Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [71]
There was another group—another so-called inner circle—in the White House that included former California lieutenant governor Bob Finch, Pat Moynihan, George Shultz, and me. We were what Bill Safire once described as “youngish intellectual types” who appealed to Nixon’s inner policy wonk. Unlike members of the Haldeman group, each of us had backgrounds in elected office, government, or academia that predated the Nixon administration. We all respected the President, but none of us awoke every morning planning to bash through closed doors for Nixon’s political purposes.
During his early years as president, Nixon tried to merge these two groups into meetings Haldeman called FRESH, constituting Finch, Rumsfeld, Ehrlichman, Shultz, and Harlow.4 We were an informal sounding board for Nixon on policy and political issues. It was an interesting opportunity to watch Nixon’s mind at work. He was a strategic thinker, often looking two or three steps ahead of a given decision and always musing about and considering a full range of options.
There were, of course, times that Nixon would rant about something that had angered him. He’d go on about members of the press or certain administration figures who weren’t carrying the ball well enough. I wasn’t surprised to learn that sometimes I was the subject of these harangues. Contrary to the impression from the secret Nixon tapes—and the occasional deleted expletives—I did not find the President anywhere near as profane as some portray him. As historian Stephen Ambrose noted, most of those expletives were milder words, like crap and hell and damn.5
One of the things I took occasion to discuss with the President was the administration’s outreach to minorities—a perennial problem for Republicans and something government needed to be attentive to if it hoped to be truly representative. Some people blamed the widening gap between minorities and the GOP on Nixon’s Southern strategy, a political effort that sought to win the votes of Southern Democrats, many of whom tended to be unsympathetic to civil rights legislation. Whether the strategy was a good idea or not, the fact is that the Democratic Party had successfully engaged in exactly that sort of maneuvering for decades—these voters were called “Southern Democrats” for a reason.
While I did not favor racial quotas, I believed it was important for the administration to make a serious effort at diversity. In the Nixon administration there were too few individuals from minority groups involved in policy-making positions at a time when issues with significant racial ramifications—school desegregation, riots, inner-city school problems, and drugs—were front and center. I suggested that the White House form a group to monitor minority hiring, marshal aid to black colleges, and focus on other efforts in support of minorities—including speaking to minority organizations.
In making my case to the President, I cast it in political terms that I thought might appeal to him. Strained relations between the Nixon administration and minorities, I noted, were eroding support for his priorities, such as the economy and ending the war in Vietnam. “A critical factor in altering the present perception of the Administration is hiring,” I suggested in one memo. “Minority groups will be far more likely to see the administration in a favorable light if they are in fact a part of it.”6
As the tapes have revealed, Nixon occasionally made offensive remarks about minorities. I didn’t know exactly how he felt, however, since my experience was that his comments seemed in part generational, and I found his actions regarding minorities were not consistent with his sometimes inappropriate words. Nixon generally seemed to agree with my arguments about minority outreach, and his administration made serious efforts in that regard, including the major effort on school desegregation and the successful work by Bob Brown, Nixon’s White House lead on minority affairs.
President Nixon