There is a profound difference between campaigning for office and governing in office. A campaign’s goal is popularity. In governing, popularity is only the means to an end. It should never be hoarded; it should be used to achieve greater goals. A President’s success is measured by his domestic and international achievements, not by his popularity in the polls. For example, Harry Truman left office with one of the lowest approval ratings of any postwar President. But because he defined the contours of U.S. foreign policy through the Greek-Turkish aid program and the Marshall Plan, he is rated as one of America’s strongest and most successful leaders. He also had the advantage of being challenged by great issues. He did not have the problem of a nineteenth-century British prime minister, Lord Rosebery, who Churchill said had the misfortune of living in a “time of great men and small events.”
Governing is infinitely more complex and difficult than campaigning. A President must understand and balance the competing and at times adversarial roles of the White House staff, the Cabinet, the bureaucracy, Congress, the media, and the public in a way that will enable him to achieve his goals for the nation.
One of his most important decisions is defining the roles of the White House staff and the Cabinet. No general rules can be laid down, because no game plan will work unless you have the players to carry it out. An official or staff member is not useful to the President because of the position he occupies but because of the qualities he brings to it. Still, there is one fundamental principle that must be kept in mind: The closer a staff member is to the President institutionally, the better the President can count on him. Especially when the President is not a member of the party that holds Congress, he needs a strong, loyal White House staff to counter the competing agendas and ambitions of Congress and the bureaucracy, both of which are far more assertive than a generation ago. That is why appointments to top White House positions are harder to make and also more important than appointments to Cabinet positions.
Critics of a strong White House say it runs the risk of becoming an “imperial Presidency.” On the contrary: a strong White House staff is essential today if the President is to avoid becoming a vassal of the Congress and the bureaucracy.
After the Iran-contra foul-up, it became a cliché to proclaim that foreign policy should be run by the State Department. It is true that the State Department should execute the game plan. But the President must reserve the right to call the plays. While the White House staff is usually well-advised to stay out of foreign-policy operations, a strong National Security Council is indispensable, both to ensure that the President’s policy is followed and to coordinate it. Foreign policy is far more than diplomacy, which is the State Department’s bag. It also involves the activities of the Departments of Treasury, Defense, Commerce, and Justice, and the CIA.
Most critics of the “imperial Presidency” magically transform into boosters of a strong White House when a President who advocates policies they agree with is in power. But there are also well-meaning academic types who mistakenly believe that the best way to make policy is to let it percolate up from the bowels of the departments and be decided upon by a Cabinet chaired by the President. “Cabinet government” is fundamentally at odds with the American system, and also with Americans’ expectation that their President will lead and not follow. A Cabinet can execute policy, but it cannot and should not initiate it. It was not elected to do so, and Cabinet officers who are totally dependent on unelected bureaucrats for information and guidance are not capable of doing so.
In a Cabinet officer, strength and loyalty are just as important as brains. A President’s appointees must particularly understand that it is their responsibility to represent the President to the bureaucracy, not the other way around. Over the past forty years I have known many strong Cabinet secretaries whose loyalty to the President was unquestioned but who unwittingly became captives of their bureaucracies. Businessmen are most vulnerable to this treatment. They come to Washington with the naive notion that government is just like business. It is true that the game of politics is played in both business and in government. But politics in business is a science. Politics in government is an art. Even the strongest-willed businessman will become putty in the hands of skilled bureaucrats, who are masters at buttering up the boss and at battling for turf with other departments and with the White House staff—a game in which the businessman is a rank amateur. Before long they will have him convinced that the best way to serve the President is to feud with real and imagined adversaries on the White House staff and in the Cabinet to make sure that his department’s budgets are funded and interests served. Once this happens, his usefulness to the President is gone. Similarly, a businessman appointed as an ambassador will go abroad breathing fire about being the President’s man. Before long, foreign service officers pursuing their own agenda will be leading him around like a pussycat.
