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"Nine Enemies and One Ingrate: Presidential Appointments During Transition," in The In and Outers: Presidential Appointees and the Problems of Transient Government in Washington, edited by G. Calvin Mackenzie (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
Nine Enemies and One Ingrate: Political Appointments during Presidential Transitions
The frustrations of recruiting presidential appointees are still accurately characterized by President Taft's observation that each appointment he made created nine enemies and one ingrate. But in addition to the frustrations of the ungrateful and disappointed, several other contemporary additions must be made.
Every new president faces the daunting task of selecting an administration composed of twenty to thirty cabinet and near-cabinet-level appointments, three hundred to four hundred subcabinet officials, and more than three thousand lesser positions. It must be done quickly, yet with care and scrupulous clearance procedures. Appointments must be controlled from the White House, but not too tightly. The inevitable pressures for patronage must be deflected or turned to the president's advantage. A system of active outreach must be able to scour the country for the best and brightest potential administration members, most of whom are not seeking jobs with the new administration.
This chapter examines the challenge a newly elected president's personnel team faces. It looks at recent experience with the presidential appointments process, particularly the contrasting approaches of the Carter and Reagan administrations. The conclusion suggests some of the lessons we have learned from the experiences of recent presidencies.
The Initial Onslaught
On the surface, making the personnel appointments for a new presidential administration would seem to be a dream job. The president-elect's personnel staff is fresh from the flush of victory and is charged with the job of dividing up the spoils of victory. There are many plums to hand out, and there is a chance to help mold the administration that will carry out the mandate of the new president. But as each new administration learns the hard way, the task is often a thankless one, and it sometimes seems impossible. Pendleton James, who headed President Reagan's personnel efforts from the beginning, characterized the process: "The appointment process is a minefield that I tiptoed through daily, and sometimes, I stepped on one of the mines .... There's no way my job wins friends and influences people."1 According to John Ehrlichman, "There isn't any good way to handle the job."2 One political appointee characterized the process thus: "We telescope what in a rational world would be a months' if not years' long process for how you would staff up a business one percent of the size, half of one percent of the size, of what the federal government does. We just throw people at it."3
In addition to the delicate political task of choosing some and thus excluding others, the sheer volume of the job is overwhelming. Aside from military appointments, the president has the legal appointing authority for 3,925 positions.4 Of these, those that are crucial to the president's control of the executive branch number five hundred or six hundred, with about half of them requiring Senate confirmation (PAS) and half appointed at the president's sole discretion (PA).5 More important than the number of positions that must be filled is the volume of demands that pour into the administration soon after the election. Arnie Miller, who headed President Carter's personnel operation, referred to the demands as "that avalanche, that onslaught at the beginning, that tidal wave of people coming from all over the country, who've been with a candidate for years, and who have been waiting for this chance to come in and help."6 Pressure also comes from Congress. According to Pendleton James, "The House and Senate Republicans just start cramming people down your throat. Then the [White House] political office wants to find places for all the campaign workers. The collision is sometimes horrendous to behold."7
Just as aggravating as the tremendous size of the job is the shortage of time within which to do it. Presidential transitions involve more than the personnel recruitment effort. During the transition the president must set up his White House and establish budget and legislative priorities as well as staff his administration.8 All of this must be done against the backdrop of people struggling for position and power in the new administration. The president cannot afford to spend much time on the appointments he must make, yet a certain amount of his personal involvement is crucial to the success of the process.
Cooperation between the incoming and outgoing administrations is strained when there is a party turnover of the presidency, and those who have just won the election usually do not take advantage of the experience of the previous administration. Dan Fenn recalls ironically, "We were a little bit hubristic-our impression was that there wasn't an awful lot that they could do for us that we couldn't do for ourselves.... To us, at least, it was perfectly clear that presidents over two hundred years of American history had screwed everything up. The last thing we wanted to do was to pay the least bit of attention to the terrible Eisenhower administration."9 The lack of institutional memory and the unwillingness to learn from one's predecessors has been, until only recently, unmitigated by the presidential candidates' careful preparation for the task.
