The Presidency: Where More Is Less

By James Thomas Flexner

The following Bicentennial Essay is the second in a series that will appear periodically into early 1976 and will examine how we have grown in our 200 years.

The executive staff of the first President of the U.S. rarely consisted of more than two men. When George Washington did not have the heart to keep his secretaries from going on vacation, he penned all the presidential correspondence himself. President Ford's executive staff totals 535.

Washington had no need of organizational charts or doorkeepers to prevent his staff from interfering with each other and becoming an irritation to him. Ford, wishing to replace Nixon's sealed chamber with an "open presidency," announced that nine designated advisers would have direct access to him at all times. But this attempt at simplification did not work out in practice; there were still too many people clamoring to see him, too many interruptions, too many demands on his time. The President still needs a kind of traffic cop, and Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld is entrusted with deciding who should see him and when.

Although the men who drafted the Constitution were familiar with the tyranny of kings, they gave the President great power, largely because they tailored the office to fit the man who they knew would be the first incumbent. Trusting George Washington, they made him -- and all his successors -- Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, ruled that he could be removed from office only for treason or criminal behavior, and gave him veto power over the Legislative Branch. Since then, other Presidents have increased this inherently powerful office in size, panoply and functions, but not in effectiveness, public confidence or contact with the people.

In setting up his own staff when he became President, Jefferson described with admiration how Washington had handled official correspondence. Each Cabinet minister received all letters relevant to his department. Should he decide that a letter required no reply, he would nonetheless communicate it to Washington "for his information." Other letters were sent to the President with the proposed reply attached. In most cases, Washington returned them without comment. "If any doubt arose, he brought it up at a conference," Jefferson commented. "By this means he was always in accurate possession of all facts and proceedings in every part of the Union ... and met himself the due responsibility for whatever was done."

Letters now come into the Executive by the millions. There are eleven Cabinet posts to Washington's four. Ford, like Nixon, has avoided Cabinet Secretaries who possess any political clout of their own that would give them substantial independence (the exception is Kissinger). Washington's chief Cabinet members were the nation's two outstanding leaders after Washington himself: Jefferson and Hamilton. As long as they stayed in office, Washington kept them under control. Under Washington, the personnel of the total Federal Government was 350. In March 1975 the number of employees in the Executive Branch alone totaled 2,815,670.

During Washington's presidency, the national capital was first in New York and then in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, he occupied a cramped three-story house built as a private residence. There was no place for public offices except on the third floor, and callers climbing the stairs passed through the Washingtons' living quarters. Since the kitchen was in the visitors' plain view, Washington left his New York cook and her daughter behind: their "dirty fingers" would not be a "pleasant sight." Most of the official furniture was brought from New York where it had been inherited by the Federal Government from the congressional president. Much of it wore out so completely that Washington had to use his own money for replacements.

There are 132 rooms in the modern White House. The President's personal domain occupies much of the second story: 13 rooms, 6 1/2 baths, two sitting halls. Each incoming President can draw on furnishings left over by his predecessors and kept in bulging storehouses.

Washington had no budget to supplement his annual salary of $25,000. The current White House has an operating budget of $1,695,000--but that is just the beginning for today's President. He has an annual salary of $200,000, plus a personal expense allowance of $50,000 a year. Other departmental budgets also help cover presidential expenses. For example, if Ford gives a dinner for Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the State Department foots the bill for the state dinner. In addition, such expenses as the operation of Air Force One, which Ford uses now exclusively for his travels, are paid by the Air Force. Thus the President gets all of his travel free.

When his Government was moving to Philadelphia, Washington sought a small farm to work on near the new capital because his doctors believed he was endangering his life by lack of exercise. He had no available cash, but offered in exchange 3,000 of his western acres. The exchange was not considered adequate. At Washington's command, his need was never made known to anyone in authority. Nor was it ever satisfied. Nixon, according to the General Accounting Office, spruced up his homes at Key Biscayne and San Clemente with $1.3 million in tax money.

When Washington decided to make a three-month trip through the Deep South, how many Secret Service men and other guards, how many publicity men and speechwriters, how many advisers, aides and secretaries, how large a press corps did he take with him? None. In addition to the men who handled his horses, his entourage consisted of his valet. The army of advancemen who set up the situation for Ford wherever he goes, where were they? Tavern keepers were amazed when a carriage turned unheralded into their dooryard and out stepped a tall man who proved to be the President of the U.S. The coachman would then investigate the stables, the President the rooms. If both proved too dirty for beast and man, the President would set out again, once in the middle of a torrential rainstorm although he did not know where on the deserted road he would find another tavern. He was puzzled that he received no dispatches from the capital. It turned out that due to a confusion of mails and roads, his Government did not know exactly where he was for almost two months.

