The Presidency and the Political Environment

An effective White House staff, Howard Baker tells us, is an extension of the president. Drawing on their own experience, other White House veterans explain why. Richard Cheney sees a good White House staff as absolutely essential to a president's success. "A President can do a lot based on his own personal skills, but there's a limit. His reach, his ability to guide and direct the government, to interact with the cabinet, to deal effectively with the Congress, to manage his relationship with the press ... are all key ingredients to his success," and the presidential staff gives him these capacities.(1) David Gergen (who served in communication posts in four administrations) points out that the presidential staff has become "his intelligence-gathering operation, his media management team, his congressional team, and the formulation of his policy."(2) Because of these staff contributions, W. Bowman (Bo) Cutter (who held economic positions in the Carter and Clinton White Houses) adds that the staff maximizes the most valuable commodity in government, the president's time. Who are the critical players in carrying out these responsibilities? Interestingly, there is a bipartisan consensus on this point. With small variations, Democrats Leon Panetta and Harrison Wellford (who worked on reorganization and administration in the Carter Office of Management and Budget [OMB]) and Republicans Roger Porter (who held economic/ domestic posts in three administrations) and Jerry Jones (staff secretary in the Nixon and Ford White Houses) list the same positions: chief of staff, congressional relations chief, press secretary, national security assistant, economic adviser (usually including the OMB director and sometimes another source of economic guidance), chief domestic aide, and counsel. These persons give vital advice to the president and direct important staffs of their own. Whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican, he or she needs skilled professionals in these positions. Returning to Howard Baker's fundamental point, how does the White House staff allow the president to extend his own governance throughout a complex political environment? Since the staff serves as intermediary between the president and all the other institutions that make up the political environment, it must be anchored at both ends. That is, presidential aides must adapt to the president's way of doing business and also must adapt to the work styles of legislators, journalists, diplomats, economists, and the rest who inhabit the political jungle surrounding the White House. Only when the staff is secure in their relations with the president and all the presidential clienteles can they bring essential stability to the president's relations with his political environment. The Need to Adapt to Presidents Presidents, of course, differ from one another. Clinton was different from Bush, who was different from Reagan, who was different from Carter, and so on-all the way back to Washington himself. Yet Roger Porter calls our attention to an important characteristic they have in common. Presidents come to office as mature individuals. "They're not in the formative stage of their life; they're not figuring out how they're going to do things.... Given [that and] all of the pressures that are attendant with that job, the notion that they are going to adapt is rarely the case."(3) The result, in the words of James Cicconi (a deputy of the chief of staff in the Reagan and Bush administrations), is that you usually "have to adapt the system in the White House to the President's work style rather than expect [presidents] to adapt their work style to the system."(4) Hence, White House staffers must discover how each president likes to work, how he likes to make decisions, the degree of detail with which he is comfortable, what types of things he wants to see himself, and what types of things he is willing to let others handle for him. …