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Nixon's Administrative Presidency Revisited: Aberration or Watershed?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Ron Seyb
Ron Seyb
Affiliation:
Skidmore College
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Extract

On 5 January 1973, one month after his reelection to a second term, Richard Nixon described for Congress a major restructuring of his cabinet and White House staff. Nixon began by emphasizing his determination to “revitalize and streamline the Federal Government in preparation for America's third century,” a reference to his effort of the preceding two years to replace seven domestic executive departments and several agencies with four “superdepartments”: a Department of Natural Resources, a Department of Community Development, a Department of Economic Affairs, and a Department of Human Resources. The failure of Congress to report out of committee any of the four bills Nixon submitted in March 1971 to create these superdepartments was now prompting the president to act unilaterally to “reorder … the timeworn and in many cases obsolete relationships among top staff and line officials” in an effort to realize “the broadening of policy perspectives on the part of top managers and advisers” and improvements in “managerial effectiveness” he had hoped to achieve through comprehensive reorganization of the executive branch.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 249 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1992

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References

Notes

1. This quote and those that follow, except where noted, are taken from “Statement by President Nixon on Executive Reorganization,” in Nixon: The Fifth Year of His Presidency (Washington, D.C., 1974)Google Scholar, 95-A.

2. “Message to Congress on Reorganization of the Executive Branch,” in Nixon: The Third Year of His Presidency (Washington, D.C., 1972)Google Scholar, 73-A.

3. Arnold, Peri, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning, 1905–1980 (Princeton, 1986), 298.Google Scholar

4. By elevating Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz to assistant to the president for economic affairs, Nixon created a surrogate for the fourth superdepartment as well.

5. Bonafede, Dom, “White House Report/President Nixon's Executive Reorganization Plans Prompt Praise and Criticism,” National Journal 5(10) (10 March 1973): 331.Google Scholar

6. Lowi, Theodore J., The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 144Google Scholar. For example, “three Domestic Council assistant directors were elevated to high department posts: John C. Whitaker, undersecretary of Interior; Egil Krogh, Jr., undersecretary of Transportation; and Edward L. Morgan, assistant secretary of the Treasury.” Ibid., 335.

7. Richard P. Nathan used the term “administrative presidency” to describe Nixon's second-term management strategy in his definitive work, The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 62.

9. Bonafede, Dom and Iglehart, John K., “White House Report/End of Counselor System Enlarges Policy-Forming Role of Cabinet,” National journal 5(20) (19 May 1973): 726—29.Google Scholar

10. Bonafede, “White House Report/President Nixon's Executive Reorganization Plans Prompt Praise and Criticism,” 329.

11. John Ehrlichman, as quoted in Bonafede and Iglehart, “White House Report/End of Counselor System Enlarges Policy-Forming Role of Cabinet,” 727.

12. “Reorganization: A Super Cabinet and Super Assistants,” Congressional Quarterly 31(2) (13 January 1973): 36.Google Scholar

13. Bonafede and Iglehart, “White House Report/End of Counselor System Enlarges Policy-Forming Role of Cabinet,” 727.

14. “Reorganization: A Super Cabinet and Super Assistants,” 36.

15. Bonafede, “White House Report/President Nixon's Executive Reorganization Plans Prompt Praise and Criticism,” 329.

16. Richard Neustadt, as quoted in Ibid., 339.

17. James MacGregor Burns, as quoted in Ibid., 330.

18. (New York, 1987), 121.

19. Ibid., 124.

20. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989).

21. Ibid., 169–70.

22. Lowi, The Personal President, 144.

23. (New York, 1983).

24. (New York, 1975).

25. Ibid., 13.

26. Nathan describes Ronald Reagan's use of these and other administrative tactics in Ibid., 69–81.

27- Pfiffner, James P., “Political Appointees and Career Executives: The Democracy Bureaucracy Nexus in the Third Century,” Public Administration Review 47 (January- February 1987): 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. The President's Committee on Administrative Management, Report of the President's Committee (Washington, D.C., 1937)Google ScholarPubMed. For discussions of how closely Nixon's comprehensive reorganization proposal conformed with the “classic themes” or “traditional organizational principles” of the Brownlow Committee's reform vision, see Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 293, and Ronald C. Moe, “Traditional Organizational Principles and the Managerial Presidency: From Phoenix to Ashes,” Public Administration Review (March-April 1990): 130–32.

