Known and Unknown (17 page)

The episode was like a body blow and left me with a deep caution of the press. Years later, when I left government and moved back to Chicago in 1977, the Anderson story would still haunt me. Joyce and I would run into people who, while generally friendly and complimentary, wondered why I had built that fancy bedroom and private bathroom at the expense of the poor.

 

O
ur plan was to have OEO serve as a laboratory for experimental programs, not as an entity that managed large operations in perpetuity. For example, OEO had tried a number of innovative approaches to education. Under my predecessors, to their credit, OEO had launched an experiment providing school vouchers for parents. The plan had the support of my friend Milton Friedman.
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Friedman and I believed that school vouchers could lead to an improvement in public education by giving parents choices rather than forcing them to send their children to a particular school.
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OEO also had supported an experiment in performance contracting for teachers, an idea that was bitterly opposed by the politically active teachers' unions.

I also served on a committee President Nixon established to encourage and guide school desegregation policies as required by the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision
Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka
. The committee was originally chaired by Vice President Agnew, which offered an early glimpse for me of Agnew in a substantive setting. I did not come away impressed. He soon lost interest in the issue, did not seem particularly knowledgeable on the substance, and rarely came to the meetings. The chairman-ship was assumed by another member of the committee, the Secretary of Labor and a rising figure in the Nixon administration, George Shultz. Shultz quickly became a friend. Also a Princeton graduate, and a former Marine, he was not flamboyant—though rumor has it that he has a tattoo of a Princeton tiger on his backside.

The President thought well of Shultz. Nixon had a collection of favorites who would go up and down in his level of interest, depending on his priorities at the time. Early on, at least, Shultz was one of them. “Keep your eye on Shultz,” Nixon told me at our meeting in Key Biscayne. “He's going to be a star.”

Shultz skillfully moved the heated debates about school desegregation away from emotionally charged, confrontational discussions toward more practical approaches. Our effort to peacefully desegregate schools in the South, supported by the President, deserves to rank high in the Nixon administration's domestic record.

 

I
n addition to dealing with policy matters at the Office of Economic Opportunity, we often had to face the raw public emotion provoked by the thorny social issues of the time. A day at OEO without a protest, a demonstration, or a bomb threat was a good day. There were times when my courageous secretary, Brenda Williams, would have to move her desk in front of the door to prevent protesters from breaking into our office on M Street.

On one occasion in November 1969, some fifty people barged into a conference room during a staff meeting, protesting the hiring policies of the Legal Services program. Terry Lenzner, the program director, escorted the group to a room on another floor so our meeting could continue. A pugnacious young Democrat, Lenzner had captained the Harvard football team some years before. He was not one to back down from trouble. When Lenzner tried to leave the group, the protesters blocked the door, effectively holding him captive.

I was notified of the problem and went down to the room. Wedging myself in past those blocking the doors, I took Lenzner's arm and told him we were leaving.
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I then told the protesters they had the right to express their views, but we were not going to conduct the government's business under threats or intimidation, and that if they didn't leave the building, they would be arrested. That, of course, was exactly what some of them wanted. I obliged them and called in the local police. I was later told that I had caused the arrest of a major fraction of the graduating class of Howard Law School. As it turned out, among them was a young law student by the name of Jerry Rivers, later better known as Geraldo Rivera. It was but one example of the hostility and divisions that some of the OEO programs had caused in the country.

 

C
onsidering the many issues in the agency's purview, I had to delegate enormous amounts of responsibility to keep OEO operating. As a congressman, I had not had a large staff. But at OEO I understood well the importance of having talented assistance. Among others, the group I recruited and worked with included Christie Todd Whitman, a future governor of New Jersey and later administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); Bill Bradley, then the talented New York Knicks basketball star and a future U.S. senator; Ron James, who later became a senior official in the Department of the Army; and Max Friedersdorf, an outstanding director of congressional relations in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations.

