Criteria for Selection

According to James, the Reagan team applied a set of five criteria--philosophical commitment, integrity, toughness, competence, and being a team player--to the initial list of candidates to determine who would be included in the short list for administration positions:

Number one, philosophical commitment to Ronald Reagan. In other words, if you're coming in to serve in this Administration, you know what Reagan ran on. You know what his campaign policies are; you know what his speeches were; you know what he wants to accomplish, because all political candidates outline that during the political campaign. Are you philosophically compatible with this program that this President has outlined? That was one criterion.

Second, we would appoint men and women of unquestioned integrity from the moral background and capability and lifestyle to be sure that they had integrity.

The third criterion was toughness. By toughness we meant the ability to withstand the buffeting you take in the executive branch. Men and women who serve in these high-level posts are buffeted daily by special-interest groups, by Congressmen, by some committee chairman, by lawyers who want to influence your policy for their direction or for their clients. So by toughness we meant the ability to hang in there, withstand that buffeting as much as you can, to adhere to the President's program.

The fourth criterion was competence. Obviously you had to have something in your background, training, and experience that gave you the ability to understand the substantive nature of that particular post you would have to take.

And the fifth criterion was being a team player. By "team player" we meant you're not taking this appointment for your own self-aggrandizement, which is a byproduct of any senior-level post anyhow, but you recognize that you're there to work with a team, to work with a commitment, and try to accomplish what the President's agenda is. You're not off the reservation enhancing your own political career or seeking that job you're looking for after you leave the administration.

Selecting Cabinet Officers

The Reagan team put the selection of Cabinet officials on a separate track, outside the normal transition operation. James began by identifying the pool of nationally known individuals who were capable of running Cabinet departments, who were well-known to Reagan, and who were philosophically committed to Reagan:

I put together--hypothetically, again--without talking to people, without interviewing people, three to seven names for each department: State, Defense, Treasury. Many times there are duplicates. For example, obviously you knew Cap [Caspar] Weinberger was going to be on that list. Well, I had Cap under State, Defense, and OMB. You could put him in either one, or Bill Casey, or whatever it may be.

The day after the election, we were all out in California at the Century Plaza Hotel. The next morning, a meeting took place at the President-elect's residence in Pacific Palisades. Subject: Cabinet selection. At that meeting in his living room were Mike Deaver, Jim Baker, George Bush, Paul Laxalt, Bill Casey, and myself and the President-elect, and I had the report.

Everybody in that room had been focusing all their time on getting the man elected. They were not thinking about anything else except votes, fund-raising, ballots, electoral college. Now, all of a sudden, "Gee, now we've got to put together a team." So by doing just the staff work, now we had the names. We passed it around, and then for the first time the President-elect started focusing on Cap here or Bill Casey there, or Al Haig or Don Regan here, or Drew Lewis, and the process went on.

Preparing for the Press

It is very important, says Chase Untermeyer, who headed the Office of Presidential Personnel under President Bush, to remember that personnel is always a news story. He suggests that the President select someone to handle the media:

It also seems to me inevitable that Presidential Personnel will be a big news story during the transition and the immediate post-inaugural period, deep into the first year of the administration. It is also inevitably a bad story, particularly as in recent administrations where it's taken ever longer to fill positions.

It seems to me, therefore, that one essential element of a Presidential Personnel Office would be a full-time press person to field the calls that will come in with what I used to call the body counts: "How many vacancies are still open? How many women have you selected? How many minorities are selected? How many people from Ohio have been selected?" These can occupy the day of the Director of Presidential Personnel, who has a few other things to do, such as interviewing people, attending meetings, taking calls from Senators, and all the rest.

I came to the conclusion that I could do one of two things. I could be the Director of Presidential Personnel or I could take care of my press relations, but I could not do both. And my press relations suffered, which was the right choice, but it seems to me that because the President's own standing and image of the administration is so key, that is extremely vital.

Pressure from the Cabinet

The pressure from Cabinet secretaries to control their own staff appointments can be intense, says George Mason University professor of government James Pfiffner. In part this is a simple "turf battle." Yet if a Cabinet secretary is to be held accountable for his agency, then, some argue, the secretary should be able to assemble his own management team. Pfiffner explains the Cabinet secretary's viewpoint, as described by Frank Carlucci, who served as Secretary of Defense late in the Reagan Administration:

The Cabinet secretary position has been articulated by Frank Carlucci in a National Academy of Public Administration interview in the 1980s. We were asking him his advice for new political appointees coming into an administration, and he said, "Spend most of your time at the outset focusing on the personnel system, get your appointees in place, have your own political personnel person, because the first clash you're going to have is with the White House Personnel Office; and I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, if you don't get your own people in place you're going to end up being a one armed paper-hanger."

