PRESIDENTIAL HIERARCHIES AND DECISION MAKING:
THE INTERACTION OF ORGANIZATION AND INFORMATION
ANDREW RUDALEVIGE
Dickinson College
Department of Political Science
Princeton University
Center for the Study of Democratic Politics
[email protected]
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political
Science Association. Thanks to Matt Dickinson, Dave Lewis, Rick Waterman, Jeffrey Weinberg, and
especially Tom Hammond for helpful conversations and comments on various aspects of this project.
This is very much a work in progress and any feedback is appreciated.
ABSTRACT
Voluminous and varied work on the “institutional presidency” has yet to yield systematic
analysis of how different staff institutions make a difference to presidents: how they impact the
kind, caliber, and amount of information presidents receive on policy matters. Instead,
presidential decision making is often deemed idiosyncratic and personalized. This paper draws
on various theories of organization and hierarchy to create a basis for arguing that staff is a
necessary limiting structure on an otherwise chaotic informational environment. How that staff
is structured will, likewise, matter for the amount and type of information they receive and
thus for the decisions they take. The paper argues, melding recent formal work with earlier
hypotheses about staff effectiveness, that informational institutions centered on functional rather
than specific policy lines will best serve the president. Archival evidence from the Truman,
Nixon, and Reagan administrations is used to illustrate this theory and sketch a more
systematic research agenda.
-1“The pulse of the life of the presidency... moves by one rhythm: the making of decisions.
To know a presidency is to catch this rhythm.”
– Emmet John Hughes (1973: 29)
I. Information, Organization, and Presidential Decision-Making
If decisions are at the heart of the presidency, information is at the heart of how
presidential decisions are taken. And at the heart of information are decisions that first shaped
how the flow of advice reached the Oval Office. That in, turn, at least in the modern
presidency, is a function of staff and staff organization. Organization is policy, Nixon adviser
Roy Ash used to say -- but perhaps instead organization is information, which makes policy.
Scholars of the presidency largely agree with the first tenets of this syllogism. As early
as the 1940s, Leonard White’s standard textbook on public administration (1948: 52) painted
much of the justification for the then-new Executive Office of the President (EOP) in
informational terms. Forty years ago Neustadt (1960: 153) stressed the importance of what the
president got “into his mind. His first essential need is for information.” And as Witherspoon
(1991: 149) put it more recently, “Information is power because it is the substance of which
decisions are made.”
However, while the notion that prior decisions about staffing shape current decisions
about a wide range of issues – and, more generally that organization reflects informational
needs – has received sustained attention in economics (e.g., Arrow 1973) and other subfields of
American politics (see especially Krehbiel 1991), presidency scholars have been relatively slow
to take up the challenge in a systematic way. The presidency is still seen largely as the
bailiwick of a single individual whose idiosyncracies shape the decisionmaking process; and
despite much solid work on various aspects of the “institutional presidency” over the past
decade or so, the work on how presidents obtain and use information “has not made notable
advances beyond the casual theorizing of sophisticated participants” and tends to consist of
“conventional administrative doctrine modified by a few apparent lessons of recent
presidencies” (Quirk 1991: 39, 40). Organizations generally process information in order to
reduce uncertainty (Daft and Lengel 1986); but while scholars have produced templates of
presidential organization, there is much less in the way of explicit theory about how those
varying organizations affect the flow of information to the president and thus the kinds of
uncertainty they ameliorate. What, and what kind of, information reaches presidents, of the
nearly infinite amount that in prospect might do so? When does it arrive, and through what
channels? And how do these factors affect the ways decisions are conceived, and taken? In
short, the overall question might be more specifically formulated as how presidents structure
their staffs in order to ensure that they both become aware of relevant policy problems and
receive germane, timely advice on the range of options which might be utilized to solve or
mitigate those problems.
-2-
These are crucial questions, but not simple ones.1 This paper takes a preliminary cut at
the problem by bringing together organization theory with industrial economics with formal
work on hierarchy and agenda-setting with what we know about presidential staffing. The
basic argument takes its cue from the “chaos” theory developed in the public choice literature:
just as structure must be used to induce equilibria in situations of collective decision making
(Shepsle 1979), presidents must impose a limiting institutional structure, in the form of staff,
upon a chaotic informational environment. That structure, which may be analogized to the
agendas used by legislatures to order and limit their alternatives, has wide bearing on the
information received up the hierarchy. The choices made along the way, as advice rises to the
president, will matter for the choices he himself makes; how the staff is structured will have an
important impact on this.
Most broadly, I argue that informational institutions centered on functional tasks (e.g.,
legislative policy formulation generally) rather than those tied to specific “policy lines” (e.g.,
foreign or domestic) will give the president the information s/he needs most. That is, a staff
hierarchy ensuring that generalist expertise is brought to bear on technical policy will give the
president better options than one that isolates policy with specialists,2 and one that forces policy
disputes to the president’s level will give him better information about their proper resolution
than one that resolves them with “consensus” before reaching the Oval Office.
Such a hypothesis cuts somewhat across the conventional wisdom. Recall the
controversy that erupted when it emerged that Bush political guru Karl Rove was also advising
the president on foreign policy (Berke and Sanger 2002). The Rove furor, far from being unique,
echoed General George Marshall’s complaints about Truman advisor Clark Clifford’s role in the
U.S. diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1948 (McCullough 1992: 614-20). Foreign policy is not
supposed to be “politicized” by electorally–minded minders. But the literature on how
organizations use information, both specific to the presidency (Dickinson 1997; George 1980;
Porter 1980) and more broadly construed (Graber 1991, 2003; Hammond 1994; Wilensky 1967),
suggests that the kind of information any executive needs will cut across different issue-areas.
Only then can the president himself remain in control of his own choices.
One way to test these ideas is to examine important “change points,” where presidents
shifted their staff organizations within their administration. This allows one to present
structured comparisons while holding constant such variables as presidential personality, style,
or skill. After further elaboration of executive hierarchies, then, the paper concludes by
presenting data from the Truman, Nixon, and Reagan administrations. These cases both
highlight the plausibility of the hypotheses and indicate future lines for more comprehensive
research.
1
As Hughes added to his claim that starts this paper, “there can be no secret to any presidency as difficult to discover as the riddle
of precisely how even one decision came to be made.”
2
Note that who fills a given slot matters, too – a “generalist” slot filled by a policy advocate may not help the president. This
selection question receives some preliminary attention below.
-3-
II. The Institutional Presidency and Informational Institutions
A. The Institutional Presidency
As opposed to the common behavioral focus on the president as individual, the literature
collected under the rubric of the “institutional presidency” seeks to examine the presidency more
broadly as an ongoing collection of regularized processes and roles (Moe 1993). Some research
along these lines focuses on the formal (often, Constitutional) rules constraining and
empowering presidents, as well as the duties and rights of the office as shaped by historical
precedents of law, prerogative, and circumstance. These structure presidential behavior by
channeling the formal and informal “recurring interactions in organizations” (Hult and Walcott
1990: 34), a phrase I will take as a basic definition of “institution.”
The bulk of “institutional presidency” research centers on those interactions as they are
shaped by the organizational nature of the modern presidency, highlighting the routines,
procedures, and staff units that comprise the presidential branch. It provides a broadly
historical account of units and functions in the EOP through different administrations,
sometimes assessing typologies of staff organization and dicta of staff management. At one
extreme, organization is treated as a constant (formalistic, “spokes of the wheel,” etc.); at the
other, it is seen as a fungible offshoot of presidential personality. There is also a middle ground,
exemplified by Walcott and Hult (1995: 3-6). “Personal contingency” approaches seek to match
a given type of presidential personality with a given staff organization. Broader generalizations
are sought using a “problem contingency” tack that argues that the circumstances faced by the
president and presidency affects the shape of EOP evolution. That is, presidential staff
institutions develop as a response to problems posed by the wider political environment.
This literature is extensive and quite varied. Still, information is at least implicitly the
central issue in the institutional development traced by this scholarship. After all, as Norman
Thomas (1970: 561) argued long ago, the primary job of presidential staff “is to furnish the
president with sufficient information and analysis to permit him to make decisions with an
awareness of the available alternatives and their probable consequences.”
