It speaks volumes that the first known political use of the term “cabinet” in English, by Sir Francis Bacon in 1607, was pejorative. Bacon noted with disdain that some Italian and French rulers had introduced standing “cabinet
It speaks volumes that the first known political use of the term “cabinet” in English, by Sir Francis Bacon in 1607, was pejorative. Bacon noted with disdain that some Italian and French rulers had introduced standing “cabinet counsels,” so named for the small, private rooms in which they met. These he dismissed as “a remedy worse than the disease,” in part because they contributed to “the revealing of affairs, whereby they become less secret.”
In 1789, President George Washington organized the first American Cabinet, including the attorney general and the heads of State, Treasury and War—the departments that still matter most. Some 40 years later, Andrew Jackson realized his group was “less secret” than it needed to be, so he relied on a shadowy “kitchen cabinet” of unofficial advisers. It’s no accident that the golden age of the Cabinet came in the midst of the Civil War, when the crisis led Abraham Lincoln to empower seven Cabinet members to rule with near-dictatorial authority on matters of public safety.
By 1939, Franklin Roosevelt had coaxed Congress into creating the executive office of the president, allowing him to hire hundreds of Brain Trusters to circumvent a sluggish Cabinet overwhelmed by the Depression. Then came the chief of staff, a post officially named in 1961 for the West Wing’s de facto chief operating officer. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson still had consequential individuals in their Cabinets—Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was practically his brother’s co-president—but by the late 1960s the institution was well on its way to becoming a hood ornament.
Yet the Cabinet has also remained a sort of funhouse mirror, magnifying a president’s managerial strengths and weaknesses. Richard Nixon isolated himself, abused and bullied Cabinet secretaries, and then, after a few highballs, blamed everybody for disloyalty. Bill Clinton crowdsourced his Cabinet before that was even a word, calling secretaries like Reich at odd hours with odd questions and setting aides against one another in a mock court, where decisions were as often deferred as made. George W. Bush, the first MBA to serve in the Oval Office, promised to restructure and streamline the presidency, but he found his Cabinet mired in bickering and infighting in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. All too often, the only adviser who mattered was Vice President Dick Cheney.
Obama intended to be different, instructing John Podesta—the former Clinton chief of staff he recruited to help line up his inaugural Cabinet—and his other headhunters to think “team of rivals” big. At one point, he was considering extending offers to not one but three former Democratic presidential hopefuls: In addition to courting Hillary Clinton for secretary of state (a job she accepted to the surprise of Obama’s inner circle as well as her own), he sounded out 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry for a variety of possible posts and even offered former Vice President Al Gore first crack at being his environment czar. (Gore declined.)
But as the United States fell deeper into full-fledged recession, Obama diverted his attention to assembling a crisis team to deal with the crumbling economy. Soon after his team was in place, he had the management epiphany every president experiences during his first weeks in power: He was drowning in data and chicken-pecked by aides asking for input. He privately groused that Emanuel was overwhelming him with requests to make decisions, so he issued a standing order to Emanuel and all future chiefs of staff, one of them told me: “Cut down on the number of decisions I have to make.”
At the same time, the constitutional law professor in Obama was driven by his disdain for what he saw as abuses of executive power under Bush and Cheney. One incident in particular haunted Obama: the attempt by top Bush aides to extract, from a barely conscious Attorney General John Ashcroft, hospital-bed approval for extending warrantless wiretapping. So while Obama may not have empowered his Cabinet, he bent over backward to avoid the appearance he was coercing them.
Reflecting that desire, just about every Obama Cabinet member received a no-meddling pledge from the president himself. As he told Arne Duncan, a basketball buddy who became his education secretary, “Don’t worry about the politics. Do what you think is right. … I’ll handle the politics.”
But not worrying about the politics is never an option in Washington, as Attorney General Eric Holder and the rest of the Cabinet soon found out. In February 2009, in the depths of the financial crisis, a time when Obama didn’t need any distractions, Holder, the highest-profile African-American in Obama’s Cabinet, told an audience of Justice Department employees, “In things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”
Obama might have promised not to meddle with his Cabinet secretaries, but politics was no side issue for his top advisers—David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Gibbs and Emanuel—who knew full well that it wasn’t a good idea to have one of the most visible Cabinet members out there expressing his innermost thoughts on sensitive racial issues. In fact, Obama’s political guys had been skeptical of Holder’s appointment from the beginning, quietly backing Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano over the easygoing career prosecutor, whom they considered unimpressive in vetting interviews.