164 Presidential politics
and the Executive Office. A Domestic Council was established in order to
coordinate the activities of the departments and agencies operating in the
domestic field. The Council consisted of the president, the vice-president and
the heads of the departments, with the exception of the Secretaries of State
and Defense, but it included also the two members of the White House Staff
with the title of Counselor to the President, as well as other presidential
aides and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Most of the
White House Staff working on domestic affairs were absorbed into the staff
of the new Council, which was intended not to operate as a single entity, but
to divide into a number of committees each dealing with a particular area of
policy. The development had begun of a new kind of cabinet, constructed in
part out of some members of the traditional cabinet and in part out of the
White House Staff, who were to assume formally responsibilities that they
had exercised before, if at all, only informally.
At the beginning of his second term, President Nixon pressed on fur-
ther with this line of development. In January 1973 he announced the
establishment of a ‘Super-Cabinet’, in which the dividing lines between
the cabinet and the White House Office disappeared almost entirely. Al-
though the Super-Cabinet was never really to operate because of the vast
upheaval of the Watergate affair, it is worth some study since some similar
structure may yet emerge again in response to the need for coordination at
the top of the federal government.
Nixon established five Assistants to the President to work under him, ‘to
integrate and unify policies and operations throughout the executive branch
of the Government, and to oversee all of the activities for which the presi-
dent is responsible’. The five assistants were H.P. Haldeman (White House
administration), John D. Ehrlichman (domestic affairs), Henry Kissinger
(foreign affairs), Roy L. Ash (executive management) and George P. Schulz
(economic affairs). Schulz, to be appointed an Assistant to the President in
the White House Office, was to retain his Cabinet post as Secretary of the
Treasury. Three other cabinet members, in the field of domestic policy, were
to be given broad coordinating functions over their cabinet colleagues and
other divisions of the administration. These three members of the cabinet
were also to become members of the White House Staff as Counselors to
the President and to become chairmen of the committees of the Domestic
Council dealing with their area of policy. Furthermore, the three domestic
coordinators were to report to the President through the Assistant to the
President, John Ehrlichman.
How this system would have worked had it not disappeared in the Water-
gate holocaust it is impossible to say. It is significant, however, that it formed
the White House Office and the cabinet into a single hierarchy of control
under the president, and so blurred the distinction between cabinet mem-
bers and presidential assistants that it hardly seemed any longer a guide to
the significance of an individual; what was important was his position in the