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Good Morning.
I'm Jim Gardner and I'm
pleased to be here this
morning on behalf of
the Archivist of the United
States, David Ferriero, and it's
my pleasure to
welcome the Nixon Legacy
Forums back to the National
Archives, and to welcome
you here this morning.
This will be the 22nd of these legacy forums.
The most recent was only two
weeks ago at the
Gilchrist Museum of the University of Tulsa.
That forum examined President Nixon's
pivotal role in returning
sovereignty to American Indian
Tribes and ending two
centuries of what the President,
in a message to Congress in
July, 1970, called "ineffective
and demeaning, end quote, federal
policies and that
Tulsa forum was a
first because it comprised
two separate [xx] one
of the administration officials other the
Indian leaders and solicited of
the interior department which
was to survey developments since Nixon's time.
In November we will be
cosponsoring another forum on
the Nixon administration Indian policy
with our neighbors across the
mall at the Smithsonian's
National Museum of the American Indian.
The Nixon legacy forums it's the
perfect pairing of National Archives
where we have documents, the papers,
the tapes and the artifacts.
And the Richard Nixon
Foundation, which has the
people who created and generated
and implemented them.
The videos and transcripts of these
forums and the
papers and tapes and other
materials that will compliment
and supplement them will be
available at the library
in Yorbal Linda and eventually
all around the world online.
They will truly be a
unique resource for citizens
and scholars seeking to
know about the Nixon administration.
At the end of this month at
the library in Yorba Linda,
we will be releasing the latest
group of Presidential documents.
The most substantial segment
of this group will be the
files of the First
Lady's Press Office, representing some
67 linear feet, which,
take my word for it, translates into a lot of space.
This is particularly fitting because
since March 16th, which was
Pat Nixon's 100th birthday, the
library has been presenting
a terrific new exhibit.
Pat Nixon people her
project and in the
public vaults here at the
National Archives, we also
have a tribute to
Pat Nixon, to Pat
Nixon's centennially and next
year there will be
a new Richard Nixon exhibit
in Yorbalinda [sp?]
to mark the 37th President's 100th
birthday on June, on
January 9th, 2013.
Now it's my pleasure
to introduce Jeff Sheppard, who
will be moderating this morning's
forum on Nixon's Recruits.
The Professionalization of Executive Appointments.
I have an introduction here.
You just Well you, go short.
Jeff is an alumnus of
President Nixon's Alma Matter Whittier
College and of Harvard Law School.
He came to Washington 1969 as
a White House fellow assigned to the Department of the Treasury.
In 1970, he joined the
White House staff as a member of John Erlingman's [sp?]
domestic counsel and from
1972 to 1975 he
was the Counsel's Associate
Director for General Government.
Recently retired He was
an attorney in the insurance industry
for over three decades.
Now he is an author and
a coordinator for the Nixon
Foundation of the next legacy forums.
Thanks again for being with
us here this morning and here is Jeff Shepard.
Jim thank you very much.
and our panel is going to come out.
As Jim has said this is
our twenty second legacy forum on
policy initiatives of the
Nixon Administration co-sponsored by
the National Archives, and by the Richard Nixon Foundation.
It's been a wonderful and productive
partnership, and we look
forward to continuing it in the months and years ahead.
This morning's forum is Nixon's Recruits:
The Professionalization of Executive Appointments.
It's a fact that over the
decades that have passed since
President Nixon left office, Significant
numbers of men and women
who later came to prominence in
government, came to Washington to serve in his administration.
How and why that phenomenon
came about, and I
think the numbers are sufficient to
qualify it as a phenomenon,
will be the subject of today's discussion.
Let me introduce today's panelists.
You already have some background, but I think we should add a little bit more.
Alan Companon - we have
a picture of Alan when he was
a young man, just yesterday -
joined the personnel office in
June of 1969, and except
for a stint at the reelection
campaign, he stayed there throughout the Nixon administration.
It makes him the longest serving member
of the personnel office on this panel.
His job might be described as political clearance.
Being satisfied that the people
under consideration for appointments really
were Republicans and have
helped President Nixon win his election in the first place.
Sitting next to Allen is Fred
Mallock, also a young man in those days.
Fred is your classic executive.
A Westpoint graduate, and a
Vietnam veteran, he ran his
own business in South Carolina before joining the Nixon administration.
in 1969, as deputy under
secretary at HEW, the
most senior management position in
that huge department, he was
brought over White House in
1970 to head the Personnel Office.
Our primary focus today, is
on the changes that he helped
to bring about when he made
that move from Independence Avenue
to Pennsylvania Avenue.
Fred moved on in 1973
to take over the largest management
job in the executive branch.
be director for management at OMB.
Returning to the private sector,
he formed his own financial firm, Fair Capital Partners.
That's been his day job But
he's also the most successful Republican fundraiser of all time.
Working either for the Republican
National Committee, or various GOP campaigns, or governors.
And let me assure you Fred
has a golden rolodex and calls from Fred can be quite productive.
Barbara Franklin, our next individual,
we have Barbara Pritchard with President
Nixon, join the
personnel office in 1971
to do what we called
targeted outreach, Barbara's specific
assignment was to women
into high level position in
the government, and she succeeded
beyond their wildest dreams.
She then went on to become
the Secretary of Commerce in
the cabinet of President George H.W. Bush.
Jerry Jones, whose wife neglected
to send us a picture, is another entrepreneur.
He also joined the Malek staff
in 1971 and then succeeded Fred when he moved to OMB.
I learned only recently that they
shared a common heritage before that,
they were section mates at Harvard
Business School and had worked
together at McKenzie's office in Los Angeles.
As I say, Jerry succeeded
Fred as the Head of the
personnel office when Fred moved on.
Jerry then went on to
become Staff Secretary to Al
Haig in the Nixon administration.
A position he held the Ford
administration, and then he
became Deputy Assistant for Scheduling in Advance.
I should point out that Jerry
and Alan returned to the
government in 2001 to
help Donald Rumsfeld staff
the Department of Defense when
Rumsfeld became the Secretary of Defense.
Ken James We have
a picture of is a
professional recruiter, a classic head hunter.
One of Fred Mallock's first moves
when he took over the office
was to convince major head firms
to lend him some of their
best talent, just for a
six week stint, according to
Fred, to get a handle on real recruiting.
Ken was loaned from the firm of struggles.
And Fred liked him so much he convinced Pen to join his staff permanently.
Pen later left government an
founded his executive recruiting firm.
We've asked Ken to speak
last because he returned
to Washington with the Reagan
administration to run the
Personnel function during the 1980
transition and then to
supervise the administration staffing
during it's first 18 months
in office talk about
what changed and the lessons learned from the Nixon administration.
So you can see
we have full representation from the White House personnel office.
The one person person who wasn't
able to be with us this
morning, is Peter Flanagan,
one of Richard Nixon's oldest friends
and advisors, who staffed President
Nixon during the transition
in 1968 and stayed on
in the early months of the Nixon administration to do personnel.
He wasn't able to join us,
but we talked at length last
week and I think I'll
be able to present his point of view.
As you see from the [xx] seed
from the discussion that unfolds, the
[xx] improvement process
may be seen as a part
of the various organizational and structural
changes that originated with
the Nixon administration and that
now form the basis for the modern presidency.
In essence it was a
move away from what was
known as cabinet government, where
the president picks the cabinet,
the cabinet picked their staff
or their departments, and ran their
departments, to a centralized
process of policy and
of personnel to the
President's own governing function
into the Executive Office of the President.
That's the innovation President Nixon
introduced and that's pretty
much how the Executive Branch branch has been run ever since.
Remember for example, the Nixon
administration centralized the policy
making process into the White House.
the revitalization of the
National Security Council under Henry
Kissinger meant the President
was running foreign affairs.
The creation of the Domestic
Council under John Ehrlichman meant
the President was making the
major domestic policy decisions.
And the creation of the Office
of Management and Budget from the
old bureau the budget, centralized
into the White House not
just the management function, but
also the central clearance of
all regulations the approval
of all testimony rendered before Congress
on behalf of the Executive Branch.
So, that was an innovation
that ocurred in policy making under the Nixon administration.
We are gonna see in a moment,
there was parallel change in
personnel also under that administration.
Let's begin with the big picture.
The presidency functions at it's
highest as an agent of change.
Presidents run for office
promising to cause change, and
those that succeed are classified
as among our most successful presidents.
It's relatively easy in
retrospect, to promise
change when you're running for president.
But after a president has
been elected, he, and soon
she needs to figure
out how to effectuate that change.
And there are two ways to do
it through structural reorganization
of the sort I already and through
personnel, through people the
president attracts to Washington,
men and women, to help
them to lead the executive branch.
Their It's a confirmation process in the United States Senate.
But it's generally conceded that
a new president ought to get to name his own people.
How How many people does he get to appoint and to what positions?
There's no doubt about that.
