No one saw this Chief Executive more often or more closely than his Budget Director, Harold Smith, who was exasperated as Roosevelt transgressed the orthodox canons of administration even while he gaped with disbelief at his chief’s broken-field running. In his diary Smith recorded the range of Roosevelt’s interests, his inability to extricate himself from odd details and ideas even at the height of a world war.
March 17,1943: “The President told me he had a job for me. He tried to find the papers but could not do so. However, he decided to tell me about it. He wants me to investigate the situation with respect to the Government’s purchasing the Empire State Building, about which Al Smith has talked to him recently. He…had turned the problem over to Jesse Jones, but Jones was getting nowhere with it.”
April 9, 1943: “…The President did not agree with our recommendation. He made a strong argument that physical fitness and recreation are properly separable, and asked that provision be made in the Office of Defense, Health and Welfare Services for a physical fitness group….”
May 8, 1943: “The President approved the Army budget.…I think he proposes to use it as a propaganda instrument in connection with the forthcoming conference concerning military strategy, with the near conclusion of the North African campaign.”
June 3, 1943: (The President had just awakened from a short afternoon nap.) “I said I was glad to know that he was following a regimen, since he is one of the most important men today. In passing off my comment, he made a remark to the effect that John L. Lewis apparently did not think he was very important and would be glad to see him out as President. The President said he made a comment—which he thought was a good crack—that he would be glad to resign as President if John L. Lewis committed suicide….
“The President pointed out that mint tea, for instance, would help to satisfy the population of Morocco and Algiers….”
August 31, 1943: “I reminded the President that he had received a letter from his Chief of Staff saying essentially that everything was lovely [in military planning], I commented that he, the President, knew different. The President suggested that we might continue this correspondence with another memorandum…in the vein, ‘Now boys, even if you are kidding yourselves, don’t try to kid the Commander in Chief….’
“The President commented that the Army was always crying that he did not understand the Army and that he was partial to the Navy. He said, ‘You know that I have been tougher with the Navy than with the Army.’ I had to admit that was true. Furthermore, he said that he had had more trouble with the Navy in this war than with the Army.”
Such was the unconventional Chief Executive as he was known to his subordinates, to conservative critics who castigated him for one-man rule and dictatorial tendencies, and to those who admired him precisely because he did not follow the usual rules of the game and standard principles of orderly administration. But there was another Chief Executive who had long been concerned with orderly executive management; who had established New Deal executive or co-ordinating committees and sometimes presided over them; who had set up a host of planning agencies; who had appointed a committee on executive management to shape proposals for more effective presidential direction and control; who had backed most of its proposals against one of the most fanatical counterattacks on Capitol Hill that he had ever encountered; who after the defeat of his first reorganization attempt had won extensive power to reorganize his own Executive Office and submit broader reorganization plans to Congress; who had created the Executive Office of the President and by transferring the Budget Bureau into it had immensely strengthened central presidential control; who had regrouped agencies into more coherent entities, such as the Federal Security Agency; who had secured a continuing authority to reorganize under war-powers acts and had fashioned and refashioned defense and war agencies to his liking.
The two Chief Executives had long lived together in a manner as baffling as Roosevelt’s ability to be both party leader and Chief of State, both leader of a popular majority and leader of the people, both conservative—or at least traditionalist—and liberal, both man of principle and man of expediency, without any apparent strain, except on his subordinates. The latter could never be sure which Roosevelt would confront them. By what inner compass or design the President decided to take on any one of these roles—or whether he consciously made decisions about his roles—was never clear even to intimates.
But on one great executive responsibility—the recruitment and positioning of talent—Roosevelt deserved credit by any test of administration. Somehow, as much by some unerring instinct as by observation and insight, the President had made a host of brilliant appointments by mid-war. Hopkins, Hassett, Smith in the presidential office, Stimson, Marshall, Patterson in War, Forrestal in Navy, Elmer Davis in OWI, Henderson and, later, Chester Bowles in OPA, Byrnes and Cohen in OWM, Bush and Conant in war science, Davis and Morse on the War Labor Board, Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur in the field—these men were not only instruments of a President’s purpose but also adornments of a public service.
The fate of another adornment of the service, Sumner Welles, at State, poignantly reflected the anomaly of Roosevelt’s administrative ways. The President kept Welles on as Undersecretary because he was a superb presidential agent in a vast organization that often seemed beyond the grip of the White House. Hull of course resented the agent and the arrangement; “every department has its thun of a bitch,” he told a friend, “but I’ve got the all-American.” Welles’s place in Roosevelt’s court, along with his hauteur and his brilliance, made for enemies in Washington. And he was vulnerable. Someone spread rumors through Washington that he had made advances to a Negro porter on a train. Roosevelt heard that William Bullitt, long a rival to Welles, was the rumor monger. When the former envoy next came to the oval office, Roosevelt stopped him at the door.
“William Bullitt,” he trumpeted, “stand where you are.
