Editor’s Note: This column appeared on the Jan. 1, 1969 combined Opinion pages of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution.
WASHINGTON—The Nixon Cabinet is taking its cure from its leader, who has been the soul of tact, unobtrusiveness and nonprogrammatic utterances in this transition era. The Cabinet, composed of cheerful pragmatists, is distinguished mostly for its happiness. The members were not dragooned or collared from countinghouse or law firm. They leapt at the call of their leader to serve in a climate in which calm competence has never been so welcome.
The “interchangeable” members, except for Secvretary of State William P. Rogers and Attorney General John N. Mitchell, the inscrutable and austere Nixon campaign manager, have been paraded before the press at Federal Building No. 7, the transition headquarters.
With Herbert G. Klein, the consonant-swallowing director of communications, as their chaperone, they have exhibited their joy at being tapped for the “bring-us-together” administration.
David M. Kennedy, the newly designated secretary of the Treasury, came to some small grief for his excess of discretion about the price of gold. Nobody else has said anything of the slightest moment.
There has not been a boat-rocker or a crusader in the crew so far. Gov. George W. Romney, ruddy face aglow at the prospect of wrestling with the problems of the city as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, expatiated, with his usual scrambled syntax, on the missionary work of private citizens in alleviating the woes of the ghetto poor.
That slum tour he undertook during his doomed quest for the presidency did him no political good at the time. But it left him with countless impressions of individual enterprise which he hopes to multiply during his tenure as the faithful servant of the leader he once tried to vanquish on the hustings.
The important point is that while the new Cabinet is, taken as a whole, a rather inarticulate group — “problem solvers,” they prefer to be called — at least the two most conspicuous new White House staffers, Moynihan and Henry Kissinger of Harvard, may turn out to the the rhetoricians of the Nixon regime.
Both have taken the vow of silence, which in Moynihan’s case especially is taken with a grain of salt, since he is one of the most brilliantly voluble Democrats in the republic, but they are already in print on the most vital matters with which they are concerned.
Kissinger’s article in the current Foreign Affairs Quarterly on the necessity of “two track” negotiations is already being credited with having brought Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky of South Vietnam to heel on the matter of separate talks with the Viet Cong.
As for Moynihan, his prose is familiar to Washingtonians. His controversial report on the Negro family was almost made official doctrine by the Johnson administration — until black leaders, in the wake of Watts, backed away from its shattering findings.
Moynihan has announced to the press that he will speak only when spoken to by the President-elect, but word of his forthcoming book, “Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding,” is already in wide circulation. In it, he charges the Johnson administration, in its antipoverty exertions, with “inexcusably sloppy work.”
Presumably, now both Kissinger and Moynihan will forswear the written, as well as the spoken, word. But these two academicians are the most closely watched trains in the incoming administration.
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