The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (93 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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19. What do you wish you had known prior to accepting nomination to a PAS position?
20. What advice would you give incoming appointees?
21. How do you assess your stress level, and that of the agency overall?
22. What originally pulled you into public service?
 
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Notes
1
Introduction
1. The institution of political appointments has evolved into a system of some complexity and large numbers in the modern era. Located primarily in the executive branch, there are some 1,163 full-time and 1,565 part-time PAS positions, 561 high-level political positions that do not require Senate confirmation (PAs), 459 excepted political positions, 95 "other" positions, 723 positions in the Senior Executive Service, and 1,794 Schedule C positions. Additionally, there are 903 federal judgeships in the judicial branch
(The Plum Book).
2. Appendix 1 details the trials and tribulations of efforts to gain cooperation from the Bush White House to execute the Bush PAS Survey, as well as the methodologies of the survey and interviews.
3. This particular bit of conventional wisdom happens to have solid basis in fact: Some 71 percent of Reagan's early appointees had
no
previous government experience (Newland 1983, 3).
2
Presidential Appointees in the Modern Era
1. The conservative partisan sauce deemed good for the goose is likewise good for the gander in Nathan's schema: "when the wheel of government rotates again to the liberal side on domestic issues, this is precisely what social policy liberals must do in their turn" (Nathan 1985, 376).
2. President Bill Clinton's two years of Democratic control of the Congress did not mean the end of the administrative presidency. He discovered to his chagrin, as had Jimmy Carter before him, that unified government does not equal united government. Even before the Democratic party lost both houses in 1994 the Democratic Congress could not have been expected to follow unhesitantly its president's lead in all, or even most things, given that so many of its new members came to office riding the anti-Washington wave. The House, with its gung-ho, increasingly conservative, reform-minded new class (not unlike the 1974 post-Watergate class), and the Senate, lacking a filibuster-proof majority of sixty, constituted a significant challenge to President Bill Clinton's leadership. In 1995, with both houses in Republican hands for the first time since 1955, the president might have found the administrative presidency a particularly attractive strategy.
3. Conveniently for Oliver North, the White House refused to make public the secret documents he claimed he needed for his defense. Consequently, two
 
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major charges against him had to be dropped. This carried the added benefit to the White House of protecting Reagan and Bush from further exposure to charges of complicity that might have been found in the documents.
4. See chapter 3.
5. Administrative discretion is also within the purview of careerists; subsequently, court involvement has curtailed their power, as discussed below.
6. Discussion of this concept follows in chapter 3.
7. This group of inexperienced PASs (71 percent, 101 of 142) stands in marked contrast to the Bush PASs, of whom, according to the Bush PAS Survey, 71 of 182 had been in a PAS position in Reagan's second administration, 34 in his first, 8 each in Ford's and Nixon's, and 5 in Carter's administrations. Sixty-seven of Bush's PASs had served in at least one SES position, 58 in at least one Schedule C position, and 94 in some other type of federal (nonmilitary) employment. Additionally, 77 had moved directly from federal government service to their initial PAS job and 10 came directly from state or local government service. Pfiffner reports that of the initial Bush White House staff, 24 of 29 had previous White House experience (Pfiffner 1990, 66). Clearly, the Bush people were a group well-versed in the ways of government service.
8. R. H. Melton and Bill McAllister, "From Watergate to Whitewater, Ethics an Issue,"
Washington Post,
October 21, 1996, Al.
9. Howard Kurtz. "The Big Sleazy,"
Washington Post,
March 26, 1995.
10. Ibid.
11. Melton and McAllister, "From Watergate to Whitewater," Al.
12. "Nixon Suggests Vandalizing RNC Offices,"
Washington Post,
February 15, 1997.
3
Politicization and Depoliticization in the Nation's Pressure Cooker
1. Over time, the presidential superstructure came to embrace the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council, the President's Special Trade Representative, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and other offices, all with sizeable staff. By 1987, the Executive Office of the President ran a budget of more than $114 million and a staff of more than sixteen hundred: 620 in the budget bureau alone and 325 in the White House proper (Smith 1988, 301).
2. See Appendix 1 for further details of negotiations with the White House over the Bush PAS Survey.

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