Читать книгу Organizing the Presidency - Stephen Hess - Страница 6

2

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

1933–1945

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March 1933, the White House staff consisted of thirty-seven people, nine of professional rank. Those in the three key positions, known as secretaries to the president, were assigned to handle appointments, press, and correspondence. The executive branch also included a career executive clerk in charge of presidential mail and files; the Bureau of the Budget, located in the Treasury Department but otherwise an arm of the presidency, employing thirty-five persons; and ten cabinet departments.1 A number of commissions, although within the executive establishment, were beyond the range of presidential control, except for the power to appoint members for fixed terms.

In all there were 578,231 executive branch employees, of whom 467,161 were in the classified civil service. “A considerable proportion of them,” in the opinion of a Roosevelt adviser, “had been appointed during the preceding twelve years of Republican rule.… What we called the Civil Service was, in the main, merely a mass of Republican political appointees frozen into office by act of Congress.”2

It was a familiar arrangement, and other administrations had found it workable. But the election year just past had seen the Great Depression spread inexorably. The agricultural heartland was devastated by years of drought and mismanagement of the land. Banks were failing at a rate of a hundred a month. More than a quarter-million families had been evicted from their homes. The government Roosevelt inherited had neither the structure nor the personnel to deal with the most serious economic crisis in the nation’s history.

The new president would change that forever, not simply by enlarging the government but by fundamentally redefining its goals and the way it achieved them. He would, in effect, be the first person to be the presiding officer of the modern presidency. But he certainly had no coherent plan. Despite having been governor of the most populous state, he was not much interested in the traditional forms of administration. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” he told Anne O’Hare McCormick in 1932. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”3 He was to stay in office long enough to give special weight to his view. His administrative predilections were to be flexible, to work informally, often outside the normal chain of command, to give competing assignments, to keep shifting the composition of his inner circle, to marshal support through adroit appeals to the public, and to maintain himself at the center of the action. A generation of political scientists would make of this style a virtue by which to measure subsequent presidents.

In staffing the administration Roosevelt generally relied on five (often overlapping) sources of talent:

 The friends and colleagues of his young years, contemporaries in Washington such as Daniel Roper, William Phillips, Breckinridge Long, and William Bullitt when Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson, and more important, a small band of supporters (Louis McHenry Howe, Stephen Early, Marvin McIntyre) who had recognized his political potential, in some cases as early as during his pre-World War I tenure in the New York state legislature.

 Those who had been in his state administration (Frances Perkins, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Harry Hopkins, Samuel Rosenman).

 The 1932 campaigners, particularly those who supported him before the Democratic convention in Chicago: professional politicians (James Farley); financial backers (Joseph Kennedy); and the Brain Trust, mostly Columbia University professors (Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Berle) who had provided position papers and otherwise sought to educate the candidate on policy.

 The old boy networks, people who knew people who knew Roosevelt, the most fertile being united through a connection with Professor Felix Frankfurter and the Harvard Law School.

 The rank and file of the Democratic party, the foot troops of politics whose just rewards would be the more lowly jobs in Washington and around the country.

Roosevelt’s staffing choices were a haphazard blend of chance, friendship, obligation, and pressure, as were those of the presidents who followed him. He was luckier than most, and his network of acquaintances was larger than most. It was not until much later that presidents began to make tentative efforts to systematically assess the qualities needed in appointive office, and even now staffing remains an underdeveloped responsibility of public administration.

When selecting the cabinet, Roosevelt seemed guided, according to Raymond Moley, by “neither a well-defined purpose nor an underlying principle.”4 He picked Frances Perkins as secretary of labor in part because he wanted to appoint the first woman to a cabinet position, although she was only tolerated by the unions. Harold Ickes at the Interior Department was a Bull Mooser and not personally known to the president-elect. The choice of Claude Swanson for secretary of the navy may have been made for no better reason than to create a place in the Senate for Governor Harry Byrd of Virginia, and anyway, as an old navy man Roosevelt would have wanted to make key decisions himself. Henry Wallace, the new secretary of agriculture, while a distinguished agricultural economist, was, like Ickes, a nominal Republican. Daniel Roper added no weight of any sort, but Commerce was no longer to be treated as a first-line department. Homer Cummings at the Justice Department was a last-minute substitution, again like Ickes, reflecting the fact that four senators had declined to enter the cabinet. The practice of appointing the national committee chairman of the president’s party to the position of postmaster general was continued: Farley was also put in charge of routine patronage, and by July 1934 he had located jobs for about 100,000 deserving Democrats, mostly in the new emergency agencies.

