• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1900 0

follow-on, which became known as Phase Two, would have to have rules covering all sorts of things, from permitted increases in union contracts to the price of dill pickles, for the period until market forces ruled again. The deadline for moving from the freeze to Phase Two came fast, and the two entities that were supposed to write the regulations, the Pay Board and the Price Commission, wrangled and dithered. When it looked as though they were going to miss a crucial deadline for getting regulations published in the Federal Register, Rumsfeld decided to take things in hand. He assembled Jack Grayson, the chairman of the Price Commission, and about a dozen of our CLC staff and said that we wouldn’t be leaving until we had the regulations ready for the printer. We set up in Rumsfeld’s outer office, and as others paced and dictated, I sat at one of the secretary’s desks and typed everything on an IBM Selectric typewriter. By nine the next morning, when the secretaries arrived and emptied the ashtrays and replenished the coffee, we had written the regulations that would now be governing a major share of the U.S. economy. The degree of detail we achieved during our overnighter was truly impressive. We drew distinctions between apples and applesauce; popped and unpopped corn; raw cabbage and packaged slaw; fresh oranges and glazed citrus peel; garden plants, cut flowers, and floral wreaths. We regulated seafood products “including those which have been shelled, shucked, iced, skinned, scaled, eviscerated, or decapitated.” We covered products custom-made to individual order, including leather goods, fur apparel, jewelry, and wigs and toupees.

REGULATING ENERGY PRICES WAS one of the most complex and complicated tasks the CLC had to address. At one point, when we were up against a deadline to set prices for the coming week on oil, we discovered that there was no one available with expertise in that area. Then someone mentioned that Chachi Owens was from Texas and that Texas had a lot of oil, so we called Chachi and asked him to stop by. At that time he was working for the public affairs office. If the CLC was going to permit the price of bread to rise by two cents the following week, it was Chachi Owens who would bring you that news.

Aside from his resonant voice, his claim to fame was that he had played fullback for Darrell Royal at the University of Texas. He turned out to be a very bright young man. Perhaps it was his Texas confidence, or perhaps it was the result of the coaching he’d received, but he had no hesitation about sitting down and writing the oil regs we needed.

As assistant director for operations, I oversaw some three thousand IRS agents tasked with enforcing wage and price controls. At one point I sent a team of them to visit the major food chains, such as Safeway and Giant, and report on how they were complying with our regulations. The agents reported back that, depending on how a single regulation was applied, any one of several different prices might result, from one high enough to give the chain a significant profit to one low enough to cause a terrible loss. It was pretty clear which option the chains would pick—and who could blame them? They were dealing rationally with the arbitrary rules we were trying to impose.

As a junior staffer in the White House, I didn’t see that much of the president, but occasionally I attended meetings at which he presided, usually so I could flip charts as Rumsfeld made a presentation. One day at a meeting in the Cabinet Room, I sat in one of the chairs lining the wall as the president’s economic advisors debated reimposing a freeze on food prices. After letting the discussion continue for a while, Nixon finally spoke. He recalled a conversation he had had with Nikita Khrushchev at the Soviet premier’s dacha back in 1959. After a long lunch, Khrushchev became expansive. He said that sometimes in order to be a statesman, you have to be a politician. If the public sees an imaginary river in front of them, the politician doesn’t tell them there’s no river. A politician builds