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many agencies suffered from the loss or transfer of appointees, some of whom had only recently come on board, only to be moved elsewhere. Cabinet tenure also suffered. "From 1933 to 1965 the median length of service for cabinet officials was 40 months; during Nixon's presidency it dropped to 18" (ibid., 126-27). Thus began a trend from which cabinet tenure never recovered.
At the same time he fired his cabinet, Nixon unveiled a new and-

 

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grandiose "supercabinet" structure. It basically consisted of two tiers of policy makers perched at the peak of the White House: on the upper tiers were five presidential assistants, each with a special area of responsibility, and below them three cabinet secretaries who were made responsible for coordinating interagency affairs and given the additional title of counselor. (Bonafede 1987a, 41-42)
However, the brouhaha over the Watergate break-in and cover-up and the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman on April 30, 1973, effectively derailed the supercabinet plan (ibid.).
Deeply conflicted regarding the federal bureaucracy, the Nixon White House thought it a principal and often hostile obstacle and at the same time a "potentially powerful political resource" (Cole and Caputo 1979, 400). But unlike the Eisenhower administration, which came into office blaming the bureaucracy for "the mess in Washington" but eventually developed a suitable working relationship with it, the Nixon administration never did reach an accommodation with the bureaucracy. On the contrary, Nixon's distrust "hardened to the point where unprecedented reorganizational steps were planned for the second term to take control of the machinery of domestic government" (Nathan 1975, 82).
Fred Malek was a crucial ingredient in this hardening process. His dislike of the federal bureaucracy was phrased with notable lack of restraint:
Because of the rape of the career civil service left by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations . . . this administration has been left a legacy of finding disloyalty and obstruction at high levels while those incumbents rest comfortably on career civil service status. Political disloyalty and insimpatico relationships with the administration, unfortunately, are not grounds for the removal or suspension of an employee. (Aberbach 1991, 226)
While Watergate undercut Nixon's dreams of controlling the bureaucracy, his efforts were not in vain. Gaining early training in bureaucrat bashing under Fred Malek was E. Pendleton James, later to head Ronald Reagan's preinaugural talent search and become his assistant for personnel. Malek's credo, "You cannot achieve management, policy, or program control unless you have established political control" would live on in the Reagan administrations. "The Nixon experience, then, was more than just a historical aberration. It was a school for many who followed; its lessons were assimilated and applied with telling effect in the Reagan period" (Aberbach 1991, 225).
Thanks to Malek, Nixon was largely successful in his attempts to ex-

 

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ercise political control over the civil service personnel system. The majority of the careerists had come in during the Democratic years when many domestic social programs were expanding and defense allocations decreasing. Nixon's New Federalism was designed to reduce the power of the federal bureaucracy and its careerists, bypassing them and sending funds directly to the states.
The tensions between the White House and the bureaucracy were intensified as many of Nixon's new federalism proposals called for a reduction in the number of categorical grants, the consolidation of various departments and agencies, and the elimination of federal bureaucratic discretion in various grant-in-aid programs. . . . [Thus,] many of Nixon's domestic programs could be interpreted as posing direct threats to the careers [and power bases] of many federal executives. (Cole and Caputo 1979, 400)
Cole and Caputo's 1979 study of supergrade