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DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

1953–1961

If a new administration appears to be a tabula rasa, it is not because the tablet is blank but because the writing is invisible. It is there. But it is best discerned after the fact, when those traits and experiences in a president’s background that are casual can be distinguished from those that are causal in that they determined the shape and the organization of his presidency.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected president in 1952, was a genial, shrewd, optimistic, confident, successful small-town American of sixty-two years. He had devoted his life to government service in the military, and although he was a newcomer to partisan politics, he was skilled at bureaucratic politics. He had spent much time abroad, which gave a somewhat anomalous internationalist cast to his otherwise conventional beliefs. His aspirations as president were limited to two overriding objectives: peace abroad and a balanced budget at home. In keeping with those aspirations, his view of the presidential role was circumscribed.

Eisenhower followed the pattern characteristic of the modern presidency by reacting to the style of the president who preceded him. As Roosevelt, the disorganization man, was followed by the tidy Harry Truman, so Eisenhower saw the purpose of his presidency as trying “to create an atmosphere of greater serenity and mutual confidence” in the wake of the cocky controversialist whose legacy, he felt, was “an unhappy state … bitterness … quarreling.”1 (Truman, of course, would have argued that presidential prestige is meant to be used to force desirable actions.) Later, the youthful Kennedy would react to the aging Eisenhower, and so on, back and forth in the whipsaw fashion that almost defines a principle of contrariness in presidential succession.

Confronted with the immediate problem of putting together a government—the first controlled by the Republican party in twenty years—Eisenhower turned not to his party’s leaders, whom he did not know well, but to an old friend, former general Lucius Clay, chairman of the board of Continental Can Company, and a new one, New York attorney Herbert Brownell. To them was left the initial screening of the cabinet. The job was made easier because no one declined the invitation to join Eisenhower’s cabinet, a statistic unique in the modern presidency. The cabinet then made the initial selection of the subcabinet. Other matters of personnel were handled by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams. An assistant to Adams estimated that the Governor, as Adams was called inside the administration, made 75 percent of the final decisions on personnel; the rest were made by the president from lists of candidates prepared by Adams.2 Eisenhower’s noninvolvement was partly a deliberate delegation of responsibilities, partly an expression of his distaste for the process of patronage, and partly a reflection of his limited circle of acquaintances outside the military, coupled with his strong belief in not appointing military people to civilian jobs if equally capable civilians were available.

The result was that Eisenhower picked a cabinet of strangers. Not one member could have been considered an old friend; most were barely known to him or not known at all. Only two of the ten initial department heads, Attorney General Brownell and Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, had played major roles in the campaign. (Some others had more minor parts, and several had been opposed to Eisenhower’s nomination.)

The construction of the cabinet was not totally without attempts at balance. Following tradition, the position of interior secretary went to a westerner, Douglas McKay, the retiring governor of Oregon. Eisenhower wanted a woman in the cabinet, and Oveta Culp Hobby was made director of the Federal Security Agency with the promise that the agency would be quickly transformed into a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Hobby’s appointment also gave the cabinet a southerner and a registered Democrat).

In the president’s only eyebrow-raising selection, he named a trade unionist as secretary of labor. Picking Martin Durkin, head of the AFL Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union, had two justifications. First, Eisenhower was trying to rectify what he felt was Truman’s unwise practice of allowing the presidency to be drawn into labor-management relations. If the unions had their own person at the Labor Department, presumably they would not go over Durkin’s head to the White House.3 More conventionally, Eisenhower was seeking to broaden the perspective of the cabinet—“to help round out any debate,” as he put it. In choosing Durkin he unrealistically believed that he could get “an impartial adviser,” not a “special pleader for labor.”4 He did not, however, look upon his secretary of commerce, businessman Sinclair Weeks, as potentially being a special pleader for business. But Durkin resigned after nine months. Eisenhower then got the type of secretary he really wanted by going outside union ranks. In replacing Durkin with James Mitchell, a respected specialist in industrial relations, he was able to keep labor disputes away from the White House and add a more liberal voice to his cabinet. Mitchell remained in the post until the administration left office in 1961.

