Monday, Dec. 25, 1972
Advance Men Advance
All that was missing from the scene was the distant drum roll and the thwack of the guillotine blade as White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler briskly announced each day which heads will roll in the President's pruning of the bureaucracy. Last week alone the count of important resignations accepted reached 17, bringing the overall total to nearly 60. Not in memory had a U.S. President made such a clean sweep of his own appointments.
The upper echelons of major departments have been decimated: several are gone from the health sector of HEW; only two of the ten top officials survive in the Labor Department; four are out at Agriculture; five have been dismissed at Justice. Only one assistant secretary is likely to remain at Interior. The sacking of longtime Park Service Chief George Hartzog stirred the biggest outcry there. "He has more competence in his little finger than that whole bunch at the White House," growled a staff member of the Senate Interior Committee, which was not consulted on the firings.
Loyalist. Scheduled to go some time soon is the much respected CIA Director, Richard Helms, apparently a victim of the President's desire to have the entire national security apparatus reflect his thinking and outlook. James Schlesinger, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, has been offered the CIA post. Amid all the firings, it is difficult for anybody who says he is leaving of his own accord to be believed. Gene P. Morrell, outgoing director of the Office of Oil and Gas, demanded a retraction of a Washington Post article that said he had been ousted. He had accepted a job with an oil firm, he indignantly explained, long before the firings.
To date, more people have been canned than recruited--another sign perhaps of the presidential disregard for the bureaucracy. The chief talent scout, White House Staffer Fred Malek, is expected to reserve the No. 2 position at the Office of Management and Budget for himself. "It's the year of the advance man," sighs a second-level official as he waits for the bad word. Four of the new appointees were Nixon advance men in 1968. One of them, Ronald Walker, 35, who will replace Hartzog as Park Director, continued to serve as advance man on the President's trips to China and Russia. An official at Interior sardonically notes, "Well, we were looking for a guy with international experience."
Among the more notable appointments announced last week:
P: GEORGE BUSH, 48, was named chairman of the Republican National Committee. This is something of a comedown for Bush, who has served creditably as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for two years. "You do what the President asks you," he says. "And this is what he asked me to do." Bush has let it be known that he would have preferred something else; the chairmanship of the President's party usually has little power and less prestige. The man he replaces made no secret of the fact that he was being ousted from a job he wanted to keep for a while longer. But Kansas Senator Robert Dole had expressed himself too frequently and too wittily for the White House. When he suggested that the President's re-election committee had not campaigned hard enough for G.O.P. congressional candidates, he burned his last bridge. On departing, Dole took a final swipe at his tormentors. "They seem to make it difficult, make it hard on you," he remarked. "I don't know who 'they' is--the faceless, nameless, spineless ones who do it this way."
P: JOHN SCALI, 54, is moving to the U.N. post. A White House consultant who has been a journalist for most of his career, he worked first for the Associated Press and later for ABC. During the Cuban missile crisis, Scali served as a behind-the-scenes intermediary between John Kennedy and the Russians. He also played a role in arranging Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow. Though Scali is sophisticated and able, his appointment to a post once held by such major figures as Adlai Stevenson and Arthur Goldberg seemed to be Nixon's not so subtle way of showing his dissatisfaction with the U.N.
P: JAMES KEOGH, 56, chief of the White House research and writing staff in 1969-70, will succeed Frank Shakespeare as director of the U.S. Information Agency. A skilled newsman who was once executive editor of TIME, Keogh recently published President Nixon and the Press, a book highly critical of the major news-media treatment of the boss (TIME, April 17). Though propaganda as part of U.S. foreign policy has been toned down, Keogh says that the USIA job is more important than ever "now that we're moving from an era of military confrontation to an era of negotiation, a period of time when we'll be talking about and competing in ideas round the world."
One conspicuous part of Government not to feel the ax yet is the White House staff, which the President has promised to reduce drastically. Another advance man, Kenneth Cole Jr., 34, who used to work for J. Walter Thompson, replaces John Ehrlichman as executive director of the Domestic Council. The post will not be as significant as it used to be, because the council has lost several members who have moved to the executive departments. It will, however, absorb the Intergovernmental Council, which was headed by Spiro Agnew during the first term. Ehrlichman, meanwhile, will remain the President's chief domestic policy aide, leaving day-to-day management to Cole.
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