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

ANDREW RUDALEVIGE

Dickinson CollegeDepartment of Political Science

Princeton UniversityCenter for the Study of Democratic Politics

arudalev@princeton.edu

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Midwest PoliticalScience 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 systematicanalysis of how different staff institutions make a difference to presidents: how they impact thekind, caliber, and amount of information presidents receive on policy matters. Instead,presidential decision making is often deemed idiosyncratic and personalized. This paper drawson various theories of organization and hierarchy to create a basis for arguing that staff is anecessary limiting structure on an otherwise chaotic informational environment. How that staffis structured will, likewise, matter for the amount and type of information they receive andthus for the decisions they take. The paper argues, melding recent formal work with earlierhypotheses about staff effectiveness, that informational institutions centered on functional ratherthan 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 moresystematic research agenda.

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“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 howpresidential decisions are taken. And at the heart of information are decisions that first shapedhow the flow of advice reached the Oval Office. That in, turn, at least in the modernpresidency, is a function of staff and staff organization. Organization is policy, Nixon adviserRoy 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 earlyas the 1940s, Leonard White’s standard textbook on public administration (1948: 52) paintedmuch of the justification for the then-new Executive Office of the President (EOP) ininformational terms. Forty years ago Neustadt (1960: 153) stressed the importance of what thepresident 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 whichdecisions are made.”

However, while the notion that prior decisions about staffing shape current decisionsabout a wide range of issues – and, more generally that organization reflects informationalneeds – has received sustained attention in economics (e.g., Arrow 1973) and other subfields ofAmerican politics (see especially Krehbiel 1991), presidency scholars have been relatively slowto take up the challenge in a systematic way. The presidency is still seen largely as thebailiwick of a single individual whose idiosyncracies shape the decisionmaking process; anddespite much solid work on various aspects of the “institutional presidency” over the pastdecade or so, the work on how presidents obtain and use information “has not made notableadvances beyond the casual theorizing of sophisticated participants” and tends to consist of“conventional administrative doctrine modified by a few apparent lessons of recentpresidencies” (Quirk 1991: 39, 40). Organizations generally process information in order toreduce uncertainty (Daft and Lengel 1986); but while scholars have produced templates ofpresidential organization, there is much less in the way of explicit theory about how thosevarying organizations affect the flow of information to the president and thus the kinds ofuncertainty they ameliorate. What, and what kind of, information reaches presidents, of thenearly infinite amount that in prospect might do so? When does it arrive, and through whatchannels? And how do these factors affect the ways decisions are conceived, and taken? Inshort, the overall question might be more specifically formulated as how presidents structuretheir staffs in order to ensure that they both become aware of relevant policy problems andreceive germane, timely advice on the range of options which might be utilized to solve ormitigate those problems.

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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 riddleof 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. Thisselection question receives some preliminary attention below.

These are crucial questions, but not simple ones.1 This paper takes a preliminary cut atthe problem by bringing together organization theory with industrial economics with formalwork on hierarchy and agenda-setting with what we know about presidential staffing. Thebasic 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 theagendas used by legislatures to order and limit their alternatives, has wide bearing on theinformation received up the hierarchy. The choices made along the way, as advice rises to thepresident, will matter for the choices he himself makes; how the staff is structured will have animportant 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 staffhierarchy ensuring that generalist expertise is brought to bear on technical policy will give thepresident better options than one that isolates policy with specialists,2 and one that forces policydisputes to the president’s level will give him better information about their proper resolutionthan one that resolves them with “consensus” before reaching the Oval Office.

Such a hypothesis cuts somewhat across the conventional wisdom. Recall thecontroversy that erupted when it emerged that Bush political guru Karl Rove was also advisingthe 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 theU.S. diplomatic recognition of Israel in 1948 (McCullough 1992: 614-20). Foreign policy is notsupposed to be “politicized” by electorally–minded minders. But the literature on howorganizations 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 presidentsshifted their staff organizations within their administration. This allows one to presentstructured comparisons while holding constant such variables as presidential personality, style,or skill. After further elaboration of executive hierarchies, then, the paper concludes bypresenting data from the Truman, Nixon, and Reagan administrations. These cases bothhighlight the plausibility of the hypotheses and indicate future lines for more comprehensiveresearch.

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II. The Institutional Presidency and Informational Institutions

A. The Institutional Presidency

As opposed to the common behavioral focus on the president as individual, the literaturecollected under the rubric of the “institutional presidency” seeks to examine the presidency morebroadly as an ongoing collection of regularized processes and roles (Moe 1993). Some researchalong these lines focuses on the formal (often, Constitutional) rules constraining andempowering presidents, as well as the duties and rights of the office as shaped by historicalprecedents of law, prerogative, and circumstance. These structure presidential behavior bychanneling the formal and informal “recurring interactions in organizations” (Hult and Walcott1990: 34), a phrase I will take as a basic definition of “institution.”

The bulk of “institutional presidency” research centers on those interactions as they areshaped by the organizational nature of the modern presidency, highlighting the routines,procedures, and staff units that comprise the presidential branch. It provides a broadlyhistorical account of units and functions in the EOP through different administrations,sometimes assessing typologies of staff organization and dicta of staff management. At oneextreme, organization is treated as a constant (formalistic, “spokes of the wheel,” etc.); at theother, 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 matcha given type of presidential personality with a given staff organization. Broader generalizationsare sought using a “problem contingency” tack that argues that the circumstances faced by thepresident and presidency affects the shape of EOP evolution. That is, presidential staffinstitutions 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 thecentral issue in the institutional development traced by this scholarship. After all, as NormanThomas (1970: 561) argued long ago, the primary job of presidential staff “is to furnish thepresident with sufficient information and analysis to permit him to make decisions with anawareness of the available alternatives and their probable consequences.”