More than any other president, Eisenhower was looking for types rather than merely weighing the competing merits of individuals. “Eight millionaires and one plumber” was how the New Republic described the cabinet.5 But Eisenhower was not impressed by money per se—Truman’s administration had more men of wealth. What impressed Eisenhower was the ability to succeed (money was simply the unit in which success was measured). He believed that a successful person, someone who had already proved he could run something big, would be best able to tame a government department. It was a view shaped by his conception of what a government department does (namely manage something) and honed by campaign promises and the business-oriented philosophy of his party. The only two members of the cabinet (except of course for Durkin) who did not have backgrounds in management, attorneys John Foster Dulles and Brownell, were put in charge of the State and Justice departments, which from a presidential perspective can be considered more analytical than operational. Moreover, Eisenhower wrote in his diary on January 5, 1953, that to seek a government position is “clear evidence of unsuitability. I feel that anyone who can, without great personal sacrifice, come to Washington to accept an important government post, is not fit to hold that post.”6 He would hire people who were above chiseling, or not in need of it. As the representative of a party that placed its faith in the private enterprise system, who better than a business executive could ferret out waste and recognize reckless spending?

This proclivity for bringing in the successful outsider also held true in the selection of undersecretaries (later renamed deputy secretaries). Before Eisenhower the standard practice had been to divide the work in a department between the two top political appointees along “outside” and “inside” lines—with the secretary being the spokesman to the outer world, the undersecretary managing the bureaucracy. Yet most of the Republican undersecretaries were carbon copies of their superiors.

Eisenhower’s business executives joined the government in the same spirit that one contributes to the United Way, not joyously but because it is what civic-minded citizens ought to do. What was remarkable was that they stayed, held by the magnetism of Ike’s personality more than by any other force. Seven of his original cabinet members were still in place at the end of the first term; most stayed much longer. One died in office, the acting secretary of commerce left because he failed to win Senate confirmation, and two lasted the full eight years. With only one exception, replacements came from the ranks of the subcabinet or the White House staff.

The kind of person the president chose was the kind of person he was. Dwight D. Eisenhower of Denison, Texas, and Abilene, Kansas, born October 14, 1890, surrounded himself with people of similar background. Only Dulles was older—by two years. George Humphrey, secretary of the treasury, and Charles E. Wilson, secretary of defense, were born in 1890. Thirteen of the twenty-one cabinet officers were within a decade or so of the president’s age. Their places of birth read like a gazetteer of small-town America—Killeen and Burleson, Texas; McRae, Georgia; Whitney, Idaho; Minerva and Berea, Ohio; Pinconning and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Charleston, West Virginia; Kingston, New York. Their personalities also matched the president’s. Cheerful and confident, they were not the dour conservatives buried in the stuffed chairs of the Union League Club. While Dulles or Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson could not be mistaken for the life of the party, they were the exceptions that Eisenhower made in the name of expertise. “Foster has been in training for this job all his life,” he often said.7

They were decidedly not politicians. The three cabinet members who had been in the U.S. Senate—Dulles, Weeks, and Eisenhower’s second secretary of the interior, Fred Seaton—had held interim appointments. The only elected senator to whom the president gave cabinet status was UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, his earliest supporter. Legislator-politicians were difficult for Eisenhower to fathom. They seemed consumed with concerns such as headlines and patronage that did not concern him. He was much more comfortable with executive-politicians, and five former governors were to serve on his White House staff.

