THE NEXT FOUR YEARS

...Early in the first year of the Nixon Presidency, then Attorney General John N. Mitchell admonished critics of the President to pay attention to what the Administration was doing and not to what it was saying...

...The damage may be long lasting...

...But if Mr...

...Although President Nixon in 1971 sent a consumer message to Congress, the Administration never showed much interest in so meaningful a proposal as the bill to create a Consumer Protection Agency, which could intervene in behalf of consumers before Federal departments, agencies, and courts...

...The Nixon Administration has created a clear pattern of protection of corporate interests, tax favors for the rich, a lack of compassion for the poor, neglect of the problems generated by racial tensions, and a short-sighted disdain of environmental controls if they might reduce profits...

...When the Administration really wanted something urgently, like more money for the Pentagon, or the huge Lockheed loan, it fought like a tiger and won Congressional approval...

...Nixon wanted to reduce non-military expenditures...

...The legislative program Mr...

...The President did get his revenue-sharing legislation, the only major domestic priority measure of his that Congress approved...

...Although it did lose its hard fought battle in Congress to keep pouring money into Boeing's supersonic transport, it will be back pressing for revival of the multibillion dollar SST program...

...To the surprise of most persons in Washington concerned with transportation problems, Secretary of Transportation John Volpe supported a Senate plan to use money from the Federal Highway Trust Fund for subways and other mass transit projects...

...During the 1968 campaign, Mr...

...Oh, no, argue the true believers in the bad Nixon...

...The spending issue, which the President pursued in his unsuccessful fight for a $250 billion, Presidentially-en-forced ceiling on all Federal expenditures, became the capstone of his domestic program as the election drew nearer...

...This happened when the Administration joined with business lobbyists in urging the Senate to seek approval of pension reform legislation from its Finance Committee as well as the Labor and Public Welfare Committee...

...Only in a national sales tax that would cost the average American more than he will get from revenue-sharing benefits...

...Nixon in January, 1971, and the other five of its "six great goals" in addition to revenue-sharing—welfare reform, environmental initiatives, health insurance, full employment, and government reorganization...

...In his first term, President Nixon spent more time on the war in Vietnam than on any other issue, but now that Vietnam may be receding—at least as an American problem— where will he focus his energies in his second term...

...In fact, in the waning days of the 1972 session, the White House spurned efforts by Senator Ribicoff to develop a compromise...

...The Administration position," said Senator Ribicoff, another supporter of the consumer legislation, "was simply that it wanted no bill at all—not even the House bill, which it previously supported...

...There are already indications that revenue-sharing, originally conceived to help save the cities and states from their fiscal crises, may be coming at a time when the cities and states are pulling out of their financial quagmire and the Federal Government is sinking deeper into taxing and spending difficulties...

...Nevertheless, in 1970 and again in 1971, the House passed reform legislation only to see it founder in the Senate...

...Failure marked efforts by liberals in Congress to establish some Federal controls over the nation's 45,000 private pension plans with their tens of billions of dollars in assets...

...As in the case of the school busing furor, Mr...

...Two basic theories about the essential Nixon emerge from the Washington cocktail party circuit...

...While Harlow and his business-lobbyist friends defeated consumer legislation, another group of industry lobbyists led by the National Agricultural Chemicals Association succeeded in getting Congress to approve legislation to indemnify the manufacturers of pesticides whose products are taken off the market because they have been found to be unsafe...

...He vetoed not only the anti-pollution water bill but also twice vetoed emergency employment bills, contending that Congress was contributing to inflation and raising the specter of higher taxes by being so generous when it came to human needs...

...It can be said, and will be said, that the President proposes while Congress disposes, but anyone who has been around Washington for long knows that Presidential support—or opposition—is more often than not the key to success or failure of major legislation on Capitol Hill...

...In consumer affairs and environmental matters, for example, White House proposals were modest...

...Julius Duscha is director of the Washington Journalism Center...

...Nixon wanted an issue rather than a law...

...Nixon's role: "Compared with past administrations, the Nixon White House was hard to pin down on many of the major pieces of legislation considered...

...Chamber of Commerce, General Mills, American Cyan-amid, the Grocery Manufacturers of America, and Procter and Gamble, whose chief lobbyist is Bryce N. Harlow, a former White House counselor under President Nixon...

...Robert Finch, then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, did not help when he appeared before Mills' committee in the fall of 1969 and quickly demonstrated that he did not know what was in the welfare legislation...

...Everyone knows that second-term Presidents play to the history books, and that Presidents who come out well in history are the ones who do the right things regardless of ideology or personal feelings...

...He is the author of two books, "Arms, Money and Politics" and "Taxpayers' Hay ride...

...Nonsense, answer the martini-drinkers who fancy themselves historians...

...It would seem that to assure himself of the landslide mandate he wanted, Mr...

...In the face of that fact, it is noteworthy that the independent, authoritative research enterprise, Congressional Quarterly, had this to say about Mr...

...Nixon's relations with the Ninety-second Congress constitute even a reasonably valid indicator, the outlook for meeting these domestic needs is bleak...

