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The second principal weakness in the presidency is the inability of the White House to maintain control over the large federal bureaucracy. There is nothing more frustrating for a President than to issue an order to a Cabinet officer, and then find that, when the order gets out in the field, it is totally mutilated.
I have had that happen to me, and I am sure every other President has had it happen.
There are bureaucratic fiefdoms out in the states or in various regions, and the people who occupy those pockets of power want to do things in their own way. They are pros at it. They have been disregarding Presidents for years, both Democratic and Republican. And a President sits in the West Wing of the White House, and he says, "How could that happen?"
It would be helpful if a President could fire somebody when there was an obvious disregard of orders and policy determinations. He should just be able to say, "Mr. Cabinet Officer, this man violated your order and the President's order. He ought to be fired tomorrow." If you did that a couple of times, I think the disregarding of orders would stop.
The solution to that — and a lot of other problems in the imperiled presidency — is to use the Vice President as a real Chief of Staff, both to control the administrative bureaucracy and to see that Administration relations with the Congress really mesh. Having been the Vice President and having been the President, I know that there has to be a better delegation of responsibility between the two offices. I don't care how well intentioned a President or a Vice President is — and I have seen both Democrats and Republicans try to work it out — no Vice President that I have known has been a full partner. The President has always relied much more on his own people. I believe that you have got to take an elected official, a Vice President, and move him right into the West Wing of the White House as the Chief of Staff of the whole Administration.
This would be comparable to what happens in a well-organized business, where you have a chief executive officer and a chief operating officer. The President is the chief executive officer. He makes all the decisions. He signs all the actions. He is the final autions. He is the final authority. But you then have the Vice President as the chief operating officer. He does not have a separate staff; he run the White House staff He manages the White House. He does not make the decisions. It is not a co-presidency, as some people were trying to call it at the time o the Detroit convention last summer. But the Vice President should be in the job of making the Administration work. That is the only way, in my opinion, that you can really make the team of a President and Vice President function efficiently, the only way to avoid all the jealousies, all the inefficiencies, all the conflicts — and they certainly do exist in every Administration.