We finally moved to reorganize, reduce, or abolish the remaining behemoths of the Great Society that had done little to aid the poor, and which were now primarily serving the interests of the federal bureaucrats who administered them. Of the $2.5 billion it took to run the Office of Economic Opportunity, 85 percent was filtered out in salaries and overhead before it ever reached the poor. It disserved the poor to keep funding programs that didn’t work, but I was prepared for the inevitable accusations from the poverty lobby and the liberals in Congress and the media that we were callous and heartless in proposing these cuts—and I did not have to wait long. “President Nixon’s new budget takes the breath away,” Joseph Kraft wrote in words of intended criticism that came as music to my ears. “It moves to impose on our whole society his belief in the work ethic.”
A year earlier, on January 24, 1972, I had sent Congress a request for placing a ceiling on federal spending. Since Congress had never established a method for staying within an overall budget as it voted on individual appropriations, congressmen and senators had never before been forced to accept responsibility for the fact that passage of some worthwhile project might have the ultimate effect of forcing the government into deficit spending. The legislators had thus been enjoying the best of both worlds: they could vote for whatever spending measures their consciences, their constituents, or their party leaderships urged upon them, while not having to accept the blame for the inflation and tax increases that result from federal deficit spending. Needless to say, there was not much congressional enthusiasm for blowing this comfortable cover, but they did establish a committee to recommend new procedures for budgetary control.
I came back again in January 1973 with a challenge to Congress not only to hold spending to $250 billion that year but to agree to establishing projected spending limits through 1975. Many congressmen had sincere and serious questions concerning who would establish the spending priorities and what criteria would be used. But others were simply frightened by the prospect that budgetary restraints might inhibit their ability to campaign for re-election on a platform of how much federal money they had obtained for their districts. I had made a choice on which programs deserved priority. It was up to Congress to do the same. A reporter wrote in the New York Times, “The new budget proposed so sweeping a challenge both to programs and to Congress that it provoked not just surprise but shock, awe and anger. . . . Congress showed signs that it would rally to the defense one by one of the sacred cows the President had so badly defiled.”
While my budget with its proposed spending ceiling was sending shock waves through Congress, my plan for government reorganization was sending seismic tremors through the federal bureaucracy. Congress had smothered my attempt in 1971 to streamline the government, so I had asked Ehrlichman and Roy Ash, the incoming Budget Director, to set up task forces and consult with constitutional lawyers to determine how much reorganizing I could legally do on my own. 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.
We decided to organize six of the eleven Cabinet departments and some of the hundreds of federal agencies under four general management groups: Human Resources, Natural Resources, Community Development, and Economic Affairs. George Shultz would head Economic Affairs and one of the current Cabinet secretaries would be named Counsellor to the President for each of the remaining three areas. These men would then be directly responsible to me for all the programs under their supervision. For example, in 1972 it took seventy-one different signatures to buy one piece of construction equipment for certain federally funded urban renewal projects; five agencies and fifty-six signatures could be required in order to hire one person. Nine federal departments and twenty agencies all had responsibilities for educational programs. Local water and sewer projects alone involved seven different agencies. Under my reorganization plan, the Counsellor in charge would be responsible for eliminating duplication and inefficiency.
I also announced my renewed determination to break the hammerlock the federal government had on the nation’s taxes and return some of the revenue to local levels. From 1960 to 1970 the number of categorical grant programs—programs that gave local and state governments federal money for projects which were then controlled and monitored by federal officials—had multiplied from 44 to more than 500. In 1969 a poll found that a majority said big government was a bigger threat to the country than either big business or big labor. I did not consider this an unreasonable fear.
In 1969, 1970, and 1971 I had introduced proposals embodying the principle of revenue-sharing, by which money would be returned from the federal government to state and local governments to spend according to their own needs and priorities. General Revenue-Sharing was passed by Congress in 1972; it provided for a simple return of money without program or project restrictions. During its first year of operation, over $5 billion was designated for return to state and local governments. There were also several Special Revenue-Sharing programs, which would return money with only the provision that it be spent for programs within broadly defined areas: urban development, law enforcement, education, job training, transportation, and rural development. Special Revenue-Sharing would have replaced 125 categorical grant programs that were bound up in red tape, but so far Congress had not passed any of its component parts. I reintroduced four of them in 1973.
On a practical level, revenue-sharing was a way of revitalizing local government and local responsibility. On a philosophical level, it was the first change in the direction of federal growth in forty years—no less than the New American Revolution we called it.
On a political level, revenue-sharing exacerbated the hostilities in Washington, where it threatened sections of the bureaucracy with obsolescence, and where no one was eager to relinquish any amount of power or control.
