The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush by Judith E. Michaels Read Free Book Online

political and career officials traces how this administrative strategy created a ''fundamental shift in bureaucratic-presidential relations" to redirect the loyalties of the senior-level bureaucracy (Cole and Caputo 1979, 401). Malek's specialty, direct attack on the career bureaucracy, shines here in its own way: if no vacancies were identifiable, the PAS should create them. The so-called Malek Manual provided specific guidelines for how to do it:
"There are several techniques which can be designed, carefully, to skirt around the [difficult problem of firing established career executives]. You simply call an individual in and tell him he is no longer wanted . . . you expect him to immediately relinquish his duties. There should be no witnesses in the room at the time."
If this "frontal assault" (the manual's own terminology) were not successful, the manual went on to suggest transferring unwanted personnel to regional offices, described by the manual as "dumping grounds." "If you have an employee," the manual advised, "who was born and raised in New England and is currently serving in your Boston regional office, and his record shows reluctance to move far from that location, a transfer accompanied by a promotion to an existing or newly created position in Dallas might just fill the bill." If the transfer technique failed, the manual recommended other "special assignments" as well as other techniques. But the point was clear: where no positions at the senior career levels were open, political executives were instructed in the art of creat-

 

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ing such openings by encouraging the firing or transferring of personnel. (Ibid., 403)
For those troublesome careerists who simply would not go away, a technique was devised that offered flash but no substance, a "new activity technique designed to provide a single barrel into which you can dump a large number of widely located bad apples." The manual suggested the creation of a new unit or program:
"By carefully looking at the personnel jacket of your selected employee-victims, you can easily design an organization chart for the project that would create positions to which these employee-victims can be transferred that meet the necessary job description requirements, offer promotional opportunities in grade, and by having the project report directly into the Secretary's office provide for promotions in status." The only thing missing is impact. (Light 1995, 53)
The White House also "facilitated" the personnel process by suggesting acceptable senior career people for vacancies in the agencies. When combined with its removal and replacement scheme, the White House hoped this strategy would "circumvent the 'normal' civil service process and . . . achieve a high degree of managerial control over the federal bureaucracy" (Cole and Caputo 1979, 403). Another technique was to simply move the careerists down the food chain by adding new partisans, SESs, or Schedule Cs above them. While Malek's machinations did long-term damage to the concept of neutral competence, they also added to the overall "thickening" of government by interposing additional layers of political appointees between the top careerists and the top politicians. While absolute control of the bureaucracy is unlikely, given the total number of vacancies available in any given presidential term, Nixon's strategy was remarkably successful in changing the face of the federal bureaucracy. Although some Democrats were appointed to high-level political and career positions, they were far outnumbered by Republicans.
Republican career executives were about 3 times as likely to be promoted to senior positions in the social service agencies during the Nixon years and more than 1.5 times as likely to be promoted to senior positions in all other departments and agencies. . . . Proportionally more Republicans were selected for more career executive positions during the Nixon years than before and, through this process, the White