Stephen Hess, an expert on the presidency at the Brookings Institution, has participated in most presidential transitions since the Eisenhower administration. He has written a new book, What Do We Do Now?, a guide for presidents-elect on what to do and what to avoid in the two and half months between Election Day and the inauguration. A few days before the election, Hess spoke with John Maggs about the crucial first steps for a victorious candidate. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: One of the lessons that I took away from this book and your other writings is that the transition into and beginning of a presidency is more of a management challenge than many presidents-elect realize. Why isn't that better understood?
Hess: It's not the nature of what candidates promise. They promise they will do something about Iraq, they will do something about the economy. These management questions don't really interest most people. Actually, they don't very much interest most presidential candidates. So they're not very much discussed, and there aren't necessarily very great commitments along these lines. So they get there and they find out that this a pretty big management problem. You've got 3 million civilians who work for you.
Q: Early in the book, you advise the president-elect to answer two questions: "Why did the voters choose you?" and "What promises did you make?" Why is this so important an exercise?
Read the complete interview after the jump.Hess: That is a way to sort out your priorities very quickly. And for example, if Bill Clinton had simply done this exercise, what are the most important things, one, two, three, four, five, he wouldn't have started with gays in the military. That was a pledge he made, it was important, but it was a second-tier pledge. Obviously, as we all remember, that was a campaign about "it's the economy, stupid." But instead, he drifted off for one reason or another... and said in his memoirs he was totally unprepared for how emotional this issue was. So what happened was, this very smart man, long-term governor, ran things, gets going by hitting the ground stumbling.
Q: You start with the White House appointments.
Hess: I start with the White House for a very simple reason -- you need the White House to fill the rest of government. And here, the example of how not to do it -- he says it in his memoirs -- is Bill Clinton, who was so fascinated by putting together -- micromanaging, as he called it -- the Cabinet, because he was the first president who made almost a commitment to have a Cabinet that "looked like America"... that with the exception of his chief of staff, he didn't get to appoint his White House key advisers till six days before his inauguration. Obviously they had no learning time, but more important, the point is: The chief of staff, the general counsel, the personnel director, the congressional relations person, the press secretary, the speech writers, these people all need to be in place to move the process along.... So all of those people are really very important, and should be in place early, at least by Thanksgiving.
Q: You talk about different kinds of chiefs of staffs. What are the best ones?
Hess: There are heavy-handed chiefs of staff -- H.R. "Bob" Haldeman under [Richard] Nixon, John Sununu the elder under George H.W. Bush. They make enemies awfully fast. They may do something for you, the president, for a while, but before you know it, you've got to think of a way of moving them aside. Others find that it's helpful if they've had some congressional experience, either as a member themselves or as a staffer. They've got to know how the system works, and where the footfalls are, and where you're going to fall into one of those holes, and it helps to have some experience in that way.
Q: In picking staff, you referred to one aspect of that choice as "calibrating conflict." What is that?
Hess: You're picking people and before you know it, they're not agreeing with each other. Maybe you picked them not to agree with each other, and that is a process, management by conflict. Lots of organizations like that -- academics love that idea, the clash of ideas. The problem, very often, with a president is, first of all, all that conflict, it soon creates all sorts of leaks, and soon the White House looks as if it's in disarray.
Additionally, all that conflict moves the time frame. There's something, as we know, called the hundred days. It happened with [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], what he did in a hundred days. And now because of that, whether it's a realistic number or not, you can be sure that on the hundredth day of the next administration, every Washington journalist will be calling every presidential historian and comparing to that. So you want to get some things done quickly, so that you have something to say on the hundredth day. The conflict type of management is harder to do in that time frame.
Q: You've got section in the book in which you discuss three unsuccessful nominations and why they failed.
Hess: You're guessing in picking a candidate. You're picking someone who looks great on paper or you've had a great experience with them, and suddenly you give them a job and it turns out that within a year or so, you fire them. Well, that's your failure, because they're still great somethings, but not great Cabinet officers. And I picked three that were terribly important -- that's the inner Cabinet -- Les Aspin was secretary of Defense under Clinton, you have [Al] Haig, who was secretary of State under [Ronald] Reagan, and Paul O'Neill, who was secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush....
Les Aspin, who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.... Anybody who knew Aspin knew that he was a disorganized college intellectual, the idea he couldn't get to a meeting on time, couldn't get his jacket starched, he suddenly is dealing will all these generals, colonels and so forth, and it's a mess, it really is a mess. [Clinton] should have known that, vetting would have shown that....
Paul O'Neill... was a great [Office of Management and Budget] executive and at that time was well-known by people like Dick Cheney. He went out into the world and rose to be the head of Alcoa.... O'Neill sits down with the president-elect and vice president-elect. And O'Neill tells them every reason they should not appoint him: "I don't agree with you on X, Y and Z. I have been the head of a very large organization for so long that I don't think I could become a staffer again" -- and even a Cabinet officer is a staffer. And he goes through this. And they say, No, no, we don't care, and they hire him. Two years later they fire him for exactly the reasons he told them not to hire him. So who's at fault there?
The third one was Al Haig. Al Haig, of course, had been the commander of NATO in Europe, he knew the Pentagon, he had come up to be a general, but importantly, he had risen to become chief of staff under Richard Nixon at the moment of Watergate when everything was collapsing, and he importantly held it all together. So they appoint him. This is what Ronald Reagan knows. That's his resume. And he gets there, and for some reason or another, he can't get along with Reagan's staff. They are fighting constantly. And you think to yourself, hey, if he could do it with Nixon's staff, how come he couldn't do it with Reagan's staff? And then I conclude, well, that's not Reagan's fault. He was different.
Q: Which were the best transitions and the worst transitions?
Hess: The best transition, clearly, was Ronald Reagan.... California comes as close as you can come to replicating something like the United States. The size of it, the diversity of its population, the diversity of its industry, the diversity of its agriculture. And it even had a divided legislature. He knew things. And he knew people to pick... partly because they were in his government in California....
The most unsuccessful?... Probably Clinton. The Clinton people probably made more mistakes that, as I say, got them to hit the ground stumbling. We've already talked about the gays in the military one. The Cabinet that "looks like America" produced the fiasco that finally produced Janet Reno. He had painted himself in a corner when he landed in the position that he had to have a woman for attorney general....
Some people come in with a very experienced staff. Usually these are people who are front-runners. The good people who want to be in the campaign are attracted. Then the person at the back of the pack has to make do with what he has. Which usually means a lot of young people, with a lot of enthusiasm, maybe a lot of ideology.
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