The fast start; a former White House staff member lists seven ways the next president can make his administration a winner.

• Author: Hess, Stephen

A former White House staff member lists seven ways the next president can make his administration a winner

What is good for the president is good for the country is a proposition not always true, even though all presidents eventually come to believe it. However for the purposes of this exercise, which is to offer commonsensical advice to the next president, we assume his perspective.

There is no presidency for all seasons, of course. These are notes directed at a first-term president. They are also for a president who wants to be reelected.

Presidents have no shortage of advisers, selfappointed or otherwise, and we should try to be as helpful as possible in those areas that we think we know best. What follows, then, mostly relates to presidential organization or presidential press relations.

Avoiding contrariness

Incoming presidents vow that they will not make the same errors as the outgoing president. That mistakes have been made is always a given. That new presidents judge that they have a mandate to be different is also a given. This is most obvious if there is a changeover of political parties, especially if an incumbent president has been defeated. But the urge to start afresh is even present when the new president is the old vice president. The principle of contrariness is very strong.

Newly installed President John Kennedy disbanded recently departed President Dwight Eisenhower's National Security Council machinery and consequently was left without a proper advisory body in the White House during the Bay of Pigs crisis. Jimmy Carter's antipathy to having a chief of staff was partly a reaction to the way Richard Nixon ran his White House. The adage to be recalled is "don't fight the last war." Or in the words of Richard Cheney, Gerald Ford's chief of staff` new administration tries to organize itself in such a way that it avoids a problem that the previous administration had, but they always get it wrong."

In 1989 the danger of responding to an unengaged presidency is a return to Carterism. The presidentelect must guard against abolishing things Reaganesque simply because of their provenance. One possible candidate for change is the relationship between president and cabinet. Although hardly noticed by public and press, Reagan created what his aide Martin Anderson calls a "fairly elegant solution to the problem of how to effectively use cabinet members in the development of national policy." It was called the cabinet council system and it consisted of six subgroups of cabinet members arrayed by topic, such as natural resources and the environment, commerce and trade, and so forth. Anderson reports that by the first week in December 1981 there had been 112 cabinet council meetings, roughly one-fifth of them chaired by the president. He goes on to say: "This meant that on 112 separate occasions a halfdozen or so cabinet members got into their cars and journeyed to the White House. They usually arrived 10 or 15 minutes early and stayed for a while after the meeting. Most of that extra time before and after the meeting was spent in discussion with other cabinet members and senior members of Reagan's White House staff.

"Sometimes after a meeting a member or two of the cabinet would join a White House aide in his office for further discussions. These short, impromptu discussions among and between the president's policy advisers were probably as important to the advancement and development of his policy as the meetings themselves. Valuable pieces of information were exchanged, disagreements got worked out privately, and Reagan's advisers got to know each other personally, intimately. It created, for a while, an unusual degree of harmony between two normally antagonistic groups, the White House staff and the cabinet."

Anderson's account of life within the Reagan White House may claim too much for what can be developed through cabinet councils. The system works best on issues that are least important to a president. On a scale of zero to ten, these are the number fives and below, issues like natural gas deregulation, telecommunications, federal credit policy-all mentioned by Anderson as having been studied. What should be obvious, of course, is that presidential policies less important than war or peace, boomor bust, are still very important.

The major test of the principle of contrariness in 1989 could be how the new president responds to "Irangate." If hard cases make bad law, as the lawyers say, so too do the sort of presidential actions that are given the "gate" suffix. When President Reagan chose to sell arms to Iran, he was disregarding the advice of his secretaries of state and defense. The fault was in the president's judgment, not his advisory system. The report of the congressional investigating committees rightly concludes, "Congress cannot legislate good judgment." When Oliver North arranged to divert funds from the arms sale to the contras-questions of legality aside-he violated rules of behavior that have governed NSC affairs for four decades.

An irony of the Iran-contra affair is that Reagan initially wanted to downgrade the NSC. It looked to Larry Speakes as if "the president and his top aides. . . had such low regard for the position of NSC director that they paid little attention to those who held the post." If so, the president paid dearly for his indifference.

The Tower Commission offers some sensible advice on the role of the NSC advisers: they should have direct access to the president and not have to report through some other White House official; they should not try...