The President-Elect: The Quiet Time

THE PRESIDENT-ELECT

By Dec. 1, 1952, President-elect Dwight Eisenhower had already named his entire Cabinet. Richard Nixon is in no such hurry—partly because he thinks Ike should have weighed his choices more cautiously. Despite some muttering among members of Lyndon Johnson’s Administration that new Cabinet officers had better start consulting with their outgoing counterparts soon in order to smooth the transfer of power, Nixon was moving with characteristic caution.

As he did during crucial moments of the campaign, the President-elect sought complete privacy. On Florida’s Key Biscayne for much of the week, Nixon considered the most important of some 3,000 federal posts he must fill—jobs ranging in rank and responsibility from chauffeur to the twelve Cabinet jobs. Nixon will not announce any appointments until late next week at the earliest, but speculation was inevitably growing about the makeup of his Administration’s top echelon.

Reasonable Bets. C. Douglas Dillon, John Kennedy’s Secretary of the Treasury and an Under Secretary of State under Eisenhower, was thought to be a favorite for Secretary of State. David Rockefeller, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Arthur Burns, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ike, were both reasonable bets for Secretary of the Treasury. Republican National Chairman Ray Bliss may become Postmaster General, which would let Nixon put his own man atop the G.O.P. apparatus. Michigan’s Governor George Romney or Pennsylvania’s Governor Raymond Shafer could be named Secretary of Commerce.

Nixon Advisers Robert Finch and John Mitchell, along with Lawyer Charles Rhyne, who headed Citizens for Nixon-Agnew this fall, are in the running for Attorney General. Finch, however, is in a delicate political dilemma. Now lieutenant governor of California, he has built an impressive constituency among moderate Republicans and independents at home. He would like to run for the U.S. Senate or the governorship in 1970, but both George Murphy and Ronald Reagan seem to like their current roles, and will probably seek reelection. Finch, 43, must either return home to tend to his political power base or come to Washington and risk losing the California support that some Republicans think might propel him to the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 1976.

Talent Search. Whatever Finch’s future, his role in Nixon’s current talent search is crucial. The President-elect, closeted with Finch, Mitchell and Assistant Bob Haldeman, is working his way through two tomes, each as thick as a Washington telephone book, to mold his Administration. Prepared over the past seven months by Dr. Glenn Olds, former president of Massachusetts’ Springfield College, the black-bound volumes contain scouting reports on some 1,500 possibilities for the Government’s top 300 jobs. It remained to be seen how far Nixon will bow to political considerations in his appointments, but Olds deliberately gave that factor little weight.

Nixon also pushed ahead with a quest for “brains, judgment, creativity and youth” to fill some 2,000 secondary jobs. His transition headquarters in Manhattan and Washington are dispatching more than 75,000 letters to university presidents, business leaders and foundation heads soliciting nominations for such posts. Replies will be screened, then the information will be transcribed on tape for storage in Government computers. But Nixon Adviser John Ehrlichman was quick to assure: “Computers won’t be picking people—people will be picking people.” Ehrlichman added that no special effort will be made to recruit members of minority races “in the sense that we will have a quota of 12% Negroes because that is the ratio of Negroes to the total population. That would be artificial.”

Simple Relief. As Nixon continues his careful preparations for the Inauguration, ten task forces are preparing reports on such problems as taxes, transportation, public welfare, and the environment. Michigan Economist Paul McCracken, a member of Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers, will supervise the writing of reports on what one aide called “the swords of Damocles hanging over our heads.”

The most formidable sword, of course, remains national disunity. Like all Presidents-elect, Nixon has been enjoying the traditional honeymoon with the nation in his first weeks after election. He has used the quiet time that often follows the end of a long campaign to forge an Administration privately and deliberately. Nixon knows well that the decisions he makes on appointments between now and the first of the year will determine the character of his Administration for many months, and the public’s reaction to it. The President-elect has also begun work on his Inaugural Address, hoping that it will give him the same sort of lift that John Kennedy’s gave him in 1960.

A lift of a very different nature—strictly nonpolitical—should be buoying Nixon in the near future. The new First Family announced last week that Julie Nixon and Ike’s grandson, David Eisenhower, will be married Dec. 22 in Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.