Washington

There may be no more peculiar period in the life of the nation’s capital than when the government changes hands, and there is probably no analogue elsewhere. Status, careers, contacts, incomes, and inside knowledge are all suddenly unsettled, and it is some time before new and perceivable patterns become fixed. The town becomes preoccupied, almost obsessed, with sorting out the new order of things, and with counting up one’s own debits and credits as a result of the change. There is an unconquerable tendency to compare everything with the way things were before, making all of us suddenly sound, and feel, very old. The Götterdämmerung exit of Lyndon Johnson and the slow, almost mysterious entrance of Mr. Nixon heightened the sense of displacement. Longtime Nixon-haters, who are plentiful here—they include members of the press—were unhinged by the President’s good beginning; the acclaim for the President’s press conferences was intensified by the fact that as the reporters sat in the East Room watching Mr. Nixon, they still saw the specter of Mr. Johnson’s rambling, sometimes frightening, responses. Democrats began to sense they were in deeper trouble than they had thought. As the new group makes its first moves, the old-timers, who have seen it all before, cluck quietly over its naïveté. But for the most part, in the beginning, press, Democrats, and Republicans are all very polite. Within the new Administration, there is a good deal of going about and reassuring that one has no ambitions but to do one’s job, no desire for power or territory-just one team.

None of this will last, of course, and everyone knows it, but it is a rather civilized and even restful ritual.

White House positioning

Campaign talk and obediently printed newspaper leaks notwithstanding, Mr. Nixon has built up the largest and potentially most powerful White House staff in history. It is standard litany to talk about “downgrading” the White House staff. Government being as complex as it is, however, if the President wants to be in charge, he has no choice but to make his own staff very strong. Moreover, the White House staff being his direct employees, a President is likely to trust in them more than in Cabinet officers, who have pasts, special constituencies, congressional committees, and futures to serve, in addition to serving the Chief Executive.

When the staff of Daniel P. Moynihan sat down with that of Joseph Califano in the week before the inauguration, the incoming group already numbered twice as many as the departing one. The talk inevitably turned to how to make the Cabinet Departments respond to the White House staff. The Nixon White House was shaping up, one of its members commented, as “a cross between Roosevelt and Eisenhowerorganized confusion.” What there is not, at least yet, is any single person with the status or the power of a Sherman Adams or, more recently, a Califano. (This is not to say that none of Mr. Nixon’s staff coveted such a role. Nor when a Nixon aide asserts, “There is no Califano on this staff,” can one be certain whether he is pleased or sorry.) H. R. Haldeman acts as a sort of chief of staff, and daily “action memos” are issued from his office, but, his colleagues say, thus far at least he has not interfered in policy. The positioning of Arthur Burns as an unprecedented counselor with Cabinet rank caused some uneasy stirring inside and outside the White House. Burns’s staff is more conservative than that of the Urban Affairs Council, and he is in a position to have an impact on all domestic and economic policies. But Mr. Burns does not appear to have strong instincts for power, and there is even a theory among knowledgeable people that Mr. Nixon placed him there, among other reasons, so that no “czar” could emerge.

Interestingly enough, for a government not exactly marked by a bounce to its step, there are more men under thirty on the Nixon White House start than there have been on all previous White House staffs combined. Part of this has to do simply with the sheer size of the start, and part with its origins. Most of the young men are technicians drawn from the Nixon presidential campaign, and some are bright young men plucked by Moynihan, through his Harvard contacts, for his own stall.

The speed with which Henry Kissinger assembled a staff of some of the ablest men, in and out of Washington, regardless of party, even snatching some of the really firstclass minds in the State Department, shook foreign policy and defense circles here. Some of these men formerly had held very high jobs elsewhere in the government, and everyone knows that they would turn in a title only in exchange for power. At this point, the new loreign policy machinery is a highly—without doubt overly—structured affair. There are several levels and groupings to the Kissinger staff itself: one for general oversight of government policies in each ot the regions—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and so on—or subjects such as arms control or economics; “program assistants,” who are senior people to handle specific crisis areas, such as the Middle East at present, or Vietnam, or events such as the visit of a foreign minister; and some junior members to do long-range studies and planning. Among the members of the staff are Helmut Sonnenfeldt, formerly of the State Department and perhaps the brightest student of Soviet affairs in Washington, and Morton Halperin, formerly of the Defense Department’s International Security Affairs staff, the group which turned Clark Clifford, and ultimately Lyndon Johnson, around on the Vietnam War. Having been noticed and written about, Kissinger’s National Security Council staff has been instructed not to talk to the press and has been “discouraged from having its own dealings with embassies; Mr. Nixon has been at pains to point out how important the State Department is, and what a good friend Bill Rogers has always been.

Mr. Nixon, however, appears to he proceeding with no illusions about the capacities of the State Department to provide him with fresh policy options or detached information. Moreover, in january, before most of the rest of the new government officials had found their offices, there was a subterranean power struggle between the NSC staff, which persuaded the President to dismantle the State Department’s key (if largely unused) instrument for coordinating government-wide foreign policy—the Senior Interdepartmental Group—and State Department staff men who persuaded Undersecretary U. Alexis Johnson to persuade Secretary Rogers to fight back. The result was a compromise and, inevitably, more interagency committees—one for the Undersecretary and another one, called the Review Committee, for the NSC.

