PRESIDENTIAL HIERARCHIES AND DECISION MAKING: THE INTERACTION OF ORGANIZATION AND INFORMATION

ANDREW RUDALEVIGE Dickinson College Department of Political Science Princeton University Center for the Study of Democratic Politics [email protected]

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Thanks to Matt Dickinson, Dave Lewis, Rick Waterman, Jeffrey Weinberg, and especially Tom Hammond for helpful conversations and comments on various aspects of this project. This is very much a work in progress and any feedback is appreciated.

ABSTRACT Voluminous and varied work on the “institutional presidency” has yet to yield systematic analysis of how different staff institutions make a difference to presidents: how they impact the kind, caliber, and amount of information presidents receive on policy matters. Instead, presidential decision making is often deemed idiosyncratic and personalized. This paper draws on various theories of organization and hierarchy to create a basis for arguing that staff is a necessary limiting structure on an otherwise chaotic informational environment. How that staff is structured will, likewise, matter for the amount and type of information they receive and thus for the decisions they take. The paper argues, melding recent formal work with earlier hypotheses about staff effectiveness, that informational institutions centered on functional rather than specific policy lines will best serve the president. Archival evidence from the Truman, Nixon, and Reagan administrations is used to illustrate this theory and sketch a more systematic research agenda.

-1“The pulse of the life of the presidency... moves by one rhythm: the making of decisions. To know a presidency is to catch this rhythm.” – Emmet John Hughes (1973: 29)

I. Information, Organization, and Presidential Decision-Making If decisions are at the heart of the presidency, information is at the heart of how presidential decisions are taken. And at the heart of information are decisions that first shaped how the flow of advice reached the Oval Office. That in, turn, at least in the modern presidency, is a function of staff and staff organization. Organization is policy, Nixon adviser Roy Ash used to say -- but perhaps instead organization is information, which makes policy. Scholars of the presidency largely agree with the first tenets of this syllogism. As early as the 1940s, Leonard White’s standard textbook on public administration (1948: 52) painted much of the justification for the then-new Executive Office of the President (EOP) in informational terms. Forty years ago Neustadt (1960: 153) stressed the importance of what the president got “into his mind. His first essential need is for information.” And as Witherspoon (1991: 149) put it more recently, “Information is power because it is the substance of which decisions are made.” However, while the notion that prior decisions about staffing shape current decisions about a wide range of issues – and, more generally that organization reflects informational needs – has received sustained attention in economics (e.g., Arrow 1973) and other subfields of American politics (see especially Krehbiel 1991), presidency scholars have been relatively slow to take up the challenge in a systematic way. The presidency is still seen largely as the bailiwick of a single individual whose idiosyncracies shape the decisionmaking process; and despite much solid work on various aspects of the “institutional presidency” over the past decade or so, the work on how presidents obtain and use information “has not made notable advances beyond the casual theorizing of sophisticated participants” and tends to consist of “conventional administrative doctrine modified by a few apparent lessons of recent presidencies” (Quirk 1991: 39, 40). Organizations generally process information in order to reduce uncertainty (Daft and Lengel 1986); but while scholars have produced templates of presidential organization, there is much less in the way of explicit theory about how those varying organizations affect the flow of information to the president and thus the kinds of uncertainty they ameliorate. What, and what kind of, information reaches presidents, of the nearly infinite amount that in prospect might do so? When does it arrive, and through what channels? And how do these factors affect the ways decisions are conceived, and taken? In short, the overall question might be more specifically formulated as how presidents structure their staffs in order to ensure that they both become aware of relevant policy problems and receive germane, timely advice on the range of options which might be utilized to solve or mitigate those problems.

-2-

These are crucial questions, but not simple ones.1 This paper takes a preliminary cut at the problem by bringing together organization theory with industrial economics with formal work on hierarchy and agenda-setting with what we know about presidential staffing. The basic argument takes its cue from the “chaos” theory developed in the public choice literature: just as structure must be used to induce equilibria in situations of collective decision making (Shepsle 1979), presidents must impose a limiting institutional structure, in the form of staff, upon a chaotic informational environment. That structure, which may be analogized to the agendas used by legislatures to order and limit their alternatives, has wide bearing on the information received up the hierarchy. The choices made along the way, as advice rises to the president, will matter for the choices he himself makes; how the staff is structured will have an important impact on this. Most broadly, I argue that informational institutions centered on functional tasks (e.g., legislative policy formulation generally) rather than those tied to specific “policy lines” (e.g., foreign or domestic) will give the president the information s/he needs most. That is, a staff hierarchy ensuring that generalist expertise is brought to bear on technical policy will give the president better options than one that isolates policy with specialists,2 and one that forces policy disputes to the president’s level will give him better information about their proper resolution than one that resolves them with “consensus” before reaching the Oval Office. Such a hypothesis cuts somewhat across the conventional wisdom. Recall the controversy that erupted when it emerged that Bush political guru Karl Rove was also advising the president on foreign policy (Berke and Sanger 2002). The Rove furor, far from being unique, echoed General George Marshall’s complaints about Truman advisor Clark Clifford’s role in the U.S. diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1948 (McCullough 1992: 614-20). Foreign policy is not supposed to be “politicized” by electorally–minded minders. But the literature on how organizations use information, both specific to the presidency (Dickinson 1997; George 1980; Porter 1980) and more broadly construed (Graber 1991, 2003; Hammond 1994; Wilensky 1967), suggests that the kind of information any executive needs will cut across different issue-areas. Only then can the president himself remain in control of his own choices. One way to test these ideas is to examine important “change points,” where presidents shifted their staff organizations within their administration. This allows one to present structured comparisons while holding constant such variables as presidential personality, style, or skill. After further elaboration of executive hierarchies, then, the paper concludes by presenting data from the Truman, Nixon, and Reagan administrations. These cases both highlight the plausibility of the hypotheses and indicate future lines for more comprehensive research.

1

As Hughes added to his claim that starts this paper, “there can be no secret to any presidency as difficult to discover as the riddle of precisely how even one decision came to be made.” 2

Note that who fills a given slot matters, too – a “generalist” slot filled by a policy advocate may not help the president. This selection question receives some preliminary attention below.

-3-

II. The Institutional Presidency and Informational Institutions A. The Institutional Presidency As opposed to the common behavioral focus on the president as individual, the literature collected under the rubric of the “institutional presidency” seeks to examine the presidency more broadly as an ongoing collection of regularized processes and roles (Moe 1993). Some research along these lines focuses on the formal (often, Constitutional) rules constraining and empowering presidents, as well as the duties and rights of the office as shaped by historical precedents of law, prerogative, and circumstance. These structure presidential behavior by channeling the formal and informal “recurring interactions in organizations” (Hult and Walcott 1990: 34), a phrase I will take as a basic definition of “institution.” The bulk of “institutional presidency” research centers on those interactions as they are shaped by the organizational nature of the modern presidency, highlighting the routines, procedures, and staff units that comprise the presidential branch. It provides a broadly historical account of units and functions in the EOP through different administrations, sometimes assessing typologies of staff organization and dicta of staff management. At one extreme, organization is treated as a constant (formalistic, “spokes of the wheel,” etc.); at the other, it is seen as a fungible offshoot of presidential personality. There is also a middle ground, exemplified by Walcott and Hult (1995: 3-6). “Personal contingency” approaches seek to match a given type of presidential personality with a given staff organization. Broader generalizations are sought using a “problem contingency” tack that argues that the circumstances faced by the president and presidency affects the shape of EOP evolution. That is, presidential staff institutions develop as a response to problems posed by the wider political environment. This literature is extensive and quite varied. Still, information is at least implicitly the central issue in the institutional development traced by this scholarship. After all, as Norman Thomas (1970: 561) argued long ago, the primary job of presidential staff “is to furnish the president with sufficient information and analysis to permit him to make decisions with an awareness of the available alternatives and their probable consequences.” However, there has been little progress made in exploring presidential information in terms of presidential institutions, systematically evaluating advisory systems to determine the impact differing institutions might have on the nature and amount of information the president receives. One exception that perhaps proves the rule is the comparison of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where contrasting decisions are often linked to the intentionally very different decision-making structures that produced them (see, e.g. Wilensky 1967). Burke and Greenstein (1989) also come close to what I have in mind in their structured comparison of the Eisenhower and Johnson decision-making processes with regards to Vietnam. But more frequently, presidential management structures are presented as a simple trinity -- hierarchical, collegial (“spokes-of-the-wheel”), or competitive (see Johnson 1974, or the useful summary in Graber 2003: 179-83). This is, to be sure, a useful simplifying framework. But such structures are not unitary facts, one per administration: presidents utilize multiple

-4-

formal and informal structures to channel information (Burke and Greenstein 1989), and these both vary within administrations across issue areas (Porter 1980; Walcott and Hult 1995) and shift with the priorities presidents attach to a given question or set of policies during their term (Kohl 1975; Pika 1991). Indeed, Kessel (1984) found that relatively small variations in communication networks within an administration can significantly affect information flow. Thus – ultimately, at least – the unit of analysis must be the decision, not the structure per se. This is not to say that extant research on staff structures to date is not useful to the current project; as discussed below, it provides important grounding for the hypotheses developed here. It is simply to note that, on the whole, the broad generalizations about presidential staffing that have been promulgated themselves rarely provide hypotheses appropriate for comparative, empirical testing of informational content.

