test of time, so it's a beautifully simple dress. and we thank mrs. johnson because it has held up very well. >> what happens when a woman would be -- if a woman would be elected president? we came close in 2008. >> we'd like to say when a woman is elected president, not if. we take it as a given. >> just a question of when. >> but it is an interesting question. people ask a lot, will we put her husband's suit in the exhibition? and it takes us back to i said in the beginning that the smithsonian definition of first lady. we'll have to wait and see who in that administration plays the role of the official hostess, the role that the first lady has played. and there's no telling who that will be. will it be the husband? will it be the host of her own home, surely she will be the hostess, but will it be one of them, will it be a daughter? will it be a professional job? we just don't know. we're waiting to see and then to figure out what we do next in

this exhibition where we take it forward. and i think even more interestingly after -- when a man is, again, president, what will happen to first ladies? will it revert? or will it move in a direction that is maybe more free to the woman who then becomes first lady. >> lisa kathleen graddy, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> you can watch american artifacts and other american history tv programs any time by visiting our website, cspan.org/history. the richard nixon presidential library convened a symposium called understanding richard nixon and his era. this hour long program focuses on the environmental and economics policy and the civil rights record and the expansion of the white house staff and its authority during the nixon years. >> well, as the coordinator of

of this event and i say in all sin saincerity that i'm very gld to see you all here. this is one of the panels that i've really been looking forward to, the domestic panel. starting with nigel boll who was educated at georgetown university and oxford university, he's taught at the university of edinburgh and oxford where he's been a lexurer since 1988, his books include "the white house and capitol hill," "nixon's business authority and power in presidential politics" which won the richard e.nustead prize in 26. his current project which we're looking forward to is "the politics of money, president's congress and the federal reserve board 1945-1988" and he's

currently the director of the american institute at oxford. we're also pleased to have karen holt. karen m. holt, she's professor of political science at virginia polytechnic institute. she's the author of "agency, merger and bureaucratic redesign" and is the co-author of "empowering the white house, governance under nixon, ford and carter, governing the white house from hoover to lbj and governing public organization." she's co-authored essays on the white house council and staff and secretaries and the white house transition project from 2000 to 2008. she's the past president of the american political science association presidency research group and a book review editor for the presidential studies quarterly. dean cowlowski here, he's a professor of history at the university of maryland. he's the co-author of "nixon's

civil rights." and he's written lots of articles and mini journals including the policy history, diplomatic history, and presidential studies quarterly. he was the paul v. mcnutt visiting professor of history at indiana university and he's currently conducting research for a biography on paul v. mcnutt. and paul charles marozzo is here as well, he's associate professor of history at ohio university and the author of "unlikely environmental congress and clean water" 1945 to 1972. he received his ph.d. from the university of virginia and fittingly was a fellow at the miller center for a year, one of our co-sponsors here. and his current research and teaching interest include 20th century history, u.s. history, politics and policy, the environment, american intellectual history and history with an emphasis on conservative

thought, so it's an excellent panel, and looking forward to what they all have to say. >> thank you, mindy, and good afternoon, everybody. thank you for coming. and my thanks to everybody who has made this occasion possible, not least of all but also to this library and its formidable director and staff and to the miller center. it's to all of them we are most grateful. when i met a colleague yesterday for the first time and he asked what i'm speaking about, and i explained, he raised his eyebrows. and said but it might be that it's one of the more thinly

attended of the talks today. i'm glad to see that he was wrong. as i was making my way to my room in the hotel yesterday, i observed the mug which i'd been given upon my arrival. and i do what i usually do with mugs, i checked its provenance, so i turned it upside down and sure enough saw what i expected to see, namely made in china. and i reflected, not for the first time, upon the extraordinary creativity of richard milhous nixon in having contributed so mightily to opening up china and to reconfiguring united states foreign policy and to reflecting more broadly upon creativity as a theme in this remarkable

president's policy. and it's the upon of creativity that i wanted to speak today, because it seems to me in his economic policy he was in key respects at least as creative as he was in his foreign policy. what were the context of the making of economic policy? when he assumed the office of the 20th of january. it was a quite formidable challenge both at home and abroad, but the territory is fafa familiar. i needn't run over them. the most important was vietnam had brought about by fiscal 1967 a deficit, a recurrent deficit, in 1967 prices of $27 billion u.s. dollars which was within $200 or $300 million which is exactly the total federal fiscal

deficit for that same fiscal year. the special southeast asia appropriation in '67 accounted for the whole of the united states fiscal deficit in that year. that gap was closed by fiscal '69 because 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 fiscal american politics which the united states had -- nevertheless the fiscal position remained extraordinarily difficult. and 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 been extraordinarily and publicly difficult as policy preferences diverged. and crucially although it was of no domestic political importance, it was a most momentous international importance. crucially the bretonwood system which died gold to the dollar and all other currencies to the dollar and fixed exchange rates, the present system had provided the liquidity for which the rest of the world recovered after the second world war. the prbretonwood system by the late 1960s was plainly in incipient crisis. the countries which had sought dollars were exchanging the