The State Department is, in fact, even more firmly in the grip of the traditional Foreign Service than before. The Service had battled for the establishment of an Undersecretary for Political Affairs, to be filled by a career Foreign Service Officer. Ironically, the Young Turks of the Foreign Service waged the battle in order to improve their own status and morale within a top-heavy organization, only to see the post given to Johnson, the most senior of the Foreign Service, a devoted supporter of President Johnson’s Vietnam policy and a friend of Dean Rusk, who lobbied hard for Alexis Johnson to receive the job. The Foreign Service was also able to entrench itself during the lengthy time Rogers spent establishing his own men in the Department, a process that was not completed while the President was making fundamental decisions about Vietnam and the Middle East and taking his trip to Europe.

The key point about the Kissinger staff, as about Moynihan’s, is that they were off and running early, and well chosen, and therefore in positions to do work which is “better staffed-out,” as they say here, than were the Cabinet officers, who were still selecting assistants. Moreover, they are in the building, with more opportunity to catch the king’s ear. As George Ball has put it, “Nothing propinques like propinquity.”

Committee-happy

This Administration is committeehappy, but the older hands around town are betting that it won’t last long. One can get odds on whether some of the committees or the Sunday White House prayer meetings will be the first to go. Mr. Nixon was warned in the report of the task force on government organization that no committee of more than three can operate successfully for any length of time. They tend to become bureaucratic in themselves, wanting everything presented to them, and on paper, before there is a decision, slowing action even further. They are time-consuming for the principals, who must sit through discussions of issues of no concern to them. Committees therefore have a way of withering away in disuse. The real work is done around them, or under them, by the people most involved in the problem at hand.

Sic transit

About a month after the election, there appeared a story in the Washington Post with the headline, “Nixon Plans Wide Housecleaning in Government, Key Aide Says.” John Mitchell told a group of investment hankers, the story said, that “Nixon considered the lack of a thorough changeover one of the biggest errors of the Eisenhower Administration.” Those who were here at the time say that the incoming Eisenhower group talked much the same way. Yet the most striking thing about the Nixon take-over was how long it took and how thin it was, and how many lives and even entire government agencies were suspended in confusion. An astonishing number of Johnson Administration officials have been kept on, and, accustomed to the power and the inside poop, they are delighted.

Around the middle of January, one Cabinet officer came to the office of a Department official who had been assuming, with regret, that his future lay elsewhere, and said, “I hope you’re not thinking of leaving.” Surprised, the official replied, “Well, among other things, I worked for Mr. Humphrey’s election.” “Hubert?” replied the Cabinet officer. “Great guy!” The official is still there.

There are a number of reasons why Mitchell’s prediction did not pan out. For one thing, Republicans, almost by definition, do not seem to have the same zest for government as Democrats. For another, the group that has come in seems largely to be one with limited contacts, and also limited daring for reaching out to the unknown. The law firms and universities which virtually staffed the past Democratic Administrations have barely been touched. Businessmen, in general, are not all that interested in serving, except perhaps at the very top. Once here, moreover, they often have a miserable time of it. They are accustomed to a command structure, clear organization charts, and the ability to fire employees, none of which are features of office life here. Younger businessmen have expressed reluctance to leave their firms, for fear of losing their slot on the promotion list. This bespeaks failure to understand the interconnections that have developed between business and government in the past eight years. It is difficult to think of any recent government man with any sort of responsibility and exposure who, if he wanted to, did not land in a handsome business position afterward. Finally, the difficulty in attracting people into the new Administration has also been attributed to the extent to which crime in the streets of Washington was discussed during the campaign.

One result of all this was that despite all the publicity about a “smooth” transition, there was little transition at all. Johnson officials had earnestly collected data and briefing books, but often found that there was no one to “transish” with. This meant, in turn, that the Nixon Administration lost time, which, for all of their talk about the virtues of moving slowly, they may come to regret as the congressional season warms up.

Togetherness

There are two kinds of Nixon associates: those who, when one says “Spiro Agnew,” stare at the carpet; and those who, when the Vice President is mentioned, respond, “He won the election for us.” There are a number of people around Nixon who did argue and still maintain that he could have won a larger victory with a vice presidential candidate more identified with the cities and the young; yet they have only hypothesis, not victory, on their side.

Mr. Nixon has been talking, as Presidents do, about being President of all the people, but a major preoccupation here is watching the struggle for the Administration’s conscience, and its signals to the North or to the South. The obvious trouble with trying to emit both is that they can become mixed, as in the Administration’s first moves on school desegregation, where HEW Secretary Robert Finch is the man in the middle. Yet sometimes it works: Mr. Nixon went to 7th Street, which had been left in rubble since the riot last April, and announced a project to clean it up (he even got himself called “soul brother" by someone in the crowd, an event his aides say was a surprise to all), both very important signals. That afternoon he announced a crime package, most of which picked up proposals of a Johnson-appointed commission on crime, but which also included provisions for preventive detention.