It's all nicely set out in what's called The Plum Book.
This is officially known as the
List of United States Policy and Supporting Positions.
It's published once every four years by the United States Congress.
It lists, by name and
by salary every political position
of the outgoing administration.
And in case you're wondering, yes, it really does have a plum-colored cover.
In 1968 the list
that President Nixon received
identified over 5000 physicians,
550 five of
which were confirmable by the Senate.
The 5,000 included 19 cabinet-level
positions that 12 departments that
existed at that time, and
seven cabinet level positions for
the President to use as he saw fit.
Some 450 members the White house staff.
About 2500 schedule C positions.
Those are positions that are non competitive.
because of the sensitive nature or the confidentiality required.
These are positions the president gets
to make: about 150 agency
heads, including boards and commission
Just over 100 ambassadors, US ambassadors to foreign countries.
Some 94 United States
attorneys spread throughout the federal
courts and some 2,000
appointments to part-time boards and commissions.
President Nixon's challenge as he
came into office was that
many people from the Eisenhower
administration, which served from
1952 to 1960, had
been older when they were in government.
Which was the standard at the time.
by the time President Nixon was
elected, there were only
a handful of Eisenhower alumni
willing or able to
be conscripted to come back
to government and primarily this
was Bill Rodgers, Maury Stans, and Bryce Harlo.
But other than that President Nixon
and his people had to start scratch.
It was the first administration.
Excuse me.
It was the first administration that purposely
brought so many young people.
Young staffers, and I mean
really young staffers in their
20s, 30s and 40s to serve in
the departments and on the Nixon white house staff itself.
I'm going to skip through Peter for a second.
Nope, I don't have a slide.
We had a picture, which we
don't have up, of a
magazine article which showed ten
or twelve of the young people
who were on President Nixon's early White House staff.
And it was...I mean, I was 24.
I don't hold the record.
There was Larry Higby, who
was Bob Haldeman's personal aide
was 22 when he joined the white house staff.
And let me recount now because
now we go to Peter's picture, there
we are, let me recount
what Peter told me last about
those early days in the Nixon Administration.
As he remembers, he was
called by the president-elect the morning
after President Nixon's 1968
election victory and asked to do two things.
He was asked to find to
space in New York city for
the transition and he
was asked for the first
time to help the cabinet
officers to staff their departments.
Peter found two floors at
the Hotel Pierre in New
York, and they took
space right at the street
at the Willard hotel for a staff here.
Nixon said he wanted to
pick his own cabinet but that
Peter's job was to help
the cabinet officers to staff out their departments.
For each cabinet officer, Peter
and his staff, and his staff
were Martin and Ann Lee
Sanderson, Bill Casey, and Cal Knutsen.
They prepared three ring binders
that contained a list of
the open positions, classified by
department, and promising resumes
for the secretary's consideration to appoint to those positions.
It was a huge undertaking
but they completed it by the
time the President was inaugurated
in January of 1969.
At that point,
Peter was then asked to
stay for another six weeks because
the personnel function was wasn't quite complete.
He stayed but
his job gradually evolved into
becoming an economic adviser to
the President and concentrating training
on international affairs and on trade and tariffs.
I asked Peter last week
what sort of feedback he got
from the secretaries on the
jobs that they had listed
and given them on these three-ring
binders about what they were doing.
And Peter said those decisions
were theirs alone and that
reporting back on what
they did was not a part of Peter's responsibilities.
As I've said This
is a classic example of cabinet
government which was the model
for the executive branch when Nixon took office.
The president picked the cabinet.
The cabinet staffed and ran their own departments.
Let's look at President Nixon's first
cabinet, which was named all at one time.
Many people believe it was
the strongest cabinet of any
reason personal and this
is an informal sharp on how
to pick up the heads
on the individual shark but they
are seeded in the cabinet room of the west wing.
The way the cabinet room
is set up the president
sits in the center on the
one side the vice president opposite
him and then flanking out.
both directions are the
cabinet department by order of when they were created.
So, right next to the
President and Vice President
are State, Justice, Treasury Defense, and
then beyond that you go
by when the particular department was created.
William Rogers, Eisenhower's attorney
general, was at Department
of State, David Kennedy of
Chicago Bank and Treasury, Congressman
Nell Laird of Defense, the
President's law partner and campaign director John Mitchell.
Alabama businessmen red blunt at the post office.
Alaska governor Walter Hickle at Interior .
Chancellor of the University
of Nebraska got Clifford Hardin at
Agriculture, former director of
the Bureau of the Budget and
Nixon's campaign finance chairman Maurice
Stans at Commerce, University
of Chicago Business School Dean
George Schultz at Labor, California
Lieutenant Governor Robert Finch
at HEW, Michigan Governor
George Romney at HUD, Massachusetts
Governor John Volpe at Transportation.
Those were the twelve existing cabinet
departments, but in addition,
Henry Kissinger was to run
the National Security Council, Nixon's two
White House counsellors were Arthur
Burns and Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, and Don Rumsfield
was to run the Office of Economic Opportunity.
The President announced
his entire cabinet at one
time in a nationally televised
event, and we have a film
clip from that that is going to come up.
This is a special report from NBC News.
President-elect Richard M. Nixon names his cabinet.
Here is NBC news correspondent Edwin Newman.
Good evening, at this moment
the twelve men who will head
the major executive departments of the
United States government for the
next 4 years are in
the Palladian Room of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington.
President elect Richard Nixon is
scheduled to appear shortly to
identify the those 12 men in short to name his cabinet.
Within the next half hour we
will see the shape of the forthcoming Nixon Administration.
And now at the outset I
wish to express appreciation to the
radio and television networks for
providing this opportunity.
For the first time in history
for millions of Americans to be present in effect.
As a President elect names the members of his cabinet.
In introducing the members of the
cabinet to you tonight I'm
not going continue to go through
the usual procedure of giving the biographical material.
Where they were born.
Where they went to school.
How many children they had.
and the like.
You can read in your morning papers or in Who's Who.
What I am going to do however
is to share with you
this evening some of
the concerns that went through
my mind as I made
this tremendously important decision with
regard to the cabinet, because as
I had to decide the men
who are lead this nation in
the next four years, considerations beyond
what their academic records happen to
be or their records in
business, professional life or in
government, all of those considerations were important.
But in selecting men for the
highest positions in government,
there has to be an extra
dimension, an extra dimension
which is the difference between good
leadership and superior or even great leadership.
President Nixon then goes on at that
event to walk you
through each cabinet officer
and why he chose them.
I happened to watch it.
I was in law school at I happened to watch it live.
And one of the
intriguing things to me is he
skips Maurice Stans, one of his very best friends.
And he just thinks he's
covered him and Stans, you
can see it in his face, he's
trying to decide whether to
raise his hand and say "you
skipped me" and he chooses
not to and the president goes on.
But what's so intriguing
about President Nixon and one
of his greatest strengths, in that
video clip there's no teleprompter.
He's not looking down at notes like I am.
President Nixon is winging it
and it was one of the
incredible strengths of that
individual; he could stand up,
and he could give a 45
minute speech, without notes.
And in that era when you
didn't have teleprompting, when you
couldn't do that under the
glare of cameras where you
really shouldn't make a mistake, it was an incredible performance.
Those selections of that
original cabinet, along with
others who came afterwards, read
like a leadership directory for subsequent administrations.
We kind of put together
a list of other names that you should recognize.
John Connally, Bill Simon, and
Paul Volcker at Treasury William
Renquist and Antonio Scalia at justice.
Earl Butts at agriculture.
Peter Peterson and Fred Dent at commerce.
Elliott Richardson, Leon Panetta and
Cap Weinberger at H.E.W. Jim Lynn at Hud.
George H. W. Bush as UN ambassador.
James Baker as RNC
finance chairman Pat Buchanan,
Elizabeth Hanford Dole, Barbra
Franklin, David Gergen, Allan
Greenspan, Virgina Tom Korologos
and his now wife, Ann McLaughlin
Korologos, all from the
White House staff, John Bolton
on the Vice President's staff, Al
Haig, John Lehman "Fred Scrowcroft
on the NSC, Lou England
and Henry Paulson, Hank was
a kid just like I was on the domestic council.
Roy Ash, Fred" Alec, Paul
O'Neill, Don Rice, Jim Schlesinger
at OMB, Frank Carlucci, and
*** Cheney at OEO., Helen
Bentley at the Federal Maritime
Commission, Ken Duberstein, at GSA
and Bill Ruckelshaus at EPA.
Many people in the media
found their beginnings in the Nixon administration.
Roger Ailes, Brian Lamb,
Bill Kristol, John McLaughlin, Diane
Sawyer and Ben Stein were
all young people, (John McLoughlin wasn't
that young) were all young people there on Nixon's staff.
At one point, the heads
of 19 different trade associations
came from the Nixon staff here in Washington.
