Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today’s topic was suggested by the simple fact that President Biden’s Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, is stepping down, and he formally announced this news on Friday, January 27th. Klain was seen as an extremely influential chief of staff. He’s being replaced by a man named Jeff Zients.

Now Klain was very much a Washington insider, so he was one particular kind of chief of staff. Apparently, Jeff Zients is a former business person, who is kind of known in Washington as a Mr Fix It, but comes in from a very different place and will have possibly a very different influence on the president.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The change from Klain to Zients is going to be an especially interesting one because Klain has really been with Biden for a very long time, and this is going to play into the way he is perceived, I think. Biden met Klain when he was a third-year law student, and Klain went to work for him on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

As soon as they met, as Biden said, “I knew the moment he started that he was a once-in-a-generation talent with a fierce and brilliant intellect. Just as important, he has a really big heart.” Biden went on to say, “During the last 36 years, Ron and I have been through some real battles together. And when you’re in the trenches with somebody for as long as I have been with Ron, you really get to know the person. You see what they’re made of.”

And then, of course, when Biden became president, he said, “I knew that I wanted Ron to lead the White House staff. He was uniquely qualified, given his prior public service. He knows how government works, how politics works, how Congress and the White House works. He is as tough, smart, determined, and persistent as anyone I have ever met. He assembled the most diverse and the most talented White House team in history and leaned on them to solve impossible challenges.”

Now, some of the observers who are looking at the transition from Klain to Zients have noted that Klain really does seem to be one of the most able and prepared chiefs of staff in our history. And some people are even saying that perhaps they ought to break the job up a bit among advisors so that it doesn’t all fall on Zients, who himself has quite an illustrious history from working under President Obama as the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Then finally taking over healthcare.gov after its initial disastrous rollout in 2013. Then he went on to chair the National Economic Council from 2014 to 2017. And then, after Joe Biden took office, Zients served as the White House Coronavirus response coordinator until April of 2022. Very talented man, but one who has not been with Biden as long Klain has, and one who doesn’t have quite as extensive experience making sure that this particular president’s ideas get put into action.

So what’s interesting about this moment and this change is the two different things people are looking at going into the modern switch from Klain to Zients. And that is the idea of an advisor as sort of a president whisperer if you will, and the idea of an advisor as an extraordinary organizer. And sometimes, those things overlap, and sometimes they don’t. And both of them have very deep roots in our history. So to start, Joanne had a great idea, and that was to talk about Thomas Jefferson.

Joanne Freeman:

Now see, this is entirely your fault, Heather. It’s one time when I was going to say absolutely-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh my God-

Joanne Freeman:

… nothing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… I was kidding. You’re going to talk about Thomas Jefferson.

Joanne Freeman:

Wait, you’re the one who raised him. You’re the one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All right.

Joanne Freeman:

Not me.

Heather Cox Richardson:

No, but you had a really good point when we talked about this before. About how the idea of a president whisperer ties into a much longer strand of ideas about government.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, absolutely. And it’s one that you see a lot. It predates, certainly, the United States. But if you’re looking at the revolutionary period and the formative period of the United States, what you see a lot in revolutionary literature and newspapers and pamphlets is people who initially are not blaming the king for what’s going wrong. They’re blaming evil ministers, people whispering into the king’s ears. Maybe it’s members of parliament, maybe it’s just friends or influencers of various sorts who are giving him bad policy, and the king is listening.

And what this does for a time is enable colonists, American colonists, to not blame the king, to not blame their monarch, but instead to blame whatever’s going wrong on evil advisors who, in one way or another, they want pushed aside even though they can’t necessarily put their finger on what specific advisors they have in mind. So it makes perfect sense that if there’s some kind of executive or monarchical person in power, that one thing people might do if they don’t like what that person is doing is to immediately point a finger at the influencers of that person.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So can I ask you a question about that? I get that. I understand that that’s one way to make it clear to your king, in this case, that you don’t like the policies that that government is enacting without actually being disloyal. So I understand why that would come from ordinary people. But I was wondering, we were thinking about this, do wannabe ministers make that argument because they want those jobs?