Under the Eisenhower system the cabinet officers were expected to run the daily operations of their departments without presidential interference. They had the right to come to Eisenhower when their problems were big enough, which was left for them to decide. But the president was impatient if they sought his counsel too often on matters that he felt were strictly operational. Defense Secretary Wilson infuriated him by constantly wanting to discuss the internal workings of the Pentagon, problems that the president considered unpresidential. Cabinet officers also were to come to the White House—meaning Sherman Adams—when they disagreed among themselves. Adams “spent many hours,” for example, with Commerce Secretary Weeks and Labor Secretary Mitchell “sitting across the table from each other while they ironed out their differences.”8 It was hard for the press to accept the fact that someone as powerful as Adams was not making policy, but he saw his role otherwise and largely resisted the temptation to overrule the department heads, although he was equally willing to take the blame for doing so when the decision really had been made by the president.9

Of course, basic differences within the cabinet were minimal, at least by the standards of the preceding administrations. The like-mindedness of the department heads ensured it. Nevertheless, the Eisenhower cabinet was composed of very strong personalities. A body that included John Foster Dulles, Charles E. Wilson, George Humphrey, Ezra Taft Benson, and Harold Stassen must rate high for sheer tenacity. The feuds smoldered, but they rarely surfaced, and the president effectively used his weekly cabinet meetings to give what historian Stephen Ambrose called “his standard pitch for teamwork.”10

Eisenhower’s conception of the cabinet differed markedly from the conceptions of the other White House occupants during the modern era. In an effort to convert the cabinet into a major deliberative mechanism, he expanded meetings to include such key aides as the UN ambassador, the budget director, the director of defense mobilization, the mutual security administrator, and the White House chief of staff. He thought it useful to gather the views of all cabinet members even if their departments were not directly involved. This practice did not, however, mean that all members were equal. George Humphrey and his successor, Robert B. Anderson, were more-than-equal voices in domestic affairs, the predictable role of the Treasury in a conservative government; and Dulles jealously guarded his position as chief adviser on foreign policy.

Eisenhower got his information from listening; he formed his opinions by talking with others. This preference, perhaps more than theory, accounted for the heightened role of the cabinet and the National Security Council. He concentrated on discussion around the table, and then if he had reached a conclusion he would announce it on the spot, thus making sure that all his subordinates heard what he had decided. This was not collective government, any more than it had been with other presidents; Eisenhower accepted the fact that the decisions were his alone to make. The job of the White House was to ensure that important matters were placed on the cabinet agenda, that department heads were prepared to state their positions, and that they were periodically reminded of their responsibilities in implementing decisions the president had made.

That department heads, competing as they must for scarce resources and answerable to constituents beyond the administration, would freely put their most cherished proposals up for grabs was not an entirely workable notion. Despite the prodding of the cabinet secretariat in the White House, the trivial often substituted for the controversial. Douglas Dillon, the undersecretary of state, later recalled that at one meeting, “We sat around looking at the plans for Dulles Airport. They had a model and everything, and we would say why don’t you put a door there, and they would explain why they didn’t.”11

Eisenhower’s doctrine of delegation had a number of consequences. It may have helped to keep his appointees on the job longer than they planned. It contributed to their comfort (some said complacency), for they knew the outer limits of their assignments and had no fear of poachers. It removed burdens from the president, which added to an impression that he was not on top of his job. (He would have argued that no presidential decisions were made by anyone except the president and as few as possible nonpresidential decisions were made by the president.) And according to the power equations by which presidents are often measured, Eisenhower gave himself considerable freedom of action by giving his subordinates considerable latitude to act.

What Eisenhower artfully constructed was an elaborate system of buffer zones.12 Press secretary James Hagerty later recalled, “President Eisenhower would say, ‘Do it this way,’ I would say, ‘If I go to that press conference and say what you want me to say, I would get hell.’ With that, he would smile, get up and walk around the desk, pat me on the back and say, ‘My boy, better you than me.’ ”13 These buffers meant, for one thing, that the Republican loss in the 1954 midterm elections was blamed on Agriculture Secretary Benson, not Eisenhower. In one poll, 33 percent of farmers gave Benson a poor rating, while only 8 percent considered Eisenhower’s performance inadequate.14 It was as if the president and the secretary of agriculture worked for different administrations. In foreign relations (especially with the British), the secretary of state was as unpopular as the president was popular. If a cabinet officer could not get to see the president, he blamed Adams, not Eisenhower.

