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To My Favorite Student in the Class of 2016

It’s that time of year again. Middlebury held its commencement ceremony Sunday, and as I have done ever since I started this blog, I commemorate the event by sitting down on the deck and, while the bluebirds fly by, pouring a deep glass of single malt (thanks Tuesday Luncheon auditors), and raising a toast to you, My Favorite Student.

Who, you ask, is My Favorite Student? You know who you are.

Four years ago you dragged yourself across campus in the dark to make that first 8 am class in Twilight Hall, only to doze off six minutes into my opening lecture on why you should study American politics. And yet you kept coming, week after week, likely inspired by my promise that “90% of success in life is just showing up.” By the semester’s end, you realized that it truly was “great to study American politics in America” and you signed on to become a political science major.

Four years later you have reaped the many benefits from this decision. Perhaps none is more consequential than getting added to the distribution list to this Presidential Power blog. Your participation during the Live Blogging (Fill in the Election) results made listening to Wolf Blitzer so much more tolerable.

You heard my impassioned plea regarding the consequences of a legal career (the rhinoplasty to repair damage from your cocaine habit, the estranged children, the massive debt, the adultery with the pool boy, the long hours writing briefs defending BP [“It was just a little spill! In Louisiana, for god’s sake!”] and, of course, the terminal cancer) and still asked me for a letter of recommendation to law school;

You listened, amazed, at my lecture on the American Revolution, during which I quote from memory and with perfect inflection Captain Kirk’s famous speech about the Constitution – “We, the PEOPLE!… Down the centuries you have slurred the meaning of the words!” – and then asked your classmate: “Who’s Captain Kirk?”;

You now understand that political science is the “queen” of the social sciences, and why after four years this major has better prepared you to improve the world than if you had chosen any other discipline (but especially economics) – unless you blow it and go to law school;

You know now that just because a pundit says it is so, you still need to ask for evidence;

You didn’t make me explain “Teabagging” during my lecture on the Tea Party movement;

You gave me a gift of a bottle of scotch after the final class lecture that wasn’t Old Smugglers and didn’t come in a plastic bottle;

You figured out that my political views and partisan affiliation are exactly the same as yours;

You entered my blog contests for a chance to win an “It’s the Fundamentals, Stupid!” t-shirt, and then sent me a picture of you wearing your prize;

You stifled a gasp when entering my office, and managed not to fixate on the coffee stains and food remnants;

You learned, from “my son”, how to really do “the wave”;

You laughed at all my jokes, even the second time through (“Did you hear about the two hunters from Ripton who drove to Yellowstone to shoot grizzly? The sign said ‘Yellowstone – Bear Left’, so they went home”);

You understood that when I hectored you in class, it was to make a broader teaching point, and not (necessarily) to humiliate you, although that was an ancillary benefit;

You remembered not to bring your Strawberry, U-Pad or other hand-held electronic device to exams;

You took on responsibility for sending the seemingly endless stream of emails the night before exams, asking all the questions that the other students wanted to ask;

You know that when we next see each other, I will not recall your name, but I will remember everything you ever said to, or wrote for, me during your entire four years at Middlebury. (Which means at our next meeting you must greet me by first telling me who you are);

You brought me free beer during Election Night at the Grille, so that by evening’s end I was spouting utter nonsense even though all my electoral projections were dead on;

You understand now what really happened when they tried to “Free Willy”;

You know as well how to survive a nuclear holocaust;

You stayed home until you were sure you could not infect me;

You became part of my twitterverse by joining the other Twits who now receive my infrequent twittings.

And, finally, you taught me more than you realize during your four years here. Students often don’t appreciate that my interactions with them provides the impetus and the spark for keeping up with developments not just in my area of expertise but in society more generally. How else would I learn about The Cable, or FaceSpace, or the myriad other technological innovations? Always remember that the questions you ask often inspire lectures or blogs or tweets! In short, education at Middlebury is an interactive process – a two-way street – from which I benefit as much, or more, than do you. That is why I stay in this job despite the fact that, as I have reminded you countless times, Middlebury pays me nothing.

