MOVING AHEAD, NIXON STYLE

IT has long since become a cliche to talk of the caution and deliberation of Richard Nixon's presidency, which sometimes makes the White House seem like Miltown Mansion. But last week, for a change, the people's business was humming at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and on Capitol Hill at a tempo brisker than any heard since Lyndon Johnson's happiest days--and the tune was pretty much the President's. Nixon returned to the capital early in the week from his round-the-world tour with stops in Asia and Rumania; six days later, he flew to California for a month's vacation on the Pacific oceanfront, with a state dinner for the Apollo 11 astronauts in Los Angeles scheduled for this week. It was what came between jet journeys that counted.

While Nixon's relations with Congress have sometimes been clumsy, he won his toughest congressional battle to date when the Senate narrowly went along with his request for funds to start deployment of the Safeguard antiballistic-missile system. Though he had originally planned to defer tax reform for a while, he was happy to claim some of the credit for the historic tax bill passed by the House last week.

No Danger of Wipe-Out

Then he set out to make a little history of his own. Nixon has never been famous for social innovation, but he proposed fundamental reforms in the nation's welfare system. If enacted and if successful, the changes--measures liberal Democrats have often talked about --could become the major domestic accomplishment of his Administration. In a persuasive TV presentation, he spoke of a "New Federalism" in which "power, funds and responsibility will flow from Washington to the states and to the people." And he put forward a plan for federal-state revenue-sharing that could eventually make the slogan mean something.

It is Viet Nam, of course, that remains the most urgent problem. Nixon is expected to announce soon another reduction in U.S. combat troops in South Viet Nam. The inside betting now is that by January the President will have withdrawn a total of 125,000 servicemen --nearly a quarter of the U.S. forces there. And it is Nixon, for all his public defense of the military, who is initiating a constriction not only of American might in Viet Nam, but also of the U.S. armed forces generally. The latest move came last week with the Pentagon's announcement that the 9th Infantry Division would be deactivated.

Unusual as the pace in Washington was, the week's events were consistent with the Nixon presidency. Like a practiced surfer, he was balanced carefully in the curl, in control of his board and in no apparent danger of a wipeout. He chanced on a good wave, and he was also riding it reasonably well. If stranded astronauts were starving on the moon instead of preparing to dine at the presidential table, the national mood--and Nixon's--would be markedly different. If the Democrats had the unity to capitalize on their congressional majorities, or a single leader to follow, the President would be feeling his minority mandate far more keenly. The public's frame of mind may be mercurial and dour, but summer has quenched the campuses without igniting the ghettos--so far. Inflation continues to be a serious threat and the stock market a shambles, but prosperity prevails for most citizens. Apollo 11 and the Asian trip made good box office. A new Gallup poll shows public approval of Nixon's performance popping back to 65% after slumping to 58% in July.

By his relative placidity, Nixon seems to have helped to calm the national temper. He may also be the beneficiary of simple popular fatigue following the tumult and continual crises of 1968.

For the President, the victory for his ABM program was doubtless the week's most satisfying development. He had much to lose by a defeat. Nixon rightly considers himself something of an expert in foreign policy, and by extension in matters of national defense; those occupy a good two-thirds of his time. Thus far in his presidency, his National Security Council has met 26 times, his Urban Affairs Council only 15. A rebuff on the ABM issue would have been a repudiation of his judgment of U.S. security requirements. By winning, Nixon has the flexibility to go ahead with ABM or to scrap it if future events warrant. He has promised periodic reviews of the project. Of course, Congress too will have future opportunities to attack the program.

The crucial Senate vote on ABM came after months of debate in Washington and around the country, which divided politicians, scientists and laymen alike. The Safeguard plan calls for 14 missile sites in the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii, aimed chiefly at protecting the U.S. nuclear deterrent --ICBM silos, Strategic Air Command bomber bases and the National Military Command Center in Washington. Beyond the immediate technical issues, ABM came to symbolize to many a national crossroads in the crucial issue of civilian v. military priorities. It also underscored the new skepticism toward Pentagon proposals which in the past rarely received thorough scrutiny.