However, there has been little progress made in exploring presidential information in
terms of presidential institutions, systematically evaluating advisory systems to determine the
impact differing institutions might have on the nature and amount of information the president
receives. One exception that perhaps proves the rule is the comparison of the 1961 Bay of Pigs
invasion to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where contrasting decisions are often linked to the
intentionally very different decision-making structures that produced them (see, e.g. Wilensky
1967). Burke and Greenstein (1989) also come close to what I have in mind in their structured
comparison of the Eisenhower and Johnson decision-making processes with regards to
Vietnam. But more frequently, presidential management structures are presented as a simple
trinity -- hierarchical, collegial (“spokes-of-the-wheel”), or competitive (see Johnson 1974, or the
useful summary in Graber 2003: 179-83). This is, to be sure, a useful simplifying framework.
But such structures are not unitary facts, one per administration: presidents utilize multiple
-4-
formal and informal structures to channel information (Burke and Greenstein 1989), and these
both vary within administrations across issue areas (Porter 1980; Walcott and Hult 1995) and
shift with the priorities presidents attach to a given question or set of policies during their term
(Kohl 1975; Pika 1991). Indeed, Kessel (1984) found that relatively small variations in
communication networks within an administration can significantly affect information flow.
Thus – ultimately, at least – the unit of analysis must be the decision, not the structure per se.
This is not to say that extant research on staff structures to date is not useful to the
current project; as discussed below, it provides important grounding for the hypotheses
developed here. It is simply to note that, on the whole, the broad generalizations about
presidential staffing that have been promulgated themselves rarely provide hypotheses
appropriate for comparative, empirical testing of informational content.
B. Agendas and Organizations
On the other hand, other work on institutions in political science and economics
explicitly explores their informational role. While much of this literature is an offshoot of
rational choice institutionalism, “rational” here should be understood to mean simply
“purposive.” Indeed, the limits of bounded rationality (cf. Simon 1985; B. Jones 2001)
frequently help explain why institutions are needed, and must be at the crux of models of
decision-making.
For example, institutions help to mitigate the uncertainty inherent in strategic
interactions. They give actors an idea of the behavior to expect from each other, perhaps by
giving a means of signaling intent or furnishing a focal point; they create automatic decision
rules that save on cognition and information search; they provide commitment mechanisms in
otherwise fluid bargaining situations (e.g., Calvert 1995; Schelling 1960; Shepsle 1991).
Coordinating conventions don’t have to be the objectively “best” mechanism so long as they are
commonly understood. For example, driving on the right side of the road is not clearly better
than driving on the left – but everyone needs to drive on the same side.
Another body of formal work on institutions deals with rules and agendas in decisionmaking. This literature ranges widely, but derives in principle from one key theoretical finding:
that very few areas of decision making have stable outcomes that can be derived directly from
the preferences of the participants. We often, of course, will not have full knowledge of those
preferences. But even if we do, that information does not normally in itself allow us to predict a
unique outcome. After all, just three self-interested participants with different preference
orderings over outcomes (x, y, z) can start an unending cycle whereby x is preferred to y, y
preferred to z, but z preferred to x. The famous Arrow impossibility theorem, along with the
“chaos” results derived in the 1970s, made it clear that this indeterminancy is at least potentially
a universal problem. In the jargon, there are very few “preference-induced” equilibria –
“structure-induced” equilibria are required instead (see Shepsle 1979, 1989).
-5-
That is, we need to know the rules of the game before we know how it will come out.
Those rules, whether formal or not, are agendas, where “agenda setting” might be defined as
the power to determine which options are considered and in what order. As above, having no
agenda can mean no result is reached -- critically, though, different agendas, even over the same
options, will lead to different results. Indeed, all agendas are biased in some way (see Riker
1993). For example, part of the power of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives
is to determine not only which amendments may be offered but in what order, and to what base
bill. If amendments are put up against each other, instead of against the status quo, a wholly
different outcome may result. Hence the use of complicated rules like “king of the hill” or rules
that themselves amend the underlying bill (Sinclair 2000: 20-28).
The insight, if not the specific process, can make the jump between the branches. After
all, presidents seeking decision-making advice oversee a set of institutions which guide the
consideration of policy alternatives. Recall the basic definition of “institution” above: in an
iterated process, who does what when? Suddenly this looks a lot like the definition of “agenda”
as well.
In fact, as Thomas Hammond (1986, 1993, 1994) and his collaborators have observed, to
the extent that the outputs they produce are driven by the sequential consideration of sets of
options, hierarchical organizations are themselves structured agendas. Organization charts
even look like an extended form game tree. Further, like agendas, hierarchies are always
“biased” in some way (Hammond and Thomas 1989). The structuring of those institutions will
affect the alternatives that reach the president. That is: since “policymaking involves making
comparisons.... an organization’s structure affects who compares what with what, so that
different structures can produce different policy outcomes” (Bendor and Hammond 1992: 317).
Thinking of the problem in this way has direct implications for the organizational
choices the president makes. After all, the input to presidential decisions is information. In a
real sense his problem is not too little advice, but too much (B. Jones 1994, 2001; March 1978;
more specific to the EOP, see Kessel 1984; Thomas 1970). As Simon (1973: 270; 1976) writes,
“the scarce resource is not information; it is the processing capacity to attend to information.
Attention is the chief bottleneck in organizational activity, and the bottleneck becomes narrower
and narrower as we move to the tops of organizations.” For reasons of time and cognitive
capacity, no president could usefully receive as much information as exists on any given topic.
Thus the problem is not gathering data so much as it is structuring them into some sort of
equilibrium. The sea of information at the bottom of any hierarchical pyramid bears little
resemblance to the puddle that reaches the top: at each level, some information flows up but, as
March and Simon (1958) famously put it, more and more uncertainty is absorbed (see also
Downs 1967). Put another way, institutions “narrow the choice set” (North 1986: 230).
This is just as true for presidential institutions. The informational chaos they face must
be structured by imposing an agenda upon it – by forcing it through a staff – just as in the world
of collective preferences, equilibrium must be induced by the imposition of some sort of
structured rules.
-6-
If so, a president’s original choices in this area will affect his future options – will make
his subsequent decisions better or worse. Thus, how does he arrange his hierarchy -- how does
he set the organizational agenda -- to achieve the informational results he wants and we the
people need him to have? It is to this problem we turn next.
III. Presidential Problems and Solutions
“How do you decide what the President should know?” an interviewer once asked
Lyndon Johnson aide Douglass Cater. Cater thought, then replied: “the man who has to choose
between apples, it’s a matter of judgement. And this I would say is probably the greatest power
and perquisite that presidential assistants have -- making those judgements.”3
Cater’s White House colleague, Harry McPherson, put the problem this way in his
memoir (1988: 292):
All the memoranda I have quoted were biased.....The real danger was that we [LBJ’s
advisors] would weigh it wrong. The very process of reducing a dozen position papers
and committee meetings to a three page memorandum for the President required that we
exclude some arguments and data, and emphasize others. We tried to give him both
sides, but our judgements colored what we wrote. Presidents are not helpless in such
matters; any man who attains the office may be presumed to be familiar...with the
tendency of staff men to shape what they tell him in accordance with their opinions.
Presidents also choose staffs on whose values they believe they can rely. But the danger
of bias or omission is always there, and it is unavoidable so long as Presidents make
twenty decisions a day on the basis of information they can only receive through the filter
of other men’s convictions.
Nixon counsel Leonard Garment added a third metaphor in agreeing: “there is old rule in
physics that the ingredients of the screen affect the material that passes through the screen”
(Reichley 1981: 62).
How should presidents construct that screen or filter so that it best serves them? One
means is the careful structuring of informational institutions. To do this we need to know two
things: what the president needs to know; and, flowing from this, what staff structures should
look like.
A. What does the President need to know?
A decision process itself should not be considered “good” or “bad” based on its outcome
alone. Rather, it should be assessed according to whether it brought the president the
3
Cater oral history of 5/8/69, AC 72-19, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, p. 16.
