Flanigan's Shenanigans

EVERY Administration has its in-house contact with big business--a staff aide or presidential intimate to hear the complaints, plead the cases and soothe the ruffled feathers of the fat cats and Pooh-Bahs. The position naturally invites allegations of mollycoddling business at public expense. But few who have held it have proved more controversial or more subject to charges of favoritism than Peter Flanigan, Richard Nixon's "Mr. Fixit" when it comes to powerful business interests.

A millionaire former Wall Street investment banker (Dillon Read), Flanigan, 48, is variously regarded as a mischievous genius of finance, a wheeler-dealer and the business community's best friend at the White House. According to Ralph Nader, Flanigan is the "most evil" man in Washington because he so often appears to be responsible for shifts in presidential policy favorable to business.

When the ITT brouhaha arose, many predicted that it was only a matter of time before Flanigan's name surfaced--and with good reason. Since he was appointed a presidential assistant three years ago, Flanigan has been the focal point of every controversy about business influence involving the Nixon Administration. Two of Flanigan's more notable shenanigans:

> In 1970 he was accused of using improper influence to gain a Treasury Department waiver permitting an oil tanker to engage in coastal shipping trade, thereby increasing the ship's value by $5,000,000. The tanker, it was discovered, was owned by officials of Dillon Read. Flanigan too had held a share in the vessel and had disposed of it only five days before the waiver was granted. Flanigan's reply: "I did not even know Treasury was considering a waiver."

> When a Government task force recommended elimination of the quotas on oil imports two years ago, the domestic oil industry, which stood to lose billions of dollars, was up in arms. Anticipating the repercussions among oil-rich G.O.P. campaign contributors, the President ordered a new "study" of oil-import quotas. Not surprisingly, the second commission disagreed completely with its predecessor and recommended the retention of the tariffs. Though not officially involved, Flanigan sat in on so many of the second task force's deliberations that one participant remarked, "I thought he was a member." Pointedly, it was Non-Member Flanigan who informed the group of the decision it was supposed to make.

Flanigan's rejoinder to his critics in such cases is that "every decision that I have made I believe has been made in the public interest." It is a fact, moreover, that despite his obvious business bias, he is often hard-boiled with businessmen. Besides, Flanigan does frequently take the rap for decisions made higher up in the White House, where his loyalty is above question. He is extremely close to the President. He headed "Citizens for Nixon" in 1960, and when Nixon moved to New York after his defeat in California in 1962. Flanigan helped him raise funds for other Republican candidates during the five-year span when such activity was Nixon's only political lifeline.

His reward was the White House appointment and, in the Administration's early days, responsibility for clearing foreign-embassy appointments--one of the choicest of patronage plums. Last month, in addition to his other jobs, he assumed the leadership of the Council on International Economic Policy, and he now meets often with the "Quadriad," the top economic policymakers of the Administration, and has the final word on any appointee to the federal regulatory agencies.

Princeton-educated and a mod dresser by Administration standards, Flanigan plays tennis, skis and swims, often with his attractive wife Brigid and their five children. At home in fashionable Spring Valley Park in northwest Washington, he is considered pleasant by some of his neighbors, and humorless, autocratic and rude by others. On the job he is thoroughly hard-nosed, very much Richard Nixon's no-nonsense subaltern.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.