Unmasking the Administrative State

by John Marini

  The 1972 Election

  A number of observers have suggested that the practical effect of Watergate was the reversal of the election of 1972. Henry Kissinger has noted,

  Nixon in the final analysis had provoked a revolution. He had been reelected by a landslide in 1972 in a contest as close to being fought on ideological issues as is possible in America.… The American people for once had chosen on philosophical grounds, not on personality.… For reasons unrelated to the issues and unforeseeable by the people who voted for what Nixon represented, this choice was now being annulled—with as-yet unpredictable consequences.5

  Was it indeed possible that the issues of Watergate were unrelated to the political and “philosophical” issues of the 1972 election? Or was Watergate political in a different way than the public debate would lead one to believe? Nearly a decade after Watergate, a presidential scholar suggested that

  Nixon triumphed in the 1972 election, but the fragility of his power was perfectly shown by the capacity of the Watergate break-in, an intrinsically trivial episode, to become the symbol of great awfulness and to fuel his destruction. Washingtonians destroyed him, but they, rather than he, by that time held the confidence of the people.6

  What had happened to public opinion in the interim? The election was an explicitly partisan event; Watergate was not. Both events, however, sought to mobilize public opinion in support of partisan as well as institutional goals. If Watergate obscured the issues of the election, it was a crucial event in undermining the moral authority that the president derived from the majority in the election and transformed public opinion concerning the use of presidential power. Just after the election, the president appeared to be invulnerable; within a year, his opponents had the upper hand.

  On the surface, Watergate was viewed narrowly as a case of political corruption in high places. The tone of the public debate is seen in its most characteristic fashion in the famous query of Senator Howard Baker, put to the many defendants who appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” The central focus was the cover-up, and the primary question was a legal one. Was Nixon guilty of a crime? Furthermore, the president’s public defense against impeachment only reinforced the legal character of the public debate. His lawyers argued that an impeachable offense should be narrowly construed to be an indictable offense. The defense was reduced to the assertion that Nixon had committed no crime.

  Beneath the surface of the public debate, staged largely through the media and presented as a legal question, was an intensely partisan, political battle, as well as an institutional or constitutional struggle. Ironically, the political battleground was the least understood dimension of Watergate; the public debate was as little partisan as such an event can be, because the ground of the debate was narrowed to encompass the legal question of criminal guilt or innocence.

  A great deal of confusion concerning Watergate was the result of focusing too much on the details of the event and too little on the political circumstances surrounding it. Nelson Polsby noted the following in a symposium on presidential power: “I think a good bit of the thrashing around that constitutional scholars have recently engaged in is directly traceable to their unwillingness to deal directly with, yet their incapacity quite to ignore, the fact that impeachments are by design and, in any event, inescapably, political acts as well as constitutional events.”7 In order for a president to court impeachment, Polsby suggested, he “must be guilty of substantial misdeeds, abuses of power rising to constitutional dimension, and in addition [his italics] must have alienated the other centers of power in and out of government to which a President, in our complex and interrelated system, must render account.”8 There is no doubt that Nixon alienated nearly every center of power in American life.9 We must consider the extent to which the political circumstances and events that existed during and after the election of 1972 contributed to Watergate.

  The Mandate

  In a crucial way, the election of 1972 shaped the contours of the subsequent events known as Watergate. In the decisive respect, particularly in regard to domestic affairs, the election was a referendum on the issues of centralization in American government. Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1972, brought to focus one of the central issues of that election: “Richard Nixon campaigned in 1972 … against central power, against the idea of the omnipotent President doing his will from Washington. He was for returning home power to the people in their communities.”10

  On November 2, 1972, in one of his last radio addresses to the nation before the election, Nixon deplored the increasing growth in the size and power of the centralized administration. “If this kind of growth were projected indefinitely into the future,” he observed, “the result would be catastrophic. We would have an America top heavy with bureaucratic meddling, weighted down by big government, suffocated by taxes, robbed of its soul.”11

  By the end of his first term, Nixon had come to believe that the problems of domestic government could not be solved by the leadership of the national government. Moreover, that leadership—and its creation, the centralized bureaucracy—had undermined the ability of the people to govern themselves by weakening the character of the individual citizen. The problem of government had become the machinery of government, which, though enshrouded in the humane purposes of the New Deal and the Great Society, had obstructed an essential element of democracy—the responsiveness of government to the people. The primary obligation of the president in domestic affairs was control of the executive bureaucracy so that government could become responsible to political leadership and responsive to the demands of the contemporary majority. Nixon attempted, in his second term, “to revive and restore the principles of individual enterprise, personal responsibility, and limited government that were the legacy of the Founders to us.”12