In one important instance, however, Eisenhower chose not to employ a buffer. When the Soviet Union shot down a spy plane over its territory in 1960 and threatened to cancel the Paris summit meeting, Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, volunteered to take full responsibility for ordering the mission and to resign. Premier Khrushchev seemed to invite this approach when he stated he was “quite willing to grant that the president knew nothing.”15 But Eisenhower felt that to have denied knowledge of the U-2 would have been an unconscionable admission that he did not control the country’s national security apparatus. He took the blame and the summit collapsed.

Another part of Eisenhower’s buffer system was to use Vice President Richard Nixon as his political surrogate, an arrangement that also reflected the president’s strong distaste for party politics. The vice president assumed the burdens of campaigning during the midterm elections of 1954 and 1958. This was Eisenhower’s contribution to resolving the apparent conflict between the presidential roles of chief magistrate and chief party leader.

Because Eisenhower came from a career outside politics and often expressed his aversion to partisanship, some were led to conclude that he lacked the political moxie to direct the machinery of government to his ends. Marquis Childs presented the conventional wisdom when he noted in 1958 that the president “brought to the office so little preparation.”16 Yet a cogent case can be made for reassessing Eisenhower, as a highly skilled bureaucratic politician.17 The contemporary portrait of him as the forthright old soldier beyond his depth in a world of high government machinations was a caricature; he had, after all, spent a lifetime in the Byzantium of military politics and come out supreme Allied commander. It should be noted, however, that the portrait was also a self-caricature drawn by Eisenhower for his own reasons. (Once when asked about a newspaper column at a press conference, he replied that he could not answer because he never read the columns. The statement was patently false; he began each day with a heavy dose of newspaper reading.)18

Eisenhower brought with him to the White House very definite ideas of how a staff should be constructed and should work. They were based on the military model, but as only a professional soldier fully understood, they were adaptable to the vicissitudes of circumstance. The ideas worked for him; later they would not work for Nixon, who did not understand their subtleties. “The use of staff is a kind of art,” David Lilienthal once mused in his diary, and another New Dealer, Rexford G. Tugwell, wrote of Eisenhower that he “was more skilled in using staff and more willing to delegate than any of his predecessors.”19 Although Tugwell profoundly disagreed with the aims of the Eisenhower administration, there was no sense in confusing Eisenhower’s constricted aspirations for his government with his means of achieving them. Tugwell was simply stating what he knew to be a fact.

Eisenhower’s staff was an entirely different sort of entity from his cabinet, with different functions and a different kind of personnel. Because they were personal assistants, staff members were better known to the president. Of the original thirty-two professional members, excluding military aides, twenty-two had worked in the presidential election, often on board the campaign train, five had served under Eisenhower in the army, and two had been with him at Columbia University. Twelve stayed in the administration for the full eight years.20

Members of the staff, much more than of the cabinet, were likely to have had previous employment in the federal government. Five had worked in congressional offices, one had served in Congress, and seven had held appointments in the executive branch. As in all administrations, top White House aides generally were younger than cabinet officers, although this did not create the friction it has in other presidencies. Thus, while the Eisenhower cabinet was unique in its pervasive business background and in its lack of Washington experience, the presidential staff was more in the traditional mold. It did have more members from the corporate world than would have been found in a Democratic administration, but the business executives on Eisenhower’s staff seemed to have a more contemplative cast of mind than those in the Eisenhower cabinet.21

