinet officials feel they can live with your choices. This creates a sort of “double veto” system.

Business
The size of government agencies might suggest that the natural choices for these executive positions reside in corporate America. The answer is yes and no, depending on factors such as whether the executives have spent their entire careers in one company (not good prospects), whether their type of company has extensive contact with or regulation by the government (useful prospects), and whether their résumés also show substantial community involvement, such as being a school board chair (very good prospects).

Government
The safest place to look for good cabinet officials is among those who have already been good cabinet officials—the repeaters. There are people in both parties, as well as others who have served under presidents of both parties, who have already proved their worth. Take a look at a résumé like that of the late Elliot Richardson, the only person who ever held four cabinet-level positions: secretary of health, education, and welfare; secretary of defense; attorney general; and secretary of commerce. And for good measure, he had also been under secretary of state. Richardson was not an expert in welfare policy or commerce; his expertise was in running large government departments. You cannot go wrong with people like Richardson.

NEXT WEEK: CONFIRMATION BATTLES

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Your Speechwriters

Stephen Hess — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:00:00 -0500

No president had a White House speechwriting shop as oddly constructed as Richard Nixon’s. Its three senior writers were about as far apart in background and ideology as it is possible to get: Raymond Price (liberal, WASP); Patrick Buchanan (conservative, Catholic); and William Safire (centrist, Jew). According to Safire, “When Nixon wanted to take a shot at somebody, he turned to Buchanan. . . . When Nixon wanted a vision of the nation’s future, he turned to Price.” Safire himself contributed “a touch of humor.” Nixon did not want them to work together as a committee. The moral of the story is, I guess, that a president can have any type of staff that he feels serves his purpose.

Where you look for a speechwriter also defies a simple answer. Among those who did heavy work for Franklin Roosevelt, Raymond Moley was a professor at Columbia University, Samuel Rosenman left his seat on the New York Supreme Court to join the White House staff (not as a lawyer, but as the speechwriter), Robert Sherwood was a playwright who won four Pulitzer Prizes, Archibald MacLeish was a poet who won three Pulitzers, and Charles Michelson was the publicity chief at the Democratic National Committee. Good speechwriters are merely people who are good at putting words—in speech form—in other people’s mouths.

Since you already have speechwriters—presidential candidates have to have them, as well as those who hold the jobs that lead to the presidency—your basic question is probably not where to find them but what you do with them in the White House. The argument among scholars revolves around whether to put them in their own box (and direct them to stay in it) or distribute them among policymaking offices, as they were in an earlier time.

The problem is that presidents now make so many more speeches.

Robert Schlesinger, in White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters, notes that Herbert Hoover averaged eight public appearances a month, Kennedy nearly nineteen, and Clinton more than twenty-eight. Your speechwriters will have to be tightly organized to meet this demand. At the same time, you should seek ways to take advantage of the talents they could bring to creating your policies, not just to explaining them.

If ever there was a case of divine intervention on behalf of the harried speechwriter, it occurred just before a “Dinner with Ike” for 7,000 in Los Angeles on January 27, 1960. The speech of that evening was a big deal: 83 dinners around the country designed to raise $5 million were connected by closed-circuit TV, with Richard Nixon in Chicago, Nelson Rockefeller in Washington, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in Pittsburgh and the president accepting the tributes in Los Angeles. And the piece of paper in my typewriter was absolutely blank.

But in my in-box appeared a letter:

My dear Mr. President,

I have just turned 21 years of age. I am now old enough to vote and mature enough to take part in political elections. My problem is, which party am I best suited to serve? I thought you would be able to help me by telling me what the Republican Party stands for. What are its goals and in what way may I help it to achieve them?

Shirley Jean Havens
Arvada, Colorado

Here’s the divine intervention part: I had nothing to do with presidential correspondence. The correspondence section at the White House had never before forwarded a letter addressed to the president to me (nor would it ever do so again).

So the president would tell Shirley Jean why she should be a Republican.

The president loved the idea, picked up the phone, and asked Aksel Nielson, a Denver banker who was a good friend, to go to Arvada and give him a report on Shirley Jean. (Maybe she was a communist or a drug dealer.) The report came back that Shirley Jean was polite, pretty, a mother of two, and the wife of a plumber. Equally nice: she had written the same letter to Harry Truman and had received a gruff reply to go read a book. Shirley Jean was then invited to the “Dinner with Ike” in Denver so that she could witness (along with Time and Life) the president’s reply to her letter. After that, she kept writing the president—but of course that wasn’t my department.

NEXT WEEK: CHOOSING YOUR CABINET

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Your Congressional Relations Chief

Stephen Hess — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

No job on your staff will have as large a pool of talented people to choose from. Draw a circle with a ten-mile radius from the White House, and you will capture dozens—if not hundreds—of members of your party who have vast experience as former members of Congress or as current or former congressional staffers. Most will take a substantial cut in pay to become your chief lobbyist. Why? Because the job is important, it is fun for the right kind of person, it is highly visible in their world of political advocacy—and it is only deferred income anyway.

