Tales from the top; inside the White House with eight former presidential aides.

• Author: Kernell, Samuel
• Position: Excerpts from Samuel Kernell's book, Chief of Staff: 25 Years of Managing the Presidency

TALES FROM THE TOP

Last year, eight former senior member ofthe White House staff met at the University of California to discuss the last 25 years of the presidency.

The panel included General Andrew Goodpaster,from Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration; Theodore Sorensen, from John F. Kennedy's; Harry McPherson, from Lyndon Johnson's; H.R. Haldeman and Alexander Haig from Richard Nixon's; Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, from Gerald Ford's; and Jack Watson, from Jimmy Carter's.

Questioners included John Chancellor, DavidBroder, Samuel Popkin and Larry Berman, professors of political science, and Doug Newhart, a student.

John Chancellor: Presidents are human. Presidentsmake mistakes. Sometimes presidents want to do damn fool things they have to be talked out of, and so my question to all of you to begin this panel today is: How do you talk a president out of a damn fool idea?

Harry McPherson: Well, very gingerly--if yourpresident is Lyndon Johnson.

Donald Rumsfeld: I can recall President Fordmeeting privately with one of his senior officials in the administration and, in effect, coming away with an

agreement that he would put forward to the Congress a proposal which had not been staffed out at all and which, in my view, was not very wise--and that is a massive understatement. The way it was finally accomplished was simply by staffing it out. In other words, taking this idea and putting it into the staff system--the people that he had hired and brought aboard, who in some cases had statutory authority over that area of government--and letting them then provide their advice and allowing some time so that he could have the benefit of their views.

Chancellor: Isn't that called stalling?

Rumsfeld: No. I would call it professional staffwork. But sometimes it takes very, very long.

Richard Cheney: The biggest problem was thedecision that didn't receive attention. It wasn't so much a matter of his making a damn fool decision . . . as it was his making some kind of offhand decision that hadn't been carefully thought about, and then people took it and ran with it. It's what I called an "oh, by the way" decision.

It was the kind of thing that would happenwhen somebody was cleared to go into the Oval Office, a cabinet member, to talk about a subject; the president was prepared. They had their discussion, and as the cabinet member was leaving, he'd turn around and he'd say, "Oh, by the way, Mr. President," and then bring up a totally unrelated subject, get a decision on it, and run with it. That's when you really got into big trouble.

Chancellor: Mr. Haldeman, it has been writtenthat when President Nixon would give you certain kinds of instructions, you'd say "Yes, sir," and then go off and start a process which didn't always result in that action being taken . . . . Wasn't there one time when he said to you, "Bob, you never did that, did you?" and you said, "No, sir, I didn't"?

H. R. Haldeman: Yes, there was. And it's interestingbecause it's been repeated not too far back in time now. I was ordered by the president unequivocally and immediately to commense lie detector tests of every employee of the State Department because there had been a series of leaks which were seriously damaging our negotiations in Vietnam. The order to solve the problem was that every member of the State Department staff worldwide was to be submitted immediately to lie detector tests. That was an easy order not to carry out because it was physically impossible to do. But we didn't do it, and the president said the next day, "Have you gotten a lie detector program started?" And I said no, and he said, "Aren't you going to?" And I said, "I don't intend to," and he ordered that it be done.

I again didn't do it on the first round that time,then went back to him later that day, and after that time--Al is smirking over here, because Haig remebers this perhaps more vividly than I do--I went back and said, "Mr. President, this really is a mistake. There are other ways of dealing with this problem at this point, and we will be back to you with a plan for doing that." We came back in a few days with a plan, and he said at that point, "I didn't think you would do it."

Chancellor: General Goodpaster, you worked forPresident Eisenhower. Did you ever have a comparable experience with him?

General Andrew Goodpaster: Somewhat comparable,I think. He came over one morning rather exasperated and said, "I've said that I want to start reducing our forces in Europe. You know that's our policy, and I want action to be initiated on that." I said, "Well, Mr. President, it isn't quite our policy."

"What do you mean?"

I said, "Well, that's the goal that's stated--towork down to the long-term strength--but it's conditioned on the ability of the Europeans to fill the gap that's there, the gap we created."