In addition to that, there
were executive officers and
members of the boards of directors
of hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies.
All these people and numerous others
originally came to Washington or
came to prominence in Washington
during the Nixon Adminstration.
It was an exciting time.
Our panelists "they help appoint those very special teams.
Campaigning changes, campaigning evolves.
Each campaign seems bring" new
approaches and new innovations, but
the challenges that actually govern
it are the ministering
departments and running agencies does
not chance, but There
are relatively few people
who excel at the art
of governing in politically appointed positions.
And Richard Nixon seems to have
attracted an inordinate number them to his administration.
With that I will sit down
and we will hear from our panelists
who did this starting with Allan
Kaupinen First i'd
like to thank Jim Gardner
and the national archives for the
very strong [xx] [xx] the
Nixon Legacy Forum staff.
I believe that future historians
will be giving thanks to
you for not only providing
all the papers that Richard Nixon has.
But also having panels where
people who actually did
this work at that time
to have that personal touch, I
think, will be an important thing
in 50 years and 100 years from now.
I want to thank somebody
else also and that's you
Jeff, because Jeff has
been the leader who has
helped cause 22
of these forums to take place.
It's been an enormous amount of work.
He's quite a leader
when it comes to getting one
of these together so, you're working
on the Nixon legacy, but I
think that, in this
process, Jeff, you've also added
something to the already outstanding
legacy that you personally have had.
I want to start out
by talking about President
Richard Nixon and his relationship
to the personnel office, and
the first and most
poignant the people in
the White House personnel office, was
early in the administration, where
he told about what
he expected as far
as the people that he wanted to serve in his administration.
Now you just saw what he
said on TV, and
it was much the
same that this groups
will go out and find the
most competent person for every
single position in this administration
and most importantly, he added
on to that sentence, without regard to politics.
So he was oriented towards
finding the best people and
that was, that was the aim.
Now, leadership is projected
in many ways, and in
the case of President Nixon
he not only gave us a
direction as to what
he expected the White House
personnel office to do, but
remember, you just heard
Jeff goes through the cabinet
that was appointed by Richard Nixon.
Announced as a group.
Now I've been interested in
politics and government since
I was about 14 years old seriously.
And I have watched the
cabinet, some of the cabinets before Richard Nixon's cabinet.
And I've really watched all of them since.
And I believe that the Richard
Nixon cabinet, the people
who were in that
cabinet, that was the
most talented single cabinet ever
put together to this day.
I was glad Jeff also
told about the number of people
who were the young people in this
administration and where they
continued to make a contribution
to our government through all these years.
I wanted to talk
a little bit about what it was like to be there.
First, where were we?
I ask personel operation, we all
know this called the old
executivebuilding then, and now
it's called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
As you walked up those steps
and saw that beautiful building and
were cleared by the uniformed Secret
Service, you took a
right, all those offices right
across that first floor on
Pennsylvania Avenue, plus down
17th street, plus the
offices across from that were the White House personnel's offices.
That's important because there
is a relationship of
proximity to power, and
the fact that we were in
a prestigious location, we
were in prestigious offices, we not
only had to go find people
to come to the administration, but we
had to attract them to
the administration, and the
setting there was an impressive
setting that you were coming
to something that was important and
that you would be dealing with
an office, in our case there
was a important office in the mix there.
I think it was by design that
that office was placed where
it was and had the prestige that it did.
I am going put to you through the basic process.
In the first step in this it
was to do a wide-aid reach
out as you could to get
as many people as pos how
could possibly serve in the administration,
and of coarse when president
Nixon was elected and started
his work on staffing his
administration that was publicized
by the news media.
Also, there was a
effort made to draw people
in by sending a letter to
everybody who was in Who's
Who and this invited
them if they had an
interest in serving the administration
to have their credentials and
make them known to us, and
also to recommend people that
they thought might be good for the administration.
So what was it like there?
In those early days there was
an inundation of people from
all walks of life
that wanted to help be
part of the Nixon administration, we
strongly felt that we
had an obligation that each
person that said they wanted
to help Nixon administration would
be part of it, but they
should be responded to and
recognized and thanked for
their volunteering to do this.
And so the early
going we had to quickly
make sure that these letters
were all acknowledged and people felt
that they were sincerely considered.
How were they considered?
Well, they were actually
considered by once the resume
received at that office, every
single one of those was reviewed by a human being.
There was a cover sheet put on that resume.
They were divided by
their various talent levels and
rated as such.
And also where their skills maybe useful in the departments or agencies.
Because you heard the figures: 550
positions at the toppest level.
And then there were 2,500
additional positions and all
of those were what were classified as
non-career positions, and those
were where the people who were
supposed to be implementing the
policies the elected President
could be, so we were
interested in people at all
levels and this was how we got them.
Now currently when this
was happening there was
being set up in each
department an agency a liaison
group which would then
receive sent from
the White House and there
was a cooperative effort where we
were doing interviewing, they were
doing interviewing, and then
so that this I don't take too much time on this.
There are a whole set of
procedures which I will call General Process.
That was a very serious effort
which included reference checks, which
included the vetting by the
state they came from, there
was a, we had people
in every single state of the
union that did vetting for us.
There were name checks done through
the FBI and there was
an FBI person who worked with our office on a regular basis.
And for the top
positions, a full field investigation was done.
So if you were joining
the Nixon administration, you were vetted very seriously.
We also believed strongly in
redundant interviewing, so that
a person would come in, and
not only would maybe i would
interview them, but i would
ask of my colleges to also
interview them, we would also
have them interview that the departments
that they would related to, or
the agents that they would
relate to, so people would have
four, five, or six interviews and
there would be a consensus reach to
them they were moved
along into the process of being hired.
I felt that it
was a thorough process
and a redundancy meant that a
lot of good people came out of this.
So at the time we
recommend somebody to be
employed by the Nixon Administration
it was Our belief, that at
that point, of all these
hundreds of thousands of people
who had applied that we
had reviewed, that was the
best individual for that job
at that time.
I want to take just a couple other minutes.
So that was basically the process.
I wanna take a couple other
minutes to mention presidential and
mental boards and commissions, these
are a very important thing, and
a lot of departments have
staffs that work for
these various was vicious,
and they produced a lot
of substantive recommendations across the government.
What we had because of
all of this outreach, we
had a lot of people that didn't
want to work full-time necessarily but
did want to make contributions part-time.
And there was a very
good by which literally thousands
of people that had worked for
Nixon, maybe in the campaign
with him, been campaign contributors.
There had been just talented people states.
They were recommended to us.
We saw that they got on
boards and commissions because we knew:
A, which each board and
commission was; B, how many
people were on that; C, vacancies
were coming, so we worked
hard to get a great
participation of many Americans
in this administrations by having
them on these boards and I
wanna mention one other thing
which relates to what you'll
be hearing from my colleagues here
is there was, I
don't know whether this was one meeting
or this was multiple meetings,
but as the president put that
cabinet together, perhaps he
said this sometimes to the
individual cabinet officer I do
believe that there was one point
he said this to all of
them where he said,
"You are the cabinet officer" and
more or less indicated those
were your shops out there and
you should get those [xx] and
do the recruiting and staff them.
I was told that
after one of those meetings
where the President has said that
he, as he was walk out
said: I think maybe
I went to far there, and
that probably was true,
because as [xx] so well stated.
There was generally cabinet governments
and it was more important
to be was what
the president's wishes were, that
this be a government
where the policies are carried
out from what the
elected official wants and that
there'll be this be done
in unison and in a cooperative basis.
Since some of the
cabinet officers had taken
literally what was said and
pretty much were moving along
on the basis of cabinet government.
We received a signal.
I'm not sure how this
our offices but we had
to pull that back some because
the administration was going
to be more effective if it
operated under the policies
the president promulgating as opposed
to what maybe what the cabinet officers
were promulgating and we
did have a distinct effort
where we met with the have
an office, we met with her,
she's a staff, we met
with her as people, and i
remember the statement was
used in candy stores, well
and These really
are all Richard Nixon's candy stores
I don't trust this government, not
individual candy stores that
are the cabinet officer's candy stores.
Well we chuckles out of
that, but actually the message was pretty clear.
So we made a
valiant effort to pull
this back and I would
say we had some
success or we were moving
in a good direction, but I
certainly would not present it
by having few meetings and
emphasizing this on a regular
basis that we achieved
complete victory in this.
And as you'll see for the
rest of the panel, they also
pursued this and they had
some other this by which
they a i think
got peoples attention, thank you
Allen thank you, that brings
us to Fred who was brought
in, in 1970 to
a help effectuate that change.
Thank you, Jeff, and thanks for
what you're doing to make this series of forums happen.
you mentioned some very, very important
and impressive people who came out of those days in the Nixon administration.
There are three you missed: Colin Powell,
who was my executive assistant
at OMP.
