With the 1972 presidential campaign in mind, Nixon soon had another thought for me. He suggested that I become chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President, which had the unfortunate acronym of CREEP. Running Nixon’s reelection campaign might have seemed like a prestigious assignment at the time, but I had no desire to be a full-time political operative.
I tried to turn the President down in a lighthearted way. “Mr. President,” I said with a laugh, “I’m pretty sure you’re going to run your campaign, and to the extent you don’t have the time, John Mitchell will run it, and to the extent he doesn’t, Bob Haldeman will. So you certainly don’t need me at that post. The organ-grinders will all be in the White House.” I didn’t have any desire to be the trained monkey.
Nixon smiled. “Well, let’s think about it some more,” he said. For whatever reason, that idea too was dropped.
Later the President raised the idea of my becoming chair of the Republican National Committee. I felt once again that it would be Nixon, Mitchell, and Haldeman who would be calling the shots, and that whoever was at the RNC would be little more than an adornment. It was not the job for me.
I was well aware that repeatedly saying no to a president posed risks, risks that increased each time I did it. My pattern of turning down job offers did not seem to please Haldeman or Ehrlichman. I’m sure they began to think that I wasn’t a team player. And I suspected that Nixon probably was beginning to feel the same way.
As the 1972 election drew closer and politics took over, the group in the White House that Joyce and I were close to, the academics and policy-oriented people like Shultz and Moynihan, became less involved than they had been at the beginning of Nixon’s term. The other circle—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and later, Colson—were the ones who seemed to have his ear and confidence.
In one sense, this was a natural development. The Haldeman group was attuned to Nixon’s increased focus on his reelection. We were not. But the theory put forward by some, that this group unduly influenced the President by appealing to his resentments is inconsistent with my experience. Maybe it’s because I was younger and he was the president of the United States, but I seldom observed Nixon being unduly influenced by anyone. He may have had his enablers, but Nixon seemed to me to be the one in the lead.
As the campaign proceeded, I did sense a change in mood at the White House, and not for the better. At the end of one meeting I watched the President walk off with Haldeman and Colson. There was nothing particularly unusual about that, since they were frequently together. But for some reason I was increasingly uncomfortable with what was going on at the White House. Something didn’t feel right.
By the early 1970s the rate of inflation, though not high by historical standards, was a growing political issue. As was typical in Washington, there was pressure on politicians to do something, if for no other reason than to demonstrate the government’s concern about a problem. The Democratic majority in Congress came up with a solution that seemed politically attractive but was unwise: They passed legislation giving the president the power to impose wage and price controls on the country.
My suspicion was that Congress passed the legislation never imagining that President Nixon would actually use the power, but rather to put him on the spot politically, and to demonstrate that the Congress was doing something about inflation. The Democrats hadn’t counted on John Connally, the charismatic former governor of Texas. Connally was well-known for having been hit by one of the bullets fired at President Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. A Democrat who switched to the Republican Party in 1973, he was a prominent, if not dominant, figure in the Nixon cabinet. Nobody seemed to have the effect on Nixon that Connally did. Indeed, the President appeared to hang on his every word.
Connally, a protégé of LBJ’s, liked big, bold action. When wage and price control legislation first came up, Connally’s staff at Treasury drafted a memo urging the President to veto it on philosophical grounds. “Why are we doing this?” Connally demanded, when he saw their memo. “If a legislature wants to give you a new power—you take it. Put it in the corner, like an old shotgun. You never know when you might need it.”12
Six months later, to almost everyone’s amazement—and certainly to mine—Connally had successfully persuaded Nixon to grab that old shotgun and pull the trigger. The dollar was weak, inflation seemed to be getting worse, and Connally recommended presidential action.
In August 1971, the President held a confidential meeting with his economic team at Camp David. Nixon had long blamed an economic downturn for his narrow loss to Kennedy in 1960. Now that he was president, he was determined to not have the economy ruin his chances for reelection. At the meeting, the President agreed to the approach recommended by Connally.
Nixon demanded absolute secrecy about his decision until he was ready to unveil it. In the first phase of the program, Nixon planned to announce a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices in the United States. He also would sign an executive order to create an economic stabilization program, a pay board, a price commission, a health advisory board, a rent-control board, and various other new government entities.13 All of them would be overseen by the Cost of Living Council, to be chaired by Secretary of the Treasury Connally, which would include most of the non–national security members of the President’s cabinet.14
In my view, imposing wage and price controls may have been politically expedient, but it was probably the worst policy decision the administration made. I thought the proposal would subvert the free market’s ability to allow consumers and producers across the United States to determine prices based on the laws of supply and demand. This couldn’t be done by any centralized planning or planner, no matter how brilliant.15
The President needed a director for the Cost of Living Council (CLC) to administer what was called “Phase Two” of the program. Nixon, with the advice of Shultz, decided I was the man for the job. I’d told him I wanted to be involved in policy, and this was clearly a policy position. It just happened to be one I did not agree with. George Shultz, who had moved from being Secretary of Labor to director of the Office of Management and Budget, informed me of the President’s decision. He urged me to accept the post.
