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9 Legacy and Significance
- Texas A&M University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
9 h Legacy and Significance History is dynamic.For example,the presidential hit parade changes over time. Truman’s and Eisenhower’s standings were low in the first decades after leaving office, but now (2009) each is much better regarded. In that vein, the story of Nixon’s super-secretaries had a relatively permanent historical reputation.Something lasting less than half a year was assumed, ipso facto, to be of little consequence or importance. Then, Richard Nathan’s negative,even sinister,judgment about it was widely accepted as the definitive post-hoc interpretation.In this revision of the given history, the counsellors have been presented as an interesting effort by a president seeking actually to be the chief of the executive branch. In particular, he used the novel variation of administrative reorganization for the grand reorganization template that had mostly been a dead-end and nonstarter for his twentieth-century predecessors. Besides the potential historical value of this recounting,it may also be relevant to studies of the presidency, Congress, and public administration. The comparison in chapter 1 of the presidential and congressional record regarding grand reorganization pre- and post-counsellors documented that the super-secretary event may well have underestimated the counsellors as a significant hinge of history. Grand reorganization plans were routinely proposed by Nixon’s twentieth-century predecessors but not by his successors. Instead, they opted at most for incremental and single-department reorganizations. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress had routinely passed reorganization acts, delegating to presidents the power to submit reorganization plans that were subject only to legislative veto. All presidents from Hoover to Nixon were given that power. After Nixon, Congress was increasingly hesitant, not giving it to Ford but giving it to Carter, only with more strings attached, and then giving Reagan even less reorganizing power. After Reagan, Congress Legacy and Significance : 197 stopped passing these across-the-board reorganization acts that gave broad restructuring powers to presidents. In that context, the super-secretaries were the last grand presidential reorganization effort. Evaluating the super-secretaries or drawing lessons applicable to the future must be pursued with caution.There is a large political science and public administration literature on structural and statutory reorganization and, using the more recent term, organizational design. While much of the early literature was normative or descriptive, more recent work seeks methods of assessment and evaluation.1 However, those approaches are not applicable to administrative reorganization at the top,absent structural and statutory reorganization. Therefore, this historical assessment uses two different approaches as a way of drawing conclusions about it. The super-secretaries are first evaluated as a stand-alone event with criteria that emerge directly from the stated and behind-the-scenes purposes of the project itself.This evaluation is an internal one based on the historical record. Second, the super-secretary reorganization is compared to other relatively similar presidential reorganizations. This is an effort at an external evaluation. Assessing the Counsellors in Meeting Presidential Goals h Based on the information developed from this case study,there were three discernible types of goals that gave birth to the project: political,managerial ,and structural.Some were stated openly and publicly,others indirectly or confidentially. Each of these three rationales needs to be examined in terms of the desired goals versus accomplishments. Nixon’s Political Goals for the Counsellors President Nixon had had several overriding political goals for the second term.First,the counsellor project was part of his larger strategy of assuming more control over the executive branch during the second term.Other components of the strategy included administering loyalty questionnaires before appointing anyone to a Cabinet post, appointing first-term White House staffers to positions of responsibility in the departments and [54.210.224.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:28 GMT) 198 : chapter 9 agencies, and strengthening the OMB’s new management role (the “M” in OMB). The last included naming OMB Director Ash to serve concurrently as assistant to the president for management and approving OMB’s management-by-objectives project. Therefore,the first political evaluation question is,Did the counsellors contribute to giving the president more control over the executive branch? It appears that, had the experiment lasted longer, the counsellors would have helped assert presidential control over federal departments and agencies. The strongest indication comes from Weinberger’s counsellor activities. He created three active subcommittees that met regularly (at first every two weeks, then monthly) and consisted of the working-level bureaucrats...