You missed John Huntsman who I
recruited in HCW and then
later up at the White House John Huntsman Sr.
I was signed with Presidential candidate and
former [xx] and of course the
gifted writer and columnist [xx]
Safire.
When I was to come over to the White House.
I had been a deputy undersecretary
of Health, Education, and Welfare, which
doesn't currently exist.
It's a combination of HHS and the Department of vocation.
I came out of a background of
having been in business, Harvard
Business School business and I
understood organisation, I understood
the value of professional recruiting.
Didn't understand too much about politics.
But I think I was
brought over because the president
wanted to have a greater
more structure in the office,
more organization in the office and a broader outreach.
I was just barely ten years
out of West Point, probably would
have helped if I
had had a little bit more experience and actually knew what I was doing.
But it was a heady
responsibility for a young
man coming in at that point in time.
What I found is,
was that they had
done a really good job I
think of organizing all of the inflows and outflows.
They appointed some very good people.
but the difficulty was in
getting people in across the
board who really had the
qualifications and fit the jobs
well and it was difficult
to combat a Cabinet officers'
selections might have been sub
par unless you have better,
or a Senators, or any political
organizations push for
somebody unless you have get
somebody that was better.
You can't beat something with nothing.
I kind of felt
that the approach to recruiting
was what we called bogata,
bunch of guys around a table.
You would sit around a
table and you would say,
well, who do you know and
who do you know and it's now
alot of companies do this
to, and there were
no former way to reach
out and go after
the broader universe of people
that were out there My thesis
was that the very best
people are probably not going to
contact you because they're gainfully employed,
climbing a very important ladder in their careers.
and you got to find them, and
you got to find them and
persuade them to come in
and lend their talents to Government,
so the one of
the very first things that I
did was get approval to form
an executive search unit, an
executive recruiting team within
the White House personnel office I
went to several leading search
firms to ask their
help in providing people,
either a part-time or a full-time basis.
and succeeded in bringing on
board three key recruiters:
Pen James, who came from
[xx], was the head
of the group; Bill Muramoto,
I can't remember what firm he came from.
He came on board
and later led the effort
on minority recruiting and John Clark.
I also had *** Fairey [sp?]
of [xx] on a temporary
basis, who helped organize us
all to get started, i think
he was still there when Penn came on board and helped Penn to get adjusted.
We then developed a system where we would go out.
We would carefully specify the job requirement.
We'd get agreement from the cabinet
officer on what the job requirement was.
What kind of criteria we should try to fill.
And then the recruiters would
go out and span the country
as a professional objective search
executive does, and find
the best they could find
who were willing to come on board.
The cabinet officer in
the meantime, might have his
or her - well, it was
only his at that point - own
person [xx] and there
might be political pressure from various sources from somebody else.
We would then develop for
the president a series of
options One, here is
somebody who best fits the
qualifications who we really think
would do the best job.
Here's the person the cabinet officer wants.
Sometimes they're the same one, hopefully.
here's the one with the great political support.
And where it's coming from.
And out of these three, here is our recommendation.
And it won't always be one or the other.
sometimes they would be combined.
But he would have that choice.
The president didn't put that
much reliance, as Al said,
on political, our thesis
and i believe the Presidents thesis was
that loyalty and philosophy
could be adopted and learned over
time We were doing the right things.
We felt we were doing the right things.
We felt we had the right policies
and anybody we brought in, we
weren't good enough to bring
them on board and convince them
of the righteousness of the directions
we were going and that was maybe our fault and not theirs.
Because if we recruited good people
and brought them on board, they would
adopt, they would become loyal to the policies we espoused.
I believed this firmly.
When I was at HEW, three
of my most valued colleagues were
Democrats, or one a very moderate Republican.
Lou Butler, the Assistant Secretary for
Policy, who was kind of
my running mate there, was a Democrat from San Francisco.
Across the hall from me
were two assistants to the
undersecretary, or the deputy undersecretary.
One was named Tim Worth.
Tim later went on to be an elected Democrat senator from Colorado.
The other one was Leon Panetta, who
was a Republican then.
He was a moderate Republican from California.
Of course, he went on to
become a congressman from
California budget director chief of staff and now defense secretary.
So my feeling was they were amongst my most valued colleagues.
They performed well.
Their whole dedication was to mission
and that's the way we
would try to go, and the
President to his very very
great credit, agree with
that approach in fact vouched [xx]
and that's the way we went about
recruiting We later
determined at the president's direction
that we needed to do a better job of outreach.
We're getting a lot of the, you
know, the same kind of
people you see from the positions
the cough white male
Ivy league folks like
you * worry.
I went to Whitier college, forget
that Harvard stuff and we need.more
humble people from the sticks like myself.
so we developed an outreach program.
The president particularly wanted to outreach to women.
And I was able to
attract Barbara to that position.
Barbara I had known for many, many years.
She was an executive at
Citi...Citigroup or Citibank I guess it was called then.
It was First National Citibank, which
became And Barbara was a classmate of mine at West Point.
At West Point?
Excuse me.
Wow.
Excuse me.
Barbara was not a West Pointer.
This is good, Fred.
Barbara was classmate of mine at the Harvard Business School.
Now I then reached far
and wide to try to find other talented people.
And as you can see, I
used a "bugata" approach because
failing at finding really talented
people I resorted to those
who I knew best, my classmates
from Harvard Business school
Barbara, and then later from Jerry
Jones, who performed remarkably
preferably in their positions by the way.
I then asked Bill
Morimoto to take on the
job of recruiting more minorities
and we had a particular focus of
course on African Americans and
Hispanics and i think we
made a meaningful difference and Barbara
will of course will talk a little bit more about that.
I think We made
a real, I think we made
a real difference in this.
I think the result was
a greater professionalism amongst the
people we brought in.
I always had full agreement from the cabinet.
It was an interactive process.
I was the cabinet officer on the selection of people.
And where there were differences, we'd
sit down and we'd resolve them and we'd come to an agreement.
In some cases, the most qualified
person wasn't selected because it
was apparent that that person
wouldn't work as well with the cabinet official.
As long as that person
met that certain criteria, we were
okay with that and the President was okay with that.
But I think the result of the
process is that we got a
awful a lot of more people involved
in being consider for these
positions and a lot more
confidence in to the [xx]
positions, that would really
make the machine of government work effectively.
Thank you.
Thank you, Fred.
Barbra.
We have a slide for you.
Oh, we have a slide.
There we are.
The first photograph of
women in women appointees in the Rose Garden.
April nineteen seventy-two.
There were more than that, but
this was the group we could find
and I want to add to
everyone's comments that Jeff my thanks.
to what your doing with these
legacies forms, it's quiet wonderful
and Jim also to you with
what the archives is doing, well
i am always struck at listening
to the President and now twelve
men who are going to lead the government.
Let me start by indicating
what happened at his second press conference.
And I'm gonna read from
this book, A Matter of
Simple Justice by Lee Stout,
which chronicles the whole effort
To advance women, which was
really quite considerable, in the administration.
Second press conference the President
had Vera Glasser,
who Was covering the White
House for the North American News paper alliance.
Was a very attractive, well spoken women.
You knew her, I think all of you probably look what he did.
Stood up in this really
almost all male briefing room.
There's a photo in this book
and asked this question:
Mr President, in staffing your
administration, you have so
far made about 200 high
level cabinet and other
policy position appointments, and
of these only three have gone to women.
Can you tell us, sir, whether
we can expect a more equitable
recognition of women' s
abilities or are we
going to remain a lost sex?
And I can just imagine
the gasp that must have
gone through that beefing
room at the audacity of such a question.
The President jumped a little
bit with her but then
he said, and again we have this and I'm gonna quote it.
He said very seriously, "I
had not known that only
three had gone to women
and I shall see that we
correct that imbalance very promptly.
Strong statement I think from the president right up front here.
And that then triggered what
I would term a circuitous
set of events.
One of the things that happened
was the appointment of a
president's task force on
women's rights and responsibilities, and
there was an internal fight Charlie
Cleft whom you know was
the guy who did this working for
Arthur Burns was a
fight inside the whitehouse... about
what kinds of people would be on this.
And the progressives won.
Charlie pulled that off.
And therefore, what came out
that report in late
1969 released in 1970
called A Matter of
Simple Justice was a
very ...big progressive set of
recommendations about what should
be done for women, including more
appointments and including what ended up being my job.
And then the next big thing... that
happened after Fred had
come and reorganized the personnel
function in the spring,
April of 1871 there
were three things that
were done, pretty much in
tandem that set the
stage for the advancement of women.
The first was that the
President sent a memorandum
to his cabinet secretaries and agency
heads saying he wanted
an action plan about how
they were going to a point,
advance, train women in
their departments and he had
a due date, "I want it
back by May fifteenth and I
want you to tell me who
in is your point person in the department.
And then at the end
there was a paragraph that said
something like "I'm going
to personally monitor the results here.
