New Actors and a New Issue

One impact of creating the Domestic Council as the structure for developing policy options for presidential choice was that NASA’s FY1972 budget pro­posal was evaluated, as had been suggested in the March 1970 presidential space statement, in comparison to the budget proposals of other domestic agencies. The Domestic Council staff person assigned both to look for poten­tial cuts in the overall budget and to track NASA issues was Ehrlichman’s deputy Ed Harper, who held a doctorate in political science and who had worked in the Bureau of the Budget before joining the council staff. In mid­August, even before formal agency budget requests were submitted to OMB, Harper had provided John Ehrlichman with a list of potential budget cuts across the executive branch. Listed as among the “easier cuts to announce” were an “across the board” reduction of $40 million in the NASA budget;

Harper also identified the possibility of canceling Skylab, which would save $300 million. Another Ehrlichman assistant, John Whitaker, had provided a “political evaluation of cutback or elimination possibilities” related to the budget planning targets that OMB had provided to various agencies; with respect to NASA, Whitaker had suggested that “in principle for policy rea­sons, continue moon manned space flight on a stretched out basis, but cut out space shuttle and station. Real money ($2 billion) could be saved—[but] look at unemployment effect.”3

Tom Paine, even as he was preparing to leave NASA, and Low met with George Shultz and Cap Weinberger, the new leaders of OMB, in early September. Low reported that “the meeting was fairly short but. . . fruitful. Shultz looks like the kind of person we could easily work with, if only he were going to be available to us. I’m not sure whether the same would be true of Weinberger.” NASA was told that “the procedure that will be used by OMB this year is that they will try to delegate agency level discussions to one of the three political appointees at the Associate Director [actually Assistant Director] level.” For NASA, that would be “a man by the name of Don Rice, whom we have not yet met.” That would change quickly; Rice would establish himself as a formidable presence in NASA-OMB dealings over the 1970-1972 period. Also in early September, new science adviser Ed David came to NASA for a briefing on NASA programs. David “was attentive for about two hours while we ran through our entire program and commented very little,” according to Low, who observed that it was “quite difficult, on the basis of this first meeting, to even form a first impression.”4

Like most politicians, Richard Nixon throughout his first term as presi­dent worried about his prospects for reelection, and was concerned that job reductions in the aerospace sector caused by his cuts in the defense and space budgets could have negative political consequences in key electoral states, particularly California. Nixon and his long-time associates recognized that Nixon had won the presidency “by an eyelash in 1968, just as we lost by an eyelash in 1960, and thought during the first term we would likely win or lose by an eyelash in 1972.”5 Thus winning California loomed large in Nixon’s reelection planning. Nixon was also interested in restoring the U. S. economy to a healthy condition, and believed that unemployment in high technology sectors ran counter to that objective. Nixon brought his long­time associate Robert Finch to the White House in June 1970 both because Finch was having problems handling the stress of his position as secretary of health, education, and welfare and because he wanted Finch’s advice on strategy for the 1970 Congressional elections and the 1972 presidential cam­paign.

Harper from the Domestic Council staff wrote Finch on an “urgent” basis on September 23 about a “Key Election Issue: Federally Caused Unemployment.” He reported that “cutbacks in Defense and NASA by 1972 will shrink by 30% in expenditures from 1968 levels, creating unem­ployment (850,000 workers)—especially among scientists and engineers (an additional 130,000).” He added that “the unemployment is very localized,” with 43.5 percent concentrated in the Pacific region, with the Los Angeles area as the hardest hit.6 The connection between aerospace employment and the space shuttle, already evident in 1970, was to prove an important fac­tor in the final decision to approve the NASA-preferred shuttle at the end of 1971.