"No," he said, "that's not right. Our policy isto make that reduction and I want to get that started."

I said, "Well, Mr. President, that really isn'tthe policy. It's conditioned in this way." He glared at me, and he said, "I've got Foster Dulles coming over here today, and I'm going to have him straighten you out on this."

Well, I didn't say a word to Secretary Dulleswhen he came over. We went in together, and the president looked up and he said, "Foster, I want you to straighten Andy out on this once and for all. It is our policy to reduce those forces in Europe." And Foster Dulles, bless him, said, "Well, Mr. President, it isn't quite that clear. We always have put that condition on it, that the Europeans have to be able to fill that gap." The president looked up at Foster Dulles and he said, "Foster, I've lost my last friend."

Chancellor: Mr. Sorensen, did you ever go in toPresident Kennedy and say, "This idea that you are ciculating is a bad one"?

Theodore Sorensen: The short way was to say,"That sounds like something Dick Nixon would have suggested."

Chancellor: I'd like to ask you all now to moveon to something that is more serious: crisis management. All of you have been there at the center of the storm when either domestic or international crises have come. In rading your biographies, I found a wide range of moments when your stomachs must have churned, when you must have been scared.

Cheney: I think there's a tendency--at least ourexperience was, thinking back on it now--that oftentimes when these crises develop, that you end up sucking decisions into the White House that perhaps ought to be made someplace else.

Alexander Haig: The most important thing, Ithink, is the evolution of technology and its impact on crisis management. I think at the Gulf of Tonkin, President Johnson was engaged much too early, when we had just very fuzzy intelligence reports.

Cheney: The technology now makes it possiblefor the president to make a decision in a case involving military force that really ought to be made maybe by the commander of the aircraft carrier [as] in the Tonkin Gulf or, in the case of the Mayaguez, off Cambodia. And the decision actually goes all the way up the chain, not only to CINCPAC [Commander-in-chief, Pacific] in Hawaii and the secretary of defense and the NSC, but ultimately ends up on the president's desk, and he makes a relatively small decision that can have an enormous impact upon how he's perceived, and really should have been done by somebody else.

Sorensen: On the other hand, presidents alsosometimes reach out for decisions that they don't have to reach out for because they deliberately want to be involved. President Kennedy remarked often that he was damned if the question of war with the Soviet Union over Berlin was going to be decided by some sergeant on the border making a decision with respect to a tank or troop movement. He personally monitored the conduct of our armed forces during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it turned out it was a good thing he did because he and the chief of naval operations had a very fundamental difference, one on which a war might have hung in the balance.

McPherson: President Johnson wanted to becalled every time something happened in the Vietnam war era. He said, "I'm sure that some day, my luck being what it is, a guy is going to call me from the NSC staff at three in the morning and tell me that a navy pilot has dropped a bomb down the smokestack of a Russian freighter sitting in Hanoi Harbor. And that navy pilot would have been born and raised in Johnson City, Texas." He really wanted to know the particulars.

And my generalization is that perhapsDemocratic presidents, being more government-oriented, being more oriented toward the use of government than the Republican presidents we have had in the last 25 years, that is, shaping government, starting these big programs that everybody sooner or later wrings their hands over and so on--Democrats are likely to be involved. They are likely to be wanting to get their hands on the throttles, whereas the successful Republican presidents in the polls, Eisenhower and Reagan, particularly, have been much more inclined to sit back and let the staff deal with it until some moment at which they can speak, rather, from the mountaintop.

Goodpaster: Eisenhower had a saying that heused a number of times. He said, "Now boys, let's not make our mistakes in a hurry."

One of the great moments, going back to theinitial question, was when he would propose something and be a little assertive and anxious to get on with it. I recall on occasion telling him, "Mr. President, I've heard a wonderful saying, I don't recall where it came from, but 'Let's not make our mistakes in a hurry.'" And he would take that well.

Sorensen: I think that everyone up here couldtestify to one important lesson a president learns about crisis management in the course of his presidency, and that is who should be in the room. Our first crisis involving Cuba was the Bay of Pigs, and that was a fiasco handled badly from beginning to end. The president, regarding that crisis, met with a very small group...