However, there has been little progress made in exploring presidential information interms of presidential institutions, systematically evaluating advisory systems to determine theimpact differing institutions might have on the nature and amount of information the presidentreceives. One exception that perhaps proves the rule is the comparison of the 1961 Bay of Pigsinvasion to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where contrasting decisions are often linked to theintentionally very different decision-making structures that produced them (see, e.g. Wilensky1967). Burke and Greenstein (1989) also come close to what I have in mind in their structuredcomparison of the Eisenhower and Johnson decision-making processes with regards toVietnam. But more frequently, presidential management structures are presented as a simpletrinity -- hierarchical, collegial (“spokes-of-the-wheel”), or competitive (see Johnson 1974, or theuseful 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

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formal and informal structures to channel information (Burke and Greenstein 1989), and theseboth vary within administrations across issue areas (Porter 1980; Walcott and Hult 1995) andshift 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 incommunication 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 thecurrent project; as discussed below, it provides important grounding for the hypothesesdeveloped here. It is simply to note that, on the whole, the broad generalizations aboutpresidential staffing that have been promulgated themselves rarely provide hypothesesappropriate for comparative, empirical testing of informational content.

B. Agendas and Organizations

On the other hand, other work on institutions in political science and economicsexplicitly explores their informational role. While much of this literature is an offshoot ofrational 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 ofdecision-making.

For example, institutions help to mitigate the uncertainty inherent in strategicinteractions. They give actors an idea of the behavior to expect from each other, perhaps bygiving a means of signaling intent or furnishing a focal point; they create automatic decisionrules that save on cognition and information search; they provide commitment mechanisms inotherwise 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 arecommonly understood. For example, driving on the right side of the road is not clearly betterthan 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 decision-making. 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 fromthe preferences of the participants. We often, of course, will not have full knowledge of thosepreferences. But even if we do, that information does not normally in itself allow us to predict aunique outcome. After all, just three self-interested participants with different preferenceorderings over outcomes (x, y, z) can start an unending cycle whereby x is preferred to y, ypreferred 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 potentiallya universal problem. In the jargon, there are very few “preference-induced” equilibria –“structure-induced” equilibria are required instead (see Shepsle 1979, 1989).

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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 asthe power to determine which options are considered and in what order. As above, having noagenda can mean no result is reached -- critically, though, different agendas, even over the sameoptions, will lead to different results. Indeed, all agendas are biased in some way (see Riker1993). For example, part of the power of the Rules Committee in the House of Representativesis to determine not only which amendments may be offered but in what order, and to what basebill. If amendments are put up against each other, instead of against the status quo, a whollydifferent outcome may result. Hence the use of complicated rules like “king of the hill” or rulesthat themselves amend the underlying bill (Sinclair 2000: 20-28).

The insight, if not the specific process, can make the jump between the branches. Afterall, presidents seeking decision-making advice oversee a set of institutions which guide theconsideration of policy alternatives. Recall the basic definition of “institution” above: in aniterated 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, tothe extent that the outputs they produce are driven by the sequential consideration of sets ofoptions, hierarchical organizations are themselves structured agendas. Organization chartseven 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 willaffect the alternatives that reach the president. That is: since “policymaking involves makingcomparisons.... an organization’s structure affects who compares what with what, so thatdifferent structures can produce different policy outcomes” (Bendor and Hammond 1992: 317).

Thinking of the problem in this way has direct implications for the organizationalchoices the president makes. After all, the input to presidential decisions is information. In areal 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 narrowerand narrower as we move to the tops of organizations.” For reasons of time and cognitivecapacity, 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 ofequilibrium. The sea of information at the bottom of any hierarchical pyramid bears littleresemblance to the puddle that reaches the top: at each level, some information flows up but, asMarch and Simon (1958) famously put it, more and more uncertainty is absorbed (see alsoDowns 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 mustbe structured by imposing an agenda upon it – by forcing it through a staff – just as in the worldof collective preferences, equilibrium must be induced by the imposition of some sort ofstructured rules.

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

If so, a president’s original choices in this area will affect his future options – will makehis subsequent decisions better or worse. Thus, how does he arrange his hierarchy -- how doeshe set the organizational agenda -- to achieve the informational results he wants and we thepeople 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 askedLyndon Johnson aide Douglass Cater. Cater thought, then replied: “the man who has to choosebetween apples, it’s a matter of judgement. And this I would say is probably the greatest powerand perquisite that presidential assistants have -- making those judgements.”3

Cater’s White House colleague, Harry McPherson, put the problem this way in hismemoir (1988: 292):

All the memoranda I have quoted were biased.....The real danger was that we [LBJ’sadvisors] would weigh it wrong. The very process of reducing a dozen position papersand committee meetings to a three page memorandum for the President required that weexclude some arguments and data, and emphasize others. We tried to give him bothsides, but our judgements colored what we wrote. Presidents are not helpless in suchmatters; any man who attains the office may be presumed to be familiar...with thetendency 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 dangerof bias or omission is always there, and it is unavoidable so long as Presidents maketwenty decisions a day on the basis of information they can only receive through the filterof other men’s convictions.

Nixon counsel Leonard Garment added a third metaphor in agreeing: “there is old rule inphysics 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? Onemeans is the careful structuring of informational institutions. To do this we need to know twothings: what the president needs to know; and, flowing from this, what staff structures shouldlook like.

A. What does the President need to know?

A decision process itself should not be considered “good” or “bad” based on its outcomealone. Rather, it should be assessed according to whether it brought the president the

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information he needed. A bad decision is not improved by the effectiveness of itsimplementation; on the other hand, since all structures will fail sometimes, the president’s goalis 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 alsoGraber 1992: 61-70).