Some President have shared this view and allowed Cabinet secretaries to appoint their department positions. One such President was Jimmy Carter. But Carter's Director of White House Personnel, James King, explains that the Carter Administration learned a hard lesson from that approach:

President Carter believed that the Cabinet [secretaries] should appoint their own folks, and that made it much easier in personnel. What you got, basically, was to carry a mop and a broom and clean up after everyone. Obviously, you learn from that experience, and I'm very grateful you did. The citizens of this country are better served.

One of the great myths is, "The buck will stop here if I've got my own team out there," and that's the argument from the Cabinet. The buck doesn't stop there. The buck stops with the President, plain and simple, and you're putting the integrity of the administration, its future, and the trust of the American people on the line.

Building a loyal Cabinet is, of course, critical to a President's success. The Reagan Administration understood this well, and Reagan's top White House staff took steps to ensure that the Cabinet worked closely with the White House in carrying out the President's agenda (see Chapter 4). Reagan, however, believed that it was equally important that the first loyalty of a Cabinet secretary's staff should be to the President. Key agency staffers, then, should owe their jobs, as well as their loyalty, to the President rather than the Cabinet secretary. Pendleton James explains that the Reagan White House made sure they controlled the agency positions from the beginning of the process:

How did we get control of the appointment process? This was key. The President decided, "I'll hypothetically pick Don Regan Secretary of the Treasury." Don came in, sat down with the President. Ed Meese and Pen James were in the room. And the President said, "Don, congratulations, I want you to be my Secretary of Treasury. You're a great guy. We're going to have a great team, we're going to do this, we're going to do that."

He said, "One thing I want you to understand, though." This is the President talking: "We are going to control the appointments here at the White House, and Pen is going to be head of Presidential Personnel. Now, Don, we want your input on who you want for your Deputy, Assistant Secretary, and such, because it's your team and you have a part, but we are going to control it here at the Oval Office, and do you agree with us?" And, of course, every one of them says, "Yes, I really do."

So we got control of it right away. Obviously, you lose that after about nine months or so, but for the first six or eight months, that Cabinet officer is going to clear it with us before he does anything.

In order to appoint staff this way, however, the President must follow a systematic process and not allow himself to bypass the process, as, for instance, when lobbied by an old friend. After Reagan succumbed to such pleading once or twice, a more formal White House clearance procedure was put in place:

All the names suggested, whether they came from the President himself or from the Cabinet officers, came into the process. The process was controlled by Baker, Deaver, Meese, and James. Every day ... at five o'clock weekdays, we met in Jim Baker's office. In that meeting, there were only the four of us. Nobody else was ever invited or attended that meeting. It was a closed-door session unless by special request that we bring somebody in who had a particular point to make and he was invited by Ed or Mike or Jim.

At that time, books would have been prepared by my staff over in the OEB [Old Executive Office Building] saying, "Today we are looking at the Assistant Secretary for whatever." First page in the book was what is the job, what is the job description, what is his authority? The second page was the candidate, his or her background, capabilities, whatever. The third page was political support, who's been lobbying to get this appointment, who was for him, who was against him. And the fourth page, what they always looked at first, was who else was considered, because instead of coming in with just one name, other people were considered in the pipeline.

It would be at that five o'clock staff meeting that the President's senior team would make a judgment as to whom they would recommend to the President. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I met with the President, and at that time we went through the process. Sometimes Ed or Mike or Jim would be in there, or me, or by ourselves. Then he would approve or ask for more options. So that was the other process on controlling.

Untermeyer agrees that Cabinet secretaries and the White House can easily come into conflict, and that the personnel staff must be ready and equipped to deal with this:

As a practical matter, Cabinet officers are very politically sophisticated and often have held important positions as governors or panjandrums on Capitol Hill. They have coteries and teams of their own, who they very much want to see with them in those departments and agencies.

