US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for New York City from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, US, November 2, 2019. Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts.

Casey Stengel (actually) said that the secret to management is keeping the five guys who hate you from the four guys who haven’t made up their minds. According to Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump (Regnery, 2020), Tevi Troy’s rollicking and insightful history of White House staff feuds, successful presidencies depends on achieving the same outcome.

Troy points out that there has been plenty of chaos and drama generated by staff fights regardless of party, president, or policy. He notes that before Franklin Roosevelt, the presidency was served by a small informal group of advisers and Cabinet members. In 1939, the Executive Office of the President (EOP) was created by Congress. It was comprised of a new White House Office and Bureau of the Budget. Since then, the EOP has expanded, “leading to the current White House operation of more than 1,600 people and the creation of the modern White House staff.”

Troy, who served as Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy under George W. Bush, writes that “process governs White House policy operations. The president may be the ultimate decider-in-chief, but process determines how information is presented before final decisions are made. Process determines questions such as who attends the key meetings, what information is required, and what is the timeline for decision-making.”

And therein lies the source of conflict from Truman to Trump. Staffers and specific officers of the president vie to be at the meetings or — through leaks and other maneuvers — seek to be the one who the president relies upon when an executive decision is made.

Troy makes clear that who is “closest to the president can overcome obvious power disparities between them and congressionally constituted cabinet officials.” Fight House describes how Truman’s special adviser Clark Clifford squared off against the State Department and then-Secretary of State General George Marshall on behalf of the president’s drive to recognize the new State of Israel in 1948.

Truman asked Clifford to make the case for recognition on his behalf. When Marshall responded to Clifford’s presentation, it was dismissive and personal. Marshall told Truman: “I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter. The only reason Clifford is here is that he is pressing a political consideration.” Truman lashed back quickly: “Well, General, he’s here because I asked him to be.”

As Aaron Wildavsky observed in his essay “The Past and Future Presidency”: “The importance of Presidents is a function of the scope of government; the more it does, the more important they become.” Because a president’s management or manipulation of the jealousies, personal grudges, and ideological battles is the nexus for leadership on a larger number of issues, such fights have grown in importance too. The nature of the conflict is ultimately determined by how the president responds to or channels conflict.

Losing control (Ford) or micromanaging (Carter) is bound to undermine the public’s perception of the president and his effectiveness. Lyndon Johnson’s paranoia about Robert F. Kennedy led LBJ to ignore his EOP staff and shape Vietnam policy to stop Kennedy from running for president.

Additionally, when a president focuses on the processes of one set of policies and ignores others, the political consequences can be severe. As Troy points out, Bush 41 ran a tight foreign policy ship that steered America through the fall of the Soviet Union and Operation Desert Storm. But he was indifferent to domestic issues and let aides like budget director Dick Darman include a proposal to raise taxes that violated Bush’s “Read my lips. No new taxes” pledge. Ironically, determined not to make the same mistake as his father, Bush 43 “had a well-run domestic policy but had a semi-dysfunctional foreign policy operation, one in which backbiting, undercutting, and leaking occurred as a matter of course.”

Every president tolerates fights and hissy fits, as long as the people involved are deemed valuable. Nixon regarded Henry Kissinger as mentally unhinged, telling Chief of Staff Robert Haldeman that “Henry’s personality problem is just too goddamn difficult for us to deal [with]. … Goddamn it, Bob, he’s psychopathic.” He put up with Kissinger’s behavior because “Nixon may not have wanted the sniping, the backbiting, or the bad blood, but he did want policy run out of the White House rather than Foggy Bottom.”

The two presidents who seemed to be engaged in fighting the most are Obama and Trump. “Obama ran a tight ship in terms of chain of command … he was very aware of every email, slight, or conflict that took place,” but “in the Obama White House it (conflict) surfaced in areas where Obama was willing to let it happen.”

The same goes for Trump. (A book entitled Fight House would be incomplete without discussing the Trump administration.) Fight House makes a convincing case that Trump contretemps are not outside the range of normal distribution of EOP battles. The difference is that Trump encourages conflict and enjoys it. Troy writes that Trump’s communication adviser “Hope Hicks and press aide A. J. Delgado got in a screaming match about a media mix-up on the campaign plane, Trump Force One, while standing near Trump. Trump was reading a newspaper at the time, but put down the paper long enough to shout, ‘Cat Fight.’ He then picked up the paper again and continued reading. This is not the action of a leader who wishes to stamp out arguments among his staff.”

Fight House demonstrates that the key, as Troy (and Casey Stengel) makes clear, is to use the disputes among staff to strengthen the presidency.

Robert Goldberg is co-founder and Vice President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.