...Once again, Washington correspondents, Senators and Congressmen, lobbyists and other hangers-on in the capital are looking for the real Richard M. Nixon...

...As in the case of welfare reform, there were many devils in this end-of-the-session drama, most notably Democratic Representative John C. Kluczynski of Illinois, chairman of the House Roads Subcommittee and a supporter of the highway lobby whose feet might just as well be set in concrete when anyone suggests using highway taxes for purposes other than building highways...

...With no re-election to seek and no special privilege constituencies to please, this theory runs, he can do what is best for the country...

...The House had passed a measure weaker than the one before the Senate...

...The President vetoed a three-year $24.6 billion antipollution bill (he had proposed $6 billion) designed to rid rivers and lakes of pollutants by 1985, but the veto was overridden by huge bi-partisan margins...

...Minimum wages...

...Industry opposition to the bill was led by a coalition of business lobbyists representing such groups as the U.S...

...Nixon picked traditional conservative Republican issues like opposition to government spending and promises that there would be no tax increases with a Nixon in the White House...

...But the fact remains that if the President had pushed a bit in the Senate on welfare, the way he did, for example, in supporting the Safeguard ABM program in 1969, at least a compromise version of the welfare reform legislation could have been approved...

...He specialized in national politics during his eight years as a reporter for The Washington Post...

...It will be a long time before Mills, Long, and the leaders of the Senate and the House are likely to try to mount any sort of effort to improve or change welfare legislation in an era when the Campaign for Human Development, sponsored by the country's Catholic bishops, estimates that there are thirty-six million poor in the United States, not the 25.6 million estimated by the Government...

...Whatever happened to the rest of the "New American Revolution" proclaimed with great pomp by Mr...

...Nixon should have allied himself with needs of the ordinary people—which he pretended to do—rather than with the demands of the big business community...

...Anti-busing legislation, which the President turned into one of his principal priorities last winter, was buried by the Senate in the last days of the session for want of a compromise on the House-approved bill, confirming the feeling, among proponents of de facto as well as de jure school desegregation efforts, that Mr...

...The White House argues that it was the Democratic Congress that stymied the President, but the truth is that there would be welfare reform today if the President had agreed to a sensible compromise worked out by Democratic Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, that effective environmental legislation was often opposed by the White House, that neither Mr...

...A second term, they maintain, will mean the removal of all the political restraints that have kept him from being, during the last four years, the ogre that those who truly understand him know he is deep down inside...

...Nixon holds fast to his past, it will take a tough-minded Congress— and a tough-minded citizenry behind it—to counter the next four years of malign neglect of the nation so clearly foreshadowed by the last four years...

...It is interesting and ironic to note, however, that when the Republicans did not hold the White House they were always demanding more power for Congress, but that in seeking a $250 billion spending ceiling to be enforced by the President, Nixon was trying to wrest from Congress what little power over spending it still asserts...

...In the end, as in the case of welfare reform, the Nixon Administration seemed to collapse when the crunch came for mass transit...

...There are, of course, other major foreign-policy questions such as further arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the development of relations with China, but the likelihood is that foreign policy will be less important in Nixon's next four years than it was in his first term when the Vietnam war was still preoccupying the United States...

...The St...

...Or will a Nixon, at last free from the constraints of winning the next election, be an improvement on the man we have puzzled over during the past quarter-century...

...In August, 1969, President Nixon proclaimed welfare reform to be the nation's most pressing domestic need...

...President Nixon may thus be forced to turn his attention increasingly to domestic matters...

...It was as if the President felt, three years later, that Moynihan had sold him some shoddy merchandise...

...Where can a second Nixon Administration find the revenue for revenue sharing, if it doesn't close tax loopholes...

...Second, Mr...

...Even so, the $74.4 billion voted for defense was the largest single military appropriations bill ever approved by the Senate and the House...

...Mass transit...

...Nixon's top domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, who comes from Boeing's home town of Seattle, already has said that funds for the SST might be included in next January's Federal budget, according to The Wall Street Journal...

...It was apparent in the cases of welfare reform, the consumer protection agency bill, the clean water measure, and the highway-mass transit bill that while Cabinet members, White House aides, and sometimes even the President himself were supporting the legislation in public, White House Congressional liaison staffers either were not really pushing it or actually working against it...

...That, of course, is old and hallowed Republican doctrine...

...But that wasn't the way it worked...

...He presented to Congress a guaranteed income plan sold to him by Daniel P. Moynihan, a Democrat who was then the liberal on the President's staff...

...Congress failed in attempts to override these vetoes...

...Nixon nor his aides pushed health insurance, that public-works efforts to help bring about full employment were opposed by the White House, and that the President did not seem interested in modernizing the Government organization...

...Adding to the confusion over where the President stood," the Quarterly continued, "was the problem of determining who spoke for the President and what the White House really wanted...

...Percy reported that Ehrlichman simply wasn't interested...

...Then he added: "I have nailed my colors to the mast on this issue: the political winds may blow where they may...

...Congressional Quarterly's tabulation for 1972, for instance, shows that the President took a position on only eighty-one roll-call votes in the House and Senate...