The only appointee of national stature was the secretary of state, Senator Cordell Hull of Tennessee, “the one man in public life,” according to Samuel Rosenman, “who could give the President substantial concern by threatening … to resign.”5 Other men of distinction, such as Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, would join the cabinet on the eve of World War II, when Roosevelt wished to give a bipartisan cast to national defense. And still others, of course, would acquire distinction in office. But Rosenman’s comment hinted at an underlying principle: Roosevelt sought cabinet subordinates who would neither overshadow him nor prove politically threatening. His administration was designed to be distinctly Rooseveltian.

A second underlying principle, although it is hazardous to attribute too much theorizing to Roosevelt, who operated largely on instinct, was to balance opposites. William Woodin, the first secretary of the treasury, was a conservative financier, as was Lewis Douglas, the budget director; others such as Hopkins, the federal emergency relief administrator and later secretary of commerce, were clearly spenders. “A little rivalry is stimulating, you know,” the president was to explain to Perkins. “It keeps everybody going to prove he is a better fellow than the next man. It keeps them honest too.”6 In practice, the balancing of opposites sharpened internal policy debates, but the price paid was that frictions often carried over into program implementation.

Appointments to the subcabinet—undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, general counsels—were of superior quality. Dean Acheson, Jerome Frank, Charles Wyzanski, James Landis, and many others were generally in their late thirties and early forties, which was younger than the cabinet members, and they were more ideological. They also were technicians and academicians who, in the opinion of Vice President John Nance Garner, had never worked a precinct. As the supreme mixmaster of his administration, Roosevelt made the secondary selections himself. His cabinet members acquiesced with forbearance or veiled distaste. Observing the blend of disparate ingredients from within the Agriculture Department, Russell Lord reported “national figures using the same washroom, shoulder to shoulder, and pretending not to see each other.”7

The presidential staff, those on the White House payroll, were noted primarily for their dedication to Roosevelt. “Those who were closest to him for the longest time,” thought Rexford Tugwell, “were kept there because they did not probe or try to understand but rather because they gave an unquestioning service.”8 McIntyre, Early, military aide Edwin (Pa) Watson, and Roosevelt’s personal secretaries, Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, provided the president with a comfortable, good-humored core around which the New Deal revolved. That the core did not become a cocoon was due mostly to Roosevelt’s insatiable appetite for information and his immediate staff’s recognition of its own role and limitations. Primus inter pares of this original group was Louis Howe, who, like the other members of the inner circle, was little interested in policy questions other than for their political ramifications. He was more hair shirt than comforter to the president, however. “Howe was the only one who dared to talk to him frankly and fearlessly,” Ickes remembered. “He not only could tell him what he believed to be the truth, but he could hang on like a pup to the root until he got results.”9 After Howe’s death, there was never to be another intimate with the same willingness to tell the president to go to hell, as Howe was known to have done.

Roosevelt placed other personal aides in the departments. When they also had departmental duties—as did Assistant Secretary of State Moley and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Tugwell—they were eventually drawn into conflicts with the cabinet officers to whom they supposedly reported. But others, such as Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen, were more like detailees, essentially presidential assistants who were carried on payrolls other than the White House’s, a duplicitous though harmless budgeting arrangement.

The president also relied heavily on volunteers outside government to perform duties that would later become regular White House operations. This was often true of speechwriting. But outsiders were not always available when needed. Rosenman, for instance, was a justice of the New York Supreme Court and could be in Washington only on weekends and during summer recesses. The physical strain finally led to his resignation from the court in 1943, at which time he was given the title counsel to the president.