-7-
information he needed. A bad decision is not improved by the effectiveness of its
implementation; on the other hand, since all structures will fail sometimes, the president’s goal
is merely to reduce the incidence and costs of those failures.
What kind of information do presidents need to rise to the top? Wilensky’s 1967 study of
“organizational intelligence” describes high-quality information as clear, timely, reliable,
logically consistent with real-life contexts, comprehensive, and diverse (1967: viii-ix; see also
Graber 1992: 61-70).
These characteristics are rather broad. Still, they mesh with work more specific to the
presidency. For example, George (1980: Ch. 6) gives a set of decisional malfunctions, such as
the avoidance of certain logical options; the presentation of a united front by advisors to the
president, disagreements having already been hashed out; dependence on a single channel of
information; lack of review of key premises by neutral parties (i.e., bias); and a lack of follow-up
on dissenting proposals. Further, each of the basic models of presidential staffing suggest costs
and benefits (George 1980; Graber 2003; Porter 1980: 229-52). The formalistic model (what
Porter calls “centralized management”) provides for clear jurisdictions, a wide potential scope
for information gathering, and the elimination of extraneous data; the downside, of course, is
that the screening process on the way up may make decisions about what is extraneous that
differ from the president’s needs. Staff may not share the presidential perspective, and may
hide information that shows them in a bad light. A collegial model allows interconnection
horizontally around the spokes that lead to the president, and reduces specialists’ ties to their
“home” organization; however, its reliance on consensus-building may lead to “groupthink”
(Janis 1982). A competitive model, by creating overlapping jurisdictions, forces a wealth of
information to the president and ensures he maintains final control over decisions (Dickinson
1997); however, it may lead to deadlock (Kowert 2002) and requires that the president invest a
good deal of personal energy in managing the system.
Space does not allow a more detailed examination of the informational costs and benefits of
these various systems here. The point for the present is that common threads run through the
literature above, enabling us to draw a picture of “good advice,” recognizing that no single
system will provide this all of the time. Namely:
•
•
•
•
presidents need advice that gives them a manageable amount of information;
that information must be useful, in the sense that it fits real-world options;
it must be “comprehensive” in that it includes all the options and an estimate of their
likely success;
it must be diverse, in that it provides both the “winning” and dissenting options, and
(addressing George’s point) is vetted by “neutral” people not in the specialist camp.
B. How can he get to know it?
Personnel Approaches. The problem discussed by the aides above is a classic principal-agent
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question of hidden action and information. Since what the agent (here, the staffer) does may be
unobservable by the principal (here, the president), the agent must be given incentives to act in
the desired manner. McPherson, in discussing LBJ above, suggested two ameliorating
mechanisms: that the president: (1) choose subordinates with care, to ensure they share his
values; and (2) understand the bias of each and weight it accordingly when considering their
advice. In fact that advice is quite consistent with more formal treatments of principal-agent
problems that argue for a selection process centered on agent preferences, so that agents adhere
to the principal’s beliefs and preferences (Arrow 1985; Moe 1984; Miller 1992; Waterman and
Meier 1998). Even if staff members remain biased in some manner, knowing the direction and
extent of the bias can still make advice useful (Calvert 1985).4 Careful selection of responsive
subordinates on the basis of loyalty and ideological commitment -- along with the centralization
of tasks within the White House partly in order to reduce monitoring costs -- is, of course, the
cornerstone of work on the “politicized presidency” (Moe 1985; Nathan 1983; Weko 1995).
Wilensky put it nicely: executives need “recruitment, indoctrination, and rotation” (1967: 59).
This approach, however, may not solve the problem. Problems of adverse selection may arise.5
Responsiveness may overshadow competence -- in contrast to “opportunism” problems in
private industry, the difficulty may not always be one of controlling self-interested behavior
that is knowingly hostile to the president’s interests but rather controlling misguided
enthusiasm expressed on White House letterhead (“I have a great way to help the contras!...”)
Or, thirdly, the principal may not know what to ask, or know if given options are missing from
the menu she receives. Information asymmetries are common when specialized tasks are being
performed and overseen by generalist managers; the more specialized the task, the higher its
transaction costs (see Miller 1992: 33). How does the president prevent shirking (i.e., the
presentation of options that do not match his interest) by subordinate agents whose initiatives
who may well have more extensive knowledge of the subject area than he does?
A Structural Approach. The answer might require presidents to follow a third strategy,
structuring their advisory stream to bring the “best” information to the top. In effect, the lesson
of the principal-agent literature is that presidents protect themselves by “institutionalizing
distrust,” to borrow Richard Rose’s useful phrase (1991: 108). As above, much of the argument
about hierarchical structure presented by analysts such as Bendor, Hammond, and Miller
breaks down to the ways in which different institutional structures influence what conflicts
reach the president and, thus, what information he gets with regard to decisions.
Earlier the notion of “uncertainty absorption” was mentioned as a standard pathology of
hierarchy: as information flows upwards, subordinates tell those at the next level up what they
4
Roy Ash, budget director under Presidents Nixon and Ford, in fact described the latter’s information gathering in just these
terms: “When an issue would arise, he would attempt to get the views of a number of people given to him directly. He would
obviously have in his own mind some weighting that he would give to these different people, and their views. Then, after
applying that weighting he would have a pretty good leg up on what his decision was going to be....And I sensed, as I watched it at
work, the importance of applying different weights, from subject to subject, to the views of the people whom he consulted.” Ash
Oral History, 8/4/88, Nixon Presidential Materials Project [NPMP], p. 15
5
Since the agent knows his skills and preferences better than does the principal, the principal cannot be sure that the agent she is
hiring is actually qualified or really shares her preferences (rather than mouthing them in order to get the job.)
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think the latter want to hear -- and what they want them to know. The usual result is that
problems are weeded out as information is summarized at each successive level. What the
remaining fraction contains, substantively, will depend on which half is passed up each time.
As the preceding discussion makes clear, this can be affected by institutional design; and since
a priority for presidents is preserving their right of choice over important decisions, they need
to be alerted to key issues and ensure that their resolution is not pre-empted by lower-level
officials (Neustadt 1990; George 1980: 176).6
The key question of institutional design, then, can be restated as one of designing a process by
which desired information is forced through the hierarchy. Hammond (1994; see also Bendor
and Hammond 1992) argues that this process is largely a function of the categories around
which the institution is organized. The chief executive in any hierarchy will learn about intercategory matters, but not intra-category concerns, since the latter will be settled at a lower level.
For example, if the reporting structure of the State Department is based on countries, the
Secretary will hear about different issues than if it is based on policy-areas (trade, military, etc.)
If economic policy flows through an interdepartmental organization like the Ford
administration’s Economic Policy Board, the president will get different advice than if domestic
and foreign economic news come to him in separate streams. However the units are defined,
presidents will learn largely about what crosses units’ jurisdictions, because that will be the
disputes that rise to the top.
Most prescriptive works on management design argue that structure should be matched up
with important environmental categories (e.g., with a division to deal with each). Hammond
argues, however, based on the foregoing, that if a chief executive wants to be well informed
about his decision-making environment, the categories on which the firm is structured should
cut across the categories used for classifying elements of the firm’s environment (1994: 152).
A useful point of comparison is Chandler (1962), who discusses the shift in large American
corporations from a functional model of organization (departments centered on accounting,
sales, and the like) to a product-line model (encompassing all functions as applied to a specific
set of commodities). One case is DuPont Chemical, which in the late 1910s reported to its
president via departments such as purchasing, sales, development, production, and
engineering. The Production Department, to take one example, was then divided into different
subdepartments handling various types of goods (explosives, dyes, paint and chemicals, etc.)
In 1921, however, it was proposed that those subdepartments become the departments
themselves: Explosives, for example, would become a division in its own right, subsuming most
of the functions needed to keep its product-lines going, and reporting directly to the president
of DuPont (Chandler 1962: 74-7, 108-9).
