political debate.
It’s worth noting that Nixon, who is remembered in history as a foreign policy president, did not stop thinking about what might have been possible in health care, even during his postpresidency. In one of his final books, Seize the Moment, he wrote with remarkable prescience: “We need to work out a system that includes a greater emphasis on preventive care, sufficient public funding for health insurance for those who cannot afford it in the private sector, competition among healthcare providers and health insurance providers to keep down the costs of both, and decoupling the cost of healthcare from the cost of adding workers to the payroll.”57
An Inconsistent Economist
“Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal,” said Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser for presidents Nixon and Ford. It should be noted that Nixon was not especially interested in economics. He had no economic background, so he surrounded himself with experts who could help him make decisions without too much personal involvement. Most of his advisers were moderate-to-conservative Republicans, including Paul McCracken, Arthur Burns, Robert Mayo, and David Kennedy. Nixon took office just as America’s long economic boom was coming to an end. Throughout the 1960s, the economy had been robust and jobs plentiful. By 1968, though, the federal budget deficit had reached $25 billion, the highest level since the Second World War, and inflation was nearing 5 percent. Nixon believed that standard Republican solutions—tight monetary policy and spending cuts—wouldn’t do. As Stein noted, Nixon’s aim was “to be a conservative man with liberal policies.”58
Thus Nixon devised a four-phase “game plan.” In Game Plan I (1969), Nixon pursued a traditional conservative laissez-faire, tight-money approach. As a result, unemployment rose, as anticipated, but inflation continued to climb, as well. In 1970 and 1971, Nixon implemented Game Plan II, abruptly announcing, “I am now a Keynesian”59 and pursuing full employment. He embraced an expansionist monetary policy in the hope of stimulating the economy, possibly with an eye toward improving his electoral prospects for 1972. But Game Plan II proved equally ineffective.
Nixon made another radical departure with Game Plan III, announced in August 1971. Called the New Economic Policy, it aimed both to stimulate the economy and to cut inflation. The plan involved floating the dollar against gold for the first time, imposing a 10 percent import tax, restoring the investment tax credit, providing income tax relief, repealing the excise tax on automobiles, and imposing a ninety-day freeze on wage and price hikes. This last measure, never before done in peacetime, was particularly extreme.
Coming from a moderate Republican who supposedly favored the free market, the wage and price freezes were surprising. Even more oddly, the Democrats helped set the stage for many of these freezes by passing the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, which granted the president unprecedented power to “stabilize prices, rents, wages, and salaries.”60 The Democrats never believed that Nixon would resort to these measures; they thought they could embarrass him, at no cost to themselves, by giving him tools that he would never use and then blaming him for not using them. But as he so often did, Nixon out-thought the Democrats, and they were forced to go along with his liberal, stimulative policies.
As the 1972 election neared, Nixon increased the fiscal stimulus, hoping to prime the economy and win over voters. By the final quarter of 1972, the economy was growing at a robust 11.6 percent. Nixon won reelection in a landslide. By 1973, however, when the administration finally lifted the price controls, inflation returned and the bill for his artificial overheating of the economy came due. Finally, Nixon implemented Game Plan IV, involving a return to the “old Nixon” of tight fiscal and monetary policies.
On the economy, in particular, the Nixon record has long been a sore spot for conservatives. Nixon’s economic policies were all over the map, ranging from traditional Republican approaches, to mainstream Democratic ones, to leftist wage and price controls, and finally back to traditional Republican measures. His economic apostasies alienated conservatives, as did his big-government focus in other areas.
Reviewing Nixon’s domestic policy record in full, as I did for a 2013 op-ed I wrote marking the centennial of his birth, I was struck by his willingness to inject government into domestic policy. This was the case whether Nixon was implementing economic measures, as we have just seen, or implementing a vast web of new regulatory and administrative bureaucracies, which have endured in the American economy and had major influence on business and consumer behavior, ranging from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. But it was in the area of environmental protections that the Nixon administration may have left its most enduring regulatory legacy.
The Environmental President
“I hope that you become known as Mr. Clean,” Democratic senator Edmund Muskie, a leading environmentalist, told William D. Ruckelshaus at his 1970 confirmation hearing to become the first head of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which Nixon had announced the creation of earlier that year.61 “It was not long,” Jack Lewis wrote, “before the media were portraying William Ruckelshaus as a knight in shining armor charging out to do battle with the wicked polluters of America.”62
Today, Democrats and Republicans eagerly tout their environmental credentials, though Democrats, with their more favorable attitudes toward regulation, enjoy, by far, a stronger public identification with proenvironmental “green” policies. Few today realize the irony of this association—most do now know that it was Richard Nixon, not the any of the Democrats, who first forged a strong environmental record for the White House, and it was Nixon who put in place the framework of the modern environmental regulatory apparatus.
As recently as the early sixties, the environment was barely on the American radar screen as a political issue. But in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s powerful bestseller Silent Spring, awareness increased and momentum built for environmental legislation. An oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969 had been the largest in American history up to that point and caused public outrage.63 In 1970, Wisconsin Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day, putting environmentalism onto the national agenda.64
Unlike welfare and health care reform, where past personal experience motivated Nixon, he did not come to the environmental issue with any real passion. He had not regarded the environment as a pressing issue before it came onto the public agenda. As the movement gained momentum, he was slow to become receptive to its message—and, in fact, in private conversations in the Oval Office, was heard calling environmentalists “kooks” and “enemies of the system.” It was John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, who did the most to get the environment onto the Nixon agenda. Ehrlichman, despite his Watergate infamy, had a progressive side: he had specialized in land-use law, and one forest preservationist even called him “the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot,”65 referring to the head of the US Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt. Ehrlichman’s advocacy finally woke up Nixon to the issue’s importance, though to Nixon, the importance was political more than anything else. Showing his lack of genuine conviction about the cause, he once told Ehrlichman, “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.”66
And yet, in 1985 the EPA Journal conceded Nixon’s achievement in turning his initial reluctance on environmental policy into “a show of visionary statesmanship.”67 The president declared that “our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food.”68 Thus in 1970, Nixon created the EPA, installed Ruckelshaus as administrator, and also created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).69 Eventually, Nixon also supported and signed the Clean Air Act, which required that the EPA establish national air quality standards and set
