Being Nixon: A Man Divided (30 page)

On January 20
Nixon celebrated his first anniversary in office. He buzzed two of his closest associates, H. R. Haldeman and Rose Woods—“each of whom cordially despised the other,” recalled Safire—into the Oval Office. The room was half-dark in the early winter dusk. Standing in his overcoat, Nixon lifted the lid on a silver music box. It tinkled out “Hail to the Chief,” getting a little slow toward the end. Shutting the box, the president said only, “Been a year.” Then, as Safire recounted the scene, he “walked through the French doors into the night; end of celebration.”
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That night, Nixon
was seated next to Liz Moynihan at a cabinet dinner at Blair House. Vivacious, dressed in a slinky halter top on this evening, Mrs. Moynihan was rarely at a loss for words. “I tried to open him up, saying that he must be happy about the editorials, even the
New York Times
,” she recalled, citing a wave of friendly press at the end of Year One. “He couldn’t answer. I noticed that his hands kept spinning.”
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Nixon had outmaneuvered
the peace movement to seize back the support of Middle America for Vietnam. Now, as he shaped his State of the Union, he wanted to outflank the liberals and raid their base on the home front as well. Reading his copy of Robert Blake’s
Disraeli
and chatting with his social history tutor, Pat Moynihan, he was inspired by the notion that “Tory men with liberal policies” had done what liberals could not—win the support of working men to overcome conservative opposition.
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When Nixon took office, Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for all but four years going back to FDR and the New Deal. LBJ’s Great Society had ushered in a raft of programs to help the poor and the middle class. Americans might grumble about government, but they had become accustomed to its benefits and wanted more. Although the country had veered slightly right in 1968, partly in reaction to the over-promising of the Great Society, the body politic was actually tilting leftward again in 1970.
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Social scientists were still in the ascendancy and dominated federal agencies; the conventional wisdom among most opinion makers held that, with enough money and brainpower, government technocrats could cure society’s ills.
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That was the political reality in 1970, and Nixon was a realist. His contradictory acts and impulses have to be seen in light of the liberal zeitgeist of the era and political necessity (or expediency). Like the liberals he scorned, Nixon was not above buying votes with government benefits. While Nixon wanted to take the high road to govern, politics—getting elected—was a different matter. “He had an idealistic view of government,” recalled Jim Schlesinger, whom Nixon
appointed to run three different agencies (Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA, and Defense). “But then politics were dog-eat-dog, get-them-before-they-got-you. It was as if there was no connection.”
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Of course, there
was
a connection—Nixon was perfectly well aware that his ability to govern depended on political skills, his ability to persuade lawmakers that it was in their political interest to back his policies. But Schlesinger’s bafflement is understandable. Nixon’s approach to government is a riddle that needs to be solved with proper attention to Nixon’s political genius and his complex psyche.

Nixon liked to rail against “liberal bureaucrats” and suspected, not wrongly in many cases, that they were working against him. He tried from time to time, without much success, to restrain federal spending, which was largely controlled by a free-spending Congress. In the winter of 1970, Schlesinger was assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget and spent “hours and hours” with the president going over spending requests. He vividly recalled the Nixon approach and the inevitable pushback:

I’d bring up an agency and invariably he would say, “Not worth a damn. Cut ’em in half.” I’d go back and say this to the budget examiners, and they would go to pieces before your eyes. “Cut in half? Good God, what can we give up?” They’d come back and say, “We really can’t cut that.” One day, he leaned over and said, “You know, Jim, I don’t know the first thing about these agencies. I figure if I tell you, cut them in half, it will strengthen your hand.” It was Nixon on stage, playing a role, like his Madman Theory on Vietnam.
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Nixon wanted to take power away from Congress and federal agencies and give it “back to the people,” or at least to their elected representatives in state and local government. To do this, he first sought to greatly concentrate power in the White House, a move guaranteed to make him more enemies on the Hill and in the Federal Triangle. (“Bringing power to the White House,” he later explained
to historian Joan Hoff, was necessary to “dishing it out.”)
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In January of 1970, he was still searching for an animating theme and a label. “Need for a name,” he jotted on his yellow pad on the night of January 14 as he prepared for his State of the Union address. He listed those coined by his predecessors: “Square Deal, Fair Deal, New Deal, New Frontier, Great Society.”
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The name Nixon came up with—“the New Federalism”—was more confusing than catchy. It sounded to voters unfamiliar with the papers of James Madison to be a program for
more
federal government, not less.

