Power in the Clerkship

The more determinedly a President seeks power, the more he will be likely to bring vigor to his clerkship.

--Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power

Watching the 43-year-old President's first, fast weeks in office, even John Fitzgerald Kennedy's sharpest critics had to admit that for better or worse he was bringing uncommon vigor to his presidential clerkship. His staff and his Cabinet had long since accepted him as an active boss who would not hesitate to order the toning down of a speech by tough-minded Admiral Arleigh Burke, to personally dress down an aide responsible for a critical news leak.

To his own surprise, Jack Kennedy found that the job was not nearly so strenuous as it had first seemed. If the problems weighing on the President were still as heavy as they looked on Inauguration Day, there at least seemed to be far more time to solve them--and the gift of time was like a second burst of energy. "It's unbelievable,'' said a top White House staffer, recalling his days as Kennedy's assistant on Capitol Hill. "We didn't realize how much time we were wasting up there.'' Some veteran Kennedy aides had been apprehensive about the President's work load before they moved into the White House. Now, seeing their boss at work, freed from the time-wasting small worries of a campaigner and a Senator, and clothed with enormous authority, they worried no more. "I think one man can do this job,'' said a friend, "when you do it like Jack."

Uses of Patronage. Doing it like Jack, in essence, meant working 16 hours a day in the exercise of every power that the presidency carries with it. It meant taking permissible executive action that Dwight Eisenhower thought unnecessary, e.g., increasing food allotments to distressed areas, or promising to use "the moral authority or position of influence of the presidency" in school integration disputes. It meant using press conferences and well-publicized messages to Congress, or sending Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg on a whirlwind tour of depressed areas to create a climate of public opinion in favor of the legislation Kennedy wants to see enacted.

It also meant taking full advantage of the patronage at the President's disposal.* Kennedy is fond of Teddy Roosevelt's injunction to "speak softly and carry a big stick," and he applies it to domestic as well as foreign affairs. Since taking office, his soft words have been used more often than his stick: day after day, congressional leaders have dropped by the White House for chats--and exposure to the effortless Kennedy charm. But he threw the full weight of his prestige behind House Speaker Sam Rayburn in the fight over the Rules Committee, personally calling up important Congressmen to get their support. On his order, most of his Cabinet members lobbied too. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall was caught red-handed threatening cuts in big public projects in retribution for anti-Rayburn votes. Somewhat nervously, Udall telephoned the White House to ask if he had done right in telling reporters he had just been "playing by the rules of the game." He got a delighted reply: "You said just exactly what I wanted to say and couldn't."

Nowhere will the game be played more openly than in the second-floor White House office of Larry O'Brien, special assistant to the President for liaison and personnel. In the office is a card file containing the background of every Senator and Congressman. Among the data are such items as a man's close political friends, college fraternity, his wife's maiden name, his economic and educational milieu--information that has proved invaluable in finding undreamed of ways to reach a man. A tough, candid operator. O'Brien has already talked over the President's program with several congressional delegations, told them that the White House will call Congressmen with good news for constituents, leave unpleasant announcements to Cabinet members. Congress has already learned that when a man votes against the President, more and more of those announcements will be coming from the Cabinet.

Limits of Liberty. In theory, John Kennedy's growing apparatus of power rests upon his own historical study of the nation's active political leaders--a study confirmed during a recent reading of Presidential Power, by Columbia University's Professor Neustadt (who was added permanently to the Kennedy staff last week as an adviser on the structure and operations of Government). In practice, it rests on the President's determination to get things done--and his belief that in politics, power is the prime, even the only, mover of events.

One question raised by the new President's determined seizure of the executive reins was whether he would remember that some power is best not used at all--especially when the Federal Government is tempted to take on tasks adequately managed by the states and local communities. Another was whether events could really be moved far and fast, as energetic John Kennedy hoped. Faced with bureaucratic inertia, the unalterable decisions of predecessors and the provocation of crisis by men beyond his control, he was learning that a President, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, barely retains the liberty "to be as big a man as he can." But in the vigor he brought to the early days of his clerkship, in the power he applied to the problems at hand, John Kennedy was clearly reaching for stature.

* Last week Attorney General Robert Kennedy requested authorization for 59 new federal judgeships. A Democratic Congress studiously ignored a similar request from Ike last year, but obviously will not ignore this one.

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