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Introduction to the symposium on "the administrative presidency".

Article Excerpt
The term "administrative presidency" was coined by Richard Nathan in his 1983 book of that title to describe the efforts of the Richard M. Nixon White House to gain control of the federal administrative apparatus. Nixon wanted the bureaucracy to be a tool of his presidency in an environment of divided government. The existence of the administrative presidency had long preceded Nixon, of course. Presidents have always worried about getting the bureaucracy to do what they want it to do and to not do what they do not want it to do. They often have been wary of their own appointees. Richard Fenno (1958), for example, details the difficult relations between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jesse Jones, his agriculture secretary, and Richard Neustadt (1990) notes how Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of the treasury, George Humphrey, sought to sabotage Eisenhower's budget proposal. Presidents also have been skeptical of the legion of career bureaucrats in Washington. They often think the careerists are out of tune with the changes they wish to bring about. Nixon, of course, did carry these concerns and, at the very least, responded to them in ways that tilted the balance of power within the bureaucracy and across political institutions decidedly in the president's favor. In view of Nixon's downfall and Congress's reaction to his initiatives, the administrative presidency strategy was overshadowed by the conditions that beset the Gerald Ford and...

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