Managing Up, Down and Sideways 從美國總統領導學談起

Managing Up, Down and Sideways

By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: October 7, 2007
AH, the heartache of the presidential adviser.

John Dominis/Time Life Pictures — Getty Images
AMBITIONS “Journals: 1952-2000,” the diaries of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., describes Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s “unctuous smiles.”
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President Kennedy silenced Chester Bowles for his outspokenness.
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A. H. Ritchie/Library of Congress
Lincoln’s cabinet had a no-holds-barred style.
In 1966, White House aides found themselves precariously perched between apprehension of looming disaster in Vietnam and the need for candor with their boss, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Disaster seemed a safer choice.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was a logical candidate to speak the truth to his boss. Mr. McNamara told the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in January over dinner and drinks that he regarded a military solution as impossible, according to Mr. Schlesinger’s diaries, which have recently been published as “Journals: 1952-2000.” A sensible objective, Mr. McNamara told them, would be “withdrawal with honor.” Seven months later, the defense secretary was still publicly urging a widening of the war.
So dovish eyes turned to Ambassador at Large W. Averell Harriman. Alas, Mr. Schlesinger noted of his friend: “Everyone has his weaknesses, and Averell’s is the desire to be near power.”
As for Hubert H. Humphrey, the diarist writes that the vice president and soon-to-be presidential candidate offered only “unctuous smiles.” “His trouble,” according to Mr. Schlesinger, who later backed Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential bid, “is that he cannot say something publicly without deeply believing it privately; and when, as now, he has no choice in his public utterances, he whips up a fervency of private belief.”
To be a White House adviser, as the late Mr. Schlesinger reminds us, is to occupy a peculiarly circumscribed world. You can be a confidant to the most powerful leader in the world, you can fetch his coffee or write brilliant briefs on nuclear disarmament, ride in limousines, snare the corner office and chuckle over martinis with the wife of the French ambassador. But the coin of your realm is your relationship to one man. Displease him and the wilderness beckons.
“The rule of thumb is never tell the president what he doesn’t want to hear,” said Richard Reeves, who has written histories of the Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan administrations. “As David Halberstam made clear, there was one similarity between Mao Zedong and Douglas MacArthur: Neither of their staffs ever told them a thing they didn’t want to hear.”
Perhaps, but some of the best American presidents encouraged robust debate, heated rivalries even, in hopes of threading a path to a tough decision. Lincoln was comfortable with discord. The White House of the 1860s bore little resemblance to the modern institution; Lincoln had two important staffers and a cabinet filled with contentious personalities, several of whom considered themselves superior to the president.
Charles B. Strozier, a history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait,” described a virtual war within the cabinet room, as Secretary of State William H. Seward went behind Lincoln’s back, and others almost came to blows. “Lincoln absolutely had control of his cabinet but not in a way that prevented him from hearing dissenting views,” he said.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” said cabinet members became so angry with each other they had no time to pursue the president. “In the end, he could come to them and say, I’ve made my decision on emancipation, now help me with the timing,” Ms. Goodwin said.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired intense loyalty. But as war loomed in 1941, he invited prominent Republicans into his cabinet. Those who saw Germany as the true enemy and those who argued Japan was no less menacing waged loud battles.
“Roosevelt was very forgiving of disagreement,” said David M. Kennedy, the Stanford University historian and author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945” “But once a decision was made, it was incumbent to shut up or get out.”
In the crucible of the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy listened to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who barely blanched at the prospect of a nuclear war. But he sided with those who urged a negotiated step back from the breach.
Mr. Kennedy’s style was witty, and critics note that Mr. Schlesinger tended to render his administration in hagiographic terms. But no one could fail the president’s test of loyalty, as Mr. Galbraith makes clear in his book “Name-Dropping.”
Chester Bowles, a Kennedy adviser, spoke out about his opposition to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Mr. Kennedy crafted an ingenious gallows. Mr. Bowles “was promoted to non-employment in the White House — to no function and a general requirement of silence,” Mr. Galbraith wrote. “The man who almost certainly would have been the chief critic of the emerging Vietnam disaster was safely contained.”
The modern presidency is marked by powerful chiefs of staff. Richard Nixon relied on H. R. Haldeman, who with the White House counsel, John D. Ehrlichman, formed the “The German Mafia.” Mr. Nixon, too, had his intellectual, Henry Kissinger. Theirs was a productive enough partnership, although each enjoyed slipping the rhetorical shiv into the other in private.
President Reagan was the ideological helmsman, pointing to the distant shore. But his staff hashed out how to navigate there. “It deteriorated in Reagan’s second term,” said John J. Pitney Jr., who served as a policy adviser and is now a professor at Claremont McKenna College. “You ran and leaked to conservative columnist Bob Novak before others ran to him and leaked on you.”
The Bush White House, through Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has exacted a thorough line discipline, even now, despite the tell-all memoirs of former aides. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell may feel he was misled into lobbying for an Iraq invasion but he offered no whisper of public doubt while an adviser.
Professor Kennedy recalls watching an interview with Mr. Powell in Colorado this summer. “Jim Lehrer asked him: ‘Why didn’t you resign?’ Powell couldn’t give a useful answer.”
President Johnson, in particular, intuited such weakness. He could butter a prospective adviser like a turkey. But once under his sway, his abuse was considerable.
Mr. Schlesinger, who was not a fan of President Johnson’s, recalled what befell a fellow power-seeker. President Johnson, he wrote, ordered Pierre Salinger, a former Kennedy hand, to eat bean soup for the sheer humiliation of it.
“There is nothing more dangerous, so far as I can see, than being accepted by Johnson as one of his own,” Mr. Schlesinger writes. “He has been meticulously polite to those in the White House whom he regards as Kennedy Men. But when he starts regarding them as Johnson men, their day is over.”