That is, if you were ministering to the king, which obviously wouldn’t have happened, and I basically wanted your job, would I have sort of whipped up the people to say, “Oh man, that Freeman, she’s got terrible ideas about whatever. He should have somebody more reasonable like me.”

Joanne Freeman:

I suppose you could do that, but what you would also be doing would be possibly attacking, in this case, the king’s choice of trusting me. So, in other words, it wouldn’t be as easy as just saying, “Why are you trusting that horrible person? I’m better.” You could do that, I’m sure, strategically and carefully and promote yourself and tear somebody else down.

And heaven knows in monarchical courts, that kind of stuff is happening all the time. But I think part of this, blaming the influencer and not blaming the leader, is it’s a simple way of, in a sense, safely opposing what’s happening without opposing the person who is absolutely in power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And when the framers write the Constitution, they have all sorts of places where they suggest a president can get information. He’s frequently supposed to be acting with the advice and consent of the Senate. But when Washington first tries to put together a government, he ends up basically knocking on door after door saying, “Will you talk to me so we can make some decisions?”

And finally they give up or finally everyone turns… I mean, I’m totally synopsizing here. But he ends up putting together an actual Cabinet, right, actually saying, “You take this portfolio, and you take this portfolio.”

Joanne Freeman:

Well, he does that very early on. So he does… And it is true. The Cabinet is not designated in the Constitution. He does create a Secretary of State and a Secretary of the Treasury and pick an attorney general. But he also does, right off the cuff, some of what it would make sense that most presidents do, which is reach out to friends and acquaintances, colleagues who he thinks have a lot of knowledge about related things.

And as the first president, he feels particularly clueless about what he’s supposed to be doing and really aware of the fact that if he does something wrong and acts vaguely monarchical in some way, that the whole thing could tank the whole experiment. So he does reach out to people like John Jay, who’s been a diplomat overseas, or Robert Livingston, same thing, or James Madison, whose opinions he trusts, or Alexander Hamilton, who is his aide during the Revolution, and ask them basic questions about, “How I should act, what I should do.”

And they either tell him in person or write letters back to him. And some of those people, in particular Madison, and I suppose you could also say Hamilton, although he’s formally in the Cabinet, do throughout Washington’s presidency act in a kind of informal way too. People who Washington can go to and say, “What do you think about this?” Madison ends up having a more complicated relationship once he teams up with Jefferson.

But still, Madison’s there helping with the farewell address. So it makes sense, right. If you’re president, you want to find people who you can trust, who you feel have an expertise that you don’t have, who you can consult and at least consider what they’re offering.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which makes a special sense in a democracy where theoretically you’re trying to reflect the will of the people.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That you’re supposed to do what people… what will be best for the most people, and how are you going to learn how to do that? And we’ve done it different ways in different periods. But what we’re really focusing on today is the influence of individuals on the president and the way people think about that. So we’re going to talk about Jackson, and we’re going to talk about how Jackson ends up splitting the people who give him advice. But I do think it’s important to understand why he gets so mad at his Cabinet to start with.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. So there is a scandal of sorts towards the beginning of Jackson’s presidency. There is a woman who initially is Margaret Timberlake, sometimes called Peggy, although it’s unclear whether she called herself that, married to a Mr. Timberlake, who is in the Navy. He dies overseas and less than a year later, Margaret, formerly Timberlake, marries a member of Jackson’s Cabinet, his Secretary of War, John Eaton. And that’s unseemly and suggests that Eaton and Peggy had been together in some way before. Less than nine months and they’re married after Timberlake’s death.

She already was disliked because apparently she was outgoing and assertive and she, as one historian puts it, didn’t cooperate with gender norms, right. She was a little sort of freer and easier than some. So she’s just disliked. And then when this gets on top of it, she’s pretty much ostracized by women, Washington elite women. And some members of Jackson’s Cabinet join up with these women in saying that Peggy Eaton is unacceptable, shouldn’t be accepted, shouldn’t be in polite society.

