Channels, Fall 2018

Page 84 Schwall • 21 st Century Javelin Catchers viewed his most important role as managing the president's time wisely. According to one journalist, Card fulfilled his role as administrator and guardian with a "unique mix of politeness and well-timed bluntness" that “lubricated the Bush operation with big doses of courtesy and candor, high expectations, and humility" (Kieferand and McLaughlin, 2001). Summary and Departure. In March 2006, Bush was beginning to hear complaints about White House dysfunction. Over lunch in early 2006, a close confidant pulled out a pen and a napkin and sketched the organizational system of the White House. Bush writes in his memoir (2010), "It was a tangled mess, with lines of authority crossing and blurred...He told me that several people had spontaneously used the same unflattering term: It started with 'cluster' and ended with four more letters." After this conversation, Bush believed it was time for a change in COS. On April 14, 2006, Andrew Card stepped down as White House COS, having served in the position for almost five years and three months, the longest any COS has served to date. Joshua Bolten as COS Choosing Bolten. As a replacement to Andrew Card, Bush chose his Office of Management and Budget director, Joshua Bolten. Previously, Bolten served as the deputy COS for policy under departing COS Andy Card from 2001 to 2003. Office of COS under Bolten. Immediately after Bolten's appointment as COS, he began to construct a stronger staff hierarchy. Card's organizational structure drew criticism after Karl Rove was reported to be playing a large advisor role in the president's foreign policy decisions, including forming and chairing the internal White House working group, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). WHIG's main responsibility was to develop a strategy " for publicizing the White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States." This working group was little known until early 2004, and when made public, drew intense criticism for Rove's handling of potentially classified information about the Iraq War (Arena, 2004). He solidified Karl Rove's position and provided boundaries by appointing him as deputy COS for policy, placing Rove directly under Bolten's command in staff hierarchy. Similar to Card, Bolten placed the most focus on his role of administrator, but unlike Card, he placed slightly more emphasis on his role as advisor, particularly as it related to national security and the burgeoning Iraq War. As administrator, Bolten restructured White House staff and advised President Bush on cabinet departures. In the midst of the Iraq War, Bolten believed that Bush was not being provided with enough diversity in opinion and undertook his role as advisor to share his viewpoint with President Bush himself. He explains: "I took it as one of my roles as chief of staff to say, 'I am the new guy here—but this looks very bad to me. I told the president I thought his apparatus was not serving him as well as it should, because he wasn't being given alternatives... I viewed it as my job as chief of staff to be the one to say, "Why aren't you giving the president better options?" Summary and Departure. Bolten served until the end of the Bush administration in 2009. His tenure in the White House brought much-needed organization that had begun to wane under Andy Card. Further, Bolten was effective in countering some of Bush's personal weaknesses by providing a structured open-door policy that helped to counter the weakness inherent to Bush's closed-door, CEO-style organization that tended to alienate