milhouse nixon in having contributed to mightily to opening up china and to reconfiguring united states foreign policy. and reflecting more broadly upon creativity as a theme in this remarkable president's politics. and it's upon the theme of cry yaytivity that i wanted to speak today, because it seems to me that in his economic policy, he was, in key respects, at least as creative as he was in his foreign policy. what were the contexts of the making of economic policy when he assumed the office on the 22nd and 20th of january 1969. they were contexts, i suggest, of quite formidable challenge both at home and abroad. the territory is familiar. i need nt run over them. the most important from my point of view is perhaps that vietnam had brought about by fiscal 1967

a deficit, or a current deficit in 1967 prices of $27 billion. which was within $200 million or $300 million exactly the total federal fiscal deficit for that same fiscal year. so the special southeast asia appropriation in '67 accounted for the whole of the united states' fiscal deficit in that year. and that gap was closed by fiscal '69 because of and only because of the tax surcharge which lyndon johnson belatedly and at considerable political cost to him persuaded congress to pass in 1968. so that by '69 the context -- the fiscal context was a little easier. fiscal '69 was, in fact, one of those rare years in post-war american politics when the united states had a fiscal

surplus. nevertheless, the fiscal position remained extraordinarily difficult. it was one of the points of considerable difficulty and challenge which president nixon inherited. there were others. monetary policy was highly contested. highly politicized. relations between the fed and the outgoing johnson administration had, on occasion, been extraordinarily and publicly difficult as policy preferences diverged. and crucially, although it was of no domestic political importance, it was of most momentous international importance. crucially the system which tied gold to the dollar and all other currencies to the dollar and fixed exchange rates, the brekenwood system which hadn't till 1958 provided the liquidity with which the western world would covet after the second world war.

the brekenwood system by the late 1960s was plainly -- was plainly in a condition of incipient crisis. it could not last for so long as other countries which had once sought dollars now wished only to exchange those dollars for gold. the system was unsustainable. so much for the context. now, all choices are technically difficult in economic policy. and these choices were made especially difficult by the intellectual context of economics which was one of the declining credibility of keynesian nostrums in the face of what appeared to be the early emergence of the conjunction of high and rising unemployment and high and rising inflation. all choices are technically difficult, and these were

technically difficult because that conjunction was incompletely understood, as it remains today. but all choices, of course, are also politically charged. and all the choices in fiscal policy and fiscal monetary policy were politically charged because they concerned directly questions of distribution of goods, distribution of post-tax income, distribution of political power and all of those questions had domestic political and electoral resonance as nixon knew very well indeed. in one respect at the outset of his presidency he severed, severed privately within the white house the -- what he took to be the public perception of republican presidents. namely, that they preferred low inflation over low unemployment. he sought to sever that connection in the public mind and made it crystal clear to all

his economic advisers in december 1968 and january '69 that as president of the united states, his choice would be different. he would privilege job creation and high employment over inflation. nobody, i think, could have foreseen how dramatically that trade-off was to shift from 197 1 on wards. but nixon's kra yaytivity bursts through not in the first 18 months, but therefore in 1971 with a vengeance. firstly and most obviously in his replacing david kennedy as secretary of the treasury with john connolly, a conservative, it is true, but a democrat and a prominent democrat. and someone with whom he had previously not had close and continuing political relations, but of whom he had long been an admirer. and who was politically

immensely useful to him. most dramatically, nixon's creativity, his agency, his, as it were, rediscovery of the possibilities of transformative politics in the presidency, is expressed and evident in his doing what everybody thought, everybody knew he would not and could not do. that is to say accepting the challenge thrown down to him by a democratic congress in 1970 which had granted to the president of the united states the authority in law to impose price and wage controls, a statute which was passed because -- precisely because majority democrats knew that an incumbent republican president could not and would not avail himself of those powers. in august of 1971, he did, and imposed a freeze on prices and wages for 90 days. there is no more dramatic

illustration of the capacity of the federal government as of any state to intervene in markets than to seek to control prices and wages in peacetime. nixon, of course, had some considerable personal knowledge of those processes through war. rough his work in the office of price administration. but the setting of rubber tires -- the prices of rubber tires in 1974 is one thing. seeking to control the prices and wages in the united states economy in 1971 was another. it was a dramatic move and it was accompanied by the exit from the brekenwood system. the temporary imposition of import surcharges. and by the continuation of a spectacularly successful campaign which the president led to pressure the federal reserve board and particularly the federal open market committee under the chairmanship from 1970

