Beaten and Bushed.

• Author: Podhoretz, John
• Position: Sam Skinner's ineffective management of White House during George Bush years - Includes related article

The black comedy of a White House on the verge of a nervous breakdown

"It's the worst job in the world," said Sam Skinner. "Howard Baker said that when he was Reagan's chief of staff. The worst."

One month after Bush's defeat on November 3, 1992, and Skinner was in his Elba, eating three kinds of popcorn out of a tin cylinder eight inches wide and two feet tall. The tin was that year's omnipresent holiday offering; every Republican office in Washington was inundated with popcorn supplied by friendly lobbyists, every word processing keyboard stained with the icky orange residue of the cheese flavoring and the sticky brown goo of the caramel. Skinner's place of exile was a handsome office suite on the fourth floor of the Republican National Committee building on Capitol Hill. It had been his perch since August, when James Baker replaced him as White House chief of staff.

Skinner had arrived at the White House just a year earlier, in December 1991. He was a chief of staff for eight months, and in all that time he never had a good day. The first major event of Skinner's tenure was the president's trip to Japan in January 1992. That was followed in turn by the unsuccessful State of the Union address, and then Bush's first campaign trip to New Hampshire, in which he attempted to demonstrate to people that he cares about them by speaking the immortal words "Message: I care." And on and on it went, through an unbroken series of disasters and missed opportunities: the Rio summit, the Los Angeles riots, the great media flap over Dan Quayle's speech insulting "Murphy Brown."

Throughout the first half of 1992, stretching into summer, staffers watched as their administration, once thought invincible, absorbed blow after blow and could not come up with a single thing that might improve Bush's standing in the eyes of the voters. They would gather and regather at the feet of the Old Executive Office Building staircases, huddling together in impromptu meetings by the men's-room door or on their way out at night.

Their conclusion was always the same: It was all Skinner's fault, Skinner and the guys running the campaign. The one person who was not held responsible in these discussions was the president himself. The only acceptable way to criticize the president was to say that he was too trusting, too generous, especially about giving Skinner's a chance.

They repeated the stories they had heard about how sure Bush was he was going to win, about how he had no doubts and did not want his people to worry. But the fact was, things weren't working well, and Only One Man Could Save Them. He was the Republican magus, James A. Baker III, Bush's close friend of thirty five years, the man who had run every Republican campaign since 1976 and had won three of four.

Staffers would have been surprised to discover that Skinner agreed with them. By the summer Skinner had come to be very much in favor of a Baker takeover; for months he had been saying Baker was the key to the reelection. But he had believed Baker either would be put in charge of the campaign or would come into the White House as a Super Counselor. Either way, Skinner figured he could keep his title and some of his duties. So he had been shocked when, on an August Wednesday right before lunch, the president informed him that come ten the next morning, Skinner was to be banished from the White House.

Skinner's evisceration came as a kind of spiritual deliverance to the White House staff, not because they disliked him but because their sense of justice had at last been satisfied. Things had gone horribly wrong, and somebody was finally taking the fall for it. The president's decision to bring Baker on had confirmed their conviction that the problem lay in Skinner's faulty management. Skinner, and only Skinner, had been the cause of all the administration's troubles in 1992. Skinner's failure was not only a danger to the country's future, but an even more immediate threat to the livelihoods of the White House staff.

The Baker team played this opinion for all it was worth. In the myriad articles, written about Baker's takeover of the White House, Baker's people spoke of little else (on background, of course) but the parlous state of the place in Skinner's wake. The clear implication was that if Bush did win in November, the credit would be entirely Baker's, but if he lost, Skinner would be the one responsible.

But on that December day after the election, Skinner was actually one of the few Republicans in town cheerful and upbeat. He had just landed a $500,000 job as chairman of Commonwealth Edison. So while hundreds of his former employees woke with night sweats trying to figure out how, as loyal employees of a disgraced administration, they were going to meet their mortgage payments, Skinner was returning to his hometown, Chicago, perhaps a bit bloodied but basically unbowed. (Upon hearing of Skinner's hiring, one staffer immediately began calling around and with mock urgency advising his friends who might own stock in Common wealth Edison to "sell short, for God's sake, sell short!")

But there was plenty of blame to go around for the defeat. Skinner certainly thought so: He constantly cited the role of his predecessor, John Sununu, and campaign chief Bob Teeter while belittling the significance of his own eight months in the chief of staff's office. Those months had proved to be merely an interregnum between Sununu and Baker. "I was just an asterisk in history," he said, only he pronounced the word "asterik." It was, evidently, an important word to him; later, he dismissed a midlevel staffer's role in a key policy decision that year by calling her an "asterik," too.

What had made the job especially frustrating, he said flatly, was that he had inherited "the weakest staff in White House history" from Sununu. "You won't find anyone to disagree with that," Skinner said. "It was just hopeless."

Out of the mouths of babes: Skinner had stumbled onto the truth. The management problems of the White House preceded his time there and did not go away when he left. The management problem of the White House was George Bush, and the singularly inept way he structured his own operation.

By dissing the White House staff, Skinner had merely put into words something that had been evident to people in the administration and elsewhere in Washington from January 20, 1989, onward. The White House staff, almost every member of which had been hired by Sununu himself, was astoundingly mediocre - politically shortsighted, ideologically deprived, inclined to inflate the importance of the trivial and discount the significant.

When the Bush administration began, Bush filled a few of the top jobs himself and left the rest to Sununu, his first chief of staff. The president's insouciance about the structure and order of his own political operation turned out to be a key indication of how he was going to pursue his presidency. Having spent eight years doing nothing but retail politics in his effort to get elected, he now wished to cleanse himself, to rise about it. He would leave all that to his famously brash and tough chief of staff and focus his attention on his consuming interest, foreign affairs.

While Bush was hunkering down with National...