Consider an earlier presidential transition aided by a man whose career had included managing congressional relations for two presidents: Bryce N. Harlow, who in November 1968 was working at New York City’s Hotel Pierre, headquarters for President-elect Nixon:

“I’m there in this room, phones ringing, jumping off the wall. Suddenly over runs a secretary, “Mr. Harlow, President Johnson’s calling.” I cut off who I was talking to and I said, “Yes, Mr. President . . . yuppity yup, yes, sir. . . .” And over runs the secretary. I put my hand over the receiver. “President Eisenhower is calling.” “Tell him I’m talking to the President and I’ll call him right back, or if he prefers, we’ll put him on hold.” Believe me, we put President Eisenhower on hold. Now I’ve got the President [on the line], got the former President waiting. In runs [Nixon aide] Larry Higby, and he says, ‘’Mr. Harlow, Mr. Harlow,” very imperiously, “The President-elect wants you in his office immediately.”

The story of a man whose counsel was demanded simultaneously by a former president, the current president, and the future president may suggest an extraordinary ego. But Harlow was a small, unassuming man who spoke almost in whispers and gladly let others take credit.

His résumé: after graduating from the University of Oklahoma, Harlow went to Washington and became an assistant to his member of Congress. He rose to chief clerk of the House Armed Services Committee and was the Pentagon’s liaison officer to Congress during World War II. He was the chief lobbyist for Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and, between these periods of White House service, directed the governmental relations office of Proctor & Gamble. In other words, Harlow was a man who had worked long and hard to take the measure of government.

What made Harlow such an effective bridge between the executive and legislative branches was his skill as a negotiator. As the go-between, he had an uncanny knack for discerning what was most crucial to each player. He knew when a legislator could afford to give in and when the legislator would have to stand firm. He understood the trick was to make sure, if possible, that everyone would be able to claim some victory. Moreover, he was eminently practical: his job was to solve problems for the president—not to turn legislative proposals into moral imperatives.

In seeking a Harlow type—and they’re still around—you should make sure that they report each side accurately to the other, that they do not promise what they cannot deliver, that they do not make cutting comments in drawing rooms for recirculation in gossip columns and blogs, and that they do not call opponents’ motives into question.

NEXT WEEK: YOUR SPEECHWRITERS

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Picking Your Press Secretary

Stephen Hess — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:33:22 -0500

It would be useful if your press secretary had great briefing skills: an ability to explain your policies with brevity and accuracy, to deflect difficult questions without rancor, and to cut tension with good humor or a quip. It would also be useful if reporters considered your press secretary to be a fun sort of person—if only because they will have to spend so much time together and because nothing is gained by a hostile workplace.

It would be useful, but not sufficient.

Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary, had all these skills. He was a good fellow, but the White House press corps at the time did not hold him in the highest regard. Why? Because he lacked what reporters consider the one essential: membership in the president’s inner circle. When important decisions were being debated in the White House about the Bay of Pigs invasion, Salinger’s name was not on the manifest. The opposite was true of President Carter’s press secretary, Jody Powell. Powell was far from a personal favorite of the Washington press corps, yet he was valued for his closeness to Carter.

News organizations spend a lot of money to cover you, yet White House reporters will have limited opportunities to ask you questions directly (unless you are very different from those who came before you). Because of this, reporters need to feel the information they get from your press secretary is bankable.

So, what career path produces the perfect press secretary—journalism or political communications? Ideally, your press secretary will have a background in both fields. This was the case with President Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, who invented the modern White House Press Office. Hagerty had been a reporter for the New York Times before becoming press secretary to New York Governor Thomas Dewey and, later, the spokesman for Ike’s 1952 presidential campaign.

But if your press secretary doesn’t have experience in both careers, the record suggests a background as a political communicator is the better fit. The estimable James Brady came to the Reagan press operation after having handled press relations for the OMB in the Ford administration and having been chief spokesman for a defense secretary and a senator. The fundamental duality of the White House job is less wearing on the political communicator.

As Hagerty told reporters, “I’m here to help you get the news. I am also here to work for one man, who happens to be the President. And I will do that to the best of my ability.” Press secretaries who come to the White House with a journalism- only background seem more conflicted.

Jerald terHorst, who left the Washington bureau of the Detroit News to become President Ford’s first press secretary, lasted only thirty days, resigning when he could not support Ford’s decision to pardon former President Nixon. TerHorst was an honorable man who made a conscientious decision—but it was not a decision that was helpful to President Ford. The usual habit is to elevate the campaign spokesman. In some recent cases, unfortunately, this has not produced complete satisfaction.

Ask candidates for press secretary to repeat after you this “oath” of office:
“I, ___________ , am here to work for the President and it is my job to explain my president’s position—whatever it is—to the best of my ability.”

NEXT WEEK: YOUR CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS CHIEF

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Staffing the White House

Stephen Hess — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The White House is the obvious place to start putting the pieces in place that will define your administration. How do you wish to organize your staff? In what order should you make the appointments? Consider the degree of tension that you want to build into your system. What are the qualities you need in your key assistants? As you make these and other decisions, the nation and the world will be assessing the rightness of your first moves.