B. Agendas and Organizations On the other hand, other work on institutions in political science and economics explicitly explores their informational role. While much of this literature is an offshoot of rational choice institutionalism, “rational” here should be understood to mean simply “purposive.” Indeed, the limits of bounded rationality (cf. Simon 1985; B. Jones 2001) frequently help explain why institutions are needed, and must be at the crux of models of decision-making. For example, institutions help to mitigate the uncertainty inherent in strategic interactions. They give actors an idea of the behavior to expect from each other, perhaps by giving a means of signaling intent or furnishing a focal point; they create automatic decision rules that save on cognition and information search; they provide commitment mechanisms in otherwise fluid bargaining situations (e.g., Calvert 1995; Schelling 1960; Shepsle 1991). Coordinating conventions don’t have to be the objectively “best” mechanism so long as they are commonly understood. For example, driving on the right side of the road is not clearly better than driving on the left – but everyone needs to drive on the same side. Another body of formal work on institutions deals with rules and agendas in decisionmaking. This literature ranges widely, but derives in principle from one key theoretical finding: that very few areas of decision making have stable outcomes that can be derived directly from the preferences of the participants. We often, of course, will not have full knowledge of those preferences. But even if we do, that information does not normally in itself allow us to predict a unique outcome. After all, just three self-interested participants with different preference orderings over outcomes (x, y, z) can start an unending cycle whereby x is preferred to y, y preferred to z, but z preferred to x. The famous Arrow impossibility theorem, along with the “chaos” results derived in the 1970s, made it clear that this indeterminancy is at least potentially a universal problem. In the jargon, there are very few “preference-induced” equilibria – “structure-induced” equilibria are required instead (see Shepsle 1979, 1989).

-5-

That is, we need to know the rules of the game before we know how it will come out. Those rules, whether formal or not, are agendas, where “agenda setting” might be defined as the power to determine which options are considered and in what order. As above, having no agenda can mean no result is reached -- critically, though, different agendas, even over the same options, will lead to different results. Indeed, all agendas are biased in some way (see Riker 1993). For example, part of the power of the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives is to determine not only which amendments may be offered but in what order, and to what base bill. If amendments are put up against each other, instead of against the status quo, a wholly different outcome may result. Hence the use of complicated rules like “king of the hill” or rules that themselves amend the underlying bill (Sinclair 2000: 20-28). The insight, if not the specific process, can make the jump between the branches. After all, presidents seeking decision-making advice oversee a set of institutions which guide the consideration of policy alternatives. Recall the basic definition of “institution” above: in an iterated process, who does what when? Suddenly this looks a lot like the definition of “agenda” as well. In fact, as Thomas Hammond (1986, 1993, 1994) and his collaborators have observed, to the extent that the outputs they produce are driven by the sequential consideration of sets of options, hierarchical organizations are themselves structured agendas. Organization charts even look like an extended form game tree. Further, like agendas, hierarchies are always “biased” in some way (Hammond and Thomas 1989). The structuring of those institutions will affect the alternatives that reach the president. That is: since “policymaking involves making comparisons.... an organization’s structure affects who compares what with what, so that different structures can produce different policy outcomes” (Bendor and Hammond 1992: 317). Thinking of the problem in this way has direct implications for the organizational choices the president makes. After all, the input to presidential decisions is information. In a real sense his problem is not too little advice, but too much (B. Jones 1994, 2001; March 1978; more specific to the EOP, see Kessel 1984; Thomas 1970). As Simon (1973: 270; 1976) writes, “the scarce resource is not information; it is the processing capacity to attend to information. Attention is the chief bottleneck in organizational activity, and the bottleneck becomes narrower and narrower as we move to the tops of organizations.” For reasons of time and cognitive capacity, no president could usefully receive as much information as exists on any given topic. Thus the problem is not gathering data so much as it is structuring them into some sort of equilibrium. The sea of information at the bottom of any hierarchical pyramid bears little resemblance to the puddle that reaches the top: at each level, some information flows up but, as March and Simon (1958) famously put it, more and more uncertainty is absorbed (see also Downs 1967). Put another way, institutions “narrow the choice set” (North 1986: 230). This is just as true for presidential institutions. The informational chaos they face must be structured by imposing an agenda upon it – by forcing it through a staff – just as in the world of collective preferences, equilibrium must be induced by the imposition of some sort of structured rules.

-6-

If so, a president’s original choices in this area will affect his future options – will make his subsequent decisions better or worse. Thus, how does he arrange his hierarchy -- how does he set the organizational agenda -- to achieve the informational results he wants and we the people need him to have? It is to this problem we turn next. III. Presidential Problems and Solutions “How do you decide what the President should know?” an interviewer once asked Lyndon Johnson aide Douglass Cater. Cater thought, then replied: “the man who has to choose between apples, it’s a matter of judgement. And this I would say is probably the greatest power and perquisite that presidential assistants have -- making those judgements.”3 Cater’s White House colleague, Harry McPherson, put the problem this way in his memoir (1988: 292): All the memoranda I have quoted were biased.....The real danger was that we [LBJ’s advisors] would weigh it wrong. The very process of reducing a dozen position papers and committee meetings to a three page memorandum for the President required that we exclude some arguments and data, and emphasize others. We tried to give him both sides, but our judgements colored what we wrote. Presidents are not helpless in such matters; any man who attains the office may be presumed to be familiar...with the tendency of staff men to shape what they tell him in accordance with their opinions. Presidents also choose staffs on whose values they believe they can rely. But the danger of bias or omission is always there, and it is unavoidable so long as Presidents make twenty decisions a day on the basis of information they can only receive through the filter of other men’s convictions.

Nixon counsel Leonard Garment added a third metaphor in agreeing: “there is old rule in physics that the ingredients of the screen affect the material that passes through the screen” (Reichley 1981: 62). How should presidents construct that screen or filter so that it best serves them? One means is the careful structuring of informational institutions. To do this we need to know two things: what the president needs to know; and, flowing from this, what staff structures should look like.

A. What does the President need to know? A decision process itself should not be considered “good” or “bad” based on its outcome alone. Rather, it should be assessed according to whether it brought the president the 3

Cater oral history of 5/8/69, AC 72-19, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, p. 16.

-7-

information he needed. A bad decision is not improved by the effectiveness of its implementation; on the other hand, since all structures will fail sometimes, the president’s goal is merely to reduce the incidence and costs of those failures. What kind of information do presidents need to rise to the top? Wilensky’s 1967 study of “organizational intelligence” describes high-quality information as clear, timely, reliable, logically consistent with real-life contexts, comprehensive, and diverse (1967: viii-ix; see also Graber 1992: 61-70). These characteristics are rather broad. Still, they mesh with work more specific to the presidency. For example, George (1980: Ch. 6) gives a set of decisional malfunctions, such as the avoidance of certain logical options; the presentation of a united front by advisors to the president, disagreements having already been hashed out; dependence on a single channel of information; lack of review of key premises by neutral parties (i.e., bias); and a lack of follow-up on dissenting proposals. Further, each of the basic models of presidential staffing suggest costs and benefits (George 1980; Graber 2003; Porter 1980: 229-52). The formalistic model (what Porter calls “centralized management”) provides for clear jurisdictions, a wide potential scope for information gathering, and the elimination of extraneous data; the downside, of course, is that the screening process on the way up may make decisions about what is extraneous that differ from the president’s needs. Staff may not share the presidential perspective, and may hide information that shows them in a bad light. A collegial model allows interconnection horizontally around the spokes that lead to the president, and reduces specialists’ ties to their “home” organization; however, its reliance on consensus-building may lead to “groupthink” (Janis 1982). A competitive model, by creating overlapping jurisdictions, forces a wealth of information to the president and ensures he maintains final control over decisions (Dickinson 1997); however, it may lead to deadlock (Kowert 2002) and requires that the president invest a good deal of personal energy in managing the system. Space does not allow a more detailed examination of the informational costs and benefits of these various systems here. The point for the present is that common threads run through the literature above, enabling us to draw a picture of “good advice,” recognizing that no single system will provide this all of the time. Namely: • • • •

presidents need advice that gives them a manageable amount of information; that information must be useful, in the sense that it fits real-world options; it must be “comprehensive” in that it includes all the options and an estimate of their likely success; it must be diverse, in that it provides both the “winning” and dissenting options, and (addressing George’s point) is vetted by “neutral” people not in the specialist camp.