These characteristics are rather broad. Still, they mesh with work more specific to thepresidency. For example, George (1980: Ch. 6) gives a set of decisional malfunctions, such asthe avoidance of certain logical options; the presentation of a united front by advisors to thepresident, disagreements having already been hashed out; dependence on a single channel ofinformation; lack of review of key premises by neutral parties (i.e., bias); and a lack of follow-upon dissenting proposals. Further, each of the basic models of presidential staffing suggest costsand benefits (George 1980; Graber 2003; Porter 1980: 229-52). The formalistic model (whatPorter calls “centralized management”) provides for clear jurisdictions, a wide potential scopefor information gathering, and the elimination of extraneous data; the downside, of course, isthat the screening process on the way up may make decisions about what is extraneous thatdiffer from the president’s needs. Staff may not share the presidential perspective, and mayhide information that shows them in a bad light. A collegial model allows interconnectionhorizontally 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 ofinformation to the president and ensures he maintains final control over decisions (Dickinson1997); however, it may lead to deadlock (Kowert 2002) and requires that the president invest agood deal of personal energy in managing the system.

Space does not allow a more detailed examination of the informational costs and benefits ofthese various systems here. The point for the present is that common threads run through theliterature above, enabling us to draw a picture of “good advice,” recognizing that no singlesystem 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

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4 Roy Ash, budget director under Presidents Nixon and Ford, in fact described the latter’s information gathering in just theseterms: “When an issue would arise, he would attempt to get the views of a number of people given to him directly. He wouldobviously have in his own mind some weighting that he would give to these different people, and their views. Then, afterapplying 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 atwork, the importance of applying different weights, from subject to subject, to the views of the people whom he consulted.” AshOral History, 8/4/88, Nixon Presidential Materials Project [NPMP], p. 155 Since the agent knows his skills and preferences better than does the principal, the principal cannot be sure that the agent she ishiring is actually qualified or really shares her preferences (rather than mouthing them in order to get the job.)

question of hidden action and information. Since what the agent (here, the staffer) does may beunobservable by the principal (here, the president), the agent must be given incentives to act inthe desired manner. McPherson, in discussing LBJ above, suggested two amelioratingmechanisms: that the president: (1) choose subordinates with care, to ensure they share hisvalues; and (2) understand the bias of each and weight it accordingly when considering theiradvice. In fact that advice is quite consistent with more formal treatments of principal-agentproblems that argue for a selection process centered on agent preferences, so that agents adhereto the principal’s beliefs and preferences (Arrow 1985; Moe 1984; Miller 1992; Waterman andMeier 1998). Even if staff members remain biased in some manner, knowing the direction andextent of the bias can still make advice useful (Calvert 1985).4 Careful selection of responsivesubordinates on the basis of loyalty and ideological commitment -- along with the centralizationof tasks within the White House partly in order to reduce monitoring costs -- is, of course, thecornerstone 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 inprivate industry, the difficulty may not always be one of controlling self-interested behaviorthat is knowingly hostile to the president’s interests but rather controlling misguidedenthusiasm 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 fromthe menu she receives. Information asymmetries are common when specialized tasks are beingperformed and overseen by generalist managers; the more specialized the task, the higher itstransaction costs (see Miller 1992: 33). How does the president prevent shirking (i.e., thepresentation of options that do not match his interest) by subordinate agents whose initiativeswho 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 lessonof the principal-agent literature is that presidents protect themselves by “institutionalizingdistrust,” to borrow Richard Rose’s useful phrase (1991: 108). As above, much of the argumentabout hierarchical structure presented by analysts such as Bendor, Hammond, and Millerbreaks down to the ways in which different institutional structures influence what conflictsreach the president and, thus, what information he gets with regard to decisions.

Earlier the notion of “uncertainty absorption” was mentioned as a standard pathology ofhierarchy: as information flows upwards, subordinates tell those at the next level up what they

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

think the latter want to hear -- and what they want them to know. The usual result is thatproblems are weeded out as information is summarized at each successive level. What theremaining 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 sincea priority for presidents is preserving their right of choice over important decisions, they needto be alerted to key issues and ensure that their resolution is not pre-empted by lower-levelofficials (Neustadt 1990; George 1980: 176).6

The key question of institutional design, then, can be restated as one of designing a process bywhich desired information is forced through the hierarchy. Hammond (1994; see also Bendorand Hammond 1992) argues that this process is largely a function of the categories aroundwhich the institution is organized. The chief executive in any hierarchy will learn about inter-category 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, theSecretary 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 Fordadministration’s Economic Policy Board, the president will get different advice than if domesticand 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 thedisputes that rise to the top.

Most prescriptive works on management design argue that structure should be matched upwith important environmental categories (e.g., with a division to deal with each). Hammondargues, however, based on the foregoing, that if a chief executive wants to be well informedabout his decision-making environment, the categories on which the firm is structured shouldcut 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 Americancorporations 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 specificset of commodities). One case is DuPont Chemical, which in the late 1910s reported to itspresident via departments such as purchasing, sales, development, production, andengineering. The Production Department, to take one example, was then divided into differentsubdepartments handling various types of goods (explosives, dyes, paint and chemicals, etc.) In 1921, however, it was proposed that those subdepartments become the departmentsthemselves: Explosives, for example, would become a division in its own right, subsuming mostof the functions needed to keep its product-lines going, and reporting directly to the presidentof DuPont (Chandler 1962: 74-7, 108-9).

Chandler argues this change made sense; it fostered continued corporate growth and producedmanagers with a broader range of knowledge about corporate functions. However, there is nooptimal solution to organizational problems: the real discussion is what type of ignorance each

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7 For purposes of simplicity, the managerial choices in Figure 1 are assumed to be by Management-by-Exception (MBE) rules: if amanager’s subordinates agree, he accepts that recommendation; if they are divided, he chooses the option he prefers (Hammond1986: 387).8 As Ford chief-of-staff Dick Cheney noted, “In a legislature, everybody gets a vote. Downtown in the White House,....[t]here’sonly one vote cast, and it’s in the Oval Office” (Kessel 1984: 160).

firm (or president) wants at the top. We can operationalize this question using Chandler’sdimensions -- deciding whether the firm should implement structures centered aroundfunctional lines or product-lines. As Figure 1 demonstrates, the same people, with the samepreferences, arrayed differently along these dimensions can yield different outcomes.