Leadership of the Senate skeptics fell to Democrat Philip Hart of Michigan and Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, a respected bipartisan duo. They offered an amendment that would permit ABM research to continue but forbid deployment of any rocket or radar hardware. As last week's vote approached, each side was hopeful of victory by no more than a couple of votes.

Enter Senator Margaret Chase Smith, 71, an ABM opponent, senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, a retired Air Force Reserve lieutenant colonel, wearing her customary red rose. Without a hint of what she was up to, the lady from Maine put in an amendment of her own to ban research as well as deployment for Safeguard. That was handily defeated, 11-89, to no one's surprise. Then the Cooper-Hart forces, fearing that they were about to lose a vote they desperately needed, sweet-talked Mrs. Smith into putting in a new amendment: this one would also halt both research and deployment on Safeguard but allow research on other types of ABM systems. Since Mrs. Smith was clearly not going to vote any money whatsoever for Safeguard--not even the research-only funds included in the Cooper-Hart amendment--the opposition's only hope was to get all the anti-ABM forces together behind Mrs. Smith's new amendment. They did just that, but it was not enough. Even with Mrs. Smith, they had only 50 votes, one shy of the majority needed to carry an amendment. Although the amendment was already defeated, Vice President Spiro Agnew added his vote to make the result 50-51. Far easier passage of Safeguard is expected in the House.

Richard Nixon won an important, if narrow, victory. Unlike his Democratic predecessor, however, he had left Congress free to work its will. Nixon's manner in dealing with Congress is almost diffident, a throwback to the more passive presidency of the Eisenhower years, a direct contrast with the hot-breath methods of Lyndon Johnson. Nixon quietly lobbied dozens of Senators for Safeguard, but he never made it a party issue with Republicans. A month ago, Nixon met with five anti-ABM Republican Senators, but mentioned the issue only in passing. He understood their position, he said, and they were free to vote as conscience dictated.

Some in Congress believe that Nixon is making a deliberate effort to dissociate himself from the wheeler-dealer image of L.B.J. If so, the President could not have made the point more dramatically than he did during the final hours of Senate debate last week. On the Senate floor, a page slipped up to Delaware's John Williams, one of the very few Senators who had not announced a position on Safeguard. "Senator," the page stage-whispered, "the President is on the telephone." The ABM opponents concluded that Nixon was applying last-minute pressure to win a wavering vote. Not a bit of it. ABM was never mentioned in the phone conversation, though Williams eventually voted with the Administration. Williams is the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and the President merely wanted to talk over with him the tax-reform proposals that the House of Representatives was about to take up.

The Tax Bill

That tax-reform bill was something had not reckoned on-- at least yet. It was a classic case of a Congress of one party forcing on a President of the other party something he not particularly want, though it was from the rancorous kind of battle Democrat Harry Truman fought almost weekly with the Republican 80th Congress. The habitual formula -- the President proposes, Congress disposes--was turned around.

The President wanted an extension the 10% income tax surcharge as an anti-inflationary measure. He was notably less keen on tax reform at this time. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield warned the President that he could not have the surtax without reform--and managed to impose this view on Finance Chairman Russell Long, a Louisiana Democrat to whom 27 1/2% oil-depletion allowance is most precious the reform-bill cuts the allowance to 20%). As Senate Democrats were squabbling, however, Long's House counterpart, Ways and Means Chairmen Wilbur Mills, who cherishes the House's constitutional prerogative to originate revenue measures, felt the public pulse and went ahead with what turned into the bill passed by the House last week (see story, page 19). After his initial hesitation, Nixon talked with Mills and Wisconsin's John Byrnes, the top Ways and Means Republican, and tossed into consideration some reform ideas of his own as well as others suggested by the Treasury Department. They became part of the bill. Says one Ways and Means member: "He found out that we were going to have some tax reform, and he wanted to be part of it."