“I don’t believe in wage and price controls,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why you need to do the job.”
Shultz told me he wanted a director of the program who would work to make sure the new controls were temporary and did as little damage as possible.16 So for the second time in the Nixon administration, I agreed to take on a presidential assignment that seemed like a no-win position, and which ran counter to my beliefs.*
If the goal was to end wage and price controls as soon as possible, I saw a first step in that direction: the need to ensure that we did not hire a permanent staff that would want to perpetuate itself. Instead, I borrowed individuals from other departments and agencies—called detailees—particularly individuals who understood the dangers of wage-price controls, and who could be sent back to their home departments with the stroke of my pen.
Second, I emphasized from the outset that Congress passed the Economic Stabilization Act for the sole purpose of dealing with inflation. Not only did I believe that such an intrusion by the federal government would undermine the free market system, I feared that it presented government officials with the almost irresistible temptation to use that power for political ends.17 Some wanted the controls to be used to break labor unions. Others wanted them to be used to strengthen unions. I ruled out all of those ideas immediately. Furthermore, I insisted that we would not use these new statutory powers to favor or punish any given constituency for political gain.
We established a tiered system based on the size of the companies to be regulated. We freed smaller companies from the controls, placed only modest reporting requirements on medium-sized companies, and focused on the larger companies that could better handle the burdens. They had the resources of large law, accounting, and lobbying firms to ef
fectively deal with the federal government.
Our nonpolitical, nonpartisan approach to the work of the cost of living program did not sit well with everyone. The different interpretations of how the powers of the CLC should be used led to some difficult encounters. Joyce could often tell who was on the other end of the phone based on how much colorful language I used. When Ehrlichman called, he would rail against the decisions of various entities that made up the Economic Stabilization Program. I had to explain repeatedly that once the President gave them the powers to make decisions, we had little choice but to live with them.18
From the outset, I was deeply concerned that the CLC would be tarnished with allegations of political favoritism and corruption. As a result, we spent a great deal of effort trying to make sure that that did not happen. During the time that I was director of the Cost of Living Council, to my knowledge there was only one accusation that a staff member might have a conflict of interest. When I heard about it, I sent it straight to the Justice Department, where it was promptly found to be groundless. In a presidential election year—especially in the Nixon administration that particular election year—I considered it an amazing, indeed an almost unbelievable, accomplishment that there was not one instance of wrongdoing. Public officials generally don’t get credit or awards for avoiding potholes, but our group at CLC deserved an award for the many bad things that did not happen on our watch.
A consequence of my service as director of the CLC was that it put still further distance between Nixon’s closest political aides and me. Not being deeply involved in the 1972 campaign, however, turned out to be a considerably bigger blessing than I could possibly have imagined.
As the election year heated up, Nixon was heading toward what some political experts said would be a close reelection fight. During much of the prior year, Nixon’s job approval rating had hovered at just under 50 percent in the Gallup polls. While I personally liked the eventual Democratic nominee, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, I did not believe he would be a strong candidate for president. I came to know him while I was serving in Congress. He was to the left of the country, and his platform seemed weak. But McGovern did have an advantage, the same advantage Kennedy and Humphrey had had in Nixon’s previous contests: He projected warmth.
I wrote a memo for the President, noting that McGovern’s “warmth, concern, and decency are appealing.” I suggested that the administration seek opportunities to highlight Nixon’s interest in the problems of ordinary Americans. I believed Nixon did care about improving people’s quality of life but that he just preferred to view and discuss things in theoretical, rather than personal, terms. That didn’t always come across positively in that new media age. “A danger for our administration is that in its competence we seem harsh, in our strength we seem tough, in our pragmatism we seem goal-less and ideal-less.” Finally, I offered a warning, perhaps reflecting concerns I was starting to have about operations at the White House. “The campaign,” I wrote, “must scrupulously avoid going ‘over the line.’”19
Even if anyone had listened to that advice, it came a bit late. On June 19, 1972, three days after I sent that memo to the President, the Washington Post published a front-page news story with a headline: “GOP SECURITY AIDE AMONG FIVE ARRESTED IN BUGGING AFFAIR.”20 The story linked an attempt to place listening devices at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel to an aide at the Committee to Reelect the President.21
I attended the regular White House senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room that morning.* Several expressed curiosity about the piece in the Post. There were differing ideas as to how to deal with the article. Some wanted to confront it as a news story that needed to be managed—in other words, as a public relations problem. My instinct was to get to the root of what had happened and get the situation resolved. Years later, Chuck Colson recalled my comment in the meeting: “If any jackass across the street [at campaign headquarters] or here [in the White House] had anything to do with this, he should be hung up by his thumbs today. We’d better not have anything to do with this. It will kill us.’”22 I don’t remember if that was precisely what I said, but if anything that was an understated version of my thinking.
