The Nixon Monument

Huston, Tom c[mrles

for an increase in funding over the last fiscal year. Lobbying pressure grew. The groups most directly affected had represent-atives in wheel chairs and wearing leg braces moving about the Capitol...

...Moreover, no one knew if work incentives actually worked or if the tripling of the income of h~lf the people in a rural southern community would create social, economic, or politi- cal problems of a magnitude greater than those allegedly existing...
...These young turks, led by Jesse Helms, (R.-North Carolina) intro-duced the Landgrebe substitute as their own bill on the Senate side and received wide backing for it...
...By taking key leadership roles, these members of the Senate were able to round up the neces- sary votes to sustain the President's veto in the Senate...
...Leslie Lenkowsky is a teach- ing fellow at Harvard, completing a doctoral thesis on welfare in the United States, Britain, and Canada...
...Nixon was ripe for a radical program that could be suitably packaged to pacify his conservative sup- porters, and to the credit of the man, only Moynihan had sense enough to recognize the fact...
...Moynihan's story of the struggle over FAP is incomplete for reasons which are perfectly understandable...
...In defeat, Nixon appeared grateful for what Burns had attempted to do...
...if it had not been in the area of welfare, it most certainly would have come on another issue...
...Landgrebe's action gave the United States Senate and the President himself the peg to hang their hat on in this opening round the 1973 battle of the budget...
...John Price, a Ripen stalwart, served as staff director of the UAC committee on wel- fare and played a principal role in the committee's decision to recommend FAP, while Ripeners Dick Bloomenthal and Chris Bemuth worked to salvage OEO and Model Cities...
...It is the first major study of policy-making in the Nixon White House by an to deception, guile, or flattery, to do any- thing other than make a straightforward presentation of the facts upon which a presidential decision could be based was, in Burns' view, an act of disloyalty to the President...
...On paper, it looked promising...
...As an advocate at the presidential ~ourt, Moynihan is without peers...
...That he is representative of the view of the vast majority of Americans cannot be questioned when one analyzes public opinion polls...
...Moynihan knew as Burns did not that policymakers are moved by many things and least of all by cold facts, Whether for reasons such as those which influenced Burns, or otherwise, the conservatives in the White House failed in any significant way to make of FAP "insider" and will undoubtedly provide much material for future students of the period...
...Those with valid credentials as conservative activists were removed from, if not above, the battle...
...David Brud- noy is an associate professor of his- tory at Merrimack College, national affairs commentator on WGBH-TV in Boston, and an associate of The Alternative...
...In the course of his tenure in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, he made numerous con- tacts within the permanent government which were invaluable to him at the White House...
...Erhlichman and his staff of young lawyers with little political experience and no disposition for principled decisions guaranteed that the President would never again be bothered by the inconvenience of a substantive in-house disagreement over matters of public policy...
...Among the senior members of Richard Nixon's White House staff, only Moynihan, Dr...
...the very folks who were supposed to believe all that stuff about getting people off welfare rolls and onto pay rolls...
...For conservatives it was another story altogether...
...John F. Lulves is Executive Vice President for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute...
...tion's relations with Congress would never have deteriorated to the point that virtually every disagreement between the Executive and Congress portends a constitutional crisis...
...Richard Brookhiser, age eighteen from New York, has already appeared twice in National Review...
...For the new-comers to Washington, there was never any assur- ance that information flowing up from Lhe bureaucracy was reliable or even Lhat all the relevant information was in fact flowing...
...Arthur Burns had also served in the Eisenhower Administration...
...It is diffi- cult if not impossible for even a presi-dent's closest advisers to know what in- fluences a presidential decision, but if there were no data to suggest that in 1969 we had a welfare problem or that a program of income maintenance might solve that problem, it is reasonable to assume Nixon would have chosen a less radical alternative...
...As bright and able as any young man in Washington, Anderson was handicapped by the reticence of Burns and by his own disposition to go-it-alone...