B. How can he get to know it? Personnel Approaches. The problem discussed by the aides above is a classic principal-agent

-8-

question of hidden action and information. Since what the agent (here, the staffer) does may be unobservable by the principal (here, the president), the agent must be given incentives to act in the desired manner. McPherson, in discussing LBJ above, suggested two ameliorating mechanisms: that the president: (1) choose subordinates with care, to ensure they share his values; and (2) understand the bias of each and weight it accordingly when considering their advice. In fact that advice is quite consistent with more formal treatments of principal-agent problems that argue for a selection process centered on agent preferences, so that agents adhere to the principal’s beliefs and preferences (Arrow 1985; Moe 1984; Miller 1992; Waterman and Meier 1998). Even if staff members remain biased in some manner, knowing the direction and extent of the bias can still make advice useful (Calvert 1985).4 Careful selection of responsive subordinates on the basis of loyalty and ideological commitment -- along with the centralization of tasks within the White House partly in order to reduce monitoring costs -- is, of course, the cornerstone of work on the “politicized presidency” (Moe 1985; Nathan 1983; Weko 1995). Wilensky put it nicely: executives need “recruitment, indoctrination, and rotation” (1967: 59). This approach, however, may not solve the problem. Problems of adverse selection may arise.5 Responsiveness may overshadow competence -- in contrast to “opportunism” problems in private industry, the difficulty may not always be one of controlling self-interested behavior that is knowingly hostile to the president’s interests but rather controlling misguided enthusiasm expressed on White House letterhead (“I have a great way to help the contras!...”) Or, thirdly, the principal may not know what to ask, or know if given options are missing from the menu she receives. Information asymmetries are common when specialized tasks are being performed and overseen by generalist managers; the more specialized the task, the higher its transaction costs (see Miller 1992: 33). How does the president prevent shirking (i.e., the presentation of options that do not match his interest) by subordinate agents whose initiatives who may well have more extensive knowledge of the subject area than he does? A Structural Approach. The answer might require presidents to follow a third strategy, structuring their advisory stream to bring the “best” information to the top. In effect, the lesson of the principal-agent literature is that presidents protect themselves by “institutionalizing distrust,” to borrow Richard Rose’s useful phrase (1991: 108). As above, much of the argument about hierarchical structure presented by analysts such as Bendor, Hammond, and Miller breaks down to the ways in which different institutional structures influence what conflicts reach the president and, thus, what information he gets with regard to decisions. Earlier the notion of “uncertainty absorption” was mentioned as a standard pathology of hierarchy: as information flows upwards, subordinates tell those at the next level up what they 4

Roy Ash, budget director under Presidents Nixon and Ford, in fact described the latter’s information gathering in just these terms: “When an issue would arise, he would attempt to get the views of a number of people given to him directly. He would obviously have in his own mind some weighting that he would give to these different people, and their views. Then, after applying that weighting he would have a pretty good leg up on what his decision was going to be....And I sensed, as I watched it at work, the importance of applying different weights, from subject to subject, to the views of the people whom he consulted.” Ash Oral History, 8/4/88, Nixon Presidential Materials Project [NPMP], p. 15 5 Since the agent knows his skills and preferences better than does the principal, the principal cannot be sure that the agent she is hiring is actually qualified or really shares her preferences (rather than mouthing them in order to get the job.)

-9-

think the latter want to hear -- and what they want them to know. The usual result is that problems are weeded out as information is summarized at each successive level. What the remaining fraction contains, substantively, will depend on which half is passed up each time. As the preceding discussion makes clear, this can be affected by institutional design; and since a priority for presidents is preserving their right of choice over important decisions, they need to be alerted to key issues and ensure that their resolution is not pre-empted by lower-level officials (Neustadt 1990; George 1980: 176).6 The key question of institutional design, then, can be restated as one of designing a process by which desired information is forced through the hierarchy. Hammond (1994; see also Bendor and Hammond 1992) argues that this process is largely a function of the categories around which the institution is organized. The chief executive in any hierarchy will learn about intercategory matters, but not intra-category concerns, since the latter will be settled at a lower level. For example, if the reporting structure of the State Department is based on countries, the Secretary will hear about different issues than if it is based on policy-areas (trade, military, etc.) If economic policy flows through an interdepartmental organization like the Ford administration’s Economic Policy Board, the president will get different advice than if domestic and foreign economic news come to him in separate streams. However the units are defined, presidents will learn largely about what crosses units’ jurisdictions, because that will be the disputes that rise to the top. Most prescriptive works on management design argue that structure should be matched up with important environmental categories (e.g., with a division to deal with each). Hammond argues, however, based on the foregoing, that if a chief executive wants to be well informed about his decision-making environment, the categories on which the firm is structured should cut across the categories used for classifying elements of the firm’s environment (1994: 152). A useful point of comparison is Chandler (1962), who discusses the shift in large American corporations from a functional model of organization (departments centered on accounting, sales, and the like) to a product-line model (encompassing all functions as applied to a specific set of commodities). One case is DuPont Chemical, which in the late 1910s reported to its president via departments such as purchasing, sales, development, production, and engineering. The Production Department, to take one example, was then divided into different subdepartments handling various types of goods (explosives, dyes, paint and chemicals, etc.) In 1921, however, it was proposed that those subdepartments become the departments themselves: Explosives, for example, would become a division in its own right, subsuming most of the functions needed to keep its product-lines going, and reporting directly to the president of DuPont (Chandler 1962: 74-7, 108-9). Chandler argues this change made sense; it fostered continued corporate growth and produced managers with a broader range of knowledge about corporate functions. However, there is no optimal solution to organizational problems: the real discussion is what type of ignorance each 6

Shapiro (1981: 49ff) makes a parallel argument about judicial appeals systems, noting that they are designed to provide the top of a hierarchy with nondigested instances of system failure.

-10-

firm (or president) wants at the top. We can operationalize this question using Chandler’s dimensions -- deciding whether the firm should implement structures centered around functional lines or product-lines. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the same people, with the same preferences, arrayed differently along these dimensions can yield different outcomes. [Figure 1 here]7

This has important implications for studying the institutional presidency. Consider that a policy staff might be organized around cross-cutting functional lines -- speechwriting, statutedrafting, and the like -- or around its own sort of product lines, or, better, “policy-lines” (since government’s product is, in a real sense policy. Such lines could include economic, domestic, and foreign policy or, even more specifically, agriculture, education, housing, etc.). Both methods would produce options for the president, but different advisory networks would be involved. The former would bring together different personnel depending on the task at hand; the latter would mainly unite specialists. In the modern EOP, replete with specialized policy staffs from NSC aides to the Office for Policy Development, the latter seems to be -- at least formally, an important caveat -- the dominant method of staffing. Superficially, this parallels legislative developments. As Keith Krehbiel (1991) has argued, Congressional committees spring from the desire of members in the aggregate to ameliorate their uncertainty about policy outcomes: committees are formally established, bureaucratically layered, and substantively specialized by subject matter with strict issue jurisdictions. In these regards, the committees bear resemblance to contemporary White House staffs; and their rationale mirrors presidents’. Ceteris paribus, more staff should be beneficial, the better to increase the president's stock of information. Yet is all else equal? Members of Congress, in large part, are specialists: the incentives of the body make this imperative. Further, members of Congressional committees are peers of the full body and are controlled by it - thus they have incentives to report honestly. Presidents, on the other hand, cannot specialize; and they cannot reliably seek cues from trusted peers – they have no peers. There is no presidential equivalent to Krehbiel’s “majoritarian principle.”8 Few presidential staffers fully share the president's viewpoint; a given aide may not know how a given transaction fits into others. One can argue, then, that compartmentalized policy advice channels cannot produce the information the president most needs: namely, how different problems interact across policy areas. Longtime presidential troubleshooter W. Averell Harriman argued, “There is only one Presidency, and all talk of ‘two Presidencies’ – one foreign and one domestic – is nonsense. All 7

For purposes of simplicity, the managerial choices in Figure 1 are assumed to be by Management-by-Exception (MBE) rules: if a manager’s subordinates agree, he accepts that recommendation; if they are divided, he chooses the option he prefers (Hammond 1986: 387). 8 As Ford chief-of-staff Dick Cheney noted, “In a legislature, everybody gets a vote. Downtown in the White House,....[t]here’s only one vote cast, and it’s in the Oval Office” (Kessel 1984: 160).

-11-

policies within and beyond our national frontiers have to be concerted and integrated. They can only be different aspects of the same national purpose” (Hughes 1974: 349). A functional approach, on the other hand, seems close to the organizational formulation Richard Neustadt urged long ago: “the most effective kind of staff organization is an organization built around what I would call an action-forcing process, by which I mean a steady stream of actionable issues, concrete issues, that have to be attended to, issues where something has to be done, a decision has to be reached” (1965: 283). Notably, as Neustadt later elaborated, these streams are “differentiated by particular sorts of actions, not by program areas” (1990: 221). This advice nestles comfortably within another aspect of organizational design. Jurisdictions need not be unique, and managers are often urged to create alternate, and competing, sources of information. Such “parallel processing” has the benefit of providing a check on each flow of information, and of allowing a clearer assessment of different staffers’ preferences and biases (Simon 1976). Nixon domestic adviser John Ehrlichman (1982: 95), for example, tells of a situation when Nixon asked him to become involved in defense matters so as to give the president an "outsider's view" on the situation. John Kennedy’s inclusion of domestic advisers like Robert Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorensen in deliberations over the Cuban Missile Crisis reflected his discomfort with the advice received from the CIA and Defense Department leading up to the Bay of Pigs. When practiced systematically, this strategy has costs, in time, timeliness, and managerial effort. Further, as Herbert Simon points out, the higher up the hierarchy it is practiced, the less compatible is parallel processing with coordination of the various streams. Still, some presidents have done this: beyond the examples above, notions of parallel processing run through the literature describing Franklin Roosevelt’s “competitive ad-hocracy” (Dickinson 1997: 206-7; George 1980: 150) and, as discussed further below, Reagan’s first-term “troika” (Buchanan 1991). Roosevelt did the coordinating himself; Reagan delegated it. In both cases, though, broader policy review invited competition and review by generalists more attuned to the widest range of presidential goals and needs. That is, it created a functionally-driven staff structure.

