Transition admission.

• Author: Rogers, Ed
• Position: Staffing the White House

A former Bush administration insider explains why a lot of fancy-titled jobs in the White House aren't as important as they sound

At about this time four years ago, I thought I was one of the most popular people in Washington. My job: organizing the staffing of the White House for a new administration. It's not as grand as it sounds. After all, only about 300 people technically work directly for the president, meaning that the White House transition was only a small part of the overall transition. But the 300 jobs that Andy Card and I were responsible for were unquestionably among the most prized in town. And with good reason: The White House staff is the hub of the president's machinery; their actions (or lack thereof) vitally shape the nation's image of the president and the success of his policies.

With the benefit of hindsight, I'll be the first to admit that in assembling the White House team we made some mistakes--not in whom we chose, but in how we organized the staff. But in some ways, that's to be expected; the White House does not come with an owner's manual. There is no mission statement and no crisp, "Welcome to the White House, this is how to make it work for you." This bodes especially ill for the Clinton White House transition team: After all, four years ago, we were involved in a friendly takeover; that is, the administration before us had every reason to caution us about the mistakes they had made.

But that doesn't mean Clinton's White House transition team can't avoid the same pitfalls we fell into. The Clinton people are not suffering from a lack of advice, but take it from someone who's been there: As the transition continues over the next few weeks and months, seemingly minor organizational mistakes made now will balloon into major obstacles to implementing policy down the road. A smartly organized and staffed White House is as important to meeting your mission as the ideas themselves. And what does that mean for the White House transition team? First, they should step back, reflect on what they want to accomplish and then build their staff from there. Second, they need to understand the unique roles of the White House staff.

It was soon after the 1988 election that John Sununu, the newly-named chief of staff for President-elect Bush, put Card and me to work overseeing the White House transition. Because Bush, James Baker, and Sununu were preoccupied with selecting the Cabinet, determining who would run the National Security Council, and who would write the inaugural address, they left us to work out the transition details. We were to assign mid- and low-level staff to their posts, based, of course, on the gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) guidance of people like Sununu, Atwater, Darman, and Baker. We also were to decide on White House goodies, such as who got offices in the West Wing, as opposed to the Siberia of the Old Executive Office Building, and who got to attend the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room.

Though both Card and I had worked for years as mid-level staffers in the Reagan White House, we were essentially clueless, especially when it came to the first order of business: resumes. Set up in our small suite, we innocently requested all the resumes of people who expressed an interest in working at the White House. We even arranged a clever routing...