Within a week in September 1971, Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and John Harlan both submitted letters of retirement to me for reasons of health.
After my experience with the Carswell and Haynsworth appointments, I did not intend to make the same mistakes again. I was still determined, however, that those appointed be strict constructionists, and I still wanted to find a qualified Southerner. This time I also wanted to find a qualified woman. Above all, I wanted to be sure that my nominees would be confirmed.
Now I decided that while John Mitchell would once again play the leading role in recommending possible candidates, I would try to elicit some independent evaluations.
Our search for a woman nominee was serious and intense, and accompanied, I might add, by Pat’s cogent and determined lobbying on every available occasion. But we found that in general the women judges and lawyers qualified to be nominated for the Supreme Court were too liberal to meet the strict constructionist criterion I had established.
On October 19, 1971, I asked Mitchell to extend to Lewis Powell, a Virginia attorney and a former president of the American Bar Association, an offer to fill one of the vacancies. Powell was reluctant because he was sixty-four years old, but that night I telephoned him and urged him to take it. The next afternoon he called Mitchell and accepted the nomination.
My friend and White House Special Counsel Dick Moore suggested that I consider Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist for the other vacancy. Rehnquist had been first in his class at Stanford Law School and then served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Apart from his unquestioned legal qualifications and his moderately conservative philosophy, Rehnquist’s most attractive attribute was his age: he was only forty-seven and could probably serve on the Court for twenty-five years. Mitchell shared Moore’s high opinion of Rehnquist and enthusiastically endorsed him.
When I announced Powell and Rehnquist as my nominees on national television on October 21, there were the predictable charges that I was packing the Court with ultraconservatives, and the Senate dragged its feet in order to give the critics time to try to knock down the new nominees. But they were so obviously highly qualified that only the most partisan opposition could be raised. Both men were confirmed, Powell on December 6 and Rehnquist on December 10, by overwhelming votes.
I consider my four appointments to the Supreme Court to have been among the most constructive and far-reaching actions of my presidency. Some critics have characterized my appointments as an effort to create a “Nixon Court.” It is true that the men I appointed shared my conservative judicial philosophy and significantly affected the balances of power that had developed in the Warren Court. But as individuals they were each dedicated and able constitutional lawyers who often disagreed on major cases. When I appointed them, I told each that I would never try to influence his judgment and that his only loyalty should be to the law and not to me. Their decisions in cases that affected me politically or personally reflected the fact that they accepted my admonition.
From the first days of my administration I wanted to get rid of the costly failures of the Great Society—and I wanted to do it immediately. I wanted the people who had elected me to see that I was going to follow through on my campaign promises. The worst offender was the welfare system, and welfare reform was my highest domestic priority.
It was Pat Moynihan who made an uncharacteristic plea for caution. In several long sessions in the Oval Office he paced back and forth in front of my desk, waving his arms to punctuate his argument. “All the Great Society activist constituencies are lying out there in wait,” he said, “poised to get you if you try to come after them: the professional welfarists, the urban planners, the day-carers, the social workers, the public housers. Frankly, I’m terrified at the thought of cutting back too fast. Just take Model Cities. The urban ghettos will go up in flames if you cut it out.”
Moynihan wanted to take a year to consolidate our domestic situation before proposing any domestic legislation. But a year was simply too long, so I pushed the Cabinet and staff to develop a program of creative and innovative social legislation as soon as possible.
The current welfare system was a mess. It was inefficient and inconsistent. Payment for equivalent families could range from as high as $263 a month in one state to $39 a month in another. In most states higher payments were made to fatherless families; not surprisingly, families split up in order to collect more money. From 1961 to 1967, 93 percent of the families added to the welfare rolls had absent fathers. There was a rise in illegitimacy; by 1969 over 69 percent of welfare births in New York City were out of wedlock. There were loopholes that meant an individual could earn more on welfare than working for the minimum wage and that a woman earning over $12,000 a year might still be eligible for welfare benefits. There were also flagrant problems of fraud, along with the graft that plagues any big system with a multitude of different regulations and large amounts of money.
Seething beneath the surface of the welfare problem was a disturbing undercurrent of racial friction. Moynihan summarized this in a memo to me on May 17, 1969: “In the present time the service-dispensing groups in the society—teachers, welfare workers, urban planners, nutrition experts, etc., etc.—are preoccupied with the black problem and almost at times seem to resent hearing there are whites who are in difficulty or marginally so.” Moynihan pointed out that the current services strategy for welfare tended not only to exclude working-class whites—and 60 percent of low income workers were white—but to create a group of middle-class whites and blacks who were in what he called the “resentment business”:
They earn very good livings making the black poor feel put upon, when they are, which is often the case, and also when they are not. . . .