So, assuming you didn’t get heat stroke, let me end by sending you – My Favorite Student – best wishes in all your future endeavors. Do stay in touch, and remember to thank your parents for getting you vaccinated; for rousing you out of bed for all those 5 am trips to the skating rink; for the endless piano lessons; for reminding you to finish those application essays; for instilling a strong sense of values based on discipline, hard work, and rooting for Boston sports teams; and for forking over the $76,000 a year (none of which went to me) to attend Middlebury College. They did all this because they love you and they want to be sure you don’t have to move back home again.

And parents, you should realize that although you won’t ever see that money again, and that your kids are in fact going to move back home for a bit, it was well worth the investment. Contrary to what you probably believe deep in your soul, your child did not squander your retirement money on endless nights of booze and partying. They actually learned to think and to communicate and to treat anything they read in the New York Times with skepticism. Nor did s/he waste four years by majoring in political science. Read the papers. Listen to the news. More than any other discipline, it is politics that most determines whether tomorrow will be an improvement over today. Your child has a head start in fulfilling that promise.

So, to paraphrase the late, great Richard Neustadt, “Trust the kids.” After all, you were one too and look how your life turned out! (Ok, maybe a bad example….)

And finally, if you don’t want to take the elevator down while your spouse holds the bag, remember to always, always, know your limits.

Good luck, stay in touch, and may your scotch bottle never run dry…

With fond memories,

Matt (which you may call me only after you are handed your diploma!)

P.S. To My Favorite Student: If you would like to continue to get direct email notifications of new presidential power blog postings, please remember to provide me with an updated email address before your Middlebury email expires. And the same goes for you parents out there who also wish to get blog notifications. Unlike the Middlebury alumni office, I’ll never ask for money. (But I won’t turn down an endowed chair!)

A Switch in Time: How Nixon Might Have Survived Watergate

On Jan. 27, 1969, less than a week into the Nixon presidency, Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman relayed the following request from President Nixon to White House aide and former Time magazine executive editor James Keogh: “The President is most anxious to bring in an official White House historian to make sure that we maintain on a current basis an accurate record of the work of this administration.” Nixon even had a person in mind for the position: Professor Ernest May, a historian at Harvard University who had served on the Lindsay transition task force. More generally, Nixon sought someone “who has outstanding intellectual ability to analyze everything as it is happening in historical perspective and keep an accurate record… .” Here is the full memo from Haldeman to Keogh.

On February 10, evidently after canvassing various White House aides regarding Nixon’s proposal, Keogh responded with a four-page memo to the President that began, “There are some serious questions involved in the recruitment of a White House historian. The first is the ultimate: Should there be a staff historian, as such, in the White House?” Would the President want an outsider sitting in during key meetings? Keogh’s answer, shown here at the bottom of the first page of his memo, was: “I would say he should not, for his presence surely would tend to inhibit what the President and others might say and do. And so the historian’s presence could have a negative effect not only on the Presidency but also on history.”

In addition to inhibiting conversation, Keogh warned that “any established historian that we might bring on would have very definite ideas about his own freedom of point of view.” That might mean a desire to prove “his credentials to his colleagues in the profession by being critical even if that meant doing so only for the sake of being critical.” Keogh also warned that “Loyalty is another problem” – someone who initially expressed support for the President might, over time and in reaction to events, change his views.

In seekng a “court historian” Nixon may have had in mind some counterpart to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian who served on JFK’s White House staff, and who used his position to write A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, a not uncritical but generally quite positive account of JFK’s presidency. But Keogh had other examples in mind, telling Nixon: “The recent track record on all this is not encouraging. Eric Goldman, professor of history at Princeton, was brought into the White House by Lyndon Johnson. He has just produced the Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, which can only be described as an anti-Johnson book.”

Keogh noted that he had discussed Nixon’s request with his immediate team of White House aides: “The consensus in this group is that this Administration should not bring in a historian as such. This position is based on the feeling that the risks are too high and the potential for positive results too low.” Rather than a court historian, Keogh suggested instead that aides be assigned to keep detailed notes of meetings, “recording the color, the tone, the asides for the general Administration record.” For more intimate conferences with the President “I see only one process. The people involved should as often as possible record their own impressions… .This also suggests that the President himself should, as often as possible, dictate his own thoughts and impressions… on tape or on paper…and on some kind of more or less regular schedule.”

