THE WELFARE STATE, REPUBLICAN STYLE

THE job, as Wilbur Cohen pictured it, is a one-way passport to ulcers and oblivion. The new Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, warned the outgoing Secretary, would not only have to maintain a man-killing schedule--twelve hours a day, six days a week--but would also have to put up with endless opprobrium from every conceivable quarter. "Whatever he says or does," said Cohen, "it will impair his political future."

After three months in office, Robert Hutchison Finch wholeheartedly endorses his predecessor's first premise. "This," he admits, "is the hardest job I've ever had." As for jeopardizing his career, Finch is a self-avowed "political animal" with a finely tuned instinct for survival and the magnetism to assure it. At 43, he is the canniest politician in Richard Nixon's Cabinet--and its youngest member. He is also the most liberal, most independent and, at the same time, perhaps the most loyal of the President's top advisers. Though the new Administration has hardly settled in, Finch, who has successively been the President's protege, confidant and closest adviser over the past 22 years, is already being talked of as his running mate in 1972--or his successor in 1976.

Now, for the President's first term at least, Finch has to master what another former HEW Secretary, Abraham Ribicoff, contemptuously called "that can of worms, that catchall for programs with no place to go." As head of a vastly expanded HEW, Finch not only has one of the three or four most demanding jobs in Washington--after the President's--but also must take the lead in mapping the Nixon Administration's battle plan for the home front. As the President's chief of staff in the most serious domestic crisis since the Civil War, he must work to alleviate poverty, reform the welfare system, improve health services and raise the quality of education--even as he safeguards drugs and medicines, protects the purity of the nation's food, builds hospitals and oversees the social security system.

The Major Accomplishment

If he had time to look back, he might find some irony in his present position. Only a few years ago, the welfare state was anathema to many Americans, who made a religion of self-reliance. Both Finch and his boss inveighed routinely against "creeping socialism." Today U.S. society accepts almost without question most of the machinery that exists to aid the poor, the elderly, the sick, the uneducated--all the fixtures that have come close to making the U.S. a welfare state. Perhaps the most notable accomplishment of the Nixon Administration so far has not been what it has proposed, but its acceptance, almost without murmur, of the Great Society. It may even fall to a Republican Secretary of HEW to initiate the boldest foray yet into the welfare state--the guaranteed annual wage.

That, like many other things in Nixon's Washington, is still in the discussion stage. Three months after the new men took over, there is a paucity of proposals for social reform. Most of the efforts have been directed toward reorganization. Some of the men in the White House, including the President, react defensively to suggestions that more should have been done. What has been done so far, counters Presidential Aide Stephen Hess, is "not very dramatic. But it's what makes Government work. This is very meaningful stuff."

Finch makes no apologies. He could have had almost any other Cabinet post. Why did he choose one of the hardest? "The first reason," he says, "is that people say it can't be done. The second is that with all of our institutions under fire, it is going to be terribly exciting to head an agency that must deal simultaneously with both the attacked and the attackers." He adds: "HEW is where the action is. I like problems--rather, I like trying to solve problems."

He should certainly be at home at HEW, a 16-year-old agency whose principal wards are the castoffs of the affluent society. The agency's problems multiply even faster than its programs. More than any other man, the President excepted, HEW's Secretary directly touches the lives of more than 200 million Americans, rich or poor, black or white, young or old, ailing or well. When it was established, HEW was responsible for fewer than 70 programs; by the end of the New Frontier, it had 130. By the time Nixon took office, it had more than 250, from Medicare to air pollution. Despite the formidable cost of Viet Nam, domestic appropriations rose dramatically during the Johnson Administration. The figures: a 668% increase for health (to $12.3 billion), 442% for education (to $3.8 billion), 46% for welfare (to $4.4 billion). Social security benefits doubled to $30.8 billion. Today HEW has a budget of $51 billion, second only to the Pentagon's, and Washington's third biggest civilian payroll (107,000), behind those of the Pentagon and the Post Office.

Finch does not intend to add many new programs soon, but he has already indicated what he and the new Administration are likely to do.

sb WELFARE. Working closely with members of the Council for Urban Affairs, Finch has recommended to Nixon a restructuring of the archaic welfare system. Very simply, the proposal would guarantee every American a minimum income of $31 a month (Mississippi pays indigents $8.50); 17 states now give less. Bonuses would be given for working, so that no one would be penalized, as at present, for earning extra money. At the same time, all poor families would be given more generous allotments of food stamps. Added cost: $3 billion to $4.5 billion in the federal welfare bill.

In one stroke, the Government's proposals would both raise the living standards of many poor people, particularly in the South, and reduce the gap between generous and ungenerous states. The disparity, already serious, became crucial last week when the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional state residency requirements for welfare. Unless the Federal Government does something--and soon--the more lenient states may attract many more welfare applicants in search of higher benefits, compounding the troubles in the ghettos and adding to the cities' already intolerable financial burdens.

