America on the rocks: Ship of state suffers from incompetent captains, professor says

by Tom Griffin | September 1, 1992

Like most professors, Walter Williams is used to giving out grades. After all, he’s been doing it for more than 20 years in the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

So if you push him hard enough, the author of Mismanaging America: The Rise of the Anti-Analytic Presidency will sit down with you and grade the presidents of the United States.

His grades aren’t tied to a political score sheet. Rather, he looks at their ability to operate “the machinery of government,” what Williams calls “organizational mastery.” Yes, he says, the president is the country’s premier political leader, but he also is the nation’s top CEO, running a multitrillion-dollar enterprise.

So how do the presidents rate on Williams’ management scale? Surprisingly, Dwight Eisenhower gets an A+ and no elected president since then even comes close: John F. Kennedy: D. Lyndon Johnson: C/C+. Richard Nixon: C/C+. Jimmy Carter: C-. Ronald Reagan: F. George Bush: F/D-.

In Williams’ view, Eisenhower is the best example of an executive who has the knowhow to control the world’s most complicated organization. “He had the ability to move people and the knowledge of the complex operations of the government.”

Eisenhower’s military training was excellent preparation for running the federal government, he adds, not simply because Eisenhower could handle complex logistics such as the D-Day invasion, but because he could get the best out of people, even “prima donnas” like George Patton and Bernard Montgomery.

One reason for his success was Ike’s ability to give key people, such as Cabinet officers, “the flexibility to run their organizations,” Williams says.

“Eisenhower used his White House subordinates as staff who were not to interfere with Cabinet secretaries. It’s simply not possible to run our complex government from the White House. It would be the equivalent of one of Eisenhower’s generals having to call him up every time that general had to make a decision on the battlefield.”

The fatal flaw of every president since Eisenhower is that they took away that flexibility. Starting with Kennedy, the White House staff became more important than Cabinet officers on policy decisions.

The weakening of the Presidential Cabinet is one reason Kennedy ranks poorly on Williams’ scale. “Kennedy was ill-prepared to be president, but he talked a good game.”

Williams worked in the Office of Economic Opportunity during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, but he still feels LBJ was a poor manager. Johnson had a “tremendous ability to move people,” but he followed Kennedy’s lead by relying on staff to micromanage federal departments.

Richard Nixon was only average at running the machinery of government. A classic example of his mismanagement was politicizing the Office of Management and Budget (then called the Bureau of the Budget), which had been made up of top nonpartisan analysts in the federal government. The move weakened OMB’s ability to provide “objective and expert counsel” and was the first step toward the excess of David Stockman’s reign as OMB chief under Reagan.

Williams prefers to pass on Gerald Ford, since he was not elected to the presidency. Jimmy Carter ranks lower than Johnson or Nixon due to his entanglement in detail and his inability to step back and see the “big picture.” Williams likes to repeat a Washington anecdote from those years: “Secretary of Defense Harold Brown looks at the trees; the president himself looks at the leaves; National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski looks at the biosphere; and the forest goes unnoticed.”

By the time we get to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, “decisions are made with almost no involvement from the people below on how government should be run,” says Williams. “Under Bush you had domestic policy made by [former Chief of Staff] John Sununu and [Budget Director] Richard Darman with very little input from below.”

The best leaders make decisions after they’ve heard all sides of the argument, what Williams calls “multiple advocacy.” He says Eisenhower listened to reasoned debate among well-informed people. “That’s not what’s going on now.”

“If you believe that off the top of your head you can make major decisions, this is the ultimate stupidity, or perhaps the ultimate hubris,” he warns.

Williams, who has taught policy analysis and decision-making courses at the UW since 1970, is quick to concede that organizational mastery alone does not make a successful presidency. The ideal president must also have political mastery, the ability to mobilize support; strategic competence, the ability to see the big picture; and a probing mind, the ability to work through problems by assessing a wide range of advice.

