Reagan's Advice Squad
JudeWanniski
"Reagan's Advice Squad" himself with the aging lions of the American Left. Twenty years ago, Aaron interviewed or corresponded with almost all of them in the process of writing a large book called Writers on the Left,...
...The SCC finally awards State to Donald Rumsfeld, who almost made it as Reagan's running mate...
...Surely Lyn Nofziger will be press secretary...
...Grace & Co...
...At CIA, he's an entrepreneur, rebuilding the nation's intelligence capability...
...9. Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers: The SCC debate raged between those who said Arthur Laffer should have the job and those who said he should THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 19 not have the job, on the grounds that he would be too controversial...
...Like Simon and the World Bank, anywhere else Connally is a retread...
...He and Max Fisher, the Detroit industrialist, threw Reagan's biggest fundraiser during the primaries, in Fisher's home town...
...Who can judge of it?--who can say...
...The international bureaucrats are so worried that Reagan will be elected and Simon appointed that there is talk of filling the chair with a non-American this time...
...Senator Paul Laxalt, Reagan's campaign chairman, stayed at Agee's house during the GOP convention, and Reagan himself spent a day at the house practicing his acceptance speech...
...Last year, the IPAA drafted him to come back as president on the argument that the industry and nation were so imperiled that they needed the best man...
...And he'd probably love to be Secretary of Energy...
...In subsequent meetings, and over the telephone grapeTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 17 vine, the list goes through several transformations...
...Representative Manuel Luhan of New Mexico, second-ranking Republican on House Interior Committee, Hispanic-American from a public-lands state...
...Reagan not only has a colossal mandate, which makes the idea of government service exciting again, but he has also made it clear that he expects to be a 9-to-5 president...
...a00i00i60OIOoiO00I0BoiO00600ia060DOOIi0i00QOiO0iiQi0QiOoio~Di0i00QD000O0i0Oi00~OI000ioi00QOiiOi0io00Bii0iQo9o0QiiQi00~iiii0iiiiiiO~DQiii J u d e Wanniski REAGAN'S ADVICE SQUAD Fourteen people who should lead the countryma missive to P r e s i d e n t Reagan...
...Secretary of Labor: Old Nixon bands, like Melvin Laird, are promoting Nixon's first Labor Secretary, George Shultz, as Secretary of State...
...The Lehrman Institute in upper Manhattan has provided the only forum for classical ideas in the last decade...
...The GOP is in Fat City...
...The SCC also assumed that importam White House jobs were not subject to influence by "outsiders...
...In a year's time, Simon would find himself in an uncharacteristic position, a popular hero, with William Simon statues eventually sprouting over the developing world...
...If he can be enticed to Washington, the Shadow Cabinet Committee believes he would be ideal...
...He was in the original Bush "kitchen cabinet," and supported Bush through the primaries...
...The Old Guard is pushing Charles Walker, Treasury Undersecretary in the Nixon administration, a fair choice...
...He's not going to stick around to "wash the dishes," he says, which suggests that his team will be given a good deal of power and responsibility...
...The official Reagan task force on the Cabinet, composed entirely of men who read Business Week, is also meeting, in Washington, D.C...
...There are about 2,500 subcabinet jobs that should be turned over as a result of the Reagan landslide...
...Shuhz does have a brilliant protege, though, whom Reagan might draft into Shultz's old job: Kenneth Dam of the University of Chicago Law School...
...What about Health and ttuman Services, HUD, Education, and Transportation...
...Agee, originally from Idaho, has been on social terms with several of the Reagan inner circle for years...
...The Committee is composed solely of men and women who Jude V/anniski is the author of The Way the World Works: How Economies Fail-and Succeed...
...He was president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America from 1973 to 1975...
...This is not going to be an easy task...
...Agee's credentials for OMB are perfect...
...we had better leave it alone...
...Reagan's foreign-policy advisers think Rumsfeld was the best Defense Secretary the nation has had in their memory, and would love to see him back at the Pentagon...
...The Institute has, through its myriad seminars on global public policy, exposed Lehrman to the leading academic, political, banking, and business figures of the world...
...The Old Guard would put Simon in the Pentagon, a nonsensical spot for a fellow who has made his mark in finance...
...The exercise is theoretical, aimed at producing the best possible Reagan Cabinet...
...A a r o n ' s seeming lack of bias actually produces a biased view of the 30s," Phillips pointed out, " t h e bias coming from the assumption that something called the 'record' is identical with the history...
...One of Reagan's closest advisers on energy, Michael Halbouty of Houston, enjoys an international reputation as a geologist and as a wildcatter...
...He understands the importance of international economics and would complement Simon at World Bank...
...He understands global markets and incentives, and at age 67 seems eager for an assignment to help Save Western Civilization...