We now know, of course, that Nixon did Keogh one better. In 1971, so as to provide a more accurate history of his administration’s proceedings, he had a secret taping system installed in the Oval Office, the Old Executive Office Building, the Cabinet Room and at Camp David. Conversations were recorded via this voice-activated system for more than two years, starting on February 16, 1971 through July 18, 1973. It was these tapes, particularly this so-called “smoking gun” tape dating from June 23, 1972, that provided clear proof that Nixon obstructed justice by trying to impede the investigation into the Watergate break in.

[youtube.com/watch?v=_oe3OgU8W0s]

When a unanimous Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that Nixon must hand over the tapes to an independent prosecutor, and the transcripts of the tapes were made public, Nixon lost any hope of surviving the Watergate scandal. Forty years ago today, he officially resigned the presidency. It is tempting, of course, to surmise that if only Nixon had appointed a court historian, he might not have also seen the need to install a taping system. But that is probably not the case. From the moment they take office, all presidents, and their immediate advisers, are aware that they are making history and they understandably want to insure an accurate record of the events in which they participate. But meeting notes can only go so far toward providing that record. For this reason Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson all secretly recorded some White House conversations. Kennedy did so despite the presence of Schlesinger, Jr., as his White House “court historian”.

But these previous recording systems differed from Nixon’s in one key respect: they had to be manually activated by the President. This meant that they were forced to exercise a bit more discretion than Nixon did when deciding what to record for posterity. Had Nixon been forced to activate his recording devices, he might never have decided to essentially tape himself admitting to crimes. But in his memoirs Nixon defends the decision to install a voice activated machine: “I thought that recording only selected conversations would completely undercut the purpose of having the taping system; if our tapes were going to be an objective record of my presidency, they could not have such an obviously self-serving bias. I did not want to have to calculate whom or what or when I would tape.” Alas for the future of his presidency, Nixon was initially “conscious of the taping, but before long I accepted it as part of the surroundings.”

“From the very beginning,” Nixon writes in his memoirs, “I had decided that my administration would be the best chronicled in history.” Little did he know how prescient that statement was. No subsequent president has, to my knowledge, kept any recording system in their White House, and for good reason. And, with the advent of e-mail, even the paper documentary trail is a less reliable history of a president’s time in office (although there are safeguards in place that are intended to preserve electronic messages as part of an administration’s presidential records). Had Nixon been less conscious of the need to accurately record the events of presidency, he might have emulated his predecessors and utilized a manually-activated recording device. But he did not.

For want of a switch, he lost the presidency.

Why Brennan Stays

Finally, there is something liberals and conservatives can agree on: CIA director John Brennan must go. So why is he still in office? Even more puzzling – why did the President go out of his way during last Friday’s press conference to state that Brennan has “his full confidence”? Of course, it is possible that Obama has just given Brennan the equivalent of the sports team’s owner’s public “vote of confidence” in the manager which is often a prelude to firing the unfortunate soul, but for now Brennan has the president’s public backing, and that does not sit well with some members of the Senate, never mind pundits on the Left and the Right.

The controversy regarding Brennan centers in part on the recent finding by an internal CIA Inspector General that five CIA employees improperly accessed a Senate Intelligence committee file pertaining to the committee’s investigation, using classified material, into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The disclosure came after Brennan had publicly denied allegations that CIA officials had accessed the files, saying, “As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth.” That turns out not to be true.

In the wake of the IG’s disclosure that the hacking did occur, Brennan has reportedly apologized to committee members. His apology, however, did not mollify everyone; at least two senators on the committee – Democrats Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich – have called for Brennan’s resignation, a call echoed by Republican Senator Rand Paul. Paul, you may remember, spent nearly 13 hours filibustering on the Senate floor last year in an unsuccessful effort to block Brennan’s nomination as CIA director.

To Brennan’s critics, the CIA director either authorized his agency to spy on the Senate committee, or he did not know the spying was occurring on his own watch. In either case, they argue, he deserves to be fired. Conspicuously, however, Senate Intelligence committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein reportedly described Brennan’s apology, along with commissioning the internal review, as a “good first step” – hardly the sign of a person looking for Brennan’s scalp. This conciliatory tone stands in sharp contrast to her words last March, of course, when Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the CIA of possibly violating the law and the Constitution by monitoring her staff’s computers. Of course, Feinstein may be saving her ammunition pending her own further investigation into the incident, but for now her reticence to call for Brennan’s resignation sends an important signal.

