Partner to Power

by K. Ward Cummings

  Colonel House was not a member of Wilson’s family, like Ivanka and Jared were to Trump, but as a “quasi-official” of the US government he functioned similarly to them. Though he frequently spoke and acted on the president’s behalf, his official status hovered in a gray area that was difficult to define. This became a source of problems because, while House was Wilson’s chief aide at the peace conference, his unclear governmental standing rendered the promises he made on Wilson’s behalf non-binding. For example, in Wilson’s absence, House attempted to resolve minor disagreements among the delegates in preparation for the president’s return. Any of the decisions he made on Wilson’s behalf were subject to challenge because House was not an actual government official.

  When access, influence and legitimacy are considered, the advantages of a president using his or her vice president as right hand are clear. The president’s power is extended by an assistant who is above the petty squabbles that can fracture a cabinet; the gravitas of the vice president’s office will open doors that might open reluctantly for other senior officials; and, unlike a family member of the president, the vice president does not have to face challenges to his or her authority or issues arising from nepotism. The choice of the vice president in the vital right-hand role has advantages for the American voter as well.

  Unlike House (chapter three), Howe (chapter four) or Clifford (chapter five), for example—presidential assistants who exercised enormous influence and yet were mysteries to an inquiring public—the vice president is already a relatively well-known figure by the time he or she steps into the office. But consider how little was known about Colonel House when he acted on behalf of the US in Paris. As he made promises for President Wilson and conducted secret negotiations with foreign heads of state, Americans did not have the benefit of understanding his history, nor were they afforded the opportunity to question his qualifications. In Wilson’s day, the public was more willing to trust the president’s judgment about such matters, but since the Watergate scandal exposed the illegal activities of officials in the Nixon Administration, Americans have been more skeptical of the activities of these shadowy figures. In other words, they are less open to giving the president the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his or her associates.

  Recall the uproar that greeted President Trump’s appointment of White House strategist Steve Bannon to the National Security Council. Almost as soon as the news of his appointment was made public, Americans began to openly issue challenges about his competency and qualifications. That uproar, and the backlash against the Trump children in their high-level roles, shows the increasing scrutiny to which Americans subject presidential advisers. When citizens perceive that there are options like a knowledgeable, constitutionally authorized vice president, the public demands for the chief executive’s closest advisers to have comparable qualifications have merit.

  Today, unlike in Wilson’s day, Americans expect the people advising the president to be clearly qualified to do so. This may signal an important opportunity for any members of the public hoping to influence the vital selection of right-hand men and women. Given that almost every president has employed a right hand at some point, and given the extraordinary influence these unique individuals possess, shouldn’t American voters have a say—or at least the right to have their basic expectations met—regarding who is selected in this critical post?

  Some academics may question the utility of the role of right hand to the president or the legitimacy of those who serve in the post. But, as a historical institution, it seems that the role is here to stay. So, considering that Americans have direct influence over who is elected vice president and indirect influence—by way of their representatives in Congress—over who is appointed to head federal agencies, why shouldn’t they have a say in who becomes the president’s right-hand man or woman? Could the answer to this question be as simple as paying closer attention to who presidential candidates select as running mates?

  The rising public esteem in recent years for the office of the vice president has had important consequences for the evolution of the role of president’s right hand. Even as Americans have been persistently critical of the ghostlike figures working in the White House, it appears that they have grown more comfortable with the vice president in a position of White House leadership. As a consequence of the convergence of these two vital dynamics—greater scrutiny of presidential advisers and the growing relevance of the vice president—the American public is presented with an opportunity to influence, perhaps for the first time in history, who the president selects as his or her right hand.

  The media will continue to ferret out and identify those individuals who are exercising the president’s power by proxy behind the scenes, and the American public will undoubtedly continue to object when these figures fall short of their expectations. This is as it should be. Given that reality, and considering the expanding role of the office and the frequency with which vice presidents have been utilized as right hands in recent years, in order to ensure effective and accountable government, Americans should insist that candidates for vice president be legitimately qualified to lead and that they have a genuine working relationship with the presidential candidate. No more left-field selections like former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who had no Washington expertise and no prior relationship with 2008 presidential candidate Senator John McCain. It is hard to believe, given her questionable qualifications, that President McCain would have selected Vice President Palin to be his most trusted adviser.

  If a vice-presidential candidate is extraordinarily capable and gets on well with his or her running mate, chances are that, once the two are in office, the president will draw the vice president into his or her inner circle—which increases the chances of being selected as right hand. That is a win-win scenario for the president and the public. The president will have the benefit of a powerful assistant with gravitas, constitutional relevance and ability, and the American public will have someone who they know has been properly vetted and who, as an elected official, is directly accountable to them.

