Quotes about Presidential Loyalty

William Odom

The presidents I served under don't have anything to do with my politics.

James Q. Wilson

Making the bureaucracy accountable to the President in any comprehensive and enduring way is impossible. Making it alert to his preferences is possible in those cases where Presidents put loyal and competent subordinates in charge of making decisions.

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.

Jeb Stuart Magruder

I had believed it [organizing the Watergate break-in] was wrong but believed that the greater good was in serving the President.

Tom Harkin

We raised our right hands ... and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. We didn't swear to support and defend the President.

Gore Vidal

That loyal retainer of the Chase Manhattan Bank, the American president.

Tavis Smiley

When it comes to the president, we have to respect him, we have to protect him, and we have to correct him. And in my career, since he'd been on the national stage at least, I've had - I've always respected the president.

Jerry Lewis

I will not say anything negative about the president of the United States. I don't do that. And I don't allow my children to do that.

Barry Goldwater

You never tear your President down.

Ann Coulter

If you don't hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don't love your country.

Ken Starr

I think the President inspires tremendous affection and loyalty by a wide range of people.

Jeffrey R. Immelt

He is my President …. When the President asks you to do something, you say yes.

He was a Republican who served a Democratic President to the distress of some of the extreme right wingers of the Republican Party.

Elliott Abrams

For most career bureaucrats, the most important reference points are other career officials; they are bureaucratic loyalists rather than Presidential loyalists.

Political ideologues like Abrams distrust and disrespect civil service officials. Abrams and his colleagues are most critical of the civil service’s alleged lack of loyalty to the President. However, he forgets and most people never realize that all Civil Servants when they take their oath of office pledge their loyalty to the Constitution and not to the President. Many of them criticize presidential, political party and ideological loyalists like Abrams because even Abrams and other Presidential appointments swear an oath to the Constitution and not the President or a political party.

Pam Bondi

Will I support our president, whoever that might be? Absolutely. Did I vote for Donald Trump? Absolutely.

John Dean

Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It's a natural tendency.

Nikki Haley

What he does, faults and all, he's our president. And so I want him to be successful. When these tweets come out, I mean, do I look at 'em and say, 'Okay, where did that come from?' Yes. But I don't pick up the phone and say, 'What are you doing?' I just know that's who he is.

Monica Crowley

When you talk about presidents, loyalty is a great thing until it becomes a bad thing. Witness once again Watergate.

Powers Boothe

I've had presidents in my lifetime - and I'm old enough to have seen several - that I really detested, but they're still my president. I've had presidents that I've really liked.

Donald Rumsfeld

In the execution of Presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

I am not bound by instructions from the State Department. I am a member of the President's cabinet and take instructions only from him.

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.