Jackson is very sensitive to this in part because his own wife, Rachel, had been attacked and scandalized during his running for the presidency, and she died not that long after he becomes president. And so he certainly is someone who’s sensitive to women being attacked by gossip. So he turns on his Cabinet for this. He’s angry at this sort of scandal creating, and the Cabinet pretty much divides. Some of it agrees with what he’s doing. Some of it remains really opposed to Eaton. They side with John Calhoun, his vice president who doesn’t like him.

So you end up with essentially a broken Cabinet. And Jackson, with this broken Cabinet, begins to rely more on what came to be known at the time as his, quote-unquote, Kitchen Cabinet. The idea was that the Parlor Cabinet was the real one, and the Kitchen Cabinet was this group of informal advisors who he began to turn to increasingly for advice, for suggestions, bounce ideas off of them. And some people pointed to these people and said, “What is this? What is happening here with these advisors of sorts, happening behind the scenes, making all kinds of suggestions to Jackson? What’s going on here?”

Kitchen Cabinet, we might think of as being a sort of cozy or bemused kind of a statement, but it was more of a putdown in the way that it was being used at the time. Supposedly Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank of the United States, that Jackson detested, both Biddle and the bank seems to have been the one to coin that phrase Kitchen Cabinet. And he writes in an 1831 letter, “What I have already dreaded about this new Cabinet was that the kitchen would predominate over the parlor.” So we’re moving into the realm of unknown, suspicious, potentially malicious advisors of sorts of what’s going on here.

So among the people in this Kitchen Cabinet is Andrew Donaldson and Jackson’s nephew, treasury auditor and master writer Amos Kendall, who goes on to become the postmaster general. The editor of the administration aligned Washington Globe newspaper, Francis Preston Blair, Cabinet Secretaries Eaton and Van Buren, John Eaton, and Martin Van Buren. So it’s a mix of people. It’s people who are in the world of politics and journalism. Some of them he’s known for quite some time and is friendly with. Blair, I think, was an ongoing advisor of various sorts, whether he was in the Kitchen Cabinet or not.

And again, being aligned with that newspaper, the Washington Globe, made him particularly important. These are the people who he’s regularly meeting with, not always in a group. They’re coming in and out of the White House. He’s consulting with them, asking them questions. So it’s not as though there’s a formal Kitchen Cabinet, but these are the people who were quickly understood to be offering Jackson advice.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and Amos Kendall ends up working fairly closely with him on writing his messages to Congress, no.

Joanne Freeman:

I believe so, yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He also really puffed up Jackson’s dislike of John C. Calhoun and really pushed Jackson to take a stand against his own vice president, right.

Joanne Freeman:

Although I think he was already leaning in that direction. But yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the reason that I’m interested in the way this develops is that out of this, we’re going to get essentially the pushing of John C. Calhoun out of a role as being a national leader and push him back toward his state where he is going to become one of the architects of the concept of state’s rights. Essentially what started over a fight of the Eatons and Jackson about whether or not Mrs. Eaton should be welcome in Mrs. Calhoun’s drawing room.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, I mean, I suppose you could say that. I do think that that fight is evidence of divisions already. So, in other words, it’s not as though everything was hunky dory. And what is the phrase you always say? You don’t say hunky dory. You say ducky. That’s a Heather word. I don’t think everything was hunky dory, or ducky before that point. But yes, that initial controversy cements that divide and breaks it apart for sure.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and so that idea that these unofficial advisors, although some of them were Cabinet members. But these unofficial advisors are forcing Jackson in a direction he might not otherwise go, makes them essentially say what you were saying about the people whispering in the president’s ear that they are leading him down the road to perdition if you will.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And he responds to that, apparently. He writes a letter, at this 1831 letter, which he’s responding to the idea that these people have an improper influence over his decision-making and says, “In regard to these complaints and others of a similar character founded on a pretended distrust of influences near or around me, I can only say that they spring from the same false view of my character. I should loathe myself did any act of mine afford the slightest color for the insinuation that I follow blindly the judgment of any friend in the discharge of my proper duties as a public or private individual.”

