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WHITE HOUSE NOTEBOOK
Despite A Take-Charge Conductor The Orchestra Is Still Off Key
Even as the wreckage of the single-engine Cessna still lay nestled below the President's bedroom window, Leon E. Panetta took charge. His objective was to keep the story from damaging the White House.
Given President Clinton's political vulnerability, the story of the stolen airplane that had pierced the capital's defenses in the wee hours of Sept. 12 could have been been treated by a snappish press as "almost our fault," a White House aide said.
Panetta, named to be Clinton's chief of staff in June, used his regular 7:30 A.M. meeting of about a dozen senior aides in his office to plot a response. He assigned Philip Lader, a deputy chief of staff, to the government team that would review what had happened. Aides were put in charge of communications and other aspects of the operation. There was "clear accountability and a clear sense of strategic direction," an aide said -- namely, that "we don't want this to be a White House story." Within a day or two, it wasn't; reporters had stopped asking White House officials about the crash.
It's in the things that haven't happened -- the mistakes unmade -- that insiders have seen the benefit of Panetta's recent shake-up of the White House staff. Soon after Panetta took over, Clinton presented an ill-considered proposal on foreign trade to the gathering in Naples of the leaders from the world's industrialized nations -- and hastily had to withdraw it. Panetta ordered a review of what had gone wrong and took up the findings with several of the offenders, who'll presumably take pains not to repeat their misjudgments.
Other things have changed. Hardly anyone can enter the Oval Office whenever they want to anymore. "People don't decide for themselves, I'm going to see the President,' " a White House official said.
Panetta still may. But no longer is such a privilege accorded to others on the staff who had it before, the official said, including Anthony Lake, the national security adviser; George R. Stephanopoulos, the senior adviser for policy and strategy; or Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty III, Panetta's predecessor, who's now a counselor to Clinton. They must ask permission from Nancy Hernreich, Clinton's personal scheduler, who'll now control access to the Oval Office as the director of Oval Office operations; she may in turn confer with Panetta. "Nobody sees the President without Leon being checked with," the official added.
McLarty, who was a minimalist chief of staff, ran a haphazardly organized White House and let the decision making flow up and around him. Now, "everything is centralized," Stephanopoulos said. "Everything is run by Leon and his office."
That office is a little grander than it used to be. Among the raft of adjustments in the White House staff that Panetta outlined to reporters on Sept. 23 was an additional title for Stephanopoulos -- as the executive assistant to the chief of staff. That only "formalizes the relationship," Stephanopoulos said, that he and Panetta have developed. Panetta assigned him to coordinate the White House's successful effort to rescue the crime bill last month. John B. Emerson, a deputy assistant to Clinton, is doing much the same now in the Administration's push to ratify a worldwide trade pact. He coordinates a lot of the activities and reports to Panetta daily.
Panetta anchored another of Clinton's intimates-without-portfolio to the organization chart by naming Bruce R. Lindsey, a senior adviser, as a deputy White House counsel. Mark D. Gearan, who's been the communications director, will instead coordinate what Panetta described as a "strategic planning operation" under his purview. He's supposed to get away from the day-to-day focus of the White House and plan a communications strategy to help advance Clinton's agenda.
But for all the modifications, it isn't clear that much has changed. It's not only that Dee Dee Myers was kept on as the press secretary, reportedly against Panetta's wishes. Stephanopoulos couldn't say how his day-to-day duties are different from before. The Administration's decision making on foreign policy is still herky-jerky. In deciding which operatives on the staff should report to which of his deputies, Panetta clarified the lines of authority only a little beyond those in effect since the start of the year. (John D. Podesta, the staff secretary, and Christine A. Varney, the secretary to the Cabinet, will now join the aides in charge of political affairs, public liaison and intergovernmental affairs in reporting to Harold M. Ickes, the deputy chief of staff in charge of policy and politics.) The realms of the two deputy chiefs of staff still overlap. The aides in charge of scheduling Clinton's time and of controlling access to the Oval Office -- crucial in making policy as well as in conducting politics -- are to report to the deputy with the more mundane job of managing White House operations.
Moving into that deputy's job is one of the two newcomers Panetta is bringing in as White House functionaries. Erskine B. Bowles, who as the chief of the Small Business Administration (SBA) became a favorite of Clinton's, is swapping jobs with Lader. (The administrator of the SBA is to be given, for the first time, a seat in the Cabinet.) William Mendenhall (Billy) Webster IV, an aide to Education Secretary Richard W. Riley (another Clinton favorite), was appointed the assistant to the President in charge of scheduling and advance, replacing Ricki L. Seidman, who's leaving the White House to run Rock the Vote, the music industry's voter registration campaign.
That wasn't as many new faces as Panetta had been expected to hire. But they only continued the astonishing pace of turnover on Clinton's White House staff. Bowles is the fourth deputy chief of staff in just 20 months who's charged with keeping the West Wing running right. Webster is becoming Clinton's third scheduler, in place of Seidman, who's leaving her third post on the staff. Abner J. Mikva is starting on Oct. 1 as Clinton's third successive counsel. Just a handful of senior aides have stayed in their jobs since Clinton took office: Podesta; Alexis M. Herman, who's in charge of relations with interest groups; the advisers in charge of foreign, economic and domestic policy; and Ira C. Magaziner, whose grand construct of health care reform fizzled in the political world.
Or maybe there haven't been enough changes. Certainly, the ones Panetta has made since June have done nothing to prevent Clinton's recent political nosedive. He and his advisers couldn't figure out how to salvage even a face-saving success on health care, the issue that was Clinton's top priority. Ickes, who came to the White House last winter to shepherd health care reform to enactment and to manage the midterm elections, flopped in the first task and is in sight of doing the same on the second. Whatever was done to reshape the making of foreign policy didn't stop Clinton from boxing himself in on Haiti or reversing 35 years of policy toward Cuba inside of 13 hours. (See NJ, 9/3/94, p. 2044.)
"I think what this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian," McLarty jested to reporters in June about his successor, the son of immigrants from Italy. Panetta has imposed some discipline on a staff -- and on a President -- badly in need of it. His practice of requiring aides to preview the discussions they're about to hold with Clinton
has tightened up Oval Office meetings.
It isn't unusual for Presidents, especially Democrats, to tighten up on things and centralize their decision making as time goes on. Jimmy Carter, for instance, started with a nonhierarchical staff but eventually named a chief of staff. It didn't prevent him, though, from becoming a one-term President.