Dividing the Roosevelt staff into those on the White House payroll, department officials with special presidential assignments, those in the departments who were on loan to the White House, and outside volunteers still leaves out one important member of the president’s establishment. Eleanor Roosevelt was “essentially a presidential aide.”10 Her special responsibilities were twofold: she was an experienced fact finder who traveled widely and reported to her husband, and she was an in-house advocate for liberal causes, social welfare programs, minority groups, and youth. In tracing the organization of the modern presidency, those chief executives who relied on members of their families (usually wives or brothers) to carry out formal assignments or to offer advice would sometimes, but not always, benefit from this familial support. FDR certainly did.

Although there was never anyone resembling a chief of staff to the president, Roosevelt played favorites at least to the degree that the press was constantly bestowing the title of assistant president on someone or other. Over the course of three terms those who received this appellation included Moley, Donald Richberg, Tugwell, Corcoran, Hopkins, and James Byrnes. All except Byrnes worked on presidential speeches, although none did so exclusively. Tugwell and Moley were involved in different aspects of economics; Corcoran, more than the others, drafted bills and handled congressional relations; Richberg and Byrnes were coordinators; and Hopkins was given a broad but fairly random variety of assignments, including diplomatic missions. None performed duties similar to those later given to Sherman Adams by Dwight Eisenhower or to H. R. Haldeman by Richard Nixon.

The White House staff’s relations with Roosevelt were informal. There were no staff meetings with the president. Staff members, singly or in combination, would appear while the president was having breakfast to discuss the day’s work. They could then see him in his office if necessary—if not by going through the office of appointments secretary McIntyre, then through the more accessible door of Missy LeHand. Roosevelt also was usually available during the daily cocktail hour. And the evenings were reserved for drafting sessions with his speechwriters.

The official members of his administration formed only the first line of the president’s information network. Unlike some presidents whose careers have been on a single track, often legislative or military, Roosevelt’s earlier years in national politics and state and federal government and simply as a Roosevelt had given him broad and diverse acquaintances throughout the country whose opinions and observations he now used to supplement or challenge the advice he received from his subordinates. He also sought ancillary information by expanding the device known as the presidential commission. One study covering the Roosevelt years through 1940 mentions more than one hundred advisory bodies.11

What the president chose to do, and where he needed assistance, is reflected in the pattern of his week. Although always subject to change, the schedule revolved around three events: sessions with the congressional leadership on Mondays or Tuesdays, press conferences on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings, and cabinet meetings on Friday afternoons.

There was no organized congressional liaison office in the White House. Roosevelt handled this chore himself with the assistance of ad hoc troubleshooters such as Corcoran. The president’s dealings with Capitol Hill were conducted almost exclusively with the House Speaker, majority leaders, and committee chairmen, a system that created some dissatisfaction among the less privileged legislators. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin, about seventy-five in number, as well as a number of other progressives, not classed as Democrats,” wrote Representative Kent Keller of Illinois in 1938, “and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group in consultation as to administration policies.”12 Still, in an era of ironbound congressional seniority, this was a grumble more than a problem.

The press conferences were held in the Oval Office with the reporters crowded around the president’s desk. The frequency of these sessions meant that Roosevelt, rather than his press secretary, was the chief White House spokesman. The president prided himself on his detailed mastery of government operations and needed little advance preparation; as a rule, press secretary Steve Early merely reminded him of topics on which inquiries were expected. Roosevelt broke with tradition by abolishing written questions, but he established three ground rules: no reporters could quote him directly unless granted permission; his answers could be given for background, meaning that the reporters must not identify their source; and he could speak off the record, that is, strictly for information. Nearly half the meetings began with a statement by the president, ensuring in these cases that he controlled at least part of the session’s substance. On occasion, moreover, the press secretary planted questions with friendly reporters.

Thus, Roosevelt tailored the format of the press conference into an instrument of considerable utility. The flexibility of responding without quotation or sometimes even without attribution allowed him to meet the press with hardly any fear of error—political, substantive, or grammatical—a luxury that rules out comparisons with later presidents.

