interested in the scholarly revisionist, something to kind of keep in mind, here i do something i don't usually do. i'm going to speak for more than just myself here. we were not claiming in our writings that this liberal nixon, in terms of domestic policy, was the dominant aspect of nixon's presidency. we were not, in other words, using this new nixon to supplant other nixons or other new nixons. we were all different people with different takes on nixon's liberalism, and again i won't go into all of the details. we can talk about this in the question and answer. scholarship since the revisionists i think again very briefly here two schools of thought. we have what we might call the anti-revisionists who would include kenneth o'riley and elizabeth drew. they stress nixon's racism, anti-semitism, political expediency. his divisiveness in ramping up the issue of busing. and they argue that his accomplishments in this area of

civil rights and domestic policy stemmed from his pragmatism rather than his liberalism. others have used the works of the revisionists to deepen our understanding of specific mixon era policies, and i'm thinking of kevin yule and john david secretny, earlier than yule, who showed how urban unrest in the 1960s was one of the things that prompted nixon to adopt an economic development strategy regarding minority groups that you can see in affirmative action. garrett davis' study of federal education policy showed how nixon's school desegregation efforts were strongly influenced by southern politics in 1969, but then came to be influenced by what he called presidential responsibility in 1970, as the president set out to implement the supreme court's decision in holmes versus alexander. other books have enhanced our knowledge of nixon's policies with respect to minority businesses, fair housing and native american indian policy.

so my conclusion here is trite but i think true. much has been done in the area of civil rights and much needs to still be done. thank you. [ applause ] >> well, it's my pleasure to be here today at this wonderful conference to talk about my contribution to the nixon volume which is on the environment, and environmental policy, and in doing so i was able to draw upon the literature of environmental history, which is both fascinating and a burgeoning field which is good news for me, not such good news for mel, because i kept submitting revised and expanded bibliographies, but i think he forgave me. and it's particularly good, the literal of late, in dealing wi environmental policy history. and the most nixon specific of this literature has to be jay

brooks flippins' book called "nixon and the environment" by far the most comprehensive treatment of the subject and the administration's efforts in environmental policy. and by coincidence, the name of the essay i needed to write was called "nixon and the environment." and so in an effort to be something other than utterly derivative, i needed to figure out something to do with it. so my take on it was to take the spotlight off of nixon and to a certain extent off of the period of his administration, the late '60s and the early '70s. not to deny their importance, certainly, but more to provide some context and some perspective along with the specificity about what the administration accomplished. and when you look at the literature on environmental policy, whether it's environmental law or whether it's on congress, whether it's on environmentallism i probably defined, what it all reveals is

the rather deep and extensive roots of environmental concern, environmental consciousness and government policy stretching back certainly to the post-1945 careo go there. so environmentallism was not quite the fad or the fringe element that nixon thought it was. he referred to environmentalism as "crap for clowns." i desperately wanted to entitle my essay "crap for clowns." i was overruled. but you can't quite blame nixon for being caught offguard by the suddenness and the urgency with which the issue cropped up during his administration, really eight days after his inauguration. you have the santa barbara oil spill and you're off to the races. if you look at the 1968 election there was really no hint the environment was going to be a big deal. it didn't really come up. his response to this in many ways was defensive. he was worried his political

enemies, musky, senator from maine, henry jackson, senator from washington. both democrats. both potential presidential rivals, would take advantage of this. in many ways he was defensive. he didn't want to lose ground on this issue. less explicable, i think, is his unwillingness after his presidency to incorporate his environmental achievements or his administration's environmental achievements into his legacy. he just really never mentioned it. this is a little odd for a guy who was so concerned with framing his legacy. which is why, i think, flippant's book is so important. it builds on the his tor 0gy of john hoff and others who see the more akivity domestic policy and see it as part of that. there is, indeed, a lot to talk about. i can't get into all, air pollution, water pollution, natural resources, parks, wilderness, pesticides, the epa, the national environmental policy act, take your pick.

