What Trump Can Learn from Nixon

After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential Transition Is In Chaos. This is a hardy perennial, or quadrennial, of Washington jibber-jabber, and I don’t want to be the little Tootsie Roll floating in the punchbowl who has to point out that every presidential transition, from John Adams through Barack Obama, at one point or another falls into chaos. So I won't.

But history might make a more helpful contribution. We can point out that no matter who ends up manning the White House staff, it will matter less than we think, if only because it can be very difficult for the White House staff to get anything done. And the difficulty embraces the president too.

White House memoirs always tell one or two stories about how irrelevant an executive decision can be. Even if it comes roaring out of the Oval Office, it often falls to rest in the lower reaches of the bureaucracy with a barely audible tinkle. William Safire's great account of his years working for Richard Nixon, Before the Fall (1975), offers two instructive examples from early in Nixon's presidency, back to back.

As Pastor Niemöller would have said if he were an organizational consult­ant, first they came for the Tea-Tasters. The federal Board of Tea-Tasters was a panel of civil servants that beginning in 1897 met annually to taste and approve imported tea, for reasons no one could any longer recall. The Food and Drug Administration screened imported tea, too. In a presidential message to Congress in 1970, Nixon cited the board as an almost comical redundancy, a textbook case of a government institution that had long ago outlived its purpose and survived solely by inertia.

Or so Nixon and his men thought. After Nixon singled out the tea tasters for dismissal, as Safire tells it, a handful of congressmen emerged in their defense, doing the bidding of tea importers who had a vested interest in the board. A Nixon ally in Congress introduced a bill to kill the tea tasters—only figuratively, of course—but it died in committee. Lawsuits were filed against the executive branch, and the threat of a writ of mandamus forced the president to reinstate the board.