But it was also Roosevelt’s keen knowledge of the mechanics of journalism and the elements of newsworthiness that ensured proper attention would be paid to what he wanted emphasized. The White House press corps liked him (Leo Rosten found that 64 percent of its members favored his reelection in 1936)13 because he was good copy and they were sympathetic to his programs. And he liked the reporters, who were often invited to Sunday suppers at which Eleanor Roosevelt scrambled eggs. Then, too, he was a masterful performer. After observing a Roosevelt press conference, John Gunther wrote, “In twenty minutes Mr. Roosevelt’s features had expressed amazement, curiosity, mock alarm, genuine interest, worry, rhetorical playing for suspense, decision, playfulness, dignity, and surpassing charm. Yet he said almost nothing. Questions were deflected, diverted, diluted. Answers—when they did come—were concise and clear.”14 These relations could not, of course, have continued at their initial level of mutual admiration, the interests of press and president often being contradictory. The enthusiasm of the press corps was based on “a will-to-believe which, because it ignored future possibilities and past experiences, would end by tearing down the myth it was creating.”15 While the situation never reached that point, Roosevelt’s press relations did deteriorate in his second and subsequent terms.

Speeches were the other primary way in which the president reached the public. As governor, Roosevelt had grasped the potential of radio as a way to break through “the paper curtain of the publishers and appeal directly to the voters.”16 His calm and reassuring voice was ideally suited to the medium. Yet his celebrated fireside chats averaged only two or three a year; as he explained, “individual psychology cannot … be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.”17

Given the consistent style of Roosevelt’s rhetoric, it is startling that so many hands were involved in crafting the speeches. Drafts were prepared by teams or by one writer gathering submissions from a number of sources. During 1933 Moley was chief gatherer; drafts were prepared in 1933 and 1934 by Richberg, Howe, Bullitt, Frankfurter, Hugh Johnson, Tugwell, Cohen, and Corcoran. The team of Cohen and Corcoran played a more important role after Moley broke with the administration. Rosenman, who had been Roosevelt’s draftsman in Albany, again emerged as chief speechwriter in 1936; Stanley High was active in the second presidential campaign; and Roosevelt’s last team, from 1940 until his death, consisted of Rosenman, Hopkins, and Robert Sherwood, with occasional help from Archibald MacLeish. Roosevelt’s distinct style of speaking seemed to be made to order for speechwriters, but that phrases from so many sources could have taken on a unitary character can be explained only by his involvement in the process. In the end, as Sherwood wrote of FDR’s martinis, the president “mixed the ingredients with the deliberation of an alchemist.”18

The speechwriting operation often also served as a mechanism for forcing decisions. Rosenman explained, for example, that in preparing a 1942 congressional message on economic stabilization, he first arranged a conference of the vice president, secretary of the treasury, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, director of the budget, and the price administrator, whose suggestions and disagreements were presented to the president in a memorandum, then fought out in various forums, and eventually resolved by Roosevelt under deadline pressure.”19

Despite their regular appearance on the president’s weekly agenda, cabinet meetings were not an important administrative mechanism. Roosevelt did not consider his department secretaries a collegial body whose collective wisdom should be applied to making high government policy. “Our Cabinet meetings are pleasant affairs,” Ickes wrote in his diary, “but we only skim the surface of routine affairs.” The chief value of the Friday sessions, Stimson felt, was their usefulness “as a way in which to get into the White House to have a word with the President in private after the meetings were over.”20

In relating to the cabinet members as individuals, Roosevelt had little respect for jurisdictional boundaries. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau was given assignments that rightly belonged to Secretary of State Hull and Secretary of War Harry Woodring. Cabinet members survived as best they could in this laissez-faire atmosphere, if not by implicit contract with their fellow department heads, then by conquest. At Interior, Ickes was tenacious in his quest for additional responsibilities, as when he attempted to snatch the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture. Hull, however, drew a narrow line around the State Department, even allowing himself to be excluded from wartime summit meetings on the grounds that they dealt with military planning and were not of diplomatic concern.

