Dulles drafted the release and presented it to Attorney General Herbert Brownell for comment along with the suggestion that Brownell get the views of the cabinet on the draft at the upcoming cabinet meeting. Having the attorney general read the release during the meeting would lend it authority, but, more importantly for Dulles’s purposes, would make it seem less like a power grab. Neither Adams nor Nixon knew about the draft until the day Brownell presented it to the cabinet.
The weekly meetings of the cabinet were always well attended, but on September 30, 1955—the first meeting after Ike’s heart attack—the room was swollen with officials of all ranks. Any White House staffer who could justify his attendance squeezed into any available space. The mood of the room was somewhere between opening night and a funeral. An apprehensive Dulles claimed his regular seat and waited for Nixon to call the room to order.
Nixon began the meeting at 9:30 a.m. by inviting everyone to observe a moment of silence. As he lowered his gaze to say a prayer for Eisenhower, Dulles’s thoughts might have strayed from thoughts of the Divine just long enough to alight upon his own situation. Had he done a good enough job drafting the release to throw off any suspicions about his motives? What would he do if Adams or Nixon challenged the release?
Nixon broke the silence with a reading of the latest medical report of Eisenhower’s condition. The president was recovering well and was out of danger. He had been removed from the oxygen tent and was sleeping comfortably through the night. The vice president then invited Dulles to report on any foreign-affairs matters deserving of the cabinet’s attention. This was a routine practice to which Dulles was accustomed, and usually he would go around the globe highlighting all the issues worthy of note, but on this occasion his comments were understandably brief. He mentioned the turmoil brewing in Cyprus and then raised the possibility that the Russians were sending weapons to Egypt for use against Israel. He concluded his report with a short description of the recent foreign ministers’ meeting in Geneva, after which he looked over at Nixon. The vice president then introduced the topic that everyone had been waiting for—how the government would operate going forward.
Dulles and Adams listened closely as Nixon suggested that work go on as normal and with dispatch, with an eye to avoiding logjams. He advised that all urgent matters be channeled through the NSC or the cabinet and that any other new business be placed on the back burner until the president’s return. Attorney General Brownell saw this as the opening he needed to raise the issue about the draft press release.
The only part of the release that sparked discussion involved the recommendation that the chief of staff, Adams, leave immediately for Denver. Adams did not react, but Nixon did. He interrupted to question why Adams needed to leave at all. Nixon said he assumed that Adams would be in charge of the White House while the president was away. Dulles jumped in to argue that it was essential that Adams be in Denver because Adams was recognized nationally as the official most closely identified with Eisenhower and he needed to be near the president in the event that some influential outside person tried to take advantage of Eisenhower’s reticence. Here, Dulles mentioned no names, but in his memoirs, Adams wrote that he believed Dulles was referring to the president’s brother Milton, who was widely thought to be positioning himself for a run for the presidency.
Not wanting to appear discordant, Nixon quickly agreed and recommended that Adams’s deputy, Jerry Persons, oversee White House operations in Adams’s absence. Dulles scanned the room, prepared to pounce on anyone else who might want to challenge the press release. Adams said nothing. The document was summarily approved, and the cabinet turned its attention to other business.
As the meeting adjourned and he rose to leave, Dulles must have felt a tremendous sense of relief. He had just marginalized the vice president and chief of staff, and no one seemed to have noticed. We know now, according to Adams’s memoirs,12 that he did in fact notice, but no one objected strongly, because to have done so would have appeared uncooperative and, more importantly, no one had really lost anything. Dulles left the meeting confident that Nixon and Adams would not be sticking their noses into his affairs. In a few days, he would be on a plane to Paris to attend a meeting of European foreign ministers, while Adams would be harmlessly tucked away on the second floor of an anonymous building on the outskirts of Denver, waiting for the old lion to recover his strength.
Dulles may have succeeded in getting Adams out of the way, but Adams was hardly out of the picture. If anything, his proximity to Eisenhower only enhanced his power. A popular joke during the Eisenhower Administration captured the scope and scale of Adams’s influence during the president’s long convalescence: “What if Eisenhower should die and Nixon should become president? Worse still, what if Adams dies and Eisenhower becomes president?”
In the days ahead, Adams would tighten his grip on the White House and experience a level of influence the likes of which had never been seen. And there was nothing Dulles or his brother Allen could do about it.
III
Power by Proxy
When Adams arrived in Denver and saw Eisenhower for the first time, he found him cheerful but weak. Victims of acute anterolateral myocardial infarction—Eisenhower’s eventual diagnosis—often experience severe fatigue. Without timely emergency medical care, they may suffer cardiac arrest and die. Eisenhower’s heart attack was caught in time, but the episode left him unable to maintain focus for extended periods.
