The High Art of Threatening

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Most of the men and women who take top positions in the Federal Government could get along without the low salaries, the long hours and the public scrutiny--but they love power too much to resist.

In so many ways, the exercise of power is the ultimate challenge: the management of people for great causes. Yet despite all that has been recorded about the frustrations and hazards in this formless world of political leadership, the people who enter it are often caught off guard.

Even Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a veteran of 36 years in public service of one kind or another, was surprised at how difficult it was to establish himself as this nation's chief foreign policy spokesman. So Haig did what a lot of others before him have done. He began to mutter, and then to say outright, that he did not really relish the headaches and the humiliations and maybe he ought to walk out the door if he did not get his way.

The threat of resignation is about the only weapon that disgruntled top officials possess. The threat does not always work very well around the White House. James Rowe, who was Franklin Roosevelt's administrative assistant, recalls that F.D.R.'s curmudgeonly Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, used to send in his resignation periodically. Ickes never expected it to be accepted, and Roosevelt understood that the threat was a kind of body language of power. He would bring Ickes to the White House for warmth and flattery, and thus renewed, Ickes would go back to his tasks, one of which was being Roosevelt's lightning rod. Resignation would be forgotten until next time. After Roosevelt's death, the Secretary delivered his umpteenth offer of resignation. Harry Truman did not talk the same language. He took Ickes at his word. Goodbye Ickes.

Judging the temper of a President is tricky business. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara grew weary and disillusioned over the Viet Nam War. He brooded about resigning, then began to mention it to friends. Lyndon Johnson, who had called McNamara his right arm, wanted to listen to none of this resignation nonsense--up to a point. But then one day in the winter of 1967 L.B.J. startled everyone, especially McNamara, by accepting his resignation. McNamara's mind told him resigning was right, but his heart was troubled. Somehow the resignation was not meant to have been handled just that way.

Henry Kissinger raised the threat of resignation to real art. In 1971, when a leak of secret transcripts disclosed the White House "tilt" toward Pakistan (in its war with India over independence for Bangladesh), Kissinger was mortified. He never intended to resign, but he sent the signals out through his elaborate network of foreign policy friends. A resounding vote of confidence came quietly back. It shored him up spiritually and also within Nixon's White House.

Whether he wanted to or not, Al Haig has got himself into the same game. But he has added some new dimensions. He confronted a President in public, a heretofore forbidden gambit in power survival. Then he brushed aside another old maxim: if you have to claim pre-eminence publicly, you have already lost it. In the past, such pronouncements have often been the point of no return down the slippery slope toward the premature opportunity to go back to high pay, lush fringe benefits and absolute authority in the old firm. The odd thing is that when it happens not many people so honored seem to enjoy their liberation.

The Haig drama may be just starting. There is a feeling around Washington that the city is witnessing a new and intricate chapter in the resignation ploy. The outcome is uncertain, and the resolution lies in the guarded recesses of the minds of two strong men.

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