[Figure 1 here]7

This has important implications for studying the institutional presidency. Consider that apolicy staff might be organized around cross-cutting functional lines -- speechwriting, statute-drafting, and the like -- or around its own sort of product lines, or, better, “policy-lines” (sincegovernment’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.). Bothmethods would produce options for the president, but different advisory networks would beinvolved. 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 policystaffs from NSC aides to the Office for Policy Development, the latter seems to be -- at leastformally, 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 amelioratetheir uncertainty about policy outcomes: committees are formally established, bureaucraticallylayered, and substantively specialized by subject matter with strict issue jurisdictions. In theseregards, the committees bear resemblance to contemporary White House staffs; and theirrationale mirrors presidents’. Ceteris paribus, more staff should be beneficial, the better toincrease the president's stock of information.

Yet is all else equal? Members of Congress, in large part, are specialists: the incentives of thebody make this imperative. Further, members of Congressional committees are peers of the fullbody and are controlled by it - thus they have incentives to report honestly. Presidents, on theother hand, cannot specialize; and they cannot reliably seek cues from trusted peers – they haveno peers. There is no presidential equivalent to Krehbiel’s “majoritarian principle.”8 Fewpresidential staffers fully share the president's viewpoint; a given aide may not know how agiven transaction fits into others.

One can argue, then, that compartmentalized policy advice channels cannot produce theinformation the president most needs: namely, how different problems interact across policyareas. Longtime presidential troubleshooter W. Averell Harriman argued, “There is only onePresidency, and all talk of ‘two Presidencies’ – one foreign and one domestic – is nonsense. All

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policies within and beyond our national frontiers have to be concerted and integrated. They canonly be different aspects of the same national purpose” (Hughes 1974: 349).

A functional approach, on the other hand, seems close to the organizational formulationRichard Neustadt urged long ago: “the most effective kind of staff organization is anorganization built around what I would call an action-forcing process, by which I mean a steadystream of actionable issues, concrete issues, that have to be attended to, issues where somethinghas 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. Jurisdictionsneed not be unique, and managers are often urged to create alternate, and competing, sourcesof information. Such “parallel processing” has the benefit of providing a check on each flow ofinformation, 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 asituation when Nixon asked him to become involved in defense matters so as to give thepresident an "outsider's view" on the situation. John Kennedy’s inclusion of domestic adviserslike Robert Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorensen in deliberations over the CubanMissile Crisis reflected his discomfort with the advice received from the CIA and DefenseDepartment leading up to the Bay of Pigs.

When practiced systematically, this strategy has costs, in time, timeliness, and managerialeffort. Further, as Herbert Simon points out, the higher up the hierarchy it is practiced, the lesscompatible is parallel processing with coordination of the various streams. Still, somepresidents have done this: beyond the examples above, notions of parallel processing runthrough the literature describing Franklin Roosevelt’s “competitive ad-hocracy” (Dickinson1997: 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 tothe widest range of presidential goals and needs. That is, it created a functionally-driven staffstructure.

C. Hypotheses on Hierarchies and Information

The discussion above suggests several potential, if admittedly preliminary, hypotheses. First, ifdifferent structures (i.e., different combinations of jurisdictions, sequences, and preferences)bring different types of information to the attention of the president, functionally-based structureswill give the president more useful information than policy-specific structures.

We will also expect that multiple sources of competing information (parallel processing) will give thepresident better information, though at some cost.

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9 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 onisomorphism 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 thepresident by other actors, especially Congress.

Again, by “better” or more useful information, I mean advice with the characteristics tracedabove: that it is tied to real world policy and political realities; that it is comprehensive; that it isdiverse.

Finally, drawing on the principal-agent literature, we should expect presidents will get betterinformation about policy matters when they have (a) effective monitoring mechanisms; or (b) knownelements of bias (preferably equivalent to the president's own, through the appointments process) alongthe information channels.9

Tracing these hypotheses e discussion above gives us leverage on a key question: why has theexpansion of the presidential branch not necessarily resulted in enhanced presidentialeffectiveness? Quite simply, the growth has been along counterproductive lines.

There is not enough space here – nor enough data available at this point – to test thesehypotheses fully. However, archival evidence from three presidencies (Truman, Nixon, andReagan) provides a view of three important “change points,” where presidential stafforganizations changed. What impact did that shift have? In various ways these casesilluminate 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 distinctionbetween “product line” and “policy line” organizations of the EOP. While this cannot yet besystematic, 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 ofManagement and Budget (OMB) – was reorganized to center its advice flow around specificpolicy areas, instead of broader functions. The types of issues that flowed to the top of theagency, and thus to the president, were changed by the restructuring, and not in a way that metthe 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 thatorganization in exactly Chandler's "functional"/"product-line" terms. The BoB, since its shift tothe Executive Office of the President (EOP) in 1939, had quickly become indispensable to the

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10 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

president, serving as his chief staff resource for both creation of the executive budget andclearance of the wider executive branch’s desired policy initiatives. Given the small size of theWhite House, the BoB served effectively as an extension of the president’s personal staff, at theedges indistinguishable from it (see Dickinson and Rudalevige 2004-05).

However, many members of the Bureau staff were not entirely satisfied with the organization’sperformance, and as seasoned public administrators they thought naturally in structural terms. In September 1947 deputy director Elmer Staats presented director James Webb with a longsummary memorandum laying out the pros and cons of reorganization.10 In it, Staats notedthat “the historical development of the Bureau has been along lines of functions, skills, orprocesses.” By 1947, as Figure 2 shows, the main functions were the annual compilation of theexecutive 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 ofthese cut across subject-matter areas and each organized its work around some aspect of theannual budget and legislative cycles.

[Figure 2 here]

The main problem, Staats argued, was that “the organization of the Bureau along highlyfunctional lines, with no part of the Bureau having primary responsibility for interdivisionalcoordination short of the Director’s office, makes...management exceedingly difficult....[A]lmost any major problem cuts across the responsibilities and functions of the variousdivisions.” Budgetary questions were often divorced from legislative and managementquestions, all separate from the broader fiscal picture: “every individual must coordinatehimself with an indefinite and sometimes unknown number of individuals in other divisionsconcerned with a similar or related problem.” This might be successful, but such success wasad hoc.

