doc_text: According to one writer, "He said no to cabinet secretaries and to congressmen, to journalists and to job-hunters; he said no short and sharp without troubling to be polite about it; and so he would come to be warmly detested on the Hill, in the National Press Club, at Republican National Headquarters and across the country."
  And his improprieties, when they were revealed, shocked the nation and rocked the administration to its very foundations.
  And he wasn't even named John Sununu.
  ; But the rise and fall of Sherman Adams, President Eisenhower's powerful chief-of-staff, is more than an interesting political doppleganger to the travails of his lineal heir, John Sununu.
  The case of Sherman Adams sheds an eerie light on Sununu's rise in the ancient, stony soil of New Hampshire politics.
  It gives us a grip on the origins of the presidential chief of staff, an unofficial position that has come to be a virtual American prime ministership.
  And the course of Sherman Adams' humiliation may even allow us a perspective on the course of John Sununu's struggle for survival and possibly even a way to predict the timing of his ultimate demise.
  ; That Sherman Adams, the first "assistant president" and John Sununu, conceivably the last of the imperial chiefs of staff, were both catapulted from governor of the Granite state into national prominence is not at all coincidental.
  Rather it stems from the strange configuration of American politics and New Hampshire's place in it.
  With its "first-in-the-nation" primary, New Hampshire has historically exerted a pull far in excess of a population still only marginally larger than the city of Detroit.; Sherman Adams had risen in New Hampshire politics of the '30s and '40s because of his organizational abilities and the perception of his incorruptibility.
  ; After graduating from Dartmouth, Adams worked as a logging camp supervisor and eventually rose to become an executive in one of New Hampshire's leading timber companies.
  In 1940, at the behest of his employers, he ran for a seat in the New Hampshire House, eventually becoming governor in 1949.
  ; When he took office, Adams began a program of streamlining and reducing state government that provided a model followed three decades later for another new New Hampshire governor, John Sununu.; In late 1951, New Hampshire was the launching pad for the campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower.; Eisenhower, with Adams' support, defeated the isolationist Sen. Robert Taft in the New Hampshire primary.
  But Eisenhower and Taft ran neck and neck in subsequent state tests and arrived at the Republican Convention in Chicago virtually tied.
  It was then that Eisenhower's top lieutenants came to Adams and asked him to become their candidate's floor manager.;
  The 1952 Republican convention was the last national convention to go beyond one ballot.
  And when Eisenhower did win, he asked Sherman Adams to become his personal campaign manager.; Bush's campaign debt; In a very similar way, three and a half decades later, George Bush paid off a very major campaign debt by appointing Sununu chief of staff.
  Without Sununu, the chances are very good that the current president of the United States would not be named George Bush.;
  In February 1988, a reeling Bush campaign limped into New Hampshire after finishing a near-fatal third in the Iowa caucus.
  But the savvy Sununu, evidencing some of the high arrogance for which he has become justly famous, was not at all downcast.
  "Isn't it great," he reportedly told a puzzled friend about the news in Iowa.
  "Don't you see how much good I'm going to do for the next president of the United States?"; And true to his words, Sununu crafted an attack campaign that painted Bush's chief rival, Bob Dole, as a closet "tax and spend" liberal.
  That ploy, plus a computerized get-out-the-vote campaign, crafted by Sununu on his own spreadsheet program, did the trick, and the rest is history.
  ; Unlike Sherman Adams, John Sununu could not be mistaken for a rock-ribbed Granite Stater.
  Born in Havana, Cuba, the son of an immigrant Lebanese trader and a Greek mother from El Salvador, the stubby, rumpled Sununu liked to refer to himself as a "universal ethnic."; Three degrees from MIT; But an upper middle-class New York upbringing, a brilliant career at military school and three degrees from MIT put the reputed 180 I.Q. Sununu on the fast track.
  In the early '60s, he began building a solid career running the several engineering firms he founded and also became a professor of physics at Tufts University.; Sununu was elected to the New Hampshire Assembly in 1972, and 10 years later became governor of New Hampshire on a conservative campaign theme of nuclear power, increased business and no new taxes.
  ; It was a propitious era to be governor of New Hampshire.
  The state was coming out of the '82 recession and beginning a six-year boom that pumped enough revenue into the coffers to build a new state hospital and prison and still have money left over to give state employees raises.