On average, I would suppose for example, that the white women who teach Head Start children earn about three times as much per hour as the black men who fathered the children. And for all this the results are really rather marginal so far as the children are concerned. In the meantime the black poor seem to be favored over the white near poor, the loud mouths get louder and temperatures rise.
The result of this situation was that, as one magazine writer described it, we were on the brink of “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Classes.”
After several months of study and discussion of every aspect of the problem, we devised the Family Assistance Plan, which I announced in a televised address on domestic legislation on August 8, 1969.
The Great Society programs had poured billions of dollars into supplying a formidable range of social services for the poor; if you could prove that your income was below a certain level you could qualify for any number of free or subsidized goods and services. I felt that this kind of approach encouraged a feeling of dependence and discouraged the kind of self-reliance that is needed to get people on their feet. I thought that people should have the responsibility for spending carefully and taking care of themselves. I abhorred snoopy, patronizing surveillance by social workers which made children and adults on welfare feel stigmatized and separate. The basic premise of the Family Assistance Plan was simple: what the poor need to help them rise out of poverty is money.
The answer we came up with was also simple, but revolutionary: we decided to provide federal financial aid not just to the unemployed poor, but to the working poor. Payments would go not just to families with fatherless children but to families in which the fathers lived at home. By providing a federal income floor we would ease the financial burden on the states; by setting nationwide standards and establishing automated payment procedures we hoped to cut down on red tape, and before long to eliminate social services, social workers and the stigma of welfare.
But there was something else that was revolutionary about FAP. It was not a simple guaranteed income. The plan required that everyone who accepted benefits must either accept work or training for work if suitable jobs were available within a reasonable distance. The bottom line was—no work, no welfare. The on
ly exceptions would be the aged, the infirm, and mothers of pre-school children.
FAP was a risk. I knew that. We would be making thirteen million more people eligible for federal help than were currently eligible in an effort to reward work and not punish the poor for holding jobs. We would be incurring a first-year cost increase of $4 billion on the speculation that once people were not penalized for work—once they were certain they could earn more in jobs than solely on welfare—they would prefer to work. We hoped that the stability that the increased money would provide would be an incentive to get better and better paying jobs, ultimately taking people off the welfare rolls. It was a speculation that no one was certain would work. For these reasons FAP had a rocky passage through my own staff and Cabinet, where Moynihan, Finch, Ehrlichman and Secretary of Labor George Shultz defended it against the criticisms of the opposing conservative faction led by Arthur Burns, Ted Agnew, and Budget Director Robert Mayo.
I knew that we were taking a chance with FAP. But I also knew that the current system was a disaster that deteriorated faster every year. And FAP was the only plan with any chance of changing that.
In many respects I was in a very peculiar situation: less than eight months after my inauguration as the first Republican President in eight years, I was proposing a piece of almost revolutionary domestic legislation that required me to seek a legislative alliance with Democrats and liberals; my own conservative friends and allies were bound to oppose it. I thought the biggest danger would be the attack from the right. I was in for a surprise.
Predictably, conservatives denounced the plan as a “megadole” and a leftist scheme. But then, after a brief round of praise from columnists, editorialists, and academics, the liberals turned on the plan and practically pummeled it to death. They complained that the dollar amounts were not enough and the work requirements were repressive. In fact, FAP would have immediately lifted 60 percent of the people then living in poverty to incomes above that level. This was a real war on poverty, but the liberals could not accept it. Liberal senators immediately began to introduce extravagant bills of their own that had no hope of passage. As Moynihan observed, it was as if they could not tolerate the notion that a conservative Republican President had done what his liberal Democratic predecessors had not been bold enough to do.
The interest groups reacted no more admirably. The National Welfare Rights Organization, purportedly representing the interests of welfare recipients, formed an alliance with the social workers who were threatened with extinction, and denounced the plan. NWRO called it an “act of political repression” and accused the administration of conspiring to starve children. The plan was even called “racist,” despite the fact that immediately upon passage it would have provided roughly 40 percent more money to blacks living in fourteen Southern states—and in 1969 slightly more than half the black population lived in the South. NWRO held noisy hearings at which welfare recipients testified, “We only want the kind of jobs that will pay $10,000 or $20,000” and “You’d better give me something better than I’m getting on welfare.” NWRO proposed its own plan, which was introduced in the Senate by George McGovern, to guarantee a $6,500 income to every family of four. Such a plan would have put about half of America on welfare.