Staats suggested coordination “could be realized if the Bureau were organized primarily alongvertical lines with key individuals designated as points of coordination and liaison with certainagencies.” That is, the Agriculture Department would report to a division devoted toagriculture which contained the budgetary, management, and fiscal staff. While Staats stoppedshort of recommending a wholesale shift, he thought this broader view worthwhile. He arguedthe Fiscal Division was superfluous, especially given the new Council of Economic Advisers,and suggested a Division of Program Management incorporating Administrative Managementand some Estimates staff to complement a new Estimates framework (renamed the BudgetaryStandards Division.) Alternatively, program coordination personnel could be placed in theDirector’s office -- a solution that would have resembled the program associate directors (PADs)later added by the Nixon administration.11

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12 Charles B. Stauffacher to Director and Assistant Director, “Outline of Budget Bureau Reorganization Proposal,” memo of 17January 1952. Lawton papers, Box 4, [BoB Reorganization – 4/1/52 Working Papers], HSTL; see also the attached “Notes onOrganization 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 31and 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 wasproclaimed to be "on functional lines" since by function the authors meant a function of government (e.g., the military). But inthe sense that term has been used in this paper, this was clearly a "product-line" reorganization -- functions (budgeting, legislativeplanning, etc.) were subsumed under products or policies (since the product of the government is policy).

Nothing happened with these suggestions immediately (see Berman 1979: 45-7). However, theyregained momentum in 1951 after the Hoover Commission put pressure on the Bureau toreorganize and longtime BoB staffer Frederick Lawton, sympathetic to this, became budgetdirector. Charles Stauffacher, an architect of the reorganization, summed up his thinking in amemo to Lawton in January 1952. The idea was to shift the burden of coordinating “inter-relation of budgetary, management, fiscal, and legislative problems within areas of majorconcern” from lower-level staff to the Bureau top management by creating relatively purepolicy-line divisions centered around government program areas (national security, “resourcesand works,” and the like). The separate fiscal, management, and estimates divisions would beconsolidated. Thus, most of the staff would specialize on particular policy areas (“this, in myopinion, is a real advantage”). The idea, quite explicitly, was to “bring the more importantissues 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 ofsubstantively-related executive departments and agencies; “the Divisions represent a groupingof Bureau staff concerned with a general field or program area of the Government.” Theybrought together “budget examiners, fiscal analysts, and administrative analysts [to] worktogether within each” area. As Stauffacher wrote in the subsequent orientation manual forBureau staff, the Bureau had needed “a better grouping of functions and a stronger supervisorystructure 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'sprogram.” He also hoped the new structure would aid in “strengthening…the Bureau'sworking relationship with the agencies of the Executive Branch.”

[Figure 3 here]

Note that the claim that “more important” issues would rise through the hierarchy wassubjective: the only thing certain was that different issues would so rise. In the originalorganization, the Director was given options arising from functional divergences: fiscal aspectsvs. agency-oriented budget complaints vs. managerial advice. In the reorganization, thoseclaims would be resolved at the division level and the arguments reaching the Director wouldbe competing claims of different policy realms for resources (monetary and managerial). AsStauffacher noted, “I happen to believe that this type of a setup would produce more of aproduct, though it may lose certain advantages of dual or triple perspective along the way.”

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14 Harold Seidman oral history, HSTL, pp. 108f.15 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 sentthem along to Staats.16 Interestingly, some 40 years later a new reorganization of the OMB returned to the same ground under Director Alive Rivlin bycreating Resource Management Offices (RMOs) that combined budgetary and management staff. An evaluation of thisreorganization is underway for inclusion in future versions of this paper; thanks to Jeffrey Weinberg for bringing this to myattention.

For Lawton, the reorganization made sense, since the “product” he wanted was strong controlover budgetary decision making. Harold Seidman, then a Bureau staffer, later commented in anoral history that “Lawton viewed the mission of the Budget Bureau from the perspective of abudget examiner. He tried to organize the Bureau into five little Budget Bureaus around thebudget process.”14

The reorganization, then, created a “policy-line” orientation for the Budget Bureau, exactly inline with what Chandler praised in DuPont and the other companies he studied. Informationflowing into the Bureau, and thus to its director and thence the President, came through thebudget-oriented divisions. A CEA staffer told his boss that “Under this arrangement, there willbe a tendency to restrict economic analysis to problems which are closely and directly tied tothe estimates work, with the result that the broader type,… which is concerned with theinterrelationship of program areas and with the effects on the economy, may suffer.” Bureaustaffers from the now-defunct Fiscal Division argued the same thing, urging unsuccessfully thattheir analysts be maintained in a separate branch within each division rather than beingintegrated horizontally into programmatic units.15

On paper, the central offices were to take the wider view. In practice, they were insufficient tothe task. Staats had worried back in 1947 that “one of the primary sources of value of theBureau to the President is that it can give him a horizontal or government-wide approach toproblems 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 anyagency position….” Seidman argued in his oral history that this “was one of the things thatgreatly impaired the Bureau’s role... Of course, [Lawton’s] reorganization didn’t stick….It was avery misguided reorganization.”16

Seidman’s negative view represents the scholarly consensus as well: the reorganization isgenerally judged to have provided the president with less useful advice. As Larry Bermansummed up (1979: 47; see also Tomkin 1998: 39): “the reorganization destroyed or seriouslyimpaired those BoB units with across-the-board outlook and organized them around the budgetdivisions, which were agency oriented. Problems immediately manifested themselves in themanagement area and before long the Budget Bureau became open game for presidentialreform groups” beginning, in fact, as early as the new Eisenhower administration. Thereorganization was particularly damaging since Eisenhower wanted to stress managementissues in government. He wound up creating a separate task force for the purpose.

