2. Don't let your cabinet secretaries put career officials in top positions.
In most cases, Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz, made political appointees his assistant secretaries -- for good reason. As he wrote in his memoir, "In the end, it is the president's foreign policy, so key people who help him shape it and carry it out -- including in the State Department -- should be on his political wavelength." He stuck carefully to the line that important decisions must reflect the president's views, and in Shultz's opinion, the most energetic and successful enforcers were unlikely to be bureaucrats.
There's a reason for that. For most career bureaucrats, the most important reference points are other career officials; they are bureaucratic loyalists rather than presidential loyalists. A cabinet or subcabinet official can be very lonely surrounded by career officials and needs the moral, intellectual, and political sustenance of other political appointees around him or her. If he or she is left out in the wilderness, the outcome is predictable: going native.
This is inevitable. "Making the bureaucracy accountable to the president in any comprehensive or enduring way is impossible," wrote the late James Q. Wilson in his classic work Bureaucracy. "[M]aking it alert to his preferences is possible in those cases where presidents put loyal and competent subordinates in charge of making decisions."
It's not that all career officials are disloyal, though some are. I recall an assistant secretary under Secretary of State Colin Powell, a career Foreign Service officer who in 2004 made very clear her hope that Democratic nominee John Kerry would win the presidential election and rid the country of the fools in the White House. The more common problem, however, in the vast U.S. national security establishment is that career military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials come to see American foreign policy as, in the words of historian Arthur Schlesinger, "their institutional, if not their personal, property, to be solicitously protected against interference from the White House and other misguided amateurs."
No one has ever explained the problem better than Truman, who defied the unanimous demand of his top State Department appointees that he not recognize the new state of Israel in 1948. Secretary of State George Marshall famously told Truman that, in view of his decision to defy those recommendations, Marshall could never vote for him again. Truman reflected on the incident in his memoir Years of Trial and Hope, noting that career bureaucrats see themselves as "the men who really make policy" and "look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants."
That was a notion Truman was keen to dispel, and he worked mightily to do so. "The civil servant, the general or admiral, the foreign service officer has no authority to make policy," he wrote. "They act only as servants of the government, and therefore they must remain in line with the government policy that is established by those who have been chosen by the people to set that policy."
It is impossible to carry out presidential policies without appointees who owe their jobs and loyalties to the president, not to their own service's personnel system. This is about more than personal prejudices or ambitions. It is also about having a genuine understanding of the president's worldview. And who better than the president's personal picks?
SUBJECTS:
