H. R. Haldeman Quotes

See {626594} for Polk’s negative view of delegation of any authority or responsibility.

During the Korean War Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sent instructions to the United Nations Ambassador as to how to vote in a UN debate. Lodge voted to the contrary. The Assistant Secretary of State called to inquire why the instructions were not followed.

He was Chief of Staff and was trying to calm the nation. However, he created a real problem. By saying he was in control, he alarmed many people as the Constitution did not give him any authority to be in control of anything. Many people saw this as a sign of his extreme personal ambition. Others, that he had just made a mistake.

The Supreme Court had decided to hear an important case on gun rights. Cheney discovered that Solicitor General, the Administration’s chief lawyer before the Supreme Court, Paul Clement planned to file a brief that was very different from Cheney’s own personal views. In protest, he signed his name to a much stronger brief filed by 55 pro-gun senators and 250 members of the House of Representatives. The President’s Chief of Staff called Cheney on the carpet for doing something that was unforgivable—the Vice President had publicly criticized the position that the President’s (and the Vice President’s) chief lawyer was taking. This was Cheney’s excuse—ie that he was not protesting as the Vice President but as President of the Senate, the only other Constitutional Role of the Vice President. Bolton let the vice president know that if he ever tried something like this again, he would be frozen out of most government activities. See {633772} . In Bush’s second term Cheney had less and less influence, in part because of his unethical behavior like this.

That is one view—the one tried the most frequently by Presidents who by their own estimates didn’t get a responsive civil service working to his priorities. Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson had great cooperation from their civil servants; they instead appointed very competent people with strong senses of fairness and leading personnel. Ronald Regan tried both techniques. He used Wilson’s technique in his Education and Justice Department where there was slow-rolling and dissonance when his appointees tended to be ideologues with little or no outstanding professional competence in the fields they supervised. However, his military and State Department bureaucracies was very responsive to his appointees who were excellent leaders.

This was a subtle criticism of the Presidential Candidate Donald Trump whose only experience was in real estate development, reality TV, and promotion. This was in contrast to his opponent Hillary Clinton who had had vast experience at many roles and levels of government.

This statement was made more than 1/2 a year after he was pushed out of his job of WHite House Cheif of Stafff by President Donald Trump