Presidential Aide Research Articles

Presidential AIDS Panel Named

Presidential AIDS Panel Named

Presidential AIDS Panel Named

Presidential AIDS Panel Named

Approaches to Staffing the Presidency: Notes on FDR and JFK

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.

Presidency and Legislation: The Growth of Central Clearance

Ten months after President Eisenhower's inaugural, an article in Fortune extolled a presidential aide in terms which would have seemed familiar ten months before; the picture of his role in Eisenhower's entourage might easily have been drawn in President Truman's time. The subject of this piece was Roger W. Jones, an Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget and chief of its Office of Legislative Reference. In Fortune's terms, here was a confidential, if “non-political,” member of the White House circle performing tasks of great importance to the President, trusted, respected, and relied upon by all of his associates. As an analysis of governmental functions and relationships, this testimonial was scarcely definitive, but its mere publication testifies to the continuation of the Budget Bureau's so-called legislative clearance operations, handily surviving the Great Transition of 1953.What are these clearance operations? Essentially they amount to central coordination and review of stands taken by the various federal agencies at three successive stages of the legislative process.