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

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 dra