Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [63]
As Nixon had predicted, the election was close—his victory margin was less than 1 percentage point, making the 1968 presidential election one of the tightest in American history. Richard Nixon had risen from the political grave.
CHAPTER 8
The Job That Couldn’t Be Done
“For the past five years we have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor,” Nixon observed in his convention speech in Miami.
“And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.” To cheers, Nixon said it was time “to quit pouring billions of dollars into programs that have failed in the United States.”1
One of the chief targets of the Nixon speech was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which had started under John F. Kennedy as a small set of experimental programs run out of the Executive Office of the President. The agency had been lassoed by his successor, LBJ, as part of what he grandly called his War on Poverty.
Under Johnson, who thought on a mammoth scale, OEO ballooned. At one point it administered Community Action Programs, Head Start, the Job Corps, Legal Services, and the Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA (a domestic Peace Corps) as well as programs to help senior citizens, Native Americans, migrants, neighborhood health centers, and drug treatment centers, plus others, a number of which evolved into their own independent activities over time.
As a member of Congress I voted against the 1964 legislation that established the Office of Economic Opportunity.2 I was uncomfortable with OEO programs being run out of the Executive Office of the President rather than being housed in the relevant cabinet departments and agencies. It seemed like another layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing department bureaucracies.
As OEO grew during the Johnson administration, so did its opposition. When Nixon took office, it was clear that Johnson’s lofty goal of eradicating poverty was failing. Hundreds of millions of dollars were being spent, and it proved difficult to identify and track progress. There was also an air of radicalism in some of the OEO programs. When I first walked through the OEO offices I saw posters of the Marxist Che Guevara proudly displayed on the walls. In some parts of the country taxpayer dollars were going to radical and violent “Black Power” groups. An additional controversy was that OEO provided funds to community groups, intentionally bypassing the locally elected governors and mayors. This led to resentment of OEO by state and local officials of both political parties.
Though Nixon ran on a platform hostile to the OEO, he decided after his election he would not abolish it outright, but instead would try to reform it. Racial tensions were high, and many groups had their hopes set on the success of OEO’s mission. Nixon thought OEO might somehow be redirected into more realistic and effective activities. When he was searching for someone to run the agency, now the scourge of most conservatives in his base of support, Nixon turned to his top domestic policy aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for suggestions.
Pat Moynihan was creative, entertaining, and one of the smartest individuals I had ever met. As the saying went, Moynihan wrote more books than most people had read. He had applied his considerable intellect to the Department of Labor during the Kennedy administration, and later had written on Lyndon Johnson’s vision of the Great Society. A Democrat with an independent streak, he was now working for Kennedy’s old rival, Richard Nixon, as an expert on urban and minority