Adams left their meeting knowing that three main tasks lay before him: keeping issues away from Eisenhower until he was lucid enough to deal with them; matching the president’s work schedule to his energy level; and controlling staffers’ access to him. As a fan of the symphony, in his childhood Adams must have fantasized about what it was like to conduct an orchestra. Wielding Eisenhower’s power by proxy like a baton, for weeks Adams would be the White House equivalent of a conductor—guiding the ebb and flow of events around the president.
Adams was Eisenhower’s gatekeeper: he worked with the physicians to choreograph the flow of the president’s visitors, by determining which cabinet members could visit and in what order. As was his custom in Washington, Adams attended many of these meetings to ensure that they stayed on point and that the necessary actions were taken as a result.
Adams controlled the president’s reading: He had always managed the paper flow to and from the president, but during Eisenhower’s illness, he was more selective than usual. In the interest of stabilizing his mood, Eisenhower was not presented with any information that might upset him. For much of his illness, Adams kept even newspapers away from the president.
Adams controlled the pace and intensity of Eisenhower’s work schedule, slowly increasing the load as the president’s health improved. Within a week of his attack, before Eisenhower could even walk, Adams brought in his first item of business—the approval of a list of “pre-approved” government appointees.
Determining what rose to the level of the president’s attention and the packaging of policy presentations had always been an immense source of power for Adams, along with the benefit of being in the room when Eisenhower talked himself through important problems—at such times, Eisenhower did not need someone to guide his thoughts as much as he needed the feeling of urgency that came from having someone with him in the room; normally, Adams would sit quietly and listen as Eisenhower spoke. During Eisenhower’s illness, it is not hard to imagine Adams guiding the president’s thoughts and decision-making in a way he had not done in the past. Eisenhower had confidence in his right-hand man. Years spent leading large military operations had taught him the importance of people like Adams.
During his many visits to the White House as a senior army officer, Eisenhower had been surprised by the level of chaos and mediocrity surrounding Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. When he became president, he brought Adams—whom he had worked with during his election campaign, and whose masterful administration of floor operations duri
ng the 1952 Republican convention had shown how disciplined and effective an organizer he was—with him to establish a formalized decision-making structure in the White House. The management process they developed together helped relieve much of the pressure on Eisenhower while he recuperated.
During this critical period in the nation’s history, there was no staffer working more closely with the president and none more vital to the proper functioning of the government than Adams. He had always played an outsized role on the staff, and there were times when he was criticized for it. When Eisenhower was still healthy, Adams could always defend himself by saying that he was simply executing the president’s wishes. As Eisenhower lay in bed in Denver, unable to sit up on his own, Adams’s go-to defense must have lost some of its resonance.
The president spent seven weeks recovering in Fitzsimons Army Hospital and another six weeks at his 500-acre farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote in his biography of the president that he was lucky to have suffered his attack when he did—with Congress out of session and no events of urgent importance occurring domestically or abroad.13 But of course, there were crises occurring in the US and around the world—the Soviets were selling arms to the Egyptians to be used against the Israelis, the French were at war in Algeria, the US had officially entered the conflict in Vietnam—and, at home, the Montgomery Bus Boycotts had begun.
These were undoubtedly events that would have been meaningful to Eisenhower and worthy of his full attention, but Adams kept them from him until he felt the president was strong enough. He handled what issues he could himself and left the rest for future days.
IV
Adams: Partner to Power
The White House chief of staff is a relatively recent invention, but its many precursors have existed since the Washington Administration. President George Washington had what was referred to as a “private secretary.” In those days, the executive mansion was small (the White House had not yet been built), and there were few staff employees to oversee, so the president’s private secretary, Tobias Lear, functioned as one would expect a modern-day secretary might—managing correspondence and appointments.
President Thomas Jefferson appointed the famed explorer Meriwether Lewis as his secretary. Presidents John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore employed their sons in the role. Later, as the White House staff grew, the title changed to match the evolving responsibilities. President James Polk’s wife, Sarah Childress Polk, was the first woman to serve as a president’s private secretary. Given her extensive influence in the White House, one might stretch the definition and pronounce her the first female chief of staff, though some have reserved that distinction for Missy LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the role expanded to somewhat resemble the modern chief of staff. George Cortelyou was President William McKinley’s secretary, but, as mentioned in the prologue, his duties were wide-ranging and included overseeing the president’s press operations. Later, when the White House staff mushroomed during the Great Depression and World War II, Louis Howe was appointed “secretary to the president,” with responsibility for overseeing the growing staff and managing the policies and politics of the president.
Under Harry Truman, the title was changed to “assistant to the president,” to settle a staff dispute (between Clark Clifford and John Steelman). Sherman Adams was the second person to hold the title of assistant to the president, but, in private, Eisenhower referred to him as his chief of staff. He rarely used the title in public, to avoid making the White House sound like a military operation.