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 decline, the declining credibility of keynesian policy in what the face 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 monetary and international 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 intellectual resonance. at the outset of his presidency, he severed, severed privately within the white house, 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 prefer high job creation over high inflation. no one could have seen how

dramatically that trade-off would shift in 1979 onwards. but nixon's creativity burst through. not i think in the first 18 months, but thereafter in 1971 with a vengeance. firstly and most obviously in his replacing david kennedy as secretary of the treasury with john connolly, a conservativcon it's 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 of the presidency is expressed and evident in his

doing what everybody thought he could not do, that is accepting the challenge by a democratic congress in 1970 which had granted the presidency of the united states the authority in law to impose price and wage controls, a statute which was passed precisely because majority democrats knew that an incumbent republican president could not and would not avail itself of those powers. in august 1971 he did and imposed a freeze on prices and wages in the united states. 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,

through his work in the office of price administration, but that's one thing. seeking to control the prices and wages within the united states economy in 1971 was another. it was a dramatic move and it was accompanied by the exit from the bretonwood 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 in 1970 of his chosen lieutenant. the pressure of 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. politically it was in my view a masterstroke, indeed a master club. the wage and price freeze -- by the wage and price freeze, richard nixon abandoned his former conventional policy tools to control inflation. august 1971, and november, 72, marked his odeliberate policy rush in the presidency and the conduct of the united states his entire peacetime economic policymaking in the postwar world. he thereby comprehensively outma nuver outmanuvered his political opponents. and the 1972 election showed the chosen policy instruments. dramatic presidential politics,

showed the disruptive policy of the president's use of lawful authority. thank you very much indeed. >> nor do i have a british accent. nonetheless, i would like to add my own thanks to the others that have expressed theirs to nixon presidential library staff as well as to the miller center and certainly to mel small. as a scholar and as a citizen actually of the united states i have gained a great deal with what i've been able to do with the help of all of those sources so, so sincerely, thank you very much. i'm a student of white house staffing and on occasion people will say, gee, that's kind of boring, isn't it?

then they say, what do we know? are there lessons? and 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 debates that have come over the administrative presidency indeed started with richard nixon. now, as it turns out, all presidents have clear incentive 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 talked to us about the context of the time.

those things have to be kept in mind when one thinks about strategies and one thinks about the kind of goals that mr. nixon tried to pursue as president. those contexts -- the contextual elements interacted, of course, with his ideological commitment and his beliefs and his sense of politics. he confronted both a democratic congress and an executive branch populated by those that richard nixon and his aides believed were opposed to his policy objectives. as a result together they fashioned what former appointee of richard nixon, richard nathan, first called the class 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 systematically 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 the presidents try to achieve their policy and political objectives. that's what i want to talk about just a little bit today with the pioneer of some of those strategies. so, 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 in 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 the 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 and evaluation of the entire executive branch and he did that with management and budget and directed under richard nixon as well as the creation of the domestic council. 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 the 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 grew disenchanted with many of his own initial executive branch appointments. most cabinet members, as it turns out, have 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 mitt romney, secretary of housing and urban development pressed for support of great society programs such as model cities that the president found. indeed, nixon's speechwriter wrote, romney was, quote, thoroughly sold. one could say cruelly brain washed by the experts and that

had certain residents 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 offici official, 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 executive branch apartments were populated by civil servants who were liberal, democratic and mostly opposed to his administration's priorities. 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. what 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, was strategic appointments. though he began with promises of the 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 malik who came to the white house who worked for him and started the first systematic 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 1200 people to just about 1800 people, and that doesn't count all of the so-called btles 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 ayer quickly grew with am doestic policy development. one of theaed minh station's single intent was the march 1970 creation of a domestic council and a supporting policy staff launched in the executive office and also a restructured and renamed office of management and budget. the domestic council fol led the model of the existing national security council, a cabinet council with cabinet member, but also a dedicated policy staff. much like the national security council staff during the nixon years, the domestic council staff yielded real influence over most domestic policy and the scope of the domestic council's responsibilities were not integrated to policy ideas. rather, they often became involved and 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 ad infinite up, but i won't. i do think that the impact of richard nixon's administrative policy initiatives is something that we ought to continue to think about. many of these, forts, as you might imagine never were fully implemented as the second term screeched to an early -- and nathan's nixon's strategies and the plot that failed. 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 and structures and processes have persisted.

later presidents have continued with executive branch budgets like omb and his early, forts 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 systematic 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 president that we began to hear more of under the recent president, many people would think back to the 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 kinds of administrative strategies as presidents and it is with richard nixon. [ applause ] >> i, too, would like to thank the miller center and the nixon library, and i would like to thank melvin small for inviting me to contribute to this. i am greatly honored to have been invited to do so, and i think what mel has done here is to create a kind of model for these other presidential companions. it seems like our presidents will not be lonely. we have companions for ronald reagan coming out and a companion for harry truman and other presidents and the idea of partnering a book with the presidential library and bringing scholars together to discuss historiography as well

as important aspects of these presidents and demand their presidencies. what i will do is to talk a bit about the historiography of the civil rights program of the nixon administration and to start you off with the quotation. this is nixon in 1973 when the historical record of the first four years is written, i am confident that it will show that this administration did far more in the fields of civil rights and equal opportunity than its critics were willing to admit. it's more evident to sustain that claim. the nixon administration implemented affirmative action for minority-owned businesses and it desegregated southern schools and approved an expanded voting rights act and informed federal policy. the president also courted conservative white southerners and he strongly opposed bussing. as a result, the white house' approach to civil rights was garland and the nixon adviser recalled oat