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

B. Nixon and the Supersecretaries

A 1972 case offers another example of how shifting presidential advisory structures mightimpact the kind of information presidents get. In this case, the approach was never fullyrealized because of Watergate (Bonafede and Iglehart 1973). However, it highlights the role ofmanipulating 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 EnvironmentalProtection Agency and Office of Economic Opportunity manifested the regulatory and socialservice explosion of the 1960s. Coordination of these multiple sources of advice and policy wasbecoming a more complex task than ever.

It was one with which Richard Nixon was much concerned. “The key to a successfulpresidency is in the decision-making process,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs (1990: 337). “I feltthat the matters brought before a President for decisions should be only those that cannot orshould not be made at a lower level on the White House staff, or by the Cabinet memberresponsible.” In part, this reflected the huge number of decisions pressing in, but also Nixon’sdislike of face-to-face interaction (see, e.g., Reeves 2001). From the start, he had walled off hisforeign policy staff in an effort to shift important decisions in that realm from Foggy Bottom tothe White House. His assistant for national security, Henry Kissinger, noted (and abetted) “analmost total separation between the domestic and foreign policy sides” of the Nixon staff, to thepoint that they were “prisoners in adjacent cells” (1982: 77).

On the domestic side, Nixon had already tried at least two modes of policy advising. Originallythe process was rather freewheeling, providing wide access to the president for strongideological counterweights. White House advisers Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Arthur Burnswere given overlapping jurisdictions, and they battled fiercely over policy formulation (notablythe 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 ofconflict that played out in front of him. In response the centralized Domestic Council wascreated 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 AshCouncil after its chairman, Roy Ash), which had recommended the creation of the DomesticCouncil,17 also proposed a large-scale departmental reorganization combining Cabinetdepartments with related substantive duties into “super-departments.” Single departmentswere envisaged for Economic Development, Community Development, Natural Resources, andHuman 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).

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18 Caspar Weinberger to President, “Reorganization Along Lines of ‘Corporate Executive Vice-Presidencies,’” memo of 14November 1972, WHSF: Staff member and Office files: H.R. Haldeman, Alpha Name Files, Box 107, [Caspar Weinberger1972], 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).

By the end of his first term, Nixon was again frustrated with the general flow of informationreaching him. He noted (1973: 3) that “most of today’s major governmental goals and activitiescross existing departmental lines in a way that makes coherent policy formation and effectivemanagement extremely difficult.” He felt that too much information flowed his way – yet not ofthe right sort, material too unimportant to be worthy of presidential notice. Ash put it this wayin an oral history:

[Nixon] didn't really feel...that he should be spending substantial parts of his time withwhat he considered second and third order issues that a lot of Department heads wantedto bring before him, but save his time for the first order issues. But he didn't want lessermatters to be out of sight, out of mind....he wanted them to be handled consistent withhis own policies and objectives, yet without a lot of time of his. Which meant some sortof a structural arrangement that gave him that comfort....

After the 1972 election, Nixon spent much of his time at Camp David with Ehrlichman andHaldeman, searching for second term changes in personnel and structure that would give himthat 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 followthe model of California Governor Ronald Reagan and place groups of related Cabinetdepartments under four or five presidential appointees styled after “Executive Vice Presidents.”

These officers [Weinberger wrote] would not have day-to-day administrative duties, butrather would coordinate the activities of those departments and agencies placed underhim. They would also serve as the spokesman for those agencies in presenting their ideasand 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 detailedadministrative duties or of the task of 'running' an agency, but each would havecoordinating duties over a large group of agencies and departments which are nowsupposed to report to the President directly.18

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

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20 John Ehrlichman, press briefing of 5 January 1973, Office of the White House Press Secretary. WHSF: Staff Member andOffice Files: John W. Dean III: Subject Files, Box 63, [Reorganization 1972/73 (1 of 5)], NPMP. This was not a statutoryreorganization, Ehrlichman stressed, but a way to channel advice: “simply a change in the President’s relationship to theDepartments 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.

[Figure 4 here]

This startling proposal, which fundamentally reworked jurisdictions and bureaucraticsequence, was designed, as Ash put it above, to give the president increased control overpolicymaking while (at least on the domestic side) spending less time doing so. Ehrlichmansaid in a January 1973 press conference that “the Counsellor will serve as the focal point forthose lines of reporting on a common subject, so that the President will benefit from fewer linesof reporting coming into him on a given subject.”20

By May 1973, the reorganization was thrown overboard with Haldeman and Ehrlichman (theyresigned 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, andthat it mattered as such. He certainly understood that the issues and options reaching his deskwould 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, theAsh Council’s original proposals were changed to increase the super-departments’ capacity forcross-specialty management (Arnold 1998: 297).

Would this help the president? Nixon’s overall organization already separated domestic andforeign affairs. The “counsellor” system promised to push the options offered by variousstreams of domestic policy down to the staff level. Parallel processing would diminish ordisappear. There was, further, no means of coordinating different policy streams – theassistants would report separately to the president. Nor did any of them have broadperspectives that could replicate the president’s own vantage.22 Haldeman’s notes from theCamp David meetings reveal what he called an “insight”: namely, “P doesn't really want towork w/just a few. He wants better people that he can work with.”23 It is true that thesupersecretary scheme would have expanded the number of White House aides with directinput to the president (though sharply limiting the number of advisers who on paper reporteddirectly to him). Still, in large part, Haldeman’s insight was wishful thinking. The level ofdelegation the reorganization contemplated endangered Nixon’s authority. And there was nomechanism 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 thepreference side, with more carefully chosen subordinates (who would, further, be dispersed

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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 verylong if he weren’t.” Ehrlichman press briefing, pp. 12, 1625 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.

into the operations end of the bureaucracy). The five assistants to the president themselveswould receive a wide array of competing input; Ehrlichman, defending the system (he, ofcourse, 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, economicdiscrimination, how can we best spend our money, someone who has an overview like theCounsellor for Human Resources is going to be in an ideal position to give good advice to thePresident.”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.” Nixoncommented 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 thiscontext is almost a compliment: it did not refer to party careerists but Nixon loyalists withadministrative skills. Nixon would make fewer decisions, but the bulk of the others would bemade by better people, i.e., competent generalists.

