You never can tell about Senate confirmation.
There could scarcely have been a more qualified candidate to serve as secretary of commerce than Adm. Lewis Strauss (pronounced “strawz”), who had been chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, among many things in a long and distinguished career in business and public life. President Eisenhower had wanted Strauss to succeed John Foster Dulles as secretary of state; but Strauss didn’t want to preempt the appointment of his friend, Under Secretary Christian Herter. Yet when Ike appointed Strauss to the Commerce Department (1958-59), the Democrats, who had just added an historic 16 seats to their control of the Senate, were out for blood. They didn’t like the fact that Strauss, as AEC chairman, had presided over the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and they wanted to humiliate Eisenhower. So Strauss was rejected.
Things are likely to go a little more smoothly for Donald Trump’s appointees, this week and next. The left is determined to have a fight—the New York Times seems especially agitated about Attorney General-designate Jefferson Sessions—and committee hearings will be especially contentious. But Republicans control the Senate and show no signs of breaking ranks over Sessions, or anyone else. No one, at this juncture, can say who will have the most difficulty getting confirmed; more important, nobody can now say who, in the long run, will have been worth the trouble.
For the drama of Senate confirmation often yields to the law of unintended consequences. I call it the Hickel Paradox; and its corollary, the O’Neill Rule.
When the newly-elected Richard Nixon nominated his cabinet in 1968, the appointee most reviled by the press, and by some distance, was Gov. Walter Hickel of Alaska, who was to be secretary of the Interior. Hickel had been a successful property developer, and the nascent environmental lobby joined forces with the muckraking columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, and Senate Democrats, to depict Hickel as a corrupt governor and sworn enemy of wilderness, wildlife, and common decency. Of course, none of it was true—Pearson/Anderson were notoriously reckless, and the Times, as usual, was apoplectic—but Hickel’s nomination was almost fatally delayed, and he barely made it in by Nixon’s inaugural.
After which, it need hardly be added, he took office and soon proved himself to be not only an environmentalist and vigorous regulator, but a nascent opponent of the Vietnam war. Indeed, during the uproar over the invasion of Cambodia in May 1970, Hickel wrote a letter to Nixon pleading for understanding of the student-protesters in Washington, and complaining that the administration failed to show “appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans—our young people.” In due course, the letter was leaked, Hickel became an unlikely hero to the press and antiwar left—and a White House pariah, who was fired six months later.
That is the Hickel Paradox: The nominee most abhorred by the media, on appointment, is likely to become its ideal, in practice.
Another instance of this same phenomenon would be the nomination of C. Everett Koop, M.D., to be surgeon general in 1981. Koop was a distinguished pediatric surgeon, but was also deeply conservative, and a foe of abortion and euthanasia —and as such, regarded by the media, and the usual left-wing suspects, as an especially dangerous appointment. Like Hickel, Koop was subjected to a nasty, and prolonged, ordeal by committee and press—this was a few years before the surname Bork was transformed into a verb—but the GOP had just gained control of the Senate, and so confirmed him. And once in office—or in uniform, to cite his eccentric precedent as surgeon general—Koop defied expectations as well, and became a particular media favorite during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
Still, for watchful students of Washington tribal rites, the corollary to all this is the O’Neill Rule, which in some ways is the obverse of the Hickel Paradox. That is to say, the nominee who is universally regarded as a safe and sane choice – the veteran diplomat or political insider, the beloved activist, the CEO whose mere name inspires business confidence – will often turn out to be the least impressive, sometimes the most disastrous, member of the cabinet.
The rule is named for Paul O’Neill, the Alcoa chairman who was George W. Bush’s first secretary of the treasury, and the most widely admired in the press among Bush’s nominees. O’Neill was welcomed at the Treasury by nearly everyone, admired by most, was reassuring to the right while acceptable to the left, inspired bipartisan fawning at his confirmation hearings, and was confirmed by voice vote. He was also a catastrophe as Treasury secretary. Almost immediately at odds with the White House on tax policy, weak before Congress, thin-skinned, indiscreet, indecisive, and easily distracted, O’Neill injected himself into fights beyond his purview (foreign policy) and lasted a bare two years before being shown the door.
Because of the stark contrast between promise and performance, Paul O’Neill is a particular object lesson in assessing the value of presidential appointees; hence the Rule. He is also notorious for collaborating, almost immediately upon dismissal, with a left-wing journalist on a hostile book about Bush, the man who had entrusted him with high office.
It is possible, of course, that neither the Rule nor the Paradox will apply to the secretaries-designate currently under the Senate microscope. But you never know. Just as presidents swiftly find themselves embroiled in crises they hadn’t anticipated, cabinet secretaries can be full of surprises. Some exceed expectations, and others are worse than your wildest surmise.