Chandler argues this change made sense; it fostered continued corporate growth and produced
managers with a broader range of knowledge about corporate functions. However, there is no
optimal solution to organizational problems: the real discussion is what type of ignorance each
6
Shapiro (1981: 49ff) makes a parallel argument about judicial appeals systems, noting that they are designed to provide the top of
a hierarchy with nondigested instances of system failure.
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firm (or president) wants at the top. We can operationalize this question using Chandler’s
dimensions -- deciding whether the firm should implement structures centered around
functional lines or product-lines. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the same people, with the same
preferences, arrayed differently along these dimensions can yield different outcomes.
[Figure 1 here]7
This has important implications for studying the institutional presidency. Consider that a
policy staff might be organized around cross-cutting functional lines -- speechwriting, statutedrafting, and the like -- or around its own sort of product lines, or, better, “policy-lines” (since
government’s product is, in a real sense policy. Such lines could include economic, domestic,
and foreign policy or, even more specifically, agriculture, education, housing, etc.). Both
methods would produce options for the president, but different advisory networks would be
involved. The former would bring together different personnel depending on the task at hand;
the latter would mainly unite specialists. In the modern EOP, replete with specialized policy
staffs from NSC aides to the Office for Policy Development, the latter seems to be -- at least
formally, an important caveat -- the dominant method of staffing.
Superficially, this parallels legislative developments. As Keith Krehbiel (1991) has argued,
Congressional committees spring from the desire of members in the aggregate to ameliorate
their uncertainty about policy outcomes: committees are formally established, bureaucratically
layered, and substantively specialized by subject matter with strict issue jurisdictions. In these
regards, the committees bear resemblance to contemporary White House staffs; and their
rationale mirrors presidents’. Ceteris paribus, more staff should be beneficial, the better to
increase the president's stock of information.
Yet is all else equal? Members of Congress, in large part, are specialists: the incentives of the
body make this imperative. Further, members of Congressional committees are peers of the full
body and are controlled by it - thus they have incentives to report honestly. Presidents, on the
other hand, cannot specialize; and they cannot reliably seek cues from trusted peers – they have
no peers. There is no presidential equivalent to Krehbiel’s “majoritarian principle.”8 Few
presidential staffers fully share the president's viewpoint; a given aide may not know how a
given transaction fits into others.
One can argue, then, that compartmentalized policy advice channels cannot produce the
information the president most needs: namely, how different problems interact across policy
areas. Longtime presidential troubleshooter W. Averell Harriman argued, “There is only one
Presidency, and all talk of ‘two Presidencies’ – one foreign and one domestic – is nonsense. All
7
For purposes of simplicity, the managerial choices in Figure 1 are assumed to be by Management-by-Exception (MBE) rules: if a
manager’s subordinates agree, he accepts that recommendation; if they are divided, he chooses the option he prefers (Hammond
1986: 387).
8
As Ford chief-of-staff Dick Cheney noted, “In a legislature, everybody gets a vote. Downtown in the White House,....[t]here’s
only one vote cast, and it’s in the Oval Office” (Kessel 1984: 160).
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policies within and beyond our national frontiers have to be concerted and integrated. They can
only be different aspects of the same national purpose” (Hughes 1974: 349).
A functional approach, on the other hand, seems close to the organizational formulation
Richard Neustadt urged long ago: “the most effective kind of staff organization is an
organization built around what I would call an action-forcing process, by which I mean a steady
stream of actionable issues, concrete issues, that have to be attended to, issues where something
has to be done, a decision has to be reached” (1965: 283). Notably, as Neustadt later elaborated,
these streams are “differentiated by particular sorts of actions, not by program areas” (1990:
221).
This advice nestles comfortably within another aspect of organizational design. Jurisdictions
need not be unique, and managers are often urged to create alternate, and competing, sources
of information. Such “parallel processing” has the benefit of providing a check on each flow of
information, and of allowing a clearer assessment of different staffers’ preferences and biases
(Simon 1976). Nixon domestic adviser John Ehrlichman (1982: 95), for example, tells of a
situation when Nixon asked him to become involved in defense matters so as to give the
president an "outsider's view" on the situation. John Kennedy’s inclusion of domestic advisers
like Robert Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorensen in deliberations over the Cuban
Missile Crisis reflected his discomfort with the advice received from the CIA and Defense
Department leading up to the Bay of Pigs.
When practiced systematically, this strategy has costs, in time, timeliness, and managerial
effort. Further, as Herbert Simon points out, the higher up the hierarchy it is practiced, the less
compatible is parallel processing with coordination of the various streams. Still, some
presidents have done this: beyond the examples above, notions of parallel processing run
through the literature describing Franklin Roosevelt’s “competitive ad-hocracy” (Dickinson
1997: 206-7; George 1980: 150) and, as discussed further below, Reagan’s first-term “troika”
(Buchanan 1991). Roosevelt did the coordinating himself; Reagan delegated it. In both cases,
though, broader policy review invited competition and review by generalists more attuned to
the widest range of presidential goals and needs. That is, it created a functionally-driven staff
structure.
C. Hypotheses on Hierarchies and Information
The discussion above suggests several potential, if admittedly preliminary, hypotheses. First, if
different structures (i.e., different combinations of jurisdictions, sequences, and preferences)
bring different types of information to the attention of the president, functionally-based structures
will give the president more useful information than policy-specific structures.
We will also expect that multiple sources of competing information (parallel processing) will give the
president better information, though at some cost.
-12-
Again, by “better” or more useful information, I mean advice with the characteristics traced
above: that it is tied to real world policy and political realities; that it is comprehensive; that it is
diverse.
Finally, drawing on the principal-agent literature, we should expect presidents will get better
information about policy matters when they have (a) effective monitoring mechanisms; or (b) known
elements of bias (preferably equivalent to the president's own, through the appointments process) along
the information channels.9
Tracing these hypotheses e discussion above gives us leverage on a key question: why has the
expansion of the presidential branch not necessarily resulted in enhanced presidential
effectiveness? Quite simply, the growth has been along counterproductive lines.
There is not enough space here – nor enough data available at this point – to test these
hypotheses fully. However, archival evidence from three presidencies (Truman, Nixon, and
Reagan) provides a view of three important “change points,” where presidential staff
organizations changed. What impact did that shift have? In various ways these cases
illuminate aspects of the key question: what are the effects of a given institution on the type,
amount, timing, and quality of information the president receives?
IV. Exploring the Evidence: Three Brief Cases
In the following sections, the hypotheses above will be explored, stressing the distinction
between “product line” and “policy line” organizations of the EOP. While this cannot yet be
systematic, a number of useful preliminary conclusions can be drawn.
A. The 1952 Reorganization of the Budget Bureau
In 1952, the Bureau of the Budget (BoB) – the predecessor agency of today’s Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) – was reorganized to center its advice flow around specific
policy areas, instead of broader functions. The types of issues that flowed to the top of the
agency, and thus to the president, were changed by the restructuring, and not in a way that met
the president’s needs. As a result, the reorganization did not take root.
Interestingly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the president’s BoB staff were thinking of that
organization in exactly Chandler's "functional"/"product-line" terms. The BoB, since its shift to
the Executive Office of the President (EOP) in 1939, had quickly become indispensable to the
Note the underlying assumption (which is just that), that divergence in institutional structures is driven by informational needs.
Other literatures suggest other baseline assumptions. Institutions might tend to converge in structure, as sociologists’ work on
isomorphism predicts (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Or, some parts of the information search could be symbolic -- touching base,
building consensus (George 1980, even Porter 1980). Or, and this is clearly sometimes true, institutions could be foisted on the
president by other actors, especially Congress.
9
-13-
president, serving as his chief staff resource for both creation of the executive budget and
clearance of the wider executive branch’s desired policy initiatives. Given the small size of the
White House, the BoB served effectively as an extension of the president’s personal staff, at the
edges indistinguishable from it (see Dickinson and Rudalevige 2004-05).
However, many members of the Bureau staff were not entirely satisfied with the organization’s
performance, and as seasoned public administrators they thought naturally in structural terms.