  Given the secret power of presidents’ right hands, it is no surprise that Americans are interested in the identities of these people. Of course, those among the public who hope to influence the selection of right-hand men and women must accept the fact that it is ultimately up to the president to choose his or her closest adviser. But engaged Americans should also recognize that by bringing to bear the special influence they possess as voters, they can help guide that decision.

  Writing a book is impossible without the help of a community of supporters. Thank you to MAC for your advice, encouragement, ideas and rock-steady support. There were times along the way when I had doubts. Thank you for believing in me.

  Thank you to Will DeRooy for helping me find the words.

  Thank you to Karen Robb for providing the inspiration for the book. You prove that rock stars aren’t always the people on the stage.

  Every author needs readers, and I want to thank Camilla McKinney, Rick Gilmore, Elizabeth Hoffman Schmeltz, Richard and Milton Anderson, Tony Jennings and Kelley O’Neill, Becky Levin, Kimberly Overbeek, Diana Meredith and Scott Russell for your patience and advice. I know the rough cuts were just that—rough. I appreciate your time.

  And thank you to the staff of the Library of Congress—if not for your sheer strength—for your advice, for your recommendations and for responding to my many stupid questions with generosity and patience.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1.Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York: Dover, 1964).

  2.Edmund Wilson, “Woodrow Wilson at Princeton,” in The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), p. 322.

  3.George and George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, p. 318.

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Churchill’s representative Brendan Bracken was joined by a colleague who is
reported to have described Hopkins as “so ill and frail that a puff of wind would blow him away” (Michael Fullilove, Rendezvous with Destiny [New York: Penguin, 2013], p. 202).

  In a letter to his brother Lewis dated September 8, 1939, Hopkins tried to describe the severity of his condition:

  I am not absorbing proteins and fats in any adequate manner. My protein count or whatever you call it, is one-third normal. This is in spite of a very well-regulated diet. In other words, nothing that I can take by mouth seems to make any difference so they are pushing a variety of things intravenously and intra-muscularly, including some material which they are using experimentally here. My eyesight is going back on me, and I have lost about thirty pounds from my top weight a year ago.

  2.What became known as the Trail of Tears did not occur during the Jackson Administration, though President Jackson deserves credit for the tragedy. The removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi was initiated by authority of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The forced relocation of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek tribes was begun during the Jackson Administration, but the Trail of Tears occurred under the direction of Jackson’s successor, President Martin Van Buren, in 1838 and 1839. In his entire eight years as president, the Indian Removal Act was the only law passed at President Jackson’s personal behest. John Eaton helped engineer its passage and worked aggressively with President Jackson to encourage the impacted tribes to accept the terms of the law. When, in 1838, Cherokees refused to comply with President Van Buren’s order to relocate, Van Buren sent in the military to move them by force.

  3.This list is by no means exhaustive. Not all of the presidents’ right hands have fit neatly into one of these five categories. Valerie Jarrett, for example, was officially the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and Colonel Edward House had no official White House title at all while working for President Wilson. What these five categories represent are frequent models of the presidential right hand over the years. Examining the profiles of the men and women since the Washington Administration who have served in the role will reveal that most of them fit into one of these categories.

  4.Another reason for the nickname, besides the fact that he looked the part, was Cheney’s penchant for working in the shadows. He notoriously preferred not to put anything down on paper and to conduct business on the telephone or in person whenever possible so as not to leave a trail.

  CHAPTER ONE: GEORGE WASHINGTON & ALEXANDER HAMILTON

  1.George Washington, letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham, January 9, 1790.

  2.Hamilton recognized that he had a talent for organization and management that was appealing to men in leadership, but he preferred his role as captain of artillery. After coming to the attention of Generals Alexander McDougall, Nathaniel Greene, Lord Stirling, and Washington for his role in a battle that led to the capture of a thousand Hessian troops, he was approached by at least two of the generals about serving as their aide-de-camp. He refused each time, out of a belief that the job required a level of “personal dependence” that he found unappealing. On January 20, 1777, George Washington wrote Hamilton a personal letter requesting his service on his staff. Days later, Hamilton published his acceptance in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. Hamilton’s official appointment and accompanying double promotion to the rank of lieutenant colonel were announced on March 1.

  3.Washington’s irascibility was particularly apparent when he was in the presence of servants or subordinates. Observers describe him as being two people—the public Washington who was calm and composed, and the stern, abusive, and violent Washington that emerged in his private dealings with his slaves. Paul Longmore, on page 181 of his book The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), quotes the wife of the British ambassador, who said of Washington that he “acquired a uniform command over his passions on public occasions, but in private and particularly with servants, its violence sometimes broke out.” Biographer Ron Chernow, on page 114 of his book Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), describes in chilling detail the level of “attentiveness” to Washington’s moods that his slaves displayed at Mount Vernon. They watched Washington closely as they went about their work, attentive to his slightest movements, as if even a silent glance in their direction carried a veiled threat.