I moved immediately after the election to pare down radically the size of the executive branch. When I took office in 1969, the executive office of the President numbered more than 4,700 employees. We announced that by the end of 1973 we intended to cut that figure by 60 percent. I regretted that during the first term 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 were 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. That this was especially true of a Republican President was confirmed a few years later by a study reported in the American Political Science Review. Researchers Joel Aberbach and Bert Rockman found that in 1970 only 17 percent of the top career bureaucrats in the executive branch were Republican; 47 percent were Democrats and 36 percent were independents, who “more frequently resemble Democrats than Republicans.” The authors of this study confirmed that the frustration we felt with the bureaucracy was based on solid reasons: “Our findings document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation but even more pointedly portray a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy.” A different study, by Bernard Mennis, concentrated on the foreign service bureaucracy and found that only 5 percent of foreign service officers considered themselves Republicans.
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. Most of the resignations would not be accepted: my action was meant to be symbolic of a completely new beginning. In the weeks before the election, while rereading Blake’s Disraeli, I had been struck by Disraeli’s description of Gladstone and his cabinet as “exhausted volcanoes.” I announced that my second term would not suffer the same malady; I was determined that we would not settle into the lethargy that had characterized Eisenhower’s second term after an
overwhelming re-election victory in 1956. I also wanted the Cabinet members, especially the new ones, to feel that they had complete freedom to choose their staffs for the second term. In some cases I planned to transfer White House staff members into the Cabinet departments to see to it that our policies would be followed.
As much as it was within my power, I was determined during the second term to break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government. I urged that we reach out into the West and Midwest for fresh talent. I told Haldeman and Ehrlichman that I wanted an administration infused with the spirit of the 1972 New Majority. I gave them four explicit criteria for selection: loyalty, breadth, creativity—and moxie. I wanted to appoint labor leaders, women, and members of ethnic groups, such as Poles, Italians, and Mexican Americans, that had not been adequately represented in the government in the past.
The call for resignations included the entire White House staff and all Cabinet members. I see this now as a mistake. I did not take into account the chilling effect this action would have on the morale of people who had worked so hard during the election and who were naturally expecting a chance to savor the tremendous victory instead of suddenly having to worry about keeping their jobs. The situation was compounded by my own isolation at Camp David, where I spent eighteen days in the four weeks after the election, holding more than forty meetings with old and new appointees and making plans for the second term.
It was one thing for the Democrats to hold all four aces in Washington—the Congress, the bureaucracy, the majority of the media, and the formidable group of lawyers and power-brokers who operate behind the scenes in the city. It was another thing to give them the fifth ace of a timid opposition party.
As I began the new term I had a sense of urgency about the need to revitalize the Republican Party lest the New Majority slip away from us. We even deliberated for several days about starting a new party. There was no question that the party had ability—it had some of the most able and principled men and women in public life. It seemed to me that what we most lacked was the ability to think like a majority party, to take risks, to exhibit the kind of confidence the Democrats had because of their sheer numbers. During the campaign I made a note about this after I had addressed the Democrats for Nixon rally at John Connally’s ranch.
Diary
We simply need more people on our side who have the love of politics that many of our Democratic friends seem to have in such great abundance. As I have told Connally, the Republicans are more inhibited, more restrained, more proper. The Democrats let it all out and love to shout and laugh and have fun. The Republicans have fun but they don’t want people to see it. The Democrats, even when they are not having fun, like to appear to be having fun.
We made plans to revamp the party’s organizational structure. I talked with Bob Dole, George Bush, Clark MacGregor, Barry Goldwater, and Jerry Ford about ways we could get the best candidates in every nationwide race in 1974 and 1976. I felt there was a sense of excitement growing about our opportunities and prospects; if we worked hard and were lucky, by 1974 we might have laid the foundations for the first Republican Congress in twenty years.
It was clear that Congress was determined to do battle. Connally reported to me that the mood on Capitol Hill was “the most vicious thing I have ever seen. They are mean and testy.” No sooner had the Vietnam peace agreement been announced than the complaints began over the reorganization plans, the proposed budget cuts, the December bombing, and what was soon labeled as the attitude and style of the “Imperial Presidency.” In the past there had been similar instances of attempts by Congress to reassert its power and re-establish its prerogatives after the ending of a war. With this precedent in mind I prepared myself for a long and hard fight to get my programs passed and working.
Congressional frustration was exacerbated by the Gallup poll in January, which showed me with an approval rating at 68 percent. Respect for Congress, as measured at the end of 1971, had fallen to an all-time low of 26 percent. Walter Lippmann said that he did not believe that Congress had the wisdom to decide what programs should be proposed or how the country should be led.