The president tried to stay above the interdepartmental battles. Typical of this approach was a memorandum he sent to Rosenman: “Get [budget director] Harold Smith, usually known as ‘Battling Smith,’ into a room with the Secretary of the Treasury, usually known as ‘Sailor Morgenthau,’ lock them in and let the survivor out.”21 Yet despite the president’s seemingly cold-blooded practice of management by combat, he was almost incapable of firing anyone for incompetence or even disloyalty. Rather, he devised ways to go around them, as when he chose to conduct War Department business with Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson instead of Woodring, who was too isolationist for the president.

When Roosevelt believed most strongly that a job was important, however, he often simply ignored the departments and created a new agency. Topsy-turvy was the patron saint of his administrative theory. As a deliberate policy, this implied one or more of the following: that a new function was to be undertaken for which there was no niche in the existing structure, that the costs of giving new duties to an ongoing agency were too high in terms of disrupting existing programs or disturbing the delicate relationship between departments, that a new agency symbolized a higher level of concern, that existing agencies either lacked capable personnel or were unable to move quickly enough, or that a new agency could circumvent existing regulations. James Rowe, a Roosevelt aide, thought that one reason the president frequently employed this device was that it was the best way to deliver on his patronage obligations.22 The result was an administrative monstrosity, proliferating the number of executives who had the right and obligation to report directly to the president.

Roosevelt made a short-lived attempt to coordinate the work of the new agencies with that of the old-line departments through the creation of the Emergency Council in 1934. At one time the coordinating involved 124 interdepartmental committees and 224 subcommittees. The enterprise ultimately collapsed under the weight of its apparatus, the unwieldy size of its meetings, the pro forma reading of mimeographed reports, and the president’s disenchantment with its director, Donald Richberg. General confusion may have been somewhat lessened, however, by government’s ability to attract experienced managers because of decreased employment opportunities in the private sector during the Depression.

By the time Roosevelt stood for reelection in 1936 his methods of running the government had become as controversial in some quarters as his goals. He therefore set up the Committee on Administrative Management, with Louis Brownlow as chairman and Charles Merriam and Luther Gulick as the other members. Their report, which he enthusiastically forwarded to Congress in January 1937, accepted as its premise that “the American Executive must be regarded as one of the very greatest contributions by our Nation to the development of modern democracy.” The need for reorganization was not based on potential savings to the taxpayers, as in past reports, but because “the President needs help.”23 The committee’s solution, as George Graham put it, was “a plan of salvation by staff.”24 The report recommended that the White House Office should be augmented by six administrative assistants, “possessed of high competence, great physical vigor, and a passion for anonymity.”25 In addition, there should be an Executive Office of the President consisting of “managerial arms” for personnel, fiscal affairs, and planning.

The reorganization bill became entwined in Roosevelt’s attempt to alter the composition of the Supreme Court and did not become law until 1939. But eventually he got what he asked for, with the exception of having the functions of the Civil Service Commission transferred to the White House. The Executive Office was physically located next door to the White House.26 Into it was placed the Bureau of the Budget and the National Resources Committee, renamed the National Resources Planning Board. Thus the president controlled two of the recommended three managerial arms, fiscal affairs and planning.27

The reorganization act did not measurably increase the size of Roosevelt’s White House staff; the more significant expansion had taken place in 1933–1934 as the president borrowed personnel from the departments. Although authorized to have six administrative assistants, Roosevelt chose to appoint only three in 1939. While the new aides—William McReynolds, James Rowe, and Lauchlin Currie—were largely generalists standing ready for whatever assignments were uppermost on the president’s mind, they also developed areas of special interest. McReynolds became liaison officer for personnel management, Rowe’s particular involvements were in politics and patronage, and Currie was concerned with economics. The importance of the Brownlow report was in legitimating what Roosevelt had been doing all along. It was a ringing manifesto for presidential supremacy, which had not been an accepted fact before the New Deal.

