Presidential politics 163charge against one member of the President’s staff, Sherman Adams. Presi-
dent Eisenhower appointed Adams as ‘Assistant to the President’ a title that
had been created under the administration of his predecessor, President Tru-
man. Adams was given a broad grant of power that led his critics to label him
‘the Assistant President’. Access to the president was channelled through
Adams, who saw his function as that of ‘shielding the president from prob-
lems that could be settled on the lower echelons’, and ensuring that work
of ‘secondary importance’ should be kept off the president’s desk. Although
Adams strongly denied that this position represented in any way a usurpa-
tion of presidential authority, it inevitably meant that it was his judgement
that determined what was, and was not, of secondary importance. In effect,
every president since Eisenhower has had a chief of staff in the White House
Office to act as the main coordinator of his advisers, and as the channel of
communication between the president and his administration.
President Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, together with John Ehr-
lichman, Nixon’s Domestic Policy Adviser, were known as the ‘Berlin Wall’
because they controlled access to the president and helped insulate him from
public opinion. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman received jail sentences for
their part in the Watergate scandal. Another member of the White House
staff to be indicted and convicted was Vice Admiral John Poindexter, who
became National Security Adviser to President Reagan. Poindexter was con-
victed of criminal conspiracy with Colonel Oliver North, a member of the
staff of the National Security Council. Poindexter and North were convicted
in 1990 for their role in the Iran–Contra affair, the trading of arms for the re-
lease of American hostages. President Reagan denied all knowledge of these
activities of members of his staff.
The relationship of the White House Office to the cabinet is, therefore,
of critical importance. The cabinet, which should contain the main adminis-
trative lieutenants of the president, has been consistently downgraded, and
a new, potentially extremely powerful apparatus has been created around
the president. The evolution of this relationship during the ill-fated presi-
dency of Richard Nixon is particularly instructive. On taking office in 1969
President Nixon, concerned with the problem of coordinating government
policies in the field of urban affairs and economic policy, created two new
important posts in the administration and two new coordinating bodies. The
post of Counselor to the President was established in the White House Staff,
with the prime responsibility of coordinating the development of domestic
policies and programmes. The President appointed Dr Arthur Burns to this
position, and gave him cabinet rank, thus putting him at a level never for-
mally held by a member of the White House Staff. The President also ap-
pointed to his staff an Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs, Dr D.P.
Moynihan. There were created alongside the National Security Council two
new cabinet-level organisations, the Council for Urban Affairs and a Cabi-
net Committee on Economic Policy. In July 1970 President Nixon effected
an even more fundamental change in the relationship between the cabinet