Two others stand out. Frank Carlucci, for one, was an enormously capable man I lured from a promising career in the Foreign Service. I first knew Carlucci when we were on the varsity wrestling team at Princeton during the early 1950s. Frank went from there to the U.S. Navy and then the State Department, where he led an initiative that reduced the number of personnel at the U.S. mission in Brazil by a large fraction. His ability to move into an entrenched operation and reorganize it caught my attention.

Another excellent decision was hiring a serious young man from Wyoming. After interviewing with me six months earlier, Dick Cheney had gone to work for my good friend Congressman Bill Steiger of Wisconsin. I knew Steiger was impressed with his work. When I was nominated as the director of OEO, Steiger suggested that Cheney write a strategy memo to assist me in my confirmation hearings. It focused on what I sensed and heard was needed for a successful OEO: better accountability. Once I was confirmed by the Senate, I asked Carlucci to call Cheney and bring him aboard as my special assistant. Cheney had been thinking of returning to the University of Wisconsin to complete his doctorate in political science, but he took the job. Together, Carlucci, Cheney, and I—three future Republican secretaries of defense—labored to fix a cornerstone of Johnson's Great Society.

The well-worn recent media caricature of Dick Cheney as a rigid ideologue is unfamiliar to those of us who know him well. I've known him from his start in the federal government. At first Cheney was one of the many bright young staffers around the OEO office, but in short order he proved indispensable. The words steady and unflappable were frequently applied to him—and with good reason. Dick was an enormous help as we wrestled with the many heated controversies in which OEO had become embroiled over its short life. In fact, the more difficult the situation, the more Dick seemed to like it.
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B
ecause of OEO's mission and its position as the centerpiece of the Johnson antipoverty legacy, many prominent people were interested in its activities and agreed to serve on its advisory board. One of them was Sammy Davis, Jr., often introduced as “the world's greatest entertainer.” Sammy and I became friends. One memorable night the entertainer came to visit us at our small row house in Washington. It was only twenty-eight feet across; the second floor had two small bedrooms. We took the door off the upstairs closet so we could fit in a small crib when our son, Nick, was born.

“This is a nice place,” Sammy said, when he entered our front room. “Let's see it.”

“You just did,” Joyce replied with a smile.
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Some months later, Joyce and I were in Nevada, where I was giving a speech. It happened that my trip coincided with Sammy's hundredth performance at the Sands Hotel & Casino. After his spectacular show, Sammy told Joyce and me he would not be performing the next night and wanted us to go to dinner with him. He said he would arrange for us to see the best entertainer in Las Vegas which, considering Sammy's fame, was quite a compliment. So that evening we went to the International Hotel and were seated at a front row table—Sammy, his lovely wife Altovise, Joyce, and me.

Before long, the entertainer whom Sammy had extolled came onstage. Wearing a sequined jumpsuit and alternating between the ridiculous and the sublime, he promptly took command of the large audience. He sang songs of every genre, and that evening I became an Elvis Presley fan.

I could see that Elvis was a masterful showman. The audience was enthralled. Periodically he would take a silk scarf, wipe his brow, and toss it to the screaming crowd. At one point he threw a long, scarlet scarf in our direction. Sammy's wife caught it and handed it to Joyce.

After the show, Sammy took us backstage to Elvis' dressing room. The room was filled with all sorts of people—fans, friends, members of his entourage, and showgirls. Eventually Joyce and I became separated in the crowd. After a while, she spotted me in what had to have been an unexpected place—standing in a corner of the room talking intently with the king of rock and roll.

After Sammy introduced us, Elvis pulled me aside. He wanted to discuss what I thought was an unlikely subject—the United States Army. Some years earlier he had served with the Third Armored Division in Germany for seventeen months. He wanted to share his thoughts about the armed forces and the pride he had in his service. Something of an admirer of Nixon, he was also interested in discussing the administration. Around that time, Presley had sent a letter to Nixon asking to help with the illegal narcotics trade. This led to the famous meeting between Elvis and the President in the Oval Office of the White House.