And I’ll add to that just a throwaway comment that I found a million years ago in a letter from one of Alexander Hamilton’s sons describing a conversation he had with Andrew Jackson. And apparently, in this conversation, Jackson was curious about how George Washington treated his Cabinet. How did he interact with them? How did they deal with him? How did he consult with them? That, in and of itself, I always find fascinating.

But what is relevant to what we’re saying now is that after that conversation, he goes on to say some version of what he just said here, which is, “Well, that’s very interesting. But the fact of the matter is I never follow anybody blindly, right. I get advice. I hear from people. And then I decide whatever it is that I want to do, and I would loathe myself if I did otherwise.” So whether it’s the Parlor Cabinet or the Kitchen Cabinet, that’s certainly how Jackson likes to portray himself.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that is utterly in keeping with Jackson’s personality. I have no doubt that he did whatever the heck he wanted to do.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he liked to hang out with his good friends. But what’s interesting about the whole thing to me is that the way people reacted to it, that they assumed that if Jackson was doing something they disapproved of, it’s because the bad guys were leading him astray.

And it also raises the question of what do you do about a situation where an elected leader is being influenced unduly by somebody who is not elected, who is just kind of hanging out there. And you think about the number of times in our history that somebody who is not elected has had an inordinate effect on our government.

Joanne Freeman:

These are people who, and whether we’re talking about chiefs of staff who are presidential appointments or informal advisors, as you said earlier, Heather, that in a democracy, the people we give power to, we explicitly give them power, and then they have power and are accountable to us for their use of it. The people we’re talking about today are people who are between the lines of the reins of power, right.

These are people who are right in the center of things, potentially with a big influence, as you were just saying, but we don’t necessarily even know who they are. If we do, we don’t know anything about the way that they’re interacting with presidents. It’s the sort of thing that, as a historian, you want to get into that track, right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes.

Joanne Freeman:

You want to find that person and what they’re saying and what they’re doing. And can you find their private letters. And what can you find out about that person? Because there you will see the actual process of politics, person to person, taking place.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which is a great setup for the next person we wanted to look at. Who is George B. Cortelyou? He was born during the Civil War in New York City, part of the old New York Dutch ancestry group. He went to law school, graduated in 1895, and became a stenographer to President Grover Cleveland. Now, what’s interesting about the period in which Cleveland’s second administration happened from 1893 to 1897 is that that’s a period when a lot of different professions are making sense of that profession. They’re bringing order to it.

And Cortelyou, as a stenographer to Cleveland, does that. And he does it well enough that when he leaves office, Cleveland recommends Cortelyou to his successor, President William McKinley, whose policies he absolutely abhorred. And yet, Cortelyou clearly was good enough at his job that William McKinley went ahead and made Cortelyou his assistant secretary in March of 1897. Now, one of the first things he does is he begins to organize the practices around the office of the presidency. So, for example, he began to put together a daily media brief for the president, and it was all the articles that mentioned him.

But in fairness to McKinley, in that era, virtually all the commentary on politics was centered around the president. So he wasn’t simply looking for mentions of his name. He was looking at the way people were reacting to the policies of his administration. And he would present it every day to the president, sort of a daily presidential brief, right. Although not nearly as extensive as it was going to become in the 20th century. He also institutionalized the idea of having presidential official statements for the press, which makes the press very happy. And he would talk to 20 to 40 reporters each day.

And he’s often thought of as being the forerun into the press secretary. He’s also a chief of staff, although we don’t have that position yet, in that he is organizing what the president does. And the reason we wanted to emphasize him is because, at first, nobody is accusing Cortelyou of whispering unduly in any president’s ear. After all, he starts with a Democrat and he goes to Republican, and they could not be farther apart in terms of their policies. But what he is doing is he is institutionalizing the system of governance in the executive branch.

And if you think about putting policies forward, you can say anything you want, but making those things happen is incredibly difficult. And it’s one of the reasons you see now that people who aren’t good at those things don’t ever seem to get anything done. They make all kinds of promises, and then they can’t possibly manage to get it done because they don’t have those pieces in place. And one of those reasons we have those pieces in place are because of George Cortelyou, who recognize that they need it to have some sort of a system. In that system, he became, and you know where this is going, incredibly close personally to the president because he is spending all kinds of time with him. They’re reacting to each other.