Again, I think another strong statement.
The second prong of this attack
was Fred's recruiting of me
to come in to in turn
recruit women for the
top quality or the
top policy-making jobs in
government and also to my
This came the action plans, which
were quite frankly a total mess.
Because nobody had ever done that before.
And so I spent considerable ...books
like I'm working with the folks
in the department to get these
action plans to actually make
sense and we did
get there, and the third
thing that was done three-pronged
effort was to bring Jane
Baker Spain as commissioner
of the old civil service commission,
and her role was to
watch over women in the career service.
So it was a three-pronged effort.
There were goals set up at the outset.
We were double in a
year the numbers of
women in the policy making
jobs, which would be GS 16 and above.
We were to considerably advance.
So the numbers of women in
the middle management ranks GS13 -
15 and 25% of the positions in the big companies commissions.
You talked about at the commissions
and board, yeah, were to be women.
Now this was far reaching
if you really think about all
and then I had to
for my part here beat the
bushes to find women.
and we didn't have talent bank of women.
I went to the business and
professional women's clubs who had
started a talent bank.
They were very helpful.
But really, we didn't have google and Facebook.
So we couldn't find people.
I literally had to divide the country into regions.
ten regions and then reach out to each one.
So I did some traveling and
looked for sources who could
help me bring some of the women to the forefront.
...and then gather the documents
about them and hand them
over to some of the vetting
all though by then I
had some staff thanks to
Fred, we were able
to do some... some of the vetting ourselves.
I have to emphasize one thing.
We had to find women who really were qualified.
And in fact, because women
were under titled, under paid, under recognized.
They were really over qualified.
I think the ones that
we found and brought into
the process, we did not
want any everybody to fail, and
I really don't think anyone did,
and i should also say that
I was bringing the women in,
but I had to depend depend
on the guys in the
liason part of the shop
to place them.
So I had to get
kind of clever about where the
vacancies were going to be
the help of some of these folks.
And there was one member of
your liaison staff - I'm
thinking of Stan Anderson, who's not
here - who used to get really mad at me.
And we'd be on
this and he would
say, "Enough of this," and he'd hang up on me.
And I'd have to go and,
you know, try to schmooze a
little and say, "We really do have to do this."
And and the
president wanted it and we did monitor.
One of the things that made
this work was that we were
monitoring how the departments and agencies were doing.
They had targets too.
There were numbers in here.
They were not quotas.
They were targets.
And I think the managerial part
of this was in
large measure what made this
successful and then if
we go to when this
photograph was taken in April of seventy-two.
What had been accomplished
in that year We had
not just doubled the numbers
of women in policy making jobs we had tripled it.
And I want to say a lot of people helped in this.
really did, including some of those I had to fight with.
A lot of people did, in
government and out.
And so that was a The
key thing though was that
many of them were in jobs
that women had never held, more than half of them.
You had the break through's.
Marina Whitman became the first
woman Council of Economic Advisers;
Cynthia Hall, the first woman
on the tax court; Dixie Lee
Ray, the first woman on the old Atomic Energy Commission.
That kind of litany.
And then in the 13 to 15
category, 1,000 were moved up
at a time when the federal government
was shrinking by 5%.
And those to and
many of those were non traditional jobs.
Tug boat captains, forest rangers,
secret service agents, narcotics agents.
Again proving that a
woman could do such a job.
I think we also have to
say that there was not consensus
in our society then that
women should be doing There
was not, where the women had careers and families.
That's changed now, but that's the way it was.
And then in terms of boards and commissions.
There was a very good record there.
It was a great
start, once the genie
was out of the bottle, by
the time we got to the
second The numbers had
gone up even further.
Fantastic and you can tell
that Barbara was a formidable force in causing that.
We go to Jerry, Jerry came
on a little bit later and had
fun of evaluation and replacement.
The three of
us, Al, Fred, and
I, were at the
campaign in 1972.
We different times.
But we came back from the
campaign, just after the
election, and the
president had made a
a really unusual
decision that I
don't know in modern times
if it's ever been done before
that and think certainly it's not been done since.
He asked each presidentially appointed
person, who typically had
been confirmed by the senate two
or three presidential appointees that
are not, to please submit their resignations.
And the So
here were 555 presidentially-appointed people
who submitted resignations at the
The election was [xx] and
it was bizarre really in
the sense that it was a total new start.
basically said, "I want
to be sure that we
use the time in the
second administration effectively and
that we fresh, effective people in these positions.
He used the term,
unfortunate term, we want
to be rid of the spent volcanoes.
And so the...here this personnel
function was presented with
the president's view of what
he now wanted to do
having won the second term
about re-energizing and
renewing what he was trying to do as a program.
And this was the way he chose to do it.
This team that six
of us as I recall, who
under Fred's leadership at the
time, Fred ran the
personnel office from after
the election we arrived until early January.
So that two-month period.
And in that two-month period, we
were asked to recommend
whose resignations he should accept.
And so the six
of us had frankly,
fairly terrible task to look
through the 555 people
that were in these positions currently
and make a judgment
and make a series of recommendations
to the president on what he should consider doing.
The let me add one other thing.
In the beginning, as Al said,
the president had told the
cabinet officers, you name your
people" essentially is what he said.
We spent the entire first
term Trying to
pull that back.
Fred did a great job.
Al pulling it
back,working with the capital
officers getting agreement getting
consensus, making recommendations and so on.
But the president
had begun to feel that
He really must have his people out here.
I know Fred said that
he was okay with the officers
having their own people and so on.
But what we found as he
began to construct a new
concept of the presidency, which
is a centralized directing policy
out into the departments and
agencies that he needed
a much more cohesive team
than we had found.
And I'll get to that in a second.
But he decided
that he absolutely wanted
the most confident people he could
get but also team player.
And so our job was
find those people who
- let me back up a second.
Unfortunately, working And
the executive branch of the
federal government is not like
anything most anyone else,
most people have ever done before.
So you do the best
job you can do, recruiting, background
checks, great credentials
of people, and they come.
And they get and they go to their departments.
And unfortunately, even though
we have the highest expectations for
all of these people to be
successful they're not.
Many are woefully unsuccessful, at
least in terms of driving
change that the president wanted.
And it's almost impossible to
predict beforehand who's gonna be super and who isn't.
And some people that
you think are going to be
superior performers aren't.
Some people that you don't
necessarily expect that sort
of performance from become stars
And the job then
as we began a second term.
Was to try to sort through
who had done well.
who had been team players, who
had been successful, and those
who had not been, who had been disappointments.
And those are hard judgments to make.
no one wants to make judgments like that.
But the President, you have eight years.
You have four year terms.
That is a flash.
It very often takes people almost
the first year after their
found to be confirmed,
to have an office, to
know what their job is, and to begin.
presidential term goes by in a flash.
And unless you're absolutely determined
to use that time well it gets frittered away.
Eight years frittered away is
an incredible waste for the
American people, for the
world [xx] goal really given our position.
So we had the job
of trying to renew the administration.
and re-energize it for the second term.
We had to make very hard choices.
I'll give you numbers.
Five hundred and fifty five
Presidentially appointed people, at
the end of that 2 month
period of evaluations 350 of
those jobs were open.
Not all of them were asked to leave.
Many people left on their own accord.
Another tidbit of information
many of these jobs at the
highest level turn over very rapidly.
I think the average tenure
in a senior position
in the government's about two years.
Eighteen months.
Eighteen months?
For a confirmed position, eighteen months.
Eighteen months, very rapid turnover.
Now people aren't coming and
necessarily leaving immediately, they get promoted.
They get sent to another agency.
A new position has to be created and they go there.
But It's very rapid turnover.
Patience .
So the 350 positions weren't
necessarily all terminations,
but many of them were.
And that was done
2 months at the beginning
of January before the inauguration
350 open positions.
Fred then says ***.
He goes and there's a big deal at OMD.
And leaves me holding
A great big bag with
help from Barbara and the
others, trying to
fill 350 jobs.
in a second administration where
there were clouds on the horizon.
And so off we go.
off we go.
And the incredible things in
this country of the,
we had Jeff didn't mention it.
But when you think about
the circumstance that we were dealing with.
We had a cold war with the Soviets.
We had a hot war
in Vietnam that we
were trying to extricate ourselves from
that was not going well.
Can you imagine, let's see
4,000 casualties in Iraq,
50,000 KIAs in Vietnam.
Incredible pressure on the
very ambitious domestic program he was trying to do.
And then all of the other things from the campaign.
people nonetheless in this
country wanted to come
serve and help this
administration be successful and
I'm very proud to
tell you.
I only had one direction that
was somewhat different from the
one that Fred outlined to
you earlier.
President Nixon had spent the
entire campaign, essentially recruiting
the blue collar workers of
this country to become the
new majority to support
a republican administration.
We were successful.
While successful in doing that.