...To the President, one must conclude he was old hat...
...Moynihan's recounting of the politics of income maintenance is misleading on another account...
...Moynihan was one of the key figures in the events leading to the proposal of FAP and had a favorable position for following its course in the Congress...
...But influencing the President proved to be easier than selling FAP, because the sales job had to be done on the President's terms rather than on Moynihan's...
...He implies that Nixon's decision was largely the result of the influence of the social science findings .made available for his review...
...Paul H. Weaver is an assistant professor of govern- ment at Harvard University and the Associate Editor of The Public Inter- est...
...As it turned out, the fate of the con-servatives on the White House staff as well as the prospects for a moderately conservative administration were wrapped up with the fate of Arthur Bums...
...The only criticism I ever heard him make of Moynihan or his staff in the course of the Great Debate was that they were leaking --or so it ap-peared to him --information to the press in an effort to build up pressure on the President and compromise those who were opposed to FAP...
...I do not recall once during the months the Great Debate raged that Anderson sought the assis-tance of other conservative members of the White House staff...
...A masterful mobilizer of resources, he out- ~vitted and outflanked his opposition on every front...
...C. Bascom Slemp is the chief Washington correspondent of The Alternative...
...They were still in the enviable position of having the initiative, and while their most able and articulate spokesman was no longer in- volved on a daily basis in the formula- tion of the full range of domestic poli- cies, he could nevertheless weigh in directly with the President on matters of urgency, as, for example, he did repeatedly on issues relating to edu-cation...
...it was often remarked that UAC files were apparently being maintained in the news- room of the Washington Post...
...When I would express my discourage- ment at the lack of influence we con-servatives had on the course of events at the White House, a colleague would assure me that we occasionally won a battle and thereby justified our presence...
...Tactically, this was a victory for Moynihan, and all the players recognized it as such...
...The blacks, re-ligionists, and certified liberals dis-trusted Nixon enough to be suspicious of anything he proposed, and when Moyni- han was forced to talk about "workfare" liberals, contrary to the game plan, they took him seriously...
...He dabbled in New York City politics and returned briefly to academic life...
...As a matter of political reality, it was something else...
...This objective guides the interpretive framework of the book, affecting in the usual ways the selection and emphasis of events in the narrative...
...Neff Howe is a graduate of the 0ni: versity of California at Berkeley and Managing Editor of The Alternative...
...While identified within the staff as a man of conserva- tive disposition, Harlow was above the battle: he was a technician who viewed his task simply as expediting the Presi- dent's program on the Hill, regardless of what that program might be...
...Assuming that at the time the Great Society programs were implemented there were clear ob-jectives in mind, it was possible to some extent to determine quantitatively whether those objectives were being met...
...For twenty-five years Nixon has gotten away with singing Dixie to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic...
...Tom Charles Huston served as Associate Council to the President up until the summer of 1971...
...Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel that Moynihan tripped him- self up by his desire to be one of the boys in the Nixon White House...
...ernment assume an innovative and responsible roleintheresolution of social conflict and inequity, the history of Family Assistance provides grounds for optimism...
...Personal, able, and dedicated, these young aides were of considerable assistance to Moynihan in his determination to seize the initia- tive in domestic policy formulation...
...Convince Nixon he 7 was destined to be Disraeli and he as-stmmd a British accent...
...regard such moralism as totally anti-quated in our post-industrial society...
...It is difficult as a matter of theory to quarrel with Burns, but as a practical matter it was naive to assume that such guidelines were anything other than a masterplan for defeat...
...The President is a congenital grandstander, always anxious to please and constantly concerned about his place in history...
...As Chair-man of the Council of Economic Ad-visers, he had pleaded with Ike to ease the money supply in order to enhance Nixon's chances against Kennedy, but the General refused and Nixon lost...
...Moyni- han tried it and sounded like a fool...
