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Bradley H. Patterson

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To Serve the President

Brookings Institution Press

Chapter One

A president-elect can be expected to ask:

How did the White House staff get to be what it is?

How much of it is fixed in statute and how much of it can a new president reshape?

What are its organizational elements? How much continuity has there been?

What innovations have been made by recent presidents?

How many men and women typically work there?

How much does it cost to operate the whole White House?

In fact, President George W. Bush did ask:

How do you intend to get advice from people you surround yourself-who are you going to surround yourself [with]? And what process will you have in place to ensure that you get the unvarnished opinion of advisers? Because whoever sits in the Oval Office is going to find this is a complex world, with a lot of issues coming into the Oval Office-a lot-and a great expectation in the world that the United States take the lead. And so my question would be, how do you intend to set up your Oval Office so that people will come in and give you their advice?

How Did the White House Staff Get to Be What It Is?

The environment out of which the modern White House staff was born, at the end of Franklin Roosevelt's first term, was, like any other difficult birth: messy and painful. At first, FDR tried to rely on his cabinet departments. "From July 1933 to September 1935," reports presidential scholar Matthew Dickinson,

he experimented with at least five different cabinet-level coordinating councils. But, despite his repeated attempts to make their deliberations more effective, these coordinating councils proved unable to meet his bargaining needs. By the end of 1935 he was genuinely worried that his administrative shortcomings might jeopardize his reelection chances.... Not surprisingly, Roosevelt spent a large portion of his waking hours soothing ruffled feathers and resolving administrative disputes. The maintenance of peace in his official family took up hours and days of Roosevelt's time that could have been used on other matters.... The cumulative impact of FDR's organization strategy ... was administrative disarray.

This disarray reached such proportions that consultant Louis Brownlow, on a trip to Europe, encountered pessimism abroad as to whether democracies could govern effectively when beset with economic and national security calamities. He later recalled, "It was our belief that the Presidency of the United States was the institution ... behind which democrats might rally to repel the enemy. And, to that end, it was not only desirable but absolutely necessary that the President be better equipped for his tremendous task."

Roosevelt had been meeting with several experts in public administration, including Brownlow, Charles Merriam, and Luther Gulick, to discuss government planning at the national level, and he had read a December 1935 memorandum from Merriam recommending a study of how an executive staff "should be organized, what its functions should be, and its relations to the operating agencies." In February 1936, Roosevelt had an hour-long meeting with Merriam and others to discuss how such a study might be undertaken. FDR was satisfied that he had shaped the research agenda of the study to his satisfaction and was confident that he had enough personal influence on the thinking of the three leaders; on March 20, 1936, he appointed Brownlow, Merriam, and Gulick as the President's Committee on Administrative Management. He instructed them not to share their deliberations with any of his three principal White House aides, and then let the committee alone, busying himself with his reelection.

After his electoral victory the president met with the committee (Merriam was absent) on November 14, 1936. When presented with their recommendation to enhance his personal staff by six administrative assistants, of whom one would function as a kind of de facto staff director over the others, FDR balked; staff direction would remain in his own hands. "He refused to delegate staff `coordination' to any single subordinate," Dickinson emphasized, adding "Roosevelt's administrative philosophy, as expressed in the Brownlow Committee Report, is clearly antithetical to subsequent staff development during the last half century."

The following January 10, Roosevelt convened an extraordinary press conference at which he unveiled the Brownlow Committee's report with its proposals for "not more than six" administrative assistants and sent Congress draft legislation to give statutory authorization to this new White House staff. For two years Congress huffed and puffed but took no final action to meet the president's request. (This was the same period when FDR was pushing his failed plan to augment the membership of the Supreme Court.)

On April 3, 1939, however, Congress did enact the Reorganization Act of 1939, which began:

SECTION I. (a) The Congress hereby declares that by reason of continued national deficits beginning in 1931, it is desirable to reduce substantially Government expenditures and that such reductions may be accomplished in some measure by proceeding immediately under the provisions of this Act. The President shall investigate the organization of all agencies of the government and shall determine what changes therein are necessary to accomplish the following purposes:

... (2) to increase the efficiency of the operations of the Government to the fullest extent practicable within the revenues; ... (b) The Congress declares that the public interest demands the carrying out of the purposes specified in subsection (a) and that such purposes may be accomplished in great measure by proceeding immediately under the provisions of this title, and can be accomplished more speedily thereby than by the enactment of specific legislation.

President Roosevelt took up that invitation to "proceed immediately." On April 25, 1939, he submitted Reorganization Plan Number One, which included authorization for an institutional staff unit entitled "Executive Office of the President," but it was silent about any White House office, that is, any personal staff for the president. Congress approved the plan; it became effective on July 1, 1939.

Taking these two congressional enactments together, Roosevelt saw his opportunity. On September 8, 1939, he issued his own Executive Order 8248-in effect the birth certificate for the modern White House. It begins: "By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes, and in order to effectuate the purposes of the Reorganization Act of 1939 ... and of Reorganization Plan No I ... it is hereby ordered as follows: There shall be within the Executive Office of the President the following principal divisions, namely (1) The White House Office...."

Part II, Section 1 of the order went on to specify that this new office was to be composed of "Secretaries to the President," an executive clerk, and administrative assistants to the president. These last were:

To assist the President in such matters as he may direct, and at the specific request of the President, to get information and to condense and summarize it for his use. These Administrative...