And the only instruction other than
the one Fred had on what
the president wanted to do
was that he really seriously wanted
to try to bring people from
the US labor movement into this administration.
And so we had to widen
the on what
we were looking at for recruiting
to include that segment
of the US population and to
try to people from
the labor movement into the administration.
And I will tell you, it was difficult.
background of many labor people
is simply not what is
required and the senior
level of a political
positions in the administration
they just unfortunately aren't.
So we had to struggle with that but, we did our very best.
Other than that, the guidance was the same.
The best people you can find,
taking notice that we
need more women, taking notice that need more minorities.
But being darn sure that
you had the labor movement represented.
And I had a friend right
around the corner named Chuck
Colson, who came by
several times a week to
chat with me about the
progress we were making,
helpful chat, on labor appointment.
And Chuck was a
very forceful man and quite determined on this.
So we were
able to fill those 350 positions.
I left to become staff
secretary under Al Haig
after the changeover chief of staff.
And I think we had normally
in the personnel office the float
of ten or fifteen or twenty
positions open at any one time.
I think there were ten jobs open
when I went to become staff
secretary out of the 350.
So we had 340 of them
filled and I think
with exceptional, patriotic people who
really wanted to support the president.
Thank you, and that brings
us to our clean up
hitter, Pen James, who's
going to tell us all
the lessons learned and their later application.
Well, it was an interesting time the Nixon years.
And I think we who served
in the Reagan years learned a lot.
And I have to give
some accolades to Fred who
is the one that we used
the term professionalize office of presidential personnel.
It was really through Fred and
his working with Alderman and the president to get that done.
One thing that we did learn
in the Reagan years and I don't want to belabor Reagan.
'cause we're here to talk about
Nixon is that
we learn very quickly that Richard
Nixon made his first mistake
as was alluded here, his
first cabinet officer meeting in
the cabinet said to President Nixon,
we can pick our own people.
right?
And he said yes, you can
pick your own people, and as
he walked out of the room,
and this is all documented, he
turned to an aide and said,
"I just made my first mistake."
He gave away the appointment process.
What we learned in the Reagan
years is not to repeat
the mistake but to
control the appointment process, emphasis
on control because f
you wanna control policy, you've got to control appointments.
If you don't control appointments,
you don't control policy.
So Reagan coming
off of eight years as
a governor running an executive
branch realized that he
wanted to make sure that should
he get elected would be
able to put together a
team unlike, again, Mr Nixon.
And Peter Flanigan, he gets elected.
Next day where is
he gonna put our transition office,
give us office space?
How are we gonna put together a team?
I started with Governor Reagan
seven months before he was
ever elected president at his
direction to work covertly
because it was unseemly to
look like he had put together
this team, let's say if
I gotta like, that I want
a plan, it's how we
go about putting together our
team I worked and I was just one man.
It was just me.
And so I went around
and talked to various people in
the Nixon years and other administrations
And put together 7 pages
in a big document about how
we would go about controlling the appointments.
And as it got closer to
the election like Reagan
was gonna be the president
elect, then my work got a little bit more serious.
I worked closely with
him and some of the
other senior members of the circle.
And one way we controlled it
is I was my
title was an assistant to
the president, which is the highest rank you can have.
My office was in the West Wing.
And going back to Al proximity important.
Every day I
met with Baker at five
o'clock The day,
every day and myself and
nobody else was ever in that
room or invited but me.
Where we went over the finalWho
would be presented through approval by the president.
Keep going back to control, how
do we control the process.
when each cabinet officer, going
again...talking about Reagan...was
appointed, the secretary for
example, Don Regan.
I sat in the Oval Office
when president elect asked
Don Regan to be Treasury, and
he said, "Now, Don, before
you accept this appointment,
I want you to know that I am gonna control the appointments."
And Pen James here is going
to handle the appointments.
That doesn't mean we don't want your input.
Doesn't mean we aren't gonna listen to your ideas.
but we're gonna have senate here
in the White House via presidential
personnel, which I had.
And so each cabinet officer
as he came on board [xx]
the first day that we were gonna control the appointment.
That was our control.
And and unlike Fred and
a staff of five, six, seven
people to do this job,
I had a staff of 40 people.
I had a huge staff.
Now first six months, that
staff went down to 15.
But at the beginning, because of
the sheer numbers you're talking
about, no one person can that process.
So you had to
delegate various authorities under
the presidential personnel to focus
on economic policy, national security
policy, agricultural policy, or
whatever it may be and put the team together.
So one thing we
learned was control the
appointment process Now admittedly,
as time goes on, after
two years, no matter how
strong you are at presidential
personnel, the cabinet officers
become more and more authority
and power or control
of the White House diminishes just by time and experience.
Going back to what Fred
was trying to accomplish to
professionalize the appointment process.
I'd like to give three examples of
the recruitment process under Fred and Richard Nixon.
For examples, Paul Volcker
was the undersecretary for international monetary affairs.
his deputy was Bruce McCory.
Fred said, "Bruce McCory is leaving the deputy.
Go over and see Paul
and find out what we can
do to help him find the new deputy."
so I go trotting over to
see Paul Volcker and
said, "We want to help you
on that..." So I go
back to my office and typical [xx] fashion.
We start sourcing leaders within
that given professional field.
Like for example I called [xx] at citicorp .
*** Freeman at Chicago, Tom
Clausen of B of A
and whatever and gave ideas and went on and on.
So I came up with a
series of candidates 'cause my job
was not to on the
political side but only
on the substantive side, unless they
were raving Democrats obviously, common sense takes place.
We didn't fill that position Jack
Hennesy was moved up
and become the debit of hope
it, you may recall, but during
those sourcing calls one name
kept coming up by the
name of Bill Simon, who was
a bond trader in
Salomon Brothers in New York.
And so as we went
on on in the
financial arena, I'd call this guy Bill Simon.
I'd never met him.
You know, occasional you get somebody
on the phone, you ask him a
question he's right there with you.
He's immediately on your target and very helpful.
So as time went on,
I got thinking, "We ought to know this guy Bill Simon."
And make a long
story short, we had a
position open and I
briefed Fred and Fred briefed
Haldeman and we wrote a
memo to the President
recommending Bill Simon, who all
of you know became Secretary of Treasury later on.
What is interesting about that
story, my memo is
a one-page memo, most all
memos from the President, to
my mind, was one page.
It came back from the President,
with a line drawn through the
whole letter and no, exclamation
mark, east coast establishment,
other options.
And remember Richard Nixon
had a knee-jerk reaction against
East Coast liberal establishment.
And since he was Wall Street,
obviously he's, well, we overcame that and he got the appointment.
Particularly Ivy Leaguers.
Especially how?
Ivy Leaguers.
Oh, he was [xx] College.
Yeah.
But that showed some of the
bias he would have
because he was biased against
East Coast attacks, I think that diminished.
Then Bill went on.
So that was an example of a headhunter type identification.
Interesting thing when Nixon
said no on this guy,
I called Bill and Bill
said, "Pen, if you ever
need political help on me, let me know."
And I called and I said, "Bill, you just got turned down.
I need all the help you can."
And I guess he got on the
phone and called George Schultz and
all of his buddies that he's been knowing and he got the appointment.
The other one a typical, which really blew my mind.
One time, Haldeman had
told Malik, the Secretary of
Agriculture had submitted his
resignation, Cliff Harden.
And so the president wants
candidates to fill the Secretary of Agriculture.
Fred turns to me and says pen, who do you got come up with candidates].
I said I can't believe the president
of the United States, you only got
12 cabinet officers, he wouldn't
know which one he wanted without
turning to me, who didn't even
know where the agriculture department was.
So I closet myself in the
office, ask for all
the farm journals for the
last five years, go through
reading reports, who's who
in agriculture, who gives speeches,
who gets rewards, who gets whatever, going on.
I ended up coming back with
a list of about twenty odd names just on yellow pad.
But my instructions were not to talk to him.
Another word he took away the best tool that a recruiter has.
Is his [xx] work sources to get ideas.
So I could not talk to anyone.
It was purely an academic [xx].
So I go back to [xx].
I say, "Fred, this is all I
can do Let me talk to somebody.
[xx] Let me
check it, comes
back to me and said you can talk to Rice Harbaugh.
president sent Dr Bryce Harlow.
I call in Bryce Harlow.
Bryce comes over and to
make the story short, Bryce goes
right down the list, he says, "This one."
And who secretary.
Earl Butts?
Earl Butz.
He said Earl Butz, Indiana, and that filled that job.
Yeah.
The other one I won't
mention to give you an idea of
recruitment at the White House
level is we
had two vacancies on the
Federal Reserve Board
And remember Arthur
Burns was chairman of the fed.
But evidently Nixon didn't
want Burns to make the appointments and selection.
So again Alec returns to
the recruiting side of
his shop and says come
up with candidates for the Federal Reserve Board.
and I said, "My God, why
do you have to turn to somebody
like me to fill these, come up with candidates?"
