Barack Obama's friendly-fire problem

I called George Edwards, a presidential historian at Texas A&M University, to check whether the more recent instances just seemed more common, or represent a new trend. He said the willingness to speak about differences with a president while he was still in office was unusual—and all the more peculiar since Gates, Panetta, and Clinton seem to have broad agreement with Obama on many topics and like him personally; there’s no animosity. Unlike Reich, they weren’t marginalized.

There is some historical precedent, Edwards noted, usually when the part is actively seeking their own office. Teddy Roosevelt ran against his own hand-picked successor in 1912. Postmaster General Jim Farley broke with Franklin Roosevelt when FDR ran for a third term in 1940—claiming a Democratic nomination that Farley desired. Wally Hickel broke with Nixon in 1970, but he was still the secretary of interior at the time; former Attorney General Robert Kennedy assailed Lyndon Johnson during the 1968 presidential run, though he was by then a senator.

So why the shift? There’s probably no one theory that explains it all. Glenn Thrush reported in 2013 that Obama seemed never to take much of his Cabinet all that seriously, and didn’t make many efforts to keep them happy and feeling valued. Bush, by contrast, made loyalty the paramount value of his White House. It’s easy to see how the two approaches could have different outcomes. Or maybe it’s just about the faster pace of media and life, and an unwillingness by former secretaries with strong views to let those views go unaired during a key moment.