A second notable aspect is the planned cuts in the White House staff. One upshot might havebeen an increased stress on “institutional staff” as the Brownlow Commission hadrecommended long before (Dickinson 1997). Ehrlichman argued that “this [structure] is askingthat the work previously done in the White House be done at the Cabinet level.” And at CampDavid, the President had stressed: “no staff for counsellors.”26 However, it is not clear howthoroughly 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 theshift, at the start of the second term, from a semi-competitive “troika” arrangement to a singlechief-of-staff at the head of a more formal structure. The former, by promoting generalistreview 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 (andFord) campaign strategist, as his new chief of staff. Longtime Reagan confidant Michael Deaverbecame deputy chief of staff, and California aide Edwin Meese III became counselor to thepresident. Whatever the titles, the three held equal rank and were known as the “troika”. Onpaper, 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 closelytogether (Kirschten 1982; Smith 1988: 295-7; Witherspoon 1991: 135-7). Closely, but hardlyseamlessly: troika members and their aides and partisans jostled for influence, with their battlesoften spilling over into the press.

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27 Ash disliked the counsellor idea: he wanted to bring all Cabinet officers to the White House, rather thanelevating some; instead of “principal Secretaries,” each “Policy Council” should be made up of relevantCabinet secretaries and have an executive director from the EOP. Larry Higby to H.R. Haldeman, “Ash RevisedFeeling 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 HouseOrganization: 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.

Under Meese – though effectively under the thumb of the troika as a whole – a series of sevenCabinet Councils were created, quite similar in form and intent to “policy councils” Ash hadonce suggested unsuccessfully to Nixon.27 The Councils brought Cabinet members frequentlyto the White House, cementing their loyalty to a presidential perspective while warding offbilateral lobbying (Campbell 1986: Ch. 3).

At the end of 1984, Donald T. Regan, then Secretary of the Treasury, engineered a job switchwith Baker (Smith 1988: 322; Regan 1988: 220-31). Meese went to the Justice Department asAttorney General; Deaver returned to the private sector. Regan, then, would serve as a singlechief of staff in place of the three-way troika.

Newly released archival records from the Ronald Reagan Library provide an interesting insightinto Regan’s thoughts as he took over. He found from a variety of solicited memos onorganization and staffing that the factionalism between the Baker, Meese, and Deaver campswas real and bitter. Roger Porter, then at the Office of Policy Development, wrote a series ofeight memos to Regan, giving him a brief history of White House staff organization in thepostwar era and making suggestions to fight the “fragmentation” he saw in policy developmentand coordination. He suggested the consolidation of the Cabinet Councils (to just two) and thecreation of Policy Management and Policy Implementation Groups.28 Regan aide AlfredKingon, detailed to survey the lay of the first term land, reported: “I am convinced after mytalks that this White House has been riddled with overlapping that caused the internecinewarfare 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 organizationalvacuum, with too many people performing duplicative tasks. Thus he downsized the CabinetCouncils, 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 betterthan did Regan. While the earlier system was messy (Baker aide Richard Darman, later to beBush OMB director, told Kingon “there is no ‘screwier’ organization set up in all White Househistory”), the competition between White House factions ensured that a wide array ofinformation got to president (Buchanan 1991). The consolidation of Cabinet Councils furthershrunk lines of access. A private memo from David Gergen to Regan put it this way: “in theincessant jockeying for power, creative juices often ran strong and they added immensely to the

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30 Gergen to Regan, “White House Operations,” memo of 25 January 1985 , Regan Files, [White House Transition: SolicitedAdvice on Organization and Personnel, 2 of 3], RRL.

quality of his [Reagan’s] stewardship.”30

Take, for example, national security advising. The National Security Council serves as anexcellent example of a “policy-line” agency -- and over time its staff has accrued more and moretangible functions, from budget preparation to press relations to speechwriting. This meansthose tasks are subordinated to one substantive view. However, early on the Reaganadministration made an effort to bring the NSC staff into the purview of the president’s topgeneralist advisers. Richard Allen, the first of Reagan’s six assistants for national securityaffairs, did not report directly to the president, but through Meese. Allen did brief Reagan, butnot alone; Meese was always present. Since Meese was there, Baker wanted to be there -- andso Deaver would inevitably come as well (Pfaltzgraff and Davis 1990: 74ff). The system wasunwieldy, but it worked; as above, the troika “institutionalized distrust” in a politically astutemanner, giving Reagan usefully competing channels of parallel processing and reflectingsecurity affairs through a distinctly generalist and pragmatic lens.

A year later, longtime Reagan friend William Clark replaced Allen and regained direct access tothe president. “There is no question that the system changed dramatically when Clark camein,” noted Deaver (Kessel 1984: 252). The troika became a foursome in some respects; and theNSC staff began to grow again. A Crisis Management Center, with ten million dollars worth ofcomputer and communications equipment, was installed. Now the NSC had access to the rawdata contained in the State Department and Pentagon computers, and began to use it, alongwith electronic mail systems that allowed “paper” to flow without clearance or regard for achain of command (see Hinckley 1986; Mayer and McManus 1988). While Clark was not asecurity 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 thepresident” (Bailey and Halper 1986: 189). Because of Reagan's detachment from (at least) themore mundane aspects of foreign affairs, controlling that information flow was crucial. Newchief of staff Regan was unable to gain jurisdiction over national security affairs. And withouthis knowledge, CIA chief William Casey, McFarlane, and Poindexter, were encouraging NSCstaff to delve into the direction of complicated covert operations involving Central America andthe Middle East, a state of affairs that when disclosed in late 1986 erupted into the Iran-contrascandal.