...Largely it was a matter of what he thought could be sold to Congress, and considering the shattered state of conservatism in the ranks of Republicans in the House and Senate, there was rarely reason for Harlow to assume that the troops would balk at anything the President might propose...
...I suspect the thing that riles the working man most about welfare is the suspicion that those on the receiving end simply don't believe that a person should have to work...
...From this the Nixon Administration has in fact begun a whole new direction in its dom- estic legislative programs...
...And that be has won the first several battles is certainly clear from the words of even the Democratic leadership...
...He knew who was in a position Io give him what he needed...
...for a man of conserva- tive ideas and a modest dose of self-respect, it was virtually impossible, Of those who made an effort to stop FAP, only Burns, Anderson, and Vice President Agnew were insiders, and only Anderson could reasonably be identified with the organized conservative move-ment...
...Moynihan was new, fresh, entertaining...
...2) as Director of the Urban Mfairs Council, he controlled a fair amount of the President's time and that of his Cabinet...
...In the most significant struggle to occur in the Nixon Administration, the White House conservatives were at least use-less...
...Strategically, however, it was the beginning of the end...
...The groups most directly affected had represent-atives in wheel chairs and wearing leg braces moving about the Capitol button- holing legislators and engaging in a very intensive and emotional lobbying cam-paign...
...None of these questions is without merit, but all betray an inadequate appreciation of the significance of the Family Assistance Plan and the lessons to be drawn from its history...
...More important, in my view, to Moynihan's success were his personal- ity, his lines of communication within the bureaucracy, his extraordinary ability as an in-house advocate, and the competence and loyalty of his personal staff...
...The reasons for liberal opposition were many, and Moy- nihan explains them with objectivity and perceptiveness...
...The President, how- ever, abhors confrontations, most partic- ularly those based on philosophical con- victions...
...Burns, on the other hand, is cautious, serious, and reserved, in many respects the stereo-type of the Middle-European Jewish intellectual...
...Yet, the story of FAP is a story of the struggle for power in the White House and the story of the major if not the only policy debate in the Nixon Presidency in which differing views were pressed with vigor by men of ideas who understood that fundamental principles were at stake...
...II January 21, 1969, at the White House was comparable to freshman orientation day at an eastern girls school: bright, scrubbed young faces wandering through the halls trying to figure out what in the world went on in all those rooms...
...To func- tion at all, they were forced to rely upon the bureaucracy...
...the President had said as much in announcing his appointment...
...Unquestionably each, particularly the latter two, was a factor (an office in the White House tends to be more important for impressing vis-itors than affording easier access to the President, but the image of proximity is as important in Washington as face in Saigon...
...Surely this is the basis of the gulf between those who adhere to the "work ethic" and those who rhetoric, nonetheless has indicated that he intends to chart a new course in do- mestic policy which will require stricter evaluations and a generally leaner bud-get...
...Yet FAP was also a little of each...
...However, as Moyni-han notes, Nixon was anxious for a bold domestic initiative...
...Burns kept his tongue, hut a fool never felt comfortable in his presence...
...Moynihan, however, sought help wherever he could find it and recognized the value of the services a Leonard Garment or Ray Price could render on his behalf...
...Steve Hess, Moynihan's deputy, was recognized in the White House as the most talented leaker in Washington...
...His allies were conveniently lo- cated in the senior planning staff of each Df the Departments, so he had a new Cabinet member coming and going...
...In that occupied by Richard Nixon, it soon became obvious that he was a babe- in-the-woods...
...Burns could never understand how these UAC staff members could regard themselves as working for Moynihan rather than the President, but this merely indicated the degree to which Burns failed to comprehend the nature of the struggle...
...How, then, do we measure the cost...
...For conservatives, it is the story of what went wrong and why, and for those of us who signed on with Nixon in the wake of the disaster of 1964 and entered the White House in Jatiuary of 1969 believing that things were finally going to be set straight, it is a story of what it was like to have been present at Dunkirk...