C. Hypotheses on Hierarchies and Information The discussion above suggests several potential, if admittedly preliminary, hypotheses. First, if different structures (i.e., different combinations of jurisdictions, sequences, and preferences) bring different types of information to the attention of the president, functionally-based structures will give the president more useful information than policy-specific structures. We will also expect that multiple sources of competing information (parallel processing) will give the president better information, though at some cost.

-12-

Again, by “better” or more useful information, I mean advice with the characteristics traced above: that it is tied to real world policy and political realities; that it is comprehensive; that it is diverse. Finally, drawing on the principal-agent literature, we should expect presidents will get better information about policy matters when they have (a) effective monitoring mechanisms; or (b) known elements of bias (preferably equivalent to the president's own, through the appointments process) along the information channels.9 Tracing these hypotheses e discussion above gives us leverage on a key question: why has the expansion of the presidential branch not necessarily resulted in enhanced presidential effectiveness? Quite simply, the growth has been along counterproductive lines. There is not enough space here – nor enough data available at this point – to test these hypotheses fully. However, archival evidence from three presidencies (Truman, Nixon, and Reagan) provides a view of three important “change points,” where presidential staff organizations changed. What impact did that shift have? In various ways these cases illuminate aspects of the key question: what are the effects of a given institution on the type, amount, timing, and quality of information the president receives? IV. Exploring the Evidence: Three Brief Cases In the following sections, the hypotheses above will be explored, stressing the distinction between “product line” and “policy line” organizations of the EOP. While this cannot yet be systematic, a number of useful preliminary conclusions can be drawn. A. The 1952 Reorganization of the Budget Bureau In 1952, the Bureau of the Budget (BoB) – the predecessor agency of today’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – was reorganized to center its advice flow around specific policy areas, instead of broader functions. The types of issues that flowed to the top of the agency, and thus to the president, were changed by the restructuring, and not in a way that met the president’s needs. As a result, the reorganization did not take root. Interestingly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the president’s BoB staff were thinking of that organization in exactly Chandler's "functional"/"product-line" terms. The BoB, since its shift to the Executive Office of the President (EOP) in 1939, had quickly become indispensable to the Note the underlying assumption (which is just that), that divergence in institutional structures is driven by informational needs. Other literatures suggest other baseline assumptions. Institutions might tend to converge in structure, as sociologists’ work on isomorphism predicts (Powell and DiMaggio 1991). Or, some parts of the information search could be symbolic -- touching base, building consensus (George 1980, even Porter 1980). Or, and this is clearly sometimes true, institutions could be foisted on the president by other actors, especially Congress. 9

-13-

president, serving as his chief staff resource for both creation of the executive budget and clearance of the wider executive branch’s desired policy initiatives. Given the small size of the White House, the BoB served effectively as an extension of the president’s personal staff, at the edges indistinguishable from it (see Dickinson and Rudalevige 2004-05). However, many members of the Bureau staff were not entirely satisfied with the organization’s performance, and as seasoned public administrators they thought naturally in structural terms. In September 1947 deputy director Elmer Staats presented director James Webb with a long summary memorandum laying out the pros and cons of reorganization.10 In it, Staats noted that “the historical development of the Bureau has been along lines of functions, skills, or processes.” By 1947, as Figure 2 shows, the main functions were the annual compilation of the executive budget (via the Division of Estimates), advice to agencies on effective management (Division of Administrative Management), the clearance of executive legislation and testimony (Legislative Reference Division ), and macroeconomic forecasting (Fiscal Division). Each of these cut across subject-matter areas and each organized its work around some aspect of the annual budget and legislative cycles. [Figure 2 here] The main problem, Staats argued, was that “the organization of the Bureau along highly functional lines, with no part of the Bureau having primary responsibility for interdivisional coordination short of the Director’s office, makes...management exceedingly difficult.... [A]lmost any major problem cuts across the responsibilities and functions of the various divisions.” Budgetary questions were often divorced from legislative and management questions, all separate from the broader fiscal picture: “every individual must coordinate himself with an indefinite and sometimes unknown number of individuals in other divisions concerned with a similar or related problem.” This might be successful, but such success was ad hoc. Staats suggested coordination “could be realized if the Bureau were organized primarily along vertical lines with key individuals designated as points of coordination and liaison with certain agencies.” That is, the Agriculture Department would report to a division devoted to agriculture which contained the budgetary, management, and fiscal staff. While Staats stopped short of recommending a wholesale shift, he thought this broader view worthwhile. He argued the Fiscal Division was superfluous, especially given the new Council of Economic Advisers, and suggested a Division of Program Management incorporating Administrative Management and some Estimates staff to complement a new Estimates framework (renamed the Budgetary Standards Division.) Alternatively, program coordination personnel could be placed in the Director’s office -- a solution that would have resembled the program associate directors (PADs) later added by the Nixon administration.11

Elmer B. Staats to the Director, "Organization and Management of the Bureau of the Budget," memo of 25 September 1947, Frederick J. Lawton papers, Box 3, folder [BoB - Organization], Harry S. Truman Library. 11 Staats, “Organization and Management,” pp. 3-4, 18 10

-14-

Nothing happened with these suggestions immediately (see Berman 1979: 45-7). However, they regained momentum in 1951 after the Hoover Commission put pressure on the Bureau to reorganize and longtime BoB staffer Frederick Lawton, sympathetic to this, became budget director. Charles Stauffacher, an architect of the reorganization, summed up his thinking in a memo to Lawton in January 1952. The idea was to shift the burden of coordinating “interrelation of budgetary, management, fiscal, and legislative problems within areas of major concern” from lower-level staff to the Bureau top management by creating relatively pure policy-line divisions centered around government program areas (national security, “resources and works,” and the like). The separate fiscal, management, and estimates divisions would be consolidated. Thus, most of the staff would specialize on particular policy areas (“this, in my opinion, is a real advantage”). The idea, quite explicitly, was to “bring the more important issues up for action by the Director.”12 The reorganization was announced in mid-March, 1952 (see Figure 3).13 In the end five “operating divisions” were created: the Military, International, Resources and Civil Works, Labor and Welfare, and General Government Divisions. Each was assigned a group of substantively-related executive departments and agencies; “the Divisions represent a grouping of Bureau staff concerned with a general field or program area of the Government.” They brought together “budget examiners, fiscal analysts, and administrative analysts [to] work together within each” area. As Stauffacher wrote in the subsequent orientation manual for Bureau staff, the Bureau had needed “a better grouping of functions and a stronger supervisory structure to secure continuing consideration within the Bureau of the interrelation of budgetary, fiscal, management, and legislative problems with respect to major areas of the Government's program.” He also hoped the new structure would aid in “strengthening…the Bureau's working relationship with the agencies of the Executive Branch.” [Figure 3 here] Note that the claim that “more important” issues would rise through the hierarchy was subjective: the only thing certain was that different issues would so rise. In the original organization, the Director was given options arising from functional divergences: fiscal aspects vs. agency-oriented budget complaints vs. managerial advice. In the reorganization, those claims would be resolved at the division level and the arguments reaching the Director would be competing claims of different policy realms for resources (monetary and managerial). As Stauffacher noted, “I happen to believe that this type of a setup would produce more of a product, though it may lose certain advantages of dual or triple perspective along the way.” Charles B. Stauffacher to Director and Assistant Director, “Outline of Budget Bureau Reorganization Proposal,” memo of 17 January 1952. Lawton papers, Box 4, [BoB Reorganization – 4/1/52 Working Papers], HSTL; see also the attached “Notes on Organization of Budget Bureau,” dated 22 January 1952. 13 See Bureau of the Budget Office Memorandum 358, dated 14 March 1952; Office Memoranda 361 and 362, dated March 31 and April 8, "for Bureau staff only," provide details of the new structure. All can be found in the Lawton papers, Box 3, HSTL. The quotes in this paragraph are drawn from these two memoranda. Confusingly, in Memorandum 358 the new organization was proclaimed to be "on functional lines" since by function the authors meant a function of government (e.g., the military). But in the sense that term has been used in this paper, this was clearly a "product-line" reorganization -- functions (budgeting, legislative planning, etc.) were subsumed under products or policies (since the product of the government is policy). 12