In September 1947 deputy director Elmer Staats presented director James Webb with a long
summary memorandum laying out the pros and cons of reorganization.10 In it, Staats noted
that “the historical development of the Bureau has been along lines of functions, skills, or
processes.” By 1947, as Figure 2 shows, the main functions were the annual compilation of the
executive budget (via the Division of Estimates), advice to agencies on effective management
(Division of Administrative Management), the clearance of executive legislation and testimony
(Legislative Reference Division ), and macroeconomic forecasting (Fiscal Division). Each of
these cut across subject-matter areas and each organized its work around some aspect of the
annual budget and legislative cycles.
[Figure 2 here]
The main problem, Staats argued, was that “the organization of the Bureau along highly
functional lines, with no part of the Bureau having primary responsibility for interdivisional
coordination short of the Director’s office, makes...management exceedingly difficult....
[A]lmost any major problem cuts across the responsibilities and functions of the various
divisions.” Budgetary questions were often divorced from legislative and management
questions, all separate from the broader fiscal picture: “every individual must coordinate
himself with an indefinite and sometimes unknown number of individuals in other divisions
concerned with a similar or related problem.” This might be successful, but such success was
ad hoc.
Staats suggested coordination “could be realized if the Bureau were organized primarily along
vertical lines with key individuals designated as points of coordination and liaison with certain
agencies.” That is, the Agriculture Department would report to a division devoted to
agriculture which contained the budgetary, management, and fiscal staff. While Staats stopped
short of recommending a wholesale shift, he thought this broader view worthwhile. He argued
the Fiscal Division was superfluous, especially given the new Council of Economic Advisers,
and suggested a Division of Program Management incorporating Administrative Management
and some Estimates staff to complement a new Estimates framework (renamed the Budgetary
Standards Division.) Alternatively, program coordination personnel could be placed in the
Director’s office -- a solution that would have resembled the program associate directors (PADs)
later added by the Nixon administration.11
Elmer B. Staats to the Director, "Organization and Management of the Bureau of the Budget," memo of 25 September 1947,
Frederick J. Lawton papers, Box 3, folder [BoB - Organization], Harry S. Truman Library.
11
Staats, “Organization and Management,” pp. 3-4, 18
10
-14-
Nothing happened with these suggestions immediately (see Berman 1979: 45-7). However, they
regained momentum in 1951 after the Hoover Commission put pressure on the Bureau to
reorganize and longtime BoB staffer Frederick Lawton, sympathetic to this, became budget
director. Charles Stauffacher, an architect of the reorganization, summed up his thinking in a
memo to Lawton in January 1952. The idea was to shift the burden of coordinating “interrelation of budgetary, management, fiscal, and legislative problems within areas of major
concern” from lower-level staff to the Bureau top management by creating relatively pure
policy-line divisions centered around government program areas (national security, “resources
and works,” and the like). The separate fiscal, management, and estimates divisions would be
consolidated. Thus, most of the staff would specialize on particular policy areas (“this, in my
opinion, is a real advantage”). The idea, quite explicitly, was to “bring the more important
issues up for action by the Director.”12
The reorganization was announced in mid-March, 1952 (see Figure 3).13 In the end five
“operating divisions” were created: the Military, International, Resources and Civil Works,
Labor and Welfare, and General Government Divisions. Each was assigned a group of
substantively-related executive departments and agencies; “the Divisions represent a grouping
of Bureau staff concerned with a general field or program area of the Government.” They
brought together “budget examiners, fiscal analysts, and administrative analysts [to] work
together within each” area. As Stauffacher wrote in the subsequent orientation manual for
Bureau staff, the Bureau had needed “a better grouping of functions and a stronger supervisory
structure to secure continuing consideration within the Bureau of the interrelation of budgetary,
fiscal, management, and legislative problems with respect to major areas of the Government's
program.” He also hoped the new structure would aid in “strengthening…the Bureau's
working relationship with the agencies of the Executive Branch.”
[Figure 3 here]
Note that the claim that “more important” issues would rise through the hierarchy was
subjective: the only thing certain was that different issues would so rise. In the original
organization, the Director was given options arising from functional divergences: fiscal aspects
vs. agency-oriented budget complaints vs. managerial advice. In the reorganization, those
claims would be resolved at the division level and the arguments reaching the Director would
be competing claims of different policy realms for resources (monetary and managerial). As
Stauffacher noted, “I happen to believe that this type of a setup would produce more of a
product, though it may lose certain advantages of dual or triple perspective along the way.”
Charles B. Stauffacher to Director and Assistant Director, “Outline of Budget Bureau Reorganization Proposal,” memo of 17
January 1952. Lawton papers, Box 4, [BoB Reorganization – 4/1/52 Working Papers], HSTL; see also the attached “Notes on
Organization of Budget Bureau,” dated 22 January 1952.
13
See Bureau of the Budget Office Memorandum 358, dated 14 March 1952; Office Memoranda 361 and 362, dated March 31
and April 8, "for Bureau staff only," provide details of the new structure. All can be found in the Lawton papers, Box 3, HSTL.
The quotes in this paragraph are drawn from these two memoranda. Confusingly, in Memorandum 358 the new organization was
proclaimed to be "on functional lines" since by function the authors meant a function of government (e.g., the military). But in
the sense that term has been used in this paper, this was clearly a "product-line" reorganization -- functions (budgeting, legislative
planning, etc.) were subsumed under products or policies (since the product of the government is policy).
12
-15-
For Lawton, the reorganization made sense, since the “product” he wanted was strong control
over budgetary decision making. Harold Seidman, then a Bureau staffer, later commented in an
oral history that “Lawton viewed the mission of the Budget Bureau from the perspective of a
budget examiner. He tried to organize the Bureau into five little Budget Bureaus around the
budget process.”14
The reorganization, then, created a “policy-line” orientation for the Budget Bureau, exactly in
line with what Chandler praised in DuPont and the other companies he studied. Information
flowing into the Bureau, and thus to its director and thence the President, came through the
budget-oriented divisions. A CEA staffer told his boss that “Under this arrangement, there will
be a tendency to restrict economic analysis to problems which are closely and directly tied to
the estimates work, with the result that the broader type,… which is concerned with the
interrelationship of program areas and with the effects on the economy, may suffer.” Bureau
staffers from the now-defunct Fiscal Division argued the same thing, urging unsuccessfully that
their analysts be maintained in a separate branch within each division rather than being
integrated horizontally into programmatic units.15
On paper, the central offices were to take the wider view. In practice, they were insufficient to
the task. Staats had worried back in 1947 that “one of the primary sources of value of the
Bureau to the President is that it can give him a horizontal or government-wide approach to
problems raised by a particular agency” and thus that a vertical -- or policy-line structure -would risk “the ever-present tendency to lose overall perspective and become advocates of any
agency position….” Seidman argued in his oral history that this “was one of the things that
greatly impaired the Bureau’s role... Of course, [Lawton’s] reorganization didn’t stick….It was a
very misguided reorganization.”16
Seidman’s negative view represents the scholarly consensus as well: the reorganization is
generally judged to have provided the president with less useful advice. As Larry Berman
summed up (1979: 47; see also Tomkin 1998: 39): “the reorganization destroyed or seriously
impaired those BoB units with across-the-board outlook and organized them around the budget
divisions, which were agency oriented. Problems immediately manifested themselves in the
management area and before long the Budget Bureau became open game for presidential
reform groups” beginning, in fact, as early as the new Eisenhower administration. The
reorganization was particularly damaging since Eisenhower wanted to stress management
issues in government. He wound up creating a separate task force for the purpose.
14
Harold Seidman oral history, HSTL, pp. 108f.
J. Weldon Jones to Mr. Staats, "Program Analysis in the New Operating Divisions," memo of 27 March 1952. Lawton papers,
Box 4, [BoB Reorganization – 4/1/52 Working Papers], HSTL. This memo covers two others from Fiscal staff to Jones, who sent
them along to Staats.
16
Interestingly, some 40 years later a new reorganization of the OMB returned to the same ground under Director Alive Rivlin by
creating Resource Management Offices (RMOs) that combined budgetary and management staff. An evaluation of this
reorganization is underway for inclusion in future versions of this paper; thanks to Jeffrey Weinberg for bringing this to my
attention.
