conference and say what you want me to say, I would get hell.’ With that, he would smile, get up and walk around the desk, pat me on the back and say, ‘My boy, better you than me.’ ”13 These buffers meant, for one thing, that the Republican loss in the 1954 midterm elections was blamed on Agriculture Secretary Benson, not Eisenhower. In one poll, 33 percent of farmers gave Benson a poor rating, while only 8 percent considered Eisenhower’s performance inadequate.14 It was as if the president and the secretary of agriculture worked for different administrations. In foreign relations (especially with the British), the secretary of state was as unpopular as the president was popular. If a cabinet officer could not get to see the president, he blamed Adams, not Eisenhower.
In one important instance, however, Eisenhower chose not to employ a buffer. When the Soviet Union shot down a spy plane over its territory in 1960 and threatened to cancel the Paris summit meeting, Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, volunteered to take full responsibility for ordering the mission and to resign. Premier Khrushchev seemed to invite this approach when he stated he was “quite willing to grant that the president knew nothing.”15 But Eisenhower felt that to have denied knowledge of the U-2 would have been an unconscionable admission that he did not control the country’s national security apparatus. He took the blame and the summit collapsed.
Another part of Eisenhower’s buffer system was to use Vice President Richard Nixon as his political surrogate, an arrangement that also reflected the president’s strong distaste for party politics. The vice president assumed the burdens of campaigning during the midterm elections of 1954 and 1958. This was Eisenhower’s contribution to resolving the apparent conflict between the presidential roles of chief magistrate and chief party leader.
Because Eisenhower came from a career outside politics and often expressed his aversion to partisanship, some were led to conclude that he lacked the political moxie to direct the machinery of government to his ends. Marquis Childs presented the conventional wisdom when he noted in 1958 that the president “brought to the office so little preparation.”16 Yet a cogent case can be made for reassessing Eisenhower, as a highly skilled bureaucratic politician.17 The contemporary portrait of him as the forthright old soldier beyond his depth in a world of high government machinations was a caricature; he had, after all, spent a lifetime in the Byzantium of military politics and come out supreme Allied commander. It should be noted, however, that the portrait was also a self-caricature drawn by Eisenhower for his own reasons. (Once when asked about a newspaper column at a press conference, he replied that he could not answer because he never read the columns. The statement was patently false; he began each day with a heavy dose of newspaper reading.)18
Eisenhower brought with him to the White House very definite ideas of how a staff should be constructed and should work. They were based on the military model, but as only a professional soldier fully understood, they were adaptable to the vicissitudes of circumstance. The ideas worked for him; later they would not work for Nixon, who did not understand their subtleties. “The use of staff is a kind of art,” David Lilienthal once mused in his diary, and another New Dealer, Rexford G. Tugwell, wrote of Eisenhower that he “was more skilled in using staff and more willing to delegate than any of his predecessors.”19 Although Tugwell profoundly disagreed with the aims of the Eisenhower administration, there was no sense in confusing Eisenhower’s constricted aspirations for his government with his means of achieving them. Tugwell was simply stating what he knew to be a fact.
Eisenhower’s staff was an entirely different sort of entity from his cabinet, with different functions and a different kind of personnel. Because they were personal assistants, staff members were better known to the president. Of the original thirty-two professional members, excluding military aides, twenty-two had worked in the presidential election, often on board the campaign train, five had served under Eisenhower in the army, and two had been with him at Columbia University. Twelve stayed in the administration for the full eight years.20
Members of the staff, much more than of the cabinet, were likely to have had previous employment in the federal government. Five had worked in congressional offices, one had served in Congress, and seven had held appointments in the executive branch. As in all administrations, top White House aides generally were younger than cabinet officers, although this did not create the friction it has in other presidencies. Thus, while the Eisenhower cabinet was unique in its pervasive business background and in its lack of Washington experience, the presidential staff was more in the traditional mold. It did have more members from the corporate world than would have been found in a Democratic administration, but the business executives on Eisenhower’s staff seemed to have a more contemplative cast of mind than those in the Eisenhower cabinet.21
Whereas the talents of the staffs under Roosevelt and Truman were to be found largely in their possession of highly sensitive political antennae, their overarching loyalty, or their creativity, the top echelon of Eisenhower’s staff was noted for its functional professionalism. James Hagerty was a professional press secretary; that had been his occupation since 1942. He had also been a reporter, which may have given him certain insights, but that was not his chief qualification: Truman chose his press secretaries directly from the ranks of working journalists, without notable success. Former general Wilton (Jerry) Persons, who headed Eisenhower’s congressional relations office, was a professional congressional lobbyist. That had been his role for the army during World War II. Special counsel Bernard Shanley was hired as a lawyer, not as a ghostwriter in mufti. The writing was to be done by Emmet Hughes of Time and Life magazines, in a sharp break with the past, when the distinction between policymaking and word production was left deliberately fuzzy. Besides relying on the statutory Council of Economic Advisers, Eisenhower added a personal economist, Gabriel Hauge, to the staff. Robert Montgomery, the actor-producer, was on call to advise the president on the use of television. The chairman of the Civil Service Commission was given the additional duty of advising the president on personnel management. And experts were eventually added in science, foreign economic policy, aviation policy, public works planning, agricultural surplus disposal, disarmament, and psychological warfare.
A review of the organization of the White House under Eisenhower must begin with the assistant to the president, Sherman Adams. Eisenhower’s recollection of his chief aide differs in no respect from the way Adams appeared to those who served under him:
From our first meeting in 1952 Sherman Adams seemed to me best described as laconic, businesslike, and puritanically honest. Never did he attempt to introduce humor into an official meeting. On the many occasions during our White House years when I called him on the telephone to ask a question, he never added a word to his “yes” or “no” if such an answer sufficed. It never occurred to him to say “Hello” when advised by his secretary that I wanted him on the phone or to add a “Good-bye” at the end of the call. For Sherman Adams this was neither bad manners nor pretense; he was busy. Absorbed in his work, he had no time to waste.22
Eisenhower saw the function of his assistant, called the White House chief of staff in subsequent administrations, as that of being his personal “son of a bitch,” a role ably played for him by General Walter Bedell Smith during World War II, and he deliberately sought a person with the same talents to head his White House operation. After Adams was forced out in late 1958, having been accused of accepting favors from a Boston industrialist, his place was taken by Jerry Persons. A gentle, humorous southerner, Persons had chosen a career as conciliator, and he was not overly concerned with running a tight ship. He allowed more staff members direct access to the president and was less interested in scrutinizing the matters that were to be put before his boss. This change did not, however, notably affect the operations of the government. By this time staff members were proficient in their assignments, comfortable in their relations with each other, and part of a waning administration. It was the Adams style that set the tone of the Eisenhower White House.
All activities except those relating to foreign relations came under Adams’s eye. These included appointments and scheduling, patronage and personnel, press, speechwriting, cabinet liaison, congressional relations, and special projects. A newly created staff secretariat (proposed in the Hoover Commission report, a well-thumbed document during the 1952–1953 transition) kept track of all pending presidential business and ensured the proper clearances on all papers that reached the Oval Office. A two-man operation within