  According to Concord Monitor editor Mike Pride, "Sununu did well; he fell into an easy time to be governor."; Sununu was re-elected twice and gained a reputation as an activist governor.; He also developed a propensity for the excesses that would prove so costly in Washington.
  Eschewing the mansion in Concord, Sununu chose to live an hour away from the capitol and be chauffeured to and from every day.
  The Wall Street Journal noted that Sununu "became an extremely powerful figure in a state where the powers of governor are not great."; More or less the same thing could have been said about Sherman Adams when he gave up the New Hampshire governorship to become Dwight Eisenhower's "assistant president" in 1953.
  ; The reason for Adams' enormous power lay in the nature of the Eisenhower presidency.
  Continuing the staff system that had proven itself during the war, Adams noted that "Eisenhower simply expected me to manage a staff that would boil down, simplify and expedite the urgent business that had to be brought to his attention."
  It also meant that Adams would decide who and what crossed the president's threshold.
  This power as the presidential gatekeeper has characterized the chief-of-staff position ever since.; Adams managed to keep the Eisenhower administration on a more or less even keel through the worst of the McCarthy outrages, through Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955, the Suez crises in 1956, the Little Rock school integration crimes in 1957 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1958.; According to Eisenhower, Adams was successful because "From our first meeting in 1952, Sherman Adams seemed to me best described as laconic, abrupt, businesslike and puritanically honest."
  Adams was the shining example that Republicans could hold up that they had done something about their 1952 campaign slogan to "clean up the mess in Washington."; Thus, the spring 1958 revelations that Adams had for years enjoyed free hotel accommodations and accepted the now legendary vicuna coat and an expensive rug from an unsavory New England industrialist named Bernard Goldfine, while at the same time interceding with regulatory agencies on Goldfine's behalf, came as a major shock.;
  Adams waged a vigorous and seemingly successful defense before a congressional committee, asserting that his worse crime had been "a mistake of judgment, not of intent."; And there things stood throughout the summer of 1958, with a somewhat tarnished Adams carrying out the role he had defined over the previous six years.
  When pressed about Adams, the president insisted that he was his "right-hand man . . .
  the only man who really understands what I am trying to do."
  And when really pressed about why he kept Adams on, Eisenhower wailed at a press conference, "I need him."; In 1958, an Eisenhower administration without Sherman Adams was unthinkable.
  Certainly more unthinkable than a Bush administration without John Sununu.
  But as the summer of '58 progressed, it became clear that Adams was becoming an issue that could help the Democrats.
  So when, in September 1958, Republicans were badly beaten in elections in Maine, and campaign contributions began to dry up, the pressure on Eisenhower to do something grew enormous.
  But Eisenhower refused to personally fire his aide.
  Instead, he delegated Vice President Nixon and the chair of the Republican Party to visit Adams.;
  Ever the good soldier, Adams finally listened, and in late September quit.
  The gesture was largely futile.
  The year 1958 was the beginning of the Democratic renaissance that led to the election of John Kennedy in 1960.; Today, as Vice President Dan Quayle could tell you, John Sununu is no Sherman Adams.
  Sununu is as brash as Adams was self-effacing and far more self-serving than Adams at his vicuna-coat worst.
  Nevertheless, the continuing flap over Sununu's excesses and arrogance seem to mirror a transgenerational anger at a public official who flaunted the Washington establishment, who has made too many enemies trying too hard, and enjoying too much, being the bad cop to the president's good.;
  And even if a controversial Supreme Court nomination has temporarily taken the spotlight off of Sununu, the current chief of staff ought to ponder well next year's coming election.
  He might question if his strange, parochial antics may just provide the kind of ammunition in 1992 that the similarly alien behavior of Sherman Adams did 34 years before.
  Ammunition that his own party will use to get rid of him in time for an upcoming election if not before.
  (box)
summary_text: Embattled Chief of Staff John Sununu might consider the case of another former Governor of New Hampshire who held the same White House job.
  Sherman Adams was described as "laconic, abrupt, businesslike and puritanically honest."
  But in the spring of 1958 it came to light that Adams had accepted gifts from an unsavory New England industrialist and had interceded with regulatory agencies on the industrialist's behalf.
  When it became clear that Adams was becoming an issue that could help the Democrats in the elections that fall, Eisenhower sent Vice President Nixon and the Republican National Chairman to visit Adams.
  In late September Adams resigned.