Ford's jet Air Force One is tended day and night by a ground crew of about 25. Well before a scheduled trip, an Air Force advance agent goes to the destination and checks out all landing details. Moments before the presidential plane takes off or lands, Secret Service agents drive down the runway to make sure it is clear of debris and to check for bombs.

Although the staff that accompanies Ford varies with the purpose of the trip, there is always a crowd: top personal advisers, one or more military aides, speechwriters if there are to be speeches, members of Mrs. Ford's staff if she goes along, political aides if politicking is intended, foreign policy aides if the direction is overseas. Secret Service men abound.

As he rushes through the air, Ford can pick up a radio telephone to speak to anyone in the world, his voice bouncing off a satellite. Since these conversations can be overheard by those who tune in on the right frequency, Ford also has available a teletype system whose secure method of communicating with the ground is classified top secret. In an atomic age, the President cannot afford to be out of touch for as much as a split second.

Every schoolchild who has studied American history knows that Washington was accused of showing royalist leanings by cavalier treatment of his fellow citizens. Actually, modern Presidents are far less accessible--even Gerald Ford, despite his genuine efforts to create a more open presidency.

Each week the Washingtons had two entertainments open to anyone who appeared in respectable clothes: the President's "levees," for men only, every Tuesday from 3 to 4; and Martha's tea parties, for men and women, on Friday evenings. Washington thus described his levees: "Gentlemen, often in great numbers, come and go, chat with each other and act as they please. A porter shows them into the room, and they retire from it when they please and without ceremony." At their entrance, Washington saluted each, "and as many as I can talk to I do." At the tea parties, he spoke to every lady, and spent as much time as he could with the pretty ones.

Jefferson tells us that at one of Washington's early levees, his secretary, David Humphreys, shouted as Washington entered the room where his guests waited, "The President of the United States!" Washington was disconcerted. When the occasion was over, he told Humphreys angrily, "Well, you have taken me in once, but by God, you shall never take me in a second time!" From then on, Washington was found waiting when the first guest arrived.

When Ford makes an entrance the least conceivable ceremony is the cry, "The President of the United States!" Although the Fords like to appear before groups, for an ordinary citizen to see either of them on his own initiative for purely social reasons is virtually impossible. Most presidential entertaining is official to the highest degree, lists of guests being initiated and determined long in advance. Should someone ask to see the President, he must have both important business and important connections if he is to have the slightest chance.

Ford has at his beck every facility of modern communication. To distribute his State of the Union message, squadrons of every kind of functionary that a public relations society can imagine were mobilized, and batteries of every machine for disseminating words that a technological society has been able to develop were brought into play. Translators scratched away in 36 languages. No politician of any influence, no corner of the world, was not instantly supplied with Ford's sentences, sometimes even before they had been delivered.

Poor George Washington! When he had completed his Farewell Address there was only a single copy, written out in his own hand, and not one publicity man to bless (or curse) himself with. He entrusted the manuscript to David Claypoole, the owner of a four-page Philadelphia newspaper. After Claypoole had set up the address, he expressed a reluctance to return the manuscript. Washington gave it to him, leaving the Executive without a copy. The text appeared exclusively in this one newspaper under a small head on the second and third pages (the front page was as usual devoted to advertising). There was no editorial comment or indication that this was one of the greatest scoops in history. Washington was unavailable for comment. He was in his coach on the way to Mount Vernon.

As soon as the newspaper hit the street, other Philadelphia editors grabbed copies and ran to their racks of type. By foot, by horse, by wagon, by boat, the text spread. Wherever there was a printer, it was set up anew. It took months to reach the American back country, a season or two to reach and percolate through Europe. How poky! Yet what statement of a modern President ranks in influence and prestige with Washington's Farewell Address?

The growth in the size and ceremoniousness of the presidential office is by no means a direct result of the growth of the nation. Between Washington's and Lincoln's tunes, the population enlarged eight times and the area of the nation 3 1/2 times, but Lincoln managed the Civil War with a staff hardly larger than Washington's. By 1914 the whole continent was inhabited and the population was 24 times that of 1790; yet President Wilson's staff was still about the same size. The modern presidency was a creation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Faced first by a horrendous Depression and then a horrendous world war, Roosevelt developed a new political philosophy and a new foreign policy, both of which are still dominant.