so my effort to de-emphasize nixon in talking about this, really what i want to avoid doing is peering into nixon's soul. no good comes of peering into nixon's soul. although we're very tempted to do it. because so much was accomplished on his watch. and we want to know, did he really mean it? because then, of course, after 1971, he turns around and pulls the rug out from under it and kind of turns against the environment, so what's going on? i guess the point i want to make is that nixon's true feelings about the matter really don't matter very much. indeed, in many ways, distract us from the bigger picture. one of the pieces of the bigger picture is you want to look at what the accomplishments are of the administration, you really need to look at the accomplishments of the staff. and the activities of a very active staff including john urlichmann, head of the domestic council, john whitaker, his assistant and the point man on the environment, russell trayne,

first in the department and head of the council on environmental quality and william ruk lshouse, first director of the epa. sort of the four horse men. i could also add alvin alm. really it was nixon's disinterest in domestic policy and environment in particular which created the space for these guys to operate. he just wanted them to keep him out of trouble. they did that and more with one of the fullest slates of environmental legislation you're going to find under an administration. and so in many ways, nixon's political opportunism was a catalyst for environmental policymaking during his first administration, particularly in the 1969 and '70 era. we also learned from karen that one of the mentions that nixon had was to centralize administrative control over the

bureaucracy within the white house. he did this restructuring of the bureaucracy because he wanted to circumvent career bureaucrats in congress because he didn't think he'd get much done and didn't like those guys. in the case of the environment this actually works pretty well for the issue. because when you look at the domestic affairs council, right, the task force on the environment under whitaker kind of comes out of that task force. you get a very detailed slate of recommendations coming out in 1969 as a consequence of this. and the epa, an independent agency, answering directly to the president on environmental issues created in december of 1970 under executive order, the centralizing function was seen as a way to sort of get control of things, sort of this crazy quilt of environmental agencies spread all over the government. but it actually accords with the broader consensus that was sort of out there among politicians and policy experts about how the environment should be managed. there was a real emphasis on

wholistic efforts to manage the environment which goes very much along with ecological thinking. ecology, as you probably know, was very big in this time. and ecology, again, sort of seeing the whole greater than the sum of its parts is kind of an offshoot of a broader what i call systems thinking. systems management. the sort of innate faith that policymakers had at this time you could use the tools of systems analysis to manage complex systems, whether they were the environment itself or environmental bureaucracies. policymakers in congress and the administration go to corporate elites who kind of populated the nixon administration, kind of bought this wholeheartedly as a tool kit for managing complex systems. a guy like daniel patrick moynahan who was very influential in the nixon administration was always trying to sell nixon on comprehensive policies for the cities, for the environment, something of a hierarchy might mare of planning. it has this ecological e thoes

to it, central to things like the national environmental policy act. also the epa. both interested in managing the total environment and the epa as well a vehicle that would prevent sort of the capture of any particular -- by any particular industry of the regulatory agency because it oversaw the whole thing. and in a strange way, it appealed to nixon, and here's a president who really didn't have as much of an ideological core as others. and he kind of found this systems thinking very appealing. and in many ways it fueled his grandiose and dare i say kennedy-esque rhetoric on environmental matters. when you hear him talk about the environment the soaring rhetoric, all the more confusing when very soon thereafter, even before the 1970 mid-term elections where the republicans take a bath, nixon sours on the environment. he's not getting enough political bang for the buck.

he's not getting enough credit for it. this is the time where you get more influential sort of business oriented administrators, maury stans, for example, or the office of management and budget under george shulgts performs quality of life reviews on regulation. you begin to see a turn here. again, i was argue sort of looking at nixon's salary on the environment misses the bigger picture, right. here i kind of feel like "deep throat." you're missing the overall. what's really going on here, sort of the larger picture i referred to, is the rise of the new social regulation in the late '60s and the early '70s. what i mean by that is erratically expanded scope and capacity of the government to regulate not just sort of narrow economic concerns like the trucking industry, telecommunications industry, but large swaths of american life that affect the lives of millions of people, right?