At the same time, the Presidential Personnel Office is hoping to take care of those brave volunteering souls who slept on floors in New Hampshire and who expect to be and would love to be Assistant Secretary for Press or Congressional Liaison and who then come smash up against the Cabinet Secretary, who has other names in mind, maybe somebody who's even against the winning candidate and may well have been tittering about the candidate's foibles in some cocktail party here in Washington.

This is the inevitable clash against which the Director of Presidential Personnel must be armed with the lists. If not, if the Cabinet officer selectees arrive in that initial meeting with the lists of their team from Capitol Hill or Wall Street or wherever else they may have been, it may be extremely difficult then to fight the battle you need to fight for your own folks.

Pressure from the Campaign

In addition to pressure from his Cabinet, the President will face pressure from his campaign staff to make certain appointments. This pressure will come not only from key campaign aides, but from the hundreds or thousands of people who worked hard at some level in the campaign. As James Pfiffner warns:

The most ferocious pressure, finally, comes from the campaign. This is legitimate pressure, because these people have worked to get the President elected, and they feel that they have a legitimate claim--and they certainly have a legitimate claim--to be considered. But the reality is that you can never do enough for campaigners. There are too many of them, and there's always going to be lingering resentments from those who think that they were owed an appointment.

Pfiffner adds that it is important to understand the different requirements of campaigns and government:

I agree with the idea of the politics of running as opposed to the politics of governing, and that governance is very different. If you get driven by the campaign side, you can end up with people who are very gifted working the system in a questionable fashion.

James King, the Director of Presidential Personnel for Jimmy Carter, explains some of the many reasons that an administration should be hesitant about hiring campaign workers:

The problem is, in a campaign, the kinds of people that can drop their family or maybe they haven't started a family, drop their job--maybe they don't have a full career going--and work full-time on the campaign. Those people are great to have, but they may not have the level of maturity or experience in the private sector, local, state government, and so forth that you want at the top level. So the key, I think, is to act as a casting director and choose who is right at which slots and what levels in terms of the talent.

Chase Untermeyer, however, feels that it is important to select people who have been close to the candidate, philosophically and on the campaign trail. (Chapter 1 discusses this issue in the context of the transition.) Still, he notes that this can ruffle feathers during a "friendly takeover," when the White House stays under the control of the same party. While he discounts stories that the Bush teams systematically fired people who had worked for Reagan, he points out that an incoming President will want his own people:

I think this is the inevitable consequence of a friendly transition but I do believe that it is inevitable that a new President is going to come into office, even if that new President is the Vice President, with people who have been on the campaign circuit, who have been out there campaigning in the snows of New Hampshire and the cornfields of Iowa, wherever it may be, and who expect to be and will be rewarded.

Meanwhile, there are loyal supporters of the incumbent President who have been toiling away honorably and faithfully at their desks here in Washington who, for whatever reason, did not want to resign and go off to Iowa and New Hampshire and nevertheless do their jobs. Those are the people who may feel abused when the new team comes in.

Inflated expectations from campaign staff can become a sudden and intense problem for the new White House team, and particularly for the Office of Presidential Personnel. Pendleton James recalls the acrimony he faced:

During the transition of Reagan the regional political directors, referred to as RPDs, were very unhappy with Pen James. Number one, they didn't know who I was and why I had that job, because I wasn't visible in the campaign and appeared after the election; and, second, they weren't getting appointments, and all these other people, some of them holdovers and some of them from the Nixon years, were getting these appointments, and they were very angry and very vocal.

I knew I had to face this. So I said the only way I can do it is call them all into a room--and there was a group bigger than this number here--and let me talk to them, because they have to understand: Yes, they have worked in the campaign; yes, they've slept on the floors; yes, they've carried the banners; yes, they've done the field work; but in the appointment process, in the beginning, we had to get the Cabinet first, and then we had to get the sub-Cabinet because most of these would be at an assistant secretary level or below, generally speaking.

It is important for the President's team to explain to campaign staffers why they should not see themselves as a conquering army, taking jobs as plunder. James recalls his efforts to convey this kind of message:

I said, "You've got to be patient because until we get these strata done, we can't get around to your appointments, because you will be appointed Schedule C's [non-career positions] and SES's [Senior Executive Service]." I had Senator Paul Laxalt go with me, because I didn't dare go by myself because I wasn't a member of that group. And Paul talked to them.