I do not question the competence or loyalty of America’s career bureaucrats. They can hold their own with their opposite numbers anywhere in the world. But as intelligent, strong men and women, they have their own ideas about what policies are best for the nation. If they do not get strong leadership from the White House and from their superiors, they will fill the vacuum with those ideas. They are a tremendous potential asset for any administration. A President and his appointees must find ways to work with them rather than against them, to use them and not be used by them. For example, the credit for an initiative such as our opening to China should not go only to those of us who tipped glasses with Chinese leaders in the Great Hall of the People. The achievement would not have been possible without the dedicated work of scores of career officials, most of whom may never get the chance to visit China.
If anyone has any doubts about what an asset top-flight career foreign service officers can be, he should look at the records of some of those I have been privileged to know or work with over the past forty years—men and women like Jake Boehm, Chip Bohlen, Ellis Briggs, Henry Byroade, Frank Carlucci, Jimmy Dunn, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, Marshall Green, Loy Henderson, Alex Johnson, Foy Kohler, Bill Marsh, Armin Meyer, Robert Murphy, Mark Palmer, Jeff Parson, William Sebald, Joe Sisco, Walter Stoessel, Henry Tasca, Llewelyn Thompson, and Bob Woodward. Cabinet officers in other departments will find equally qualified men and women who will loyally and competently carry out the President’s agenda—if they only knew what it is.
The one function that a President cannot delegate to anyone else is knocking heads together when Cabinet and department heads engage in Washington’s favorite game of battling for turf. It is frustrating, maddening, and absolutely indispensable. I speak from experience. Waging war in Vietnam abroad was not easy, but waging war at home against drugs, against cancer, and for energy independence was even more difficult. Department heads would always pledge cooperation, but when they left the President’s office their resolve sometimes diminished alarmingly. Such massive problems frequently require a Presidentially appointed “czar.” But if he is to be effective, his power over each department and agency with a piece of the action in his area of responsibility must be absolute. That is why Cabinet officers do not as a rule like czars. It is bad enough to have to follow the President’s orders.
The most difficult challenge a President faces is dealing not with his staff, the Cabinet, or the media, but with Congress. Sometimes a President faces a cruel dilemma. He can’t get along with the Congress, but he can’t get along without it. As a result, government is paralyzed.
This is even more true when you inject the partisan element. Some pundits ask why President Bush in his first hundred days didn’t match FDR’s record in 1933 and LBJ’s in 1965, when the Congress approved virtually everything they asked for. They overlook the fact that both Roosevelt and Johnson had overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate. While Eisenhower had a Republican Congress in only his first two years, he usually got support from the Democratic Congress during his last six. But Eisenhower was in office during an era when all he had to do was to convince Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn, and they would deliver the Democratic votes for our program. Speaker Foley and Majority Leader Mitchell are able men, but there is no way that they could do that for George Bush even if they wanted to. Today, bipartisanship has become a chimera, and party loyalty has been replaced by loyalty to causes, some of them kooky. Besides, in this era of massive deficits, the number of spending bills a President can force through the Congress is not an indication of how effective a leader he has been. Sometimes stopping or vetoing a bad bill is the real test of leadership.
Two recent examples illustrate how difficult it is for a Republican President to get cooperation from a Democratic Congress.
When the Congress finally passed a welfare reform bill in 1988, its author, Senator Pat Moynihan, wrote to me and pointed out that it was a modest version of an initiative we attempted to get enacted twenty years ago, when he served on my White House staff. Our plan would have revolutionized the welfare system. It provided assistance not just for the unemployed, but for the working poor as well, thus taking away the incentive to quit low-paying jobs to get more on welfare. It required the able-bodied to get jobs before receiving any assistance. The plan was praised in most of the media and then cut to pieces by partisan politics in the Congress. I had incorrectly expected the biggest danger to come from the right. As Moynihan observed at the time, the liberals could not let a conservative Republican President do what his liberal Democratic predecessors had not been bold enough to do. Social workers, threatened with extinction since welfare payments would go directly to the recipients rather than through them, joined in an unholy alliance with conservatives against the plan. Due in great part to the leadership of Jerry Ford, it passed the House but was killed by liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in the Senate.
Politics also forced me to make one of my poorest decisions as President. In 1971, when inflation was 4 percent—acceptable today, but considered far too high then—Congress clamored for the imposition of wage and price controls. Because of my experience with the Office of Price Administration in 1942, I had always been unalterably opposed to such measures. John Connally argued that if I did not seize the initiative, Congress. would enact a permanent program that it might be able to pass over my veto. So I imposed a temporary, ninety-day freeze. It was enormously popular in the short run. I was not surprised when it proved to be a mistake in the long run.