We fought hard. On April 16, 1970, thanks in large part to the leadership of Jerry Ford with help from Wilbur Mills, FAP passed the House. But the Senate Finance Committee, with Southern conservatives in key positions and no coordinated endorsement from the liberals, kept the plan on ice. On July 1, 1970, Moynihan wrote to me: “I fear the chances are now less than even that Family Assistance will be passed this year, and if not this year, not this decade.” He said that no Republican was resisting efforts to kill the measure and that “increasingly the Democrats see an opportunity to deny you this epic victory and at the same time blame you for the defeat.”
During the fall I put pressure on the Senate Finance Committee, but my efforts failed. On November 20 the committee voted the measure down, 10–6. In 1971 the House again passed the bill and again the Senate Finance Committee bottled it up. Ultimately only the sections of FAP providing guaranteed incomes for the aged and disabled passed the full Congress.
By 1971 the momentum for FAP had passed and I knew it. I still believed in the validity of the idea, but I no longer believed in the political timing. In 1969 the American people had been ready for change; in 1971 they were thinking of other things—of Vietnam and the economy. By 1971 there was also the prospect of the 1972 election; I did not want to be in a losing fight with the conservatives over FAP in an election year. Therefore, in the summer of 1972 when I was given a choice either to endorse a more costly version of the bill proposed by Senator Ribicoff or to stay with our original FAP even though it would surely fail, I decided on the latter. FAP finally died in the Senate Finance Committee in 1972—an idea ahead of its time.
APOLLO XI
For me the most exciting event of the first year of my presidency came in July 1969 when an American became the first man to walk on the moon. The moon landing was the culmination of a program begun a dozen years earlier after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made orbiting satellite. American public opinion was jolted at the thought of the Soviets in control of outer space, but Eisenhower and most of his advisers were not so disturbed. Sherman Adams, for example, told a predominantly Republican audience that the so-called satellite race was just “an outer space basketball game.” I believed that this flippant remark was wrong in substance and disastrous in terms of public opinion. The next night I told an audience in San Francisco, “We could make no greater mistake than to brush off this event as a scientific stunt of more significance to the man in the moon than to men on earth.”
In Cabinet and NSC meetings during this time I strongly advocated a sharp increase in our missile and space programs. Eisenhower finally came around to this view and approved a proposal for manned space vehicles. While he justified this decision on military grounds, I felt that something far more basic was involved. I believe that when a great nation drops out of the race to explore the unknown, that nation ceases to be great.
The manned space program was already well under way when President Kennedy captured the national imagination in 1961 by setting the goal of a moon landing by the end of the decade. President Johnson was an enthusiastic supporter of NASA, and under his administration the Apollo program made great strides.
I decided that when the Apollo XI astronauts actually landed on the moon, the occasion should be well and widely marked. Working with NASA officials, we made plans for a televised phone conversation from the White House to the moon. In addition to planting an American flag on the lunar surface, the astronauts would leave behind a plaque bearing our signatures and a message that read:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY, 1969 A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
On Sunday night, July 20, Apollo VIII astronaut Frank Borman, Bob Haldeman, and I stood around the TV set in the private office and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Then I went into the Oval Office next door where TV cameras had been set up for my split-screen phone call to the moon.
Armstrong’s voice came through loud and clear. I said, “Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to earth.”
After a journey of almost half a million miles to the moon and back, Apollo XI landed less than two miles from the prearranged target about a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. I was there to welcome the astronauts home. Because the mission’s command module was named Columbia, I had asked the Navy band to play “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” as the astronauts stepped from the helicopter onto the aircraft carrier Hornet’s deck.
When I talked with them through the window of their quarantine chamber, it w
as hard to contain my enthusiasm or my awe at the thought that the three men on the other side of that glass had just returned from the moon. I said impulsively, “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” When I talked to Billy Graham a few days later, he said, “Mr. President, I know exactly how you felt, and I understand exactly what you meant, but, even so, I think you may have been a little excessive.”
The Apollo program ended on December 19, 1972, with the splashdown of Apollo XVII. By then, the public had become blasé about the ever-present hazards of space as well as the excitement of its challenge. The program had also begun to fall victim to the introverted attitude that threatened so much new technology in the 1970s. This contributed to the congressional refusal to support my proposal to continue our supersonic jet transport program, which I considered essential if America were to retain its lead in the field of commercial aviation. The argument went, as long as one person on earth is poor, not a dollar should be spent on space. In my opinion, however, exploration of space is one of the last of the great challenges to the American spirit. Space is perhaps the last frontier truly commensurate with America’s capacity for wonder.
LYNDON JOHNSON: DECEMBER 1969
On Thursday, December 11, 1969, Lyndon Johnson was in Washington, and I invited him to the White House for breakfast. I met him in the Red Room and we went right into the first-floor family dining room, where I had arranged the table so that he could look into the fire. Without his asking, a bottle of liquid saccharin had been placed by his plate and the waiter brought him very light coffee.
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