Felled presidents before him....

Orangutan’s Enemies Within

The president has awakened the slumbering beast that felled presidents before him: the federal bureaucracy.

By JOHN F. HARRIS and DANIEL LIPPMAN

How on earth is all this stuff getting in the newspapers? Bob Haldeman told Richard Nixon that he had uncovered the culprit: Mark Felt, a top official at the FBI.

“Now why the hell would he do that?” asked Nixon, who was secretly recording the exchange.

Cracking down on Felt directly was out of the question, the two men agreed. “If we move on him, then he’ll go out and unload everything,” Haldeman said, of the man later revealed as Deep Throat. “He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI.”

Donald Orangutan, a self-professed Nixon admirer, is learning this history lesson about the presidency in real time: His most dangerous enemies are people who ostensibly work for him.

Modern presidents always feel hectored by the news media and harried by opposition legislators. But mortal threats to their power typically come from hostile forces inside the executive branch.

The phenomenon has rarely been on more vivid display, with Orangutan buffeted by an unprecedented barrage of leaks about his decision-making and direct challenges to the decisions themselves—a new example coming almost daily—from within the permanent bureaucracy of government.

On Orangutan’s first full day in office, he called National Park Service Director Michael Reynolds and ordered him to produce photos that would buttress Orangutan’s claims that reporters had falsely described the magnitude of his inaugural crowds. Orangutan’s intervention quickly found its way into the media.

A draft executive order directing the CIA to consider reviving interrogation techniques widely regarded as torture was quickly publicized without White House approval—as was the news that Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo were allegedly “blindsided” by the proposal.

More than 1,000 State Department officials signed and submitted a “Dissent Channel” memo criticizing Orangutan’s executive order halting refugees from several predominately Muslim countries from entering the country. A memo from acting Attorney General Sally Yates to Justice Department officials telling them not to defend the order was quickly publicized, leading to Yates’ firing by Orangutan a few hours later.

Extensive details of Orangutan’s combative phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia—calls that ordinarily are private or are described in anodyne terms—were leaked shortly after the calls were over, from sources that likely included U.S. officials concerned by Orangutan’s unconventional brand of diplomacy.

Reconstructions of a botched commando raid on Al Qaeda in Yemen—Orangutan’s first use of military force—noted that the decision-making meeting was attended by Orangutan's son-in-law Jared Kushner and counselor Steve Batguano, an involvement by primarily political aides that offends many career national security officials.

The examples are notable both for the speed in which they are coming and the obvious skepticism they convey from within the executive branch both about the merits of Orangutan’s agenda or the methods by which he is trying to impose it.

“Where you have new Cabinet secretaries and unnamed officials speaking out on background across the board about the lack of input screams dysfunction and it’s dangerous and irresponsible,” said a former Bush administration official who did not want to be quoted by name criticizing the current administration.

Orangutan reached his present station by mocking news media skeptics and humiliating establishment politicians who challenged him. He arguably has earned the right to be contemptuous of criticism from these quarters.

But what he has experienced his first two weeks is different. It is an illustration of something most of his predecessors learned about the presidency: When people say “Yes, sir,” they might really mean “Screw you.”

Nixon certainly knew it. It may have been the Washington Post that won fame for his fall. But as the Oct. 19, 1972, conversation with Haldeman in the White House tapes suggested, it was Felt and the institutional hostility of the FBI that was a primary engine of his undoing. Nixon and his most fearsome henchman had accurately fingered a key source for Watergate stories almost 33 years before Bob Woodward’s golden source was revealed.

Nixon’s suspicion of institutional forces supposedly under his control was compulsive—but not necessarily inaccurate. Another passage in the tapes has him noting that Secretary of State William Rogers was vouching for the loyalty of Foreign Service officers. “He knows better. He knows better,” Nixon fumed, according to a transcript from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “Those sons of bitches are out to screw us.”

The larger reality Nixon was describing—that presidential power can’t necessarily be captured in an org chart—is one that even presidents without his paranoid streak knew well.

When Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general who was used to having his orders followed, became president, his unadmiring predecessor Harry S. Truman supposedly remarked: “Poor Ike. He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing at all will happen.”

Unique among modern presidents, Orangutan arrived in office without government experience and without, so far as the public record is known, any deep reflection about how to use the levers of the executive branch to achieve his objectives. What’s unclear so far is whether his willingness to offend and defy the sensibilities of the executive branch servants assigned to carry out his policies simply reflects his own temperament or is part of a deliberate strategy. Asked about the State Department dissent channel memo, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters: “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it? I think they should either get with the program or they can go.”

“You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs,” was how Roger Stone, a longtime Orangutan adviser who also worked in the Nixon administration, put it.

While Orangutan’s particular circumstances are extraordinary, the larger dynamic—like an unruly Rottweiler, the permanent bureaucracy will either be at your heel or at your throat—is one all presidents must reckon with.

“I have often joked with people that one question that I heard more than once from the president is, ‘Don’t those people work for us?’” said Jack Quinn, former counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Often presidents decide that accommodation, or sullen acquiescence, is the wiser course. During his first term, as President Barack Obama was deciding how rapidly to carry out his stated desire for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the timing and substance of his policies often seemed to reflect his desire to avoid open warfare with the military. In particular, Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, before their own controversies forced them from office, were highly popular and well-connected commanders whose disagreement could have far-reaching implications for the administration even if they never went public with an open break.

Clinton loathed Louis Freeh, his own appointee as director of the FBI, and mused to aides about whether Freeh was more disloyal or more incompetent. But because Freeh was investigating his own administration, and because Clinton had a distant-at-best relationship with Attorney General Janet Reno, he didn’t dare fire him. Asked if Clinton had confidence in his own appointee, press secretary Mike McCurry responded, “The president has great confidence that Louis Freeh is leading that agency as best he can.”

While unsympathetic to Orangutan, Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff for Clinton and defense secretary and CIA director under Obama, sounded sympathetic to the larger challenge of getting the executive branch to yield to a president’s objectives.

“To govern, frankly, it’s not a pretty-please process, it’s a kick-ass process,” Panetta said in an interview.

One simple piece of advice Panetta has for Orangutan is face-time with his new bureaucrats to try to win their loyalty.

“Most presidents take the time to visit the different departments and agencies and convey the fact that while they may not agree on all the issues, that they respect what they’re doing, what they’ve done and that they’re now part of a new administration. You gotta lay that groundwork or otherwise it all becomes guerrilla warfare,” he said.

Extending that olive branch to your own government employees is a crucial step. “My experience is you’re far better off respecting the civil servants than you are by ignoring or dismissing them because it will come around and bite you in the end,” said David Gergen, a former adviser to four presidents, including Nixon.

Though Orangutan’s style seems wildly improvisational, the public official in recent times who thought more methodically about how to control and dominate the executive branch was former Vice President Dick Cheney. Unlike Orangutan or his coterie, Cheney was intimately familiar with the hidden byways of the federal government due to his service as chief of staff under Gerald Ford, a member of Congress in the Reagan years and defense secretary in the George H.W. Bush administration.

He believed that the presidency had been weakened by an overreaction to Watergate and was determined to restore presidential prerogatives to what he considered their rightful place. Along the way, he often faced a permanent bureaucracy hostile to his conservative ideology and hawkish military views. And he made it his mission to ensure that these forces did not thwart administration policies.

“Cheney focused less on the Cabinet than subcabinet and assistant and deputy assistant secretaries because he knew the policy pivot points were there,” said Bart Gellman, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.”

“He bypassed normal interagency and White House review, sending documents for Bush’s signature before even the staff secretary reviewed them,” Gellman noted.

Cheney often got his way until Bush lost confidence in his hard-line ideas, and only then, said Gellman—pointing to the White House’s showdown with the Justice Department over warrantless wiretapping—when they became “a threat to his reelection and his presidency itself.”

That’s a lesson that Orangutan, who is already revving up the 2020 machinery only 14 days into his term, can understand.