The more memorable chiefs of staff have been the ones who oversaw major changes in how the position functioned or who added to its responsibilities in a significant way. Of the postwar presidents, John F. Kennedy had the fewest number of chiefs of staff—only one. And Obama had the most—five, including Peter Rouse, an interim chief of staff who happened to be the first Asian American to serve in the post.
The most powerful chief in history is Sherman Adams; the least powerful is either Ken O’Donnell, who functioned more as Kennedy’s appointments secretary than as a chief, and Mack McLarty, who served in the Clinton White House during the brief period when First Lady Hillary Clinton’s power was at its peak—more about this later. McLarty had a notoriously light touch when it came to management, and Hillary encouraged his appointment as a way to ensure her own influence in the West Wing.
James A. Baker has the distinction of having served as chief of staff to two presidents—Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He joined Bush to lay the groundwork for the president’s reelection campaign. It would be the last in a long string of political campaigns of which Baker would serve at the helm and which his candidate would lose.
For the most part, all the men and women who have served in the evolving role of chief of staff, since Tobias Lear worked for President Washington, have done so with distinction and honor. The few possible exceptions include H. R. Haldeman, Sherman Adams (yes, Sherman Adams) and John Sununu.
H. R. Haldeman was convicted in 1975 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice for helping conceal President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate affair. Haldeman might have gotten away with his crimes had President Nixon pardoned him as he requested, but Nixon refused. (In the end, Nixon was too worried about saving his own skin to worry about anyone else.) Sherman Adams was asked to resign in Eisenhower’s second term after a congressional committee revealed that he had accepted expensive personal gifts. John Sununu was asked to resign under President George H. W. Bush for racking up thousands of dollars in personal travel expenses on government aircraft. (The White House counsel was able to convince Sununu to repay the tens of thousands in fees he owed only after persuading the Republican Party to tighten the screws.)
Sherman Adams will long be remembered as perhaps the most powerful chief of staff this country will ever know. Though a scandal ended his political career, in his role as the first fully formed White House chief of staff, he helped establish a tradition and practice that endures to this day.
Eisenhower respected Adams immensely and bestowed upon him a level of trust that is unimaginable in present times. If a less trusted person had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff before, during and after his heart attack, his administration might not have survived. The next time a president would place so much authority in the hands of staff would not occur until almost three decades later, when President Reagan invited James Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese to help him run the government.
Eisenhower and Reagan are two presidents known for their willingness to delegate authority, though they had different reasons for doing so. Reagan was an extraordinary leader but a poor manager. As a consequence, he needed three men to do what Sherman Adams could do alone.
The team of Baker, Deaver and Meese—or the “Troika,” as they would become known—was unique in American history. At no other time had staffers functioned in the way these three did for President Reagan. Separately, each man had immense influence, but together they were an awesome force. The president’s number-one cabinet officer and secretary of state, Alexander Haig, would learn the hard way that it was a mistake to underestimate their power.
TO PLAY THE KING
President Reagan’s secretary of state once confessed that Reagan was so dependent upon his staff that he was rarely seen in public without Baker (second from right), Deaver (right) or Meese (left) nearby in case someone were to ask him a question. Despite the fact that Baker and Meese frequently disagreed, the “Troika” was successful because Deaver used his influence with Nancy Reagan to act as the deciding vote. (Ronald Reagan Presidential Library)
It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take a chance?1
—President Ronald Reagan
Historians who rank Ronald Reagan among the greatest American presidents often point to his gift for communication, the clarity of his vision and his unwavering self-co
nfidence as a source of strength and inspiration for generations of leaders. Reagan was surely an inspiring leader and perhaps even a visionary, but was he a great president? The success of his efforts to quell the Soviet Union is undeniable and well worthy of praise, but when President Reagan is measured against all the great men who have inhabited the White House, there is one area where he comes up severely lacking—people skills.
Unlike the truly extraordinary presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Reagan lacked the talent, or perhaps even the will, to effectively manage the men and women who served him. Reagan was no FDR, who had a gift for identifying and exploiting people’s strengths. And Reagan was no Lincoln, whose staggering skills as a manager enabled him to rein in legendary egos such as William Seward and Salmon Chase, who, had they worked for Reagan, might have torn the cabinet apart. Reagan hated conflict and avoided any personal interaction that required more than a superficial engagement. These are hardly the hallmark characteristics of an effective manager.
As far back as his days as California governor, Reagan had to lean heavily on his advisers for assistance. In the White House, he depended on the tightly knit trio of James Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese, who each addressed one or more of Reagan’s biggest deficiencies in leadership: Baker compensated for Reagan’s weakness as a strategist, Meese stood in for him as a policymaker and Deaver managed the interpersonal details that Reagan found so painful. At the dawn of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, when staged images were often mistaken for reality, this trio, or “Troika,” as they would become known, fooled the public into believing that Reagan was more involved as president than he actually was.
Partner to Power Page 17