Two Dozen Welfare Drafts

Nixon's domestic package was hammered out not between Congress and the White House but within the Administration itself. Sharing federal revenues with the states and cities is a Republican idea of long standing. But guaranteeing a minimum annual income for welfare recipients decidedly is not -- even with the provision that they must accept any available work or vocational-training opportunity. There was a good deal of tugging and hauling over the welfare proposals, mainly pitting two relatively liberal Nixon men, HEW Secretary Robert Finch and Urbanologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, against budget-conscious Economist Arthur Burns and other Cabinet-level conservatives.

The result, which Nixon labeled "a new family-assistance system" (see box opposite), is an intriguing mixture of features aimed to please different constituencies. Liberals support the idea of a federal standard for welfare and while some find the level of payments proposed by Nixon inadequate, they are happy to have the principle of federal standards established. New York Mayor John Lindsay called the Nixon proposal Washington's "most important step forward in this field in a generation." To appease conservatives, Republican Nixon spoke of "investment," of "startup costs" to get the engine of social rehabilitation going, of work as "part of the American character." He was almost apologetic about the need to spend more federal funds initially. Failure to act, he said, would be more expensive in the long run in both human and economic terms. He underscored the decentralizing features of his plan. His welfare and revenue-sharing proposals, Nixon said, "represent the first major reversal of the trend toward ever more centralization of government in Washington." Initial congressional reaction was mainly favorable, but there is little chance of action on the Nixon program before next year. Again, Wilbur Mills poses a problem. He opposes revenue-sharing.

The plan was by no means an instant success around the White House when Finch and Moynihan first proposed it more than six months ago, but it finally won Nixon's firm allegiance. After more than two dozen drafts, the program came out not far from its original form: the Finch-Moynihan plan would have assured a welfare family of four $1,500 a year; the final Administration proposal gives them $1,600.

One important contributor was Labor Secretary George Shultz, a quiet-spoken Cabinet comer who increasingly has the President's ear on a range of issues well outside his department's jurisdiction. It was Shultz who pushed hardest for a welfare scheme with "work incentives" that would allow families on relief to take jobs without forfeiting all federal aid. Shultz's streamlining of his cumbersome Manpower Administration (he likened its organizational chart to "a wiring diagram for a perpetual-motion machine") led Nixon to ask for restructuring of all federal job-training programs. For this Administration, the welfare proposals alone are a surprising and impressive departure. But it is a special case. "The present welfare system," Nixon declared last week, "has to be judged a colossal failure."

Because of the President's commitment to the expensive ABM system, and the limits on other federal spending that his concern about inflation dictates, there is little money for social needs that the President himself acknowledges. The result is a deliberate tendency to talk about new programs but postpone their funding; the welfare changes would add $2.5 billion to what the Federal Government already spends, but the new costs would not begin before July 1, 1970. When Nixon produced a mini-legislative program in mid-April, he included a plan for increasing Social Security benefits by 7% to counter the effects of inflation; no more has been heard of that, and Budget Director Robert Mayo is now scrambling desperately to find $3.5 billion to cover such "uncontrollables" as Social Security spending increases already mandated by law.

Bottom of the Barrel

Political pressure recently forced the to change its mind and offer a $1 billion hunger program it had shelved as too costly. Similarly, Congress just added $1 billion to the school-aid bill. "We're just literally right down to the bottom of the barrel," says Presidential Counsel John Ehrlichman. "It's very disheartening to see these opportunities and not have the money to do the job. That billion Congress just hit us for on education -- that's a billion we don't have."

Nixon wants desperately to show a substantial surplus in the present fiscal year in order to stop inflation; his bud get is designed to come out $6.3 billion in the black, twice the unexpectedly large surplus of $3.1 billion for the fis cal year just ended. Given Nixon's over riding concern for ending inflation, and the plain fact that military spending continues to be high, he can scarcely be expected to bombard the Congress with regular requests for enactment of costly social programs.

The rapid-fire week made a sharp contrast with the leisurely previous pace of Nixon's Administration, which has often brought accusations that his is a do-little presidency. Nixon himself has cautioned: "We will propose only legislation that we know we can execute once it becomes law." Generally, Nixon is reluctant to plunge ahead with ambitious and experimental social ventures; like Eisenhower, he means to consolidate and reorganize rather than innovate.

