The days when presidential Cabinets contained the likes of Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, or Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury, are long since gone (and those early Cabinets displayed a fractiousness that no modern president would be likely to tolerate), though Cabinet officers retain symbols of office—from flags to drivers to, in some cases, chefs—befitting grander figures. The lingering public image of Cabinet meetings as the scene of important action is largely a myth. “They are not meetings where policy is determined or decisions are made,” the late Nicholas Katzenbach, who served Lyndon Johnson as attorney general, recalled in his memoirs. Nevertheless, Katzenbach attended them faithfully, “not because they were particularly interesting or important, but simply because”—remembering L.B.J.’s awful relationship with the previous attorney general, Bobby Kennedy—“I did not want the president to feel I was not on his team.” Even as recently as the 1930s, Cabinet figures such as Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and Postmaster General James A. Farley were important advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt (and, in the cases of Perkins and Ickes, priceless diarists and chroniclers) in areas beyond their lanes of departmental responsibility, just as Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s all-purpose sounding board and McNamara provided J.F.K. with advice on business and economics well outside his purview at the Pentagon. “Cabinet posts are great posts,” says Dan Glickman, who was Bill Clinton’s agriculture secretary. “But you realize that the days of Harry Hopkins and others who were in the Cabinet and were key advisers to the president—that really isn’t true anymore.” “In the case of Clinton,” Glickman went on, “it was a joy to work for him, because, in large part, he gave each of us lots of discretion. He said, ‘If it’s bad news, don’t call me. If it’s good news, call me. If it’s exceptionally good news, call me quicker.’ ” The way Cabinet officers relate personally to the president is—no surprise—often the crucial factor in their success or failure. Colin Powell had a worldwide profile and a higher approval rating than George W. Bush, and partly for those very reasons had trouble building a close rapport with a president who had lots to be modest about. Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, may have a Nobel Prize in physics, but that counted for little when he once tried to make a too elaborate visual presentation to the president. Obama said to him after the third slide, as one witness recalls, “O.K., I got it. I’m done, Steve. Turn it off.” Attorney General Eric Holder has been particularly long-suffering, although he and his wife, Dr. Sharon Malone, are socially close to the Obamas. Set aside the controversy that surrounded his failure, as deputy attorney general at the end of the Clinton administration, to oppose a pardon for Marc Rich, the fugitive financier whose ex-wife was a Clinton donor. Holder, the first black attorney general, has taken a political beating more recently for musing that the country is a “nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race, and for following through on what seemed to be the president’s own wishes on such matters as proposing to try the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in an American courtroom (in the middle of Manhattan, no less). The sharp growth in the White House staff in the years since World War II has also meant that policy functions once reserved for Cabinet officers are now performed by top aides inside the White House itself. Obama meets regularly and privately with Tim Geithner and Hillary Clinton, but almost certainly sees his national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, and his economic adviser, Gene Sperling, even more often. The relentless media cycle now moves so swiftly that any president, even one less inclined toward centralized discipline than Obama, might naturally rely on the White House’s quick-on-the-draw internal-messaging machine instead of bucking things through the bureaucratic channels of the executive departments. In dealing with a Cabinet, as with life itself, there is no substitute for experience. Clinton-administration veterans told me that their boss made better, fuller use of the Cabinet in his second term than he did in his first, when officials such as Les Aspin at the Pentagon and Warren Christopher at the State Department sometimes struggled to build a cohesive team. Lincoln’s choice of William H. Seward at State, Salmon P. Chase at Treasury, and Edward Bates as attorney general were far from universally applauded. “The construction of a Cabinet,” one editorial admonished at the time, “like the courting of a shrewd girl, belongs to a branch of the fine arts with which the new Executive is not acquainted.” Lincoln’s Cabinet did solve one political problem but it created others—Lincoln had to fight not one but two civil wars.

The larger truth is that modern presidents, with a few exceptions, don’t need, and don’t use, Cabinet members as privy councillors on the most important questions. They have other people for that. Presidents do need competent, even if anonymous, executives to run the vast machinery of the federal government, but most Cabinet secretaries don’t really do that either—at least not in the classic C.E.O. sense—leaving such work to their deputies and the professional civil-service staffs. In fact, experience has shown, it is hard for modern presidents to attract private-sector C.E.O.’s to serve in the Cabinet because of the financial and personal sacrifices required. Hank Paulson, George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, once told me that if he’d known how arduous the confirmation would be for his own non-controversial appointment to the post he would never have left Goldman Sachs. The Cabinet these days amounts to a kind of demographically balanced assembly of team mascots, with increasingly ill-defined roles. The Constitution stipulates only that the president “may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices.” Maybe Obama should ask for an occasional postcard and leave it at that.