I imagine there weren't a lot of people in Elvis' normal circle with whom he could have a serious conversation about the military. I was impressed that years after his service he still cared so much about the Army. It certainly wasn't the sort of conversation I expected to have when I walked into his dressing room, but it was a welcome reminder that patriots can be found everywhere.
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D
uring my tenure as director of OEO, we were successful in saving and strengthening some worthwhile programs by reallocating funds to them from less successful projects. We spun off functioning programs to other federal departments. We didn't perform miracles there, though I believe we did some good for the poor and for the country.

Even though many well-intentioned people at the agency worked hard to find solutions to the problems of poverty, easy answers were in short supply. During those tough times I could always count on Joyce to provide some good-humored perspective. She knew how often I would come home feeling disappointed that a program had not worked out better.

One night when I came home late, I went to the refrigerator and found a note taped to the door. Joyce had written, I am sure with a smile: “He tackled the job that couldn't be done; with a smile he went right to it. He tackled the job that couldn't be done—and couldn't do it.”

A
fter I left the Office of Economic Opportunity, Nixon appointed me Counsellor to the President, a general advisory position in the White House. I continued as a member of the cabinet, and I moved full time into an office in the West Wing. I began to see the President and his top aides far more regularly than I had while at OEO.

I soon noticed that Nixon liked to ruminate away from the Oval Office. He often took refuge in a separate private office in the Old Executive Office Building, the massive nineteenth-century building adjacent to the White House. There he would meet with small groups of aides to talk about whatever might be on his mind. I would find him there dressed in a suit and tie, his feet up on a stool, the ever-present yellow pad in his lap, thinking his way through a problem.

In 1970, the country remained in turmoil. Tension over Vietnam remained high, and the situation flared in the spring after the so-called incursion into Cambodia—a phrase that seemed to conjure up a sightseeing visit more than the armed invasion it was. On May 4, students at Kent State University shut down the campus with a massive demonstration protesting the administration's action in Cambodia, which students feared would widen and extend the war. In an attempt to control the chaos, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire, killing four people and wounding others. The incident precipitated a nationwide student strike at more than four hundred colleges and universities—involving as many as four million students.
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Nixon, troubled by the mass demonstration, appeared at the Lincoln Memorial at an early-morning student protest and talked to a group of them who had made camp there. His visit was dismissed by a growing and vocal legion of critics, but I thought it demonstrated an interesting aspect of the President's character that he was willing to put himself in the middle of such a scene.

On May 15, protests at the historically black Jackson State University in Mississippi turned violent, and two more students were killed. Shortly after these shootings, Cheney (who continued to work as my assistant after I left OEO) and I traveled to Mississippi to get a sense of what might happen and to reach out to the families.
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We found a fluid, unstable situation—everyone was holding his breath waiting to see what might happen next. It was a tense moment, as the country watched Americans—young students and equally young National Guardsmen—turn on one another. The disorder continued across the country for many months, until campuses finally reopened that fall.

Members of Nixon's cabinet had their own personal experiences with young people expressing opposition to the war and wanting to be part of the so-called youth movement, which was characterized by wearing long hair, beads, and tie-dyed shirts. This provided a challenge for some parents in the cabinet, since most Sundays Nixon invited our families to the White House for a church service, and parents had to work overtime to make sure their children looked presentable enough to read scripture or shake hands with the President. Our own children were friends with some of the antiwar demonstrators, and it was not exactly easy for them to reveal that their dad worked for Richard Nixon in the White House. Valerie once told me that she was thinking of joining one of the demonstrations. “Okay, do it,” I said bluntly, “if you believe in what you are saying.” But I told her I didn't want her to join a protest simply because she wanted to be part of her crowd. She decided not to go.

 

N
ow that I was at the White House full-time, there was speculation in the press and elsewhere that I had moved into President Nixon's inner circle. That was an outsider's perspective. Inside the White House the situation was more complex. Nixon had more than one so-called inner circle—and he would swing back and forth among them, depending on his interests and moods. He also used the various circles for quite different purposes.

