Achieving The Illusion Of Control

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/FORTUNE

WASHINGTON (Jan. 15) -- As Bill Clinton's second inauguration approaches, his White House seems, finally, to have gotten its act together. Each day no longer brings a fresh disaster. His new appointees no longer crash and burn as soon as they are nominated. And most importantly, Clinton's poll ratings are strong. After four long years, the voters have gotten used to thinking of him as "Mr. President," and he, in turn, has become adept at playing the role.

But in truth, the impression of mastery is merely that: an impression. The White House is a madhouse almost all the time, no matter who's in charge. The Clintonites have merely become better at projecting the illusion of control. And it is an illusion. By its very nature, the White House -- any White House -- operates in a constant state of borderline chaos. Even in the best circumstances, it is wrong to think of the president and his staff as striving warriors or visionary leaders. Rather, they are better imagined in a defensive crouch, waiting for the next crisis to erupt, and then scurrying to cope as best they can.

Nothing typifies this situation better than the White House's much lauded Rapid Response Team. Take the day last year in which Bob Dole called for the repeal of the most recent gas tax increase. Nimble Clinton aides were able to distribute the president's response to that parry even before many journalists heard the Dole proposal. Such quick counter-punching, devoid of obvious error, made the once-derided West Wing seem like a well-oiled machine.

But the key word there is "seem." The real story is one disaster avoided rather than of superior organization. The night before Dole's gas tax attack, Clinton aide Gene Sperling got no sleep because he was rushing to complete an economic briefing book. When he finally got home at mid-afternoon, he allowed himself only an hour's rest and even that turned out to be too long. In the interim, Dole had made his proposal. Sperling dashed back to the White House and found a prescient, three-page memo on the subject, but the White House hierarchy had to be paged before it could be used. Chief of Staff Leon Panetta telephoned from a train. George Stephanopoulos got out of a taxi to call in. And to distribute the response they devised, the already exhausted Sperling was forced to run up and down the West Wing stairs. Political material has to go through a "campaign" fax in the basement; Sperling's office is located on the second floor.

So much for the well-oiled machine. The modern-day White House is a pressure cooker that is as prone to making mistakes as any other professional workplace, only more so. At the White House, errors are more likely because so many decisions have to be made at such great velocity. And where could the stakes be any higher? What would normally be considered problems-to-be-solved are "crises" and "disasters" at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Too much happens too fast for the president and his staff to deal with smoothly. As the tide of one controversy, say Whitewater or Indogate, subsides, other vexing issues, like casualties in Bosnia or rising gas prices, loom large. The only certainty is that one crisis with follow the next, in a dizzying, unrelenting whirl.

No one is fully prepared to deal with this. People come to work for the president full of hope and optimism. They believe a staff job at the White House is like being at the center of the universe, on top of the world. In fact, aides quickly learn that they cannot simply wave a wand and create change. Far from it. Even incremental alterations to the status quo come after enormous effort and at untold personal cost. The only family an aide has time to serve is the First Family.

Lobbyist Howard Paster should have known this. He was a more than 20-year veteran of Washington when, in 1993, he attained his dream of representing a president on Capitol Hill. But even he was surprised at the turmoil he found. After too many sleepless nights, stomach pains and stress-related rashes, he quit as Clinton's top lobbyist in less than a year. Policy aide Bruce Reed, another longtime Washingtonian, knew it was wise to narrow his personal wish list in order to have any chance of getting something accomplished, even from his perch in the most powerful house in the land. So he chose four of Clinton's dozens of campaign promises and posted them on his office wall. Now, four years later, he has seen only two of them completed -- cutting 100,000 bureaucrats and ending the old system of welfare. "Nothing," Reed concludes, "is ever easy."

Part of the reason for this uphill climb is particular to the Clinton White House, which, early on, was badly organized and hell bent on doing too much. But it also failed on matters it should have gotten right. Despite Clinton's call for diversity, its top echelon functioned, in the words of the women in the West Wing, as a "white boy's club," much as previous administrations had. So while Dee Dee Myers felt privileged to be the first female press secretary, she was denied the access she needed to do her job. She lasted less than two years. "I saw the world from a front-row seat, and I'll never regret a minute of it," Myers now says. But, like so many other former aides, she's glad it's over: "That's not how I want to live my life anymore."

She is not alone in this view among White House expatriates -- from any recent White House. Why? Simply put: the president doesn't really govern anything, and that's been true for a long time. After the election of Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman said of his successor: "He'll sit here and he'll say, 'Do this! Do that!' And nothing will happen. Poor Ike, it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll find it very frustrating." Indeed, ever since the publication in 1960 of Richard Neustadt's classic, Presidential Power, the examination of presidential power has really been a study of weakness and how to overcome it. Neustadt writes: "If the President envisages substantial innovations, then almost everything in modern history cries caution to such hopes unless accompanied by crises with potential for consensus."

None experience this fallen expectation more acutely than the loyal White House staff. Nancy Mitchell, a former aide in the Bush White House, now thinks of her two years on staff as a "nightmare." Her time there, she says, was like standing in the middle of a baseball stadium with everyone in the stands throwing balls at her. Fellow Bush aide Blanquita Cullum thinks often of forming a "survivors club" for White House alumni. Any aide who doesn't understand the reference to "survivors," she says, need not apply.

The best any president and his aides can hope for is to achieve the illusion of control. In recent history, Ronald Reagan, a former actor, was perhaps the most proficient at this -- until, that is, the Iran-contra scandal blew his cover. Then it became clear that even the only president to serve two full terms since the 1950s was unable to solve the mystery of how to marshal the White House staff. President Clinton has gotten much better at controlling this illusion as well. Thanks first to the iron hand of Leon Panetta and now to the efficient Erskine Bowles, the Clinton White House is much better at keeping its yap shut about the always messy process of decision making. The White House also has been smart in its selection of top White House staffers in its second term. Both Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed, standout veterans of the first term, have not just been retained, but promoted. Other savvy holdovers include Rahm Emanuel, Sylvia Matthews, John Podesta, Vicky Radd and Doug Sosnik.

But the place is a madhouse nonetheless, and always will be. It is time to accept that fact, and to try to reduce the wear and tear on the staff, and maybe burnish the reputation of the presidency at the same time. Looking ahead to the year 2000, I recommend that the leading presidential candidates begin to name their top officials, particularly important senior White House aides, long before election day. This would help the eventual winner prepare for the hard slog of governance by creating, in effect, a formal shadow government of the kind familiar in parliamentary systems. The three months between election and inauguration is too short to assemble an effective team to run a trillion-dollar enterprise. Such government-by-the-seat-of-the-pants should no longer be tolerated.

To make this work, voters will have to cooperate. They would have to see these early appointments not as arrogance or overconfidence on the part of the contestants, but rather as an attempt to make the office of the presidency less calamitous than it has lately turned out to be. And as the presidential term unfolds, they might also learn to accept that a president is not really in charge -- that he is not the king or the prime minister or the spiritual leader of the nation that we wish he were. Until then, the ill-named commander in chief will continue to be a source of frustration. What is more, working in the White House will always be fraught with turmoil.

Jeffrey Birnbaum is Washington Bureau Chief of FORTUNE magazine. His most recent book is MADHOUSE: The Private Turmoil of Working for the President. Mike Birnbaum, who drew the cartoon that accompanies this piece, is a fifth grader at Seven Locks Elementary School and the son of Jeffrey Birnbaum.

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