Critically examine the claim that the President's Cabinet is an intrinsically weak institution.

The very term "President's Cabinet" as used in the title above is revealing inasmuch as it implicitly acknowledges the relationship of dominance that the President has over the Cabinet. Unlike in Britain, where the Prime Minister has been called "first among equals" in his Cabinet (and even the use of the term "his" is somewhat more restrained in Britain), which implies a necessity to develop and implement policy explicitly and solely through that body, in the US the President is under no constitutional or legal obligation to govern in association or through consultation with his Cabinet. The institution owes its existence to him, and is an example of the force of custom in the US political system - according to Fenno, it is this customary foundation that is the basic source of weakness that he concludes is utterly apparent in the US Cabinet. However, Fenno is not alone in believing that the hypothesis as set out in the title above holds firm; there appears to be a definite consensus on the issue, that the weakness of the Cabinet is inherent, and the future possibility of altering this state of affairs is limited. In order to evaluate these assertions, reference must be made to their theoretical foundations and the empirical evidence against which they have been judged and, presumably, found to have been satisfied in practice.
Fenno argues that there are established limits on the potential power that the Cabinet can enjoy; on the one hand, as no-one can force the President to use it, and his power to do so is absolute and fixed, he can in effect disregard it and proceed with his Presidency without exploiting any potential it may have to assist him in promoting and achieving his legislative agenda; Kennedy, in particular, is cited as reflecting this view as he virtually ignored his Cabinet. At the other extreme, however, there are upper limits as to the extent the Cabinet can engage in productive activity. It cannot make up for any deficiencies a President may have, as was assumed by some commentators prior to Fenno; where the President has lacked a particular quality or qualities, this has often been reflected in the Cabinet. Fenno points to the Hoover administration as an example of this; Hoover appointed uninspiring and workmanlike individuals with political experience to his Cabinet; not in itself a disaster for potential policy making, but the effect was simply to augment and highlight the shortfalls in Hoover's own ability to connect with the public. Thus the "best minds" hypothesis - that the President surrounding himself with the finest in their field can make up for any failures on his part - is fallacious, but not merely because, in practice, they do not, but in the modern Presidency also because the Cabinet is no longer a body designed to provide coherent and outstanding impartial advice to the President. Instead, it is an institution that is used for political purposes to reward important supporters and build bridges to political opponents following an electoral success, and also to act as a symbol of a President's awareness and political correctness in understanding the symbology of creating a multi-racial team to pander to the voters. Thus, in Clinton's first Cabinet there was representation for women (Reno, Albright) and blacks (Jesse and Ron "suspicious plane crash" Brown) among others. Thus this increase in heterogeneity of ethnicity and social class (if not in partisan background) has reduced the potential for the Cabinet to act as a body of expert advisors to the President. Regardless of the composition or competence of the Cabinet, however, a President without the ability to lead the nation and create an aura of dynamism and drama in the approach to policy initiatives will not find this compensated in even the most expert and professional of Cabinets.
A second major source of weakness according to Fenno lies in the fact that there is the distinct lack of a unity of purpose among the Cabinet. Most members of it were not involved in the election campaign with the President, and as a result there is no sense in which the Cabinet is a team that is all pulling in the same direction and committed to the same goals. The consequence of this individualism is that there can be constant inter-departmental rivalries or splits, with the ever-present temptation for individual Cabinet Secretaries to leak details of internal feuding to the press. In an attempt to minimise the possibility of this happening, it has become the norm that important matters are not brought before the group, or even when they are, only for briefing and not for discussion purposes. Haldeman's diaries bear this out, where he reports that the Cabinet was often briefed on foreign affairs by Kissinger, but only discussed mundane matters. As a result, the meetings themselves were, he describes, "farce [sic.] ... [that] went on and on, [and] accomplished nothing" (Wed, March 17, 1969) Another time, he describes a Cabinet meeting as "uneventful and unimportant" (Wed, Mar 18, 1970). This lack of serious debate on crucial issues such as foreign and macroeconomic policy creates a vicious circle, whereby the absence of substantive issues both flows from and builds up a discouragement of unity and activity. However, it would be argued that in other, more obvious Cabinet systems such as the British model, the discussion of serious issues by the whole Cabinet is a regular occurrence, one that does not produce, except by way of rumour and insider information, the degree of mistrust and rivalries that, the hypothesis laid out above runs, would be the scourge of the Cabinet in America were they ever to take an active role in these sorts of issues. What then is the difference between British cabinet government and the US Cabinet that would yield a result whereby high-level business can be conducted relatively smoothly in Britain, but would paralyse the American Cabinet? The answer lies, as stated above, in the goals and objectives of the members of both Cabinets. In the British system, all members of the Cabinet have been elected and have campaigned on the basis of their party's manifesto, and all have a desire to see the programme succeed. Furthermore, their future lies in the long-term, in politics and the legislature; by contrast, their American counterparts are simply on secondment from their previous careers for the duration of the Presidency, after which they will for the most part return to their former occupations. As well as this, it must also be remembered that none of the American Cabinet are subject to approval by popular vote; their incentive to succeed in their post lies in the effect it will have on their future employment prospects away from politics in the executive branch, and not from the need to retain any democratic mandate in an election. Hence each individual will constantly be pressing for programmes and policy initiatives that will reflect best on them and their achievements whilst in office, and will not take into account how the programme as a whole that the President was elected on succeeds or fails. Thus it can be seen that evidence from a period well after Fenno's study was published strengthens his argument in this area.