I was a man of the Congress and I was proud of the fact. But by 1973 I had concluded that Congress had become cumbersome, undisciplined, isolationist, fiscally irresponsible, overly vulnerable to pressures from organized minorities, and too dominated by the media.
I knew that part of my disenchantment was the simple result of seeing things from the perspective of the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue rather than from Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, I thought that dramatic changes had taken place in Congress in the twenty-six years since I first came to Washington.
In 1947 it was still possible for a congressman to run his office, do his homework, keep in touch with his constituents, and have his eye on his political fortunes. But the federal government had become so big and the business of government so extensive that even the most conscientious congressman had to delegate a large part of his responsibilities to the personal and committee staffs that had correspondingly swelled in size and influence.
Then radio and television had demonstrated their power to make a politician a national figure overnight, putting a premium on color and controversiality rather then steady industriousness. This situation had a fundamental impact not only on the relationship between Congress and the White House but on the traditional relationships within Congress itself. More and more members refused to accept party discipline and, in effect, went into business for themselves.
Vietnam had precipitated perhaps the most serious and significant change of all: the passing of the tradition of bipartisan support for a President’s foreign policy. The long years of war and the national confusion over Vietnam had eroded this concept and further divided Congress against the President, and the two houses against themselves.
In early 1973 it seemed to me that Congress was looking everywhere except to itself for solutions to its problems of inefficiency and ineffectiveness. I thought it was absurd for members of Congress to complain that the executive branch had stolen their power from them. On the contrary, modern Presidents had merely moved into the vacuum created when Congress failed to discipline itself sufficiently to play a strong policy-making role.
The “Imperial President” was a straw man created by defensive congressmen and by disillusioned liberals who in the days of FDR and John Kennedy had idolized the ideal of a strong presidency. Now that they had a strong President who was a Republican—and Richard Nixon at that—they were having second thoughts and prescribing re-establishment of congressional power as the tonic that was needed to revitalize the Republic.
Congress was naturally anxious to find a scapegoat for its problems. The Democratic leadership decided that the best way both to assert their party’s majority power and to recover Congress’s former prestige would be to take a piece out of the executive branch’s hide. After I proposed my budget ceiling and my government reorganization programs, Washington columnists Evans and Novak consulted their inside sources and reported that a “venomous” congressional counterattack was being planned. Hubert Humphrey announced that a “constitutional crisis” was fast approaching.
The first battle lines were drawn in the ostensibly peripheral areas of procedural prerogatives. In early January the Senate Democratic Caucus voted 35 to 1 to narrow the President’s traditional authority to invoke executive privilege. The same day a bipartisan bloc of fifty-eight senators introduced legislation that would for the first time in our history limit the President’s war powers. On February 5 the Senate voted to require confirmation of the Budget Director, a position that had been filled by presidential appointment without confirmation for the fifty-two years since it had been created.
The major public battles in the executive-legislative conflict were also being fought on the issue of the impoundment of funds. Presidents since Thomas Jefferson had considered it their prerogative, and indeed their responsibility, to withhold
the expenditure of congressionally appropriated funds for projects that were not yet ready to begin or if inflation was especially severe and putting more money into the economy would make it worse. This is known as impoundment. In fact, as of January 29, 1973, I had 3.5 percent of the total budget impounded; Kennedy impounded 7.8 percent in 1961, 6.1 percent in 1962, and 3 percent in 1963; Johnson impounded 3.5 percent in 1964 but increased steadily to a high of 6.7 percent in 1967. The Democratic Congress had not challenged my Democratic predecessors for their heavier use of the practice, so I saw the 1973 impoundment battle as a clear-cut partisan attack on me.
Despite my plea for fiscal restraint and my requests for a budget spending ceiling, by March Congress had already prepared fifteen major spending bills that alone would have exceeded the 1974 budget by $9 billion. As a Washington Post article on March 28 pointed out, despite “pious statements” about the need for economy, I continued to get resistance on spending cuts. Nor was it a strictly partisan phenomenon. For example, very few Senate Republicans regularly stood with me on opposing the major budget-busting spending bills. I told Hugh Scott that I was going to give up on the Senate unless we got some solidarity in our ranks.
In the midst of this developing confrontation between Congress and the presidency, the Senate Democratic Caucus called for a full-scale investigation of 1972 campaign practices. What they meant, of course, was an investigation of Republican campaign practices and of Watergate in particular. Mike Mansfield chose Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina to head the probe.
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