The importance of the timeliness of appointments to the success of a presidency should not be underestimated. During a transition of the presidency, the permanent career bureaucracy continues to operate the government. But the machinery of government is in neutral. Routine operation will go on without many problems, but new directions in policy making will not be undertaken. Leadership is required that can only be provided by the appointees of a new president, and the longer the bureaucracy drifts, the longer it will be before the new president's priorities and policies can be implemented.
But the necessity for speed must not outweigh the need for quality of appointees, because the character and success of an administration depend upon the quality of its officials. In addition, mistakes in other areas can be mitigated by high-quality appointees. According to Theodore Sorensen, personnel is "clearly the highest priority. You can't spend too much time on personnel. . .the key is getting the right people in office. That will overcome many errors in organization and getting to know the Congress."10
Who Appoints the Subcabinet?
In every administration there will be friction between the White House and cabinet departments and agencies over whose wishes will prevail in naming the immediate subordinates of the secretary or agency head. While the appointments are clearly the legal prerogative of the president, the agency head has a legitimate claim on them as well. On the one hand, it is the president's administration, and he has to live with the consequences of his appointments in the departments and agencies. But on the other hand, if agency heads are to be held responsible for managing their own organizations, they ought to have some discretion in putting together their own management teams.
Many people with White House experience tend to believe that subcabinet appointees should owe their primary allegiance to the president and not to the cabinet member for whom they work. They see a danger that appointees will become more responsive to their own bureaucracies, interest groups, and Congress than to the White House; a process John Ehrlichman called "marrying the natives." They feel the White House should, at the very least, clear the nominees, hold a veto prerogative, and nominate people important to the president. Some White House staffers, however, are less adamant than others. Jack Watson, President Carter's chief of staff, feels that the president must have "considerable control;' but that "you cannot dictate to people like Cyrus Vance; it would not work, and if it did, it would be counterproductive."11 Theodore Sorensen recommends that "superiors should always be selected before, and consulted on, their subordinates."12
The perspective of people who have worked in the departments and agencies, as might be expected, is often different. They recognize the legitimate interest of the White House in staffing the administration, but they are suspicious of the motives of the White House-they suspect that the president's personnel office may be more interested in placing people with powerful sponsors than in placing people with the management expertise to run the agency. The question of building a management team with good interpersonal chemistry is also of direct concern to agency heads, but of less concern to the White House.
Frank Carlucci advises new political appointees, "Spend most of your time at the outset focusing on the personnel system. Get your appointees in place, have your own political personnel person, because the first clash you will have is with the White House personnel office. And I don't care whether it is a Republican or a Democrat. And if you don't get your own people in place, you are going to end up being a one-armed paper hanger."13
According to Graham Claytor, deputy secretary of defense for President Carter, being able to select their own management team is crucial to doing a good job managing the Defense Department. "We had an absolutely first-class team, every one of whom was picked by Harold Brown, Charlie Duncan, and me jointly. And it was just what we wanted, and I think we had a hell of a team. Had it been done in the way the Reagans did it, or the way that Carter would have done it a little later after he got organized, we would have had a lousy team. We would have had a bunch of stooges who represented some constituency that some politico thought important. That's the way it's usually done and that's a disaster."14
A similar view was expressed by John Rhinelander, undersecretary of housing and urban development for President Ford and assistant secretary of HEW for President Nixon. "It's the White House personnel office that's become dominant. That I think is a very serious mistake. I think the White House personnel office, whether it's a Republican or Democratic administration, it doesn't make any difference, tends to look for people who have been faithful to the party. They overlook what is the fundamentally important question, whether or not they are the ones who really in the end are going to serve the president well."15
According to John Gardner, secretary of HEW from 1965 to 1968, President Johnson gave him virtually carte blanche in his choice of subordinates. On the other hand, when he appointed somebody the president was not enthusiastic about, Johnson would chide Gardner: "John here thinks I'm smart enough to pick him for secretary but not smart enough to pick any of his people."16
In a study of assistant secretary appointments in the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations, Dean Mann concluded that the selection of assistant secretaries was "a highly decentralized and personalized process revolving around the respective department and agency heads."17 The study reported that the president was relatively inactive in the assistant secretary appointments and that the selection process was dominated by department heads. "Where the secretary and White House staff conflicted over an appointment, the secretary generally won.”18 While the normal amount of internal administration friction between White House and cabinet priorities went on during these administrations, these presidents did not express major reservations about delegating many of their subcabinet selections to their cabinet appointees.
