The March of Nixon's Managers

ONCE again Richard Nixon climbed up the mountainside to Camp David to make more appointments that he hopes will give him a grip on the bureaucracy he means to control. More than ever before, the President reached into corporate structures to find suitable Republicans. Largely unknown, they have his trust because they have shown they can manage sizable operations quietly and efficiently. Last week's three Cabinet appointments:

FREDERICK B. DENT, 50, a Southern textile executive, will become Secretary of Commerce. A transplanted Yankee who graduated from Yale, Dent is nevertheless a regional favorite. He is president of Mayfair Mills, one of the smaller textile firms in South Carolina, and is a leader in the textile industry. He is a glutton for detail in his business. "He not only worked at the machines," says an assistant, "he got underneath the machines and counted teeth on the gears." Dent is a forthright spokesman for an industry that has been the recipient of special White House favors, namely the agreement the President worked out with Japan to limit textile sales to the U.S. Indeed, protectionist measures have also aided the oil, steel and sugar industries. But in other areas, the Administration is pressing for liberalized trade. Dent will have to go along, even though he comes from an industry noted for its support of trade barriers. Dent, who has a reputation for being open-minded, is also admired for perseverance: though he lost a leg because of cancer several years ago, he continues to swim and play tennis.

JAMES T. LYNN, 45, who replaces George Romney at Housing and Urban Development, has no experience in housing, but he may not need any. The scandal-ridden department faces severe budget cuts. As a White House staffer sardonically remarked: "We could rent out offices in the HUD building. Nothing is going to be going on there anyway." Lynn speaks of moving toward the goal of decent housing for every American family, but he is not likely to be allowed to go far in that direction. A Cleveland lawyer with big corporate clients, he asked for a job in the Nixon Administration in 1968 and was named General Counsel at Commerce, where he rose to Under Secretary. Though he is all business, he is noted for his sense of humor. On a visit to Moscow last summer, he got in the habit of talking to the electronic bug that he took for granted was in his hotel room. He would say, for example: "I sure wish they would put more strawberries and fewer peaches in my fruit basket tomorrow." They did as instructed.

CLAUDE S. BRINEGAR, 45, a California oilman, could turn out to be Nixon's most controversial Cabinet appointment. He takes over as Secretary of Transportation from John Volpe, who has been named Ambassador to Italy. While the Administration has supported the diversion to mass transit of funds earmarked for highway building, Nixon has chosen a man whose company, Union Oil Co. of California, stands foursquare against such a shift. In 1970 the firm spent $20,000 to help defeat a California proposition that would have switched some gasoline-tax money to public transportation. Union Oil was also responsible for the notorious oil spill that blighted the beaches of Santa Barbara. Brinegar, who is president of the gasoline division of the company, claims to be neutral on the matter. "I am not an oilman," he insists, "I am a professional manager. Hopefully, I will be able to be very objective and view all sides." To bolster his hope, he cites his travel experiences: "I have flown a million miles on commercial airlines, and I have sat on the Harbor Freeway for an hour at a time in traffic jams."

At the second level, Nixon appointed William E. Simon Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. A senior partner in the Manhattan investment banking firm of Salomon Brothers, Simon, 45, is expected to assume most of the department's operational duties, since Secretary George Shultz will have to concentrate on his new job as overall economic coordinator. Last week Shultz was already immersed in talks aimed at simplifying the complex system of wage and price controls and turning it into a form of jawboning--with teeth. Edward L. Morgan, 34, will move from John Ehrlichman's Domestic Council to the post of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement, Tariff and Trade Affairs and Operations. Two other members of the Domestic Council also shifted: Egil Krogh Jr. was named Deputy Secretary of Transportation, and John C. Whitaker became Under Secretary of the Interior. These changes are part of the Nixon design to put trusted White House loyalists in charge of the bureaucracy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an education professor at Harvard and a White House Counsellor for two years under Nixon, was originally slated to be the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. That did not work out, but now Moynihan will join the diplomatic corps as Ambassador to India, in the tradition of another Cambridge man, John Kenneth Galbraith, who served in the post under the Democrats.

Some Administration stars are on the wane. Closest to fading is Peter Peterson, the highly influential Secretary of Commerce who negotiated trade agreements with Russia and Poland. Peterson ran afoul of the protective White House staff for precisely the reasons that others admired him: he was dynamic and freewheeling, and was in the process of building up an independent reputation out of key with the team consciousness in the White House. As an international-minded free trader, Peterson also clashed with John Connally, who speaks for economic nationalism. And in the last analysis, it is Connally, the skilled infighter, who has the President's ear. Peterson was offered the post of European economic and security coordinator, but he turned it down, largely for personal reasons. One of his sons is in a home for the mentally retarded in California, and Peterson did not want to get too far away from him. Before he quits the Government, Peterson will travel and make some trade reports to the President, but his Washington base is gone.

Though Robert Finch, an old Nixon friend, leaves with the best wishes of the President, he cannot look back on his stay in Washington as a happy one. As a Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, he found the bureaucracy too much to manage. He joined the White House staff mainly to rest up until he could plunge into politics again as a candidate for the Senate or for Governor of California. Donald Rumsfeld, 40, also leaves under gloomier circumstances than those under which he arrived. Considered to be a young man on the make under Nixon, he has quit as director of the Cost of Living Council to become Ambassador to NATO, a job usually regarded as a steppingstone to retirement. One reason for his falling out with the President was his purported differences with Shultz. When Shultz asked him to give up his White House office for another in the Executive Office Building across the street, Rumsfeld replied: "I gave up a seat in Congress for a second-class job, but I'm not going to take a second-class office." He is believed to be eying Adlai Stevenson Ill's Illinois Senate seat.

Only Black. Despite the fact that he was confirmed as Attorney General only after a bitter fight over his role in the ITT scandal, Richard Kleindienst will stay on the job. A tough law-and-order man who has Barry Goldwater's backing, Kleindienst has not been in the post long enough to be rated accurately. Five key posts under him will be swept clean as part of the Nixon effort to have a forward-looking second term. Yale Law Professor Robert Bork, a critic of the Warren Court and a key man in developing Nixon's busing position, was named Solicitor General. The only woman and the only black to be appointed so far is Jewel Lafontant, a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, who will become Deputy Solicitor General. White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler insists that she was chosen for the same reasons as others. "We will absolutely not appoint people for the purpose of tokenism," he said. "No one benefits from that."

Two other Cabinet secretaries will also stay on: Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz. Both of their departments, however, are getting a thorough housecleaning. National Park Service Director George Hartzog Jr. and four other top officials at Interior were dismissed. The names and titles of upper-echelon officials at Agriculture take up 20 pages in the Congressional Directory, as compared with twelve at State. The President wants to trim the number. In his determination to rule the bureaucracy, Nixon has turned to professional managers. Politicians and theorists have no place in the new Cabinet.

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