Bridging the Constitutional Divide: Inside the White House Office of Legislative Affairs

Preface

Preface This book is the record of a two-day symposium on White House congressional relations held at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, on September 12–13, 2003. It is primarily a transcribed group oral history, featuring the spoken recollections of seven former heads of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, spanning the presidencies of Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. All former chief congressional liaisons were invited to be with us; over half of those then living appeared. The symposium was also attended by a number of invited scholars of American politics, including several distinguished experts on presidential-congressional relations who moderated the proceedings and helped to refine the topics under discussion. Among their number was the then dean of presidential studies, Professor Richard E. Neustadt—whose own White House experience went back to Harry Truman—in what we believe to have been his final public appearance in the United States just before his death the following month in England. The purpose of the symposium was to create an occasion for candid reflection among Democrats and Republicans alike about the nature of modern presidential-congressional relations.The result is a front-row seat to presidential history as recounted by those who lived it. This symposium was sponsored and organized by the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, which in 1981, under the direction of James Sterling Young, began conducting in-depth elite oral history interviews with those who previously occupied senior positions in the White House and the cabinet. Since its inception, the program’s main course of activity has been single-administration interviews, capturing in confidence each former official’s recollections of his or her time with a given president—including systematic examination of the Carter, Reagan , George H.W. Bush, and Clinton presidencies.1 Upon the conclusion of a given presidential project, the program then opens to the public the archive of cleared transcripts on thatWhite House,releasing (according to the standard canons of oral history procedure) those materials authorized by the interviewee. Confidentiality in the conduct of these interviews has xiv   :    Preface assured the highest possible degree of candor by the respondent in speaking for history into the tape recorder.2 A group oral history,however,offers two advantages over the Presidential Oral History Program’s standard fare. First, the proceedings can be openly conducted, and the contents can be made available to the public morequickly,aswiththiseditedvolume.Thesecondgreatvirtueof agroup oral history session is that it permits a cross-fertilization of ideas among people who shared the same responsibilities over time in theWhite House, opening up possibilities for cross-administration comparisons that are seldom possible in solo interviews. Most of the participants in this symposium have,in fact,recorded individual oral histories about the specifics of their own time in the White House.3 But our intent in organizing this symposium was to look beyond the particulars of any single president or party at larger questions of governance and institutional relations. This book purposely preserves the spontaneous character of the symposium .The tone is thus informal and conversational.We tried—successfully, as I think this volume will show—to stake out a happy middle ground: to create a relaxed environment for the sharing of common experiences and the relating of favorite tales while maintaining a focus on fundamental issues. Thus, these discussions enlighten in two ways: they provide us a revealing glimpse into the inside,usually hidden,business of Washington, and they afford us the considered reflections of a thoughtful group of political veterans. What appears in these pages is authentic data about American politics, some related directly to key questions of contemporary scholarship. For example,political scientists working on formal models of institutions will find beneficial the discussions that follow about veto strategies, the issuance of executive orders, and the scarcity of anything that can be meaningfully called a“legislative agenda.”But there are also in these pages a lot of good stories, such as Max Friedersdorf’s wonderfully painful account of being ordered to confront a congressman accused of stealing White House silverware from a Nixon state dinner. It is an episode that even the most sophisticated model of presidential-congressional relations fails to apprehend, and yet it illuminates something essential about the human element of American politics. If our conceptions of political science are sufficiently broad to benefit from this tale, as well as from the thoughtful analysis about the ways of Washington offered by these well-placed sources...