of his chosen arthur byrnes to pressure the fed to ease monetary policy to the point where unemployment fell or would fall in 1972 and be accompanied because of the imposition of wage and price controls by low and falling inflation. precisely those two things happened. politically, it was, in my view, a master stroke. indeed, a master clause. the wage and price freeze -- by the wage and price freeze, richard nixon abandoned his former conventional policy tools to control inflation. august 1971, the period between august '71 and november '72 marked his own deliberate and creative policy rupture both of his presidency and in the conduct of the united states' entire peacetime economic policymaking in the post-war world. he thereby comprehensively outmaneuvered his political

opponents through the extraordinarily daring appropriation of their purposes, of their constituents as the result of november '72 election showed, and to their chosen policy instruments. domestic presidential politics, i think, give few more dramatic demonstrations of the disruptive capacity of the president's uses of lawful authority. thank you very much, indeed. [ applause ] >> nor do i have a british accent. nonetheless, i would like to add my own thanks to the others that have expressed theirs to tim naftali, the library staff, the miller center and mel small. as a scholar and as a citizen,

actually, of the united states i have gained a great deal from what i've been able to do with the help of all of those sources. again, sincerely, thank you very much. now, i'm a student of white house staffing. and, on occasion, people say after they say, gee, that's kind of boring, isn't it? they say, but what do we know? i've distilled two lessons. one is, it all depends. and the second is, everything begins with richard nixon. and i say that quite seriously. in fact, what i'm going to talk about today is nixon and the administrative presidency. and i'm going to suggest that the kinds of strategies and initiatives as well as some of the debate that has come over the administrative presidency, indeed, stted with richard nixon. now, as it turns out, all presidents have clear incentives to seek good staff around them in the white house, in executive

branch agencies, and in other parts of government. but richard nixon also, again like all presidents, also desired responsiveness to his own political and policy priorities. nigel has already talken to us about the context of the times. those things have to be kept in mind when one thinks about strategies and one thinks about the kinds of goals that mr. nixon tried to pursue as president. those context -- the context chul elements interacted, of course, with his id logical commitments, his beliefs and his sense of politics. he confronted both the democratic congress and an executive branch populated by those that richard nixon and his aides believ were opposed to his policy objectives. as a result, together, they fashioned what former appointee of richard nixon, richard nathan, first called the plot that failed, but later came to call an administrative

presidency approach. and he did that after what he saw as the successes of that approach as it was put into place more systemically by ronald reagan. we have seen it also being put into place by presidents like george w. bush, bill clinton and, to some extent, president obama. it's not a republican set of strategies nor a democratic set of strategies. it's another way that presidents try to achieve their policy and political objectives. so that's what i want to talk about just a little bit today with the pioneer of some of those strategies. of course, as it was suggested this morning, some of the responsibility or the gratitude for that may well go to dwight eisenhower. who really thought that richard nixon needed to have greater experience and understanding some of the constraints and the dynamics of larger organizations. something that mr. nixon really had never had at any point in his career. in terms of a set of strategies, when we talk about the

administrative presidency, what we're really talking about are presidents trying to achieve their goals outside of the legislative process, outside of public speaking, outside of communication kinds of devices. instead, they turn to executive branch agencies and executive branch departments as well as to their white house staff and the executive office of the president. in nixon's case, his tools ranged from firing and repositioning particular individuals to introducing an monitoring evaluation of the entire executive branch. and he did that through the office of management and budget, renamed and redirected under richard nixon as well as the creation of the domestic council. now, some of mr. nixon's strategies were more direct. relying on appointees as carriers of presidential values. others sought to directly stop or refashion bureaucratic

activities. it's important to remember, i think, that richard nixon, like all presidents, started with a congressional strategy. and he also started by saying domestic policy can be run by anybody. the reason to have a president is to have someone who can take a look at important national security and foreign policy issues. so he started without very much attention to a range of domestic policy issues. he turns to these administrative strategies, however, as he found it frustrating and unproductive to try to work with the democratic-controlled congress. and he also quickly grew disenchanted with many of his own initial executive branch appointments. most cabinet members, as it turns out, actually retained sub cabinet members. the assistant secretaries and deputy secretaries and directors of bureaus from the democratic johnson administration. moreover, some of nixon's own appointees like george romney, secretary of the department of housing and urban development,