In fact, Cortelyou was with McKinley in September of 1901 when they went to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. You know where this is going. In fact, Cortelyou tried to get McKinley not to go to the event.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s kind of the killer here.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He was very concerned… That’s right. He was very concerned about a recent assassination of an Italian king. He canceled McKinley’s appearance twice, and the president overruled him twice, remembering, of course, that McKinley had lived through Antietam. So I suspect he thought he could live through almost anything.

Well, on September 6th, when he went to allow his well-wishers to enter and greet him at the Temple of Music there at the exposition, Cortelyou did not want people to be able to come in right up to the President, and McKinley overruled him. And as you know, one of the attendees, Leon Czolgosz, who was an anarchist, he blamed McKinley for the whole situation in the country at the time, and he had a gun hidden in a handkerchief, and he fired two shots from the gun into McKinley’s stomach.

When McKinley fell, there were very famous pictures of him falling backward into someone’s arms. Those are Cortelyou’s arms. He falls into Cortelyou’s arms. And some of his final words were, “My wife. Be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her. Oh, be careful.” From then, he went on to serve the next president, in part because of just how cool and collected he had been in this crisis of a third presidential assassination in just a very few years after Lincoln and then Garfield and now McKinley.

So Theodore Roosevelt kept Cortelyou on as his personal secretary, and Roosevelt also recognized something special in Cortelyou, which was his ability to reorganize the entire system of government.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting about this to me, just as you’re pointing out, is that Cortelyou goes on under Roosevelt to create codes of behavior for White House clerks and doorkeepers and messengers and police officers and secretaries, and has books of instructions created, being an organizer. But what we’re talking about here with him and with Roosevelt and with the other people who Cortelyou has served with is that, in a sense, they’re creating the presidency bit by bit.

We take for granted what the presidency is, what the office is, what the administration is, how it functions, how it does things, how it gets things done. But particularly when, like me, you focus on the founding period. What you see are a lot of people who kind of know vaguely what the president is but really don’t know how or what to do, what they’re supposed to do to get that job done.

A document that I’ve always found particularly poignant is George Washington’s copy of the Constitution. And he goes through it, and you can see in the margins whenever there’s anything in the Constitution that affects what the presidency is supposed to be, he writes carefully in the margin, “President.” So he’s literally trying to figure out his job by reading through the Constitution in that way.

And what we’re seeing through these chiefs of staff, particularly, are people who, in the heat of battles, so to speak, in the mix of things, are helping to create that office. And I suppose if they do their jobs well, as you started out by saying, Heather, are helping presidents get things done.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and Cortelyou is really interesting because it is this moment when so many professions are organizing to figure out how on earth to be a lawyer, how on earth to be a doctor, all the different pieces that go into the professionalization of those different professions. And here is this guy doing it for the White House. But he is doing it, if you will, on a nonpartisan basis.

He goes from Cleveland, a Democrat, to McKinley, who’s a Republican, to Theodore Roosevelt, who’s an extraordinarily different Republican than McKinley is, and who continues to rely on Cortelyou to the point that he talks in public about how able he is. And finally, in February of 1903, he appoints Cortelyou, the first Secretary of Commerce and Labor, which he created in order to appoint Cortelyou to it. He thought he was that systematic and that able to pull things together that he could pull together labor and commerce. That’s when we get that.

And then, the next year, he insists on putting Cortelyou in as the chair of the Republican National Committee, even though the Republican Old Guard saw him as a bureaucrat and they wanted nothing to do with him. Roosevelt actually wrote a telegram to the organizers of the convention that said, “People may as well understand that if I am to run for president, then Cortelyou is to be chairman. I will not have it any other way.” He goes on then in 1905 to make Cortelyou the postmaster general, where he was in charge of putting together the rural free delivery system that took the post much more efficiently all over the country. That’s the old R.F.D. system.

