Contributors
was destined to be Disraeli and he asstmmd a British accent. But influencing the President proved to be easier than selling FAP, because the sales job had to be done on the President's...
...2) as Director of the Urban Mfairs Council, he controlled a fair amount of the President's time and that of his Cabinet...
...The blacks, religionists, and certified liberals distrusted Nixon enough to be suspicious of anything he proposed, and when Moynihan was forced to talk about "workfare" liberals, contrary to the game plan, they took him seriously...
...The reasons for liberal opposition were many, and Moynihan explains them with objectivity and perceptiveness...
...Burns was temperamentally incapable of the type of jungle warfare that was necessary to translate paper authority into substantive influence in any president's White House...
...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 degree of intellectual detachment...
...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 Economic Opportunity Act of 1965...
...Moynihan's story of the struggle over FAP is incomplete for reasons which are perfectly understandable...
...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...
...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...
...When he came back to Washington in January of 1969, he was no stranger to the people or methods that made the government function...
...Moynihan had held sub-cabinet positions in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations while Harlow safeguarded the corporate interests of Proctor & Gamble, and Burns directed the affairs of the National Bureau of Economic Research...
...On paper, it looked promising...
...While identified within the staff as a man of conservative disposition, Harlow was above the battle: he was a technician who viewed his task simply as expediting the President's program on the Hill, regardless of what that program might be...
...Bryce Harlow during the Eisenhower Administration handled White House liaison 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...
...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...
...the President had said as much in announcing his appointment...
...It was assumed, not least of all by Burns, that he was to be the White House staff member primarily responsible for domestic policy matters...
...Among the senior members of Richard Nixon's White House staff, only Moynihan, Dr...
...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...
...Griffith, IlI is Editor of the Greensburg Tribune.Review...
...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...
...In the course of the debate over FAP one was forced to wonder whether he had since forgotten...
...He dabbled in New York City politics and returned briefly to academic life...
...For twenty-five years Nixon has gotten away with singing Dixie to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic...
...Arthur Bums, and Bryce Harlow had any appreciable experience in the Federal government...
...It seems the only people who actually understood what Moynihan was trying to do were conservatives and southerners...
...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...
...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...
...As Counsellor, Burns had Cabinet rank and the press compared his position within the government to that of Minister Without Portfolio in a parliamentary cabinet...
...and (3) as a 8 The Alternative June-September 1973...
...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...
...If Moynihan hadn't got him, Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have...
...is Vice President of the Schuchman Foundation Center for the Public Interest . . . . W.J...
...Nevertheless, one cannot help but feel that Moynihan tripped himself up by his desire to be one of the boys in the Nixon White House...
...As it turned out, the fate of the conservatives on the White House staff as well as the prospects for a moderately conservative administration were wrapped up with the fate of Arthur Bums...
...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...
...Moynihan tried it and sounded like a fool...
...Neff Howe is a graduate of the 0ni: versity of California at Berkeley and Managing Editor of The Alternative . . . . Tom Charles Huston served as Associate Council to the President up until the summer of 1971 . . . . Patricia Kavanagh is a writer for the Baltimore Sun . . . . Leslie Lenkowsky is a teaching fellow at Harvard, completing a doctoral thesis on welfare in the United States, Britain, and Canada . . . . John F. Lulves is Executive Vice President for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute . . . . Terry O'Rourke, a graduate student from Harvard Law School, intends to practice law in California . . . . C. Bascom Slemp is the chief Washington correspondent of The Alternative . . . . Paul H. Weaver is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University and the Associate Editor of The Public Interest...
...In defeat, Nixon appeared grateful for what Burns had attempted to do...
...Arthur Burns had also served in the Eisenhower Administration...
...As a matter of political reality, it was something else...
...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 anthropological field work in Laos, currently freelancing as consultant, writer, and creator of educational materials . . . . Richard Brookhiser, age eighteen from New York, has already appeared twice in National Review . . . . David Brudnoy is an associate professor of history at Merrimack College, national affairs commentator on WGBH-TV in Boston, and an associate of The Alternative . . . . Patrick J. Buchanan is Special Consultant to the President . . . . Bathhouse John Coughlin is a perennial boss of Chicago's First Ward . . . . Edwin Feuiner, Jr...
...Moynihan's appointment to the White House staff as Assistant to the President for Urban Mfairs was announced prior to the Inauguration, while Burns' appointment as Counsellor to the President came on January 23rd...
...the very folks who were supposed to believe all that stuff about getting people off welfare rolls and onto pay rolls...
...In that occupied by Richard Nixon, it soon became obvious that he was a babeinthe-woods...
...Apparently Moynihan thought he could pull it off, but to his dismay he discovered that his coded signals were being intercepted by the enemy...
...For eight years, he was where the action was and his lines ran deep into the bowels of the Federal bureaucracy...
...As Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, 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...
...As Watergate has demonstrated, you can't begin to compete with the professional Nixonites when it comes to deception...
...The problem was that he had to sell the most revolutionary social program ever proposed by a national administration as a conservative reform measure...
Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9