The Office of Economic Opportunity was preserved, less the Job Corps, which goes to the Labor Department, and Head Start, which goes to HEW. OEO has no reason to feel secure; neither has it been wiped entirely from the map, as had been expected. “These people are working late into the night,” said one Negro Democrat here, in grudging admiration. The task forces appointed to advise the President-elect were largely liberal, and there has been a great deal of informal solicitation of advice and help from people here far more liberal than Mr. Nixon, at least as he sounded in his campaign. (Leonard Garment, a former Nixon law partner and the most liberal of the campaign entourage, has set up a law office in Washington, but seems to spend most of his time acting as a gobetween for liberals and the White House, and troubleshooting for the President. It is a convenient arrangement. A law firm with a former partner who is President of the United States can well afford it; Garment can do little chores and make inquiries which might be too delicate for an official White House representative, and he is a useful line into the Administration for outsiders.)

How much of this is just for show will become clearer in the coming months, and as the Administration finds its own policies, there will inevitably be a tightening of some of the lines of communication and power. In the meantime, it is a rather pleasant change from former Administrations, which came in believing that they had inherited all knowledge. More fundamentally, it would appear that Mr. Nixon realizes that he was elected with a mandate that could spell trouble; that the country cannot be governed with the blacks and the cities up in arms.

On the other side are the Southerners. in particular renegade Southern Democrats, who have been given high Administration jobs. J. Phil Campbell, for example, the Undersecretary of Agriculture, comes out of the Georgia agricultural establishment—he was Commissioner of Agriculture for the state—traditionally a stronghold of white landowner supremacy. Winton M. Blount announced at his first press conference that in addition to trying to get pieces of mail to their destination— which would be a major achievement—he will be looking into the possibility of getting Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. John Mitchell, now Attorney General, was Nixon’s campaign manager and a major supporter of the Agnew strategy, and his deputy, Richard Kleindienst, was a key Goldwater aide.

Yet Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater and their followers have reason, from their role in securing Mr. Nixon’s nomination, to expect more deference than has yet been shown them. There will be continuing, serious ideological struggles within the Administration. It is very possible that the 1968 Nixon coalition will come apart under the strain, and that it will be the right and the South which take a walk.

Cabinet notes

Robert Finch is the star of the Cabinet here so far, an important reason being that he enjoys the press, and the members of the press, like most human beings, respond to that sort of thing. Moreover, he is the youngest of the Secretaries, and he comes on as the can-do guy, a style that is very popular around here. He is a liberal in an essentially liberal town. Mr. Romney, to be sure, is a can-do type, and his zeal to get on with things is very much in order at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But there is also some feeling that his evangelism and volubility will get him in trouble (he reportedly does not hold his peace in Cabinet meetings, even to the President), and he has been readier than others to fight with his colleagues over turf.

Conservation is like civil rights in that there are certain code words and phrases that everyone understands. The point about Mr. Hickel’s early mishaps is that he uttered all of the code words—federal lands should not be put “under lock and key,” no point in “conservation for conservation’s sake,” and so on—revealing a state of mind which sent the conservationists to arms. Conservationists are among the most vigorous letter writers in the country, and they have just about doubled in number in the past few years, so that congressional offices were deluged. The Democrats, of course, loved it, though there was never a chance that Hickel would not be confirmed. The Interior Department, usually ignored by the press, has now become a popular beat, and the oil lobbyists are said to be suffering a bad case of nerves. It could just turn out that Mr. Hickel, who will be watched as no Interior Secretary before him, unwittingly advanced the cause of conservation in a way that would make Gifford Pinchot proud.

Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard has taken over so much of the responsibility of running the Pentagon that not long ago an exchange between Secretary Melvin R. Laird and the press, interrupted by the loud sound of a drilling machine, included the following asides:

Laird: We are carefully going over all of these items to see that the priorities which have been established within the budget are correct. . . . I think we had better get that drill turned off right now.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Drill starts.

(Laughter)

Laird: Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do about that.

Reporter: Assign that to Packard.

Laird: I think Mr. Packard has been given enough responsibility.

Packard was assigned the thorough review of all weapons systems and the budget and of the Pueblo mess. Moreover, he was given responsibility by the President for a government-wide review of the United States’s strategic position and world commitments, the sort of review that was suggested, not coincidentally, in Carl Kaysen’s chapter in the Brookings Institution’s “Agenda for the Nation.” The study was pushed by the National Security Council staff, in the hope that Packard would become convinced that a fundamental revision of policy is in order. It was made government-wide so that he would hear other views than those prevailing at the Pentagon. And the assignment, it is said, was given to him not only because of the strong role he was already playing, but also in the hope—how justified, no one yet knows—that his record of enormous contributions to education, Negro, and urban causes could lead to his becoming the “humanist” of the Pentagon.

—Elizabeth B. Drew