...There were plenty of names kicking around the Shadow Cabinet Committee, but it could not really get excited about filling these slots because they will inevitably be filled by "fresh faces" and not retreads...
...If the nation's 12,000 independent oil and gas producers could have their pick, they would choose Charles John Miller, 48, of AUegan, Michigan...
...From that defeatist tilt, policy inevitably becomes defensive, "lightening the load" by discarding the lowest priorities, radiating weakness rather than vitality...
...Washington is in a dither...
...Carter himself has really run it since Bert Lance was purged...
...It's no easy job putting together a Government...
...The word is they like each other, which is not surprising in that their temperaments are almost identical...
...8. UN Ambassador: Margaret Bush Wilson, chairman of the NAACP, is quoted by Ronala Reagan in many of his speeches...
...Plenty...
...Finally, several positions are left open, lacking suff• consensus in the Shadow group, which is actually composed of about 25 people...
...The potential for war, revolution, famine, terror, and Communist takeovers is enormous...
...To assist President-elect Reagan in the employment process, the Shadow Cabinet Committee has convened once again in a midtown Manhattan Italian restaurant to review its deliberations...
...Surely Edwin Meese III will be Reagan's chief of staff...
...His appointment would immediately soothe American allies in Europe, who wonder if Reagan is really "trigger happy...
...Eggheads, journalists, polemicists, and a smattering of radical-conservative (supply-side) businessmen are in attendance...
...The Shadow Cabinet Committee disagrees...
...Even Martin Anderson, Reagan's chief economic adviser in the campaign, would endorse Sowell, who has Laffer's assets and none of his professional scars...
...Dam was director of the Council on Economic Policy in the Nixon White House, knows his way around, is brainy, charming, and diplomatic-just the fellow to entertain Lane Kirkland while slashing the Labor Department's bloated budget...
...If there were two Hannafords, the SCC would make one Director of Internal Revenue and one Director of (;ommunications...
...He skyrocketed to the top of Corporate America before his fortieth birthday, at Boise Cascade and Bendix, with finance as his strongest suit...
...But since he left DOD, Rumsfeld, 48, has spent three years running a multinational pharmaceutical company, G.D...
...Twenty years ago, Aaron interviewed or corresponded with almost all of them in the process of writing a large book called Writers on the Left, and he apparently was so awed by the experience that he has never been able to criticize them...
...In a Reagan administration, the director would amount to being the assistant President...
...but he can't get over his idea that American domestic problems are caused by foreigners...
...Sowell, a Reagan adviser, helped him write his Urban League speech in early August...
...There is also abundant SCC support for Robert Bork of Yale as Attorney General...
...Now, to put together a government, an executive staff, and a Cabinet...
...The Cabinet also benefits by including a Democratic "regular," a respected member of Congress, who provides a conduit of information and ideas to and from Democratic and congressional sources...
...Sooner or later, it is expected he will seek elective office, perhaps the governorship in 1982...
...This is the most powerful domestic position, however...
...Both proposed record budgets and deficits...
...Some on the SCC suggest Alexander Haig, but Haig has little grasp of global economics and commerce...
...From almost a standing start in 1963, he built what Morgan Stanley & Co...
...As an alternative: John Connally as President of the World Bank, William Simon at CIA...
...Robert McNamara retires next March, leaving behind him a Third World buried in debt, perhaps $300 billion owed to Western banks...
...The Shadow Cabinet Committee contemplated forming a Shadow Subcabinet Subcommittee, but the above exercise was so exhausting that a motion was made to adjourn for drinks...
...10 Attorney General: Laurence Silberman, former Labor Undersecretary, former Deputy Attorney General, former Ambassador to Yugoslavia, now 44-yearold general counsel to Crocker Bank in San Francisco, one of the Reagan near-inner circle...
...Searle & Co., which does business in half the countries in the world...
...Surely the job of National Security Advisor will be scaled down, as suggested by Richard V. Allen, to restore the pre-eminence of the Secretary of State, and the job would be filled by a lesser light than Allen...
...But he also needs a Pillar of the Establishment, who will be able to sell Reagan's ambitious fiscal and monetary reforms, here and abroad...
...This is why the Shadow Cabinet Committee formed in early August, beginning its meetings at an apartment on Central Park South...
...But he has the brass to stand up to the elites until the reforms can work to benefit the grassroots...
...What else...
...Secretary of the Interior...
...Yet they signed the bills that created the EPA, OSHA, National Highway Safety Administration, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Energy Administration (now DOE), and others...
...For the last four years, Jimmy Carter has been the whole government, and each of the senior slots has been worth about as much as John Nance Garner's pitcher of warm spit...
