Commentary by Albert R. Hunt
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama will surround his presidency with powerful men and women. The models of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan are instructive. So is that of George W. Bush.
The current president, eight years ago, selected the formidable Colin Powell as his secretary of State, and the almost-as-formidable Donald Rumsfeld as his Defense secretary. They produced a team of rivals that thoughtlessly, and with little serious debate, started a war and devastated America’s standing in the world.
The lesson is not to avoid strong-minded people with different views; it is to appreciate that this works only with a strong-minded, temperamentally secure president who thrives on intellectual combat.
The inspiration for Obama is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” a riveting and much-acclaimed account of how Lincoln recruited for his Cabinet former political opponents who initially thought themselves superior to the man who went on to become America’s greatest president.
Actually it’s more a team of heavyweights than of rivals. The president-elect already has assembled an unusually strong White House staff and now it appears it will be even more powerful with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on economics and former Marine Corps Commandant James Jones on national security. The Cabinet will be as strong with Hillary Clinton at State, Robert Gates perhaps being retained at Defense, and New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner being tapped as Treasury secretary.
Geithner may look like a teenager, but that belies his expertise and the respect he commands in global financial circles. With the financial crisis, Summers’s role at the White House may be Kissingerian in scope.
Franklin Roosevelt would love this assemblage.
‘Know Who He Is’
This will at times make governance harder; choosing between strong points of view is tough. It is also a challenge.
“My definition of a strong president,” says Howard Baker, who as a U.S. senator served with five presidents and later was Reagan’s chief of staff, “is he must know who he is, what he believes, and not be afraid of strong people or to disagree with them.”
Conversations with three men who intimately understand the American presidency -- Baker, presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Harry McPherson, former counsel to Lyndon Johnson -- produce a consensus: Experience shows that competing or complementary power centers are essential to a successful presidency. It also shows it will be a task to make it work.
“It’s very tough,” says Beschloss. “It starts off with high policy and then often gets down to personal stuff. A president has to be very comfortable with smart people arguing with one another.”
No Automatic Success
They all note situations, including in Bush’s presidency, where the healthy clash of ideas and people didn’t materialize. In the first two years of Bill Clinton’s administration, the foreign policy team was so ill-suited for the tasks that coherent debate was rare.
McPherson recently reread the notes of Johnson’s internal deliberations over going to war in Vietnam. There was a clash of ideas. The problem was the vocal dissenter, George Ball, was so outnumbered that a balanced contest never transpired.
The successful presidencies, however, underscore the value. Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” chronicles the contribution Secretary of State William Seward made to the Lincoln years and how close the two men became. Seward, who barely lost the nomination fight to Lincoln in 1860, was a senator from New York when tapped as the nation’s chief diplomat.
Relishing Rivalries
No president relished such strong rivalries as much as Roosevelt: Interior Secretary Harold Ickes against Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace; isolationists against internationalists; and battles among most of his major economic advisers, especially early in his first term, when experimentation was the order of the day.
“FDR actually enjoyed conflict,” notes Beschloss. “He worried if one side got too powerful, and liked to keep both off balance. He also felt it kept his administration alive with ideas.”
Temperamentally, Reagan lacked Roosevelt’s manipulative magic, yet he benefited from internal conflict between Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense chief Caspar Weinberger on how to deal with the Soviet Union. “Reagan really valued the pressure brought by Shultz and Weinberger’s disagreements,” says Baker. The result was a hard line, which played a role in the eventual Soviet collapse, and an important accommodation at the end.
Republicans Welcome
The Obama Cabinet will be full of heavy hitters. In some administrations, a White House staff with such clout would dominate. Obama, however, also seems intent on assembling a Cabinet that wouldn’t allow that.
Choosing Tom Daschle, a former Senate majority leader with lots of knowledge and connections, suggests Obama won’t make the mistake of trying to craft a health-care overhaul from the White House. Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano will be a force at Homeland Security. And a few Obama insiders insist there will be more than a token Republican in his government; they will be sprinkled throughout the agencies.
Baker, Beschloss and McPherson all praise the idea of Clinton as secretary of State, while recognizing the perils. “She’s very talented,” says McPherson. “The issue is whether it’s worth the struggles that almost invariably surround Bill Clinton.”
Tension With Bill
The negotiations over what the former president would “give up” so his wife can be the top diplomat are unseemly. Tension with her husband comes with the territory.
There will be Obama loyalists in the White House suspicious of Hillary Clinton’s motives; if given a free hand to staff the State Department, the danger is she’ll enlist too many sycophants who don’t care about the president.
Then again there will be a powerful White House staff and most likely an influential Defense chief to provide a check.
(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Albert R. Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net
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