Nobody knows more about the duties, the difficulties, and the strategies of staffing and working in the White House than Brad Patterson. In To Serve the President, Patterson combines insider access, decades of Washington experience, and an inimitable style to open a window onto closely guarded Oval Office turf. The fascinating and entertaining result is the most complete look ever at the White House and the people that make it work. Patterson describes what he considers to be the whole White House staff, a larger and more inclusive picture than the one painted by most analysts. In addition to nearly one hundred policy offices, he draws the curtain back from less visible components such as the Executive Residence staff, Air Force One and Marine One, the First Lady's staff, Camp David, and many others—135 separate offices in all, pulling together under often stressful and intense conditions. This authoritative and readable account lays out the organizational structure of the full White House and fills it out the outline with details both large and small. Who are these people? What exactly do they do? And what role do they play in running the nation? Another exciting feature of To Serve the President is Patterson's revelation of the total size and total cost of the contemporary White House—information that simply is not available anywhere else. This is not a kiss-and-tell tale or an incendiary exposé. Brad Patterson is an accomplished public administrator with an intimate knowledge of how the White House really works, and he brings to this book a refreshingly positive view of government and public service not currently in vogue. The U.S. government is not a monolith, or a machine, or a shadowy cabal; above all, it is people, human beings doing the best they can, under challenging conditions, to produce a better life for their fellow citizens. While there are bad apples in every bunch, the vast majority

Established in 1939, the Executive Office of the President (EOP) consists of a group of federal agencies immediately serving the President. Among the oldest of these are the White House Office, where many of the President's personal assistants are located, and the Office of Management and Budget, which was established as the Bureau of the Budget in 1921 and by transfer became one of the original EOP units in 1939. Entities have been placed within the EOP by both presidential action and congressional determination. Some components have endured; others have been brief experiments. Some have been transferred to other quarters of the executive branch; others have been abolished with no successor. In large measure, the tenure and durability of an Executive Office agency is dependent upon its usefulness to the President -- as a managerial or coordinative auxiliary, a national symbol, or a haven of political patronage, among other considerations. This report reviews the particular circumstances of the creation of, and underlying authority for, the Executive Office of the President, and provides profiles of the entities that have been, and still are, located within that enclave.