  4.Clinton and Hamilton started out as friends. During the American Revolution, they established a regular correspondence, but, after the war, their political ambitions conflicted. Eventually, Hamilton would count Clinton, along with Jefferson and Burr, as one of his greatest political rivals.

  Their roads began to diverge after Clinton defeated Hamilton’s father-in-law for the office of governor of New York. Increasingly, as Clinton’s political power grew, Hamilton began to resent Clinton’s favoring of New York over the country as a whole. Although Hamilton initially regarded Clinton as “a man of integrity,” he ended up describing him as “circumspect and guarded” and accusing him of rarely acting “without premeditation or design” (Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton [New York: Penguin Press, 2005], pp. 220–21).

  5.There was always a sense of the theater about Washington. Whether it was in his dress or manner, before a crowd he always seemed to be an actor on a stage. He disliked public speaking, perhaps because it carried the risk of doing damage to his carefully cultivated image and he labored over the physical impression he made the way an actor might in preparation for a scene. It is no surprise that he was a huge fan of the theater. It was not uncommon for him to attend performances five nights a week. He would see plays, puppet shows, musicals, waxworks, almost anything. His letters are filled with theatrical references, and the theater informed even how he interacted with the people around him. The story of him trying to convince his officers to remain in the army during the Revolution by making them feel sorry for him is well known. They found it difficult to criticize the “old man” when he needed glasses to read his prepared remarks. Washington knew that wearing glasses would communicate to his men how the war had aged him and that their pity for him would convince them to stay.

  6.Of course, Mary Ball had the assistance of slaves to help ease her burden. George himself, even as a young boy, owned ten slaves. (They had been willed to him upon the death of his father, but George would not take full possession of them until he came of age.)

  7.Washington believed that outward appearance was the best indication of a man’s inner qualities. Throughout his life, he took great pains to ensure that he and those representing him adhered to exacting sartorial standards. His own close attention to the details of his dress can be gathered from a 152-word letter written to his tailor describing a coat he wanted made. Ron Chernow included in his biography of Washington a few lines from the letter:

  a lapel breast, the lapel to contain on each side six button holes and to be about 5 or 6 inches wide, all the way equal, and to turn as the breast of the coat does: to have it made very long-waisted and in length to come down to or below the bent of the knee, the waist from the armpit to the fold to be exactly as long or longer than from thence to the bottom, not to have more than one fold in the skirt etc. (Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life [New York: Penguin, 2010], p. 21.)

  8.The American Experience, season 5, episode 6, “George Washington: The Man Who Wouldn’t Be King,” directed by David Sutherland, written by William Martin and David Sutherland, aired November 18, 1992, on WGBH/PBS, Boston.

  9.To accuse John Adams of being slow to let go of a grudge or of having a mean streak would be a gross understatement. If he disliked a person, as he grew to dislike Hamilton, his criticism could be scathing and personal. He insulted Hamilton virulently, in ways that seem embarrassingly beneath the stature of a man of Adams’s reputation. Referring to Hamilton’s youth in the Caribbean, Adams described him to friends as the “creole bastard” or “the Scottish Creolian of Nevis” (Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton: American [New York: Touchstone, 1999]). Adams also seemed
obsessed with Hamilton’s love life, often accusing him of infidelity in the most lewd ways, such as when he said that Hamilton had “a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off” (James Thomas Flexner, The Young Hamilton: A Biography [New York: Fordham University Press, 1997], p. 62). Adams even accused Hamilton of being a habitual drug user. He once told a friend that Hamilton “never wrote or spoke at the bar or elsewhere in public without a bit of opium in his mouth” (John Adams correspondence, Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams and Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822 [New York: Little, Brown, 1927]).

  10.Alexander Hamilton, letter to Edward Stevens, November 11, 1769.

  11.Thomas Jefferson’s assessment of Washington’s decision-making style, made years after the Revolution, reveals how little Washington had changed in his later years. Jefferson describes the president as an assiduous and careful planner, but also someone who readjusted only with great difficulty if his plans were disrupted. Jefferson believed Washington to be smart but lacking a nimble cast of mind, which prevented him from being spontaneous and creative. It was as if Washington had spent so much of his life training himself to control his emotions that he had lost the ability to react naturally to his surroundings. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1318.

  12.For the better part of a year, Hamilton was being blackmailed by his mistress Maria Reynolds and her husband, James. They had lured Hamilton into the sexual relationship and then demanded regular payments from him. Hamilton’s enemies got hold of their letters and shared them with the press while accusing Hamilton of using US Treasury funds for speculation purposes. Apparently valuing his public reputation more than his privacy, Hamilton published a pamphlet in 1796 admitting to the affair in great detail and even including details from the Reynolds’s letters.