pressed for support of great society programs such as model cities that the president found. nixon's speech writer william sapphire wrote romney was thoroughly sold, one could say cruelly brainwashed by the experts. that has certain resonance, especially in that point of time. especially by the experts at hud on the wisdom of expanding many great society programs. at the same time that nixon entered the white house, he was clearly suspicious of career officials. those evil bureaucrats that populated the agencies and departments around the mall in washington. and what he was suspicious about them for was that he believed that the execute branch departments were populated by civil servants who were liberal, democratic and mostly opposed to his administration's priorities. now, those kinds of concerns were not entirely baseless. a survey of senior career officials in 1970 found, for

example, that 47% of them identified as democrats. 17% as republicans. and 36% as independents. wh the president did in response over the remaining part of his administration was to pursue a variety of administrative strategies in order to gain better control of the executive branch. i want to talk just very briefly about a few of them and talk briefly again about their seeming impact. critical to these strategies at the core of them, if you will, were strategic appointments. though he began with promises of cabinet government, he soon decided that what he would need to do was to replace people that not only shared his policy commitments and his political party, most presidents do that. but more important, according to people like fred mallic who came to the white house to work for him and started the first systemic presidential personnel program, what mr. nixon sought was loyalty.

loyalty to the person and loyalty to that person's ideological commitments and program commitments. in addition to this personnel strategy that richard nixon started throughout the executive branch, he also saw that it might make sense to not give as much responsibility or as much attention or as many resources to executive branch departments and agencies. especially those new deal agencies and great society agencies that were, at best, to be held at arm's length. most times to be distrusted and suspicious about. what he did in response, as we all can remember, is that he began to expand the white house staff and the executive office staff. they not only expanded in size, they also significantly expanded in authority. between 1969 and 1971, for example, the executive office staff, which includes the white house, grew from about 1,200 people to just about 1,800

people. and that doesn't count all the so-called detailees that were borrowed from other parts of the executive branch. more important, this added staff had a notable increase in its authority. much of the decision making in domestic policy issues increasingly became centralized in the white house. john erlichman quickly grew tasked with domestic policy development. one of the administration's signal attempts to strengthen control over the executive branch was the march 1970 creation of a domestic council and a supporting policy staff lodged in the executive office and also a restructured and renamed office of management and budget. the domestic council followed the model of the existing national security council. a cabinet counscil with cabinet members but also a dedicated policy staff. much like the national security council staff during the nixon years, the erlichman domestic council staff wielded real

influence over most domestic policy and the scope of the domestic council's responsibilities were not limited to integrating policy ideas. rather, they often became involved in making policy, writing legislation and making changes and decisions about particular bureaucratic regulations and rules. as you might imagine, for a professor of public administration and policy, i can talk about these techniques add infy nit m. but i won't. you're safe. i do think, though, that the impact of richard nixon's administrative presidency initiatives is something we ought to continue to think about. now, many of these efforts, as you might imagine, never were fully implemented as his second term screeched to an early and unpredicted end. as i said earlier, richard nathan called his book about the nixon strategies "the plot that failed." and, yet, many of these strategies did yield results. by 1976 senior career officials were more likely to report being

republican or independent than in previous years. they also were more apt to express support for more conservative policies like those nixon pursued. more generally, many of nixon's changes in structures and processes have persisted. later presidents have continued the nixon administration efforts to centralize executive branch budgets in omb. his early efforts to monitor and curtail agency regulation. and he firmly implanted the idea of a domestic policy staff in the expectations and the practices of the modern presidencies. lastly, later presidents also have pursued the systemic appointment of personnel and tried to implant their dna throughout the executive branch. we also, when we criticize presidents, often look back to richard nixon. some of the discussion of unilateral activities, and indeed of the unitary president

that we began to hear more of under a recent president, many people will trace back to some of the efforts and initiatives and rationales of the nixon presidency. what that says to me, in conclusion, is that boring, less interesting or important and compelling. attention needs to be paid, i think, to these kind of administrative strategies as presidents and the place to begin is, indeed, with richard nixon. [ applause ] >> i, too, would like to thank the miller center and the nixon library and tim naftali. i would especially like to thank melvin small for inviting me to contribute to this volume. i am greatly honored to have been invited to do so. i think what mel has done here is to create a kind of model for these other presidential

companions. it seems like our presidents are not going to be lonely. we have companions for ronald reagan comes out. a come pan yor for harry truman and other presidents. the idea of partiering a book with a presidential library and bringing scholars together to discuss history ography as well as other aspects of the presidents and their presidencies. what i'm going to do here is review the historyography of the nixon presidency because there's a strong body of historical literature. there's much evidence to sustain a claim. the nixon administration implemented affirmative action. sanction set asides for minority owned businesses. desegregated southern schools.

