The New Prince

by Dick Morris

  Lincoln’s cabinet included virtually every one of his defeated rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. As the party’s second candidate for president, Lincoln felt acutely the need to include in his cabinet those who he needed in his governing coalition. Secretary of State William Seward had been the front runner for the 1860 nomination before the convention deadlocked. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had also both been convention rivals. Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, and Simeon Cameron, the ambassador to Russia (after a short, unhappy stint as war secretary) were both emissaries from the party organizations in Maryland and Pennsylvania respectively. Lincoln’s cabinet resembled a British cabinet, bring together all the leaders of his party, than an American cabinet, which is intended to be a group of advisors to the president.

  President Clinton’s choice of his cabinet and staff reflected the same need Lincoln had, to include all the diverse members of his governing coalition. He had to be sure African-Americans were represented in his cabinet and staff, so he reached out for Mississippi congressman Mike Espy, whom he barely knew, to serve as Secretary of Agriculture. To represent labor, Clinton named Harold Ickes, a former union lawyer, as his deputy chief of staff. The Democratic barons in the House had their man, former congressman Leon Panetta, first as director of the Office of Management and Budget and then as chief of staff. House Democratic Speaker Dick Gephardt saw his own former staff member, George Stephanopoulos, enter the president’s inner circle. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle’s former chief of staff, John Hilley, became the president’s director of congressional relations.

  Of President Clinton’s inner staff and cabinet, only a handful of people could be said to have been part of his inner circle in Arkansas. Most of these were quickly shunted aside. Mac MacLarty, the president’s childhood friend, lasted only halfway through the first term as chief of staff before the Washington insiders forced the president to turn to Panetta. David Watkins, Webb Hubbell, David Kennedy, Vince Foster, Bernie Nussbaum, and most other Clinton friends were out by the middle of the first term. Thereafter, Clinton had to govern with a staff that was essentially composed of strangers and recent acquaintances.

  Once, cabinets and staffs had to be balanced geographically. Now, they have to be balanced ethnically and demographically (as President Clinton said, his cabinet needed to “look like America”). Now, in addition, they must include all the relevant wings of one’s party. By the time a president (or any other executive officer) finishes taking account of these various considerations, he may or may not have a good cabinet or staff. But certainly he probably doesn’t have a loyal one.

  So a chief executive must resort to psychology to enforce his will on his staff. In the movie version of the book Primary Colors, Governor Stanton’s (Clinton’s) longtime aide and anti-negative ad bodyguard Libby Holden looks up at the moon, right before she kills herself, and says that those who work for Stanton and his wife reflect their light. “God, they were so good and glowing, I could go for years without remembering I wasn’t producing any warmth myself, any light of my own,…Without them, I’m dark and black and cold and dead and empty and airless for eternity.…All they need is to glow.”

  The staff of a president is made up of moons, with no illumination of their own. Only by positioning themselves to catch the rays of the sun can they attract any attention at all. To control his staff, a president needs to aim his rays where he wants his staff to be so that they have to go there in order to catch them.

  A staff member’s power is the most fluid thing in politics. The White House is a monarchy much like the court of Louis XIV. When the king smiled on one of the courtiers, word rippled through Versailles at the speed of sound. Likewise, a frown is seen halfway around the beltway in an instant. Like anxious children, staff members soon learn what pleases the president-father. The chief executive has only to beam his pleasure at a staffer and the minion will hasten to earn more smiles by repeating the behavior that has won him approval and favor.

  A good chief executive uses his weapons of praise and blame to cultivate diversity in the input from his staff. No president can know, in advance, which strategy will work. He needs to be sure to get a pluralistic range of inputs so that he can test each and find which are most successful.

  By trying a bit of everything, empirically, and testing through polling how it’s going over, a president can usually stumble on the right answer. One doubts that FDR knew in advance the impact of his fireside chats. The historical record reflects how Harry Truman, at the urging of Clark Clifford, happened upon his extemporaneous style of speaking. The televised Kennedy press conference was clearly a breakthrough, but few would have known, before it was tried, how uniquely effective it would be in showing America JFK’s wit and mental acuity. Perhaps only Ronald Reagan and his staff, so schooled in the ways of Hollywood, really knew beforehand how potent their chosen means of communication—the preframed media event—would be.

  Certainly the Clinton White House arrived at its bite-sized “issue du jour” communications strategy through trial and error. Since the Republican Congress balked at passing any presidential initiative, Clinton decided that this one-issue-a-day focus gave him the ability to communicate a sense of accomplishment even in the face of an intransigent Congress.

  A president needs to follow FDR’s advice (frequently repeated by Clinton) and use “bold, persistent experimentation” to find a tactical pattern of communications that works well. Once he’s found it, he needs to steer his staff to it by his reflected approval or discontent. He must apply his smiles and frowns judiciously to bring to the fore the behavior he wants from his people.