15
-16-
B. Nixon and the Supersecretaries
A 1972 case offers another example of how shifting presidential advisory structures might
impact the kind of information presidents get. In this case, the approach was never fully
realized because of Watergate (Bonafede and Iglehart 1973). However, it highlights the role of
manipulating jurisdictions and bureaucratic sequence.
By 1972, the size of the executive branch and the President’s personal staff had grown greatly.
There were now eleven Cabinet departments, and new agencies like the Environmental
Protection Agency and Office of Economic Opportunity manifested the regulatory and social
service explosion of the 1960s. Coordination of these multiple sources of advice and policy was
becoming a more complex task than ever.
It was one with which Richard Nixon was much concerned. “The key to a successful
presidency is in the decision-making process,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs (1990: 337). “I felt
that the matters brought before a President for decisions should be only those that cannot or
should not be made at a lower level on the White House staff, or by the Cabinet member
responsible.” In part, this reflected the huge number of decisions pressing in, but also Nixon’s
dislike of face-to-face interaction (see, e.g., Reeves 2001). From the start, he had walled off his
foreign policy staff in an effort to shift important decisions in that realm from Foggy Bottom to
the White House. His assistant for national security, Henry Kissinger, noted (and abetted) “an
almost total separation between the domestic and foreign policy sides” of the Nixon staff, to the
point that they were “prisoners in adjacent cells” (1982: 77).
On the domestic side, Nixon had already tried at least two modes of policy advising. Originally
the process was rather freewheeling, providing wide access to the president for strong
ideological counterweights. White House advisers Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Arthur Burns
were given overlapping jurisdictions, and they battled fiercely over policy formulation (notably
the Family Assistance Plan, which would have fundamentally changed the welfare system).
But while this structure gave him a wide array of policy options, Nixon disliked the level of
conflict that played out in front of him. In response the centralized Domestic Council was
created in 1970, filtering options through staffer John Ehrlichman and chief of staff H.R.
Haldeman (Harper 1996; Kessel 1975; R. Moe 1976).
The President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization (PACEO, known as the Ash
Council after its chairman, Roy Ash), which had recommended the creation of the Domestic
Council,17 also proposed a large-scale departmental reorganization combining Cabinet
departments with related substantive duties into “super-departments.” Single departments
were envisaged for Economic Development, Community Development, Natural Resources, and
Human Resources. A variant of this plan was proposed by Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union,
but Congress was unenthusiastic and most of the resultant bills never escaped committee
(Arnold 1998).
17
As well as an accompanying transformation of the BoB into a new Office of Management and Budget.
-17-
By the end of his first term, Nixon was again frustrated with the general flow of information
reaching him. He noted (1973: 3) that “most of today’s major governmental goals and activities
cross existing departmental lines in a way that makes coherent policy formation and effective
management extremely difficult.” He felt that too much information flowed his way – yet not of
the right sort, material too unimportant to be worthy of presidential notice. Ash put it this way
in an oral history:
[Nixon] didn't really feel...that he should be spending substantial parts of his time with
what he considered second and third order issues that a lot of Department heads wanted
to bring before him, but save his time for the first order issues. But he didn't want lesser
matters to be out of sight, out of mind....he wanted them to be handled consistent with
his own policies and objectives, yet without a lot of time of his. Which meant some sort
of a structural arrangement that gave him that comfort....
After the 1972 election, Nixon spent much of his time at Camp David with Ehrlichman and
Haldeman, searching for second term changes in personnel and structure that would give him
that comfort (Ehrlichman 1982; Reeves 2001: 544ff). They dusted off the Ash “supersecretary”
idea but decided they needed an administrative approach without Congressional approval.
One was suggested by then-OMB head Caspar Weinberger. He suggested that Nixon follow
the model of California Governor Ronald Reagan and place groups of related Cabinet
departments under four or five presidential appointees styled after “Executive Vice Presidents.”
These officers [Weinberger wrote] would not have day-to-day administrative duties, but
rather would coordinate the activities of those departments and agencies placed under
him. They would also serve as the spokesman for those agencies in presenting their ideas
and views to the President, and would convey Presidential policy to the agency heads,
and be responsible to the President for its execution....[E]ach would be free of detailed
administrative duties or of the task of 'running' an agency, but each would have
coordinating duties over a large group of agencies and departments which are now
supposed to report to the President directly.18
The eventual plan followed this basic outline. The focus was the creation of a new White House
reporting structure. This included two components: five Assistants to the President with
crosscutting responsibilities for policy and administration in different subject areas (domestic,
foreign, and economic policy, White House administration, and executive management), and
three “Counsellors” who would channel most of the domestic Cabinet officers’ input to the
White House.19 (See Figure 4.) The White House staff itself would be cut back as Counsellors
took over most of the functions of staffers working for the Domestic Council; this also allowed
Nixon loyalists from the White House staff to be placed in sub-Cabinet positions across the
bureaucracy (e.g., Ehrlichman aide Egil “Bud” Krogh became undersecretary of
Transportation).
18
Caspar Weinberger to President, “Reorganization Along Lines of ‘Corporate Executive Vice-Presidencies,’” memo of 14
November 1972, WHSF: Staff member and Office files: H.R. Haldeman, Alpha Name Files, Box 107, [Caspar Weinberger
1972], NPMP.
19
The respective assistants were to be Ehrlichman, Kissinger, George Shultz (who was also Secretary of the Treasury), Haldeman,
and Ash (now OMB director).
-18-
[Figure 4 here]
This startling proposal, which fundamentally reworked jurisdictions and bureaucratic
sequence, was designed, as Ash put it above, to give the president increased control over
policymaking while (at least on the domestic side) spending less time doing so. Ehrlichman
said in a January 1973 press conference that “the Counsellor will serve as the focal point for
those lines of reporting on a common subject, so that the President will benefit from fewer lines
of reporting coming into him on a given subject.”20
By May 1973, the reorganization was thrown overboard with Haldeman and Ehrlichman (they
resigned April 30) in an attempt to appease Watergate’s circling sharks. Its formulation,
however, does suggest that Nixon considered staff structure as an informational variable, and
that it mattered as such. He certainly understood that the issues and options reaching his desk
would shift.21 The assistants would be authorized to deal with a wide array of disputes,
including “line” functions within their purview (Ehrlichman 1982: 210; Nixon 1973). In fact, the
Ash Council’s original proposals were changed to increase the super-departments’ capacity for
cross-specialty management (Arnold 1998: 297).
Would this help the president? Nixon’s overall organization already separated domestic and
foreign affairs. The “counsellor” system promised to push the options offered by various
streams of domestic policy down to the staff level. Parallel processing would diminish or
disappear. There was, further, no means of coordinating different policy streams – the
assistants would report separately to the president. Nor did any of them have broad
perspectives that could replicate the president’s own vantage.22 Haldeman’s notes from the
Camp David meetings reveal what he called an “insight”: namely, “P doesn't really want to
work w/just a few. He wants better people that he can work with.”23 It is true that the
supersecretary scheme would have expanded the number of White House aides with direct
input to the president (though sharply limiting the number of advisers who on paper reported
directly to him). Still, in large part, Haldeman’s insight was wishful thinking. The level of
delegation the reorganization contemplated endangered Nixon’s authority. And there was no
mechanism for combining the counsellors’ streams short of the president’s own mind.
Still, in two senses this was not a pure policy-line reorganization. The stress was instead on the
preference side, with more carefully chosen subordinates (who would, further, be dispersed
20
John Ehrlichman, press briefing of 5 January 1973, Office of the White House Press Secretary. WHSF: Staff Member and
Office Files: John W. Dean III: Subject Files, Box 63, [Reorganization 1972/73 (1 of 5)], NPMP. This was not a statutory
reorganization, Ehrlichman stressed, but a way to channel advice: “simply a change in the President’s relationship to the
Departments and agencies at his end of the Executive Branch.”
21
“Discussion Outline: November 14, 1972, 10:00 a.m., Meeting with the President.” WHSF: Staff Member and Office Files:
H.R. Haldeman, Box 14, [Camp David File (Nov.-Dec. 1972)], NPMP.