“Saint Peter is at the gate. Along comes Sumner Welles, who admits to human error. Saint Peter grants him entrance. Then comes William Bullitt. Saint Peter says: ‘William Bullitt, you have betrayed a fellow human being. You—can—go—down—there.’ ” He told Bullitt he wished never to see him again. But he knew that Welles’s usefulness was over—and losing a “member of the family” may have accounted for some of Roosevelt’s feeling.
Clearly, Roosevelt’s administrative ways were hell on his subordinates. Grumbling day after day in his diary and to friends, Stimson spoke for many of his colleagues accustomed to clear-cut delegations of power, orderly staff work, regular channels.
“He wants to do it all himself….” “…the poorest administrator I have ever worked under in respect to the orderly procedure and routine of his performance…” “I often wish the President wasn’t so soft-hearted towards incompetent appointees….” “Today the President has constituted an almost innumerable number of new administrative posts, putting at the head of them a lot of inexperienced men appointed largely for personal grounds and who report on their duties directly to the President and have constant and easy access to him…better access to the President than his Cabinet officers have. The lines of delimitation between these different agencies themselves and between them and the departments is very nebulous….” “…the Washington atmosphere is full of acrimonious disputes over matters of jurisdiction….”
Oscar Cox complained, too, from his closer vantage point to White House operations, that major policy decisions were going by default, policies were not being swiftly executed, excessive demands were being made on the President’s time.
But Roosevelt’s enemies found some solace in his methods. Late in 1942 the Japan Times-Advertiser editorialized that whatever the congressional clamor for a new unity of command, Roosevelt would never let anyone overshadow him, that he preferred “multi-phased calculations” such as playing one faction against the other and using disunity rather than unity as a means of control, that he was not a military strategist but a public-rela
tions man and hence that America’s war organization would not move out of the formative stage. This organizational view of Roosevelt’s presidency was duly forwarded to the White House, where it was dismissed, if even noticed, but the criticisms of Roosevelt’s executive leadership and management could not be ignored. Indeed, just as Roosevelt’s “one-man” administration had become in 1939 a fiery issue that spilled over into the 1940 election, the charge of bungling and mismanagement at the top of the executive branch loomed as a potential issue for 1944.
Most of the critics failed to see that their canons of orderly, “businesslike” administration, clear delegation of power, proper span of control, effective co-ordination, and the other textbook doctrines were not always—or even usually—relevant to the needs of the man in the oval office. For his problem was less one of management than of dramatizing goals, enunciating principles, lifting hopes, pointing out dangers, raising expectations, mobilizing popular energies, recruiting gifted aides and administrators, harmonizing disputants, protecting administrative morale. Even crusty Henry Stimson was not immune to Roosevelt’s healing balm. At the height of his annoyance with the President over poor administration, he admitted that a long talk with the President “tended to remove all of the unpleasant feeling which I have gradually been getting into…it indicated that his friendship and confidence in me were still unimpaired…he was very solicitous about Mabel’s health….”
For Roosevelt it was a question of power. When critics charged that he would not make Baruch or some other strong man a super-czar because he wanted to hoard his own authority or feared a rival, they were quite right. Partly it was a matter of temperament; as a prima donna, Roosevelt had no relish for yielding the spotlight for long. But mainly it was a matter of prudence, experience, and instinct. The President did not need to read Machiavellian treatises to know that every delegation of power and sharing of authority extracted a potential price in the erosion of presidential purpose, the narrowing of options, the clouding of the appearance of presidential authority, the threat to his reputation for being on top. He grumbled about his own problems.
“The Treasury is so large and far-flung and ingrained in its practices,” he told Marriner Eccles, “that I find it almost impossible to get the action and results I want—even with Henry [Morgenthau] there. But the Treasury is not to be compared with the State Department. You should go through the experience of trying to get any changes in the thinking, policy and action of the career diplomats and then you’d know what a real problem was. But the Treasury and the State Department put together are nothing compared with the Na-a-vy. The admirals are really something to cope with—and I should know. To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.”
In no particular did Roosevelt more flagrantly violate the precepts of public administration than in the casual variety of people he was willing to see. He was not easily accessible, but his accessibility was unpredictable. Late in 1943 the young American Chargé d’Affaires in Lisbon, George Kennan, feared that the State Department was making so heavy-handed a demand on Portugal for facilities in the Azores that the pressure might antagonize Salazar and push Franco over to the Nazis. When Kennan tried to take some initiative in assuring Lisbon that the United States would respect Portuguese sovereignty in all Portuguese territory, he was whisked back to Washington. There he was brought to the Pentagon and to a Kafkaesque meeting of Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Acting Secretary of State Stettinius, and other high officials. Kennan was alternately mystified and horrified by the discussion. No one seemed aware of his background reports, interested in his present views, or aware of the facts and the problem. Coolly dismissed from the meeting, he slunk away in despair. But he appealed to his Chief at State, who passed him on to Hopkins, who set up a meeting with the President. Roosevelt jovially waved Kennan to a seat, said he failed to understand how Lisbon could possibly suspect his intentions in the Azores—why, had he not as Assistant Secretary of the Navy personally supervised the dismantling of Azores bases in the last war?—and promised to give him a personal letter to take to Salazar. Kennan was elated but puzzled. What about the Pentagon meeting? “Oh, don’t worry,” Roosevelt said with a debonair wave of his cigarette holder, “about all those people over there.”