And in 1907, he appoints him to yet another Cabinet position making this his third Cabinet position in five years. Now he’s Secretary of the Treasury. There he had to work to combat the panic of 1907. He worked alongside J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan to try and inject capital into the banks that were falling apart. And he is, in the end, instrumental in enabling the United States to create a central banking system to try and make sure future panics don’t happen. And he was a major architect of the creation in 1913 of the Federal Reserve. So here’s a guy that most of us had never heard of who starts out as a secretary, starts organizing, and essentially creates a modern government.

Joanne Freeman:

Or certainly modernizes it to a great degree. And I will tell on us, Heather, by saying that as we were talking about this episode, you and I were trying to figure out how to pronounce his name because we really… it’s not as though we walk around saying, “Well, of course, Cortelyou.” We haven’t.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, he shows up.

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But he doesn’t show… I mean, it’s just so funny how when you switch the lens…

Joanne Freeman:

Exactly

Heather Cox Richardson:

… not to policies and not to elected leaders, but to…

Joanne Freeman:

The working of politics.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… the working of politics

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That the whole lens changes.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, this brings us to a very different kind of chief of staff at a very different time. And this is Sherman Adams, who ends up being chief of staff for Eisenhower, President Eisenhower. Sherman Adams is actually part of the Adams political dynasty, the John Adams, John Quincy Adams political dynasty. Starts out having a successful career in the lumber industry. He goes to Congress as a representative from New Hampshire in 1942, and then becomes governor of New Hampshire in 1949.

After serving two terms as governor, that’s when he moves on to help presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in his campaign for president in 1952. He acts as his campaign manager and then goes on to serve as Eisenhower’s chief of staff. And interestingly, Eisenhower basically doesn’t publicly refer to him as chief of staff, explaining, “I think of Adams as my chief of staff, but I don’t call him that because the politicians think it sounds too military.”

Which I find really fascinating because in a sense, I suppose you could say the military component of it is, it is sort of organizational and leader-like, and again, campaign administration. There are reasons why the idea of a campaign has a military resonance. I suppose there is a sort of military component to it simply in the pure organizational capacity of it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Adams attended Cabinet meetings. He attended National Security Council meetings. He led White House staff meetings at least twice a week. Eisenhower went on to explain Adams’ role in Mandate for Change, which was his first presidential memoir.

Eisenhower said, “At the top of the staff was, of course, Governor Sherman Adams. His task…” And I like this. This is Eisenhower identifying who this guy is and why he’s important. “His task was to coordinate all of these sections and their operations to make certain that every person in them understood the purport and the details of each directive issued and to keep me informed of appropriate developments on a daily basis. He did not lay down rigid rules to restrict the staff members and their access to me. They worked flexibly with a voluntary cooperation based on mutual friendship and respect.”

And Adams was quoted as routinely telling cabinet members to figure out their own departments that Eisenhower really needed to focus on issues related to the Cold War. Adam said, “Either you make up your minds or else tell me, and I will do it. We must not bother the president with this. He is trying to keep the world from war.” Really interesting, because there he seems to be taking on quite a bit more responsibility than a chief of staff is expected nowadays to do.

Joanne Freeman:

And yet you can see how, particularly during a time of possible war, how that would be essential for someone to allow the president to focus on what needs to be focused on at that moment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and Adams really did sort of reflect Eisenhower’s military emphasis in the sense that he was all business all the time. He would answer yes, he would answer. No, he didn’t make nice with anybody. He just said what needed to be done. I sort of think of him as a little automaton there.

Joanne Freeman:

Eisenhower says precisely what you’re talking about. He says that, “Adams seemed to me best described his laconic, abrupt, business-like, and puritanically honest. Never did he attempt to introduce humor into an official meeting. On the many occasions during our White House years when I called him on the telephone to ask a question, he never added a word to his yes or no if such an answer sufficed.

It never occurred to him to say hello when advised by his secretary that I wanted him on the phone or to add a goodbye at the end of the call. For Sherman Adams, this was neither bad manners nor pretense. He was busy, absorbed in his work. He had no time to waste.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And now we’re coming full circle because that business-like determination to do what Eisenhower wanted him to. And remember, the Eisenhower Administration is a very active administration. They’re going to do a lot of things at home as well as abroad, some positive, some negative, but he’s not doing small things. He’s putting in place the Highway Act. He’s trying to deal with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of things that are going to come on. But he really infuriates a lot of people.