users of environmental amenities. racial minorities, women, right, sort of large categories of people. and the new social regulation arises out of a radical plurmism. sort of the organization of different groups of people, right, in the political arena. but also the proliferation and the po litsization of expertise they use to push their agenda. this is a radically open kind of politics. it lies on government more than ever. distrusts government more than ever at the same time. it is very contentious when you have experts clash that's what happens. the constitutional component of this, okay, when you deal with the environment and the environment is a precise example of this, environmental values achieved institutional permanence when the mass mobilization and protests typical earth day in april of 1970 gave way to more obscure

venues like congressional subcommittees, regulatory agencies and the federal courts. nixon could barely control his own epa. there was no way he's going to wrap his hands around congress, the courts or public interest groups. and so in many ways the presidency becomes less imperial by the minute during this time. and one example i could give, nixon tried to rein in regulations and deadlines on the clean air act, for example. but never in his career did he come close to reining in and changing deadlines and regulations as much, for example, as the courts did or congress did after he left office. because those regulations and deadlines proved controversial or undoable. and they were contested and changed. and later on of course, watergate prevented nixon from mounts sort of a full frontal assault on the environmental regulatory state. so in conclusion, nixon certainly recognized some of the excesses of the environmental movement.

he sort of recognized that as happening within politics, he never took his eyes off of the economic situation. he articulated far more openly what most presidents do implicitly. that's it's the economy, stupid. it's not a coincidence that the environmental movement happened during an era very low on employment. the thing nixon did miss was the permanent change in political culture that happened on his watch. but i would say that his political opportunism did more to establish the institutional foothold of environmentallism than really his logic. thanks. [ applause ] >> that was wonderful. thank you all for that. i'd like to turn right away to the audience. are there any questions? please. of course the first question is from the farthest back. oh.

>> one can't talk about nixon domestic policy without talking about john erlichmann. so why john urlichmann. not exactly a policy wonk. a seattle attorney. not that well connected. why john erlichmann? >> would any of you like to address that? >> he was a lawyer in seattle. a land use attorney. he has a vis rel interest in grounding and environmental issues that nixon just didn't have. he brought a certain expertise that he was able to apply. he actually cared about the stuff far more than nixon did. >> i think the other part of that is a version of he was there at the time and nixon trusted him. remember, at the beginning of the nixon administration there were the two idealogically contentious advisers of arthur

byrnes who was about to go off to another appointment and daniel patrick moynahan to handle the urban affairs council. nixon after a time got quite exhausted, if you will, by the continual disputes among those two people. that wasn't the way he wanted to have a white house run. he also didn't care that much personally about domestic policy. one thing john erhlichman was very good at, he was a good negotiator and facilitator. he was willing then to take over the job of assembling task forces in order to try to address a range of environmental issues. that then turns into the creation of the domestic council and the domestic council staff. and it's the task forces, including the other members of that domestic council staff like john whitaker that really begins to make the difference. john ehrlichman then gets a lot of attention because he was very

good at what he did and he was close to the president which meant that these domestic policy initiatives got paid attention to elsewhere in the administration. >> i agree with a lot of what has been said here. in 1969 the administration was formulating its domestic programs. you had debates about welfare reform and revenue sharing. these were coming to a head. i think they submitted them in august 1969. i sort of think that moynahan was too exciting but too liberal. byrnes was too boring and too conservative. to a certain extent, ehrlichman benefited from that. if ehrlichman had any identity, it would be that of being a moderate. i think that appealed to a very important part of nixon's character.