...Roger Freeman, a man of singular distinction and ability brought into the White House by Burns, lasted barely six months after his mentor's departure...
...By June of 1971, it was possi- ble to identify three full-time members of the White House staff who were pro-fessed conservatives, none of whom had ['he Alternative June-September 1973 the remotest influence on the formulation of domestic policy...
...The problem was that he had to sell the most revolutionary social program ever pro-posed by a national administration as a conservative reform measure...
...Professor Moynihan has never been one to leave such judgments understated and regardless of their overall assessment of the book, virtually all readers will take issue with one or another, or all, of the conclusions he draws, Yet the book also has another level of meaning which is a central concern not only in this but in much of Professor Moynihan's work...
...The Politics of a Guaranteed Income attempts to explain why a conservative president came to make such a proposal the most important item in his agenda for domestic policy...
...Nixon quite expectedly picked Harlow to be his chief lobbyist on the Hill, and had the man been given the support he deserved, the Administra.Contributors Diane Alexander is a public health educator, with a background of anthro- pological field work in Laos, currently freelancing as consultant, writer, and creator of educational materials...
...Bathhouse John Coughlin is a perennial boss of Chicago's First Ward...
...In the first place, the Senate, the body that unquestionably is more liberal with the taxpayers' money, upheld the first presidential veto of the current round of budget battles...
...Information is power to a presidential adviser, and of those close to Nixon, only Moynihan had free access to the vast reservoir of information available within the Federal establishment...
...It was the conservatives on the outside who saved the day --Human Events and the American Conservative Union, particu-larly --by waging a fight that at the outset seemed inevitably doomed to failure...
...Most of all, it was not the guaranteed income which, as the President stated in his 1969 message, would have assured a minimum income "'regardless of how much (a person)was capable of earning, regardless of what his need was, regardless of whether or not he was willing to work...
...Burns, in the meantime, had departed for the Federal Reserve Board...
...As Counsellor, Burns had Cabinet rank and the press compared his position within the govern- ment to that of Minister Without Port- folio in a parliamentary cabinet...
...The winners were Shultz, who resigned as Secretary of Labor to become the first head of the Office of Management and Budget, and John Erhlichman, who became Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs...
...It was also possible to use this "good data" to determine the existence of new problems...
...Burns was temperamen- tally incapable of the type of jungle war- fare that was necessary to translate paper authority into substantive influ-ence in any president's White House...
...To attempt to do so in terms of the way in which the recipient views himself -a sort of Richter scale of self-respect --necessarily involves the way in which the tabulator believes the recipient should look at himself...
...Moynihan never had this problem...
...More importantly, however, Ehrlichman and his staff had no independent views on matters of public policy and no inde- pendent sources of information...
...Furthermore, the liberal leadership in both the House and Senate found itself in total disarray and has to retrench, regroup, and rethink its position on the key question of budgetary priorities...
...In the course of the debate over FAP one was forced to wonder whether he had since forgotten...
...To those whose intellectual tradition is rooted in the philosophy of J. Walter Thompson, Burns was a stuffy old man...
...Burns' staff was half the size of Moynihan's, and only Martin Anderson was involved on a day-to-day basis with the significant policy struggles being waged between the opposing camps...
...The trouble with ~ven this modest assertion is that in the ~ourse of the development of FAP there ~vas no doubt "good" data available, but there weren't any demonstrably re-liable answers to the critical questions :hat in most cases were and in other :ases should have been asked about the problem of welfare...
...For example, Moyni- Ran admits that no one knew why the welfare caseload rate was escalating or The Politics of a Guaranteed Income by )aniel Patrick Moynihan...
...If we were not used, we were at least had --and most conspicuously by ourselves...
...To the great disappointment of conservative staffers, when he did come down on an issue, it was just as frequently on the liberal as on the conservative side...
...he Alternative June-September 1973 why welfare dependency appeared no longer to be linked to the availability of employment...