  The ensuing struggle between the president and Congress was not a typical party struggle, as James Sundquist has suggested, “dominated by the same fundamental dispute over the role of government that defined a new party alignment in the 1930s.”13 Rather, it was a battle over control of the bureaucracy, in which the interests of the legislature—and anyone committed to the maintenance of a centralized administration—and those of the executive diverged, regardless of party. Nixon’s solution to the problem was the increased centralization of power into the White House and away from the permanent government. Such a strategy required a massive reorganization of the bureaucracy, on the one hand, and the reversal of the flow of power to Washington and back to the localities, on the other. Nixon was surely vulnerable to the charge that he was attempting to usurp power. As White noted, “in practice he took to himself more personal power, delegated to more individuals of his staff the use or abuse of that power, than any other President of modern times.”14

  It was inevitable that a rigorous attempt to manage the executive branch would result in a collision with organized interests and their allies in Congress, not to mention the elites, including the national media. White clearly recognized the battle lines at the time:

  Faced by a hostile Congress, a hostile vanguard of the press-television system, a recalcitrant party of his own, and a Democratic party committed by definition to opposition, he abandoned all the old conventions of party politics. His campaign was, therefore, a personal campaign, and above all, a campaign of issues.15

  White further alluded to the danger that would subsequently threaten the Nixon presidency: “It was a campaign that never invited Americans to judge his use or manipulation of power but only its apparent end results and its stated direction. He personally stood above detail, above the nitty-gritty of political mechanics.”16

  However, what Nixon intended to do in his second term was centrally concerned with the “nitty-gritty of political mechanics.” Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1936 sought to portray the president’s enemies as enemies of the people, Nixon attempted to get a mandate concerning the issues or ends of power.
He expected the people to trust him as regards the means, or the manner, in which he used power. As White noted, “Americans overwhelmingly responded to Nixon’s presentation of the issues—they chose his directions … as against the directions offered by George McGovern.”17 McGovern had, indeed, raised the issue of Nixon’s abuse of power in his campaign. He insisted throughout that Watergate was the issue. But, although McGovern tried “to turn national debate to a consideration of the style of power itself,” says White, “he could not score the question through on the minds of the people.” It was only after the election, when it became clear what Nixon intended to do with his mandate in the second term, that his opponents were able “to pose the question of inherent power within the Nixon Administration, and of how the president had let that power be used, and abused, to defile the laws of the country and the political process itself.”18 Although a majority of Americans agreed with Nixon concerning the issues or the ends to which he was committed, he neglected to make clear—in the campaign—what means would be necessary to achieve those ends, apparently expecting the people to trust him in the use of power. They trusted him only so long as he was considered trustworthy. It is not surprising then that the central issue subsequently became the character of Richard Nixon.

  The Administrative Presidency

  Nixon noted just before the 1972 election that the next “four years of my administration would become known as having advocated the most significant reforms of any administration since that of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.” But, unlike FDR’s reforms, which “led to bigger and bigger power in Washington,” his reforms would “diffuse the power throughout the country.” He reportedly told his staff the day after the election, “there are no sacred cows[;] we will tear up the pea patch.”19 On January 5, 1973, Nixon submitted his plan for the reorganization of the executive branch. The rationale for reorganization was laid out in his message to Congress:

  Throughout the middle third of the 20th century, power flowed to the center at every level of American government.… The vigor and independence of State and local government ebbed as Washington’s power grew.… [T]he President’s ability to manage effectively was increasingly hamstrung, … the Cabinet Secretaries, were steadily weakened by balkanization of the departments and agencies and the resultant ill-planned growth of the Executive Office of the President. Now the age of centralism in American Government is ending.20 (emphasis mine)

  Nixon believed that revenue sharing had begun to turn the tide within the federal system, and reorganization “would do the same within the executive branch.” It will, he suggested, “enhance my ability, to deliver … what the people voted for in 1972.”21 Reorganization would, he insisted, contribute to that “‘energy in the executive’ which Hamilton called ‘a leading character in the definition of good government.’”22

  Nixon’s plans to reorganize the executive branch had been detailed in his State of the Union message in 1971. In it, he stated, “I shall ask not simply for more new programs in the old framework, but to change the framework itself—to reform the entire structure of American government so we can make it fully responsive to the needs and wishes of the American people.”23 He proposed to abolish the constituency-and clientele-oriented Departments of Agriculture, Labor, Commerce, HUD, Interior, HEW, and Transportation, and consolidate their functions among four “goal-oriented” super-departments. The new departments were to be Human Resources, Natural Resources, Community Development, and Economic Affairs. He spelled out in greater detail the rationale of his reform plans in his “Reorganization Message” to Congress two months later. He made it clear, in the latter message, that it was better political control, rather than a more efficient administration, that was his prime concern.

