Hobbs covers the White House Office in his pacemaking studies of presidential staffing and its impact on administrative management. Richard Neustadt, a member. of the Truman staff and close to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, has written on the subject in several excellent articles and certainly has to be counted as the leading authority on our subject. Louis W. Koenig has written poignant biographical accounts of three staff members in our period, Thomas Corcoran, Harry Hopkins, and Sherman Adams. Rexford G. Tugwell has some interesting observations on the role of presidential staff in his volume, The Enlargement of the Presidency. Finally, J. C. Heinlein has contributed an excellent monograph On presidential staff and national security policy
One reason that so little research has been conducted on the White House Office is simply that data on the subject are very difficult to obtain. There are very few Personal memoirs of staff members, and those that have been written by frequently are not helpful. The oral] history projects of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy libraries working with the National Archives are promising, but little of: their work is available for use and much of it will not be available until all persons involved in the record are deceased. Journalistic accounts of the White House Office are not-available in quantity until the Eisenhower period and they are frequently not revealing.
With so little written material available, most of the data for this study was. collected through interviews with men who have served in the White House Office since 1939. Since early 1966 I have conducted interviews with nearly twenty per cent of the men who held professional staff positions in this period. The interviews covered staff members of all five administrations and lasted an average of about ninety minutes. The interview schedule was flexible and questions were open-ended. The respondents were generally questioned about staff organization and work patterns, their perceptions of their role in the White House Office, and their relationship to the decision-making processes in the White House. In addition, they were asked to give their account of the process by which they were 4 recruited to the White House Office and, in some cases, their reasons for leaving the job were solicited. In a number of instances the respondents discussed alternative patterns of staff organization and work habits and gave assessments of the potentiality and limitations of the White House Office of the future. Some respondents were also questioned about specific decision-making crises in the White House which will be discussed in a later paper. All of the respondents an were assured that they would not be quoted and that observations would not be by attributed to them directly.
In this paper I will deal first with some of the data for a biographical profile of the White House Office professional staff for each of the five Presidents since 1939. The major part of the paper will then be devoted to a discussion of the organization and work habits of each of the staffs. Each of these subjects will be discussed in more detail] and the role of the staff in presidential] decision- it making will be treated in a book length manuscript which is now in preparation.