I'm not a political animal.
But anyhow, we did and
we filled filled two of those
and they were appointments that came through our.
So the sum point
of that is that if
you're gonna control it, you've
got to have the president's authority and his backing.
And what we learned
from Mr. Nixon, Mr. Reagan learned.
If I want that guy in
the White House, and I
want him reporting directly to
me, and I
met with the President every twice
a week on a regular schedule,
3:30 in the afternoon on
a Tuesday, a Thursday, so I was always on his agenda.
So, I could talk to him
about the appointment and not let that slip.
So, what we
tried to do is replicate
what Nixon tried desperately to do.
He lost control.
It's a time.
Changes in communication, changes in
government, because of
media and because of the
the pressure's going on
where cabinet government used to work.
And the Secretary of Labor
could do what he wanted to do, and it really didn't matter.
But the government get more complex and the problems get more complex.
What's being done in labor
is going to impact H E
W and going to impact another department.
And when were talking about
teamwork, you got to work
with the personnel and it's
got to be an integrated whole and you got to have a team.
We're going to go around in
a minute and do a little
discussion but because it's
such a small world and we're
here, when I was
a White House fellow I was
a White House fellow at Treasury for Paul Volcker.
So I remember and broached that quite well.
At one point I was staffing Brice Harlow.
And Brice was one of
the quietest, savviest guys
you could possibly imagine, and agriculture
came up, and he
said to me, you know
what's so interesting about agriculture
is taking away benefits for the farmers.
We're changing from an agrarian economy.
And what I've learned is
the president had better have a
really good grip on
his next Secretary of Agriculture
before he lets go of
the one he's got because it's
a very hard position to
fill 'cause you're taking
away benefits, not unlike
being Secretary of Defense when the budget's being cut.
That's not the most fun thing in the world.
It's interesting.
But I'd like to do, go
back to the panel, got some
questions, one of which
is, Jerry alluded to it.
What's so different about being
in government than being in
academia or being a
business leader or being a labor leader.
What's unique about the executive branch?
I wrote an article,
"Mr Executive Goes to Washington."
It appears in the Harvard Business Review.
And since I've written so
few articles, I remember the
Wall Street Journal actually did
a favorable editorial on it.
And it talk about some of the differences.
I think a political appointment
at the top levels of government
is far more complex, far
more demanding many more
avenues of approach, many more
issues to deal with than you would in business.
In business, you have chief
executive has a board of
directors and a defined
sphere of impact.
That person has to
develop market share for his
or her product, has to improve
profitability but it's in a narrow field.
These appointments in government
are much broader, they have
much further reaching impact,
and you're answerable not to
a board of directors but to
a president and to 500
or so members of Congress.
And everything you do is
being looked at through a
magnifying glass with the
help of the press corps so
that the public really can see
what you're doing and sometimes knows
what you're contemplating doing even
before you've decided to do
it Which makes it
all the more difficult to bring
things people together and make decisions.
So you've got the complexities of
the public and the
press Congress, dealing with
the White House and getting support
there, as well as
the very complexity of the issues you're dealing with.
So I think the commonalities
are that make for
success are interpersonal skills, number one.
You have to be able to work with people.
You have to have a certain degree of empathy.
You have to know where someone else is coming and from.
You have to have an
executive capacity, an organizational capacity
because in leading any
organization, I think requires that.
And above and beyond everything else, I think it's leadership.
I think you gotta be a better leader in government than you do in business.
A business person can get
by without being a really
good leader I think a top
government official needs to be
a really good leader in addition
to a good manager and having good interpersonal skills.
Let me add to that.
Just add is right
and still have your article in my archives.
People say, "Well, we want
the brightest people in government, smart."
And I said, "Smart doesn't count."
and moving policy if you
don't have two things: if you
don't have clout and access.
If you don't have
the clout for someone to
listen to you and access to
get...you're just a smart guy sitting in your office.
And that ties in with
your...And leadership, to pick
that point up, you do
have in departments a
bureaucratic group.
And the bureaucracy, this is
true anywhere, can really gum up policy.
or just wait it out
or just bureaucratic inertia or whatever.
So you really want
people in these top positions
who have the inspiration skills
as well, the leadership skills besides
what you were talking about, Fred,
the ability to organize and whatever.
I think that becomes more important
'cause You want the career people
to be with you and I
believe that is possible, but it takes some work sometimes.
That's a really, really good point.
A lot of people
come in and think well the
career people, our here
to stand in our way, we've
got to go around them and we've gotta, they're not gonna help.
That's not the right way
to do it, the career people
are there because they believe in the mission of their departments or agencies.
That's right.
That's why they're there.
If you can't convince them that
you're taking them in the right
direction maybe there's something wrong with the leadership.
I think your, point and I'll
get to it in just a second with my next question.
You're trying to lead
them in a new direction and you're changing things.
And what happens, and Jerry
alluded to the fact that
some really top people don't quite work out.
We have a phase called
going native, where you
get appointed and you're confirmed and your sitting over there.
And if you aren't eager
to change the position will carry itself.
The bureaucracy will keep going in
the direction it's been going
and you get people, qualified
people, who go along, accept that.
And how do you distinguish one from the other?
There are two
things that I think are important here.
I'll give one example.
We were recruiting for the
Assistant Secretary for Health
Affairs at the Department of
Defense during Rumsfeld's time.
And so the issue is,
what kind of person can do this job?
Well, the answer is probably nobody.
The job oversees 53 billion
dollars a year of expenditures.
Nobody in the private sector
has ever had to deal
with 53 billion dollars a
year of expenditures in health care.
I mean, it's a
mind boggling change in
terms of dimension, that these guys are expected to do.
So who out there
has the experience to be able to do that?
Very hard job to fill.
We filled it the first
time with an insurance company
executive, the second time with a cardiologist.
Frankly, the cardiologist did a
better job than the insurance guy did.
Leave that aside.
The second thing is there's a
huge difference between any other
organization, mainly business
ones, but also others, is
that Washington is an adversarial environment.
People come here not
out of adversarial environments.
Their companies are friendly, they
get along, you know they're friends with everyone.
Here it's adversarial,
and particularly with the Nixon administration.
the Congress was controlled by
the Democrats and many of them didn't like Nixon at all.
In fact, they really didn't like him at all.
And they their authority and
usually and very often
in pretty contentious ways.
It was not easy.
so many leaders
are not used to having to
grapple with daily adversarial skirmishes.
we're reminded of the very
unfortunate suicide note that Vince Foster left.
This is a city that ruins people just for sport.
Yeah.
right.
and it is.
Everything seems fine, you're doing
a fine job, and one
misstep in the minuet and
all of a sudden their
grand juries or you discover
your driver has been
taking notes on where you've
been driven and you You
start reading about yourself in
the paper and the news
people are camping on your doorstep.
The thing that I
began and to try to do
on all of the interviews
as we began to staff the
second term, was to
try to determine if the
candidate had what I call a political personality.
Now I know that's sort of
a fuzzy term, but, what
I mean by that, is someone
who who sort of
understands the political
world here, and can
negotiate it.
And one of the things,
though what happens with
business guys is they come
down here and they don't
have any sense of how
the political stuff sort
of weaves in and out and how to play it.
and if you were tone deaf
politically, you're a
dead man walking here.
So it's a
very hard skill to
try to evaluate as a personnel person.
How do you figure
out whether somebody has that sort of that knack or not.
But to the extent
that you can figure it out,
you have a much better
chance of finding a successful
person here than if you don't.
It's a great point.
Let's follow up on
that point, the career
point I think you're
right about that, and I think our
experience-- I don't know if
you guys would agree-- has been
that if somebody had varied
experiences in business They would be better able to adapt.
Somebody would come up a
single route in one
company didn't quite have
that adaptability, that ability Fence
the political relationships that need
to be developed and how to
work with the congress, how to work with the White House to get the clout.
You almost had to lose once or twice.
quite certain.
Have a failure, because you
learn more from a failure than a constant path of success.
Probably true.
Unfortunately.
If you had a number of
successful of experiences in different fields you could.
The career thing can't be over emphasized.
I learned a lot when I
was directly under hear from
Elliot Richardson, who became secretary.
I would meet with him two,
three times a week on different
things we were doing, and organizational or otherwise.
And every time, he would
ask me to bring a
team of people who were in the agency working.
For example, if we were doing
something in the social security administration
[xx] the commissioner and
three or four of his associate
commissioners would be in that meeting.
And they would hear the reasoning
and hear the secretary expounding on things.
And over time, they are
part of the solution,
and they better understand what you're
trying to do, and they
understand that fundamental decency, that
you're not being driven just by
political motivation or by a certain philosophy.
You're trying to do the right
thing and the reason behind it,
and that's how you win them over.
And it can be done.
I was a cabinet officer who did just that.