29. James March and Johan Olsen are eloquent advocates of the notion that solutions chase problems just as readily as problems chase solutions. They argue that “alternatives are not automatically provided to a decision maker; they have to be found. Search for alternatives occurs in an organized context in which problems are not only looking for solutions, but solutions are looking for problems.” (March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P., “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78(3) [September 1984]: 740Google Scholar.) This search can result in solutions becoming attached to problems not through “the logic of causal linkages between means and ends [but] by the less problematic temporal linkages of simultaneity.” (Ibid., 740). See also March and Olsen, “Organizing Political Life: What Administrative Reorganization Tells Us about Government,” American Political Science Review 77(2) (June 1983): 292.Google Scholar

30. Good overviews and analyses of Reagan's administrative strategy can be found in DiTomaso, Nancy, “The Managed State: Governmental Reorganization in the First Year of the Reagan Administration,” Research in Political Sociology 1 (1985): 141–66Google Scholar, and Sanders, Elizabeth, “The Presidency and the Bureaucratic State,” in Nelson, Michael, ed., The Presidency and the Political System (Washington, D.C., 1988), 379–409.Google Scholar

31. A variety of scholars have attacked this assumption recently, arguing that politicians and policymakers are frequently animated by “ideas” and/or “public spirit” instead of selfinterest. At the forefront of this movement to bring ideas and public spirit into accounts of political behavior and decision-making are Steven Kelman and Robert Reich. See Reich, Robert B., ed., The Power of Public Ideas (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar; Kelman, Steven, Making Public Policy: A Hopeful View of American Government (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; and Kelman, Steven, “‘Public Choice’ and Public Spirit,” The Public Interest 87 (Spring 1987): 80–94.Google Scholar

32. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, xi—xii.

33. Many students of reorganization have commented upon its failure to produce tangible improvements in government performance. David S. Brown's assessment is typical: “in terms of their effects on administrative costs, size of staff, productivity, or spending, most major reorganizations have been described by outsiders, and frequently by participants, as substantial failures. Few efficiencies are achieved; little gain in responsiveness is recorded; control seems as elusive after the efforts as before.” Brown, David S., “‘Reforming’ the Bureaucracy: Some Suggestions for the New President,” Public Administration Review 37(2) (March-April 1977): 165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. See, for example, Benze, James G., Jr., “Presidential Reorganization as a Tactical Weapon: Putting Politics Back into Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 15 (Winter 1985): 145–57Google Scholar. Benze differs from others who make this argument by suggesting that reorganizations designed to win tactical advantage can also stimulate improvements in administration.

35. March and Olsen, “Organizing Political Life,” 292.

36. Ibid., 291.

37. The best analysis of the reasons for congressional and bureaucractic opposition to reorganization remains Seidman, Harold, Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization. 3d ed. (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

38. The various goals attached to reorganization are discussed in Salamon, Lester M., “The Goals of Reorganization: A Framework for Analysis,” Administration and Society 12(4) (February 1981): 471–500.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. New York Times, 5 December 1968, as quoted in Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 276.

40. Cole, Richard L. and Caputo, David A., “Presidential Control of the Senior Civil Service: Assessing the Strategies of the Nixon Years,” American Political Science Review 70 (June 1986): 403.Google Scholar

41. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency, 39.

42. Waterman, Presidential Influence and the Administrative State, 58–59.

43. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency, p. 39.

44. Cole and Caputo, “Presidential Control of the Senior Civil Service,” 403.

45. Vogelsang-Coombs, Vera, “The Dialogues on Executive Reorganization” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1985), 123.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., 127.

47. Ibid., 128.

48. Wayne, Stephen J., The Legislative Presidency (New York, 1978), 186.Google Scholar

49. A few months after his election, Nixon sent a memo to his department heads encouraging them to hire “a maximum number of the fine young applicants who have sent their résumés to us in response to this administration's widespread appeal for volunteers to join with us in the government of this nation.” Memorandum from Richard Nixon to the Cabinet, 2 February 1969, National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Central Files, Federal Government-Organization, Box 1, Folder “10/6/69–12/15/69.”

50. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency, 37.

51. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 283. For a thorough discussion of Reorganization Plan No. 2 and its implications for the “managerial presidency,” see McNown, Lauri Huffman, “The Evolution of the Managerial Presidency: The Role of the Ash Council and Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 1989).Google Scholar

52. Announcement of Appointments, 5 April 1969, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents 5(15) (14 April 1969), 530Google Scholar, as quoted in Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency, 111.

53. Memorandum from the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization (PACEO) to Richard Nixon, 20 August 1969, National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Central Files, Staff and Member Office Files, President's Advisory Council on Government Organization, Box 1 Memoranda for the President, Folder “EOP (Memoranda to the President).”

54. Memorandum from Ken Cole to Richard Nixon, 17 June 1970, National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Subject Files, The Executive Branch, Box 53, Folder “1/1/ 71–4/30/71.”

55. Memorandum from Richard Nixon to the Cabinet, 19 February 1969, National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Subject Files, Federal Government-Organization, Box 1, Folder “10/6/69–12/15/69.”

56. The power of economy and efficiency as political symbols is treated in Salamon, Lester, “The Question of Goals,” in Szanton, Peter ed., Federal Reorganization: What Have We Learned? (Chatham, N.J., 1981), 65.Google Scholar

57. March and Olsen, “Organizing Political Life,” 291.

58. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency, 45–47.

59. Cole and Caputo, “Presidential Control of the Senior Civil Service,” 401.

60. Waterman, Presidential Influence and the Administrative State, 65.

61. “Reorganization” (note 12 above), 37.

62. Notes of Meeting of 27 November 1972, Noon, National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Special Files, John D. Ehrlichman, Box 13, Notes of Meetings with the President, 7 August—13 December 1972, Folder 6.

63. Notes of Meeting of 14 November 1972, 4: 1 0 P.M., Ibid., Folder 5.

64. Notes of Meeting of 20 November 1972, 4:05 P.M., Ibid., Folder 5.

65. Notes of Meeting of 4 January 1973, 3:00 P.M., National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Special Files, John D. Ehrlichman, Box 13, Notes of Meetings with the President, 4 January-2 May 1973, Folder 1.

66. Notes of Meeting of 22 November 1972, 4:05 P.M., National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Special Files, John D. Ehrlichman, Box 13, Notes of Meetings with the President, 7 August-13 December 1972, Folder 6.

67. Notes of Meeting of 14 November 1972, 4: 1 0 P.M., Ibid., Folder 5.

68. Notes of Meeting of 20 November 1972, 4:05 P.M., Ibid., Folder 5.

69. Notes of Meeting of 21 November 1972, Ibid., Folder 6.

70. Notes of Meeting of 21 November 1972, 3:15 P.M., Ibid., Folder 6.

71. Notes of Meeting of 4 January 1973, 3:00 P.M., National Archives, Nixon Project, White House Special Files, John D. Ehrlichman, Notes of Meetings with the President, 4 January-2 May 1973, Box 13, Folder 1.

72. See DiTomaso, “The Managed State” (note 30 above), 149–51, 155–62, and Cooper, Joseph and West, William F., “Presidential Power and Republican Government: The Theory and Practice of OMB Review of Agency Rules,” journal of Politics 50(4) (November 1988): 864–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73. See, for example, Moe, “Traditional Organizational Principles and the Managerial Presidency” (note 28 above), 129–40, and Waterman, Presidential Influence and the Administrative State.

74. Reagan's use of his appointment power and the budgetary process is treated in DiTomaso, “The Managed State” (note 30 above), 146–51; Joseph Cooper and William West describe the “regulatory review” process conducted by OMB and its impact on the Reagan administration's control over policy in “Presidential Power and Republican Government”; and John Hart explains how the cabinet council system worked to increase the power of Reagan's White House staff at the expense of his cabinet in The Presidential Branch, 123, 211.