The National Resources Planning Board, charged with preparing long-range plans for public works, helping state and local planning bodies, and informing the president of trends in the economy, did not fare well and was abolished by a 1943 action of Congress, which further stipulated that its functions could not be transferred to any other agency. Sherwood claimed that “the N.R.P.B. was dear to Roosevelt’s heart, but to the conservative majority on Capitol Hill the very word ‘plan’ was considered a Communist invention and any planning must be part of a plot to disrupt the capitalist system of free enterprise.”28 At least one academic observer, however, could find no evidence “to support a claim that the research product of the Board ever influenced vital decisions of the President.”29 The legislators feared a long-term planning operation in the White House as an assault on their prerogatives; they were perfectly happy to create a planning operation of their own, as when the Senate set up the Special Committee on Post-War Planning shortly after cutting off funds to the NRPB. The collapse of the NRPB was the first of a series of unsuccessful attempts to graft long-range planning capacity onto the White House. Ultimately they have failed because of the character of presidents and the demands of the presidential office. The politicians who generally become presidents have had little experience with and patience for extended planning, and once in the White House they find it increasingly difficult to focus on projections beyond their terms of office.

The Bureau of the Budget, however, blossomed in the Executive Office, and under the directorship of Harold Smith (1939–1945) it rapidly expanded from a staff of forty to one of more than 500. It retained its position as the primary agency for reviewing the budget and vastly increased its other powers. For instance, while the departments had previously had to clear legislative requests with the bureau only if they cost money, now all proposed legislation went through its clearance process. A similar system was instituted for the preparation of executive orders and proclamations, and recommendations for presidential vetoes also were funneled through the Budget Bureau. It became the coordinator of statistical services and drafted reorganization plans. Survey teams recommended management improvements in the departments, and as particularly competent young professionals were attracted to the bureau in the early 1940s, the president relied on it more and more to represent him on interdepartmental committees and to perform other odd jobs. In short, the augmented Bureau of the Budget provided a significant presidential presence throughout the executive branch.

So now Roosevelt had two types of staffs: the one in the White House whose services were to the president and were of a personal, public relations, and political nature; and the one in the Executive Office whose responsibilities were to the presidency and were institutional in nature. But policy and program initiatives still flowed up to the president through the departments and agencies. The president’s men were not involved in operations; as the Brownlow report recommended, they issued no orders.

The pressures of World War II, however, brought measurable changes to this system. Except for sporadic periods, presidents had in the past spent most of their time concerned with domestic matters. The ushering in of world responsibility meant that from the 1940s forward they would become more and more consumed by international affairs.

During the war, Harry Hopkins, who lived at the White House, often acted as a direct link between Roosevelt and allied governments; the State Department was informed of arrangements after they had been concluded. Admiral William Leahy, also operating out of the White House, presided over meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Roosevelt’s representative and daily briefed the president on military matters. Rosenman, now a full-time drafter of presidential messages and public documents, assumed responsibility for creating domestic policy. The addition of these three White House advisers markedly altered the direction of decisionmaking. In particular, Rosenman’s domestic duties expanded to fill the void left by the president’s preoccupation with the war. Policies of the utmost importance were devised in his office at the White House and moved out from there, thus reversing the traditional flow. Moreover, as Roosevelt’s health declined, all his aides assumed added responsibilities.

The president mobilized the civilian side of the government for war in much the same manner he had earlier organized for the economic emergency, through the creation of numerous ad hoc agencies in response to problems as they arose or were called to his attention. But while he had been given to picking the leadership of the New Deal agencies from a free-floating body of lawyers, professors, social workers, and state and local administrators, he chose representatives of economic groups (corporate executives, union leaders, and farm organization officials) to head the new war agencies. The Office of Production Management, for example, was placed under the joint direction of William Knudsen of General Motors and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Scientists, recruited by Vannevar Bush, for the first time began to play an important role in government, developing an atom bomb being only the most obvious example.

Roosevelt also became the first president to give major executive responsibilities to the vice president. Henry Wallace, his second vice president, was made chairman of the Economic Defense Board, the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board, and the Board of Economic Warfare. This was in sharp contrast to the job description for the vice presidency under John Nance Garner, whose primary assistance to Roosevelt had been as a bridge to Congress, at least until the ideological gulf between the president and the vice president became unbridgeable. The liabilities of giving a vice president responsibility for implementing policies became apparent, however, when Wallace and Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones clashed over policy and jurisdictional questions, exchanged public insults, and had to be relieved of their assignments. Less controversial was Roosevelt’s novel use of the vice president as an envoy extraordinary on missions to South America, China, and the Soviet Union.