Bring career people into
some of the issue task forces we had.
And you're quite right.
Then they buy in, we become part of a team.
But you know it takes some
understanding that you have to do that.
I don't know how
you train people who
don't have the understanding that you do.
And then you have to do
it, if you're sitting in any
of these top jobs, whether it's
cabinet, or below.
And I agree with Jerry.
I think it's a really hard
skill, this political
thing, which is really part
of the career thing too, bringing those people in.
That's really hard to evaluate.
Let me try on that one.
Penn has talked about it and I think commented.
But one of the
things, particularly on the higher
level positions, and to
talk a second about the young people.
One of the things that the
president wanted to do was
to grow a generation of
young executive branch leaders.
And so we were all very young.
I was 32 when
we started, you were what, 33.
So, we were 24 the kid.
Well I was kind of his class mate.
We both went to [xx] But
we put in place a whole
group of young people, who
got executive branch experience.
Many dozens, many dozens.
The key though, and
going back to this Earl
Butz choice, at the
higher level of If the
person hasn't had experience in
Washington or very close
experience like being an
executive in a firm
that works very closely with the government.
Like we recruited the Secretary of
the Navy out of what had
been TRW, who had
worked for thirty years contracting
with the defense department.
But if for the
senior positions you really need
someone whose been here before.
Maybe 2 or 3 times before.
Now Republicans tend to
come and then they tend to
go out in the private sector,
so they can loop through several times.
But the Earl Butts example is a great example.
He may have been the best
cabinet officer that I knew,
in terms of being truly in
control of that area
that he was responsible for.
And this guy had been
here as an assistant secretary
for international marketing or something.
Do you remember.
I don't remember.
But he had been an assistant secretary before Eisenhower administration.
That's why Brice knew it.
This guy absolutely felt this town.
He felt the vibrations I
remember riding back from a
meeting over at the department
with him, and we were
going through the issues that
he was facing in the Ag
department This is how I'm going to play this.
If they ask me this, I'm going to say this.
I could say this or I could say, or I'm going to say this.
I'm going to play it this way.
This does this.
These three constituents are like
that, this will
smooth over,the Senator that
is about to kill me, and so on.
They guy thought politically, he
thought thought about how the town
worked and how he
would have to respond to all
these hypothetical type things he
was going to get hit with that
day I think I was came
over for some press availability.
He was absolutely on top
of it, and he couldn't have
possible have done that if
he had hadn't been there before,
new in town and been here before.
I think four years under Eisenhower
and so he was a natural.
Not everybody that has been
here before is a natural
This guy was a natural.
Let's do this because the hour grows long.
The final question on
the exam floor panel, is
what, for each of
you, what do you think
the most important thing you
learned in the Nixon administration
in doing personal, and if
you were to advise a newly
elected president on personnel,
what would your advice be?
They could key off the same
thing but let me begin with
my friend Allen and go through that.
Well actually one of the
things that I found most pleasing
about whats happened here today
is when I heard and
Jim has explained how he
worked with the Reagan administration
and what they did was,
they started early, he did
it quietly and he
also, you know, we
put the surge into Iraq and
that turned the Iraq situation around.
And, really your surge in
personnel should be the
first day you're in there
full time to start staffing
those jobs when you have a staff of 40 people.
Because my recommendation would have
been to somebody to do what
you exactly did with
President Reagan, because the
problems are you don't start early enough
and you don't have
enough people to execute at the time you have to execute.
And control it.
And control, always control.
Because everybody's trying to take that power away from you.
Well, the president's the only nationally elected leader.
I mean, everybody else has
ideas, but he's just come
off an election and he's
done the balancing in getting elected, he or she.
when I came in,
with a business background primarily, I
put a great deal of emphasis
on traditional business skills
Organization and so forth.
I think what I came
out with was a much greater
appreciation for what we've been
talking about, some of the
political skills that with that,
because without those you cannot be successful.
And, I think that it
blended the two, the organization
experience of a successful business
person combined with the
political skills one gets from
entering and conquering different challenges,
different industries, different sectors would
lead to the ideal person so
particularly one that's been here before.
However, I think it's
becoming increasing difficult to get
people from business who have had that repetitive experience.
Yes, because once that career
is interrupted in the age
of specialization that we are
in, it's much more difficult
to resume that career and be
as successful and not be left behind by your peers.
were continuing to pursue their endeavors.
Hard to go home when
you've become an expert in
a aspect of government if
what you did before isn't as from a contractor.
It's not value so therefore you have a lot of government contractors.
You got preponderance now, I
think, reliance on academia, legal
profession discover contractors as
opposed to people that come
from other sectors of the private
sector of the sectors of the industry.
Add to that, Fred,the golden handcuffs
and these guys kept on leaving mid-career.
What we found, what we
had to do this last
time through was begin to
rely on Known a lot
of guys who are ready to
retire who are
60, 62, still with a lot
of energy wouldn't have a job after they left there.
Because we couldn't get
them out of organizations and end their career.
I think if we wanted someone we could get them.
Right.
If 75 percent of people we wanted accepted.
It was an honor
to come and there wasn't the
vicious punishment that there is now.
Barbara?
And for women it was more
risky to come because they
were afraid they couldn't get back to where ever they had come from.
Anyway, that's it's not my biggest learning.
My biggest learning out of
that experience is that
presidential leadership really made a difference.
As we said there was not
consensus in our society
about what women should and should not do.
And in fact, when
Fred first called me about
coming, I was advised by friends not to do it.
You were skeptical.
"Don't do it",
they said because that administration
Will never do anything for women.
You're persuasive.
I decided to do
it and in a way, that was a risk as well.
In any case because of
where society was about women
and careers and families and
whether we should be doing both,
it needed presidential leadership.
It needed the support, however, Fred,
of people sitting here
and of Bob Finch, who was
very important in this process,
who was counselor to the President,
but it needed presidential leadership, backed
by the management effort around
it that monitored and watched
targets and watched progress
to make it work.
But it needed presidential leadership or I don't think it would have.
There was too much dissention in
the mix, even in that White House.
And in hindsight, I
think what that President did by
making a visible effort to
advance women, he pulled
this noisy, drumbeat, left-leaning
movement for women's equality right
into the middle of American life.
He made it legitimate.
He made it okay.
We made equality for women
a part of our life.
That was profound.
Jere?
The thing that's
impressive when you begin
to really look at these Government
positions is how
incredibly difficult they are to do well.
There's simply no question that
it's a world class challenge to do well.
And it is very
hard to find people who can
do them exceedingly well.
As the President said, "I
want superb people."
The unfortunate downside
is that once you put
people in place it is
very hard to replace them
in a political environment like this.
And so hard that
you leave poor performers
in places where they
shouldn't be long after
you know they're not performing well
and That's a
learning thing and I
praise President Nixon for
saying, "We are not going to have that.
I am going to change And
I know it is going
to break China but we
must change it we
are going to take advantage of the
opportunity here to govern
[xx] And so I
think the thing that I
learned was how demanding
the jobs are, how hard they
are to do, and then
how hard it is to
correct the mistake and I
praised the president for being willing to do that.
[xx] there's a
report that was done by former
President Gerry Ford, and former
President Jimmy Carter were sponsored
by the Brookings Foundation some
years ago after they had
left office and it was
your question.
The series of questions, but the
first question to Former Ford
and Carter why did
advice would you give to
the next president, which was
going to be George Bush 41, but this was before Bush.
And they said, both of them
said, loyalty loyalty, loyalty.
Three times, a direct quote.
In other words, you have
run for office on a
political platform and what
you want to accomplish and what
you believe the direction of the
government should be and what
the policies we are trying
to change and apply are growing.
The only way you can do
that, Mr. President is to
ensure yourself that the
men and women that you appoint
and that you bring in understand and are loyal.
I'll tell you we don't mean sycophants, we
don't mean hanger-onners, who really
understand what you, as
a president, are trying to accomplish in the department.
Agriculture, or defense, or
whatever it may be, or foreign
policy, that it
is your policy that you
have run on, that you
have espoused during the one
year campaign, and that
the men and women you are bringing
in are committed to help
you to achieve that goal.
That is what has to
be done for any president, otherwise
his administration will flounder off.
And, it's substantive loyalty, not political loyalty.
It's- Well, [xx] because
you're not going to appoint somebody who's opposed to your political policy.
Hopefully not.
This has been a wonderful forum.
This is our 22nd forum.
And like the others, a fantastic group of people.
Different points of view.
Insights into what's going on.
The intriguing thing about Richard Nixon.
He'd be on the national scene for so long.
There was so much he wanted to do.he
didn't preside, he led.
And he wanted, and that's
what these people's job was, to
bring people in to help bring about change.
And we know from the other
forums, a tremendous amount of change occurred.
We know from this forum, how many of those people got here.
I thank you for coming.
I hope you come join us for another forum in the future.
Good day.
Thank you.