Four New Men in Nixon's Second Cabinet

I. Fearless Fosdick Faces the Pentagon

FEW officials in Richard Nixon's Washington are held in higher esteem as masters of governmental management than is Elliot Lee Richardson, 52, the next Secretary of Defense--even though almost no one can adequately explain just why. The public Richardson is stuffily Bostonian, serenely confident, vaguely remote. His set speeches are bloodless and dull. His ad-lib language is so convoluted, yet grammatically correct, that one questioner at a Senate committee hearing jokingly confessed that he could not quite tell from a Richardson answer whether he was for, or against, drug abuse. Moreover, Richardson has been appointed to so many high posts (five in the past 15 years) by appreciative Presidents that he has rarely been able to finish any task he has tackled, leaving no clear record of concrete accomplishment.

Yet everywhere the nomadic Richardson moves, the morale around him seems to rise. The men with whom he works most closely consider him not only warm but witty. His mind is widely regarded as brilliant, with a bureaucrat's invaluable--and rare--capacity both to retain intricate detail and discard unproductive trivia, keeping basic goals in focus. His aim at HEW, he explained, was "to get away from the hypnotic absorption in tending the machinery and to look outward at what is happening to people." Richardson not only contends that HEW, which has 280 programs and a budget larger than that of the Pentagon, can be managed but also that he proved it in his two years as its head. His associates tend to agree and praise him further for lifting spirits in a department staffed heavily with liberal civil servants largely antagonistic to Nixon's conservative social policies. Some do fault Richardson, however, for too blithely accepting Nixon's rejection of both his plans for prompt school desegregation, such as the use of busing in Austin, Texas, and his attempts to compromise with Congress on welfare reform. Richardson has a self-protective knack of getting along with his superiors.

Lucky. Military affairs will be a new administrative field for Richardson, who served as Acting Secretary of HEW in the Eisenhower Administration and as an Under Secretary of State in his first Nixon appointment. Originally rejected from World War II service for poor eyesight, he volunteered for noncombat duty as a private. He soon was commanding a platoon of litter bearers in an Army regiment that suffered higher casualties than any other unit in the eleven months after its Normandy landing. He was variously dubbed by Army buddies as "Cannonball," for his aggressive manner and battlefield agility, "Fearless Fosdick," because of his sharp-jawed, square-cut features, and "Lucky," because he missed enemy mines by only a few feet on at least four occasions. He was finally severely cut and bruised when an antitank mine wrecked his Jeep and blew him into the branches of a tree. He emerged from the war as a first lieutenant, returned home with combat paintings done with the brushes and pigments he carried throughout his service. A sometime artist, he is also a former Harvard Lampoon cartoonist who doodles constantly when concentrating, even in the presence of a President. A millionaire by inheritance and investments, Richardson and his wife and three children live in a large house overlooking the Potomac in McLean, Va.

Richardson faces new equations in shifting from HEW to Defense. At HEW he successfully resisted efforts of budget officials to cut personnel by some 10%. At Defense, one of Richardson's first tasks will be to defend Nixon's intention to raise spending rather than cut it, and his credentials as a liberal Republican may help him sell that idea on Capitol Hill. Typically, Richardson is already set to make a case. Says he, with characteristic pedantry: "Disequilibrium between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. is by definition incompatible with stability in the structure of international relations." It might take some Congressmen a while to realize what Richardson means: our guns have got to be at least as good as theirs.

II. Cap the Knife at HEW

Caspar W. Weinberger's appointment to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare may be an index of Richard Nixon's social vision. In his 2 1/2 years at the Office of Management and Budget, Weinberger's almost swashbuckling enthusiasm for cutting federal expenses earned him the nickname of "Cap the Knife." He may be expected to exercise the same talent at HEW, a sprawling bureaucracy whose budget ($78.9 billion) exceeds the Defense Department's. However much Weinberger tries to hold down spending, though, all but $10 billion of the HEW budget is committed to such programs as Social Security, Medicare and welfare. As Weinberger ruefully admits of his days at the Budget bureau: "I came as an idealist who thought the rise in spending could be stopped. But I have learned that the most you can hope for is to hold down the rise."

Back in his native California, the task had sometimes been easier. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Weinberger went to Sacramento as a state legislator in 1952. In 1959 he returned to his lucrative San Francisco law practice, serving as California's G.O.P. state chairman from 1962 to 1964. The party at that time was split between the Rockefeller and Goldwater wings, and Weinberger favored Rockefeller. Conservative Ronald Reagan appointed him state finance director in 1968, even though the Governor's campaign financiers thought Cap entirely too liberal. But Weinberger set about slashing California's budget with such zeal that one Reagan aide called him "more Catholic than the Pope"; some of his Democratic enemies accused him of selling out his liberal principles, since Reagan's main targets were welfare and education spending.