...As Director he controlled the agenda and proceedings of the Urban Affairs Council and, through his staff, Ihe activities of the Council's nine com-mittees...
...Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, for example, admitted after the key Senate vote that "the Pres- ident's in the driver's seat...
...Moynihan had held sub-cabinet posi-tions in the Kennedy and Johnson Admin- istrations while Harlow safeguarded the corporate interests of Proctor & Gamble, and Burns directed the affairs of the National Bureau of Economic Research...
...But how do you count that cost...
...With the elevation of Ehrlichman, the initia-tive in policy formulation shifted to the senior careerists at HEW, Labor, and HUD...
...Griffith, IlI is Editor of the Greensburg Tribune.Review...
...his new book offers a par-ticipant's account of what occurred...
...Incrementalism goes against his political grain...
...And repeated at the beginning of the last chapter: "For those concerned to see the n~ttional gov-effective use of the resources potentially available to them when FAP was under consideration by the Executive and later when it was pending in Congress...
...The type of "good data" Moynihan had available was certainly valuable for the purpose of determining whether ex-isting programs were doing what they were intended to do...
...Good data, then, is like a good psychia- trist at a criminal trial: it should be on tap but not on top...
...Yet, detailed and com-prehensive as it is, the story is incom- lete and, to a certain extent, misleadg. , It is misleading because Moynihan con- tends that Richard Nixon's decision to recommend the Family Assistance Plan Io Congress is evidence of the manner in which social science can make possible "fundamental" as opposed to qncremental" social change...
...Nixon discards hats with wreckless abandon...
...As Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning and Research, Moynihan initiated a study into family allowances, and he was a member of the White House task force that drafted the Eco-nomic Opportunity Act of 1965...
...After all, Moynihan at least remained in place...
...Finally, FAP was not simply an extension of the admin istrative approach to welfare dependency, which seeks to reduce the number of recipients through a combination of social services, manpower programs, and inducements to work...
...His old friends and coleagues at the Labor Department were particularly helpful in providing the latest information, and only Moynihan among those at the White House recog- nized the value of the information that was so freely available from the Bureau of the Census...
...The demise of Moynihan was not, then, a rout for the liberals...
...Leslie Lenkowsky, who wrote the following essay, is completing his doctoral thesis on welJare at Harvard University...
...Is it susceptible of calculation'merely in terms of income, of years of schooling, of access to private baths...
...The unsuspecting author might quickly find himself accused not just of missing the forest for all those trees, but also of overlooking many of the trees, In The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, Daniel P. Moynihan undertook to write about events which were not only controversial but also still front-page news while the manuscript was at the presses...
...Nor was it another episode in the long history of bureaucratic tinkering with the existing welfare system...
...When contemporary issues are also fraught with ideological and political controversy, the perils of scholarship are enhanced...
...Tom Charles Huston, who wrote the ]ollowing essay, served as Associate Council to the President up until the summer of 1971...
...The long-range implications of this vote and action by the Congress are truly remarkable...
...Those acquainted with some of Professor Moynihan's writings while he was in the White House may perceive this conclusion as another effort by a public servant to look at the benign side of an otherwise regrettable situation...
...and (3) as a The Alternative June-September 1973 Democrat and newcomer, he was viewed by other members of the President's circle as less of a threat to their own power than Burns...
...When he came back to Washington in January of 1969, he was no stranger to the people or methods that made the government function...
...Shultz sub-mitted his proposal for incorporating work incentives into FAP, and in the course of doing so proposed a further expansicn of the program...
...I Daniel P. Moynihan's chronicle*of the struggle for the mind of the President fan the question of welfare reform is by r the most incisive analysis of the ~vorkings of the Nixon White House yet Io be published...
...Patrick J. Buchanan is Special Consultant to the President...
...Moynihan attributes his victory over Burns to three factors: (1) his office was in the White House while that of Burns was located in the Executive Office Building next door...
...Programmatically, this was perfectly acceptable to Moynihan, if not to Burns, but the fact that the President had turned to an arbitrator could only be read as a setback for both men...
