3. Treat cabinet officers as friends, but understand they are also enemies.
Members of the cabinet are sent out to live among the natives, who surround them all day long. Any president should try to maintain close contact with his cabinet, holding occasional (if useless) cabinet meetings, inviting them and their spouses to glamorous state dinners, and having lunch with them one-on-one once in a while.
Inevitably, however, they have very different perspectives from those of the president or White House staff. They will be focused on their own careers: Some will be worried about a future Senate seat or gubernatorial race; most will worry about their reputations with the media. All will seek the loyalty of their own subordinates in their agency. These factors will push them away from total loyalty to the White House.
To promote fidelity, the president should encourage thoughts of promotion within the administration or of vast White House assistance in a future career. He should also be aware that each cabinet member sees him and the White House staff as rivals for power, influence, and reputation and will seek to pin blame for errors and failures on the West Wing.
This phenomenon depends less on who is president than you might think. Every president, at least since Kennedy, has trusted his White House staff more than his cabinet. President Richard Nixon had Henry Kissinger run foreign policy as his national security advisor and virtually neuter Secretary of State William Rogers. Many people in the Bush White House saw Powell's team at the State Department as a major problem -- and vice versa. Obama's White House team and Secretary Hillary Clinton's State Department team were enemies during the fight for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination, and they still saw each other as rivals once in power. This shouldn't be surprising. White House staffers are devoted to the man in the Oval Office, identify his interests with their own, and have no other task but advancing his interests and policies.
The selection of cabinet officers reflects a wider variety of influences. "Some are appointed to reward campaign workers, others to find places for defeated members of Congress, still others to satisfy the demands of interest groups," Wilson wrote. "Sometimes the agency head is picked because he or she is thought to be an expert on the subject, but many times the president has no real idea of the content or policy implications of this expertise."
The president must understand that the members of his cabinet are, if not natural enemies, unreliable allies. The system will work fine so long as the president remembers this.
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