The same cannot be said of Presidents Nixon and Carter, both of whom felt that they gave too much discretion to their department heads in personnel matters at the outset of their administrations. President Nixon, at an early cabinet meeting, announced that appointment authority would be vested in the cabinet. Immediately after making his announcement he turned to an aide and said: "I just made a big mistake.”19 H. R. Haldeman wanted to control the appointments process more closely, but was not able to stay on top of it. "It just happened by inertia; we just had too much to do. Flemming was not strong enough to control it.”20 But Harry Flemming had a tough job since the president had already given away the authority. Once the authority is perceived to be delegated to the departments, getting it back is "like pulling teeth," according to John Ehrlichman.21
Jimmy Carter, in reaction to the tight White House control in the Nixon administration, came to office promising to install "cabinet government” which in his view entailed delegating some subcabinet appointments to cabinet secretaries. When Carter gave Joseph Califano at HEW discretion to choose his whole management team, Stuart Eizenstat concluded, "That's the whole ballgame."22 The president had intended to have a system of mutual veto, but the White House seldom exercised its side of the veto.23 When Arnie Miller took over the personnel operation for President Carter in 1978 he observed: "The President had given away the store for the first two years. He thought that appointments were appropriately the responsibility of Cabinet members. He then realized that this was a mistake and asked us to come in and try to take that power back."24
The Reagan administration decided that the Carter and Nixon delegations of appointment authority to cabinet members were mistakes that it would not repeat. "Nixon, like Carter, lost the appointments process” declared Pendleton James.25 This time it would be different: "When the Cabinet secretaries were selected, Meese made it clear, 'Now look, this is how the appointments process is going to be run.' And they were fully aware as to how the White House was going to handle the appointments process before they were appointed. That was the package that they bought."26 According to Edwin Meese, "The president has to decide right off the bat that there will be one central control point. And that while you encourage department heads to develop names, the ultimate approval is to be that of the president."27
It was inevitable that such an approach would cause some friction. At the highest levels ofpower the stakes are high and some egos are fragile. Those secretaries that were strongest had the best chance to win the disputed cases. Alexander Haig got his choices (with the exception of his deputy, William Clark) through the White House personnel process, if not through the Senate, with dispatch.28 Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger is reported to have prompted the resignation of a White House personnel staffer by saying, "I will not accept any more recommendations from the White House, so don't bother sending them."29 But these were exceptions in the Reagan administration.
In addition to the immediate subcabinet appointments, assistant secretary and above, there are many lower-level appointments at the discretion of an administration. These include about seven hundred noncareer Senior Executive Service positions and about seventeen hundred Schedule C positions that are rated GS-15 and below.30 Several issues are involved in deciding how much control the White House should exert on these positions, although SES and Schedule C appointments technically are made by the agency head rather than by the White House. One question is, should the White House attempt to control these appointments rather than delegate them to the officials, who are closer to the needs of the agency? The other question is, can the White House make these appointments effectively, or are the numbers of appointments just too large for the White House to handle?
At the National Academy's conference of presidential personnel assistants, Dan Fenn explained that the Kennedy White House did not control any appointments under the assistant secretary level, and they did not appoint Schedule CS.31 As a matter of management principle he felt that the agencies and departments ought to be able to choose their lower-level, noncareer appointees. Pendleton James stated the Reagan administration principle: "We handled all the appointments: boards, commissions, Schedule Cs, ambassadorships, judgeships....We made a concerted effort in the planning stages at the very beginning before we became an administration, that if you are going to run the government, you've got to control the people that come into it."32 Frederic Malek feels that there are dangers of going as far as the Reagan administration in White House control of appointments. "I think I leaned more in the direction of Dan's [Fenn] philosophy. . . . If you try to do everything, I'm not so sure you can succeed ... if you try to do too much, you may be diluted to the point where you're not as effective."33
The extreme of complete control is represented by the Reagan administration, which kept tight White House control of appointments at all levels. It is the culmination of a four-decade trend of deeper penetration by the White House of departmental noncareer appointments. In the past, most departmental appointments (SES and Schedule C) and many subcabinet appointments were effectively made by cabinet secretaries.
Elliot Richardson is critical of the deep level of White House control over appointments. "There didn't used to be anything like the degree of control exercised by the White House over presidential appointments in those days as we have seen recently.... I think this [the Reagan] administration has tried to cut too deep into the system by turning jobs traditionally held by career people over to appointees. The price paid is, I think, significant...the lower the level job the less attractive it may appear to one coming from the outside. Take the job of deputy assistant secretary. . . The consequence of that is a lot of people recruited as political appointees for that sort of job have not had outstanding competence. This administration is full of turkeys who have undercut the quality of public service in their areas."34
While there is no "correct" level of White House personnel control, a modus vivendi must be worked out between the White House and the departments and agencies. It might be a mutual veto system. What is important is that the White House clearly set out the ground rules at the beginning of an administration about which appointments it will make, which are a matter of negotiation, and which it will delegate to departments.
Pressures for Patronage
In every presidential administration there are strong pressures to reward the new president's supporters and party workers with the "spoils" of victory, that is, jobs in the federal government. Patronage is used to reward the party faithful who have been laboring in the vineyards of the presidential campaign. But the explicit justification for the presidential appointments system is to ensure that the government is staffed with advocates of the new president's priorities.
From the perspective of a new president's personnel selection operation, pressures for patronage can be very frustrating. Everybody, it seems, wants to ride the new president's coattails into office, and recommendations for specific placements come from all sides: the campaign, the political party, self-initiated job seekers, and most powerfully, from Congress. If a president-elect's transition operation does not have in place a system to handle this deluge the day after the election, it will be swamped with if demands and will be at risk of losing control of the appointments process.
In addition to the intensity of the onslaught, the volume of patronage demands can be staggering. Frederic Malek reports receiving five hundred letters per month, and Arnie Miller recalls getting one hundred telephone calls per day.35 Both Malek and Miller characterize the operations they took over (Nixon's and Carter's, respectively) more as political screening shops than as active recruitment efforts.36
New administrations come under great pressure from all sides to make appointments. It is not unusual for a president's own party to attack him for not appointing enough campaign workers and party faithful. This happened to both President Nixon and President Carter. In the Reagan administration Lyn Nofziger represented those campaign workers who wanted jobs in the administration and felt that the White House was placing too many "retreads" from the Nixon and Ford administrations. According to Nofziger, "We have told members of the Cabinet we expected them to help us place people who are competent.... As far as I'm concerned, anyone who supported Reagan is competent."37 In addition to pressure from campaign workers, a major source of pressure for jobs comes from members of Congress who want their candidates placed in executive branch positions. These people might be constituents of theirs, members of their staffs, or people who advocate a particular policy position. Pressure from Congress always looms high in the eyes of White House recruitment teams.
While recommendations for candidates from the Hill are inevitable, the trick is to distinguish the courtesy requests from the "musts." John Ehrlichman says that many demands for patronage from Congress can be handled by letting them know that you are giving the nominee a fair shake and are seriously considering him or her. "Most congressmen don't expect you to appoint their guy. They expect to be protected so they can say he was seriously considered."38 But Frederic Malek argues that it's not always that easy. "You've got to get back to those ten members of Congress and explain to them why their candidates didn't get it. You can't just say, 'Sorry, Charlie.' "39 The key problem, then, is separating the serious "musts" from the courtesy calls. John Macy argues that it is "important to have a face-to-face discussion with the alleged sponsor. I frequently found he wasn't the sponsor at all. It was somebody using his name."40
When the White House personnel office receives demands for appointments that it does not want to make, according to Frederic Malek, the best defense is a good offense.41 The personnel operation ought to have on file the position qualifications for every position. This may immediately eliminate Senator X's favorite nephew. But even better insurance is to have a list of qualified candidates for each position. "I think it's important to have that executive search capability in order to counter that kind of pressure. It's hard to go back to a Senate committee chairman and say we're not appointing your guy and we're appointing this guy and on paper they don't look too much different. But when you go back and say these are the requirements of the job and here's what your candidate has and here's the guy we want; we just have to go with our person."42
Pendleton James says that when he worked in the Nixon White House personnel office they carefully separated merit from patronage candidates, "because those are two different ballgames. Both are very important, but if you start blending them together the whole thing gets blurred."43 Theodore Sorensen agrees: "Above all, separate the functions of recruitment and placement..." The recruitment effort is finding the right individuals for the top jobs, particularly in Washington. The placement effort is finding jobs for deserving individuals, particularly in the field."44
There are ways to deal with the "must" candidate who is not qualified for a policy-making position with the administration. There are numerous boards, commissions, and honorary appointments without much operational power. Campaign workers can be appointed to transition teams, and the agency head can be given the option to keep them on after taking office. This gets the president off the hook by allowing the White House personnel office to say, "It's their decision, not ours."