The 1960s had been a time of great ferment on social policy. Nixon scorned academic “eggheads” and meddlesome bureaucrats, but his intellectual curiosity was piqued by the new “movements” bubbling up in an age of liberal activism. Ed Cox, Tricia’s suitor, was an earnest and fairly liberal Harvard Law School student who had worked for consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Cox would spend many hours talking to Nixon, who liked and sought out stimulating young people. To get ahead of the consumer movement (and to outflank the liberals), Nixon appointed a woman, Virginia Knauer, to direct an Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House. Nader dismissed the new office as a “speech making operation,” but Knauer proved to be an aggressive consumer advocate.
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Nixon’s boldest and best idea was welfare reform. In August, Nixon had proposed getting rid of the existing system, which fostered family breakup because it went to mothers who were single, and instead guarantee the poor a minimum income, provided they took jobs or sought job training. Nixon wanted to call the program “workfare” but was convinced to adopt the safer, if blander, “Family Assistance Program” (FAP). From his own Depression-era experience, seeing hungry and homeless people begging for food at his father’s grocery, he knew the shame of asking for handouts. His father had left the family badly strapped by refusing to put Nixon’s dying older brother in a free state-run TB sanatorium and instead paying out of pocket to send Hannah and her sick son out into the desert mountains.
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Nixon knew that conservatives would oppose a guaranteed minimum
income—really, a negative income tax—as a “mega-dole.”
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But he hoped to win enough moderates and liberals to pass Congress. For once, he lowballed liberal contempt. Defensive of the welfare state, which provided jobs for middle-class whites as well as services for poor people, the liberal establishment labeled the program as “racist.” FAP, said the lobbyists for the National Welfare Rights Organization, stood for “Fuck America’s Poor.”
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FAP passed the House but ultimately died in the Senate—“an idea ahead of its time,” Nixon wrote, correctly, in his memoirs.
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It was probably inevitable that Nixon’s infatuation with Moynihan would fade. Once, when Moynihan was lecturing about ending global poverty, the president turned to fellow tough guy Ehrlichman and stage-whispered, “Doesn’t it make you want to puke?” Moynihan was never going to fit in with the buttoned-up PR types occupying the West Wing. Padding around in his slippers (“he went to bed at 5
A.M
., so 8
A.M
. meetings were tough,” recalled wife Liz), Moynihan looked like a “giant Leprechaun” in an office full of handsome young bank trainees, recalled Nixon advance man Charles Stuart.
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Moynihan, a deft courtier, generally told the president what he wanted to hear. Will FAP eliminate social workers? Nixon asked. “Wipe them out!” Moynihan responded enthusiastically.
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But Moynihan could not resist jousting with (and usually one-upping) Nixon’s more conservative economic adviser Arthur Burns. Though he played one man against the other, Nixon soon grew tired of Moynihan’s turf wars with Burns over domestic policy. In the fall of 1969, he kicked Moynihan upstairs with a “Counsellor to the President” title and named the more reliable if no less liberal Ehrlichman to reorganize Moynihan’s and Burns’s duties under an umbrella Domestic Affairs Council.
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When Ehrlichman, who was ambitious as well as efficient, took
over domestic policy, the “thinkers” on the staff, both from the left and the right—men like Safire, Len Garment, Pat Buchanan, and Ray Price—fretted, as one put it, that “the balloon men have taken over.” As tour director of the 1968 campaign, Ehrlichman had been in charge of dropping the balloons at the end of Nixon rallies.
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A few old Nixon hands (the surviving moderates) still mark the day when Ehrlichman took over as chief domestic adviser to the president—only a year into his first term—as the beginning of the end, when Nixon the deep thinker and reformer morphed into Nixon the purely political opportunist.
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This is a misreading of the man, but an understandable one. The Nixon who spent hours with his yellow pads rethinking the nature of government and dreaming of new world orders is hard to reconcile with the Nixon who often cut deals that seem less than principled. Part of the confusion stems from Nixon’s emotional makeup. He needed to vent and blurt—cut that damn agency in half!—before settling down and shrewdly estimating what was possible and what was not. Nixon saw himself as a strategic thinker, but he was also a superb tactician with an instinctive sense of the possible. Nixon, as the optimist he wished to be, saw the potential for the Big Play; Nixon, as the pessimist he really was, stood willing and able to take what he could get. Nixon was a great admirer of Woodrow Wilson, who dreamed of making the world safe for democracy, but he was philosophically closer to Burke, the British statesman who valued realism and compromise.