-15-

For Lawton, the reorganization made sense, since the “product” he wanted was strong control over budgetary decision making. Harold Seidman, then a Bureau staffer, later commented in an oral history that “Lawton viewed the mission of the Budget Bureau from the perspective of a budget examiner. He tried to organize the Bureau into five little Budget Bureaus around the budget process.”14 The reorganization, then, created a “policy-line” orientation for the Budget Bureau, exactly in line with what Chandler praised in DuPont and the other companies he studied. Information flowing into the Bureau, and thus to its director and thence the President, came through the budget-oriented divisions. A CEA staffer told his boss that “Under this arrangement, there will be a tendency to restrict economic analysis to problems which are closely and directly tied to the estimates work, with the result that the broader type,… which is concerned with the interrelationship of program areas and with the effects on the economy, may suffer.” Bureau staffers from the now-defunct Fiscal Division argued the same thing, urging unsuccessfully that their analysts be maintained in a separate branch within each division rather than being integrated horizontally into programmatic units.15 On paper, the central offices were to take the wider view. In practice, they were insufficient to the task. Staats had worried back in 1947 that “one of the primary sources of value of the Bureau to the President is that it can give him a horizontal or government-wide approach to problems raised by a particular agency” and thus that a vertical -- or policy-line structure -would risk “the ever-present tendency to lose overall perspective and become advocates of any agency position….” Seidman argued in his oral history that this “was one of the things that greatly impaired the Bureau’s role... Of course, [Lawton’s] reorganization didn’t stick….It was a very misguided reorganization.”16 Seidman’s negative view represents the scholarly consensus as well: the reorganization is generally judged to have provided the president with less useful advice. As Larry Berman summed up (1979: 47; see also Tomkin 1998: 39): “the reorganization destroyed or seriously impaired those BoB units with across-the-board outlook and organized them around the budget divisions, which were agency oriented. Problems immediately manifested themselves in the management area and before long the Budget Bureau became open game for presidential reform groups” beginning, in fact, as early as the new Eisenhower administration. The reorganization was particularly damaging since Eisenhower wanted to stress management issues in government. He wound up creating a separate task force for the purpose.

14

Harold Seidman oral history, HSTL, pp. 108f. J. Weldon Jones to Mr. Staats, "Program Analysis in the New Operating Divisions," memo of 27 March 1952. Lawton papers, Box 4, [BoB Reorganization – 4/1/52 Working Papers], HSTL. This memo covers two others from Fiscal staff to Jones, who sent them along to Staats. 16 Interestingly, some 40 years later a new reorganization of the OMB returned to the same ground under Director Alive Rivlin by creating Resource Management Offices (RMOs) that combined budgetary and management staff. An evaluation of this reorganization is underway for inclusion in future versions of this paper; thanks to Jeffrey Weinberg for bringing this to my attention. 15

-16-

B. Nixon and the Supersecretaries A 1972 case offers another example of how shifting presidential advisory structures might impact the kind of information presidents get. In this case, the approach was never fully realized because of Watergate (Bonafede and Iglehart 1973). However, it highlights the role of manipulating jurisdictions and bureaucratic sequence. By 1972, the size of the executive branch and the President’s personal staff had grown greatly. There were now eleven Cabinet departments, and new agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Office of Economic Opportunity manifested the regulatory and social service explosion of the 1960s. Coordination of these multiple sources of advice and policy was becoming a more complex task than ever. It was one with which Richard Nixon was much concerned. “The key to a successful presidency is in the decision-making process,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs (1990: 337). “I felt that the matters brought before a President for decisions should be only those that cannot or should not be made at a lower level on the White House staff, or by the Cabinet member responsible.” In part, this reflected the huge number of decisions pressing in, but also Nixon’s dislike of face-to-face interaction (see, e.g., Reeves 2001). From the start, he had walled off his foreign policy staff in an effort to shift important decisions in that realm from Foggy Bottom to the White House. His assistant for national security, Henry Kissinger, noted (and abetted) “an almost total separation between the domestic and foreign policy sides” of the Nixon staff, to the point that they were “prisoners in adjacent cells” (1982: 77). On the domestic side, Nixon had already tried at least two modes of policy advising. Originally the process was rather freewheeling, providing wide access to the president for strong ideological counterweights. White House advisers Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Arthur Burns were given overlapping jurisdictions, and they battled fiercely over policy formulation (notably the Family Assistance Plan, which would have fundamentally changed the welfare system). But while this structure gave him a wide array of policy options, Nixon disliked the level of conflict that played out in front of him. In response the centralized Domestic Council was created in 1970, filtering options through staffer John Ehrlichman and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman (Harper 1996; Kessel 1975; R. Moe 1976). The President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization (PACEO, known as the Ash Council after its chairman, Roy Ash), which had recommended the creation of the Domestic Council,17 also proposed a large-scale departmental reorganization combining Cabinet departments with related substantive duties into “super-departments.” Single departments were envisaged for Economic Development, Community Development, Natural Resources, and Human Resources. A variant of this plan was proposed by Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union, but Congress was unenthusiastic and most of the resultant bills never escaped committee (Arnold 1998). 17

As well as an accompanying transformation of the BoB into a new Office of Management and Budget.

-17-

By the end of his first term, Nixon was again frustrated with the general flow of information reaching him. He noted (1973: 3) that “most of today’s major governmental goals and activities cross existing departmental lines in a way that makes coherent policy formation and effective management extremely difficult.” He felt that too much information flowed his way – yet not of the right sort, material too unimportant to be worthy of presidential notice. Ash put it this way in an oral history: [Nixon] didn't really feel...that he should be spending substantial parts of his time with what he considered second and third order issues that a lot of Department heads wanted to bring before him, but save his time for the first order issues. But he didn't want lesser matters to be out of sight, out of mind....he wanted them to be handled consistent with his own policies and objectives, yet without a lot of time of his. Which meant some sort of a structural arrangement that gave him that comfort....

After the 1972 election, Nixon spent much of his time at Camp David with Ehrlichman and Haldeman, searching for second term changes in personnel and structure that would give him that comfort (Ehrlichman 1982; Reeves 2001: 544ff). They dusted off the Ash “supersecretary” idea but decided they needed an administrative approach without Congressional approval. One was suggested by then-OMB head Caspar Weinberger. He suggested that Nixon follow the model of California Governor Ronald Reagan and place groups of related Cabinet departments under four or five presidential appointees styled after “Executive Vice Presidents.” These officers [Weinberger wrote] would not have day-to-day administrative duties, but rather would coordinate the activities of those departments and agencies placed under him. They would also serve as the spokesman for those agencies in presenting their ideas and views to the President, and would convey Presidential policy to the agency heads, and be responsible to the President for its execution....[E]ach would be free of detailed administrative duties or of the task of 'running' an agency, but each would have coordinating duties over a large group of agencies and departments which are now supposed to report to the President directly.18

The eventual plan followed this basic outline. The focus was the creation of a new White House reporting structure. This included two components: five Assistants to the President with crosscutting responsibilities for policy and administration in different subject areas (domestic, foreign, and economic policy, White House administration, and executive management), and three “Counsellors” who would channel most of the domestic Cabinet officers’ input to the White House.19 (See Figure 4.) The White House staff itself would be cut back as Counsellors took over most of the functions of staffers working for the Domestic Council; this also allowed Nixon loyalists from the White House staff to be placed in sub-Cabinet positions across the bureaucracy (e.g., Ehrlichman aide Egil “Bud” Krogh became undersecretary of Transportation). 18

Caspar Weinberger to President, “Reorganization Along Lines of ‘Corporate Executive Vice-Presidencies,’” memo of 14 November 1972, WHSF: Staff member and Office files: H.R. Haldeman, Alpha Name Files, Box 107, [Caspar Weinberger 1972], NPMP. 19 The respective assistants were to be Ehrlichman, Kissinger, George Shultz (who was also Secretary of the Treasury), Haldeman, and Ash (now OMB director).