  But it was precisely this better political control that frightened Congress. In the report of Chet Holifield’s Committee on Government Operations, this is made clear:

  All members of Congress, in principle, would favor better regional organization and making Government more responsive. In practice, members of Congress would be greatly interested in the shifts of authority, patronage, money-disbursing privileges to regional offices for their political as well as administrative implications. For those members who now have established points of contact and channels of communication with the various departments and agencies of the executive branch, reorganization undoubtedly would entail extended periods of readjustment.24

  In such a reorganization, Congress would lose control over single departments and agencies and would oversee broader functional areas. “Unlike the President,” the report noted, “who can take the initiative for the whole executive branch in proposing reorganization, the committees of Congress, with their independent … chairmen, do not fit into an administrative hierarchy subject to a single course of command.”25 As one observer noted,

  It was obvious from the outset that Congress would never enact this measure because its committee structure is closely tied to the departmental structure of the executive branch, and the legislation just languished in committee.… The effort to sell the reorganization bill … proved to be a monumental failure [because the White House could not] overcome the opposition of vested interests on the Hill which were determined enough to resist all … attempts at persuasion, influence and bargaining.26

  Nixon noted subsequently in his Memoirs that his “attempts at reorganizing or reforming the federal government … had been resisted by the combined and determined inertia of Congress and the bureaucracy.” Such resistance was not only a result of partisan differences, but also, he suggested, “because the plans and programs … threatened the entrenched powers and prerogatives that they had built up over many decades.” He admitted that he could not but accept the fact that no major reform would come from Congress in his first term. But, he wrote, “now, however, armed with my landslide mandate and knowing that I had only four years in which to make my mark, I planned to force Congress and the federal bureaucracy to defend their obstruction and their irresponsible spending in the open arena of public opinion.”27

  Congress, Nixon observed, “had smothered my attempt in 1971 to streamline the government,” so he requested John Ehrlichman and Roy Ash to “determine how much reorganizing I could legally do on my own.”28 They advised “that I could in fact create by executive authority a system closely resembling the one I had requested in the 1971 reform proposal.”29 This strategy became the basis of an “administrative presidency.” Richard Nathan suggests that Nixon, “unlike his modern predecessors, did not seek to make his mark through the legislative route for the achievement of domestic policy objectives.”30 Rather, he sought to decrease the power of the national government and the national legislature by managing the bureaucracy and making policy by reorganization, budget impoundment and reduction, personnel shifts, and regulation writing. In his first term, Nixon observed, “we had done a very poor job in the most basic business of every new administration of either party; we had failed to fill all the key posts in the departments and agencies with people who are loyal to the President and his programs. Without this kind of leadership in the appointive positions, there is no way for a President to make any major impact on the bureaucracy.” In his second term, he noted, “I was determined that we would not fail in this area again, and on the morning after my re-election, I called for the resignation of every non-career employee in the executive branch[;] my action was meant to be symbolic of a completely new beginning.”31

  Nixon hoped, in his words, to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government.” In his view, even “at the beginning of my second term, Congress, the bureaucracy, and media were still working in concert to maintain the ideas and ideology of the traditional Eastern liberal establishment that had come to dominate through the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society.” His purpose was “to give expression to the more conservative values and beliefs of the New Majority … and use my power to put some teeth into my New American Revo
lution.”32 In his diary, recorded just after the election, Nixon contemplated the critical character of the direction he would take after the election. He wrote:

  This is going to be quite a shock to the establishment, but it is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.33

  Nixon’s reorganization strategy to manage and control the bureaucracy was supplemented by his attempt to reorder national priorities. The key to such an attempt required control of the federal budget.34 As Richard Nathan has observed, “the meaning of mandate for domestic affairs … was expressed not in the State of the Union message as is customary, but in Nixon’s tightfisted budget for fiscal year 1974.”35 In his budget message, Nixon stated, “This budget concerns itself not only with the needs of all the people, but with an idea that is central to the preservation of democracy: the ‘consent of the governed.’” The 1974 budget

  is the clear evidence of the kind of change in direction demanded by the great majority of the American people. No longer will power flow inexorably to Washington. Instead, the power to make many major decisions … will be returned to where it belongs—State and local officials … accountable to an alert citizenry and responsive to local conditions and opinions.36