The President's (Incremental) Analyst

GEORGE PRATT SHULTZ, 49, named last week by President Nixon to head his powerful new Office of Management and Budget, peers through his spectacles with the donnish calm of a scholar about to address a graduate seminar. He comes by his professorial reserve quite naturally: he took a Ph.D. in industrial economics at M.I.T. and taught there for several years. Later, he served as dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business until Nixon picked him to be Secretary of

Labor. The pedagogic style stays with him. At a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, for example, he began his answer to a question about the economy by observing: 'There are three increments in the analysis." He candidly admits an obvious truth: "I am not a phrasemaker." -

In fact it is precisely Shultz's thoroughness and his disdain for the dramatic that has shot him skyward in the estimation of Richard Nixon, a man who prizes tidiness and detachment. While he is a onetime Democrat and distinctly left of the Nixon Administration's center, he prefers to consider himself "result oriented," an empirical, professional problem solver. When he met the press just after his appointment to the Cabinet in December 1968, he said that he was "a generalist," and added that he hoped the President would seek his advice on matters outside the narrow Labor Department bailiwick. Nixon has done just that.

"The President's problems have taken one hell of a lot of his time." says a Labor Department aide. Shultz won his White House letter last summer during the intramural debate over the Nixon welfare program, which set off some of the sharpest infighting this Administration has seen. Liberals and conservatives differed heatedly over such questions as aid to the working poor and the concept of a guaranteed income. Nixon found the squabbling unseemly. He put John Ehrlichman, the top domestic policy sergeant in his palace guard, in charge of finding a compromise, and told Ehrlichman to enlist George Shultz.

Shultz put together a package that everyone could live with, and from then on Nixon kept handing him things. One was the chairmanship of a study group on the vastly complicated, politically sensitive problem of regulating oil imports. Shultz protested to Nixon that he knew nothing about it. Nixon, by then completely familiar with Shultz's studious and evenhanded methods, replied: "That is why I want you."

Nixon also made Shultz vice chairman of the Cabinet Committee on School Desegregation; Shultz was one of those who persuaded Nixon to make $1.5 billion available for aid to desegregating schools in the North and South. He can be tenacious as well as persuasive. When the Administration's "Philadelphia Plan" for integrating workers on federal construction jobs was rejected by U.S. Comptroller General Elmer Staats because it established, in effect, racial quotas for hiring, which are illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Shultz got a contrary ruling from Attorney General John Mitchell, and that ruling has since been upheld by a U.S. District Court judge. -

Whether he is wrestling with oil imports or working out the settlement that Congress enacted in April to avoid a threatened rail strike, Shultz goes about his business in what he calls a "consultive" manner. While he is not an effective public speaker, he talks well at his "seminars," drawing people out, probing motives as well as positions and arguments. If he is not satisfied, he will say: "Well, let's have another meeting on this." Says an associate: "That is the signal for us to go out and come back with something better."

His temper flares rarely. Recently, after he ended an unsatisfactory meeting with a contractors' group over black employment, the contractors stayed in the conference room arguing loudly after Shultz had left. He charged back in and brusquely ordered them out.

Normally the Shultz style is placid.

While he works a full day that ordinarily starts at 8 a.m., he manages to find time for his family: his wife is a former Army nurse, and they have five children. He occasionally unwinds at tennis or golf.

Not everything about the Nixon Administration enchants Shultz, but he generally keeps his doubts to himself. He is known to deplore what he considers to be the continuing divisive rhetoric of Vice President Agnew, and he has conceded that Nixon's decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia alienated large numbers of the young. Nonetheless he defended that decision before students, professors and a meeting of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers last month in Atlantic City. The union men heard him out respectfully, but condemned the Cambodian action.

That sense of discretion is one more quality that has put Shultz high on Nixon's list of favorites. When some Cabinet members complained recently that they had trouble getting through to the President, Shultz said drily that he himself had no difficulty. Shultz has been one of only four Cabinet members --the others are Mitchell, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers--whose calls always reach the President immediately. With that head start in Nixon's esteem, Shultz should have no trouble getting his ideas across in the White House. "Give him a year," says one Labor Department aide, "and he'll be running the place."

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