-18-

[Figure 4 here] This startling proposal, which fundamentally reworked jurisdictions and bureaucratic sequence, was designed, as Ash put it above, to give the president increased control over policymaking while (at least on the domestic side) spending less time doing so. Ehrlichman said in a January 1973 press conference that “the Counsellor will serve as the focal point for those lines of reporting on a common subject, so that the President will benefit from fewer lines of reporting coming into him on a given subject.”20 By May 1973, the reorganization was thrown overboard with Haldeman and Ehrlichman (they resigned April 30) in an attempt to appease Watergate’s circling sharks. Its formulation, however, does suggest that Nixon considered staff structure as an informational variable, and that it mattered as such. He certainly understood that the issues and options reaching his desk would shift.21 The assistants would be authorized to deal with a wide array of disputes, including “line” functions within their purview (Ehrlichman 1982: 210; Nixon 1973). In fact, the Ash Council’s original proposals were changed to increase the super-departments’ capacity for cross-specialty management (Arnold 1998: 297). Would this help the president? Nixon’s overall organization already separated domestic and foreign affairs. The “counsellor” system promised to push the options offered by various streams of domestic policy down to the staff level. Parallel processing would diminish or disappear. There was, further, no means of coordinating different policy streams – the assistants would report separately to the president. Nor did any of them have broad perspectives that could replicate the president’s own vantage.22 Haldeman’s notes from the Camp David meetings reveal what he called an “insight”: namely, “P doesn't really want to work w/just a few. He wants better people that he can work with.”23 It is true that the supersecretary scheme would have expanded the number of White House aides with direct input to the president (though sharply limiting the number of advisers who on paper reported directly to him). Still, in large part, Haldeman’s insight was wishful thinking. The level of delegation the reorganization contemplated endangered Nixon’s authority. And there was no mechanism for combining the counsellors’ streams short of the president’s own mind. Still, in two senses this was not a pure policy-line reorganization. The stress was instead on the preference side, with more carefully chosen subordinates (who would, further, be dispersed 20

John Ehrlichman, press briefing of 5 January 1973, Office of the White House Press Secretary. WHSF: Staff Member and Office Files: John W. Dean III: Subject Files, Box 63, [Reorganization 1972/73 (1 of 5)], NPMP. This was not a statutory reorganization, Ehrlichman stressed, but a way to channel advice: “simply a change in the President’s relationship to the Departments and agencies at his end of the Executive Branch.” 21 “Discussion Outline: November 14, 1972, 10:00 a.m., Meeting with the President.” WHSF: Staff Member and Office Files: H.R. Haldeman, Box 14, [Camp David File (Nov.-Dec. 1972)], NPMP. 22 Indeed, Nixon complained in the Camp David meetings about the “problem of people in White House without portfolio.” Ehrlichman notes of 12/13/72 meeting with President, NPMP. 23 “11/14 1530 Aspen (Ash, Malek, E),” Haldeman Notes Oct-Nov-Dec 1972, Box 46, [Oct. 1, 1972 - Nov. 17, 1972, Part I], NPMP.

-19-

into the operations end of the bureaucracy). The five assistants to the president themselves would receive a wide array of competing input; Ehrlichman, defending the system (he, of course, would be empowered by it), stressed the vantage the structure gave White House staff: “in the trade-off discussions and say a question on the subject of, for instance, economic discrimination, how can we best spend our money, someone who has an overview like the Counsellor for Human Resources is going to be in an ideal position to give good advice to the President.”24 As Joan Hoff put it (1994: 74), the “Nixonian system of corporate governance,” derived from the Ash Council’s “horizontal, functional design” for government, was to elevate “generalists (policy politicians) to oversee the work of civil service specialists.” Nixon commented at Camp David that “we’ll get good hacks in [the] departments under this system.... Most people won’t get their charge out of this system, but it will work better.”25 “Hacks” in this context is almost a compliment: it did not refer to party careerists but Nixon loyalists with administrative skills. Nixon would make fewer decisions, but the bulk of the others would be made by better people, i.e., competent generalists. A second notable aspect is the planned cuts in the White House staff. One upshot might have been an increased stress on “institutional staff” as the Brownlow Commission had recommended long before (Dickinson 1997). Ehrlichman argued that “this [structure] is asking that the work previously done in the White House be done at the Cabinet level.” And at Camp David, the President had stressed: “no staff for counsellors.”26 However, it is not clear how thoroughly a decentralized system would have been implemented. C. Trimming the Troika: Ronald Reagan, 1981-89 Ronald Reagan’s administration provides a dramatic “change point” for consideration in the shift, at the start of the second term, from a semi-competitive “troika” arrangement to a single chief-of-staff at the head of a more formal structure. The former, by promoting generalist review of specialist information, proved more successful than the latter. As Reagan took office in 1981, he surprised many by naming James A. Baker III, a Bush (and Ford) campaign strategist, as his new chief of staff. Longtime Reagan confidant Michael Deaver became deputy chief of staff, and California aide Edwin Meese III became counselor to the president. Whatever the titles, the three held equal rank and were known as the “troika”. On paper, they divvied up substantive and procedural responsibilities, with Baker taking politics (and paper-flow), Meese policy, and Deaver public relations. But in fact they worked closely together (Kirschten 1982; Smith 1988: 295-7; Witherspoon 1991: 135-7). Closely, but hardly seamlessly: troika members and their aides and partisans jostled for influence, with their battles often spilling over into the press.

24

He added: “The raison d’être of a Counsellor or White House assistant is to be an honest broker and he wouldn’t last here very long if he weren’t.” Ehrlichman press briefing, pp. 12, 16 25 Ehrlichman notes of 11/14/72 meeting with President, NPMP. 26 Ehrlichman press briefing, p. 11; Ehrlichman notes of 11/21/72 meeting with President, NPMP.

-20-

Under Meese – though effectively under the thumb of the troika as a whole – a series of seven Cabinet Councils were created, quite similar in form and intent to “policy councils” Ash had once suggested unsuccessfully to Nixon.27 The Councils brought Cabinet members frequently to the White House, cementing their loyalty to a presidential perspective while warding off bilateral lobbying (Campbell 1986: Ch. 3). At the end of 1984, Donald T. Regan, then Secretary of the Treasury, engineered a job switch with Baker (Smith 1988: 322; Regan 1988: 220-31). Meese went to the Justice Department as Attorney General; Deaver returned to the private sector. Regan, then, would serve as a single chief of staff in place of the three-way troika. Newly released archival records from the Ronald Reagan Library provide an interesting insight into Regan’s thoughts as he took over. He found from a variety of solicited memos on organization and staffing that the factionalism between the Baker, Meese, and Deaver camps was real and bitter. Roger Porter, then at the Office of Policy Development, wrote a series of eight memos to Regan, giving him a brief history of White House staff organization in the postwar era and making suggestions to fight the “fragmentation” he saw in policy development and coordination. He suggested the consolidation of the Cabinet Councils (to just two) and the creation of Policy Management and Policy Implementation Groups.28 Regan aide Alfred Kingon, detailed to survey the lay of the first term land, reported: “I am convinced after my talks that this White House has been riddled with overlapping that caused the internecine warfare that became part of the public domain of this administration. You can stop it...”29 Regan tried. He instituted a far more hierarchical system, one where all communications flows (save one, see below) were through his office. Regan felt that the troika left an organizational vacuum, with too many people performing duplicative tasks. Thus he downsized the Cabinet Councils, limited direct access to the President, and sought to utilize a private-sector inspired “management-by-objective.” Despite these efforts there is general consensus that the first term troika served Reagan better than did Regan. While the earlier system was messy (Baker aide Richard Darman, later to be Bush OMB director, told Kingon “there is no ‘screwier’ organization set up in all White House history”), the competition between White House factions ensured that a wide array of information got to president (Buchanan 1991). The consolidation of Cabinet Councils further shrunk lines of access. A private memo from David Gergen to Regan put it this way: “in the incessant jockeying for power, creative juices often ran strong and they added immensely to the Ash disliked the counsellor idea: he wanted to bring all Cabinet officers to the White House, rather than elevating some; instead of “principal Secretaries,” each “Policy Council” should be made up of relevant Cabinet secretaries and have an executive director from the EOP. Larry Higby to H.R. Haldeman, “Ash Revised Feeling on Reorganization,” memo of 21 November 1972. WHSF: Staff Member and Office Files: H.R. Haldeman, Box 14, [Camp David File (Nov.-Dec. 1972)], NPMP. See also Ash oral history, especially pp. 48ff. 28 The Porter memos (the quote is from memo I, dated 19 January 1985) are in the Donald T. Regan Files, Box 2, [White House Organization: Memos Porter to Regan, CFOA 407], Ronald Reagan Library [RRL], p. 13. 29 Kingon to Regan, “Policy Update/Strategic Planning,” memo of 25 January 1985, Regan Files, [White House Transition: Solicited Advice on Organization and Personnel, 2 of 3], RRL, p. 13. 27