There was, of course, the well-publicized duo in the Nixon White House, consisting of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. They appealed to Nixon's political bent, his toughness, and his long-held resentment of those he called the Washington elites. Haldeman and Ehrlichman's German surnames led the press to dub them the Berlin Wall for their reputation as a united front protecting the President and, it was implied, keeping others out. My experience was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had quite different personalities and working methods.

As chief of staff, Haldeman was the aide closest to the President. He was a trim man with a crew cut, brisk and methodical, but rarely unpleasant. I liked his meetings, because they tended to be substantive and efficient. I also had a reasonable certainty when I dealt with him that he was providing an accurate version of President Nixon's wishes and views, which made me comfortable with the guidance he offered. Because of his closeness to Nixon, Haldeman might have been the one person who could have stepped in and stopped Nixon's decisions regarding the management of the Watergate scandal. Nixon sometimes said things he hadn't thought through. What he needed was someone to talk him out of those thoughts. I suspect Haldeman's fault might have been in not insisting to his boss that he was wrong.

Ehrlichman was less pleasant to deal with. He seemed to have a high degree of certainty about his views that bordered on arrogance, a trait that did him no favors as he gathered more influence in the White House. Certainty without power can be interesting, and even amusing. Certainty with power can be dangerous. It was never clear to me whether Ehrlichman was basing his guidance to others on the President's views or his own. I did not follow his guidance without checking his suggestions out with others, and then only if I agreed with them.

One person who made his way through the Berlin Wall was Chuck Colson. He served as Nixon's special counsel and seemed to become increasingly close to him as the 1972 election approached. A former Marine, a troubleshooter, and a self-described hatchet man, Colson was bright and tough. The President boasted that Colson would do anything for him, including walk “right through doors.”
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Nixon no doubt valued Colson's loyalty, but in my experience unquestioning obedience rarely serves a president well.

There was another group—another so-called inner circle—in the White House that included former California lieutenant governor Bob Finch, Pat Moynihan, George Shultz, and me. We were what Bill Safire once described as “youngish intellectual types” who appealed to Nixon's inner policy wonk. Unlike members of the Haldeman group, each of us had backgrounds in elected office, government, or academia that predated the Nixon administration. We all respected the President, but none of us awoke every morning planning to bash through closed doors for Nixon's political purposes.

During his early years as president, Nixon tried to merge these two groups into meetings Haldeman called FRESH, constituting Finch, Rumsfeld, Ehrlichman, Shultz, and Harlow.
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We were an informal sounding board for Nixon on policy and political issues. It was an interesting opportunity to watch Nixon's mind at work. He was a strategic thinker, often looking two or three steps ahead of a given decision and always musing about and considering a full range of options.

There were, of course, times that Nixon would rant about something that had angered him. He'd go on about members of the press or certain administration figures who weren't carrying the ball well enough. I wasn't surprised to learn that sometimes I was the subject of these harangues. Contrary to the impression from the secret Nixon tapes—and the occasional deleted expletives—I did not find the President anywhere near as profane as some portray him. As historian Stephen Ambrose noted, most of those expletives were milder words, like crap and hell and damn.
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One of the things I took occasion to discuss with the President was the administration's outreach to minorities—a perennial problem for Republicans and something government needed to be attentive to if it hoped to be truly representative. Some people blamed the widening gap between minorities and the GOP on Nixon's Southern strategy, a political effort that sought to win the votes of Southern Democrats, many of whom tended to be unsympathetic to civil rights legislation. Whether the strategy was a good idea or not, the fact is that the Democratic Party had successfully engaged in exactly that sort of maneuvering for decades—these voters were called “Southern Democrats” for a reason.

While I did not favor racial quotas, I believed it was important for the administration to make a serious effort at diversity. In the Nixon administration there were too few individuals from minority groups involved in policy-making positions at a time when issues with significant racial ramifications—school desegregation, riots, inner-city school problems, and drugs—were front and center. I suggested that the White House form a group to monitor minority hiring, marshal aid to black colleges, and focus on other efforts in support of minorities—including speaking to minority organizations.