Roosevelt’s war government has been described as a collection of action agencies—dealing with such matters as the allocation of rubber, drafting men into the armed forces, and price controls—and coordinating agencies “to keep the action agencies from getting in each other’s way.”30 Coordination was arranged in a series of layers with first-step coordinators such as the National Housing Agency, regional coordinators like the Plant Site Board, second-step coordinators such as the Office of War Information and, at the White House, the supercoordinator of them all, the Office of War Mobilization (OWM).31

To head the OWM, the president lured James Byrnes from the Supreme Court. It was undoubtedly a difficult decision for Roosevelt to give one person so much authority to act in his name, but in picking Byrnes there was little cause for concern. A cautious southern politician long comfortable in the folkways of Washington, Byrnes was not about to handle hot coals if he could help it. He deliberately was not an empire builder; he worked out of tiny cluttered offices in the east wing of the White House, with a staff never exceeding ten and with the unassuming Ben Cohen as his chief deputy. The OWM chose to deal with issues only if they could not be resolved at lower levels and interpreted its role narrowly as one of adjudicating controversies rather than planning and commanding the home front from its elevated perch.

But Roosevelt’s management techniques were better suited to the needs of the Depression than the wartime 1940s. When the New Deal groped its way toward economic solutions that had never before been considered within government’s province, the heady clash of ideas and the heavy emphasis on experimentation proved highly productive. The needs of massive warfare were not as well served by improvisation and redundancy. The president’s administrative juggling sometimes caused vital military messages to be delayed for days or weeks, and there were even times when the Pentagon first learned about a White House decision from the British.32

Franklin Roosevelt’s methods of organizing the presidency illustrate the intensely personal nature of the office. Even before the 1939 Reorganization Act gave him congressional sanction, he had reshaped his staff to suit his style and needs. Despite his domination of the government, the White House staff during Roosevelt’s first two terms was primarily a personal services unit, considerably bigger but not essentially different from that of past presidents. His strong desire to mold public opinion called especially for aides who could assist in such symbolic and informational duties as speechwriting and press relations.

Only during Roosevelt’s last years did new powers begin to shift to the staff. This coincided with the war and the president’s failing health. A vigorous Roosevelt, one suspects, would have been much more hesitant to delegate duties that he considered presidential. And what delegation did take place would have been more carefully limited. As it was, Hopkins’s diplomacy impinged on the prerogatives of the secretary of state, and Rosenman’s initiation of domestic policies invaded what had been the exclusive domain of the departments and agencies.

The accretion of White House staff functions was not part of a deliberate plan. The creation of the Executive Office of the President, however, had a theoretical base in the Brownlow report and in effect produced a quantum jump in staff available to a president. Although Roosevelt was relatively meticulous, for instance, in using the Bureau of the Budget for institutional purposes, there were signs by the end of the administration that it was slipping into a more personal role. Late in the war Harold Smith reportedly told a friend, “Roger, I am afraid I am becoming Mr. Fixit for the President, and this is bad for the Bureau of the Budget.”33

While the cabinet failed to serve Roosevelt as a mechanism for gathering collective advice—as it had failed previous presidents—cabinet officers continued to be responsible for running their departments and proposing legislation. However, Roosevelt’s habit of creating agencies outside the departmental framework diffused power throughout the executive branch, diminished the standing of some department heads, and increased the number of officials reporting directly to the president. Within limits, this served the purpose of keeping subordinates dependent on the president, but the practice held the inherent danger of spiraling beyond one person’s span of control.

The Rooseveltian legacy was that the reach of the presidency had been expanded and that the people’s expectations of what government could and should do had been forever altered. Whether the growth of government would outstrip a president’s ability to oversee its activities was a challenge Roosevelt left to his successors.