Despite the drumbeat of news stories that began to appear in the Post on that subject, the Watergate break-in was not uppermost in voters’ minds during the 1972 presidential campaign. However, I did notice troubling signs when the Watergate matter came up in conversations. Joyce and I attended a meeting in the fifth-floor auditorium of the Old Executive Office Building for those Nixon had selected to serve as surrogate speakers for his campaign, including many from his cabinet and key members of Congress, such as Goldwater, as well as Joyce and some other cabinet wives. Ehrlichman offered the group what seemed to me to be tortured responses to some of the questions being raised in the newspapers about Watergate and the campaign. After the meeting I advised Joyce never to repeat Ehrlichman’s recommended talking points, because I felt they did not have the ring of truth. Joyce had had the same reaction.23
The Watergate issue proved little more than a nuisance in 1972. Concerns about a close election were misplaced. Nixon won in a landslide, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. His stunning 23 point margin—60.7 percent to 37.5 percent—was one of the most decisive presidential victories in U.S. history. The President’s reaction to his overwhelming victory was not what most people might have expected. It certainly wasn’t what I expected.
The morning after his reelection, Nixon held a cabinet meeting. I assumed the purpose would be to thank everyone for their help in the campaign, and to talk a bit about his goals for his second term.24
The meeting started off well. Nixon walked into the White House cabinet room to an enthusiastic standing ovation. The President beamed and urged us to take our seats. But the applause continued. For a moment, as he soaked in our congratulations, Nixon paused and gripped the back of his chair in the middle of the large oval table.
Whatever celebratory emotions he may have felt at that moment quickly dissipated. He spoke with his usual precision. He did thank us all for our work, but then quickly moved on to abstract policy discussions. Referring to the most prominent campaign issue, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the President said that he had complete confidence that his administration would bring peace. “Richard Nixon doesn’t shoot blanks,” he said.25
He remarked at length on what he said was his favorite period of history, which oddly enough was the British parliamentary debates of the 1850s. He mentioned Winston Churchill’s father. “He was a brilliant man,” Nixon said, “whose career was ruined by syphilis.”
He talked about the rival British prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Gladstone was in office longer, Nixon observed, but Disraeli had a more brilliant record. The President informed us that Disraeli once described Gladstone’s government as “an exhausted volcano.” This was a roundabout way for Nixon to make what I took as his central point; namely, that some from his first-term administration were tired. This was a special problem, Nixon added, because second presidential terms usually did not measure up to first terms.26
Then, to his by now somewhat subdued audience, the President announced he was going to spend the next few weeks on what I knew was his favorite pastime—thinking about the role each of us would play, if any, in his second term. He said he did not want to be merciless, but that “the government needs an enema.” The President then nodded to his chief of staff. “Bob will take over now,” he said, looking at Haldeman.27 Nixon left the room to another, considerably more muted, round of applause.
After the President left, Haldeman rather abruptly announced that Nixon wanted everyone’s resignation by the end of the week. He said this was customary in a second term, and that Nixon would be making decisions to accept or reject the resignations in the days ahead. He handed each of us an unsigned memo with the subject heading “Post-Election Activities.” It was all very businesslike,
as was Haldeman’s way.
“While it is recognized that this period will necessarily be a time of some uncertainty,” the memo stated, “this will be dispelled as quickly as possible.” That was not a particularly comforting thought. Nor was what followed. “Between now and December 15, please plan on remaining on the job, finishing first-term work, collecting and depositing Presidential plans, and making plans for next term. This is not a vacation period.”
We were asked to put together a book describing our current assignments, and I sensed that we might well be writing job descriptions for the people replacing us. “This should be as comprehensive as possible,” the memo instructed.28
All in all the meeting deflated the cabinet’s enthusiasm for Nixon’s impressive victory. Many of them had worked hard to support the President, and most had served as surrogate speakers. His behavior let down some and angered others. Most everything about it—the judgment it revealed, the timing, the tone—was insensitive and unwise.
Immediately after the meeting I told Haldeman he might want to be careful about asking for resignations from anyone at the Cost of Living Council, because almost none of us had wanted to be there in the first place. If we did submit our resignations, we would mean it, and the President would be faced with the problem of trying to manage the economic stabilization programs with a whole new team—if he could find people willing to do it. I added that he should also be aware that there may be situations like that elsewhere in the administration, where his broad, sweeping request for resignations could boomerang badly. Haldeman came back to me a few hours later, undoubtedly after talking to the President, and said he understood and retracted his earlier request, saying I should not ask for the resignations of those at the CLC.
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