The President's Call: Executive Leadership From FDR to George Bush (8 page)

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Authors: Judith E. Michaels

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managing the news. He was the first president to put political people in charge of agencies' public affairs departments. Under the tutelage of media wizard and political image-maker Roger Ailes, Nixon cut back the number of press conferences, holding only twenty-eight his entire first term. He also staged White House briefings and a series of prime-time television appearances; fourteen in his first nineteen months in office, as compared to Kennedy's four (Hess 1988, 122).
To deal with the Congress, he attacked the Senate as being anti-Southern for its rejection of two of his Supreme Court nominees, G. Harrold Carlswell and Clement Haynsworth. He then basically ignored the Congress and concentrated on his administrative strategy (ibid., 123). As Nathan describes it,
The "traditional legislative strategy" of governing was abandoned and a "fundamentally different approach" was adopted. The new strategy . . . would be designed "to
take over
the bureaucracy and
take on
Congress." This would be accomplished . . . by placing Nixon's "own trusted appointees in positions to manage directly key elements of the bureaucracy . . . The new appointees would be the President's men. The bureaucracy would report to them; they would be held accountable." (Cole and Caputo 1979, 400-01)
The first step was to remove the independent power base of cabinet officials. In the process, the cabinet itself receded into grayness. With the full deployment of the Nixon strategy,
No longer would the cabinet be composed of men with national standing in their own right. . . . The president's mentrusted lieutenants, tied closely to Richard Nixon and without national reputations of their ownwere to be placed in direct charge of the major program bureaucracies of domestic government. (Nathan 1975, 7-8)
Nixon's administrative strategy beyond the cabinet was two-pronged: it involved taking more control over both subcabinet political appointments and the career civil service. Initially, the White House had given cabinet members responsibility for selection of their subordinates, telling them they should choose subordinates on the basis of ability first and loyalty second. However, this changed in late 1970 when Frederick V. Malek, former deputy undersecretary of HEW, joined the administration as associate director of OMB. His "forte at HEW had been the removal and Siberian placement of troublesome officials" and their replacement by more
 
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compliant ones. His function at the White House was no different. Under his direction "the White House role in the selection and approval of key agency officials would be much stronger. . . . By the end of Richard Nixon's first term, the original strong cabinet model had been fully displaced" (ibid., 50-51).
Control extended to performance in new ways, as well. Malek took to visiting agencies to assess personally how PASs were doing. He had "points of contact" within many of the agencies to deal with recruiting and serve as liaisons with his office. "Later, to further solidify his grip on the bureaucracy, Nixon loyalists were strategically planted in departments and agencies as overseers of administration policy" (Bonafede 1987a, 40-41).
At the same time the White House was moving to exert more control over political appointments in the agencies, OMB was being strengthened and politicized, and Ehrlichman's White House counterbureaucracy for domestic affairs was being established. The White House intended to get deeply into the operational workings of the agencies. One result of this centralizing strategy was an overload at the White House. To deal with it, Nixon turned increasingly to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who operated in the hierarchical manner that further contributed to the president's isolation.
Then, immediately after his reelection, Nixon turned on his own cabinet. In what Hess calls "perhaps the most remarkable statement ever made by a president who has just been re-elected," Nixon declared that he had lost confidence in the people he had called to serve him and that a major overhaul of the government was imminent. "Having realized the failure of his counter-bureaucracy, he nonetheless did not blame himself or his practice of isolation and remote-control government, but instead chose a strategy of massive restructuring and personnel shuffling" (Hess 1988, 126).
First, he demanded the pro forma resignation of his entire cabinet. Next, just before Christmas 1972, Nixon "announced 57 resignations and 87 other personnel decisions." As a "technique for prolonging the vitality of political appointees," the reorganization might have made some sense, but many agencies suffered from the loss or transfer of appointees, some of whom had only recently come on board, only to be moved elsewhere. Cabinet tenure also suffered. "From 1933 to 1965 the median length of service for cabinet officials was 40 months; during Nixon's presidency it dropped to 18" (ibid., 126-27). Thus began a trend from which cabinet tenure never recovered.
At the same time he fired his cabinet, Nixon unveiled a new and-
 
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grandiose "supercabinet" structure. It basically consisted of two tiers of policy makers perched at the peak of the White House: on the upper tiers were five presidential assistants, each with a special area of responsibility, and below them three cabinet secretaries who were made responsible for coordinating interagency affairs and given the additional title of counselor. (Bonafede 1987a, 41-42)
However, the brouhaha over the Watergate break-in and cover-up and the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman on April 30, 1973, effectively derailed the supercabinet plan (ibid.).
Deeply conflicted regarding the federal bureaucracy, the Nixon White House thought it a principal and often hostile obstacle and at the same time a "potentially powerful political resource" (Cole and Caputo 1979, 400). But unlike the Eisenhower administration, which came into office blaming the bureaucracy for "the mess in Washington" but eventually developed a suitable working relationship with it, the Nixon administration never did reach an accommodation with the bureaucracy. On the contrary, Nixon's distrust "hardened to the point where unprecedented reorganizational steps were planned for the second term to take control of the machinery of domestic government" (Nathan 1975, 82).
Fred Malek was a crucial ingredient in this hardening process. His dislike of the federal bureaucracy was phrased with notable lack of restraint:
Because of the rape of the career civil service left by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations . . . this administration has been left a legacy of finding disloyalty and obstruction at high levels while those incumbents rest comfortably on career civil service status. Political disloyalty and insimpatico relationships with the administration, unfortunately, are not grounds for the removal or suspension of an employee. (Aberbach 1991, 226)
While Watergate undercut Nixon's dreams of controlling the bureaucracy, his efforts were not in vain. Gaining early training in bureaucrat bashing under Fred Malek was E. Pendleton James, later to head Ronald Reagan's preinaugural talent search and become his assistant for personnel. Malek's credo, "You cannot achieve management, policy, or program control unless you have established political control" would live on in the Reagan administrations. "The Nixon experience, then, was more than just a historical aberration. It was a school for many who followed; its lessons were assimilated and applied with telling effect in the Reagan period" (Aberbach 1991, 225).
Thanks to Malek, Nixon was largely successful in his attempts to ex-

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