One of the past masters in handling Congress was Bryce Harlow. His advice was always to treat congressmen and senators with “tender loving care.” But Harlow was a hardheaded realist. He knew that when the chips were down, few would risk their political futures because of their tender affection for the President. What is decried as horse trading—giving a member something concrete for his vote besides a thank-you letter and a set of cufflinks—is sometimes indispensable in winning a close vote. An even greater incentive for members is the fear that a popular President may oppose them in the next election. That is why a President’s popularity is an asset that should be used, not just accumulated. Popularity not used means nothing. Its only purpose is to use it to do things, even if you risk losing some of it in the process.
Good personal relations alone will seldom improve political relations either with adversaries abroad or political opponents at home. There are exceptions. During President Pompidou’s state visit to Washington in the spring of 1970, we had some difficult negotiations on international monetary issues. After he left Washington, he was scheduled to be the guest of honor at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York given by a group of Franco-American friendship organizations headed by former Ambassador Bill Burden. Critics who believed the French government’s Mideast policy was too pro-Arab urged a boycott of the dinner. Demonstrations against the visit became so ugly that Mrs. Pompidou threatened to go home. Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller canceled their appearances at the dinner.
Vice President Agnew was scheduled to represent the administration. Our chief of protocol, Bus Mosbacher, called me and warned that if something dramatic was not done to change the atmosphere, French-American relations would be irreparably damaged. On the spur of the moment, I decided to fly to New York and attend the dinner in place of Agnew. When I entered the Waldorf ballroom, the place came apart. The usually reserved Pompidou could hardly restrain his emotion. Madame Pompidou had tears in her eyes. They were particularly moved when I pointed out in my toast that while it is customary for the Vice President to substitute for the President, this was the first time in history that a President substituted for the Vice President, and that this was a measure of my respect for them and their country. What differences we had in substantive issues were soon resolved, and, even more important, we established a warm personal relationship which lasted until his death in 1974. Even today, whenever I visit France, people refer to what they call my beau geste.
But this kind of reaction is an exception, not the rule, in both foreign and domestic relations. It is a mistake, for example, to assume that if Presidents and Cabinet officers only consult with and romance Congress, they will be able to eliminate all differences. A President and the Congress may well have irreconcilable differences on some issues that neither telephone calls, personal notes, invitations to dinner, nor tickets to performances at the Kennedy Center will eliminate.
But doesn’t bipartisanship, at least in foreign policy, override self-interest? The answer is that gushy odes to bipartisanship in Presidential speeches and newspaper editorials deliver precious few votes unless other factors come into play. Bipartisanship generally works only when it serves a partisan interest. If it is popular to be bipartisan, senators and congressmen will be bipartisan. They do not consider bipartisanship to be an end in itself.
In the rare event of a great overriding issue involving the survival of the nation, bipartisanship will override partisan considerations. We saw this in the much-berated 80th Congress. The Republicans had overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate. Truman’s popularity was low. And yet Republicans provided the votes that were necessary for approval of the Greek-Turkish aid program and the Marshall Plan, the cornerstones of Truman’s widely and justly acclaimed foreign policy. That spirit continued through the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and most of the Johnson administration. Vietnam destroyed it, especially when the conduct of the war passed to the Republicans. Democratic senators and congressmen who supported Kennedy and Johnson when they sent American troops into Vietnam opposed my policies for bringing them home.
A President can only get support from a Congress controlled by the other party if members are afraid to vote against him for one of two reasons—because it would be unpopular to do so, or because even though his poll standings are low, he can convince them, the media, and their constituents that the nation’s survival depends on them. But what about courage? Why can’t members of the House and Senate have the guts to vote for what is right even if they risk their seats by doing so? The reason is that congressmen are only human. Everyone agrees that committing physical suicide is not courageous. Neither is committing political suicide. In his efforts to govern, a President must not ask members of the House and Senate to sacrifice themselves. He must instead use the bully pulpit to make what is unpopular popular. Only then will he deserve bipartisan support for his policies.