Despite the lack of obligation to use the Cabinet and the apparent futility that Fenno's argument seems to suggest exists in even trying to increase its role, successive President's have attempted to create a system of cabinet government and incorporate the Cabinet more into the process of policy-making decisions. On the whole, they have failed; initial increases in Cabinet power have been quickly reversed part-way through a President's term and responsibility for policy initiatives returned to the White House staff. Nixon's was the first to attempt to raise the profile of his Cabinet; his predecessor Johnson had merely used his Cabinet as a device to act out the pretence of consultation. Nixon's strategy for managing the government, however, was as ambitious as his foreign policy achievements of d�tente with the USSR and recognition of Communist China. He wanted to reorganise and strengthen White House-Cabinet relations in his second term, but in the end all his policy initiatives were undermined by Watergate. However, evidence from Haldeman's diaries suggests that Nixon was not as enthusiastic towards the Cabinet as Walker's analysis suggests. Haldeman himself felt that Nixon "isn't [sic.] tough enough with his Cabinet officers" (Sat, Feb. 1, 1969), and Nixon himself rarely interacted with the Cabinet apart from at actual Cabinet meetings; he directed Haldeman, Kissinger, and Ehlichman to liase with his Cabinet for him. Haldeman specifically recalls that "[the] P[resident] wants to be left alone, Cabinet meetings bore him" (Wed, Apr. 23, 1969). This hardly seems consistent with a President who wanted to raise the profile and input of the Cabinet. Furthermore, Nixon's strengthening of the Office of Management and Budget and its transformation from an independent institution serving the Presidency to a partisan policy organisation controlled by the President himself did nothing to help transfer power to the Cabinet. In the end, his commitment to revolutionise the organisation of the executive branch must be questioned given the empirical observations described above. Ironically, it was in the aftermath of his resignation that a form of Cabinet government was achieved under Ford; this was described by Ford himself as a necessity in order to rebuild public confidence in the Presidency. On the other hand, it is more likely that this was merely a result of an apprehension on the part of the White House staff to be seen as repeating the errors of Nixon's staff in acting in a manner beyond their authority, and also due to the fact that they had no policies that they wanted to pursue. Thus the Cabinet secretaries were left free to pursue their own agendas with minimal guidance from the White House during this period. Carter attempted to make this arrangement a permanent feature of his Cabinet; he gave them a strong role in policy development free from interference from the White House staff, the numbers of whom he cut by 20%. However, he became dissatisfied with the independence he had given to his Cabinet, and reversed the process within a year of being elected. This can be traced to the conflicting objectives between Cabinet secretaries (who were attempting to keep campaign promises through increased expenditure) and the overall Presidential goal of balancing the budget. Carter had failed to provide a clear set of administration goals and priorities, and as a result, failed to overcome the departmental and individualist forces that, as discussed above, tend to pull the Cabinet apart. Reagan learnt from this, and at the outset of his tenure highlighted to his Cabinet his primary goals of fiscal restraint on the part of his Cabinet officers. However, despite the massive degree of centralisation of policy development, management, and Congressional implementation that occurred during the Reagan presidency, his use of the Cabinet was more effective in that he allowed it to have input on a broad range of issues, rather than the narrow focus that had been the failures of the previous administrations. The Cabinet now felt as if they were key players in the policy initiatives of the time, notwithstanding the fact that they were always subject to White House control over the issues. Reagan managed to foster the sense that policy development was a team operation between the Cabinet and the White House. His successor's approach was to suffer the same problems as Carter - how to reconcile the pledge of "no new taxes" with the promise of moving the agenda forward. This produced a resurgence of tension between the White House staff and the Cabinet. Finally, Clinton's regime has been too mired in scandal to do anything, and it seems that he is now a lame duck, despite his attempts to refocus the political spotlight on other issues.
In short, then, the empirical evidence gathered since Fenno's study lends credence to his arguments for the Cabinet's intrinsic weakness, and they remain as strong today as when they were first published. As he identified, a lack of guidance from the President to the Cabinet is a crucial factor in the failures of most Presidencies to effectively utilise their Cabinets. As was also mentioned, however, the modern use of Cabinet for symbolism purposes further undermines its ability to become a key player in government. However, inasmuch as this discussion has concurred with the title, some thought must be given to the significance of the Cabinet's weakness as an institution to the rest of the American system of government. Recent scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra suggest that there is a need for a body to act as a check on the myriad of White House staff in devising and implementing policy within accountable frameworks of government. The teamwork approach between Cabinet and White House staff is obviously not the answer: both are unelected and unaccountable groups, and it is clear that during the time when Iran-Contra was taking place, when the Cabinet's position was strongest in recent years, it did not fulfil this function. Unless explicit powers are formalised and institutionalised that clearly define the spheres of activity of both these groups, it is difficult to see how they are meant to act as checks on one another; a surprising oversight in a system of government that holds this feature as one of its basic tenets.