Whereas the talents of the staffs under Roosevelt and Truman were to be found largely in their possession of highly sensitive political antennae, their overarching loyalty, or their creativity, the top echelon of Eisenhower’s staff was noted for its functional professionalism. James Hagerty was a professional press secretary; that had been his occupation since 1942. He had also been a reporter, which may have given him certain insights, but that was not his chief qualification: Truman chose his press secretaries directly from the ranks of working journalists, without notable success. Former general Wilton (Jerry) Persons, who headed Eisenhower’s congressional relations office, was a professional congressional lobbyist. That had been his role for the army during World War II. Special counsel Bernard Shanley was hired as a lawyer, not as a ghostwriter in mufti. The writing was to be done by Emmet Hughes of Time and Life magazines, in a sharp break with the past, when the distinction between policymaking and word production was left deliberately fuzzy. Besides relying on the statutory Council of Economic Advisers, Eisenhower added a personal economist, Gabriel Hauge, to the staff. Robert Montgomery, the actor-producer, was on call to advise the president on the use of television. The chairman of the Civil Service Commission was given the additional duty of advising the president on personnel management. And experts were eventually added in science, foreign economic policy, aviation policy, public works planning, agricultural surplus disposal, disarmament, and psychological warfare.

A review of the organization of the White House under Eisenhower must begin with the assistant to the president, Sherman Adams. Eisenhower’s recollection of his chief aide differs in no respect from the way Adams appeared to those who served under him:

From our first meeting in 1952 Sherman Adams seemed to me best described as laconic, businesslike, and puritanically honest. Never did he attempt to introduce humor into an official meeting. On the many occasions during our White House years when I called him on the telephone to ask a question, he never added a word to his “yes” or “no” if such an answer sufficed. It never occurred to him to say “Hello” when advised by his secretary that I wanted him on the phone or to add a “Good-bye” at the end of the call. For Sherman Adams this was neither bad manners nor pretense; he was busy. Absorbed in his work, he had no time to waste.22

Eisenhower saw the function of his assistant, called the White House chief of staff in subsequent administrations, as that of being his personal “son of a bitch,” a role ably played for him by General Walter Bedell Smith during World War II, and he deliberately sought a person with the same talents to head his White House operation. After Adams was forced out in late 1958, having been accused of accepting favors from a Boston industrialist, his place was taken by Jerry Persons. A gentle, humorous southerner, Persons had chosen a career as conciliator, and he was not overly concerned with running a tight ship. He allowed more staff members direct access to the president and was less interested in scrutinizing the matters that were to be put before his boss. This change did not, however, notably affect the operations of the government. By this time staff members were proficient in their assignments, comfortable in their relations with each other, and part of a waning administration. It was the Adams style that set the tone of the Eisenhower White House.

All activities except those relating to foreign relations came under Adams’s eye. These included appointments and scheduling, patronage and personnel, press, speechwriting, cabinet liaison, congressional relations, and special projects. A newly created staff secretariat (proposed in the Hoover Commission report, a well-thumbed document during the 1952–1953 transition) kept track of all pending presidential business and ensured the proper clearances on all papers that reached the Oval Office. A two-man operation within the secretariat prepared daily staff notes for the president, giving him advance notice of actions to be taken by the departments and agencies. Adams coordinated White House work through early morning staff meetings, generally three times a week. These sessions also were used for briefings by the CIA and preparation of suggested answers to questions that might be asked at presidential press conferences.

Although there had been some formalized responsibility for lobbying Congress in the Truman White House, it had been essentially a closet operation. Lobbying without acknowledging that it was being done presumably was least offensive to the legislature’s sensibilities as a coequal branch of government. From Eisenhower’s point of view, however, the best reason to end this fiction was that he wanted staff positioned between himself and all those nattering members of Congress. Like many professional military men, he had a high regard for Congress, but not for its members.23 The six aides who served at some point in the White House congressional relations office had had considerable experience on Capitol Hill; one had been a member of the House of Representatives, and three had more substantial ties to the Democratic party than to the GOP. Given that the Democrats controlled Congress for three-fourths of the time Eisenhower was in office, these relationships were not without significance. The Republican congressional leadership was wooed through weekly meetings with the president for which the staff prepared detailed agendas. Eisenhower confessed that “these Legislative meetings were sometimes tiresome.”24 But in general the program fared well because of the president’s great popularity, his personal friendships with Democratic leaders Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, the skill of his staff, and mostly because he did not ask for a great deal. The White House conducted a major assault on Congress for a legislative objective only once or twice a year; the rest of the time the departments were on their own.