...President Nixon, sometimes known for PERSPECTIVE: Tom Charles Huston The Nixon Monument In this month's edition of PERSPEC-TIVES we feature two differing images of the Family Assistance Plan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the Nixon White House...
...In retrospect, however, it seems to me that the lesson is not to be found in the fact that we lost such a disproportionate number of battles, but that by our pres- ence we made it more difficult for con-servatives on the outside to win those that most needed winning...
...In either event, however, value judgments were first required: governmental objectives are rarely de-fined in exclusively quantitative terms and problems are inevitably a decision that a particular condition is unac-ceptable to the moral or political perception of the decision maker...
...it also tries to assess why Congress --and especially the liberal Senate-did not...
...To still more people, its proposal (or its defeat) typifies the trustrations of American politics: why does the system always either defeat good ideas, or fail to produce them...
...It is ironic that Moynihan should win the battle over FAP but lose the war over who should control the formulation of domestic policy...
...In fact, I am convinced that Moynihan would have found the hunting vastly more difficult if Haldeman and Ehrlichman had not been so eager for reasons of their own to serve as gun carriers...
...Moynihan insists that the most important fact about welfare "is not what it costs those who provide it, but what it costs those who receive it...
...Perhaps it is best to point out what FAP, in fact, was not...
...Part of the interest aroused by the presidential message stemmed from the perception that FAP was a landmark in social policy, "historical legislation" as The Economist put it...
...and when he needed it, he got it...
...most likely they were a liability, It was Arthur Burns' conviction that the first duty of a member of the White House staff was loyalty to the President...
...The author is too modest or discrete to relate all that he knows about the events in which he was the most significant participant, and he is writing on a subject and for the benefit of an audience that requires the author to display a conspicuous de- gree of intellectual detachment...
...He has a compulsion to seek to translate the most trivial event into a happening of historic proportions and his instinct for overstatement is a con-stant source of embarrassment to his political friends (recall his declaration that the landing on the moon was the greatest event in the history of mankind since the Creation...
...Patricia Kavanagh is a writer for the Baltimore Sun...
...As Watergate has demonstrated, you can't begin to compete with the professional Nixonites when it comes to deception...
...New, more rigorous criteria have been established for all of the programs...
...When it became obvious that Burns and Moynihan were at odds over the most significant of the President's domestic initiatives, he turned immedi-ately to a mediator, Secretary of Labor George Shultz, to work out a compro-mise...
...In a televised address on August 8, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon proposed the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a bold scheme to reform a welfare system charac-terized with striking unanimity as a "mess...
...Arthur Bums, and Bryce Harlow had any appreciable experience in the Feder- al government...
...Moynihan's estimate of his man was virtually flawless...
...It seems the only people who actually understood what Moynihan was trying to do were conser- vatives and southerners...
...To publicly suggest disagreement with the President's policies, to go outside the chain of command in an effort to influence presidential policy, to resort PERSPECTIVE: Leslie Lenkowsky The Sign "ift canoe In this month's edition oJ PERSPEC-TIVES we Jeature two differing images of the Family Assistance Plan, the Nixon White House, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Moynihan's book, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (Random House, $10.00...
...Bryce Harlow during the Eisenhower Administration handled White House liai- son with Congress and during the years of Nixon's exile had been the conduit through which the General maintained communication with his former Vice President...
...If he took the measure of those in the President's inner circle who won their spurs by dropping bal-loons in Los Angeles and Seattle, he kept his tongue and turned on the Irish charm...
...Where public deci-sions are involved, ethics is a more im-portant disciplirie than social science...
...It is as~rted most clearly on the first page: "An account of the history of the Family Assistance Plan . . . must hence be one of failure, The law was not enacted . .. Yet in an only slightly different perspective the notion of failure would appear inappropriate...
...Notwithstanding his own vigorous advocacy of its passage, for the author, FAP, even in defeat, is still a kind of success...
