ABSTRACT
On January 20, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general who led the Western Allies to victory against Nazi Germany in World War II, took the oath of office as president of the United States. A few hours later, he was handed a sealed envelope. According to Eisenhower biographer Geoffrey Perret (1999), “Eisenhower was annoyed.” He told the man who gave him the envelope, “Never bring me a sealed envelope again.” Perret wrote that this sealed envelope was “concrete proof of something he already believed—that this place [the White House] was badly organized, badly run. Hundreds of letters addressed to him arrived each day. Just opening them would have been a chore. More than that, though, they had to be screened so that only those that he had to read, whether to conduct government business or to keep old friendships in good repair, were placed before him.” To deal with the problem that was symbolized by the sealed envelope, Eisenhower adopted a variant of the system—the general staff system—that was pioneered and perfected by the Germans whose army he had so recently defeated. (To be completely honest, Eisenhower's forces only confronted about a quarter of the German Army; the rest were defeated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union.) President Eisenhower's variant of a German invention is the beginning of the widespread use of the civilian chief-of-staff system that has since been so widely copied by governments at all levels.