Staffing the White House

In the days before you become president of the United States (or POTUS, as we say “inside the Beltway”), the government may look like rows of empty offices waiting to be filled with your loyal supporters. This is not quite the case. Of the two million civilian employees in the U.S. government, you will get to pick about 3,000 of them. Moreover, the most important appointees will require confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

Let’s get started at the top.

The White House Office

The nerve center of the Executive Office of the President is the White House Office (WHO). It is imperative to choose certain White House officials immediately in order to move forward efficiently with the staffing process—from selection to confirmation—that shapes your administration. Many problems of the Clinton transition arose because the president-elect—consumed, as he stated in his memoirs, with “micromanaging the cabinet appointments”—failed to appoint his White House staff, except for Chief of Staff Thomas F. McLarty, until six days before taking office.

The key positions that you must quickly fill are:

• Chief of staff
• Personnel director
• Counsel
• Press secretary
• Congressional relations chief
• Speechwriters

Chief of Staff

Presidents usually designate one assistant their primus inter pares (Latin for “first among equals”), the PIP, in our shorthand. The PIP most often has the title “chief of staff”—but not always. Sherman Adams in the Eisenhower administration was “the assistant to the president” (with emphasis on “the”), and President Kennedy’s PIP, Ted Sorensen, was “special counsel.” Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have had what amounted to multi-person PIPs. But titles and numbers matter much less than the PIP’s dual responsibility to keep the president’s policies moving forward while trying to keep him out of trouble. The PIP is the one job you will hopefully have picked—but not announced to the press—before the election.

The PIP is your fail-safe mechanism, the last redoubt between you and a misstep. If the PIP does not know the location of all the traps that will be set for you in the capital, you are likely to get ensnared. This ability should be the key qualification of the PIP; the rest—the public relations skills or policy development skills—can be brought into the White House in subordinate positions, if necessary.

NEXT WEEK: YOUR PRESS SECRETARY »

Authors

Stephen Hess

What Now? Getting Started

Stephen Hess — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

“The President needs help!”

These are the four most urgent words ever delivered to a president of the United States. They were the words of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management. The president was Franklin Roosevelt, the year 1937. That was the year Inauguration Day was advanced from March 4 to January 20—and life for newly elected presidents became ever more difficult. You could no longer take a leisurely four months to plan your administration or, like Woodrow Wilson, enjoy a month’s vacation in Bermuda.

Instead you have seventy-seven-and-a-half days (counting Christmas and New Year’s Day) to perform the incredibly difficult and complex job of creating a government before taking office.

There is no shadow cabinet to move in with you, as in a parliamentary system. Your staff—created for campaigning, not governing—lacks many of the talents you now require. Your political party asks not what it can do for you. The government’s civil service is either too liberal or too conservative, according to past presidents. And this is just the start of your problems.

One school of transition scholars advocates that you “hit the ground running.” They urge you to take advantage of the honeymoon period that the media and the voters usually give a new president. You’ll never have all the pieces in place when you take office anyway, so go for quick victories. Good first impressions are important.

Another school of scholars advises you to be cautious while you’re still learning the ropes. You’ll never have all the pieces in place when you take office, and ignorant presidents make unnecessary mistakes. It’s hard to undo bad first impressions.

Both are right.

After you have assessed your circumstances—the size of your electoral victory, makeup of Congress, state of the economy, immediate troubles in the world—it is essential to prioritize your long-term goals and then have a pocketful of doable actions ready for quick victories.

Now, let us begin.

Getting Started

Properly position your presidency—creating a sort of personal political gyroscope—by completing these two short exercises. First, list the five reasons you think people voted for you (not merely what your pollster told you). Then list the five most important promises you made during the campaign. Don’t include promises such as President Jimmy Carter’s “I’ll never lie to you.”

If you think people voted for you because of your personal characteristics and to deny the Oval Office to your opponent or his party, then you have already accomplished these goals. But the other reasons you wrote down probably relate to fears and hopes at home and abroad. Refer to this list every December when you start to write your State of the Union address.

As for promises you made during the campaign, some will obviously have to be honored over time, but others should be ready for submission to Congress (or to be put into effect as executive orders) as soon as possible after the inauguration. Keep the list short and doable. You can name on the fingers of one hand the things Ronald Reagan said he wanted to do in January 1981. While you want to keep your promises, you may find that circumstances change and you have to adjust to new situations. Or you may learn things you didn’t know, as happened with President Kennedy, who had spoken of a “missile gap”—a Soviet advantage in nuclear weapons capabilities that threatened U.S. security—during the 1960 campaign. Later evidence revealed the missile gap to be a myth.

If President-elect Bill Clinton had used these exercises in 1992, he might have avoided the rocky start of his administration when it got sidetracked by the “gays in the military” issue.

NEXT WEEK: STAFFING THE WHITE HOUSE

Authors

Stephen Hess