AMERICA
Mr Nixon makes changes
MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—American journalists, while afflicted less with the insolence of office than the Vice President keeps insisting, are un- trained to accept the plainest evidence that the President of the-United States does not care a straw about what they think. They go on assuming that, if they complain long and unitedly enough, any President has to listen to them; and only this illusion can explain the desperate persistence of their judgment that Mr Nixon's recent shifts in command indicate that he has at last become sensitive to his danger from the alienated.
Mr Nixon relieves his Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and removes him to protective custody as a White House Coun- sel: we are told that the President did this to bring closer to him a representative of the 'moderate and compassionate elements of his party'. Robert Finch failed as a cabinet secre- tary. partly, it is true, because the President and the Attorney General, who remains his First Minister, are not men who by nature care much for the mission of Mr Finch's department but mostly because the terrain of health, education and welfare is not one across which Americans move with either dexterity or command. Secretary Finch's department was indeed the mess the country has habitually made of government efforts at social progress. He was replaced by an exemplary Bostonian who is certainly a moderate—one could almost say a tepid-ate —but who would die before he gave evidence of any feeling so vulgar as compassion and who carries the guarantee that he will never be heard from again, which looks very like Mr Nixon's most prayerful hope for the Department of Health, Education and Wel- fare.
The President himself introduced Mr Finch to the journalists at his moment of arrest. Not having the advantage of the next day's reports on the eminence to which he had been lifted, the poor victim seems to have looked like someone who had been kid- napped. It seems better to trust his instincts more than those desperate strainings of the intelligence represented by the judgment of Mr James Reston, whose treatment of Mr Nixon suggests how often patriotism is the last refuge of the decent man rather than his opposite. The President, Mr Reston argues, in bringing Mr Finch and Secretary of Labour Schultz 'closer to him in the execu-
tive office . is expanding the authority of the two men in his cabinet who are more in- formed about the grievances of the people who are most critical about the Administra- tion'. Mr Finch gave every evidence that he entertained no such illusion and that indeed he fully recognised that he would be entering a quarter where he could not expect that degree of independence afforded the official who possesses even so much as his own pub- lic relations spokesman and whose master is ready to entertain any dissent so long he can be certain that the lock and the key are ill his hands.
Mr Finch is clearly a decent sort, although he has managed to increase our appreciation of him by his habit of being visible most of his life in the company of Persons beside
Whom it is easy to seem even better than he is, for example the prior Mr Nixon and the present Governor Reagan. He seems to have well and truly tried at Health, Education and Welfare but to have been continually out- weighed by the doctors' lobby in his efforts for health, and by Vice President Agnew and the Attorney General in his efforts for the better education of Southern Negroes. His last official act was to discharge a Commis- sioner of Education who had annoyed not Mr Finch but the President himself by being stubborn about integration and publicly dis- contented about the Cambodian incursion. Mr Finch goes now to a place where even more than before the rare sight we will have of him will induce the question about what he is doing in this galley. What be will be doing, of course, is to argue, pleasantly and, one hopes steadily, that Mr Nixon has mis- read the needs and temper of the country. But Mr Nixon has a temperament to whose calculations more than whose feelings Mr Finch will need to argue; he will have to convince the President that his present policies, while morally splendid. are practi- cally dangerous. There are no signs that Mr Nixon could see any reason to agree. There is, indeed, every sign that Mr Nixon has dealt with the broad rebellion against him by deciding that it is of no importance at alL His every action suggests that he agrees with the tough-minded among his advisers and pays attention to the tender-minded only to the extent of sequestering those who agree to be silent and casting out those who do not. The only public dissenter in his cabinet has been his Secretary of the Interior, an example of the radicalisation possible to any good Republican who has to spend six months trying to convince an American oil company to cease polluting the water. Secretary Hickel wondered aloud whether the Vice President spoke for all America; Mr Nixon's response was to consign him to Coventry and to begin the process at whose end any cabinet member must choose to resign or be frozen to death.
Even those less outspoken in public can expect slights as plain: the President assem- 'Well, I suppose it's nice to get rid of the sante old faces and get some new same old faces.' bles his advisers on South-East Asia and fills the table with generals, noticeably omitting his Secretary of State and leaving him as best he can to explain why the administration's promise to leave Cambodia free of American troops approaches its deadline with increas- ing evidence that it cannot be met. What all the wise men have said Mr Nixon has to do seems less and less likely; what all the damned fools have predicted seems more and more the case. His feelings and his calcula- tions fix together on a regime resisting every moderating influence; he will rest his case with those who accept and have no care about those who quarrel.
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