reformed federal indian policy. yet the president also courted conservative white southerners. and he strongly opposed busing. as a result, the white house's approach to civil rights was, as leonard fwrks arment, liberal nixon adviser recalled, operational progressive but obscured by clouds of retrogreszive rhetoric. what i'm here to do today is review this historyography of the nixon administration. i think we're fortunate because there's a strong body of historical literature where you can see the old dialectic of thesis, antithesis, getting to what nixon did. i'll look at four or five major schools of interpretation and do so very quickly. first it would be called i think the orthodox interpretation that took shape during nixon's presidency. this is the first interpretation. it argued that what nixon did was to retreat from civil rights enforcement in pursuit of conservative white southern

votes. and the purveyors of this argument cite as their examples the delaying of deadlines for school desegregation in mississippi in 1969. the president's overt appeals to white southerners, perhaps best exemplified by his attempts to place two conservative white southerners on the u.s. supreme court. nixon's need to win the south in 1972 under the so-called southern strategy. and the general muffling of nixon's rhetoric on civil rights. southern strategy and retreat of interpretation of nixon's civil rights policies was advanced by such journalists as rowland evans and robert novak. and liberal members of nixon's administration who left the administration like leon panetta who wrote a memoir. problems with the southern strategy include that it is simplistic. it is to a certain extent

unsophisticated and one-dimensional. it's true it captures nixon's political motivation which was undeniable. it also tends to wrap isolated events into a tidy all policy is politics argument. the second school of thought might be described as the nixonian revision. this we can see in the 1970s, continuing into the 1980s. we see memoirs emerging in the 1990s. this is the first effort to revise the record. it could be found in memoirs by nixon and some of his closest and most loyal advisers such as william saffire, ray price, leonard garment, george shults. even john urlichman. these writers stress nixon's policies and accomplishments such as peaceful desegregation of southern skooms in 1970 in the wake of the supreme court's ruling and holmes versus alexander. which said that the south was to

desegregate at once and to hereaft hereafter only operate unitary schools. differences among the nixon memoirs, as you can imagine, nixon painted his actions as being statesman like. saffire, price, garment and shuls portrayed nixon as pragmatic in his approach to the south and school desegregation. the president rode white southern backlash to re-election in 1972 while at the same time doing more to desegregate southern schools than any previous president. one thing the nixonian accounts had in common, none of the memoirists, with perhaps the exception of garment, made civil

rights the tom nant or lead subject in their books. the third school of thought the scholarly revision of the civil rights policies of nixon had its origins in the 1980s and 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. why did it happen? well, documents opened. tempers and passions cooled at least somewhat. there was a wistful longing for liberal policies after the conservative administrations of ronald reagan and george bush the first and the moderate administrations that bracketed them by democrats jimmy carter and bill clinton. and in domestic policy in general and in civil rights policy in particular, here was an opportunity to say something fresh about the nixon presidency. major works in this school of thought include hugh davis graham's massive and extremely important "the civil rights era" in 1990 which documented the nixon administration's role in developing affirmative action. graham did a lot of work looking in the nixon papers but he's

notable, too, for looking at the records of the labor department. joan hoff's book "nixon rekored" in 1994 also falls into this train of thought. hoff dubbed nixon. her book was especially strong on white house decision making. melvin small's "the presidency of richard nixon," 1999, again in this school of thought took an ingrative approach blending nixon with his advisers to study motivations and actions as well as policy breakthroughs and setbacks. small's tone was fair and balanced. apologies to fox news. and praiseworthy of nixon's liberalism in domestic affairs which if we continue with the cable news references would probably gratify msnbc. my own book "nixon civil rights" published in 2001, again i put in the revisionist camp, tried to account for nixon's multiple motivations, sporadic boldness

as well as successes and failings on civil rights. it tried to do all of that by emphasizing the political, practical and philosophical underpinnings of what nixon did in the area of civil rights. my noting that nixon had principle in this area was one of the more bolder claims of the book, i think. after totalling up nixon's record, the balance sheet showed, i argued, that he did more to achieve integration in the workplace with affirmative action than in schools or in housing. although obviously the school desegregation record in the south was strong. he supported separatism in a number ways such as minority owned banks and businesses, historically black colleges and native american indian tribes. i should adhere, he was baffled by women's rights. but achieved some progress there, addressing the concerns of a group that comprised the majority of the electorate. i think for the reality check th