Special Section: Melvin Laird

He was a professional politician: he spoke a language that Nixon understood. As Secretary of Defense, Laird knew his subject thoroughly before he took office. Remaining influential in the Congress, Laird could be ignored by the President only at serious risk. While his maneuvers were often as byzantine as those of Nixon, he accomplished with verve and surprising good will what Nixon performed with grim determination and inward resentment. Laird liked to win, but unlike Nixon, derived no great pleasure from seeing someone else lose. There was about him a buoyancy and a rascally good humor that made working with him as satisfying as it could on occasion be maddening.

Laird acted on the assumption that he had a constitutional right to seek to outsmart and outmaneuver anyone with whom his office brought him into contact. I eventually learned that it was safest to begin a battle with Laird by closing off all his bureaucratic or congressional escape routes, provided I could figure them out. Only then would I broach substance. But even with such tactics, I lost as often as I won. John Ehrlichman considered mine a cowardly procedure and decided he would teach me how to deal with Laird. Following the best administrative theory of White House predominance, Ehrlichman, without troubling to touch any bureaucratic or congressional bases, transmitted a direct order to Laird to relinquish some Army-owned land in Hawaii for a national park. Laird treated this clumsy procedure the way a matador handles the lunges of a bull. He accelerated his plan to use the land for two Army recreation hotels. Using his old congressional connections, he put a bill through the Congress that neatly overrode the directive, all the time protesting that he would carry out any White House orders permitted by the Congress. The hotels are still there under Army control; the national park is still a planner's dream. Ehrlichman learned the hard way that there are dimensions of political science not taught at universities and that being right on substance does not always guarantee success in Washington.