David Frum: The history behind organizing a White House
[David Frum was special assistant to George W Bush, 2001-02, and is the author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (Doubleday).]
Almost nobody in the US has a good word to say for Scott McClellan, Bush's former press secretary turned critic. The right condemned the disloyalty of his memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington (PublicAffairs). The left complained that McClellan's change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington hands shook their heads at a press secretary writing a book at all: FDR's and Eisenhower's men took their secrets to their graves—why can't today's whippersnappers do the same?
Yet there is something sad and sympathetic about McClellan and his bitter, accusatory memoir. If you ever watched McClellan's televised confrontations with the savage White House press corps, you probably thought: this is terrible! The man has no business being up there. He looks like a schoolboy trying to retrieve his mittens from a gang of bullies.
McClellan was not alone in being deficient at his job. George W Bush brought most of his core first-term White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) were more like characters from The Office than the people one would expect to find at the pinnacle of the world's most powerful nation.
That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent, but that did not happen often with the Bush team. Bush demanded loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to himself personally. He tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (The journalist Robert Draper tells the story of a 1999 campaign strategy meeting at which Bush shut Rove up by ordering him to "hang up my jacket." The room fell silent in shock—but Rove did it.)
These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.
Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he delegated them great power. The people entrusted with the most responsibility were those who most dreaded it—Condoleezza Rice being the most damaging example.
I served in the George W Bush White House in 2001 and 2002, and saw his approach to organisation close up. The defects of the Bush administration originated in conscious design, not the accidents of personality. George W Bush may not have had much foreign policy experience when he ran for president. He may not have had much success in business. But there was one thing he knew intimately: the White House itself. In fact, he probably understood the interior workings of the White House staff system better than any previous president, having served between 1989 and 1993 as an informal deputy chief of staff to his father. (When it became time for John H Sununu to resign as White House chief of staff in 1991, it was George W Bush who delivered the order.) George HW Bush, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman all came to the Oval Office having served as vice-presidents. But nobody before George W Bush had seen the White House from below, had witnessed its petty power games or experienced its operations without the deference paid to a high office holder. And when he won first the Texas governorship and then the presidency, he determined to organise his own office in such a way as to suppress office-politicking as much as possible...
Read entire article at Prospect (UK)
Almost nobody in the US has a good word to say for Scott McClellan, Bush's former press secretary turned critic. The right condemned the disloyalty of his memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington (PublicAffairs). The left complained that McClellan's change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington hands shook their heads at a press secretary writing a book at all: FDR's and Eisenhower's men took their secrets to their graves—why can't today's whippersnappers do the same?
Yet there is something sad and sympathetic about McClellan and his bitter, accusatory memoir. If you ever watched McClellan's televised confrontations with the savage White House press corps, you probably thought: this is terrible! The man has no business being up there. He looks like a schoolboy trying to retrieve his mittens from a gang of bullies.
McClellan was not alone in being deficient at his job. George W Bush brought most of his core first-term White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) were more like characters from The Office than the people one would expect to find at the pinnacle of the world's most powerful nation.
That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent, but that did not happen often with the Bush team. Bush demanded loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to himself personally. He tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (The journalist Robert Draper tells the story of a 1999 campaign strategy meeting at which Bush shut Rove up by ordering him to "hang up my jacket." The room fell silent in shock—but Rove did it.)
These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.
Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he delegated them great power. The people entrusted with the most responsibility were those who most dreaded it—Condoleezza Rice being the most damaging example.
I served in the George W Bush White House in 2001 and 2002, and saw his approach to organisation close up. The defects of the Bush administration originated in conscious design, not the accidents of personality. George W Bush may not have had much foreign policy experience when he ran for president. He may not have had much success in business. But there was one thing he knew intimately: the White House itself. In fact, he probably understood the interior workings of the White House staff system better than any previous president, having served between 1989 and 1993 as an informal deputy chief of staff to his father. (When it became time for John H Sununu to resign as White House chief of staff in 1991, it was George W Bush who delivered the order.) George HW Bush, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman all came to the Oval Office having served as vice-presidents. But nobody before George W Bush had seen the White House from below, had witnessed its petty power games or experienced its operations without the deference paid to a high office holder. And when he won first the Texas governorship and then the presidency, he determined to organise his own office in such a way as to suppress office-politicking as much as possible...