How Nixon Works
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Wishington-USA HOW NIXON WORKS BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Richard Nixon's situation involves more than the question of whether he will stay in office. The President's predicament has made...
...I see no reason for changing under Nixon...
...Some have been indicted...
...But the Nixon political spoils system is unquestionably in trouble these days...
...Nixon and Percy were still being civil to one another, and as an inevitable consequence I became involved in the Great Executive Talent Search...
...Next, Malek placed his own man in each major government agency...
...Only one, Egil Krogh Jr., has so far gone to jail...
...He politely asked them to clean out their desks by five o'clock that day, explaining that should they fail to meet his deadline they would not be able to get back into their offices ever again...
...In some agencies, the Malek system quickly took root...
...There is reason to suspect Nixon in this instance believes what he is saying, making his statements all the more pathetic...
...Moreover, it turned out that there were fewer job openings than Nixon and Haldeman had imagined, some 3-4 thousand in all, and even fewer truly competent people who were willing to come here to fill them...
...A smooth-talking South Carolina millionaire in his mid-30s with no use for Democrats, Malek began by firing all of the pre-1969 people who had managed to hold on to their posts through demonstrated competence...
...This is what Nixon and Haldeman wanted all along, but until they came up with Malek they could find no one with the nerve to do the job...
...All free-wheeling agency heads were purged, without regard to the quality of their service...
...From this vantage point, he named his man to serve as the key budget and planning official in each agency...
...And while they are understandably secondary to the overriding constitutional issue of impeachment, they cannot be ignored...
...Attracting good people to work in his Administration...
...At least half the designated procounsels were implicated to a greater or lesser degree in Watergate...
...Indeed, the correspondence file showed that whatever the languages in which the contender could claim literacy, English was not one of them...
...But too often the White House was to eventually discover that it had been conned...
...A more comprehensive version of the Malek system was put into effect after the 1972 election victory...
...From then on, the word went out that the White House meant business...
...The only real question is how many are going to get caught...
...Finally, energy chief William Simon (who is out of favor at the White House) and Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Milton Shapp (who would be on the enemies list if one still existed) had to cut a deal with the truckers' majority faction...
...The corporation, far from making a sacrifice, had foisted on the Administration a troublemaker or an utter dodo who probably was about to be fired anyway, until someone had the better idea of packing him off to Washington...
...If the leaders decide to defer the hearings, it will be only because they do not want to put any impediments in the way of what is still the main business at hand, the House impeachment inquiry...
...The search proved to be a publicity hoax—the first of several engineered by the White House—when its results were largely ignored by Nixon's real talent scout, H. R. Haldeman...
...The lesson of these events was surely not lost on rank-and-file workers in other industries who are equally fed up' with inflation, and who are also scared silly that they will be tossed out of work in a new recession...
...Real power in each agency, though, was vested in an underling dispatched by the White House after years of loyal service to Haldeman or John Ehrlichman, then the domestic policy chief...
...Unobtrusive and technically qualified administrators were installed in their places...
...The crunch came in August 1970 with the firing of Walter J. Hickel, an independent-minded fellow, as Interior Secretary...
...At the time, I had left journalism to work as an aide to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois...
...Simon, the energy man, refuses to do business with political agents, which is one reason why he's in hot water with the White House...
...No sooner was this grand scheme in place than it collapsed under the staggering burden of the Watergate scandal...
...Like him, he contends, he has faced a hostile and malicious press that is largely responsible for his woes...
...Concurrently, Malek sought to persuade every agency head, including Cabinet members, to funnel all hiring down to the $14,000-a-year level in the civil service through the newly installed political commissar...
...Similar White House-directed networks were established for the personnel chief, the press chief and the congressional liaison man in each agency...
...Making the right decision in a major crisis after his advisers pass the buck to him...
...One need merely read a current roster of government officials to observe the trouble the White House has had in recruiting and retaining first-class administrators -although salaries and benefits have climbed steadily since 1969, and now exceed $35,000 a year in the top branches of the bureaucracy...
...The network continues to operate in the more remote government outposts, in much the same manner as the slave trade that survives in the vast interior of the Arabian Peninsula...
...They include: -Trying to bring out the best in people through personal example and specific policies...
...The President's predicament has made people here ponder what needs to be done to prevent another outbreak of the kind of excesses his crew undertook in their salad days...
...Congressional leaders are weighing whether to hold hearings that would delve deeply into the nature of the modern Presidency—in hopes of perhaps providing some useful guideposts for future White House occupants...
...And the White House still refuses to name any career bureaucrats to top civil service positions...
...Our candidate got the job and lasted a year before being fired...
...Mankiewicz thankfully had the good grace to leave Percy's name out of his column...
...A long-distance telephone call dispelled the possibility that a typist might be fouling him up...
...the operative was usually given a nebulous title, such as director of special projects...
...Percy hardly knew the man...
...Senators are showing little respect to White House requests...
...In recent weeks, in seeking to bring out the best in people, Nixon has compared his Presidency to Abraham Lincoln's...
...Malek himself took over the Number Two position in the Office of Management and Budget, the nerve center of the whole government...
...The very afternoon Hickel was ousted (he had left the Oval Office without quite realizing that Nixon had dismissed him, so indirect were the President's remarks), Malek strode into Hickel's office, summoned most of the top deputies and told them that their services would no longer be required...
...now he was working as a Washington columnist while I plied his former trade...
...Then I hung up...
...For Nixon got off to an incredibly bad start in this area with a huge talent search organized under the aegis of Peter Flanigan, a Wall Street millionaire who enjoyed brief power in the Nixon circle before being relegated to the backstairs role of coordinating international economic policy...
...That's like asking whether foxes steal chickens...
...Then there is the case of the independent truckers who wielded raw economic power in a climate of violence to draw concessions from Washington...
...Being available to contending forces in a dispute when his prestige and authority are needed to forge an acceptable compromise...
...It is fashionable to blame Watergate for the personnel failures, yet the difficulties seem to reach more deeply...
...Through circumstances beyond his control, however, the Senator was locked into supporting him—a situation that occurs in politics more often than is generally known...
...I had come into contact with Mankiewicz when he was a press aide to Robert Kennedy and I was a reporter...
...Nixon, quite simply, lacked the fortitude to intervene in the dispute...
...A check revealed that Mankiewicz' information was absolutely accurate on both counts...
...Richard Nixon scores poorly on all of these points...
...The Civil Service Commission, having gotten its back up, has yanked the personnel records of several agencies to determine whether there has been any political influence involved in hiring...
...The Nixon Administration's hiring practices offer yet another insight into its underlying spirit...
...A good deal is already known, however, about the things a President has to do these days that bear little resemblance to his duties as mandated by the Constitution...
...it seemed the candidate could neither write nor converse according to any remotely acceptable standard for high government employment...
...When no excuses came to mind, I called Mankiewicz and said: "Frank, you used to work for the Kennedys, who, as we know, favored hiring the mentally handicapped...
...those jobs are reserved for political appointees...
...In some instances, large companies agreed to lend the Nixon Administration a key executive...
...in others, it foundered because of lack of support at the top...
...some have merely left town...
...Such experiences, multiplied many times, prompted Nixon to chose Frederic V. Malek as his new personnel chief early in 1970...
...One morning, Frank Mankiewicz called to check a tip that an obscure Illinois politician was being considered for a top policy-making job in the Administration, despite the fact that a small circle of acquaintances knew him to be, as the Elizabethans used to say, weak in the attic...
Vol. 57 • March 1974 • No. 5