Eisenhower regarded meetings with the White House press corps, like those with members of Congress, as a necessary though less than pleasant aspect of being president. He could not and would not manipulate them in the manner of Roosevelt, but they did not irritate him to the degree that they had Truman. If he could not point to his meetings with the reporters as a positive accomplishment, he did take some pride in having survived: “I was able to avoid causing the nation a serious setback through anything I said in many hours, over eight years, of intensive questioning.… It is far better to stumble or speak guardedly than to move ahead smoothly and risk imperiling the country.”25

His press conferences averaged one every other week, down from once a week during the Truman presidency, although illness accounted for some of the decline.26 Hagerty’s press briefings doubled, however, with sessions each morning and afternoon. The press secretary also managed to coax greater mileage out of fewer presidential press conferences by releasing full transcripts within hours and by allowing them to be taped for radio and filmed for later use on television. Since Eisenhower did not grant personal interviews and since staff members generally referred reporters’ inquiries to Hagerty, the press secretary emerged for the first time as the principal spokesman for the government.

The reputation for efficiency that the White House staff had under Adams’s direction was well earned, but the reputation for organizational rigidity was overstated by contemporary observers. There was a box on the chart for speechwriter, but other staff members, notably Gabriel Hauge and Bryce Harlow, were pressed into service from time to time. Maxwell Rabb, the cabinet secretary, also handled relations with Jewish and other minority groups. Frederic Morrow was the administrative officer for special projects as well as being deeply involved in civil rights (he was the first Black professional on a White House staff). Paul Carroll and Andrew Goodpaster, both military officers, successively headed the staff secretariat while also being responsible for the day-to-day liaison on national security affairs. Although such mixed assignments were exceptions, there was some flexibility in the system to take advantage of special talents.

There was more organizational rigidity in the redesign of the White House foreign policy machinery. By 1956 the National Security Council staff consisted of twenty-eight members, of whom eleven were considered “think people.” Eisenhower was the first president to appoint a special assistant for national security affairs with responsibility for long-range planning. Day-to-day liaison with State and Defense, as has been noted, was handled by the staff secretary. Neither were operational, so that even together their duties did not add up to those later assumed by Henry Kissinger. The first assistant for national security affairs, Robert Cutler, described his domain as “the top of Policy Hill.”27 On the upside of the hill was the Planning Board (basically Truman’s NSC senior staff renamed). It was made up of departmental representatives at the assistant secretary level, with the presidential assistant as its chairman. The Planning Board developed position papers, which the presidential assistant carried up to the crest, the National Security Council. Assuming that decisions were made by the president at the summit, the decisions then went down the hill to be implemented by the departments. On the downside, Eisenhower placed a new mechanism, the Operations Coordinating Board, consisting of officers at the undersecretary level, whose job was to expedite decisions and follow them up.28

The NSC Planning Board met Tuesday and Friday afternoons for three hours. It normally took three or four meetings before a paper was ready to be sent forward. Gordon Gray, special assistant for national security affairs, cited one paper that consumed all or part of twenty-seven meetings and on which twenty-three consultants worked. After reviewing a paper, the Planning Board would return it to a group of assistants, who met for four to eight hours on each redraft. This laborious process was designed to force agreement, but despite the best efforts of the chairman of the Planning Board that was not always possible, and Gray mentioned one policy paper that was finally forwarded to the NSC with nineteen “splits.”29

The president presided over 329 of the 366 weekly NSC meetings during his two terms. These meetings were particularly useful during the first two years of the administration, when the work of the council was largely taken up with examining all the policies of the Truman administration. But the machinery kept getting more cumbersome. Meetings were attended by the five statutory members (president, vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization); the two statutory advisers (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of the CIA); three officers that the president added to the NSC (secretary of the treasury, budget director, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission); and enough regular invitees to add up to twenty persons around the cabinet table.30 In addition there were others, such as the attorney general or the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose presence was requested for specific agenda items. As Cutler early warned, at some point a group turns into a town meeting, and “once this invisible line is passed, people do not discuss and debate; they remain silent or talk for the record.”31