After Nixon brought him to Washington in 1970 and told him to clean out the Federal Trade Commission, Weinberger did such a good job reorganizing the agency as the consumer's friend that he even won praise from Ralph Nader, rare for a Nixon appointee. When the President made him deputy budget director six months later, Cap Weinberger arrived sounding like Herbert Hoover. In the midst of a recession, he preached the gospel of balanced budgets. Yet as a good soldier, he proceeded to preside over a string of job-creating deficits that left even some liberals bemused.

Poison. Personally, Weinberger, 55, belies his Hooveresque image and cut-throat nickname. He has an air of insouciant irreverence perhaps left over from his undergraduate days as editor of the Harvard Crimson. "Harvard," he says "bred a healthy skepticism in me." A handsome, dark-haired six-footer, Weinberger was host of a popular San Francisco TV talk show on public affairs, and once worked as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He retains a wry and self-deprecating wit. At the height of bureaucratic tension around Washington over Nixon's call for Government resignations, Weinberger briefed top department heads on their budget cuts. "I can't imagine why," he joked later, "but I couldn't seem to hold their attention." Weinberger and his wife Jane have two grown children and now live in a Capitol Hill Federal-style house.

With all his enthusiasm for the balanced budget, Weinberger may be in for some frustrating times at HEW. Even in the $10 billion area, where cuts might still be made next year, lower appropriations may be political poison. Trimming aid to ghetto schools, cutting funds for college students or medical research--all would be difficult and unpopular. Last week Weinberger sighed philosophically: "I had thought this job [at Budget] was the worst in Washington, but there's one [at HEW] that's even worse in terms of problems and hours of work."

III. A New McNamara to Battle the Budget

Presidents have always been lured by the talents of American businessmen who get assembly lines moving, goods sold and profits racked up. Eisenhower had "Engine Charlie" Wilson of General Motors and Neil McElroy (see MILESTONES) of Procter & Gamble, John F. Kennedy drew Robert McNamara from Ford. So Nixon is on familiar ground in choosing Roy Lawrence Ash, 54, president of Litton Industries, as the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The job seems tailor-made. As chairman of the Nixon Advisory Council on Executive Organization from 1969 to 1971, Ash proposed the Office of Management and Budget. A close friend and five-figure contributor to Nixon's past campaigns, Ash enjoys the President's confidence as few other men do. Crisp and positive, better in small working groups than on the public rostrum, Ash is in many ways similar to the man who appointed him.

Yet there are serious misgivings about the choice both on Capitol Hill and Wall Street. Senator William Proxmire articulated them last week, contending that during Ash's tenure as president, Litton had been involved in "two of the most highly inefficient and mismanaged military procurement operations." Proxmire was referring to the fact that Litton Industries has drastically outrun cost projections and fallen behind on delivery dates on some $3 billion worth of Navy contracts for assault ships and destroyers.

The company's shipyard at Pascagoula, Miss., which Ash once touted as "a national asset," has turned out to be a decided liability, to both Litton and the Navy. Largely as a result, Litton's profits have been steadily declining over the past three years, and plummeted this fiscal year to only $1.1 million on sales of $2.5 billion, v. $50 million in profits the previous year.

Indeed, Ash's critics claim that he is a far better talker than performer. A House antitrust subcommittee report on conglomerates, released in June 1971, charged that "Litton's image making has developed flamboyant sham into an art." A well-known California industrialist seems to agree. "Here is a man who can't manage his own company who is going to manage a nation," he said. Most of Ash's colleagues heartily disagree. But even in supporting him, they leave room for doubt. Mused one former Litton officer: "If he could read personality the way he reads charts, I guess he'd be the ultimate corporate head."

Litton's sagging profit curve and Ash's questionable managerial talents apparently do not trouble Nixon. What Nixon sees in Ash is a Horatio Alger success story much like his own. Los Angeles-born Ash did not attend college during the Depression years. Instead, he worked as a loan teller for the Bank of America. When World War II broke out, Ash joined the famous Air Force systems-analysis team, headed by Charles ("Tex") Thornton, that included Robert McNamara. After the war Ash was admitted to the Harvard Business School, even though he had no college degree, and was graduated number one in his class.

