The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush Read Online Free PDF Page B

delegate most issues that are not clearly presidential to department and agency heads. Presidents should lean on their cabinet secretaries; direct presidential involvement should be very selective.
Similarly with respect to political personnel: the president should play a positive role in setting the tone for recruiting political appointees, but he should delegate the selection of most subcabinet appointees to department and agency heads. Personal or ideological loyalties to the president do not in themselves guarantee the effective implementation of presidential priorities because, as noted, there are so many other actors and intervening factors (Pfiffner 1991, 4).
Overzealous subordinates in the agencies can work against the president's best interests, as did Elizabeth Tamposi and John Berry when they conducted an inappropriate, if not illegal, search of the passport files of Candidate Clinton and his mother during the presidential campaign of 1992. Though they vowed they were acting independently of White House control, their claims were met with nearly universal skepticism that reflected badly on their boss, President and Candidate George Bush.
However much a president may seek to control the administration, countervailing forces mitigate that control: infighting among White House staffers and their attempts at excessive control, as mentioned above, work against the administrative presidency in the long run. And
even loyal ideologues with presidentially informed policy agendas and a modicum of experience and savvy find their ability to influence the bureaucracy contingent on such key factors as: 1. perceptions of how strongly the president is concerned with their efforts; 2. how well-honed their managerial skills are; 3. how relevant their prior policy experience is to the task at hand; 4. how suitable their personalities are to relevant bureaupolitical environments; 5. whether opportunities to accomplish change emerge; and 6. how predisposed they are to alter core agency activities (processes and bureaucratic routines) rather than discrete tasks. (Durant 1991, 463)
Additionally, recruitment of highly qualified political appointees suffers in the administrative strategy, as does PASs' willingness or ability to carry out the president's agenda. The lower into the bureaucracy political

 

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appointees are placed, the less attractive are those jobs to potential PASs with appropriate experience and qualifications. As a result, these positions tend to be filled by "younger, less experienced, less knowledgeable 'ticketpunching' appointees . . . who embrace or become dependent on entrenched bureaucratic cultures, routines, and dominant coalitions" (ibid.).
With respect to the permanent bureaucracy; the career bureaucracy is often seen by new presidents as an obstacle to the achievement of presidential priorities. FDR, for example, had inherited a civil service, twelve years in the employ of Republican presidents, that was termed by one observer as "merely a mass of Republican political appointees frozen into position by act of Congress" (Hess 1988, 23). This problem transcended party lines. In 1954 Eisenhower issued the Willis Directive, setting the stage for further centralization in Nixon's White House and central clearance in Reagan's. It placed
a special assistant in each department and agency to control vacancies in both the higher competitive [career] and political posts by reporting [vacancies] to the Republican National Committee. . . , [which] was to be given time to recommend candidates with satisfactory political clearances. The secretiveness surrounding the plan and the uncertainty of its application gave the impressionprobably a correct onethat this was a thinly veiled raid on the federal service. (Light 1995, 46)
Presidents continue to be vexed by their assumptions about the careerists who served their predecessors. Nevertheless, cooperation with the career service is essential to accomplishing presidential