On countless other occasions Roosevelt protected his own purposes by seeing people far down the administrative line. Still, a President’s care and nurture of his own power for his myriad ends—winning elections, dealing with friend and foe abroad, protecting the presidential ego, defending the integrity of his position as the chief and only elected federal executive—are not easily and automatically translated into effective war mobilization or national economic power. Certain of his qualities played their part in the countless errors, delays, and wastes in the nation’s war effort.
One of these was his ambivalence toward planning itself. In no function were the two chief executives in Roosevelt more at odds with each other. He had long been a planner. He had established numberless planning agencies; he had staffed them well; he had paid attention to their reports. But planning, to Roosevelt, was a sharply limited exercise. It was segmental; he was interested in plans for specific regions, watersheds, industries, not—despite his critics—in “economic planning” or in some grand reshaping of the nation. He was critical of the National Resources Planning Board for indulging in lofty schemes, especially in the economic realm. And Roosevelt’s planning was limited in time. Repeatedly he restrained the military from making commitments more than six months or a year ahead. He was also ambivalent toward the administrative canons of unification, co-ordination, integration. He encouraged such tendencies in individual departments, especially in the military, but he resisted unification of the whole executive branch through planning or co-ordinating machinery. He never allowed the Cabinet or the OWM to serve as a collective agency for unified decision making. Over-all co-ordination was glaringly absent in the one area—fiscal and monetary policy—where it was most necessary and potentially effective. The Budget Bureau, under Harold Smith’s leadership, was eager to effect a marriage of budgeting and planning—“formal, informal, or of the shotgun type”—but the bureau never fashioned joint tools for planning, budgeting, and programing as a means of directing and co-ordinating the whole executive branch.
In the absence of strong, comprehensive, long-run planning instruments, Roosevelt’s wartime agencies were typically organized to cope with existing, dramatic crises rather than to head off less visible, potentially bigger ones; thus the establishment of a Rubber Director when the rubber supply was collapsing, the Office of Defense Transportation when the railroads seemed about to fail, the fuel and oil czardoms after those commodities were imperiled. Hence Roosevelt’s mobilization machinery tended to be more the prisoner of events than the master of them. The most comprehensive control agencies, OES and OWM, never realized their paper potential as means of planning, programing, and control. These agencies were under men—Byrnes and Vinson—who had little authority or temperament for top-level planning, but preferred to deal with disputes batted up by contending agencies, to act on the basis virtually of adversary proceedings, to mediate, negotiate, reconcile, adjust. Roosevelt encouraged them in this. He wanted no superczars in the White House outside of himself.
Nor was the mobilization structure in itself conducive to strong leadership, planning, and control. The agencies and their hundreds of subunits had grown like coral reefs. The pyramid of executive action had been built largely through “layering”—the piling of new agencies on top of others, culminating in the OWM—rather than through planning from the top down. Layering had great merits, but it tended to keep power diffused through the existing levels and it inhibited effective planning and programing from the White House even if Roosevelt had been inclined to it.
These tendencies toward pi
ecemeal, reactive war organization were reinforced by Roosevelt’s bent toward dealing with one set of problems at a time rather than establishing priorities across a wide front and over a long span of time. In particular he constantly stressed the importance of “winning the war”—that is, gaining a military victory as quickly and inexpensively as possible—rather than seeking at the same time to gain broader, more complex goals, such as “winning the peace.” He did not believe fully in separating the short-run from the long, as indicated by the fact that he was taking up postwar problems and goals long before war’s end. But he did so as much for the purpose of keeping his own choices wide and preventing others from capturing and shaping postwar issues—in short, to prevent other persons’ planning—as for the purpose of his own long-run planning. And his philosophy permeated his administration and inhibited or enervated long-term planning.
All these administrative tendencies, both institutional and Rooseveltian, toward the immediate, the concrete, the manageable were of the most profound importance in the life of the nation. World War II released social and economic forces that would have enormous impact on American life after the last bomb dropped. Millions of rural people were moving into cities and defense areas; millions of Negroes were leaving the farm, migrating north and west, tasting the delights and miseries, the opportunities and frustrations of city life; millions of women were working in factories and offices for the first time. The explosion of education—from the making of literates to the courses in languages and science—was a revolution in itself. Income, real as well as money, shot up, bringing infinite satisfactions and disappointments. Health, aid to women and children, and other welfare services were immensely expanded. Employment soared; the jobless dropped to an irreducible minimum of dedicated unemployables. Patterns of housing, congestion, employment, opportunity, discrimination were created that would closely affect the nation’s social and economic life for decades to come. How much these trends could have been affected by purposeful governmental action at the early stages is hard to say. But to the extent they could be affected, the emphasis on “Dr. Win the War” was bound to enhance the government’s short-run management only at the expense of long-run leadership. The burning cities of 1967 and 1968 were not wholly unrelated to steps not taken, visions not glimpsed, priorities not established, in the federal agencies of 1943 and 1944.
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