In making my case to the President, I cast it in political terms that I thought might appeal to him. Strained relations between the Nixon administration and minorities, I noted, were eroding support for his priorities, such as the economy and ending the war in Vietnam. “A critical factor in altering the present perception of the Administration is hiring,” I suggested in one memo. “Minority groups will be far more likely to see the administration in a favorable light if they are in fact a part of it.”
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As the tapes have revealed, Nixon occasionally made offensive remarks about minorities. I didn't know exactly how he felt, however, since my experience was that his comments seemed in part generational, and I found his actions regarding minorities were not consistent with his sometimes inappropriate words. Nixon generally seemed to agree with my arguments about minority outreach, and his administration made serious efforts in that regard, including the major effort on school desegregation and the successful work by Bob Brown, Nixon's White House lead on minority affairs.

 

P
resident Nixon occasionally gave me assignments that involved foreign policy, which he knew was among my interests. He also thought my having that exposure could be helpful if I sought a seat in the United States Senate—which was a frequent suggestion of his. He thought many Republicans in the Senate were weak-willed and poor advocates for his policies. He wanted people he considered his protégés to get to the Senate and “toughen them up.” I tended to put off his suggestions that I run for a Senate seat in Illinois. But Nixon did persuade George H. W. Bush to run for a seat in Texas, a campaign Bush lost.

In September 1970, the President asked me to be a member of the U.S. delegation to the funeral of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser, a close Soviet ally, was the beneficiary of millions of dollars in Soviet arms. As a result of our country's strained relations, no senior American foreign policy official was assigned to the delegation.

The large population of Cairo had at least doubled for the funeral of their leader. Many delegations from around the globe gathered in a huge tent to await the official events. For hours, passages from the Koran were broadcast over loudspeakers. Egyptian women on the mobbed streets wailed in a ritual chant. I left to see what was going on in the streets and ended up with the crushing mob of mourners following Nasser's body across the Nile.

While in Cairo our group met with the then Vice President and acting President, Anwar Sadat. We were advised in our Department of State and intelligence briefings that Sadat was unremarkable and not likely to successfully succeed Nasser as president. As it turned out, he proved to be a bold, courageous leader who successfully mended Egyptian relations with the West and moved the Soviet troops out of Egypt in short order.

In the spring of 1971, the President proposed that Bob Finch and I go to Europe and North Africa to discuss the growing illegal drug problem. As we prepared to leave, Nixon made an unexpected request. Stressing the need for the utmost secrecy, the President asked us to pass a message to a Romanian official that Nixon wanted to establish a channel of communications with the leadership of the People's Republic of China. We were to ask that Chinese leaders make contact with Nixon through Major General Vernon Walters, then the U.S. defense attaché in Paris. It was an unusual request to make—and I didn't know if Secretary of State William Rogers was privy to it. But Nixon sometimes had people doing things in secret. As it happened, the Romanian official in question was traveling and we were not able to pass along the message. But Nixon had given us an early indication that he had decided to make a direct and bold overture to China.

It was during this period that I first worked with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. I was impressed with Kissinger's uncommon ability to arrange matters as he wanted them. Kissinger was not in anyone's circle within the White House and over time became a force unto himself. The conventional wisdom about the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was that they worked as equals, or even that Kissinger was the teacher and Nixon the student. Though Kissinger is now properly recognized as a critical figure in modern American foreign policy, he did not enter the Nixon administration with that same stature. Kissinger had come from an academic world of theoretical rather than practical experience. By contrast, Nixon had real-world experience and had been actively engaged with foreign leaders in scores of countries for decades. If anything, at the outset, Nixon was the professor and Kissinger the student, though an unquestionably brilliant one at that.

A problem that came up time and again was something I would become familiar with over the ensuing decades: the complicated relationships between the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department. Once at a cabinet meeting a discussion arose as to how State, Defense, and the NSC were working together. Kissinger, then serving as the National Security Adviser, scribbled a note and handed it to me with a smile. It said, “As a team of barracudas.”
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