When the news broke regarding the CIA spying, I received several emails from long-time readers arguing that Brennan’s admission gave Obama an opportunity to show some long-needed decisiveness. By firing his CIA director, Obama would put away lingering doubts that he has the political backbone to make politically difficult choices while at the same time reining in an agency that seems to act without much accountability to elected officials. In my initial response, I expressed skepticism that Obama would act decisively and fire Brennan. Shortly thereafter the President expressed his full confidence in his embattled director.

Why hasn’t Obama fired Brennan? In my view it is because the President does not perceive it to be in his interest to do so. Remember, Brennan, the former White House terrorist “czar”, was the President’s hand-picked replacement for David Petraeus when Petraeus resigned over revelations that he had an extra-marital affair. Indeed, Obama nominated Brennan over safer and perhaps better qualified candidates such as Mike Morell, a career agency analyst and acting director after Petraeus’ resignation, and he did so even though Brennan was a controversial pick to some because of his role in developing the nation’s drone program – that partly prompted the Rand filibuster – and because critics viewed him as a defender of enhanced interrogation techniques.

Despite the controversy, Obama chose Brennan, I think, because after spending much of his first term in office mediating disputes between CIA director Leon Panetta and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, Obama undoubtedly realized that the DNI has no real operational clout, and that if he wants to ride herd on the intelligence process, he needed his own person at the CIA. This is not unusual – presidents often move White House political loyalists into executive leadership positions during their second term as a way to gain greater access, if not control, over important agencies. Bush the Younger did this when he transferred his national security adviser Condi Rice from the White House to head the State Department after he won reelection. Once ensconced at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy, it usually takes a lot to force a president to replace a political loyalist. Keep in mind as well that there is always some political cost to removing officials, not least because it focuses media attention away from the issues Obama wants covered as the midterm elections loom.

Moreover, Brennan’s critics view this incident from a different perspective than does Obama. They see the CIA accessing the Senate files in constitutional terms, as both a violation of the separation of powers and further indication that the CIA is a lawless agency accountable to no one. But it is not at all clear to me that Obama agrees with or is bothered by either charge. From his perspective, having a politically loyal man head the CIA is worth a few ruffled feathers in the Senate and among the civil libertarian crowd.

Note that it is not necessary to fall back on theories of blackmail to understand Obama’s reluctance to fire Brennan – his actions are consistent with his behavior in the national security realm since the day he took office. Although many on the Left fervently hoped that Obama would bring the anti-terrorist national security apparatus established during the Bush administration to heel, he has instead left it largely intact, and in some instances, as with drone strikes, expanded its reach. The reason, as I’ve discussed before, is that Obama feels his constitutional imperative to protect the nation’s security in the age of terror no less acutely than did Bush. From all accounts, Brennan plays an integral role in that fight. That combination of shared experience, personal loyalty and institutional access would be hard to replace. Moreover, as I’ve noted many times, Obama is at heart a centrist and a pragmatist who has shown no proclivity to push principle at the expense of practical politics. That is just not his way.

Yes, I understand that many on the Left and the Right see the CIA’s action as an egregious breach of civil liberties and constitutional prerogatives. But their ire is misdirected. If they want Brennan fired, they need to direct their protests at Congress. Unless Obama calculates that the political cost of Brennan remaining as CIA director outweighs the benefits of having his hand-picked man heading that agency, Brennan will likely stay.

UPDATE 12:10 p.m. : Jonathan Bernstein beat me to the punch with this post yesterday, but he comes to a similar conclusion – that Obama is trying to strengthen ties with the intelligence community: http://bv.ms/1zR52zQ

UPDATE 5:30 p.m: More evidence that Obama sees the CIA spy case as predominantly a national security issue as opposed to a constitutional or civil liberties problem: his administration has heavily redacted, for security reasons, the Senate Intelligence Committee report documenting the CIA detention and interrogation program. (This was the report that prompted the CIA to access Senate files.) Feinstein is evidently not happy and wants Obama to reduce the number of redactions. See: http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/feinstein-seeks-to-reduce-blackouts-in-torture-report-summary/

Hope and Change: LBJ and the Strategy for Winning Reelection in 1968

For this Saturday’s trip to the archives we take the WayBack machine to March, 1968 for an inside view of President Lyndon Johnson’s possible reelection strategy, courtesy of an incredibly candid 10-page memo written by his White House Special Counsel Harry McPherson. I’ve written about McPherson before – he was a longtime Johnson aide who served as the President’s speechwriter/domestic policy adviser, following in the footsteps of Samuel Rosenman under FDR and Ted Sorensen under JFK. McPherson’s memoirs A Political Education are required reading for any student of the Johnson presidency.

