The American Presidency: An Impossible Job

• Author: Alasdair Roberts
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740221118835
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Review

The American Presidency: An Impossible

Job

Hess, Stephen, & James P. Pf‌iffner. Organizing the Presidency. Fourth ed. (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2021).

Dickerson, John. The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency (New York: Random House, 2020).

Reviewed by: Alasdair Roberts , University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA.

DOI: 10.1177/02750740221118835

Sixty years ago, John Kennedy said that the American pres-

ident should be “the vital center of action in our whole

scheme of government,”and expectations about the role

have only increased since then (Schlesinger, 1965, p. 119).

The result, John Dickerson argues in his new book, The

Hardest Job in the World, is that the modern president

carries an “almost impossible”burden (Dickerson, 2020,

p. xiii). Stephen Hess and Pf‌iffner concur. The American

president, they say, oversees “one of the most complex orga-

nizations in the world”(Hess & Pf‌iffner, 2021, p. 204). In

Organizing the Presidency, Hess and Pf‌iffner consider how

the White House bureaucracy can be organized to make the

job somewhat less daunting.

Hess and Pf‌iffner are impeccably qualif‌ied to give advice.

Hess f‌irst served in the White House in the waning days of

the Eisenhower administration and published the f‌irst

edition of Organizing the Presidency in 1976. Pf‌iffner, one

of the premier scholars of the American presidency, joined

as co-author for the third edition in 2002. Every edition has

taken a similar approach, providing a chapter about the orga-

nization of the presidency under each administration. The

1976 edition examined six presidencies, from Franklin

Roosevelt to Nixon, while the current edition examines 14.

There are opening and closing chapters that sketch some

major themes and offer recommendations.

Organizing the Presidency shows how the role of the White

House has grown over the last 90 years. The White House has

extended control over many facets of work within departments

and agencies, such as goal setting, budgeting, rulemaking, f‌inan-

cial and personnel administration, and procurement policy. It

has also taken charge of political appointments that were once

left to Cabinet secretaries. Above all, it has taken command

of policy formulation. The inf‌luence of cabinet members and

their advisors has declined concomitantly. Health and Human

Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius explained the order of

things in 2010, when she testif‌ied before Congress about health-

care reform under President Obama: “I am not a principal in the

negotiations, nor is my staff …[We] provide technical support”

(Hess & Pf‌iffner, 2021, p. 184).

The White House bureaucracy has evolved to support this

expanded role. It is now much larger, employing almost

2,000 people. Assignments are demarcated more sharply,

with off‌ices exclusively dedicated to critical functions such

as media and legislative relations. There are also a welter of

councils, off‌ices, and advisors charged with formulating

policy and coordinating departments and agencies. Presidents

have come to accept that the whole apparatus should be

topped with a chief of staff who has the power to maintain

order and regulate access to the president. And a distinctive

ethic of presidential service has emerged over the decades.

The good White House bureaucrat is an “honest broker”who

assures that all interested players get a fair hearing and gives

the president a balanced view of options. Bad ones run rough-

shod over colleagues and push their own agenda (Hess &

Pf‌iffner, 2021, pp. 157–158 and 207).

Hess and Pf‌iffner emphasize how presidential personality

—those “inherent qualities of character and temperament”—

shapes operations within the White House (Hess & Pf‌iffner,

2021, p. 209). The design of the book tends to privilege this

theory. A new president means a new chapter explaining how

structures and routines have been altered during their tenure.

However, we can question whether personality matters as

much today as it did a half-century ago, when the basic archi-

tecture of the White House bureaucracy was still in f‌lux. As

time passes, the changes described in each chapter are less

dramatic. Even Trump, the most iconoclastic of modern pres-

idents, failed to make radical changes in the organization of

the White House.

Another and perhaps more useful way of organizing the

book would be to focus directly on dilemmas that have con-

fronted presidents over the decades. The biggest dilemma

relates to the size of the presidential staff. As Hess and

Pf‌iffner observe, there are strong incentives for presidents

to expand the White House bureaucracy. A bigger staff

seems to promise better control of events and the executive

establishment. But a large White House bureaucracy gener-

ates problems of its own: the parts are hard to coordinate, fac-

tionalism is less tameable, and employees are more likely to

Book Review

American Review of Public Administration

2022, Vol. 52(7) 529–531

© The Author(s) 2022

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