Lack of Loyalty Quotes

In early 1933 President Hoover was a lame duck, but the country was in the midst of a banking panic in the Great Depression. Hoover tried to get President-elect Roosevelt to join him in some joint action, but Roosevelt didn't want to commit to anything in advance and preferred not to associate his administration with the banking debacle of the Hoover administration. He felt that the public was so soured on Hoover’s incompetence and lack of apparent empathy, that anything he did with Hoover would be perceived fas bad and doomed to failure. What Roosevelt wanted to do is diminish fear and despair and have new hope. However, Hoover was erroneously told by aids that Tugwell, a Roosevelt assistant, had suggested that Roosevelt should let the situation deteriorate, and then there would be more to blame on the Republicans when Roosevelt took office. Tugwell was as far from being a partisan politician as one could get. He was an academic with a PhD in agricultural economics. He had never been involved in politics before. Surprisingly, Hoover believed the story about Tugwell, but by then, the was a very frustrated man who felt that he had almost no good options.

This quotation is very interesting in that it shows a President who was not very happy with the policies of his own Secretary of State. This would never have happened overtly after the FDR presidency. Prior, the Secretary of State had a great deal of independence of operation, which was one of the reasons that it was such a prestigious position. However, on modern times President’s would never publicly criticize their own Secretary of State. They would either control the policies directly, accept his/her actions as their own, fire the Secretary, for force him/her to resign as George W, Bush did with Colin Powell. Also, most Secretaries of State, spending most of their time on foreign affairs, become much more sensitive and sophisticated to the intricacies of the world situation, that their nuanced views are very often not viewed by American public opinion as sufficiently pro American. At the same time, there has been a tradition in America that the Secretary of State does not engage in domestic politics, so does not always seem to be pro American.