22
Indeed, Nixon complained in the Camp David meetings about the “problem of people in White House without portfolio.”
Ehrlichman notes of 12/13/72 meeting with President, NPMP.
23
“11/14 1530 Aspen (Ash, Malek, E),” Haldeman Notes Oct-Nov-Dec 1972, Box 46, [Oct. 1, 1972 - Nov. 17, 1972, Part I],
NPMP.
-19-
into the operations end of the bureaucracy). The five assistants to the president themselves
would receive a wide array of competing input; Ehrlichman, defending the system (he, of
course, would be empowered by it), stressed the vantage the structure gave White House staff:
“in the trade-off discussions and say a question on the subject of, for instance, economic
discrimination, how can we best spend our money, someone who has an overview like the
Counsellor for Human Resources is going to be in an ideal position to give good advice to the
President.”24 As Joan Hoff put it (1994: 74), the “Nixonian system of corporate governance,”
derived from the Ash Council’s “horizontal, functional design” for government, was to elevate
“generalists (policy politicians) to oversee the work of civil service specialists.” Nixon
commented at Camp David that “we’ll get good hacks in [the] departments under this system....
Most people won’t get their charge out of this system, but it will work better.”25 “Hacks” in this
context is almost a compliment: it did not refer to party careerists but Nixon loyalists with
administrative skills. Nixon would make fewer decisions, but the bulk of the others would be
made by better people, i.e., competent generalists.
A second notable aspect is the planned cuts in the White House staff. One upshot might have
been an increased stress on “institutional staff” as the Brownlow Commission had
recommended long before (Dickinson 1997). Ehrlichman argued that “this [structure] is asking
that the work previously done in the White House be done at the Cabinet level.” And at Camp
David, the President had stressed: “no staff for counsellors.”26 However, it is not clear how
thoroughly a decentralized system would have been implemented.
C. Trimming the Troika: Ronald Reagan, 1981-89
Ronald Reagan’s administration provides a dramatic “change point” for consideration in the
shift, at the start of the second term, from a semi-competitive “troika” arrangement to a single
chief-of-staff at the head of a more formal structure. The former, by promoting generalist
review of specialist information, proved more successful than the latter.
As Reagan took office in 1981, he surprised many by naming James A. Baker III, a Bush (and
Ford) campaign strategist, as his new chief of staff. Longtime Reagan confidant Michael Deaver
became deputy chief of staff, and California aide Edwin Meese III became counselor to the
president. Whatever the titles, the three held equal rank and were known as the “troika”. On
paper, they divvied up substantive and procedural responsibilities, with Baker taking politics
(and paper-flow), Meese policy, and Deaver public relations. But in fact they worked closely
together (Kirschten 1982; Smith 1988: 295-7; Witherspoon 1991: 135-7). Closely, but hardly
seamlessly: troika members and their aides and partisans jostled for influence, with their battles
often spilling over into the press.
24
He added: “The raison d’être of a Counsellor or White House assistant is to be an honest broker and he wouldn’t last here very
long if he weren’t.” Ehrlichman press briefing, pp. 12, 16
25
Ehrlichman notes of 11/14/72 meeting with President, NPMP.
26
Ehrlichman press briefing, p. 11; Ehrlichman notes of 11/21/72 meeting with President, NPMP.
-20-
Under Meese – though effectively under the thumb of the troika as a whole – a series of seven
Cabinet Councils were created, quite similar in form and intent to “policy councils” Ash had
once suggested unsuccessfully to Nixon.27 The Councils brought Cabinet members frequently
to the White House, cementing their loyalty to a presidential perspective while warding off
bilateral lobbying (Campbell 1986: Ch. 3).
At the end of 1984, Donald T. Regan, then Secretary of the Treasury, engineered a job switch
with Baker (Smith 1988: 322; Regan 1988: 220-31). Meese went to the Justice Department as
Attorney General; Deaver returned to the private sector. Regan, then, would serve as a single
chief of staff in place of the three-way troika.
Newly released archival records from the Ronald Reagan Library provide an interesting insight
into Regan’s thoughts as he took over. He found from a variety of solicited memos on
organization and staffing that the factionalism between the Baker, Meese, and Deaver camps
was real and bitter. Roger Porter, then at the Office of Policy Development, wrote a series of
eight memos to Regan, giving him a brief history of White House staff organization in the
postwar era and making suggestions to fight the “fragmentation” he saw in policy development
and coordination. He suggested the consolidation of the Cabinet Councils (to just two) and the
creation of Policy Management and Policy Implementation Groups.28 Regan aide Alfred
Kingon, detailed to survey the lay of the first term land, reported: “I am convinced after my
talks that this White House has been riddled with overlapping that caused the internecine
warfare that became part of the public domain of this administration. You can stop it...”29
Regan tried. He instituted a far more hierarchical system, one where all communications flows
(save one, see below) were through his office. Regan felt that the troika left an organizational
vacuum, with too many people performing duplicative tasks. Thus he downsized the Cabinet
Councils, limited direct access to the President, and sought to utilize a private-sector inspired
“management-by-objective.”
Despite these efforts there is general consensus that the first term troika served Reagan better
than did Regan. While the earlier system was messy (Baker aide Richard Darman, later to be
Bush OMB director, told Kingon “there is no ‘screwier’ organization set up in all White House
history”), the competition between White House factions ensured that a wide array of
information got to president (Buchanan 1991). The consolidation of Cabinet Councils further
shrunk lines of access. A private memo from David Gergen to Regan put it this way: “in the
incessant jockeying for power, creative juices often ran strong and they added immensely to the
Ash disliked the counsellor idea: he wanted to bring all Cabinet officers to the White House, rather than
elevating some; instead of “principal Secretaries,” each “Policy Council” should be made up of relevant
Cabinet secretaries and have an executive director from the EOP. Larry Higby to H.R. Haldeman, “Ash Revised
Feeling on Reorganization,” memo of 21 November 1972. WHSF: Staff Member and Office Files: H.R. Haldeman, Box 14,
[Camp David File (Nov.-Dec. 1972)], NPMP. See also Ash oral history, especially pp. 48ff.
28
The Porter memos (the quote is from memo I, dated 19 January 1985) are in the Donald T. Regan Files, Box 2, [White House
Organization: Memos Porter to Regan, CFOA 407], Ronald Reagan Library [RRL], p. 13.
29
Kingon to Regan, “Policy Update/Strategic Planning,” memo of 25 January 1985, Regan Files, [White House Transition:
Solicited Advice on Organization and Personnel, 2 of 3], RRL, p. 13.
27
-21-
quality of his [Reagan’s] stewardship.”30
Take, for example, national security advising. The National Security Council serves as an
excellent example of a “policy-line” agency -- and over time its staff has accrued more and more
tangible functions, from budget preparation to press relations to speechwriting. This means
those tasks are subordinated to one substantive view. However, early on the Reagan
administration made an effort to bring the NSC staff into the purview of the president’s top
generalist advisers. Richard Allen, the first of Reagan’s six assistants for national security
affairs, did not report directly to the president, but through Meese. Allen did brief Reagan, but
not alone; Meese was always present. Since Meese was there, Baker wanted to be there -- and
so Deaver would inevitably come as well (Pfaltzgraff and Davis 1990: 74ff). The system was
unwieldy, but it worked; as above, the troika “institutionalized distrust” in a politically astute
manner, giving Reagan usefully competing channels of parallel processing and reflecting
security affairs through a distinctly generalist and pragmatic lens.
