Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [64]
Moynihan had keen political instincts. Who better, he proposed, to run an agency disliked by Republicans in Congress than…a conservative Republican from Congress? Pat knew I had voted against OEO but that I had supported civil rights legislation and had shown an interest in tackling reform. He strongly recommended that Nixon appoint me. It was an unorthodox choice.
My reply to the request from the new president was also unorthodox: “No.” I was not thinking about leaving Congress at the time, though I was still tangling with the old guard. In early 1969, for example, I had run for chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. I thought I had support all lined up when, at the last minute, my longtime nemesis Minority Whip Les Arends persuaded Bob Taft of Ohio to run against me. Taft won by one vote, but I still enjoyed my work and wasn’t much interested in joining the Nixon administration in an assignment that seemed almost destined to fail.
Nixon’s aides continued to press me as they put together their new administration. I continued to resist. Finally, I wrote a straightforward, detailed memo to the Nixon team outlining why I was not the right choice to run OEO:
1) The probable reaction to the appointment of a white, Ivy League, suburban, Republican Congressman from the wealthiest Congressional District in the Nation, with little visable [sic] management experience and little public identification with poverty problems, and who voted against the poverty program when it was first proposed would be harmful for the Nixon Administration….*
2) The job that the Administration wishes to have done on OEO, as I understand it, is the liquidation of the Johnson poverty approach. The development of the Nixon approach to these problems would essentially be the responsibility not of OEO but of [other] Departments….
3) In a political situation, which this is, it would seem that the best approach would be to use a person identified as a liberal when one wishes to retrench and reorganize.3
I figured I would not hear about Nixon’s proposal again. Then one Sunday that spring, as Joyce and I were having dinner with our kids, the telephone rang. Before long I was talking to President Nixon. It was the first time a president of the United States had called my home.
“Don,” Nixon said, “I want to invite you and your wife down to Key Biscayne to talk.” I told the President I would be willing to meet with him in Florida, where Nixon occasionally vacationed. When we got off the phone I told Joyce about the conversation.
“Well, it’s settled,” she said simply. She liked the OEO idea even less than I did, since it meant leaving Congress to run an agency I was ambivalent about at best. But she concluded immediately that I was unlikely to leave a meeting with the President of the United States without committing to accept the job.
The reserved Nixon spent his decades in politics having to push himself to be in the public eye. Even while supposedly relaxing in sunny Florida, he was formal and businesslike. As I noticed in our earlier meetings, he could be less than easy in his personal interactions. When Nixon met Joyce, for example, he acknowledged her with a smile. “Don,” he said, “I’m glad to see you brought your daughter.” Nixon would repeat that quip on more than one occasion.
If not warm and easy in personal relationships, on a professional level President Nixon proved persuasive. As we met in Florida in April 1969, Nixon told me he needed me to take the OEO job. “The agency needs to be run right,” he said. “And you’ll have my full support.” As I made my case for not taking the post, Nixon kept telling me he did not agree and that I was the right man for the job. He left the impression that he had a personal interest in my future. And when the President told me he needed my help, I found it hard to keep up the fight. Nixon persuaded me to take on an assignment I didn’t want, at an agency I had voted against,