...Senator Sam Nunn, Georgia Democrat and a younger man, also has broad support for this job...
...He's written and spoken of the need for developing " s t r a t e g i c budget planning" at the federal level and he has schooled himself on the intricacies of the public and private pension laws and Social Security System...
...1. President of the World Bank: This is the most important selection Reagan will have to make...
...If Malcolm Cowley says he has tried to write about the 1930s as candidly as he could, what right does a mere reviewer have to say that he has not...
...But the SCC's Cabinet already has a Nixc, man, at the World Bank, and a Nixon-Ford man, at State...
...The Congress is still in Democratic numerical control, but by the Republicans' picking up seven seats in the Senate and 47 seats in the House, Reagan has effective control for his legislative agenda...
...The right man is Lewis E. Lehrman, 42, one of the best entrepreneur/financiers the country has every produced...
...The former propose Harry Rowen of the Stanford Business School, former president of Rand, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, former deputy director of OMB, a first-rate economist who has devoted much of his time in recent years to energy problems...
...He is, in addition, a Republican partisan, chairman of the New York State GOP economic policy committee...
...If there is an Anderson on the CEA, it will be his wife, Annalise, who professes classical macroeconomics at Stanford and does it well...
...4. Secretary of Treasury: Reagan's administration will fail without exactly the right Treasury Secretary...
...His hero is Jacques Rueff, President De Gaulle's legendary finance minister, and he is personally publishing Rueff's collected works in both English and French, which he speaks fluently...
...Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were perceived by the business community as pro-business Presidents," he writes...
...She's not only quotable, she's one of the smartest political women in the world, in the Margaret Thatcher class...
...Louis lawyer by profession, would strengthen the Cabinet by providing both access and assurance to black Americans, and also adding a first-class political mind...
...Few of the original names survive, as more people are drawn into the exercise and come up with superior "nominations...
...Thus, Rumsfeld's planetary travels now include commercial as well as diplomatic (NATO Ambassador) and military purposes...
...The reason for rushing into print with such early speculation is, of course, to influence the selection process...
...The official group will suggest Big, Important names, perhaps recommending one another for choice assignments...
...A Nebraskan...
...In the last decade, Scoop Jackson has spent 90 percent of his considerable intelligence on national defense, and his influence reflects that commitment...
...He was the first Fortune 500 chief outside California to endorse Reagan, when everyone else was going for Connally or Bush...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980...
...Nixon imposed peacetime wage and price controls...
...He's brisk and relentless, the kind of fellow who gets to the heart of the matter (Cabinet meetings would end in time for Reagan to get his afternoon nap...
...Lehrman belongs at Treasury, to keep the Treasury bureaucrats from chiseling down Reagan's economic programs and then to guide them through Congress...
...Secretary of Agriculture: Clayton Yeutter, undersecretary to Earl Butz, now a Reagan adviser...
...Its list will lean heavily toward former employees of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, which means no person under 50 years of age will be considered...
...read The American Spectator...
...She's fascinated by Reagan's economic program, the private sector, and supply-side ideas in general...
...The Old Guard would install John Connally at State, because he radiates vitality...
...One of the few Big Businessmen who ardently advocates econothic policies to encourage the entrepreneur...
...Ford extended controls on energy...
...There is broad agreement that the best man for the job is William Simon, especially after Hobart Rowan of the Washington Post declared Simon to be the "worst possible choice...
...The SCC also shows some support for Luther Hodges, J r , who is Commerce Undersecretary in the Carter administration, on the grounds that the defeated administration should also be represented in a Reagan Cabinet, and that Hodges, a former North Carolina banker whose father was JFK's Commerce Secretary, is one of the classiest Carterites...
...6. CIA Director: John Connally...
...Shultz, who was also OMB Director and Treasury Secretary, should stay out of Washington where he would likely run into the Peter Principle, as he did at Treasury...
...2. Director of the Office of Management and Budget: In the Carter administration this is a glamorless job...
...The obvious choice, hands down, is William Agee, the 41-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of the Bendix Corporation...
...His reputation for "ruthlessness" is undeserved...
...Its presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, had just won all 50 states, losing only the three electoral votes of the District of Columbia...
...While Reagan's commitment to free enterprise may be greater (I wouldn't know), I see many of the same advisers lining up to give him "fresh" economic advice that gave "bad advice" to Nixon and Ford...
...No member of the ad hoc SCC can be named for any post...
...He threw parties for Baker, Bush, Connally, and Kemp and a big affair for the entire Reagan senior staff on the closing night of the convention...
...He needs someone who views the world in classical economic terms and thus someone who will not be homogenized by the Keynesian and 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1980 monetarist careerists at Treasury...
...If you don't do it right the first time, you don't always get a second chance...