Nixon has sent to Congress a spate of law-and-order bills, which cost little compared to a massive social program. He was quick with legislative proposals on organized crime, narcotics, obscenity, and law enforcement in the District of Columbia. Yet another repeated 1968 campaign promise--to encourage black capitalism with tax incentives--has run afoul of a variety of problems (see BUSINESS). With that plan stalled on dead center, Nixon has little to point to that his Administration has done specifically for the black community. Moynihan's deputy, Stephen Hess, pleads: "We are not defining problems by constituency and bloc. These groups have grown accustomed to being catered to. Our major programs are fairly evenhanded--welfare, manpower training."

Still, it is six months since Nixon's second press conference, when he asked Negroes to judge him on his record as President. In that time, Nixon's most visible moves in the race-relations field have been a rearrangement of school-integration enforcement methods and an attempt to rewrite the 1965 voting-rights law. Both of those steps were widely taken to be gestures to the Southern whites, led by South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, who supported Nixon in 1968. At the same time, the Administration has initiated strong desegregation proceedings in such disparate places as Chicago, Georgia, and Waterbury, Conn. As he does in other fields, Nixon on civil rights often seems to run on alternating current as the conservative and progressive forces around him feed in conflicting impulses.

As for the future, Nixon is obviously banking on having more money to spend on domestic problems once the Viet Nam war is ended and the nagging problem of inflation has been overcome. In the meantime, he has initiated a number of proposals that make a gesture in the direction of urgent national needs --for example, a plan announced last week to spend $10 billion over a dozen years on improvements to urban rapid-transit systems. Two themes are likely to recur in the Nixon Administration's social legislation; both are contained in the welfare message, and both are favorite concepts of Pat Moynihan. One is that much adolescent and adult delinquency can be avoided only by enriching the early years of a child's life. The other, exemplified by both welfare decentralization and the revenue-sharing plan, is the idea that the Federal Government is a first-rate revenue-collecting agency, but a fifth-rate dispenser of public services.

In sum, the Nixon Administration is rarely what it seems to be. It is never as conservative as it appears when Arthur Burns or Attorney General John Mitchell is acting as spokesman, nor as progressive as when Finch is talking. Despite Nixon's dearth of personal ideology, he manages to stick to certain basic principles, but with his own twist. He wants to reduce the Federal Government's participation in the people's business, but his welfare proposal seeks to establish for the first time a nationwide minimum payment decreed by Washington. He inveighs against neo-isolationists but wants to reduce foreign involvements. So it is on matters of style. Nixon and his men are supposed to be smooth, efficient operators, with keen political sense and a horror of small errors. Once during the campaign, an airport rally went badly. "No more airport receptions," Nixon told an aide. During a White House state dinner recently, Nixon spilled soup on his sleeve. "No more soup at these things," he decreed. Of course there were later airport rallies, and soup will doubtless reappear at banquets.

Nixon promised an "open Administration," and indeed, information has flowed more freely than during the Johnson years. But is it a two-way tide? Even some of the President's aides are troubled that he sees so few people in the course of his daily routine. Nixon, long noted for political acumen, may be getting out of touch; he seemed so, for example, when he failed to consult Congress about removing postal appointments from politics. TIME White House Correspondent Simmons Fentress observes: "Nixon likes to work alone in the little study next to the Oval Office. He likes to pack himself off to the privacy of the Executive Office Building hideaway. He sits alone at night in the Lincoln sitting room and goes over his papers while his stereo blares Kostelanetz or the score from Victory at Sea. He is much too cocooned. His contacts are too narrow."

