4. Establish a shadow government of presidential loyalists.
The formal org chart of every administration is nearly identical, and it is of course an indispensable description of how the affairs of government are conducted. It is important to know, for example, that the NSC senior director for Asia connects to the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, the national intelligence officer for Asia, and so on. But it's not enough to understand how government really works.
Every administration needs an alternative nervous system of loyalists who look to the president and his staff for guidance. Many will come from the campaign or Capitol Hill. These appointees should think of themselves as colonial officials dealing with natives who will appear at various times compliant, enthusiastic, or rebellious -- they should be rewarded or punished, empowered or removed, in the never-ending daily struggle for power.
Loyalists are a critical source of inside information on the activities of their departments, including private remarks and views of key officials. Some such individuals should be put in personnel positions in the departments to help promote other loyalists and thwart individuals who deeply disagree with the president's policies; some should be the president's point men with Congress; still others should be in the White House liaison positions that every agency maintains. Many, however, must be in decision-making jobs in the bureaucracy -- as assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretaries handling the heart of the agency's work -- if they are to have the knowledge and influence to enhance White House control.
Such special networks are nothing new. One informal group of dovish officials, for example, worked hard to end U.S. efforts in the Vietnam War. As Destler describes it, critics of escalation built a web of war skeptics in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and also found allies in the office of the undersecretary of state and the White House. When President Lyndon B. Johnson balked at tempering the war effort, Destler writes, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford "widened the field of battle by encouraging the President to call together the 'Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam,' thereby bringing McGeorge Bundy, Dean Acheson, Douglas Dillon, and Cyrus Vance into the coalition urging the President to change policy." This was certainly not a group found on the organizational charts of any agency. But it is often how the most important business of government gets done, and if a president does not work hard to establish networks of his own, they will likely be established to undermine him.
Such networks are not only critical to decision-making but to the gathering of information, without which decisions cannot be made. This problem is not unique to the United States, as Winston Churchill's biographer, Martin Gilbert, explained two decades ago. Churchill, who was in 1939 and 1940 sympathetic to the movement of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine, was thwarted by a hostile bureaucracy. It was not a civil servant who ultimately let Churchill know that British ships were intercepting Jewish refugees, but his own son, Randolph.
Other U.S. presidents likewise have relied on their families. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush asked George W. to study his White House team. When the son reported that his father's chief of staff, John Sununu, was a problem, the president decided to fire the guy, but had young George, then a private citizen, do it. In his memoir, Decision Points, W. laconically describes it as "an awkward conversation."
During his own White House tenure, the younger Bush had his vice president, Cheney, reach outside government to bring in retired Gen. Jack Keane for a reliable independent view of the situation in Iraq. When Keane would report in, Bush would come down the back hallway of the West Wing to the vice president's office and join the session -- so the president's formal schedule recorded no meeting with Keane, an event that, had the bureaucracy known about it, would have set off major alarm bells.
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