...Perhaps Richard Wilcke, president of the Council for a Competitive Economy, summed up the delusions of the official group best in his Council's August newsletter...
...Wilson, a St...
...Secretary of Commerce: J. Peter Grace, president and chief executive ofricer of W.R...
...And surely Pete Hannaford, who brings out the best in Reagan, will be nearby in some capacity...
...Quiet, gracious, even-tempered, Miller is so popular in the industry that after it gave him almost every possible honor it awards, and he was still only 47, it began to award him seconds...
...Moreover, both Presidents dramatically increased the size and scope of the Federal government...
...Roughly in order of importance, here is the list of nominations by the SCC as of late August...
...Laffer, not a participant in the SCC, got wind of the debate and ended it by recommending the ideal CEA Chairman...
...Lehrman is as articulate a businessman as there exists, pens his own essays on the international and domestic economy, and has personal diplomatic skills that disarm his most hostile intellectual adversaries...
...Thomas Sowell of UCLA, the young, eminent, black economist who has written a book about Say's Law, the heart of classical economic theory...
...Trouble is, the 60-year-old Halbouty is of the type that does not suffer fools gladly and thus could not survive on Capitol Hill...
...At Defense, he'd look like a Nixon-Ford retread...
...But it can also be a headache...
...Miller and Reagan have known each other for four years, including private dinners at Reagan's home...
...He's plenty close, in other words...
...This is the group that believes the Nixon-Ford administrations would have been hugely successful if only the Watergate burglars had placed the tape vertically instead of horizontally...
...As Ronald Reagan will soon discover, it can give a fellow a dizzy feeling of power...
...The rules are simple...
...Wilson is responsible for turning the NAACP toward energy deregulation...
...All SCC participants agree that major oil company people are out, that if it is to be an oilman, it has to be an independent...
...His mentor's is just the right size...
...And the people named cannot be consulted on wht.'ther or not they would even be interested...
...Rumsfeld is overqualified for Defense, ideal for State...
...Clearly troubled by Phillips's review, Aaron published a long and defensive essay a few years later in which he announced that his attitude toward critical scholarship was the same as that of the ancient lady who owns the Aspern Papers in Henry J a m e s ' s story: "The truth is God's, it isn't man's...
...One of his greatest admirers, Malcolm Forbes, Sr., believes he should be named Chairman of the Federal Reserve and has written so...
...calls a "world-class f o r t u n e . " He and his partners built the Rite-Aid Corporation of discount drugstores after he graduated from Yale in 1960, where he was the roommate of Bucky Bush, George's younger brother...
...7. Secretary o f Energy: Here, the SCC divides, between those who believe the job should be filled by an academic and those who argue it's time for an energy producer...
...5. Secretary of Defense: Haig's name comes up again...
...Dam, about 42, no doubt has his own sights set on .Justice or the Supreme Court, but he needs a stepping stone...
...The World Bank appointment would be an audacious one by Reagan...
...The group favoring an energy producer, specifically an oilman, believes that nothing less will do if there is going to be expanded energy production...
...Here it is, Wednesday morning, November 5, and the Republican Party is pinching itself, to make sure it isn't a dream...
...But the Bush campaign rejected his ideas on fiscal and monetary refi~rm, which happen to be identical to Reagan's...
...But Bork, former Solicitor Genera/, should be saved for Reagan's first Supreme Court appointment, or so runs the SCC consensus...
...But she thinks globally, in which manner her enthusiasm for private-sector solutions to economic problems could easily spread...
...It needs a "fresh face" at Defense, namely, Senator Henry Jackson, Democrat...
...Very few opportunities to make speeches or get photo in newspapers, which will suit President Reagan just fine...
...So a lot of people want to come to Washington...
...The job would have to go to someone who has the absolute confidence of the Reagan inner circle...
...If there is a "cinch" in the SCC " n o m i n a t i o n s , " this is it...
...There is also some interest in the SCC for Representative Phil Gramm, Texas Democrat, former economics professor...
...3. Secretary of State: The fundamental assumption of the Trilateral Commission and Henry Kissinger has been that the United States is a declining power...
...If John Wayne were cast as Halbouty, Jimmy Stewart would be cast as C. John Miller...
...Anderson himself is surely ticketed for a White House assignment, heading the Domestic Council...
...The right appointment could quickly defuse much of this tension by reversing World Bank/ International Monetary Fund policies, that is, by inviting debtor nations to supply-side monetary and fiscal reforms...
...The appointment would not be popular in the world press, Simon being viewed as a flintheart...
...In a severely disapproving review of Iririters on the Left, William Phillips of the Partisan Review called attention to Aaron's failure to offer any sort of critical evaluation of the people he had written about...
Vol. 13 • October 1980 • No. 10
