President-elect reaches out to former rivals

Michael Nelson, in his "Guide to the Presidency," noted that Jimmy Carter promised: "There will never be an instance while I am in office where the members of the White House staff dominate or act in a superior position to the members of the Cabinet."

That didn't last long. Carter met weekly with his Cabinet in his first year, every two weeks in his second, monthly in his third and only sporadically in his fourth, Nelson calculated, tracing a typical pattern of good intentions lost in the wind.

Walter Hickel, Nixon's interior secretary, thought the president valued his contrary views "because, to me, an adversary in an organization is a valuable asset." Not to Nixon.

Hickel came to realize Nixon "considered an adversary an enemy." The two particularly disagreed over the Alaskan pipeline — the secretary wanted to protect wilderness lands coveted by the oil companies.

During one testy meeting, he asked Nixon whether he should leave his administration. "He jumped from his chair, very hurried and agitated," Hickel recalled. "He said, 'That's one option we hadn't considered.'" A week later, Hickel was fired.

True team of rivals
Goodwin says a true team of rivals is exceptionally difficult to make work in these days of hyperpartisanship, scandal-hungry blogs and raw feelings between parties and factions of the same party from the often nasty campaign. Disharmony in Lincoln's Cabinet was largely kept inside the meetings, exposed years later in memoirs, and that's not how the world works anymore.

Still, she said the even-keeled Obama displayed a temperament in the campaign that could help him pull it off.

"And I believe the country would respond with great enthusiasm, recognizing the great contrast to recent times."

Obama invited dissent in his election night victory speech, promising, "I will listen to you, especially when we disagree."

It remains to be seen whether he wants naysaying of the kind delivered by Stanton, who served as Democrat James Buchanan's attorney general in one of the few instances in history when a Cabinet member from one party has gone on to serve a president of the other party in the succeeding administration.

"You are sleeping on a volcano," he warned Buchanan in the lead-up to the Civil War. Without prompt action, "you will be the last president of the United States."

He was no yes-man.

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