...W.J...
...is Vice President of the Schuchman Founda- tion Center for the Public Interest...
...The point to be remembered when the battle of the budget of the 1970s is re-corded for future generations is that it was a lonely voice from Valparaiso, Indiana, Earl Landgrebe, who had the courage to stand up for principle and to fight for what he believed in despite its apparent unpopularity...
...Moynihan's appointment to the White House staff as Assistant to the President for Urban Mfairs was announced prior to the Inauguration, while Burns' ap-pointment as Counsellor to the President came on January 23rd...
...In a matter of months, Moynihan was stripped of his staff and operational responsibilities and kicked upstairs to Counsellor (the value of a title, however, depreciated as rapidly under Nixon as the dollar...
...in 1970 five persons held the superficially lofty rank of Counsellor to the President...
...The Landgrebe substitute was then no- ticed by a group of freshmen senators, when it became apparent that the Senate would be the testing ground of the Pres- ident's veto...
...Moynihan most certainly thinks not...
...Others will wonder what all the celebration is about: was not FAP really a rather pedestrian idea, or alternatively, an irresponsible one...
...His ~taff was unquestionably the most com-eotent, man for man, of any in the White use: young, ideologically committed, and totally loyal to their boss (Dr...
...Appar-ently Moynihan thought he could pull it off, but to his dismay he discovered that his coded signals were being inter- cepted by the enemy...
...Had John Ehrlichman been confronted with the charge that he proposed to inflict upon the country a new Spreenhamland, it is unlikely he would have bothered to rush to the dic- tionary, let alone to the historians...
...That some may find it less than fully comprehensive is surely more a tribute to the complexity of public life than a criticism of a serious book nearly six hundred pages in length, The work of a senior professor of government at Harvard, and an acknowledged man of letters, is not, however, to be judged solely by its ability to record daily events...
...A member of the President's cabinet, Dr...
...For eight years, he was where the action was and his lines ran deep into the bowels of the Federal bureaucracy...
...Moynihan is bold, witty, and charming, a delightful Irishman who wears his intellectualism lightly...
...In the Nixon White House it was damn tough for a man of ideas to survive...
...It provides cash, frequently in large amounts, only to seThe Alternative June-September 1973...
...His claim ~s not extravagant, it is merely that the ~vailability of data which was far more :eliable than it used to be provided de- ~ision makers in the Nixon White House with a rational basis for formulating Overnmental policy...
...Burns was gone and, with the sense of propriety that those who knew him expected, refused to be drawn into White House policy debates except to the extent that they related to matters within the scope of the FED's responsibilities, and only then to the extent that there was no misunderstand- ing about the independence of the Board...
...Martin Anderson joined Ehrlichman's staff where he promptly withered...
...Terry O'Rourke, a graduate student from Harvard Law School, intends to practice law in California...
...It was assumed, not least of all by Burns, that he was to be the White House staff mem- ber primarily responsible for domestic policy matters...
...Superficially, FAP even-handedly took its toll of conservative and liberal advo- cates of government by policy rather than press release, but as time demon- strated, the conservatives suffered most seriously...
...The magnitude of this victory can be seen by the fact that when the President called Hugh Scott, the Senate Minority Leader, to con-gratulate him, the President is alleged to have admitted to Scott that the White House congressional liaison staff was so convinced that the veto would have to be upheld in the House rather than in the Senate that they had already written the congratulatory letters to the House members, and not to the senators...
...Edwin Feuiner, Jr...
...Central to the Nixon Administration's approach to welfare was the understanding that a guaranteed income already exists...
...that is, to Moynihan's second team...
...If Moynihan hadn't got him, Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have...
...an excep-tional representative of fashionable intellectualism...
...Any scholar who writes about recent history inevitably risks nearsightedness, Does the meaning of events in eighteenth century Britain seem so much clearer not least because we have lost track of so much of what actually occurred...

Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9


 
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