This particular memorandum was written on March 18 – a crucial time in one of the nation’s most momentous presidential races. Heading into the presidential election, it was widely assumed that Johnson would run, and likely win, a second full term. Despite growing opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, no member of his party was willing to challenge a sitting president – except for Minnesota Senator Eugene “Clean Gene” McCarthy, who decided to run on an anti-war platform. On March 12, with strong support from college students, McCarthy won a surprising 42% of the vote in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, finishing second to Johnson’s 49%. Four days later Robert Kennedy, who had previously said he would back the President for reelection, jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination. That set the stage for this 10-page McPherson memo which laid out his strategy for Johnson’s reelection. McPherson wrote, as he stated at the start of the memo, in the belief that “the course we seem to be taking now will lead either to Kennedy’s nomination or Nixon’s election, or both.”

To prevent that outcome, McPherson argued that LBJ needed to resist the natural tendency, as the incumbent, to defend the status quo and to “drive down the middle of the road and run everybody else off into the ditches.” This was a losing strategy, McPherson thought, because it meant Johnson was easily linked, unfairly or not, to circumstances – rising crime, increased drug use, urban riots and, of course, the Vietnam War – that were of growing concern to voters.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the McPherson memo are his capsule summaries of the other candidates. On the conservative* side “Wallace offers a violently different way of doing things” while Nixon “offers a modified version of the Wallace change.” Rockefeller is the “Republican Kennedy.” As for the Democrats McCarthy “would provide a genteel, witty, and distinguished front for a pull-out” from Vietnam. Regarding Kennedy McPherson wrote “he will try to occupy the same relation to you that his brother Jack occupied to the Eisenhower-Nixon administration: imagination and vitality vs. staleness and weariness, movement vs. entrenchment, hope of change vs. more of the status quo.” (Where have we heard that before?) McPherson acknowledged that “many young liberals are bitter about [Kennedy’s] opportunistic entry into the race after McCarthy’s strong showing, but Kennedy is cynical enough to believe that they will forget, given time, razz-ma-tazz, and the development of momentum behind his candidacy. He is right about that.”

What could LBJ do to secure his nomination? “I recognize that to some degree you are the prisoner of the status quo. But there is no need to embrace your imprisonment.” Here McPherson lays out a series of policy readjustments designed to portray LBJ as “restlessly eager to change things as anyone else – and a great deal more knowledgeable about the problems involved in effecting a change.”

In Vietnam, that mean reducing the scope of U.S. involvement but also showing the enemy “that we cannot be thrown out of Vietnam”. On urban violence, he should ask his attorney general to invite 50 big city mayors and police chiefs to Washington for a conference on their concerns.

McPherson then pivots to discuss specific campaign strategy. His comments here on the Catholic vote, and on women and Kennedy’s and McCarthy’s “sex appeal” are particularly interesting:

The memo concludes with this exhortation: “Movement, candor, dissatisfaction – together with your strength, experience, and achievement – these can win it for you.”

Twelve days later Johnson made this bombshell announcement. McPherson, like all of LBJ’s aides, never saw it coming.

[youtube.com/watch?v=rYqmO0PJ5Zk]

*Correction: an earlier version of this post listed Wallace with McPherson’s description of Republicans – he was a Democrat of course.

Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Real West Wing

Regular readers know that every Saturday we look back, via archives I’ve collected through the years, at a key (or at least interesting!) event in presidential history. Today’s original documents come from the Ford Administration, and remind us that Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both served as senior members of the Ford White House before going on to greater glory, and both were involved in one of the first, and most thorough efforts to reduce the size and power of the White House staff.

