Unfortunately, Eisenhower had much less interest in domestic politics and this made the congressional liaison unit within the White House Office a very important one. The relatively modest operation of Murphy and his team in the Truman Administration gave way to a very elaborate system under the direction of General Wilton G. Persons in the Eisenhower Administration. Persons waS assisted by a number of very able men including Gerald Morgan and Bryce Harlow. Morgan took over direction of the work when Persons replaced Adams in 1958.
All of the respondents in this study who had worked in legislative liaison for Eisenhower agreed that, especially in the early years, it “was like pulling eye teeth” to get the Republicans in Congress to support the President’s program. Eisenhower was asking the Republicans to support programs that they had been opposing and many of them, including Senator Robert Taft, found this very difficult to take. It was in the difficult early months of his Administration that the elaborate legislative liaison machinery was developed.
The “Tuesday Morning Breakfast Conference” (in the first few months, it was held On Mondays), which had been used steadily by Roosevelt and Truman, became the central structure in Eisenhower’s legislative liaison apparatus. Each Saturday morning a member of the Persons staff, usually Morgan, would preside over a meeting of all the legislative liaison men in the ros as a part of a careful effort to coordinate all legislative liaison activities in the executive branch from the White House Office. Using the matters discussed in this conference as a base, the Persons-Morgan staff prepared a detailed agenda for the Tuesday morning meeting between the President and the Congressional leaders. The agenda was cleared with Adams and the President and then distributed in advance to the Congressional leaders. Then on Tuesday morning the legislative leaders and the President met in the White House. The President generally followed the agenda rather. rigidly and at the end of the meeting the legislative leaders bog would bring up additional matters for discussion. Morgan and Pers71S were usually in attendance at these meetings and appropriate officers from the Departments were frequently invited to attend.
The work of the legislative liaison team was greatly complicated by Eisenhower’s aversion to party politics. He was not appreciative of the bargaining which was at the heart of normal, healthy Presidential Congressional relations. One Republican Congressman, when asked about patronage under the new Republican Administration, roy complained that not only had he not gotten additional jobs but that he had lost one that he had under Truman. This story is illustrative of the nature of the problem facing the legislative liaison team and the elaborate machinery in the White House Office helped to make up for the deficiency.
The same predispositions which led President Eisenhower to develop the kind of staff operation he developed led him to make more use of the Cabinet than his immediate predecessors. In an effort to get as much order as possible into running the Cabinet, he created the post of “Cabinet Operations Officer,” later changed to “Secretary to the Cabinet.” The two men who held this position were both previously Adams' immediate aides and they continued to work directly under his supervision in their new post. They had some responsibility for coordination of affairs in the executive branch, but the really tough problems of coordination were handled directly by Adams.