There was one guy on the front row who I didn't know, who stood up, turned around to his colleagues and former RPDs. They were angry. These guys were physically angry. And he said, "All right, knock it off. I understand what Pen is saying. There has to be an order. There has to be a process. We're going to get our turn. Now, be quiet and be patient."

With that, Paul and I were walking out of the room, and I turned to Paul and I said, "Who was that guy? I could have kissed him." He said that was Lee Atwater. Lee Atwater was an RPD at that time, not the world-famous guy we know today, but he was the only one that really understood there had to be an order in the process: Yes, the campaign workers are going to get a job, but they are not going to get on board in the first 100 days of the administration.

James Pfiffner adds that the experiences of recent administrations and the scope of the staffing challenge facing a new President suggest four guidelines for a new administration:

First begin quickly. Get the infrastructure before the election, because the day after the election everything is going to hit the fan and resumes are going to start rolling in.

Second, expect the Cabinet Secretaries are going to be assertive about their appointments, but have the President lay down the ground rules early so that they understand that the final decision is in the Office of Presidential Personnel and, of course, the President.

Third, expect pressure from the campaign and from the Hill and be ready to get back to important recommenders to explain exactly why Senator X's favorite nephew cannot be appointed to be Assistant Secretary of Y Department.

Finally, the role of the President is crucial. He or she has to set the tone for appointments and intervene when it's important ... but you let the Office of Presidential Personnel act as a buffer to deflect patronage pressures away from him. That is, let the President make the decisions and OPP take the heat.

Avoiding Self-Inflicted Wounds

While congressional committees impose various and conflicting requirements that slow down the process and create frustration, says Chase Untermeyer, it is nevertheless important that the incoming administration avoid adding to these problems. (See Chapter 1.) For instance, the administration should move early to make its own selections and get executive branch clearance:

There are definitely problems on the Senate side of this, but the greater load of problems is all on the executive branch side of things. I do believe that the next administration should take the steps, many of which have already been proposed ... to shorten the process on the executive branch side in the selection and clearance phase so that it can get names to the Senate in a timely fashion, robbing the Senate at the very least of the excuse of saying, "Why are you blaming us for the delay in getting this person confirmed when the nomination didn't even come to our desks until April 27th or some other late date?"

So that is the challenge for the next administration: to make sure that it tightens up its system first before confronting the Senate, at which time I would like them to think that if there is a stack of nominations pending on desks in the Senate, perhaps the Senate leadership would realize that they then need to tighten up their own process and move things faster, in which case we have a hope of reversing the almost geometric increase in time it's taken since the Kennedy Administration to get people through the process.

In addition, the appointment process can slow down if an incoming President has made the makeup of his administration an issue during his campaign, or if he makes a commitment during the transition. As Clinton's Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel Veronica Biggins explains, Clinton's campaign and transition promises were a factor in the pace of selections in his Administration:

One of the things that Clinton said when he was first inaugurated was that diversity, an administration that "looked like America," was very important. We spent a lot of time on the issue of diversity and thinking very carefully and really sourcing, so some things took a little longer. But I do think that there were a lot of people that moved into the administration and developed, brought in skills, and brought a breadth of experience and diversity in this process that had not existed before and that really helped move this process along.

A new administration, says Untermeyer, can also ease the burden of the personnel process by taking a stand against the proliferation of positions--which itself spawns a flood of applications for jobs that can overwhelm a personnel office. He suggests a bold step:

I would recommend the next administration do what could be called zero-based personnel work in which all of the jobs that will be reported in the Plum Book, which is a snapshot of appointments held as of June 30, be erased so that the next administration coming into power will not have people applying for these titles but will begin with the basic sinews of the administration created by Congress--that is, the deputy and under- and assistant secretary positions, perhaps with a direction that you may not have any more than X-number of personal staff. Otherwise, there are going to be people who will be beating on the door, sending in their resumes to fill these positions which they will presume as a given in the federal structure.

In order to speed up the process, Untermeyer suggests, the next administration should make greater use of standardized forms and the Internet. Biggins very much agrees:

I recently had the opportunity to fill this form out, sitting there trying to find a friend to loan a typewriter to me or to figure out how to handwrite this whole process, and I had people say to me, "Why in the world?" So I go back to Chase Untermeyer's point in particular: Internet, Internet, Internet. Certainly there is a way that the White House and the Hill can come to an agreement on a mutual form that can be used, that is used across the board so that people aren't then filling out different forms for either side.