Reagan, for example, excelled in political mastery, while Carter would get an A+ for his probing mind. Yet both leaders lacked organizational mastery and “mismanaged” America.

Both of these presidents also ran on “outsider” platforms and blamed government for the country’s woes, Williams notes. But in his view, while government may be the problem, government is also “the solution.”

“I’m not saying that government should be larger or that it should have more functions. I’m saying that it must perform well. It must be competent.

“Look what happened when we cut back—the savings and loan crisis, the Iran-Contra Affair, the HUD scandal, agencies that had outstanding records are now failing.” For example, the Social Security Administration used to be the most efficient federal agency, getting its checks out on time, in the right amount and to the right people, he notes. Now it has a “terrible error rate.”

“The federal government used to be a leader in computer technology,” he adds. “Now one computer expert says the federal government is in the Ice Age.”

Unlike Great Britain, where the opposition party has a “shadow Cabinet” and Cabinet posts are training slots for future prime ministers, the United States doesn’t have a clear training ground for its leaders, Williams laments.

It used to be that the governorship of a large state, such as New York or California, was a good testing ground, but that is no longer the case, he says.

“Being a governor could still be important,” Williams adds, and “having served as a Cabinet officer would be good experience.”

A military career might provide useful training, provided it was more than “running a PT boat,” he adds. “Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf are bureaucrats—in a positive sense. There is no more bureaucratic organization in the country than the military. They happen to be career civil servants who are in uniform.”

Williams says, however, no matter how well-prepared a candidate is to run the country, voters are not going to look at his or her management record in the voting booth. When they punch their voter cards, citizens are going to remember the values and views of the contenders, not their organizational capabilities, he concedes.

But to those voters who are undecided and to whom organizational capabilities might make a difference, he offers several questions to keep in mind when analyzing Bush or Clinton’s management skills:

• Does the candidate have a realistic view of the country and the world?
• Does he offer alternatives that make sense?
• Does he have an idea of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there?
• Do the mechanisms he proposes to get there make sense?
• Has he demonstrated the ability to think through problems?

Williams faults both the media and everyday citizens for not paying more attention to the management side of the presidency. “Can this person govern the country? We’ve simply ceased to ask this question in the way it should be asked.

“My fundamental argument is that government must be run competently or we could lose our democracy.”

Bush and Clinton: Can they manage?

The media has done a terrible job of analyzing the 1992 candidates’ managerial capabilities, says UW Public Affairs Professor Walter Williams. The press spends more time investigating foreign aid to Iraq or alleged extramarital affairs than it does a candidate’s ability to govern. In conversations held this summer, Williams tried to analyze both office seekers’ managerial skills.

George Bush

Taking a quick look at George Bush’s resume in 1988, you might have labeled him a master of the machinery of government. Here was a man who made public service his career, who ran the Republican National Committee, headed the CIA, served in Congress, was the U.S. representative at the U.N. and in China, and held the second-highest office in the land for eight years.

But Williams says take a closer look. “He was never in a big government job for more than a couple of years,” he notes. The one top managerial position, CIA director, lasted about one year. And, Williams adds, the CIA is not your usual government bureaucracy, so it didn’t prepare Bush very well for the handling of the federal government.

The result was four years of mismanagement, Williams says. “Basic decisions are made by a few people. … The top of the White House has insulated itself against the rest of the Office of the President.”

Bill Clinton

Rhodes scholar, governor of Arkansas, veteran campaigner able to withstand media onslaughts, but a question mark when it comes to managerial capabilities, says Williams. “I find it very hard to say. The media has provided no way to analyze his experience as Arkansas governor. I have not seen good in-depth pieces on his managerial abilities. We have not asked, does this man have the experience and the record to run?”

Don’t make the mistake of judging Clinton’s managerial ability by looking at his campaign, Williams adds. “A campaign is a very different kind of beast compared to organizing and staffing the presidency,” he warns. “A campaign is about winning. The presidency is about governing.”