Lucy A. Winchester Quotes
I will not take orders from Bob Haldeman and the West Wing. Unless I can take orders from you only, I am going to resign.
Mrs. Nixon put her foot down and the West Wing did not thereafter control and manage the affairs and staff of the First Lady.
Lucy A. Winchester, Chief of Staff for First Lady Pat Nixon, Quoted on “Influence of First Ladies, Panel Discussion, George Washington University, November 1 1994
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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.
Mead argues that this is a trend that has been operating over many administrations. It could be argued that modern communications and the media have been significant drivers of this phenomenon along with the desire for White House staff to have as much control as they can obtain. Before modern communications, an Ambassador, or a Secretary of Commerce had to make decisions within the philosophical and political umbrella of the President’s general policies. They could not communicate immediately with the President or his staff. But once everyone in the government was connected, the President’s staff could make every important decision. However, with the many different major issues and emergencies of the modern era, the small group in the What House have not been able to deal with them all and the bureaucracy has been instructed not to decide big things without going through the White House. See {642086}.
He left a very lucrative job running a large company to take the ministry at far less pay.
Sinclair had written The Jungle which was an expose of the meat packing industry which at the time was brutal for the workers and unhealthy and unsanitary for the consumers. The book was exceedingly popular and there were many cries for reform and regulation. Sinclair however was continuing pressuring President Roosevelt who he did not think was acting fast enough. After the telegram, Roosevelt got the first Pure Food & Drug Commission created legislatively.
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.
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 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
This appears to be the first publication with the expression of “an axe to grind”.