Finally, there are Schedule C positions that are designated as confidential or policy-supporting positions at the GS-15 level or lower and can be filled by agency heads. These number about seventeen hundred throughout the government. For the first one hundred twenty days of an administration 25% of these positions can be double encumbered, and this period can be extended by another one hundred twenty days if the director of the Office of Personnel Management certifies that it is necessary.45 So a new administration can appoint four hundred and twenty-five extra people for the first eight months of the administration.
The point of all of this is not that all pressures for patronage are illegitimate, merely that they are inevitable, and new administrations must be prepared to deal with them. Experience has shown that patronage pressures can place the people the president wants placed and deflect or place in innocuous positions those whom he does not want in policy-making roles in his administration.
Active Recruitment Systems
The major focus of the president's personnel office should not be on the seekers but on the sought. As important as it is to stay on top of the flood of job applicants and recommendations and to respond to requests from the Hill, the president's programs and reputation will depend on the quality of the top-level managers who will administer the government and implement the president's programs. The White House personnel office thus must actively go out and get the best candidates for government positions that it can. If a system to do this is not in place immediately after the election, the new administration may find itself burdened with appointees of poor quality who will be difficult to fire. The problem is that the best people are not always bringing themselves to the attention of the White House.
Dan Fenn, one of the developers of the modem presidential recruitment process, characterized the traditional screening and recruitment process as "BOGSAT," that is, a "bunch of guys sitting around a table" saying "whom do you know?" When he joined the Kennedy administration in June 1961 he decided, "we were going to be in the recruiting business and not in the screening business. We were not going to be just going through the junk that was coming in over the transom."46 When Frederic Malek took over President Nixon's White House personnel office midway through the first term, he felt that "the shop that they had there was more a political screening shop as opposed to a recruiting shop. . . . The first thing I felt we needed to do was to go way beyond the screening. They had no outreach capability."47
One way not to conduct an outreach effort was illustrated by one of Malek's predecessors in the Nixon administration, Harry S. Flemming. In order to find the best and brightest from around the country Flemming sent out a mailing to those listed in Who’s Who soliciting names of candidates for jobs with the administration. This resulted in an avalanche of paper of dubious quality that overwhelmed the staff. John Ehrlichman recalls, "I can remember going down to see Flemming's operation, and I worked my way through a room with boxes and boxes of paper, and there was Harry beleaguered."48
The institutional capability of the White House personnel office to conduct active recruitment and outreach has developed greatly since the early 1960s. The recruiting that Dan Fenn was doing with three people, Frederic Malek was doing with twenty-five to thirty and William Walker with thirty-seven or thirty-eight. In 1981, Pendleton James had one hundred people on his staff to recruit for the Reagan administration.49 The rank and access to the president of the chief personnel person has also increased, with James holding the title of assistant to the president (Executive Level II) and having an office in the West Wing of the White House. But the professionalism and competence of the White House personnel office can only be put to good use if it has the support of the president. Presidential leadership is important because the president's priorities in personnel selection need to be accurately communicated to the recruiters. If the president wants the personnel operation to support him and act as an effective recruiter for his administration, he must support it by backing up its authority. If he does not, there will be constant efforts to end run the process. This will result in more demands on the president to settle disputes and will focus any dissatisfaction with appointments on the president. President Johnson effectively used his personnel operation as a buffer. When he was pressured to appoint someone he did not want, he would say, "I am doing this through the merit route." And when someone was displeased with a particular appointment he would say, "Don't blame me. It's that goddamn Macy-he insists on merit."50
Carter Personnel Operations
Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate to invest a significant amount of money and staff time in preparation for a possible transition to the presidency. The personnel portion of the operation was known as the "Talent Inventory Process," or TIP, and it began to assemble names and collect resumes for possible positions with the Carter administration. When word got out about the operation, it began to receive two hundred letters a day.51
