White House Evolution and Institutionalization: The Office of Chief of Staff since Reagan

The White House chief of staff, a job that Sherman Adams pioneered under Dwight Eisenhower, became a permanent fixture of the institutional presidency when Jimmy Carter formalized Hamilton Jordan's position in 1978. Since its emergence in 1953, the position has undergone steady evolution, and expectations about its performance mostly have stabilized. At the same time, the job continues to adapt to the distinctive needs of presidents and presidencies and to the dynamics of U.S. governance. Based on a larger project that seeks to describe and analyze the office of the White House chief of staff over the course of the modern U.S. presidency (Cohen, Hult, and Walcott forthcoming), we here explore how and why the unit has evolved and trace its importance to the conduct of the contemporary presidency. At the same time, we focus on the individuals who have performed this job. Although the office clearly is the hub of the institutional presidency and presidents shape it in specific ways, the people who become chief of staff bring their own talents, interests, and limitations to the position. Chiefs have differed considerably in temperament, their relationships with the president, and the circumstances under which they served. Part of our task has been to tease out whether, how, and why it matters who happens to be chief of staff. In doing so, we take what Jacobs and King (2010, 793) call a "structured agency approach," situating chiefs of staff within "existing ... structures of organizational combat, institutions, and policy." We begin by briefly describing the evidentiary bases for the analysis, followed by the evolution of the position and the office. Then we examine the roles and activities of chiefs of staff, highlighting those who have served presidencies from Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama. Although space constraints necessitate that we deal in conclusions and illustrations, they flow from extensive research (by the authors and others) and numerous data sources. (1) Many reflect the observations of past chiefs of staff and other White House aides (in interviews with the authors, with scholars at the Miller Center, and from the White House Transition Project). Additional information comes from presidential papers, government documents, memoirs, and media reports. Evolution of the Position and Office of Chief of Staff The advent of White House staffing with multiple professionals roughly coincides with most scholars' understanding of the advent of the modern presidency. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century presidents got along with only one paid professional staffer until Herbert Hoover introduced a four-man top staff in 1929 (Walcott and Hult 1995). (2) Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) had a similar staff until empowered by Congress to add several "administrative assistants" in the late 1930s. Presidents could manage such small staffs (including ushers, gardeners, and messengers, never numbering more than 50) informally, a task at which FDR, in particular, excelled. (3) The White House Office did not increase notably in size until World War II, when it served as a fulcrum for the hastily created units charged with managing the war and the economy during that period. After the war ended, the remnants of these, located in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconstruction, were inloaded into the White House, under the direction of Truman presidential aide John Steelman. Although Steelman's tasks mostly involved administration, he was not fully a chief of staff: he never had authority over the policy staff, headed first by Clark Clifford, then by Charles Murphy. Although the White House had grown significantly, the president still directed its operations. Position of Chief of Staff: From Partisan Learning to Stable Expectations Dwight Eisenhower, with his military background and related emphasis on organization and staffing, initiated the changes in executive management that ultimately laid the foundations for the contemporary White House staff. …