Ford, most of you will recall, became President in August 1974 upon President Richard Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the ongoing revelations in the Watergate scandal that threatened Nixon with almost certain impeachment. Much of that scandal centered on the actions of Nixon’s senior White House staff – the so-called Palace Guard – which was accused of operating as an increasingly powerful and largely unaccountable political arm of the Presidency. As Ford’s White House assistant James Connor wrote in an August 29, 1975 memo to Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s Chief of Staff, “Until recently, the expansion of the role of the White House has been viewed as a salutary, and indeed a necessary step in the development of governmental institutions dealing with the complexity of modern problems.” The Watergate scandal, however, had reversed that perception, so that now “the size, scope and role of the White House staff became an issue of public debate.”

Ford was determined to show that the actions of his White House staff would be more transparent and more accountable than were the actions of Nixon’s “Berlin Wall” of H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger. Toward this end, Ford initially decided to govern without a strong chief of staff to manage the White House on his behalf. (That experiment did not last long, and ultimately Ford appointed Rumsfeld to be his chief of staff, with Cheney as Rumsfeld’s deputy assistant.) And, because he was determined to demonstrate his fiscal bona fides, Ford – who was an expert on the budget due to his years as member of Congress – initiated a White House study project under Rumsfeld’s direction designed to make sense of what the White House staff did, and whether some positions might be eliminated in the name of cost-cutting.

That study was more successful at documenting the history and related functions of the White House staff than it was in reducing its size. (Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, would undertake a similar effort, and with a similar lack of long-term success.) The final report was issued in December 1976 (by this time Cheney had become chief of staff), a month after Ford lost a very close election to Carter, and so was never acted on. But the study does a very good job explaining what the White House staff did, and in many respects the analysis holds true today.

Among the more interesting documents were those showing a breakdown of White House staff positions and functions. Broadly speaking, about half of Ford’s White House staff, or about 250 individuals, were quasi-civil servants charged with providing administrative and clerical duties, such as handling correspondence, filing, making the payroll, etc. The second and more interesting half was the political staff – the “West Wing” of the day. Here’s a document from the internal study showing the proportion of aides engaged in external relations, internal staff management, and policy development.

As you can see, by far the largest proportion – 60% (or about 153) – are engaged in dealing with external relations with Congress, interest groups, the press and the public. In contrast, only 25% (69) of staff under Rumsfeld deal with internal management. But perhaps the most interesting finding is just how small the policy component is, with only 10 staff aides focused on managing the policy process. This reflects the fact that most policy still emanated from the departments and agencies, and that the major policy units within the Executive Office of the President (EOP) were all located outside the White House proper. At the time these included the OMB, which contained 2/3 of EOP employees, the National Security Council and the Domestic Council – the latter first created by Nixon. In addition, Ford had established an Economic Policy Board via executive order to serve as counterpart to the Domestic Council. All three councils exist today.

The report serves as a reminder that the White House staff is largely a political institution – not a policy one. Its primary purpose is to maintain the president’s standing with the key constituents with whom he (someday she) must deal on a constant basis. That remains the case today – most of the White House staff positions in the Obama presidency are focused on handling political relations.

But the report also noted a potentially more fundamental and disturbing trend. In his memo to Ford, Connor writes, “It can be argued that there has in fact been a wall built between the President and his Cabinet. The wall, however, in not in the White House staff, but rather in the Executive Office of the President, particularly in the OMB, NSC and Domestic Council. These institutions filter out policy ideas to the President, speak in his name to the Cabinet Officers, and make decisions on innumerable issues which never reach the Presidential Level. Their influence is at the direct expense of Department and Agency heads… . As the Cabinet Officer is moved further and further away he is less and less sensitive to the president’s needs….the end result of this process is that the President looks out upon the bureaucracy as an enemy.” Here’s the original portion of the report – see subheading three below:

To remedy the situation, Connor advocates for more direct interaction between the President and his cabinet and agency heads. “Were this approach to be adopted, it would be the most far-reaching change in the Presidency in the last forty years.” Alas, Ford never had the opportunity to act on Connor’s suggestions, and there is no evidence that subsequent presidents have been any more successful at integrating their departmental and agencies more effectively into the policymaking process. There are several reasons for this which I hope to address in future posts.

Today, however, the West Wing under President Obama remains quite similar in terms of size and functions from what it was under Ford. And that is a testament to its fundamental character as the personal arm of the President, devoted solely to his political success.