The Price of Loyalty

Critics of Hillary Clinton's possible appointment as Secretary of State have focused on the issue of whether she'll be faithful to her new boss. The senator, we are reminded, has her own interests and a tendency to put her own ambitions first. Perhaps so, but I doubt President Obama will have much trouble with disloyalty in his administration, from Clinton or anyone else, for the same reason it wasn't a problem in his campaign: he doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about it.

No president would think of moving into the White House without known and trusted advisers like David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. At the same time, the recurrent presidential obsession with forms of disloyalty, including leaks, disobedience and private agendas, is a marker for executive failure. Those who fixate on personal allegiance, like Johnson, Nixon and George W. Bush, tend to perform far worse in office than those, like FDR, Truman, JFK, Reagan and Clinton, who can tolerate strong, independent actors on their teams.

The demand for absolute loyalty is a relic from the age of patronage, when political appointments were tied to the delivery of votes for a sponsor. A modern-media politician does not depend on this kind of machine for his existence and has political control over only a thin sliver of top-level government jobs. As the complexity of the government has increased, so too has the importance of expertise and experience.

This is part of what has made George W. Bush's loyalty obsession such a throwback. Bush's first job in politics was as an "enforcer" for a father he thought was too nice to discipline traitors and freelancers. His own fixation with loyalty was born from the experience of watching James Baker and Richard Darman put their own careers ahead of his dad's. When his turn came, the younger Bush made personal loyalty a threshold test, and even came to regard private challenge as an indication of untrustworthiness.

The price was a surfeit of reliable hacks like Alberto Gonzales and outright incompetents like Heckofajob Brownie. My favorite illustration of the misguided notion of loyalty that ran rife through the Bush years was the testimony of White House political director Sara Taylor to the Senate committee investigating the firings of U.S. attorneys deemed insufficiently loyal to Bush. Declining to answer a question, Taylor said, "I took an oath to the president."

"Did you mean, perhaps," Patrick Leahy asked, "that you took an oath to the Constitution?"