  A president, or likely any executive, needs to work hard to figure out who is really giving him good advice. With four hundred members of the White House staff and thousands more in the agencies, it takes a detective to locate who originated a good idea. As John Kennedy said, “Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan.” It takes an elaborate system of spies and informants to keep a president abreast of who wrote the speech he is about to give, who came up with the policy ideas, and who scheduled the event. A president needs to hunt through the bureaucracy to find the staff people who are really giving him good advice. John Kennedy’s style of interaction with staff is probably the best way to do it, but with the extensive trappings of the modern-day presidency, it is hard to imagine a president roaming the corridors of the Executive Office Building, sticking his nose in each office unobtrusively and asking what each person is doing.

  Instead, the president needs to look with suspicion at his generals and with interest at his junior officers to find out who is producing for him. The resulting battlefield promotions, made in the heat of reality, not in the cool planning process before the inauguration, often provide the most loyal and effective staff.

  There is nothing simple about managing the staff at the White House. Direct orders usually find their way into the newspapers. Memos become embarrassing leaks. Idle comments at meetings become frontpage stories. A skilled president doesn’t give direct orders. He uses the alternation of praise and blame to get what he wants.

  Chapter 24

  How to Keep Your Staff from Controlling You

  THE OFFICIAL AT THE TOP of the pyramid of executive power is the one who has to stand or fall on his own merits. On election day, it is he who must command a majority. In history, it is he who will be judged. Today’s electorate demands performance and is impatient with failure. To succeed at appeasing voters who demand their will be done, a political leader must master his staff and make it march to his own beat.

  A politician’s staff, particularly a president’s staff, will always try to maximize its power. Without clear job definitions and with all power flowing from the man at the top, staff members constantly work to expand their area of jurisdiction and control. Invariably, this power diminishes the options, flexibility, and power of the president himself. Like it or not
, in politics there is always a subtle struggle for control between an executive and his staff.

  In the Clinton White House, a genuine terror gripped much of the staff when the president went out on what they regarded as an uncharted course (i.e., one they hadn’t planned for him). “He’s freelancing,” they would complain derisively, almost as if they were saying the president had escaped his shackles. Their anxiety suggested that they felt that “he’s loose.”

  The basis of the power of staff members is that they can’t be fired. Few politicians can countenance a bloody trail of angry, disgruntled former aides spilling their guts to the newspapers. In times past, before investigations and special prosecutors were a fact of life, irritable presidents like Lyndon Johnson could fire people at will. But no more; a public official’s staff today could well be his accusers, or at least his detractors, tomorrow.

  President Clinton once gloated privately that he had succeeded in getting a person he suspected of habitual leaking to the press—David Dryer—transferred out of the White House. “I worked at it for months,” the president said. “I kept raising it with Leon [Panetta, the chief of staff] and finally I got it done. He’s out of here.” The president of the United States, who has the legal right to rule the appointed staff of the executive branch like a king, was overjoyed that he had managed to transfer—not to terminate, but to transfer—someone he had so disliked that he had been working to get rid of him for months.

  President Clinton was, literally, terrified to fire anybody. With the hailstorm of scrutiny, criticism, and investigation to which he had been subject, he simply could not afford to make any employee mad at him. In fact, there is virtually no record of Clinton firing anybody except under pressure of scandal.

  For White House staff members, their access to information guarantees their tenure in office. Dismissal is a legal right a modern president can’t exercise. Armed with job security, staff members do their best to fence in a president. Their arsenal of weapons is formidable.

  • Leaking to the press. Almost every White House staffer has his or her favorite reporter. Everyone knows who feeds whom. Once, the president asked angrily how a certain piece of information about his polls got into the press. When he learned that the polls had gone to George Stephanopoulos and Rahm Emanuel, two top Clinton aides, the president shouted incredulously, “You only told George and Rahm? You only told George and Rahm? Why didn’t you just issue a press release?” Later, when Emanuel curbed his leaking habits, Clinton noted with satisfaction, “he’s our leaker now.”

  Leaks to the press are meant to deny the president maneuvering room or to foreclose his options. After President Clinton had decided to grant Wisconsin a waiver to reform its welfare law, liberal staff members from the Department of Health and Human Services leaked to the New York Times that he was planning to deny the state’s request. They had no basis for the story. They just wanted to fence Clinton in with the leak.

  How do you stop a leaker? Use the Leon Panetta method. Clinton’s chief of staff in the second half of his first term virtually eliminated hostile leaks from the White House. He kept careful track of leaks and tried to figure out who had leaked what. Did the reporter praise a certain staff member in a profile a month after the leak appeared? Did the view expressed in the leak parallel something a staff member had been saying in private? Which reporters regularly quoted which staffers in their stories? Each question led to an evidentiary trail that helped him to figure out who was leaking.