A year later, longtime Reagan friend William Clark replaced Allen and regained direct access to
the president. “There is no question that the system changed dramatically when Clark came
in,” noted Deaver (Kessel 1984: 252). The troika became a foursome in some respects; and the
NSC staff began to grow again. A Crisis Management Center, with ten million dollars worth of
computer and communications equipment, was installed. Now the NSC had access to the raw
data contained in the State Department and Pentagon computers, and began to use it, along
with electronic mail systems that allowed “paper” to flow without clearance or regard for a
chain of command (see Hinckley 1986; Mayer and McManus 1988). While Clark was not a
security specialist, his immediate successors -- notably Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter -were. And once advisers subsequent to Clark had lost the personal advantage he held, they
“attempt[ed] to gain virtually total control over the flow of national security information to the
president” (Bailey and Halper 1986: 189). Because of Reagan's detachment from (at least) the
more mundane aspects of foreign affairs, controlling that information flow was crucial. New
chief of staff Regan was unable to gain jurisdiction over national security affairs. And without
his knowledge, CIA chief William Casey, McFarlane, and Poindexter, were encouraging NSC
staff to delve into the direction of complicated covert operations involving Central America and
the Middle East, a state of affairs that when disclosed in late 1986 erupted into the Iran-contra
scandal.
It is hard to know what information was being received by the president at what time during
this process (for efforts at recreating the operations that made up Iran-contra, see Draper 1991;
Mayer and McManus 1988; Walsh 1997). However, it seems clear that the “loop” was very
tightly drawn: information about the various phases of the project was produced and evaluated
mainly by NSC specialists. What President Reagan himself knew, and when, is a controversial
topic; however, the president evidently made little effort to check facts or gain access to
competing information. The Tower Commission later noted that there was little critical review
of the project and less interagency coordination, and took Regan to task for failing to control the
Gergen to Regan, “White House Operations,” memo of 25 January 1985 , Regan Files, [White House Transition: Solicited
Advice on Organization and Personnel, 2 of 3], RRL.
30
-22-
decision-making process (Tower et al. 1987). No generalist “reality check” occurred; indeed,
those high officials with broad political experience who had some input -- e.g., Caspar
Weinberger and especially George Shultz -- disapproved of the operation in its early stages and
were subsequently cut off from the advising process. Instead, issues were resolved by
narrowly-focused staffers who had no business resolving them; the institutional structure failed
to push them to the top. Neustadt (1990: 279) deems Iran-contra a “perfect illustration” of a
president failing to protect his future power stakes. Staff structure had something, though
hardly everything, to do with that failure, the flip side of Reagan’s first term troika success.
V. Conclusions and Future Directions
As the case studies make clear, all staff serve as a screen, and how those screens are constructed
will affect presidents’ information and thus their decision making. This in itself, of course, is not
a new observation. One of the few communications-oriented studies of the White House
concludes that “the organizational structure imposed on the White House in each term directly
affected information flow into the Oval Office as well as the extent to which other sources of
information were used in the decision-making process” (Witherspoon 1991: 178).
What is new here is the attempt to build hypotheses that systematize the construction – and
evaluation – of those structures. I have suggested that presidents will find themselves better
served by advising systems that cut across different policy areas, centered on broader White
House functions. These hypotheses have not been fully tested; but the brief accounts of
presidential staff “change points” provided here indicate that staff choices have clear
implications for information flow, and show that presidents and EOP staff thought about these
issues in that manner. Where presidents have cut themselves off from multiple points of view,
they have gotten information well-attuned to one vantage but more poorly integrated with the
various tasks associated with the modern presidency.
As this project develops, I hope to fill in the details of these broad portraits. Ideally, the same
decision-topic can be traced through different advising policy structures. While precise
measurement is impossible, there is more room for systematic study than is usually exploited.
“We can find out...what efforts were made to collect the relevant information, through what
channels it was brought to the point of decision, and what chance the decision-makers had to
consider it at all” (Deutsch 1963: 161). Given a random set of presidential decisions, we can
work backwards from the president (i.e., the decision area) to evaluate what sequence each
decision went through -- which advisors, having which jurisdictions and (tougher) what
preferences. The primary independent variable, then, is the structure of the staff institution set
up by the president for a given decision or class of decisions. Is it organized around an actionforcing process cutting across policy lines, or is it organized through specific policy areas? With
what impact on the president’s decision? Collecting, not to mention coding, this kind of data
will be difficult. Still, even within case studies of this sort, we can achieve some methodological
discipline, the same variables collected across carefully selected units (King, Keohane, and
Verba 1994; George and McKeown 1985; McKeown 2001).
-23-
For the questions raised here are at the heart of the modern, institutional presidency. For
instance: Why have staffs increased in numbers and specialized knowledge often failed to
advance presidential prospects? Is there a best way to set up staff, or is “personal contingency”
the best we can hope for? Or, from the other side of the debate, do the constraints of
institutional expectation and process prevent presidential initiative in this area? Given the
bounds within which presidents operate, the ability to lead might well depend on the
president’s skill in protecting his prerogatives of choice. In 1985, press secretary Marlin
Fitzwater sent incoming staff chief Regan a prescient memo. “You must show you are
managing for the President, not managing the President,” Fitzwater wrote. “This will be
difficult because he may be willing to let you manage him.” Presidents must not allow this to
happen. Thus, in the end, the words of Dwight Eisenhower still ring true: “leadership is as vital
in conference as it is in battle” (Burke and Greenstein 1989: 265).
From the president’s perspective, problems are not either/or: not foreign or domestic,
substantive or political. Nor do they exist in isolation: each must be dealt with of a piece with a
large number of other problems. Maximizing his own influence on this entire set of problems
requires tying together the pieces of information and advice garnered from different sources.
Clearly, a president has to do this by himself. But the way he organizes his staff, and structures
the flow of information within his administration, makes it easier or harder. If the president
must remain ignorant about a large number of things, he must nevertheless “attempt to
minimize the costs of his ignorance” (Thomas 1970: 563) – for his sake, and ours. That way
leadership lies.
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Figure 1. Functional vs. Product-Line Structures: Impact on Outcomes
Decision Rule is assumed to be Management-by-Exception
Preference Orderings:
Production Line 1
Production Line 2
Sales (Product 1)
Sales (Product 2)
Manager A
Manager B
CEO
x>y
y>x
x>y
y>x
x>y
x>y
y>x
A. Final choice: option “x”
CEO
x
Manager A
Production Dept.
x
Production Line 1
Manager B
(Sales Dept.)
Production Line 2
x
y
B. Final choice: option “y”
x
Sales (Product 1)
Sales (Product 2)
x
y
CEO
y
x
Manager A
Product 1 Dept.
Production Line 1
Manager B
Product 2 Dept.
Sales (Product 1)
x
Source: adapted from Hammond (1994)
x
Production Line 2
y
y
Sales (Product 2)
y
Figure 2. Bureau of the Budget, 1948 (partial)
Director
Division of Statistical Standards
Division of Estimates
Agriculture
Branch
International
Activities
Branch
Interior/
Federal Works
Branch
National
Security
Branch
Civil Works
Branch
Justice/
Post Office
Branch
Labor and
Welfare
Branch
Treasury/
Civil Service
Branch
Hospital
Branch
Commerce/
Maritime
Branch
Division of
Administrative Management
Management
Improvement
Branch
Government
Organization
Branch
Division of
Legislative Reference
Legislative
Analysis and
Clearance
Legislative
Reports and
Coordination
Congressional
Liaison
Division of
Fiscal Analysis
Nat'l Defense/
International
Industry/Housing/
Financial
Social Welfare/
Education/
Veterans
Natural Resources/
PublicWorks
Figure 3. Bureau of the Budget, 1952
Figure 4. The Nixon Counsellor System, January - May 1973
H.R. Haldeman
Assistant to the President
for White House Administration
John Ehrlichman
Assistant to the President
for Domestic Affairs
James Lynn
Secretary, HUD, and
Counselor for Community Development
HUD
Transportation
OEO
Caspar Weinberger
Secretary, HEW, and
Counselor for Human Resources
HEW
Labor
Earl Butz
Secretary, Agriculture
Counselor for Natural Resources
Agriculture
Interior
EPA
Army Corps
of Engineers
Henry Kissinger
Assistant to the President
for Foreign Affairs
Richard Nixon
President
NSC staff
State
Defense
George Shultz
Assistant to the President
for Economic Affairs
Treasury
CEA
Commerce
Roy Ash
Assistant to the President
for Executive Management
OMB
Richard Kleindienst
Attorney General
GSA
Civil Service
USTR
Federal Reserve