When Eisenhower met with President-elect Kennedy on December 6, 1960, he reported that “the National Security Council had become the most important weekly meeting of the government.” Yet in one of the afterthoughts in his memoirs, he suggested that part of the committee structure could be usefully replaced “by a highly competent and trusted official with a small staff … who might have a title such as Secretary for International Coordination.”32 Still, as tedious as some of Eisenhower’s NSC procedures were, there is no evidence that they caused unreasonable delay when prompt action was necessary. The decision to dispatch U.S. troops to Lebanon in 1958 did not emanate from an NSC discussion; it was considered by a smaller gathering in the president’s office after an NSC meeting. The more urgent the stakes, the less likely a decision will be the result of large, formal sessions. Indeed, as Douglas Kinnard concluded in his study of Eisenhower’s national security planning: “I saw few instances where the key decisions on strategic policy were not made by the president in small informal meetings.”33 By the end of the administration, however, the NSC apparatus was coming under heavy attack from Senator Henry Jackson’s Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, whose reports would influence Senator John Kennedy.

Much of the growth in the White House staff came in the area of foreign relations. Besides the elaborate NSC operation, the presidential establishment included new offices for psychological warfare, disarmament, foreign economic policy, food aid abroad, and the international aspects of science and atomic energy. Eisenhower also relied on his brother Milton, president of Johns Hopkins University and an expert on Latin America, who has been called his “closest and most versatile adviser.”34 John Foster Dulles viewed these offices and specialists with suspicion and, when possible, cut their ranks down to what he thought was an appropriate size. Neither Nelson Rockefeller, special assistant for cold war strategy, nor Harold Stassen, special assistant on disarmament, could long survive the secretary’s enmity.

To explain the apparent paradox of the giving and taking of Dulles’s power, it is necessary to consider the role of Eisenhower’s growing staff. Grow it did. There were thirty-two presidentially appointed professionals in the White House at the beginning of his first term; forty-seven at the beginning of his second term; and fifty when he left office. The new aides fitted into four categories, each a perceived need of the president. What initially caused the expansion was Eisenhower’s desire for efficiency. “Organization cannot make a genius out of an incompetent,” he wrote. “On the other hand, disorganization can scarcely fail to result in inefficiency.”35 That was the reason for the creation of the staff secretary system. Eisenhower’s second need was for coordination, which brought about the cabinet secretariat and the NSC machinery. In certain areas, such as science and economics, Eisenhower also felt the need for his own experts. In paying tribute to the science adviser, a post he established in 1957 after the Soviets launched Sputnik, he wrote, “Without such distinguished help, any president in our time would be, to a certain extent, disabled.”36 And what was probably behind the increase in foreign policy advisers was Eisenhower’s quest to fill gaps in the regular advice system of the government, to make up for what he felt were deficiencies in his cabinet members. As Adams put it, “Granted that Dulles was a man of great moral force and conviction, he was not endowed with the creative genius that produces bold, new ideas.”37 Therefore Eisenhower turned to such special assistants as C. D. Jackson and Rockefeller to provide what he was not getting from his secretary of state. Eisenhower’s two “bold, new ideas,” the Atoms for Peace (1953) and Open Skies (1955) proposals, did not come from the State Department and were met with skepticism by Dulles. All presidents have shared Eisenhower’s need for coordination and expertise, but the desire for staff efficiency—until Jimmy Carter’s presidency—has been a uniquely Republican motivation, perhaps related to differences in philosophy and personnel of the two parties.

