(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Changing the chief of staff can sometimes make all the difference. Bill Clinton’s honeymoon, previously the worst in the modern era, gave way to a well-functioning White House once Leon Panetta took over. Ronald Reagan’s second term was in disarray until he brought in Howard Baker. Clinton and Reagan didn’t change, but their reputation and image certainly did. Washington could have dismissed them as in over their heads; instead they emerged (or, in Reagan’s case, re-emerged) as master politicians. That could have happened for Donald Trump, too, but by any normal reckoning, John Kelly’s tenure as White House chief of staff, which started off in a fairly promising direction, has wound up as an almost complete failure.
What Kelly needed to do was to professionalize the White House in spite of a president who resists professionalization. Specifically, that meant a few important tasks:
- Clear out all the folks who had no business working there and hiring new, qualified staffers.
- End the White House’s habit of making empty threats easily ignored by other power centers in Washington.
- Develop a real policy-making process that builds consensus and makes priorities clear across the administration.
- Restore order to the organization after a period of mostly self-inflicted chaos.
There was never a chance that a Donald Trump presidency could really be a “fine-tuned machine,” but there was a fair amount that was at least theoretically possible. After all, the president isn’t the entire presidency, so at least it might have been possible to build some semblance of professionalism around the chaos at the top of it.
And Kelly did make an effort, at first. The housecleaning began on his first day, when he dismissed communications director Anthony Scaramucci. After a couple of months on the job, Kelly also succeeded in controlling the door to the Oval Office and the paper flow within the White House.
But after that? Granted, we may not have full information at this point, but from what we know instead of keeping up the fight, Kelly seemed to be retreating. By the time he botched the departure of staff secretary Rob Porter, it was clear things were headed in the wrong direction, and he really never recovered from that fiasco. Even worse, at least as far as anyone has reported, he stopped trying. Starting in February, Kelly appeared to leave things on autopilot for the most part.
Perhaps, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien says, reining in the family was just never going to happen. And there are obvious limits to what any chief of staff can do about a president who won’t be briefed, won’t stop writing his own script, and can’t defuse the serious legal cloud hanging over his administration. Kelly’s initial plan was to manage the staff, not the president, but after a few months he appeared to give up on that as well.
That’s on top of various policy and public relations mistakes and questionable decisions Kelly made, from the Porter episode to Kelly’s part in the administration’s bizarre feud with a grieving military widow. Those didn’t help, but every chief of staff makes mistakes. What really matters is whether they’re able to run the White House, and that’s where Kelly’s failure mattered the most.
So why did he stay? Everyone speculates that Kelly remained in office to prevent the worst from a president who (as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last week) constantly orders people to do things that are against the law. We don’t know what fiascoes, if any, Kelly prevented. But if there were significant ones, and he was effective in avoiding unimaginable disaster, then Kelly deserved credit for putting up with constant humiliation and embarrassment in order to protect his nation.
So in that sense, Kelly’s final grade could be incomplete pending further evidence.
However, that brings up an important, albeit speculative, question. To the extent that Kelly did avert trouble, and stayed on the job because he thought it was important for someone to do so, to what extent does he have an obligation to the public to let us know just how bad things are?
Perhaps one could argue that while he was chief of staff, Kelly was correct to keep his mouth shut because it was important to leave foreign adversaries as ignorant as possible of any internal chaos. One might even believe it was justified if part of the trade-off that allowed him to stay on the job and prevent calamities was to keep quiet about it. It’s also quite possible that Kelly was part of the constant leaking that has informed us about how Trump misuses his presidency.
It’s a lot harder to argue that Kelly should keep quiet once he’s out of the White House — at least, it’s hard to make that case if things are really so bad that Kelly also should get considerable credit for avoiding the worst while he was on the job. I think that’s even true if Kelly doesn’t trust whatever poor sap succeeds him as chief of staff, although it would certainly be even more urgent if he doesn’t have confidence in whoever that turns out to be.
Rex Tillerson had been out of office for eight months when he decided it was time to reveal that Trump routinely asked him to do things that were against the law. If Kelly has more of that or worse, it’s urgent that we hear about it before someone starts obeying those orders.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mike Nizza at mnizza3@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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