Approaches to Staffing the Presidency: Notes on FDR and JFK

Abstract

It has been a quarter century since the President's Committee on Administration Management, chaired by Louis Brownlow, blessed by Franklin Roosevelt, heralded a major innovation in our constitutional arrangements: substantial staffing for the Presidency distinct from other parts of the executive establishment —in Edward Corwin's phrase an “Institutionalized Presidency.” The Executive Office, which throughout our prior history had been essentially a “private office” in the English sense, was to become a “President's Department.” So it did. Presidential agencies have filled the building which in 1937 housed the State Department (and in 1913 had housed War and Navy, too). Presidential aides outrank in all but protocol the heads of most executive departments.We date this development from Brownlow's Report. In the sphere of presidential staffing, its proposals for the most part were put into practice with promptness and fidelity. And practice, for the most part, has been kind to the proposals, has sustained—indeed has vindicated—key ideas behind them. What a rare experience for an advisory report! It gives the work of the Committee special standing which we properly acknowledge as we meet professionally in 1963, the Silver Anniversary of their devoted service to the country and to our profession.