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goals; enlisting the bureaucracy's enthusiastic support can enhance the probability of presidential success (Pfiffner 1991, 4).
As the mixed blessings of an administrative presidency were most definitively exercised and honed by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, their administrations are examined in this chapter in some detail. George Bush's administration receives initial observation here, to be followed by in-depth analysis in later chapters.
Greta Garbo in the White House: 4 Richard Nixon's Administrative Presidency
Richard Nixon's administrative strategy involved the exercise of government by executive action, relying heavily on the power vested in the hands of the PASs who headed the executive agencies (Rourke 1991a,

 

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114). He made extensive use of the tools of appointment, budget, and reorganization powers.
Preparing the way for Ronald Reagan, Nixon's administrative strategy also involved claims of executive authority, as in his attempts at budget impoundment to achieve policy goals, and a general "go it alone" attitude vis-à-vis the Congress. So-called executive privilege was used extensively by Nixon to shield his office from congressional inquiry. He set the White House over and against not only the Congress, but also against the rest of the executive branch, making broad use of the president's appointment powers to procure heads of domestic civilian agencies who were opposed to the basic mission and goal of the agencies they administered (ibid., 114-15).
Not unlike President Eisenhower, Richard Nixon came into the White House with the conservative's bias against big government and its bureaucracy, suspicious of a career civil service that had spent the past eight years working at the behest of Democratic social policies (Aberbach 1976, 466-67). According to Nathan,
The plan for an "administrative presidency" helps to explain Nixon's entire domestic policy. The roots of this plan were in the experience of his first term. The president and John D. Ehrlichman, his chief domestic advisor, came to the conclusion sometime in late 1971 or early 1972 that, in most areas of domestic affairs, operations constitute policy. Much of the day-to-day management of domestic programsregulation writing, grant approval, personnel development, agency organization and reorganization, program oversight, and budget apportionmentcan involve high-level policymaking. Getting control over these processes was the aim of the President's strategy; and judged against the lack of legislative success on domestic issues in the first term, there are grounds for concluding that this was a rational objective. (Nathan 1975, 70)
While the regulatory agencies and smaller administrative units generally were spared a direct attack, "the (Nixon) administrative presidency focused on the big-spending cabinet agencies, especially Health, Education, and Welfare, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Transportation, and Interior." Thus, Nixon's New Federalism was considered by many to be nothing more than an "elaborate rationale for paring down social spending" (ibid., 26, vii-viii).
"Nixon and his White House loyalists increasingly saw themselves as pursued by three demons: the press, Congress, and the federal bureaucracy." To counter the press, his staff developed innovative techniques for

 

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managing the news. He was the first president to put political people in charge of agencies' public affairs departments. Under the tutelage of media wizard and political image-maker Roger Ailes, Nixon cut back the number of press conferences, holding only twenty-eight his entire first term. He also staged White House briefings and a series of prime-time television appearances; fourteen in his first nineteen months in office, as compared to Kennedy's four (Hess 1988, 122).
To deal with the Congress, he attacked the Senate as being anti-Southern for its rejection of two of his Supreme Court nominees, G. Harrold Carlswell and Clement Haynsworth. He then