Matthew Coffey, who had worked with John Macy in the Johnson administration, was called in to manage the personnel operation. Coffey set up a filing system for the flood of names and produced an inventory of positions accompanied by descriptions of the job qualifications and duties.52 Collecting names for possible appointments with a new administration is a very delicate task. If word gets out that one candidate is being considered for a position, the supporters of those not being considered will fight for their own candidates and disrupt the campaign. Watson tried to keep the operation very low key, but the inevitable leaks occurred, and Watson ordered that background calls about possible candidates be strictly limited. The problem with this is that if a personnel operation cannot make background and reference calls, its functions are limited to merely collecting and filing resumes. In such a situation quality control is very difficult.
Quality control was one of the major difficulties with the Talent Inventory Process. The candidate files covered the sublime to the ridiculous, and the positions to be matched covered the very low levels to cabinet secretaries. Over five hundred names were considered for secretary of state! Jack Watson concluded that, in retrospect, the operation involved a lot of "wheel spinning," and he said that if he were to do it again he would scale down the numbers and focus on fewer positions. "We spent an enormous amount of time in that; it was not productive time."53
Part of the problem was a concerted effort to avoid the "old boy networks" and assure that all candidates got a fair chance to be considered. This left in the files thousands of names that probably should have been screened out immediately. The other problem was the large amount of time spent on cabinet positions. The types of considerations that must go into cabinet selection can only be usefully evaluated by the president-elect and his closest advisers. Background staff work is necessary for this, but developing elaborate lists and evaluations will be wasted effort when the final decisions are made.
Another problem that the policy-planning group ran into was the lack of coordination with the campaign and, in particular, Hamilton Jordan. Carter had not clearly defined the relationship between the transition-planning staff in Atlanta and the campaign. After the election the two groups arrived in Washington, each expecting to set up the government. Hamilton Jordan was not about to let Watson dominate the White House, and much energy and time were lost while Jordan established his primacy. Jordan and his staff thought that the TIP candidate files did not give enough weight to political considerations. Rather than try to abolish the TIP operation, Jordan set up a parallel operation to make personnel selections.54 The TIP files were used, but not as the center of the personnel recruitment operation.
Except for the very top positions, Carter himself was not deeply involved with the personnel selection process. Yet he found the appointments process to be frustrating. "The constant press of making lesser appointments was a real headache. Even more than for Cabinet posts, I would be inundated with recommendations from every conceivable source. Cabinet officers, members of Congress, governors and other officials, my key political supporters around the nation, my own staff, family and friends, would all rush forward with proposals and fight to the last minute for their candidates."55 The irony here is that Carter had the largest preelection operation for personnel appointments in the history of the presidency to that time, and he delegated much of his appointment authority to his cabinet; yet he still felt personally overwhelmed by minor personnel decisions.
Part of the explanation lies in Carter's failure to draw clear lines of authority in the transition and the resulting struggle between two separate personnel operations. Another part of the explanation is his failure to back up the White House personnel operation after taking office. When Arnie Miller was brought in to head the personnel office, he tried to place White House recommended candidates in departments and agencies; but he had trouble because he felt the credibility of his office was undermined by other parts of the White House.
"They would often call in with people who really didn't fit lower level positions. But those inappropriate recommendations sometimes jeopardized our credibility with the Cabinet.... We would call the secretary or the executive assistant to the secretary and discover that elsewhere in the White House someone else had called."56 Miller finally felt as if the authority of the president's personnel office was based on Miller's role as a broker rather than from any power delegated from the president. "I ended up sort of operating as a broker, building floating coalitions inside among senior staff.... I found our power was derived from that kind of canceling each other out."57 This lack of support for the personnel office was not present in the Johnson/Macy operation or in the Nixon White House after Malek took over. Nor was it present in the Reagan administration, which ran one of the tightest personnel operations in history.
