160 Presidential politics
nature of the cabinet, ensuring that the regions of the country are represent-
ed and that no section of the community feels itself to have been slighted, the
president is virtually unfettered in terms of the actual individuals appointed.
There is no ‘Shadow Cabinet’ in the American political universe, and so no
clear expectations to be satisfied, unless the president has given hostages to
fortune during the electoral campaign. The tendency is to appoint experts
to cabinet posts, in the sense of finding people qualified to do the jobs to
be done, rather than looking for any other qualification. They may be busi-
nessmen, academics, former state governors, congressmen, judges, lawyers,
engineers, or from any other walk of life, and after they have finished with
the administration they will probably return whence they came. Thus their
loyalty, their first allegiance, is to the president who appointed them.
It is not, however, their only loyalty. As we have seen, they must look also
to important figures in Congress, and they must also look to their ‘clien-
tele’. Each of the great departments, even the Department of State, has a
clientele, the people they serve and regulate, and to whom they develop a
sense of responsibility. Sometimes the identification with a section of the
community can become so strong – in the case of the Departments of Agri-
culture, Commerce and Labor, for example – that their aim seems to be to
promote a particular interest to the government, rather than to represent
the government itself. This is yet another divisive characteristic, forcing the
members of the cabinet to seek individual and confidential contact with the
president in order to ensure support. Thus there is an important distinction
to be made between the cabinet as a collective body and the individuals who
compose it. It is often emphasised, quite rightly, that it is the president who
has the final responsibility for decisions. Even if the cabinet were to be unani-
mously opposed to a presidential policy they could not outvote the president,
or veto the policy. It is true also that the president appoints the members of
the cabinet and can dismiss them. Yet to see the individual members of the
cabinet as the mere creatures of the president is a mistake. They can and do
disagree with their master. If the president is determined to overrule them,
they will be overruled, but they all operate in a political context. Department
heads have their sources of support distinct from the president, and each has
many decisions to make, so that the most active and well-informed of presi-
dents cannot be aware of all of them, or afford to try to exercise a continual
personal surveillance over them. Individual cabinet members can attain a
political influence that may be of some embarrassment to the president, and
a very few have even rivalled the president’s authority in their own sphere.
Given the nature of the American cabinet, it seems difficult to understand
why it should have persisted at all as a collective entity, and yet, although it
seems at times almost to have ceased to function in this way, there would ap-
pear to have been a continuous need for a body of this sort. Presidents need
to indicate in some way that the administration is working as a team, and
to demonstrate collective support and approval for policies, particularly at
times of crisis. A meeting of the cabinet, with its members representing their
differing clienteles, authenticates the process of consulting the pluralistic