Organizing the Nixon White House

Even after “having brooded, dreamed and schemed for the Presidency for the last sixteen of his fifty-five years,” Richard Nixon on January 20, 1969, was not well prepared to take over the reins of government. Nixon had an “encyclopedic” understanding of foreign affairs, but there were “deep and obvious gaps. . . in his knowledge of the federal government and the Congress.” As Nixon began his transition to the White House, there was “an appalling vacuum of advance planning on how to organize and oper­ate one of the biggest and most intricate governments in the world.” Nixon could “count on fewer close associates to help him run the government than any recent predecessor.” His “handful of trusted [campaign] lieutenants and advisors would, of course, take up key positions in the White House and the administration,” but “almost to a man, they were sadly inexperienced in the ways of Washington.” To supplement his few close associates in fill­ing key White House and administration positions, Richard Nixon had “to call on outsiders that would make his, at the beginning, an administration of strangers.”27 It took more than a year for the Nixon White House opera­tion to settle into place; during its first year in office there was a great deal of policy, budget, and personnel confusion. This confusion had more of an influence on NASA, as its future plans were being debated, than on many other government agencies.