One observer from the New York Times in 1956 said, “Governor Adams affects people differently. Many congressmen dislike him because he says no. Sometimes he seems to relish saying it. It is his function. He is the administration’s abominable, no man,” which is a great term.

Joanne Freeman:

I know. I love that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But you can see how quickly people are going to turn on him as the evil person whispering in Eisenhower’s ear. So the role that Adams plays in the Eisenhower Administration, especially over issues like civil rights, begins to make him vulnerable to attacks from the other side. So by 1958, a newly created House Special Subcommittee on legislative oversight begins to investigate the political influence of a textile and real estate magnate from Boston named Bernard Goldfine, who had come under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission because of apparent financial irregularities.

And the committee discovered that Goldfine had given Adams and his wife an expensive vicuna coat, a Persian rug, and had paid for them to stay at the Sheridan Plaza Hotel in Boston 11 times.

Joanne Freeman:

Oops.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, again, it was such a scandal in 1958. I’m just not going to say anymore on that.

Joanne Freeman:

No, don’t say anything else.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Anyway, then the committee, looking into Adams, found that he had contacted various regulatory agencies to check in on the troubles that Goldfine was having. And, of course, this looks like a quid pro quo. He had in 1953 called the Federal Trade Commission Chair, Edward F. Howrey, to ask for the source of an FTC complaint against Goldfine for putting a label on cloth that said it was 90% wool, 10% vicuna when it, in fact, contained nylon. And he had, in ’55, arranged for an appointment with Goldfine to talk to the FTC Chairman, Howrey, about difficulties he was having with his Woolen Mill.

And in 1956, he had asked an aide to check in with the Securities and Exchange Commission about why Goldfine’s East Boston Company was under investigation. And that information leaked to us Washington star journalist named Jack Anderson, who reported the story in June of 1958. The Democrats jump on the story, furious that Eisenhower in 1952 had accused the Truman Administration staff of being corrupt, and they began to attack Adams along with conservative Republicans who disliked Eisenhower for, as Goldwater famously said, “Falling to the siren song of socialism.”

Adlai Stevenson, who had lost the presidency to Eisenhower twice before, said to the press, “I am tired of pious preaching from Sherman Adams. This is not the only example of hypocrisy in the administration.” In June of 1958, Adams testified before the subcommittee and was largely unapologetic, but he did admit that he had acted inappropriately. He said that he should have acted more prudently. And Eisenhower, the day after Adams’ testimony, issued a prepared statement defending Adams and arguing that he was absolutely imperative to keep in the administration.

Audio:

I believe that the presentation made by Governor Adams to the Congressional Committee yesterday truthfully represents the pertinent facts. I personally like Governor Adams. I admire his abilities. I respect him because of his personal and official integrity. I need him.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that was not enough. On September 22nd, 1958, Adams announced his resignation, and Eisenhower accepted the decision very reluctantly. He read his return letter in person to Adams, saying, “Your performance has been brilliant. The public has been the beneficiary of your unselfish work. After our six years of intimate association, you have, as you have had throughout, my complete trust, confidence, and respect. I accept your resignation with sadness.”

Adams, later on, explained that he had made the calls he did for Goldfine because he didn’t want Goldfine to be bothering other members of the administration or the president. So he thought he was making things more efficient.

Joanne Freeman:

I want to go back though to the quote that you just read from Eisenhower in which he talks about why Adams is important to him because I think that gets at some of what we’ve been saying throughout this episode. He says he likes Adams. He admires his ability. He respects him because of his personal and official integrity. He needs him. And what strikes me about that statement is it’s personal. It’s official. It’s about the office. It’s about trust.

It captures the layered way in which a chief of staff interacts with the president. And how on the one hand, it is an official position. It is an appointed position. But on the other hand, it’s so much more than that, and it matters a lot to a president, shapes the presidency for that very reason in many ways that we standing on the outside, don’t necessarily know.