A restless, indefatigable man with a flair for statistics and corporate buzz words, Ash is similar to McNamara in many ways. He is an immaculate "clean-desk" administrator who reads three papers a day, believes that everything can be solved when all the facts are known, and has little patience with men who do not perform. He has little time for small talk and even less for social pretension--he still drives to work in a station wagon and wears shiny California suits. The father of five, Ash once applied his business instincts to a long family vacation in Europe. He told each child to pick a country he was interested in, learn all about it, study the language, make all the hotel and travel arrangements, and describe what he had learned about its history and lore to the rest of the family.

His energy and inventiveness helped make Litton the pioneer in the conglomerate field. Thornton and Ash founded the company in 1953 with a $1.5 million loan. Today, though shaky, Litton is the 35th largest industrial company in the U.S. and the nation's eleventh largest defense contractor. But since the stock had dropped to 13 3/4 (it once was 120 3/8), Ash's holdings in Litton are worth only $3,000,000; his total personal assets come to about $9,000,000. He announced last week that his Litton stock would be sold and the proceeds placed in a blind trust. Asked if he saw any conflict of interest between his ties at Litton and his new job, given Litton's connections and present disputes with the Department of Defense, Ash, in the best Nixonian language, replied: "When the Washington Redskins trade a football player, I doubt if in the next match he favors the team he just left."

IV. Union Man of Labor

When Peter Brennan, 54, dons his new soft hat as Secretary of Labor, he will be repaid, as it were, for the hard-hat he presented to the President 2 1/2 years ago. At the height of the public outcry over the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, Brennan organized a massive union march down Wall Street in support of the President. An elated Nixon invited Brennan and other union leaders to the White House, and friendship flowered to such an extent that Brennan rallied New York labor to Nixon for his reelection.

How well Brennan's new hat will fit is another matter.* It is surely not one he is used to. Born and bred in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, given to plain speech laced with profanity, Brennan is a local power, to be sure, but he lacks a national constituency and--some would say--anything approaching national vision. Though he is respected by George Meany, he is not a member of the AFL-CIO executive committee. He speaks for a well-paid labor elite, not for the industrial rank and file.

On his own turf, however, he has performed adroitly. Like any other labor leader, his first job is to get more money and benefits for his men, and that he has done. Wage scales for the construction unions in New York City are among the highest in the country, scandalously so in the opinion of many. Starting as a painter at Macy's department store, Brennan served aboard submarines in the Pacific during World War II, then returned to New York to rise in union influence, volunteering for any assignment that came along. When he was elected president of the construction trades council in 1957, he turned a no-show job into a powerful one, mediating disputes among the fractious New York locals. At the end of tough, bruising squabbles, exasperated union bosses would turn to Brennan. "Awright Pete," one would say. "Whaddya want us to do?"

Failure. Such is his passion for the trades that Brennan, a Roman Catholic, has been known to trace their origin to Carpenter Jesus Christ. He has a craftsman's feeling for his country. "We build this country," he said at the time of the Wall Street march. "We build these beautiful buildings and churches and highways and bridges and schools. We love this country. We were afraid it was going down the drain and nobody was doing anything about it." Like other members of the craft unions, however, he is choosy about who gets to build. Because of the rigid apprenticeship programs, outsiders, especially those from minority groups, have a hard time getting in the unions. Opposed to federal intervention, Brennan helped formulate the New York plan, which was intended to train 800 black and Spanish-speaking people. After two years, only 545 have been accepted, and 22 have union cards. Blacks and city hall consider the plan a failure. But Brennan pledges to do more as Labor Secretary: "I'll get myself set up in the office first. Then I'll call in some of the leaders of the minority groups and see what we can do."

Brennan's flirtation with the G.O.P. began some time ago. He represents unions, after all, whose members are solidly established in the middle class since many of them make $20,000 or more a year. Voting Republican was not all that traumatic. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller made it easier by promoting so many construction projects round the state, Brennan has supported him in his last two bids for reelection. But taking the post under Nixon is a risk. Much as he may agree with the President on some issues, he is poles apart on others. He supports the minimum wage bill that the White House helped kill in the last Congress, and he wants an early end to wage and price controls. He is unlikely to be sympathetic toward Nixon's efforts to force moderate wage settlements as a new round of labor contracts are negotiated next year. But he is cocky, New York style. "The President doesn't want this Administration to be an arm of big business like the reputation the last one may have got," he says. No matter what the temptations, Brennan promises not to "forsake the worker." Asked if labor would now have a friend in the Administration, he replied: "You're damned right." Would he bring labor people into his department? "Damned right." Would he last in the job? "I'm gonna make a damned good try."

*Previous labor leaders who have served in the post: William Wilson, appointed 1913; James J. Davis, 1921; William N. Doak, 1930; Martin P. Durkin, 1953.

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