-21-

quality of his [Reagan’s] stewardship.”30 Take, for example, national security advising. The National Security Council serves as an excellent example of a “policy-line” agency -- and over time its staff has accrued more and more tangible functions, from budget preparation to press relations to speechwriting. This means those tasks are subordinated to one substantive view. However, early on the Reagan administration made an effort to bring the NSC staff into the purview of the president’s top generalist advisers. Richard Allen, the first of Reagan’s six assistants for national security affairs, did not report directly to the president, but through Meese. Allen did brief Reagan, but not alone; Meese was always present. Since Meese was there, Baker wanted to be there -- and so Deaver would inevitably come as well (Pfaltzgraff and Davis 1990: 74ff). The system was unwieldy, but it worked; as above, the troika “institutionalized distrust” in a politically astute manner, giving Reagan usefully competing channels of parallel processing and reflecting security affairs through a distinctly generalist and pragmatic lens. A year later, longtime Reagan friend William Clark replaced Allen and regained direct access to the president. “There is no question that the system changed dramatically when Clark came in,” noted Deaver (Kessel 1984: 252). The troika became a foursome in some respects; and the NSC staff began to grow again. A Crisis Management Center, with ten million dollars worth of computer and communications equipment, was installed. Now the NSC had access to the raw data contained in the State Department and Pentagon computers, and began to use it, along with electronic mail systems that allowed “paper” to flow without clearance or regard for a chain of command (see Hinckley 1986; Mayer and McManus 1988). While Clark was not a security specialist, his immediate successors -- notably Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter -were. And once advisers subsequent to Clark had lost the personal advantage he held, they “attempt[ed] to gain virtually total control over the flow of national security information to the president” (Bailey and Halper 1986: 189). Because of Reagan's detachment from (at least) the more mundane aspects of foreign affairs, controlling that information flow was crucial. New chief of staff Regan was unable to gain jurisdiction over national security affairs. And without his knowledge, CIA chief William Casey, McFarlane, and Poindexter, were encouraging NSC staff to delve into the direction of complicated covert operations involving Central America and the Middle East, a state of affairs that when disclosed in late 1986 erupted into the Iran-contra scandal. It is hard to know what information was being received by the president at what time during this process (for efforts at recreating the operations that made up Iran-contra, see Draper 1991; Mayer and McManus 1988; Walsh 1997). However, it seems clear that the “loop” was very tightly drawn: information about the various phases of the project was produced and evaluated mainly by NSC specialists. What President Reagan himself knew, and when, is a controversial topic; however, the president evidently made little effort to check facts or gain access to competing information. The Tower Commission later noted that there was little critical review of the project and less interagency coordination, and took Regan to task for failing to control the Gergen to Regan, “White House Operations,” memo of 25 January 1985 , Regan Files, [White House Transition: Solicited Advice on Organization and Personnel, 2 of 3], RRL.

30

-22-

decision-making process (Tower et al. 1987). No generalist “reality check” occurred; indeed, those high officials with broad political experience who had some input -- e.g., Caspar Weinberger and especially George Shultz -- disapproved of the operation in its early stages and were subsequently cut off from the advising process. Instead, issues were resolved by narrowly-focused staffers who had no business resolving them; the institutional structure failed to push them to the top. Neustadt (1990: 279) deems Iran-contra a “perfect illustration” of a president failing to protect his future power stakes. Staff structure had something, though hardly everything, to do with that failure, the flip side of Reagan’s first term troika success. V. Conclusions and Future Directions As the case studies make clear, all staff serve as a screen, and how those screens are constructed will affect presidents’ information and thus their decision making. This in itself, of course, is not a new observation. One of the few communications-oriented studies of the White House concludes that “the organizational structure imposed on the White House in each term directly affected information flow into the Oval Office as well as the extent to which other sources of information were used in the decision-making process” (Witherspoon 1991: 178). What is new here is the attempt to build hypotheses that systematize the construction – and evaluation – of those structures. I have suggested that presidents will find themselves better served by advising systems that cut across different policy areas, centered on broader White House functions. These hypotheses have not been fully tested; but the brief accounts of presidential staff “change points” provided here indicate that staff choices have clear implications for information flow, and show that presidents and EOP staff thought about these issues in that manner. Where presidents have cut themselves off from multiple points of view, they have gotten information well-attuned to one vantage but more poorly integrated with the various tasks associated with the modern presidency. As this project develops, I hope to fill in the details of these broad portraits. Ideally, the same decision-topic can be traced through different advising policy structures. While precise measurement is impossible, there is more room for systematic study than is usually exploited. “We can find out...what efforts were made to collect the relevant information, through what channels it was brought to the point of decision, and what chance the decision-makers had to consider it at all” (Deutsch 1963: 161). Given a random set of presidential decisions, we can work backwards from the president (i.e., the decision area) to evaluate what sequence each decision went through -- which advisors, having which jurisdictions and (tougher) what preferences. The primary independent variable, then, is the structure of the staff institution set up by the president for a given decision or class of decisions. Is it organized around an actionforcing process cutting across policy lines, or is it organized through specific policy areas? With what impact on the president’s decision? Collecting, not to mention coding, this kind of data will be difficult. Still, even within case studies of this sort, we can achieve some methodological discipline, the same variables collected across carefully selected units (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994; George and McKeown 1985; McKeown 2001).

-23-

For the questions raised here are at the heart of the modern, institutional presidency. For instance: Why have staffs increased in numbers and specialized knowledge often failed to advance presidential prospects? Is there a best way to set up staff, or is “personal contingency” the best we can hope for? Or, from the other side of the debate, do the constraints of institutional expectation and process prevent presidential initiative in this area? Given the bounds within which presidents operate, the ability to lead might well depend on the president’s skill in protecting his prerogatives of choice. In 1985, press secretary Marlin Fitzwater sent incoming staff chief Regan a prescient memo. “You must show you are managing for the President, not managing the President,” Fitzwater wrote. “This will be difficult because he may be willing to let you manage him.” Presidents must not allow this to happen. Thus, in the end, the words of Dwight Eisenhower still ring true: “leadership is as vital in conference as it is in battle” (Burke and Greenstein 1989: 265). From the president’s perspective, problems are not either/or: not foreign or domestic, substantive or political. Nor do they exist in isolation: each must be dealt with of a piece with a large number of other problems. Maximizing his own influence on this entire set of problems requires tying together the pieces of information and advice garnered from different sources. Clearly, a president has to do this by himself. But the way he organizes his staff, and structures the flow of information within his administration, makes it easier or harder. If the president must remain ignorant about a large number of things, he must nevertheless “attempt to minimize the costs of his ignorance” (Thomas 1970: 563) – for his sake, and ours. That way leadership lies.

REFERENCES Arnold, Peri. 1998. Making the Managerial Presidency, 2nd revised ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Arrow, Kenneth J. 1974. The Limits of Organization. New York: W.W. Norton. --------. 1985. “The Economics of Agency,” in John W. Pratt and Richard Zeckhauser (eds.), Principals and Agents: The Structure of Business. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Bailey, Norman and Stefan Halper. 1986. “National Security for Whom?” Washington Quarterly 9(1): 187-92. Balz, Dan and Bob Woodward. 2002. “Bush Awaits History’s Judgments,” Washington Post (February 3): A1. Bendor, Jonathan and Thomas Hammond. 1992. “Rethinking Allison's Models,” American Political Science 22.

Review 86(2): 301-

Berke, Richard L. and David E. Sanger. 2002. “Some in Administration Grumble As Aide's Role Seems to Expand,” New York Times (May 13): A1. Bonafede, Dom and John K. Iglehart. 1973. “End of Counselor System Enlarges Policy-Forming Role of Cabinet,” National Journal (May 19): 726-29.

-24Buchanan, Bruce. 1991. "Constrained Diversity: The Organizational Demands of the Presidency," in James P. Pfiffner (ed.), The Managerial Presidency. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Burke, John P. and Fred Greenstein, with Larry Berman and Richard Immerman. 1989. How Presidents Test Reality. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Calvert, Randall. 1985. "The Value of Biased Information," Journal of Politics 47(2): 530-55. --------. 1995. "The Rational Choice Theory of Social Institutions: Cooperation, Coordination, and Communication," in Jeffrey Banks and Eric Hanushek (eds.), Modern Political Economy: Old Topics, New Directions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, Colin. 1986. Managing the Presidency. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. 1962. Strategy and Structure. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Daft, Richard L. and Robert H. Lengel. 1986. “Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness, and Structural Design,” Management Science 32 (May): 554-69. Deutsch, Karl W. 1963. The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control. New York: Free Press. Dickinson, Matthew J. 1997. Bitter Harvest: FDR and the Growth of the Presidential Branch. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dickinson, Matthew J. and Andrew Rudalevige. 2004-05. “Presidents, Responsiveness, and Competence: Revisiting the ‘Golden Age’ at the Bureau of the Budget,” Political Science Quarterly 119 (Winter-Spring), forthcoming. Downs, Anthony. 1967. Inside Bureaucracy. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Draper, Theodore. 1991. A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ehrlichman, John. 1982. Witness to Power. New York: Simon and Schuster. Feldman, Martha S. 1989. Order Without Design: Information Production and Policy Making. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. George, Alexander L. 1980. Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice. Boulder, CO: Westview. George, Alexander L. and Timothy McKeown. 1985. "Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision-Making," Advances in Information Processing in Organizations 2: 21-58. Graber, Doris A. 1991. Public Sector Communication: How Organizations Manage Information. Washington, DC: CQ Press. --------. 2003. The Power of Communication: Managing Information in Public Organizations. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Haldeman, H.R., with Joseph DiMona. 1978. The Ends of Power. New York: Times Books. Hammond, Thomas. 1986. “Agenda Control, Organizational Structure, and Bureaucratic Politics,” American Journal of Political Science 30: 379-420. --------. 1993. "Toward a General Theory of Hierarchy," Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 3(1):120-45. --------. 1994. "Structure, Strategy, and the Agenda of the Firm," in Richard P. Rumelt, Dan E. Schendel, and David J. Teece (eds.), Fundamental Issues in Strategy: A Research Agenda. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