Reagan
Ronald Reagan was the second presidential candidate to begin to plan in a significant way for a possible takeover of the government before his nomination by his party. In November 1979, Edwin Meese asked Pendleton James to put together a plan for a personnel operation to prepare for a possible Reagan victory. In April 1980, he was asked to implement the plan, and he began operations near Washington. The leaks that had plagued the early Carter efforts did not occur, and the personnel operation was clearly subordinate to Meese, who was in charge of the transition from beginning to end and who also played a major role in the campaign. Calvin Mackenzie has characterized the Reagan personnel operation as tighter than any other. The Reagan administration "undertook transition personnel selection with more forethought, with a larger commitment of resources, and with more systematic attention to detail than any administration in the post-war period, perhaps more than any administration ever."58
Reagan's cabinet selections were made in consultation with his "kitchen cabinet," a group of Reagan's close friends and political associates.59 James worked with the kitchen cabinet on cabinet appointments, but took over most of the work on the subcabinet with his staff of one hundred (during the early part of the administration).
The Reagan White House resolved that it would not make the mistakes of earlier presidents and lose control of its personnel appointments. In order to keep tight control, they insisted on a narrow definition of loyalty to the president and had cabinet members agree to accept White House selection of their subordinates. Loyalty to the president was assured by examining the background and attitudes of potential nominees. Heavy weight was given to support for Reagan in previous campaigns and Republican primaries. There was also a relatively narrow set of ideological values concerning the role of the federal government, the military, and social issues that could be applied to prospective candidates. This rigorous ideological screening ensured that appointees would put loyalty to the president and his policies above the tugs of Congress, interest groups, and the bureaucracy. Reagan's clearly defined ideology made this type of screening possible in ways that would not have worked in the administrations of previous presidents, such as Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, or Carter, who had much broader sets of values.
The other way that loyalty to the White House was assured was by laying out the ground rules for appointments to cabinet members very early and with no uncertainty. Pendleton James described the ground rules thus: "When we appointed the Cabinet . . . I sat down with that Cabinet officer along with Ed Meese and Jim Baker and informed him of the role of the presidential personnel operation... if you had somebody that you wanted in an office, it would have to go through the White House presidential personnel office because everything in the appointment process went into the Oval Office through the presidential personnel office. We clearly established control at the beginning."60
In order to enforce centralized White House control and still assure that all the proper bases had been touched before nominations were announced, an elaborate clearance process was set up in the White House. Pendleton James describes the beginning of the process: "At the top, you have these thunderclouds and lightning and jockeying and scheming and conniving for presidential appointments. It's a whirlwind, a black morass up there. Out of that crawl some candidates who are going to be given serious consideration and then you send those candidates through a process where you want input."61 Each nominee had to run a formidable gauntlet running from the cabinet secretary and the personnel office to Lyn Nofziger (political clearance) to White House counsel Fred Fielding (conflict of interest), to either Martin Anderson (domestic policy) or Richard Allen (national security), to the triad (James Baker, Michael Deaver, Edwin Meese), to the congressional liaison office, and finally to the president himself.62
This screening process assured that each candidate for an administrative position would be thoroughly examined and that all important officials would have a chance to exercise a veto. But the elaborateness of the screening process and the ideological battles within the administration resulted in a slow pace of appointments. Pendleton James, using his experience as head of a private sector executive search firm, sought out candidates who had proven track records and who would be loyal to the administration. Since he had worked in previous Republican administrations, he found many competent people among those who had served in the Nixon and Ford administrations. The problem with them, from the view of the Republican right wing, was that some of them had not supported Ronald Regan soon enough and were considered "retreads."