While Lyndon Johnson was rarely alone, only the most senior Nixon aides have easy access. Most of the White House staff meets him rarely, if ever, and non-government visitors are few. Attorney General Mitchell and Defense Secretary Laird see him more frequently than other Cabinet members; Transportation Secretary John Volpe, reports have it, spent nearly ten weeks trying for an appointment with the President. Nixon's own choice for Republican National Chairman, Representative Rogers Morton, has yet to see him privately. The "palace guard" of aides carefully screens requests for audiences, and often grants them only on condition that certain matters not be discussed. White House staffers assemble a detailed "scenario" covering each appointment; from it, Nixon learns what his visitor will talk about, what the issues are, and what Administration policy has been on the matter in question.

All Presidents, of course, are more or less isolated; none has been free to mingle with the average citizen in a bull session at the corner tavern. As it happens, Nixon's growing insulation from ordinary political realities has embarrassed him so far only in relatively unimportant ways--chiefly in minor domestic matters, and not at all in foreign affairs.

World View

Lyndon Johnson's talent for pressing the flesh, for example, did nothing on his few transatlantic forays to stop the deterioration of U.S.-European relations that resulted from his blunt disregard of America's allies. By contrast, Nixon's recognition of common Atlantic interests has made relations between the U.S. and Europe better than they have been for years. The moon landing left Europeans spellbound, and Charles de Gaulle is no longer France; but some of the credit for improvement in the U.S.-European ambience this year is due to Nixon's February tour of NATO capitals and the sound advice of the President's White House foreign-policy adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

The President's Asian tour seemed to be a limited success: the Nixon message, that the U.S. will keep a lower silhouette in that part of the world once the Viet Nam war is over, was received with understanding, though Nixon kept U.S. intentions inexact. So far, the Nixon Administration has done no more than make exploratory stabs at the problems of the Middle East and Latin America. But in the broad range of foreign affairs, a liberal Republican Senator argues that there are no longer any really dominant personalities on the world scene. This, he says, might increase international good will. "Nixon has a real chance, a great chance," he argues. "There is a balance of mediocrity in the world now. The world could move forward because that is so." One area in which Nixon has moved is in U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. With luck, and if the Pentagon's generals can find agreement with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency's negotiators, there is some prospect of serious strategic-arms-limitation talks between the U.S. and the Soviets very soon.

"I am no Whig," John Kennedy once said disdainfully. What he meant was that unlike his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, and the 19th century Whigs William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore, he intended to be an activist President. Richard Nixon is something of a Whig, by choice as well as by circumstance. In his Inaugural, he celebrated "small, splendid efforts" of individual men. There are conflicting pulls on him, within his own party and in the country that gave him less than a majority last November and still reflects deep division in such splits as the Senate ABM vote.

Even if the President were more of an activist in domestic affairs, he would have great difficulty in making his will law. He must be very selective, picking his battles with care. He feels that he has limited political capital to spend, but he is cheerful about his future. At a surprise party in the Rose Garden last week, marking the anniversary of his nomination, Nixon reflected: "We won a close election. We did not win the House or the Senate. But since then, we haven't lost any. We have won the close ones, and we are going to continue to win the close ones, and we are going to win them even bigger in the years ahead."

Theory of the Presidency

Whiggery has its virtues. Passage of the tax bill is a good indication that a hyperactive President is not always necessary to useful legislative progress. Ultimately, the question is whether a Whig's approach can deal with the great internal problems of the U.S. today. Federal authority expanded from the New Deal onward largely because a vacuum existed at lower levels of government and in the private sector. Crises existed that only Washington seemed willing to attack. Today the problems may be different, but they are no less urgent. One test of Nixon's philosophy will come when state and city governments show whether they can get by with more money but less control and expert guidance from Washington.

The Ripon Society, a group of articulate, liberal Republicans, praised Nixon's welfare plan but warned last week that if the G.O.P. turns aside from the problems of the day, the party will disappear just as the Whigs did. "Men of good will may disagree about the means to solve the urban and black crises," said the Society. "They do not ignore them. The party that does not deal with these problems has no future, whatever the ethnic background of its constituents, and it will go the way of the Whigs, who floundered on the great issue of their era"--slavery, which led to the Civil War. Richard Nixon has been faithful to his theory of the presidency, but it remains to be seen whether that theory is sufficient to the day.

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