The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush Read Free

book presents a composite picture of the Bush PASs themselves. It delineates four major areas of inquiry that are grounded in the

 

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empirical study of and personal interviews with the PASs: PASs' personal identity; their professional backgrounds and qualifications; intrabureaucratic issues and interbureaucratic issues.
PASs' Identity
In analyzing the Bush presidential appointees, the first issue is that of identity. Simply put, who were the people at the highest levels of government? How did they attain their positions? What were their general political leanings and party affiliations? What was their gender and racial/ethnic mix? What kinds of sacrifices did they make to accept a PAS position? What kinds of rewards did they reap?
The most recent comprehensive study of PAS executives was conducted during the second Reagan administration by the National Academy of Political Administration in 1985. It surveyed PASs who had served as far back as 1964 but encompassed relatively few current PAS appointees. Therefore, a picture of PAS executives through the Bush administration is lacking. This work fills the information gap by providing an analysis of the Bush administration's PAS workforce.
PASs' Professional Background and Qualifications
The second issue is the qualifications of the PASs. What kinds of professional background and experience did the Bush appointees offer? What was their knowledge of government and its workings? As mentioned, the conventional wisdom emanating from the Reagan era was that appointees had limited knowledge of and experience in government. 3 The temporary and short-term nature of political appointments means that those with few qualifications and little experience in government of necessity spend most of their limited time in office learning the ropes, "two years of on-the-job training," as one PAS termed it. Then they (theoretically) move on to more lucrative jobs outside government, using their government service as a useful line on their resume and their government contacts as a bargaining chip with prospective employers. To what extent was this true of the Bush appointees? Were they also emotional short-termers, or did they have a more long-term commitment to government service? Where would they go after their current PAS service?
Intrabureaucratic Issues
The third issue examined here is the relationship between political and career executives. What were PASs' sense of job satisfaction and feel-

 

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ings about working in government and their relations with career executives? The general consensus is that there is a long history of poor relations between political and career executives in the federal service, fueled by politicians' hostility toward "the entrenched bureaucracy." This history found its modest genesis in the modern activist presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took a great leap forward under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and stalled until Nixon revitalized it. From Nixon, the old hostility accelerated to its apex in the administration of Ronald Reagan, when poor political-career relations were cemented in his bureaucrat-bashing, "government-is-the-problem" mantra.
The Bush administration claimed that its political-career relations were much improved over those of the Reagan era. To what extent, then, was the time-tested, Reagan-perfected, bureaucrat-bashing mentality characteristic of the Bush appointees? How did the Bush PASs feel about and relate to the career executives with whom they worked? Were they more interested in managing their agencies well or in promoting a particular political agenda? To what extent was their self-reported priority of sound agency management affirmed by the careerists?
A related area of inquiry is PAS job satisfaction. What kinds of satisfaction did PASs derive from their job? In other words, were the Republicans, traditionally antigovernment, actually enjoying the business of running the government after twelve years of controlling the