>> moynahan was brought in to get ahold of what nixon saw as a terrible welfare program. the family assistance plan fails which is what both richard nixon and daniel patrick moynahan really wanted to get put through in some form in congress. when that fames, arthur byrnes goes off to the fed, is that where he was -- >> mm-hmm. >> goes off to the federal reserve opinion he was in the white house as a placeholder. daniel patrick moynahan goes back to his tenured position at harvard so there was a vacuum then in the white house and the tactician that the president was very comfortable with, john ehrlichman was there to fill that vacuum in part. >> i think is the first the president trusted ehrlichman implicitly. the second is that ehrlicmman had refined organizational intelligence. that was a quality which

wasn't -- that was a quality which was valuable to nixon. and nixon used it. >> right. yes, in the back. >> i have two questions. first one, dean, easy one for you. was nixon a racist? and, if so, why or why not? and the second question to the whole panel is, in nixon's economic policy, was he economics 101 or did he have a post doc? where and how much did he really know about what he was doing as an administrative president or as far as economic policy goes? >> well, i think the answer i would give to that question is yes. some people might feel more comfortable with the word "prejudiced." we see this in the halderman diaries, making some comments about african-americans. there are comments that have

emerged about views and about mexicans that we would use that word. you know, it gets into a little bit of a semantic point withint bit of a semantic point with respect to him and prejudice and racism. i think that he also believed in the idea of opportunity, though. as he put it in a conversation he said we are not all equal but we must ensure that anyone might go to the top. >> on economic policy i think yn can't give a simple answer because i think the truth is quite complex but some things can be said. first is that i think the president regarded economic policy as entrancie policy as entrancintrance -- du. it had interests of those of his

core constituents. so those are two very considerable constraints on the first point. he had, second point, no intr s intrinsic intellectual interest in the subject matter, none that i can see. i have seen no reference whether from the diaries of other participants or from the papers or any other sources, tapes, no indication that the president had any interest in the subject matter. but one could make exactly the same charge about john kennedy, precisely the same charge about johnson and i'm not sure it is a charge of much substance. it seems that the president is there to use political judgment

and not bring validated expertise to the subject. i think if there is a charge to be made the charge is that his determination to maximize employment and minimize the inflation rate by november 1972, a strategy which worked in conjunction with extraordinary success had very considerable medium run consquences. inflation rate rose in every single month between december 1972 and august 1974 and he bequeathed an inflation rate to three times. the nature of economic policy making was something which i think he was inadequately tuned to and i'm not sure he was supported on.

it was something which he himself i think had rather slight understanding. so the answer is nuanced in that he had his political interests that were clear. his preferences were clear. i think in terms of his understanding of the long run consequences of his determination to aachieve those twin objectives by november 1972 i think that is the weighting of charge. >> would anyone else like to comment? i think we have time for one last quick question. >> i'll make it quick, then. actually, i like giving grades to my students. i was wondering if you would give grade to nixon in each of the policies in terms of economy, civil rights and as an administrator. >> give a grade on environmental

policy. give nixon a grade. >> would anyone like to take a stab at that? no. >> i will quickly just because this might spark some discussion. i don't like ranking or assessing whole presidencies or whole presidents. getting it down to policy areas makes it a little better. on some kinds of what you called administration i might call governing within executive branch settings, i would give him a mixed report card. a on some things. lower grades on other things. the one thing that i do think and have argued in print that the nixon administration was very good at was developing a white house office that when the system worked it worked

extraordinarily well in bringing together diverse strands of information including everyone that should have been included in the policy discussion into that discussion and that putting that information before the president. to the extent he gets a lower grade is that that system wasn't enforced so it didn't always operate. >> i'll pretend nixon is fail. i will give him a pass on the civil rights policies but a fail on the rhetoric even though there were some instances during his presidency where he did speak out movingly. one at the death of whitney young. i guess i'm in love with presidential rhetoric and i would have liked that one great speech on civil rights. >> my concern when we start turning to rhetoric to say this is what the president thought is that we know enough about the speech writing and the policy

related speech writing in the nixon white house that we have to be a little bit careful about drawing tooesmarom that. we know the three speech writers were assigned to speeches based on the specific policy topic and the ideological intensity that the president wanted in that speech. that would be an a in terms of management. >> i'm thinking of before congress in 1965 about voting rights. we don'tcred for that. >> i'm arguing that that is a mistake that we as scholars and the public may make but we may be careful. >> thank you all. i'm afraid we'll have to end it there but the conversation can certainly continue. hi, there.

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