It is hard to know what information was being received by the president at what time duringthis 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 verytightly drawn: information about the various phases of the project was produced and evaluatedmainly by NSC specialists. What President Reagan himself knew, and when, is a controversialtopic; however, the president evidently made little effort to check facts or gain access tocompeting information. The Tower Commission later noted that there was little critical reviewof the project and less interagency coordination, and took Regan to task for failing to control the

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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., CasparWeinberger and especially George Shultz -- disapproved of the operation in its early stages andwere subsequently cut off from the advising process. Instead, issues were resolved bynarrowly-focused staffers who had no business resolving them; the institutional structure failedto push them to the top. Neustadt (1990: 279) deems Iran-contra a “perfect illustration” of apresident failing to protect his future power stakes. Staff structure had something, thoughhardly 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 constructedwill affect presidents’ information and thus their decision making. This in itself, of course, is nota new observation. One of the few communications-oriented studies of the White Houseconcludes that “the organizational structure imposed on the White House in each term directlyaffected information flow into the Oval Office as well as the extent to which other sources ofinformation were used in the decision-making process” (Witherspoon 1991: 178).

What is new here is the attempt to build hypotheses that systematize the construction – andevaluation – of those structures. I have suggested that presidents will find themselves betterserved by advising systems that cut across different policy areas, centered on broader WhiteHouse functions. These hypotheses have not been fully tested; but the brief accounts ofpresidential staff “change points” provided here indicate that staff choices have clearimplications for information flow, and show that presidents and EOP staff thought about theseissues 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 thevarious tasks associated with the modern presidency.

As this project develops, I hope to fill in the details of these broad portraits. Ideally, the samedecision-topic can be traced through different advising policy structures. While precisemeasurement 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 whatchannels it was brought to the point of decision, and what chance the decision-makers had toconsider it at all” (Deutsch 1963: 161). Given a random set of presidential decisions, we canwork backwards from the president (i.e., the decision area) to evaluate what sequence eachdecision went through -- which advisors, having which jurisdictions and (tougher) whatpreferences. The primary independent variable, then, is the structure of the staff institution setup by the president for a given decision or class of decisions. Is it organized around an action-forcing process cutting across policy lines, or is it organized through specific policy areas? Withwhat impact on the president’s decision? Collecting, not to mention coding, this kind of datawill be difficult. Still, even within case studies of this sort, we can achieve some methodologicaldiscipline, the same variables collected across carefully selected units (King, Keohane, andVerba 1994; George and McKeown 1985; McKeown 2001).

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For the questions raised here are at the heart of the modern, institutional presidency. Forinstance: Why have staffs increased in numbers and specialized knowledge often failed toadvance 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 ofinstitutional expectation and process prevent presidential initiative in this area? Given thebounds within which presidents operate, the ability to lead might well depend on thepresident’s skill in protecting his prerogatives of choice. In 1985, press secretary MarlinFitzwater sent incoming staff chief Regan a prescient memo. “You must show you aremanaging for the President, not managing the President,” Fitzwater wrote. “This will bedifficult because he may be willing to let you manage him.” Presidents must not allow this tohappen. Thus, in the end, the words of Dwight Eisenhower still ring true: “leadership is as vitalin 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 alarge number of other problems. Maximizing his own influence on this entire set of problemsrequires 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 structuresthe flow of information within his administration, makes it easier or harder. If the presidentmust remain ignorant about a large number of things, he must nevertheless “attempt tominimize the costs of his ignorance” (Thomas 1970: 563) – for his sake, and ours. That wayleadership lies.

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Figure 1. Functional vs. Product-Line Structures: Impact on Outcomes

Sales (Product 2)Sales (Product 1)

(Sales Dept.)Manager B

Production Line 2Production Line 1

Production Dept.Manager A

CEO

Decision Rule is assumed to be Management-by-Exception

Preference Orderings:Production Line 1 x>yProduction Line 2 y>xSales (Product 1) x>ySales (Product 2) y>xManager A x>yManager B x>yCEO y>x

Sales (Product 2)Production Line 2

Product 2 Dept.Manager B

Sales (Product 1)Production Line 1

Product 1 Dept.Manager A

CEO

x

xx

x y x

A. Final choice: option “x”

B. Final choice: option “y”

y

x y

y

x x y y

Source: adapted from Hammond (1994)

Natural Resources/Public Works

Industry/Housing/Financial

Social Welfare/Education/Veterans

Nat'l Defense/International

Division ofFiscal Analysis

LegislativeReports andCoordination

CongressionalLiaison

LegislativeAnalysis andClearance

Division ofLegislative Reference

GovernmentOrganization

Branch

ManagementImprovement

Branch

Division of Administrative Management

Commerce/MaritimeBranch

HospitalBranch

Treasury/Civil Service

Branch

Labor andWelfareBranch

Justice/Post Office

Branch

Civil WorksBranch

NationalSecurityBranch

Interior/Federal Works

Branch

InternationalActivitiesBranch

AgricultureBranch

Division of EstimatesDivision of Statistical Standards

Director

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

Figure 3. Bureau of the Budget, 1952

Attorney GeneralRichard Kleindienst

Civil ServiceGSAOMB

Assistant to the Presidentfor Executive Management

Roy Ash

Federal ReserveUSTRCommerceCEATreasury

Assistant to the Presidentfor Economic Affairs

George Shultz

DefenseStateNSC staff

Assistant to the Presidentfor Foreign Affairs

Henry Kissinger

Army Corpsof Engineers

EPAInteriorAgriculture

Secretary, AgricultureCounselor for Natural Resources

Earl Butz

LaborHEW

Secretary, HEW, andCounselor for Human Resources

Caspar Weinberger

OEOTransportationHUD

Secretary, HUD, and Counselor for Community Development

James Lynn

Assistant to the Presidentfor Domestic Affairs

John Ehrlichman

Assistant to the President for White House Administration

H.R. Haldeman

President

Richard Nixon

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