The ideological battles over appointments and the elaborate clearance procedures resulted in significant delays in staffing the administration. Despite claims that the administration was making major appointments faster than Presidents Carter or Kennedy, the National Journal reported that after 10 weeks Reagan had submitted to the Senate 95, as compared to Carter's 142, nominations.63 Time calculated that as of the first week in May, of the top 400 officials only 55 percent had been announced, 35 percent formally nominated, and 21 percent actually confirmed.64
The strengths of the Reagan approach to staffing an administration are loyalty to the president, a clearance process that touches all bases, and clear White House control of appointments in the administration. The weaknesses are slowness due to the elaborate clearance procedures, the narrowness of the pool of potential candidates (due to ideological criteria and bias against previous experience), and the large volume that must be handled by the White House personnel office since clearances extended to the lowest levels.
Conclusion
The personnel recruitment task for each new administration is overwhelming: it can never be done soon enough, there will always be disappointed office seekers and factions, and some appointees will be the wrong ones for the jobs. Nevertheless, recent experience has taught us some lessons, and there is room for improvement in the process. Specifically, there are some procedures the government might establish, some preparations the prudent candidate should undertake, and some lessons new administrations ought to learn.
1. The Office of Management and Budget ought to develop a master list of positions throughout the government that the president has the authority to fill.
This list should include the name of the incumbent, a position description, and an analysis of the qualifications needed for the job. During the Johnson administration, John Macy developed a list of position descriptions that he kept updated with current duties of the position and the kinds of skill the job required. But these positions are dynamic and the descriptions become outdated quickly due to reorganizations and the different ways Cabinet heads use their line officers. Matthew Coffey prepared such a list for the Carter administration, but Arnold Miller felt that the list finally was "the enabling act and a short position description in typical personnel gobbledygook."65
The list should be made part of the institutional memory of the presidency, and career officials should ensure continuity between administrations. The office would keep the position profiles up to date to reflect any changes in organization of the departments and agencies. This office should have the duty of liaison with presidential candidates after nominating conventions and before the election. After the election the staff should be made available to the president elect to help set up the transition personnel operation. This office could also be the keeper of clearance procedures for the White House personnel office to which each new administration could add its own requirements.
2. Presidential candidates should set up a personnel operation infrastructure before the election.
Candidates should set up, possibly with publicly provided transition funds, a personnel operation that will be able to move immediately if the candidate is elected. This operation should have the capacity to deal with the huge volume of paperwork and communications that immediately follows an election. These preparations should include filing and computer systems that are compatible with White House and OMB systems, word processing and prepared form letters, and plans for phone banks that can be immediately activated upon election. This capacity should include both active outreach to recruit promising candidates and the ability to deal with the deluge of unsolicited names and resumes that will inevitably follow the election.
The delicate question is whether the preelection personnel preparations should include developing lists of names for positions. The main problem with this is the probability that leaks will create animosities and detract from the campaign. Collecting names of possible appointees with some background information can be useful if there is some quality control and if publicity can be avoided. But any such operation must be very low key and mindful of John Kennedy's observation that the last president to designate his cabinet before the election was President Dewey. Finally, the relationship between the personnel operation and the campaign must be explicit and carefully controlled to avoid the problems of rivalry that plagued the Carter transition.
3. Immediately after the election the president-elect should designate a personnel director and set the tone and ground rules of personnel selection for the administration.
While the institutional continuity provided by OMB and the preparations by presidential candidates can add much to the success of the political appointments process, the shape of the new administration will be determined by the postelection personnel operations. Several lessons have been learned. The president-elect should designate top White House aides and the personnel chief early so that they can get on with their duties without jockeying for position. Having someone clearly in charge greatly facilitates the process. There is no substitute for personal presidential leadership and involvement in the process to set the tone for recruitment and to communicate criteria for choosing candidates. If the personnel system is to serve the president effectively and buffer him from undue demands on his time, he must not undercut it or allow it to be end run.
Finally, the president must set the ground rules early in order to establish the White House's final say on all presidential appointees. It is probably not wise to exercise that say most of the time. Allowing cabinet secretaries to put together their own management teams will enhance good management. But is must be clear that the president has the final word. For political appointments that are not presidential but departmental, the White House should give broad leeway to department and agency heads. A mutual veto system is attractive.
Regardless of how these issues are decided, the personnel operation must be given the highest priority. For in it lie the seeds for the ultimate success or failure of the president's administration. |