...Although there was general agreement among both liberals and conservatives that welfare programs desperately needed reform, the Nixon proposal was met with considerable skepticism on Capitol Hill, particularly from Chairman Wilbur D. Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over welfare programs...

...First, the President wanted more money for defense than Congress was willing to give him, at a time when he was constantly telling the nation that the world was embarking on a generation of peace, thanks to Richard Nixon...

...Before looking into some of the specifics of those last days of the Ninety-second Congress, two other points should be mentioned...

...The anti-pollution legislation which Congress passed over Nixon's veto provides $24.7 billion over the next three years for sewage treatment facilities to help clean up U.S...

...In 1971, by comparison, there were 139 recorded Congressional votes that presented clear-cut tests of support for his views...

...The powerful lobby's pressure on House members to whose election campaigns it contributes was a study in ruthless whip-lashing...

...If Mr...

...waterways...

...His "work ethic" appeals left listeners with the feeling that the welfare rolls are full of the shiftless poor deserving of little consideration...

...One is that the good Nixon will triumph in the President's second and constitutionally-proscribed last term in the White House...

...Seldom has an Administration given in so easily on social programs it previously deemed important...

...Republican Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, who has never been a White House favorite because he has always been regarded as too ambitious by the President and his palace guard, diligently tried to work out a compromise with Nixon aide John D. Ehrlichman...

...But Administration support seemed to evaporate as legislation to extend the $7.5 billion annual trust fund was hung up in the last days of the session by the House's refusal to go along with a Senate amendment earmarking up to $800 million for mass transit...

...Nixon sent to Congress was long on rhetoric but woefully short on substance...

...When the only real support the White House gives to a controversial proposal or piece of legislation is lip-service, it is obvious that the Administration is acting out a charade to win public support without alienating the GOP's major contributors...

...Efforts to increase the minimum wage of $1.60 an hour to $2 immediately, and $2.20 in 1974, failed because of pressures from business and agricultural lobbyists and the failure of the White House to seek a compromise...

...Will a second Nixon term be like the first, or worse...

...Louis Post-Dispatch summed it all up in a recent editorial: "If Congress lacked vision and mission, it was to a great extent because there was little of either at the White House...

...Nixon told an interviewer he always had felt that a President should concentrate on foreign policy because domestic matters could pretty much take care of themselves...

...With that maxim in mind, it is instructive to look at the last days of the Congressional session in further detail : Welfare reform...

...While these arguments were going on in the last weeks of the campaign, almost everyone who was speculating about the outlines of a second Nixon term was ignoring the final days of the second session of the Ninety-second Congress when the views of the real Richard Nixon were being stamped on legislation...

...Nixon seems to have proposed welfare reform to make it an issue rather than to see reform enacted...

...Among the opponents of an increase in the minimum wage and a supporter of an Administration proposal for a lower minimum for teen-agers than for adults, was the McDonald hamburger chain, whose chairman, Ray Kroc, contributed $225,000 to the Nixon campaign...

...Nixon's veto of a water pollution bill, in the face of strenuous Administration opposition...

...Private pension plans...

...The muscle was simply not there to back up Secretary Volpe and the mass transit advocates in Congress when they needed support the most...

...This legislation did not reach the floor of either house...

...Federal aid for consumers may be bad, but help for business is fine...

...In his final fights with Congress, as in earlier ones, Mr...

...Water pollution...

...What emerged from these final days of the Congressional sessions was a Nixon extraordinarily sympathetic to the demands of corporate America, and not much concerned with the human needs of the people of the United States...

...Consumer protection legislation...

...Consistent with his quest for the support of the ethnic and blue collar vote, his rhetoric on welfare became considerably harsher as the 1972 elections approached...

...Among programs jettisoned in the last days of the Congressional session were welfare reform, aid for mass transit from the highway trust fund, consumer protection legislation, a minimum wage bill, and legislation to provide some measure of protection for privately-administered pension plans...

...Nixon's almost self-pitying rhetoric on the political dangers of his stand against more spending it is a safe issue for the conservative Republican that he remains...

...It is an issue as old as Republican opposition to the New Deal, and despite Mr...

...The President maintained that the cost of the bill was "staggering" and "budget-wrecking" and that it would lead to "higher prices and higher taxes...

...There is plenty of blame to be shared by Chairman Russell Long of the Senate Finance Committee, the Committee's Republican members (all of whom voted against it), the Senate Democratic and Republican leadership, and the White House itself...

...What progress was made was made by Congress itself and frequently, as in the case of Mr...

...There was no Administration opposition to this potentially expensive legislation...

...The more conservative Finance Committee removed from the bill such important provisions as those that would give employes some vested rights in the now unregulated private pension plans, some of which fail to pay retirees the benefits due them...

...The McDonald establishments are major employers of teenagers, but Kroc denied that there was any connection between his generous campaign contribution and the Administration's position on lower pay guarantees for teen-agers...

...Now that a second Nixon term is a reality, it is useful to look back on what happened in the Ninety-second Congress and try to understand what this means in terms of the next four years...

...The long neglected home problems of unemployment, effective inflation control, tax reform, health care, housing, the breakdown of the cities—all of these confront the President with an ever-deepening crisis...