Speed Explainer:How Fast things work
Brought To You By The BlackBerry Bold
Rapid DeparturesWho has left the Cabinet in a hurry?
Posted Friday, Dec. 12, 2008
We are currently in the midst of that quadrennial, post-election horserace known as Cabinet selection. Some officials last awhile--Condoleeza Rice, for example, has served in every day of the Bush administration, first as national security advisor, then as secretary of state. Others...not so much. Which Cabinet-level horses have departed with the greatest speed?
Those serving recess appointments, in which an outgoing president appoints a placeholder until the incoming president's nominee is confirmed, have lasted by far the shortest amounts of time. For example, President Lyndon B. Johnson's final Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Wood, lasted all of two weeks in the job before being replaced by President Richard M. Nixon's choice, George Romney (father of Mitt); President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, Jr., served in that position for just under two weeks in 2001 while the U.S. Senate confirmed John Ashcroft.
Other than recess appointments, even duds tend to last at least a year, simply because the rapid departure of a Cabinet secretary makes the president look bad, and there is therefore inherent worth to letting poor fits stay in their jobs anyway.
Frequently, officials who served short tenures were appointed at the beginning of a president's term, before sources of tension could be revealed to all involved. Les Aspin, President Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Defense, lasted just over a year. Al Haig, President Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State, lasted under a year-and-a-half, during which time he attempted to manage crises in the Falklands and Beirut. On the other hand, when Robert Finch left his post as Nixon's first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1970, only 17 months after being appointed, it was not due to tensions: Finch, a longtime ally of Nixon's, subsequently joined the White House staff.
Finch, incidentally, was replaced at HEW by Elliot Richardson. After serving out the remainder of Nixon's first term and putting in four months as the first Secretary of Defense of Nixon's second term, Richardson positively sprinted out of the Cabinet only five months after being named its Attorney General: he was fired as a part of the notorious, Watergate-related "Saturday Night Massacre" of October 1973.
Perhaps the most ignominious set of Cabinet departures have taken place in the Department of the Interior. Walter Hickel, Nixon's first Interior Secretary, lasted under two years before his opposition to U.S. military activity in Cambodia was made public, in 1970, and he was forced out. Only a few years later, in October 1975, Stanley Hathaway left his job of running the Interior Department under President Gerald R. Ford only six months after having been nominated and four after having been confirmed. The rumored cause? A nervous breakdown.
Explainer thanks Professors James Pfiffner of George Mason University and G. Calvin Mackenzie of Colby College.