Within the Executive Office, Eisenhower had an opportunity to kill off the Council of Economic Advisers in 1953. The Republican Congress, disenchanted with the politics and economics of Leon Keyserling, had drastically cut the CEA budget. But Gabriel Hauge convinced the president to keep the council and to hire Arthur Burns as its chairman. Under the 1946 enabling act, the three members of the council were to be coequal, but Eisenhower quickly won approval of a reorganization plan giving operating responsibility to the chairman, a variation of a Hoover Commission proposal. Burns chose his staff mostly from the academy rather than from government service. Although Adams feared that Eisenhower and Burns would not get along, his worry proved groundless. When the 1954 economic downturn began, Burns introduced regular briefings, often lasting thirty minutes, at the cabinet meetings, and according to Adams, “Eisenhower listened to him with fascination.”38 The CEA survived its first crucial transition in administrations because of the increased stake of the president in the behavior of the economy, because the council members and their staff were congenial to the president, and because they provided him with information he considered immediately useful.

The Bureau of the Budget, so important in the Truman administration, did not fare as well. Two of Eisenhower’s four budget directors were bankers and two were accountants, whereas their predecessors had had backgrounds in public administration.39 For instruction in management reorganization the president was more apt to look to the second Hoover Commission and to his Committee on Government Organization (Nelson Rockefeller, Arthur Flemming, and Milton Eisenhower). Otherwise the Budget Bureau continued to do about what it had always done, but it was not as central to the making of policy. This was caused less by suspicion of the career bureaucrat than by a simple law of physics: everyone could not occupy the same space. Eisenhower’s system of an expanded White House staff and a more powerful cabinet left less room at the center for the Budget Bureau to occupy.

The testing of Eisenhower’s staff-and-cabinet system came during his extended illnesses. The illnesses happened to coincide with periods of considerable calm in the nation and the world, for which the White House–cabinet arrangement could hardly take credit. But from Eisenhower’s viewpoint these periods proved that his organizational design would work as intended—efficiently, without friction, confidently. And this was his objective for his government and his country.

Dwight Eisenhower chose a way of organizing the presidency that was very different from that of his predecessors. His structured staff system increased the size of the White House, yet the White House was to continue to grow even when it returned to more fluid designs. However, as a result of his having asked for and received substantially increased appropriations from Congress for staff purposes, a new floor was established.

The emphasis on creating new staff mechanisms did not have an adverse effect on the efficiency of domestic operations but did become burdensome for conducting foreign relations. Eisenhower’s White House showed that a large staff need not be operational, at least if it is balanced with tenacious cabinet officials. Still, as future presidents would prove, the larger the staff, the greater the temptation to try to run the departments from the White House.

The use of the cabinet for collective advice was particularly suited to Eisenhower’s preferences for receiving information and was relatively frictionless because of the homogeneity of the members. The rudimentary cabinet secretariat, however, was less successful in forcing the most important decisions through the system.

The combination of an efficient and orderly White House staff and unusual reliance on the cabinet fit the president’s personal needs and limited objectives. The liabilities of the administration—the absence of a steady stream of creative proposals and the failure to recognize the boiling point of the civil rights issue and certain other domestic conditions—have been blamed on Eisenhower’s techniques of management. Could the same system that worked for an intrinsically conservative and nonactivist president be adapted to the needs of a liberal, activist one?

The proposition was not tested by Kennedy and Johnson, who simply assumed that it could not. Nixon was an activist, but while he favored a highly structured White House staff, he quickly rejected a collegial use of the cabinet, and, lacking Eisenhower’s skill in the art of using staff, his methods turned out to be more a perversion than an extension of the Eisenhower system.

In the wake of Eisenhower, conservative results and a structured staff system were often equated by social scientists who may have been personally uncomfortable with such systems and unfamiliar with how they operate. It is hardly surprising that they would propose methods of organization that seemed more congenial to them. Yet there is no evidence to prove that Eisenhower’s system was ineffective. Certainly, imaginative people prefer to work within systems of least constraint. It is unlikely, however, that a liberal president with liberal personnel would produce a conservative administration even if the presidency were organized along more structured lines.