In his search for the “lift of a driving dream,” as he put it in his 1970 State of the Union, Nixon’s rhetoric could be overwrought. He drove his speechwriters to manufacture eloquence. Ray Price, author of the “lift of a driving dream” line, stayed up three straight nights until, addled by amphetamines, he began to hallucinate.
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Nixon was more convincing when he followed Price’s instinct toward moderation and his own bent toward pragmatism. For all his pride in American exceptionalism, Nixon understood that he was often operating from a position of strategic weakness. Abroad, America could no longer count on being the sole superpower as the Soviet Union and
China built and improved their nuclear arsenals and continued to sell a brand of Marxism that was remarkably appealing to the postcolonial world. At home, Nixon was the first newly elected president in over a century to face a Congress in which the opposing party controlled both the House and Senate. Compromise was essential. Nixon was more of an activist than an obstructionist, and he worked with the Democrats to pass a great deal of progressive legislation.

The list of what the Nixon administration accomplished domestically makes Nixon look like a great liberal as well as one of the last of the big spenders. Historian Melvin Small cites what Congress passed and Nixon signed into law, sometimes after resisting but usually by compromising: extension of the Voting Rights Act, postal reorganization, the Clean Air Act, the Water Pollution Control Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the establishment of an Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House, expansion of the national park system, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (OSHA), the Rail Passenger Service Act that created Amtrak, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act (revenue sharing), the end of Selective Service (the draft), the beginning of the federal “war” against cancer, and dramatic increases in spending on the arts and public broadcasting. He increased spending on social security and Medicare faster than inflation—making him, by some measures, a bigger spender on social programs than LBJ had been.
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In 1974, Nixon proposed massive health care reform that Senator Edward Kennedy blocked—and later regretted that he had.
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Much of this was the handiwork of John Ehrlichman, who would come to see himself as a kind of a domestic president while Nixon attended to his first love, foreign policy. Ehrlichman was easy to underestimate. He had been an obscure zoning lawyer in Seattle and, when he stuck out his lower lip, “looked buttoned-up to the point of bursting,” wrote the un-buttoned-up Moynihan.
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But he was politically shrewd, and he understood that progressive politics could win votes. His own politics were moderate to liberal, especially on the environment,
which he had learned to cherish living in the Pacific Northwest. “Ehrlichman sold him on the environment,” recalled John Whitaker, who became Nixon’s chief staffer dealing with environmental issues. “He made Nixon see it was politically dangerous if he didn’t get on board. He brought in pollsters to say, ‘this thing is catching fire!’ ”
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Nixon could see that his most likely opponent in 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, was getting ready to ride the Green wave; he was already deeply involved in plans for a first-ever “Earth Day” in April. In Ehrlichman’s diary notes for October 23, 1969, he wrote “need a bold stroke” and “pull the rug from under Muskie.”
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In his State of the Union address, Nixon pledged his administration, in general terms, to cleaning up the environment. Nixon’s younger brother Ed, a strong environmentalist who, like Ehrlichman, lived in the Pacific Northwest, weighed in. “He listened,” Ed Nixon recalled, “but he would say, ‘You have to keep the employer healthy and wealthy.’ ”
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With Ehrlichman, Nixon was more blunt: “In a flat choice between smoke and jobs, we’re for jobs….But just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.” Depending on the audience, he promised to protect big business
and
the environment. He would proclaim that if the Greens took over, “there won’t be any private enterprise, no industry left in America.” Then he would privately take aside Chris DeMuth, a twenty-three-year-old White House aide, and tell him to develop an environmental policy—but without consulting the secretary of commerce, Maurice Stans. “If Maury Stans is involved, he’ll bring in all his business friends and nothing will happen. So stay away from Stans,” President Nixon told young DeMuth. “I’ll protect you. We’ll let him know when we’re done.”
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