Autumn Books—I
Inside Mr Clean
Peter Jenkins
The Creative Balance Elliot Richardson (Hamish Hamilton £5.95) This book might have been called 'Doodles'. The author is a famous exponent of that minor neurotic art, and 'Doodles' would have made a suitably laconic title for a book Part autobiographical and part intellectual musings on the problems of our times. Instead Mr Richardson calls his book, in full, The Creative Balance: Government. Politics and the Individual in America's Third Century. What a pretentious coverful, and what a mistake; only Professor Daniel Bell is allowed to write books with that sort of title. It is really one of those texts which Politicians, especially American politicians, and especially politicians of a mind to run for federal office, tend to use as a repository for their accumulated experiences and reflections. No harm in that, but it is best done modestly. Mr Richardson, instead, tries to Put on academic weight.
The first sentence of a portentous introduction says: 'This book is concerned with the cumulative forces threatening to submerge the dignity and self-esteem of the individual and with the ways in which governmental policies could more effectively be directed toward coping with these forces.' But reflections on this theme, which is really rather commonplace, are interspersed between accounts of the author's three main Political experiences. Of these, by far the most exciting and celebrated was Richardson's brief spell as President Nixon's Attorney-General, which ended when he refused to dismiss Professor Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. During that time it fell to him also to plea-bargain With Vice-President Agnew. The third interesting chapter of his career, although In time the earlier, was as Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare in the first Nixon administration.
English readers, who came to know Mr Richardson better as United States Ambassador to London, will be generally more interested in his version of the Watergate story than in his views on welfare reform. What was he doing in the Nixon Cabinet in the first place, a nice Harvard boy like that ? Richardson was everything that Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman despised and resented in the East Coast Establishment.
Presumably, however, they felt the need for a tame species of that genus and Richardson, although by nature fastidious, seems to have had no qualms about the Nixon gang or about the fig-leaf roles which it assigned to him. So it was when he was asked by the President to transfer himself from the Pentagon, where he had barely settled in, to the Justice Department in order to handle the then exploding Watergate scandals. Nixon wanted a Mr Clean to front his dirty work. The President called him to Camp David. Richardson recounts that 'Department of Defence issues had been taking all my time and I was too unfamiliar with the details of Watergate to know what follow-up questions to ask'. Yet, by then, any reader of the Washhigton Post had a good circumstantial grasp of the case and, as a Cabinet officer with the resources of the Pentagon at his disposal (which is usually well wired into the power centres), it is barely conceivable that Richardson, unless determined to keep his nose clean and his mouth shut, did not have a dozen questions he longed to ask the President. However, he tells us, he did not at that time in any way suspect the President or doubt his fitness for the highest office; he had observed merely 'excusable weaknesses' and wished the President might be a little more 'magnanimous.'
So he became Attorney-General in April 1973, and appointed his Harvard mentor, Cox, as special prosecutor—an admirable choice. Cox's independence and freedom of action were guaranteed by Richardson's word. In October, as they finalised the Agnew affair, Nixon said in Richardson's presence 'Now that we have disposed of that matter, we can go ahead and get rid of Cox.' Richardson did not know, he says, quite what to make of that aside; it seems he did not react immediately. You might have thought it a most shocking remark by a President in the presence of an Attorney General who believed in his innocence. Ten days later, on the 'night of the long knives', Cox was fired. Richardson had tried to sell Cox the phoney compromise, concerning the subpoenaed tapes, which Nixon had proposed. It was Cox who put the backbone into Richardson and, when the prosecutor
refused to bend, he had no honourable option but resignation. Thus he became a popular hero. But he 'continued to believe that the firing of Cox could be accounted for without attributing bad faith to the president . . .' That was what he told a Congressional hearing shortly afterwards, but did he really believe it ? It was not until May 1974, he claims, that the obvious dawned on Elliot Richardson.
Richardson's version of his Watergate role is a useful addition to the record although it is really only an account of his own motives and state of mind which, as I have indicated, I find hard to believe. His account of the Agnew affair is still more reticent and so the meat of the book, for this reviewer, is the chapter on the politics of welfare—in spite of its title 'The Complexity Explosion: Simplification and Synthesis.' The centre-piece of the early Nixon administration's Disraelian social reforms was to have been the Family Assistance Plan, which Richardson inherited when he took over at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare ( HEW) in 1969. He presided over its demise. Dr Daniel Moynihan has written a deliciously entertaining, richly instructive but shamelessly wrong-headed account of this whole affair in which he holds liberals entirely to blame for the killing of the measure which went some way (although not as far as he claims) towards replacing a profusion of welfare benefits with a guaranteed cash income.* One of the scheme's drawbacks was what Americans call the 'notch' and we would call the 'poverty trap'—a built-in disincentive to work. Richardson blames the death of the plan on its own shortcomings, on a crossfire between right and left, and on Nixon's own loss of enthusiasm for it in the changed political atmosphere of 1972. Richardson, I think, is right and Moynihan wrong—but again one is left wondering whether a less diffident and rationalising politician might have put up more of a departmental fight than Richardson did.
As for the theoretical trappings of this book, they amount to not much more than an attempt to make an ideology out of moderation. Richardson manages to steer straight down the middle between Professors Rawls and Nozick, and for this feat alone deserves the Man of the Centre award. The 'dignity and self-esteem of the individual' are invariably in conflict with other societal aspirations. The formula which Richardson proposes, 'a creative balance between innovation and conservation', is banality itself. It places him on the liberal reformist wing of the Republican Party and makes him what we would call a Disraelian Conservative. But the exact colour of his politics is of no great concern. There was talk this year of Mr Richardson becoming Vice-Presidential candidate on the Ford ticket, and he has been discussed as a man of eventual presidential timber. This book adds to my suspicions that he has been overrated.
Previous page