-25-

Hammond, Thomas and P.A. Thomas. 1989. “The Impossibility of a Neutral Hierarchy,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 5: 155-84. Harper, Edwin. 1996. “Domestic Policymaking in the Nixon Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26(1): 41-56. Hinckley, Ronald H. 1986. "National Security in the Information Age," Washington Quarterly 9(2): 125-40. Hoff, Joan. 1994. Nixon Reconsidered. New York: Basic Books. Hughes, Emmet John. 1973. The Living Presidency. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Hult, Karen M. and Charles Walcott. 1990. Governing Public Organizations: Politics, Structures, and Institutional Design. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Janis, Irving. 1982. Groupthink, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jepperson, Ronald. 1991. "Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism," in Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (eds.), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, Richard Tanner. 1974. Managing the White House. New York: Harper & Row. Jones, Bryan D. 2001. Politics and the Architecture of Choice: Bounded Rationality and Governance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. --------. 1994. Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics: Attention, Choice, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kernell, Samuel. 1989. "The Evolution of the White House Staff," in John Chubb and Paul Peterson (eds.), Can the Government Govern? Washington: Brookings Institution. Kessel, John. 1975. The Domestic Presidency. N. Scituate, MA: Duxbury. --------. 1984. "The Structures of the Reagan White House," American Journal of Political Science 28(2): 231-58. King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kirschten, Dick. 1982. “Decision Making in the White House: How Well Does It Serve the President?” National Journal (April 3): 584-89. Kissinger, Henry A. 1982. Years of Upheaval. Boston: Little, Brown. Kohl, Wilfrid. 1975. "The Nixon-Kissinger Foreign Policy System and U.S. European Relations: Patterns of Policy-Making," World Politics 28(1): 1-43. Kowert, Paul A. 2002. Groupthink or Deadlock: When Do Leaders Learn from their Advisors? Albany: State University of New York Press. Krehbiel, Keith. 1991. Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lowi, Theodore. 1985. The Personal Presidency. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

-26March, James G. 1978. "Bounded Rationality, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of Choice," Bell Journal of Economics 9(2): 587608. March, James G. and Herbert A. Simon. 1958. Organizations. New York: Wiley. Mayer, Jane and Doyle McManus. 1988. Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988. Boston: Houghton Mifflin McKeown, Timothy. 2001. “Routines, Bureaucratic Bargaining, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Journal of Politics 63 (4): 116390. McPherson, Harry. 1988 [1972]. A Political Education: A Washington Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Miller, Gary J. 1992. Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Moe, Ronald C. 1976. "The Domestic Council in Perspective," The Bureaucrat 5(3): 251-72. Moe, Terry. 1984. “The New Economics of Organization,” American Journal of Political Science 28: 739-77. --------. 1985. "The Politicized Presidency," in John Chubb and Paul Peterson (eds.), New Directions in American Politics. Washington: Brookings Institution. --------. 1993. "Presidents, Institutions, and Theory," in George C. Edwards III, John H. Kessel, and Bert A. Rockman (eds.), Researching the Presidency: Vital Questions, New Approaches. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nathan, Richard. 1975. The Plot that Failed. New York: Wiley. --------. 1983. The Administrative Presidency. New York: Wiley Neustadt, Richard E. 1960. Presidential Power. New York: Wiley. --------. 1965. "Statement before the Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, March 25, 1963," in Henry M. Jackson, ed., The National Security Council: Jackson Subcommittee Papers on Policy-Making at the Presidential Level. New York: Praeger. --------. 1990. Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents. New York: Free Press. Nixon, Richard M. 1973. “Statement About the Redirection of Executive Branch Management, January 5,” Public Papers of the Presidents: Richard M. Nixon, 1973. Washington: Government Printing Office. --------. 1990 [1978]. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster. North, Douglass C. 1986. “The New Institutional Economics,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 142: 230-37. Pfaltzgraff, Robert L., Jr. and Jacquelyn K. Davis (eds.) 1990. National Security Decisions: The Participants Speak. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath. Pika, Joseph. 1991. “White House Staffing: Salvation, Damnation, and Uncertainty,” in Colin A. Campbell and Margaret Wyszomirski (eds.), Executive Leadership in Anglo-American Systems. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Porter, Roger. 1980. Presidential Decisionmaking. New York: Cambridge University Press. Quirk, Paul. 1991. "What Do We Know?" in William Crotty (ed.), Political Science: Looking Toward the Future, Vol. 4. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

-27-

Reeves, Richard. 2001. President Nixon: Alone in the White House. New York: Simon & Schuster. Reichley, A. James. 1981. Conservatives in a Time of Change. Washington: Brookings Institution. Regan, Donald T. 1988. For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington. New York: HBJ. Riker, William. 1986. The Art of Political Manipulation. New Haven: Yale University Press. --------, ed. 1993. Agenda Formation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rose, Richard. 1991. “Organizing Issues In and Organizing Problems Out,” in James P. Pfiffner (ed.), The Managerial Presidency. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole. Schelling, Thomas. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge; Harvard University Press. Shapiro, Martin. 1981. Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1979. “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models,” American Journal of Political Science 23: 27-60. --------. 1989. “Studying Institutions: Some Lessons from the Rational Choice Approach,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 1(2): 13147. --------. 1991. "Discretion, Institutions, and the Problem of Government Commitment," in Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman (eds.), Social Theory for a Changing Society. New York: Russell Sage. Simon, Herbert A. 1973. “Applying Information Technology to Organization Design,” Public Administration Review 33(3): 268-78. --------. 1976. Administrative Behavior (3rd ed.) New York: Free Press. --------. 1985. “Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Pyschology with Political Science,” American Political Science Review 79(2): 293-304. Sinclair, Barbara. 2000. Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the U.S. Congress, 2nd ed. Washington: CQ Press. Smith, Hedrick. 1988. The Power Game: How Washington Works, paperback ed. New York: Ballantine. Thomas, Norman. 1970. "Presidential Advice and Information: Policy and Program Formulation," Law and Contemporary Problems 35(3): 540-72. Tower, John, Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft. 1987. The Tower Commission Report. New York: Times Books. Walcott, Charles and Karen Hult. 1987. "Organizing the White House: Structure, Environment, and Organizational Governance," American Journal of Political Science 31: 109-125. --------. 1995. Governing the White House. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Walsh, Lawrence E. 1997. Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up. New York: W.W. Norton. Waterman, Richard and Kenneth Meier. 1998. “Principal-Agent Models: An Expansion,” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 8: 173-202.

-28White, Leonard D. 1948. Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan. Wilensky, Harold L. 1967. Organizational Intelligence: Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry. New York: Basic Books. Witherspoon, Patricia D. 1991. Within These Walls: A Study of Communication Between Presidents and Their Senior Staffs. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Figure 1. Functional vs. Product-Line Structures: Impact on Outcomes Decision Rule is assumed to be Management-by-Exception Preference Orderings: Production Line 1 Production Line 2 Sales (Product 1) Sales (Product 2) Manager A Manager B CEO

x>y y>x x>y y>x x>y x>y y>x

A. Final choice: option “x” CEO

x Manager A Production Dept.

x

Production Line 1

Manager B (Sales Dept.)

Production Line 2

x

y

B. Final choice: option “y”

x

Sales (Product 1)

Sales (Product 2)

x

y

CEO

y x

Manager A Product 1 Dept.

Production Line 1

Manager B Product 2 Dept.

Sales (Product 1)

x Source: adapted from Hammond (1994)

x

Production Line 2 y

y

Sales (Product 2) y

Figure 2. Bureau of the Budget, 1948 (partial)

Director

Division of Statistical Standards

Division of Estimates

Agriculture Branch

International Activities Branch

Interior/ Federal Works Branch

National Security Branch

Civil Works Branch

Justice/ Post Office Branch

Labor and Welfare Branch

Treasury/ Civil Service Branch

Hospital Branch

Commerce/ Maritime Branch

Division of Administrative Management

Management Improvement Branch

Government Organization Branch

Division of Legislative Reference

Legislative Analysis and Clearance

Legislative Reports and Coordination

Congressional Liaison

Division of Fiscal Analysis

Nat'l Defense/ International

Industry/Housing/ Financial

Social Welfare/ Education/ Veterans

Natural Resources/ PublicWorks

Figure 3. Bureau of the Budget, 1952

Figure 4. The Nixon Counsellor System, January - May 1973

H.R. Haldeman Assistant to the President for White House Administration John Ehrlichman Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs

James Lynn Secretary, HUD, and Counselor for Community Development

HUD

Transportation

OEO

Caspar Weinberger Secretary, HEW, and Counselor for Human Resources

HEW

Labor

Earl Butz Secretary, Agriculture Counselor for Natural Resources

Agriculture

Interior

EPA

Army Corps of Engineers

Henry Kissinger Assistant to the President for Foreign Affairs

Richard Nixon President

NSC staff

State

Defense

George Shultz Assistant to the President for Economic Affairs

Treasury

CEA

Commerce

Roy Ash Assistant to the President for Executive Management

OMB

Richard Kleindienst Attorney General

GSA

Civil Service

USTR

Federal Reserve