  When Leon had decided who was guilty, he would retaliate in the best possible way—a counterleak. A story would appear in the Wall Street Journal, one of his favored organs, reporting anonymously that one staffer or another was “losing influence” or “on his way out” or “on the president’s bad side.” It wouldn’t be true, but it did serve to hurt the presumed leaker. Leon would always deny that he had anything to do with the counterleak and would usually shake his head in dismay at its appearance. But staff people got the point. To leak to the press was to be discredited in the press. The empire struck back.

  Leon’s court was a secret one and the evidence often didn’t measure up. Probably a lot of innocent people got hurt. But most of the guilty ones were hurt as well. And the leaking stopped.

  • Scheduling. The White House equivalent of keeping the president “barefoot and pregnant” is to overschedule him. On the plane, away from Washington, the president can’t communicate freely with the outside world. There is always the danger of phone calls from Air Force One being overheard. Of course, sensitive matters of national security can be discussed on secure phones, but equally sensitive political conversations can’t be held without risking a leak that the president is using national security equipment for political purposes. In addition, the people who connect the calls could be leaking. People in nearby seats on Air Force One can often overhear what is said as the caller shouts to be heard above the roar of jet engines. All these factors make it hard for the president to communicate with the outside world while on board his plane.

  By contrast, the staff on Air Force One has the president close at hand—much more than they do when his secretary is on duty guarding the entrance to the Oval Office. When the president travels, he is the captive of his traveling companions. White House staff love to send the president on trips because it makes him that much easier to control.

  Exhaustion is another favorite staff tactic in dominating a president. Schedule him until he can’t see straight and needs a few days to sleep off the trip and the time zones. That way, he won’t be there, effectively, to supervise you.

  President Clinton was completely convinced that his staff used these techniques to control him. In 1997, he noted that he had made progress in forcing his staff to do what he wanted. “They still try to pull the usual stuff about overscheduling me and tiring me out, but I’ve cut it way back,” he said.

  A president, or any executive in politics, needs to understand that his desire to move around his state or nation undermines his ability to lead effectively. The more he moves his body, the less he can use his mind. He needs to keep a tight rein on his travel and spend as much time as possible at his desk running the office. The White House will run itself when the president is away. That’s why he has to be sure not to be away very much.

  • Information flow and options. The favorite technique of military and diplomatic advisors is to restrict the flow of information to the president and to pose options in decision memos that are stacked in favor of their point of view. Repeatedly, President Clinton expressed frustration with the limited options he got from his staff. A chief executive is just too busy to formulate his own list of alternative courses he might take. He can’t reach out and check the practicality of new ideas that occur to him. He’s dependent on the staff to do the checking.

  The word “can’t” is a favorite at the White House—the most powerful building in the world. “You can’t, Mr. President,” is everybody’s most frequent line. Lawyers say he can’t because of constitutional objections. Foreign policy people say he can’t due to diplomatic complications. Military experts say he can’t because of technical considerations. The political people say he can’t because of pressure from the party. The congressional relations people say he can’t because the Congress will “go ballistic.”

  Can’t, can’t, can’t.

  But a president can. All he needs to do is to understand that he must bypass his formal, paid staff with a part-time “kitchen cabinet” of outside advisors who work for him in fact but not in name. For every area of presidential focus, he needs non-governmental people to feed him information and options. They’ll do it gladly for a president—even for free and without credit—and they will arm the chief executive to fight the straitjacket his staff would impose on him. Unless a president has a network of outside advisors, he will be trapped, bound, and shackled by his own inside experts.

  Every president must remember that he is locked in a zero-sum game with his staff. The more powe
r he has, the less they have. The more they seize, the less he has. There is no escaping it.

  Chapter 25

  Keeping the Cabinet Locked Up

  IN FORMER SECRETARY of Labor Robert Reich’s plaintive memoir, Locked Inside the Cabinet, he accurately summons the extent to which the Clinton White House, and most administrations, work to keep their cabinet members under control.

  While cabinet secretaries usually take office filled with an almost naive enthusiasm about the administration they are entering, they soon fall under the sway of the enormous and well-established bureaucracies they administer.

  Like mini-presidents, each cabinet officer is a lord over his own manor. Served by thousands of workers anxious to impress and to move up, they are constantly tempted to emerge in the public light on a stage the president himself would have liked to have occupied. Typically, cabinet secretaries enter the administration with well-established reputations in their field of specialty or with ongoing political careers. The job of a cabinet member is hybrid. Sometimes, a cabinet secretary acts with self-serving independence as a public figure in his own right. Other times, he acts with the subservience expected of a staff member. A cabinet secretary can go either way: he can work for himself or for the president.

  The key to handling the cabinet is to be sure that the media events and issue agendas its staffs cook up are served to the press at the White House, not at each cabinet department. When the agriculture secretary closes down vendors who fraudulently sell liquor or drugs for food stamps, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service raids employers of illegal aliens, or when the Justice Department indicts banks for drug money laundering, the president needs to be there to take the credit.