But that, as we started out by saying at the beginning, is a person who we might know their name. We have a vague sense of what a chief of staff does. But we don’t know always until after the fact how that person is serving in that position and that the actual role they’re playing on what the president does, what the president says, how they say it, and who says what to the president in turn.

That statement is just such a wonderful encapsulation of the personal and political blend of things that go into being a chief of staff and the ways in which the influence of that position can really echo far beyond what its responsibilities look like on paper.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, what I really like about him at the end of this discussion is that one of the problems that people have with him is that he’s very, very good at his job and he is making it possible for Eisenhower to do things like put the weight of the government behind desegregation. So they can’t come out and say, “Well, we don’t like him because he is really good at his job.” So they come out and say, “We don’t like him because we have found this scandal that we can bring him down on.” And they do.

In a way, he blends together the Kitchen Cabinet whispering in Jackson’s ear and Cortelyou’s, creating a system that would enable a president to put policies in place efficiently. Which, as we say, nowadays, you get the evil whisperers, and the president’s ear are usually ones who don’t understand how to make things happen because they can’t actually accomplish anything.

And then we have them coming together with Sherman Adams, who’s very good at his job. And the way people attack him is by saying, “He’s whispering in the president’s ear, and he’s corrupt.” It’s just an interesting place to jump us off to Klain and the way people are looking at Klain and his influence on Biden. I do just have to say one more thing about Sherman Adams because after he left the government, people do in fact know who he was, here in New England anyway, because he began construction on Loon Mountain, which is one of the largest ski resorts in New England today.

So that’s why people today might know Sherman Adams, but that was his post-government career. So some of these themes, I think, kick forward when there are complaints, for example, about Klain. Klain has been an extraordinarily good organizer and extraordinarily good at implementing what Biden has put in place, which, as he has always said, has been across the government, which is what he calls a whole-of-government approach.

So, for example, when the Biden Administration decided to go after the concentration of corporations in the country over the last 40 years, they came up with 72 different ways in which they wanted to change policies. And implementing that people laughed at. They’re like, “There’s just no way that you’re going to get 72 different pieces moving at the same time.” And Klain did it.

And that ability to move that many pieces across the chess board at one time is one of the reasons that the Biden Administration has been the most productive administration since at least the Great Society under L.B.J. and probably since the New Deal under F.D.R.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s what I was going say.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… he simply couldn’t have done it without Klain.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. That’s precisely what I was thinking as you were talking is, although President Biden doesn’t often get credit for this, he’s had a remarkably productive, active administration. And as you just said, his chief of staff, who is this political insider and knows how to be a mover and shaker with great effectiveness, has been fueling that all along. Whether or not he gets the recognition for that from anyone who’s outside of that center of power.

So this is an interesting moment now to see what this new chief of staff will bring with him. He has a very different background. He has a business background. He has been involved in government offices of various sorts, organizing things, as we said at the outset. But when you read reflections of people who are looking at this and wondering, people within government, what this means, as we suggested at the outset.

Does it mean, given how effective Klain was, that he will be responsible for some things and that there will be other insiders who are responsible for some of the many things that Klain was so effective at doing? Will we be able to tell that here we are in this episode, pointing you to the fact that we have a change of chief of staff? In what ways might that be evident? In what ways might we be able to tell that, or in what ways might the press pick up on that and reflect on that for us?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I don’t know the answer to that, but here’s what I think we can predict. If Zients is really terrible at his job, people will be all over the press talking about how terrible he is at his job. And if he’s really good at his job, we’ll be hearing a lot about how he’s an evil influence whispering in the president’s ear.

Joanne Freeman:

Or they won’t say anything at all, which goes back to those evil ministers we talked about at the beginning. The person acting, the sort of, quote-unquote, right-hand person at the side of a president, is a person who is a chief vulnerability and an easy target if you’re trying to smack at a president.

So for all of the reasons why that person is significant and important and influential, that the personal tie, the closeness, those are the precise reasons why that same person can be a vulnerability to a president and why it is so important that a president really can trust a chief of staff.