After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential Transition Is In Chaos. This is a hardy perennial, or quadrennial, of Washington jibber-jabber, and I don’t want to be the little Tootsie Roll floating in the punchbowl who has to point out that every presidential transition, from John Adams through Barack Obama, at one point or another falls into chaos. So I won’t.
But history might make a more helpful contribution. We can point out that no matter who ends up manning the White House staff, it will matter less than we think, if only because it can be very difficult for the White House staff to get anything done. And the difficulty embraces the president too.
White House memoirs always tell one or two stories about how irrelevant an executive decision can be. Even if it comes roaring out of the Oval Office, it often falls to rest in the lower reaches of the bureaucracy with a barely audible tinkle. William Safire’s great account of his years working for Richard Nixon, Before the Fall (1975), offers two instructive examples from early in Nixon’s presidency, back to back.
As Pastor Niemöller would have said if he were an organizational consultant, first they came for the Tea-Tasters. The federal Board of Tea-Tasters was a panel of civil servants that beginning in 1897 met annually to taste and approve imported tea, for reasons no one could any longer recall. The Food and Drug Administration screened imported tea, too. In a presidential message to Congress in 1970, Nixon cited the board as an almost comical redundancy, a textbook case of a government institution that had long ago outlived its purpose and survived solely by inertia.
Or so Nixon and his men thought. After Nixon singled out the tea tasters for dismissal, as Safire tells it, a handful of congressmen emerged in their defense, doing the bidding of tea importers who had a vested interest in the board. A Nixon ally in Congress introduced a bill to kill the tea tasters—only figuratively, of course—but it died in committee. Lawsuits were filed against the executive branch, and the threat of a writ of mandamus forced the president to reinstate the board.
There’s a happy ending, though. Congress did vote to defund the board, and it died a quiet death—in 1996. This was more than a quarter-century after Nixon first tried to shut it down and two years after the former president himself sipped his last cup of oolong.
The other example had a more ominous ending, according to Safire. Early in his first year in office, Nixon’s beady gaze fell upon an unsightly set of office buildings crowding the north side of the National Mall along Constitution Avenue. Nixon knew them well. They had been built as “temporary” naval offices in 1918 under the order of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, and Nixon had worked there as a young officer in World War II. Now as president, Nixon instructed his aides to put an end to the 50-year-old temporary buildings—or as he put it, speaking Nixonese, “knocking down those goddam eyesores on the mall.”
It was a simple order, easily comprehensible and fully within the president’s authority. In the summer of 1969, the word went forth. Memos shot out of the White House in the direction of the responsible naval authorities. The president was dogged about the order, whether from his own aesthetic sense or simply as a way of flexing the presidential muscles. Safire writes that Nixon took to interrupting meetings filled with a dozen momentous and unrelated matters to demand of his staff, “Tear ’em down, kick the Navy the hell out!”
More memos followed. “The ball rolled a little way,” Safire writes, “and then stopped.” Naval staff at last made their demurral explicit. They said that some of the buildings were already scheduled to be demolished, just not right away. The largest of the buildings, housing Navy brass, could not be taken down until replacement offices could be put up at an Air Force base in Maryland, probably not for another five years. Plus, in one of those math calculations that only bureaucrats can understand, they argued that keeping the dilapidated buildings in place actually saved the taxpayers money in the long run. And in these days of tightened budgets . . .
And so on. As the inaction progressed, Nixon took to stoking his own indignation, rerouting his limousine to drive past the buildings so he could see if or when demolition had begun. He well knew the bureaucratic dodge that counters any demand that a specific order be immediately acted on: “Never say no—but never say when.”
Months went by. A score of naval personnel, Safire says, showed up at the West Wing to give a presentation to senior White House staff. Maps and charts were deployed. The charts Safire reprints are stunning in their boring incomprehensibility. (Coupled with the passage of time, boredom is the bureaucrats’ most powerful weapon.) One of the Navy’s charts showed how many congressional committees would need to be involved if the president’s order were to be carried out—meaning the chances that it would be carried out would fall to zero.
Then anonymous stories appeared in the newspapers detailing the economic havoc that the demolition would bring to Washington, D.C., and even neighboring states. The White House responded by leaking stories of its own, including one aimed, Nixon-style, right at the vitals: “The President has told his aides that there is a Navy admiral who will soon be an ensign if those buildings on the Mall are not torn down.”
With that threat, Safire writes, “the logjam began to break up.”
Nixon’s order was uncontroversial with everyone but a small platoon of naval bureaucrats. The demolition could have been accomplished in a week. Still, when it was finally carried out by the end of 1970, a mere 16 months after it had been issued, it seemed like a miracle. Nixon called one of his staffers to celebrate. “We have finally gotten something done,” said the most powerful man in
the world.
You wonder what President Trump will do when he formalizes one of his whims into an executive command and then finds himself staring into the blank, unresponsive face of the federal bureaucracy. Safire has his own theory about how Nixon reacted to being repeatedly frustrated by the inertia of the government’s lifers. In effect, Safire wrote, “[Nixon] could try to take all control inside the White House.” This scheme, along with a failed program to seed the agencies with his own loyalists, led to the “bunker mentality” that Nixon’s White House became famous for. And of course the bunker mentality led to a scandal of its own.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