Although Hamilton disagreed, Washington, Jefferson and a majority of the founding fathers insisted that the better the Government the less it had to do. People should and would want to take care of themselves. This conception remained powerful hi the American psyche until the 1929 Depression made clear that ordinary men could not, without help from Government, stand up against the vast complexes of force that had grown up within the nation and the modern world. Self-reliance was thus frightened away, and with it individualism. Coincidentally, the "knowledge explosion" encouraged the replacement of wide-ranging minds with specialists who emerged periodically from their burrows to sit around tables with troglodytes from other specialties.

Washington, Jefferson and their contemporaries believed that the U.S. should avoid "foreign entanglements." That conception lingered as the U.S., impregnable behind its ocean ramparts, moved across its own continent to ever-increasing prosperity. Under Wilson, this dominant policy was broken by World War I, but the concept regained force until it was finally shattered by

World War II.

We now feel that it is the duty of the Government, led by the President, not only to sustain the American people but to act, as guide and protector for as much of the world as our influence can be made to reach. This requires huge conglomerations of federal employees.

There can be no doubt that the popular trust of presidential incumbents has decreased with the multiplicity of the demands made upon them. When George Washington was in office, he was very conscious of the danger of a collapse of confidence if he allowed too much to be expected of him. Unlike modern Presidents, he never tried to whip Congressmen into line. He accepted their separate function as one of the facts with which he had to cope

and in the process allowed them to take off his shoulders reponsibility for many aspects of the Government. (Washington left it to Congress to set up a federal court system, for example, and did not interfere when the legislators enacted a customs bill that he disliked.) Thus did Washington manage to keep his objectives to the minimum--and to achieve almost all.

Modern Presidents are inundated with not only possible but impossible tasks; they are asked to cure, for every individual and the human race in general, all the ills that flesh is heir to. Being considered universal problem-solvers, they have become universal scapegoats. Their voices may sound across the nation and the world, but what they put forward will not impress a listener who feels that the speaker has failed to straighten out, as he should have done, the listener's own particular problems.

No rational individual would want to go back to the presidency as it was before F.D.R. The world has become so complex that there are many important areas where government must help men to determine their own destinies, and the oceans behind which American isolation once flourished have shrunk until they would be mere passing specks beneath intercontinental missiles. But it is possible, particularly after more than 40 years have passed, for even the most valuable of reforms to defeat its own objectives by going too far.

Perhaps the major reason the Bicentennial has created visible uneasiness across the land is that it inevitably calls down from the heights of our history an old ideal that frightens many contemporary Americans: self-reliance. It is a measure of our situation that a call for individual or even community action so often results, in fact, in no action at all. Whatever the problem, it is left for the Government to solve. Americans hesitate to acknowledge that perpetually passing the buck to Government may not indicate an enlightened concern with the plight of our fellow citizens so much as an easy way for an individual or a community to cop out.

Every new demand on the presidency, and on the Federal Government as a whole, increases its size and unmanageability --and also our taxes. No other living organism, not even crab grass, has the lust for life and growth of a bureaucracy. George Washington wrote, "Whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty by close application, it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if more are employed therein." But nowadays, if four prove inadequate, eight are assigned and then sixteen and so on and on.

It seems counterproductive, for example, for the President to have so large a staff that he has to have a watchdog to protect him from his own aides. The fear of assassination has necessarily hampered presidential freedom of movement; yet there is a strong indication that in other and unnecessary ways the lifestyles of modern Presidents are unduly determined by those who cluster around them.

Given the awesome (and vastly expensive) scaffolding that we have built around our Chief Executive, do we have cause to fear that we have created an "imperial presidency" capable of trampling democracy down? The fact is that the American people have just, for the first time in history, forced a President to resign. Nixon made every use he could of the prestige and power of his office; yet his fall was achieved, simply and bloodlessly, by the will of the people. That would have been impossible had he been a true emperor.

If the Government has become larger, more remote, more complicated and expensive than necessity warrants, it is partly our own fault. We have the ballot as one remedy. Congress, moreover, is showing signs of becoming more assertive and is taking some steps toward re-establishing itself as a separate center of power. Individuals, community groups and private organizations must speak out and be prepared to assume responsibilities if the unceasing growth of the presidency and its functions is to be limited. Though some Government officials may look on themselves as members of an anointed group, all of them are (to revive a phrase that has fallen out of common usage) "public servants." And that includes the President. Should we desire a simpler presidency, should we wish to take more responsibility on ourselves whenever possible, we have to ask for it--rather, to insist--and it will have to be granted.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.