While he is temperamentally opposed to the idea of the guaranteed annual wage--his welfare proposal would merely raise the minimum welfare floor--Finch has set aside $9 million in the new budget, more than double the sum proposed by Johnson, to test various income-supplement schemes. In the meantime, proposed revisions in the welfare system go at least partway toward a guaranteed-income scheme. No one in either party disputes that the welfare system, a cycle of Dickensian ignominy in 20th century America, demands radical solutions. Benefits vary greatly from state to state, city to city, and welfare recipients are frequently subjected to demeaning harassment. Most insane of all, those who could take jobs are often discouraged by rules that require working recipients, in effect, to hand their earnings over to the local welfare agency. Finch is keenly aware of the problem, and the new proposal encourages, rather than discourages, industriousness.

sb EDUCATION. On the most controversial topic affecting his office, campus disorders, Finch has ignored Nixon's campaign rhetoric. Though the Government can take punitive action, cutting off federal funds from colleges affected by disruption and from student dissenters themselves, Finch argues that the universities should be given the widest possible latitude. Repressive federal action, he says, would endanger academic freedom and harm the vast majority of students who have never even thought of joining the S.D.S. He has campaigned energetically against half a dozen repressive bills pending in Congress. "In all truth," he told a congressional committee, "many academic institutions have brought much of it on themselves. They have not always responded to the clear need of any viable institution for constant self-examination and self-renewal. In attempting to serve many masters--Government and industry among them--they have tended to serve none of them well."

Many Southerners voted for Richard Nixon primarily because they thought that he would reverse or at least slow down the process of school desegregation. While Finch treated the matter delicately at first, and with galling ambiguity, his commitment to integration was never really in doubt. His position is now clear enough, and Southerners who expected a change are disappointed.

In education, as in many other areas, Finch usually eludes the conservative or liberal label. Sometimes he sounds almost like Paul Goodman, the iconoclastic critic (Growing Up Absurd) of higher education. "I want to challenge our educational institutions in a catalytic way," he says. "They are operating essentially the same way they operated 100 years ago. I want to shake them up." One of the most important alterations he made in the Johnson budget was to add $25 million for experimental education, enough to fund 15 to 20 projects. "The name of the game is learning, not teaching," says Ed Meade, a high-ranking HEW consultant on loan from the Ford Foundation. "Our focus is going to be to find out how kids learn."

For the later school years, Finch favors faster and more comprehensive development of two-year community colleges, principally because they offer alternatives to the traditional four-year academic course. The Government, Finch believes, should work far harder to give its citizens wider choices, in education and every other field. "American education," he told a congressional committee, "has become a single mechanism, its professors and students interchangeable parts. Under these circumstances, even student riots are monotonously, repellently alike."

sb HEALTH. Finch wants to hold down medical costs by, among other things, making sure that Medicaid payments are no higher than those for Blue Shield. Indicative of his concern is his choice of Dr. John Knowles, director of Massachusetts General Hospital, to be Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs. A proponent of such cost-saving schemes as group medical practice, Knowles has aroused the heated opposition of the ultraconservative American Medical Association and its Senate ally, Everett Dirksen. The G.O.P. minority leader says that he will block the nomination if it is sent to the Senate. Finch will not back down, and the matter rests on the President's desk. If Nixon stays above the battle, it will suggest to many--rightly or wrongly--that the A.M.A. will have considerable influence over health policy, effectively ruling out any significant innovations.

In other areas concerning health, Finch has a free hand. Last week, as guardian of the nation's food, he appointed a commission to investigate the ecological effects of pesticides; he has meanwhile banned DDT-contaminated fish from interstate commerce. "I am very apprehensive about the situation," Finch declared. "Our present estimates are that each American has an average of twelve parts per million of DDT in the fatty tissue." While his department is only one of several concerned with ecology, Finch has been a leader in expressing concern. "The ecological sequence is just frightening," he says, discussing pesticides. "It drives you right out of your mind." A heavy smoker, he has nonetheless publicly supported the stand taken by the Federal Communications Commission against cigarette ads on TV: "I feel very strongly about those miserable commercials."

Since he considers Viet Nam and the battle against inflation his first priorities, Nixon has been reluctant to allot more than token funds this year to new departures. Even if it is approved, the new welfare scheme will not take effect until the summer of 1971. Some early benefits for the poor and the cities are, however, being planned. One was embodied in the tax proposals the President sent to Congress last week. Establishment of a "lowincome allowance" would entirely exempt about 2,000,000 families from the federal income tax, giving them, in effect, a subsidy of $700 million a year.

Another important tax measure, still under study in the White House, would use tax credits to induce business to invest in the ghetto. As a concept, it makes considerable sense. It will have to be very carefully drawn, however, to ensure that the slums receive the full benefits intended. Another Nixon recommendation--that the Federal Government share part of its revenues with local governments--could have an immense impact on the problems of the cities.

A Spate of Legislation

The details, not to mention the sums, are all-important. If a good share of the money were transmitted directly to the overburdened cities, the gains would be instantaneous. If it were funneled through the state governments, it would probably only raise false expectations. The states, dominated by rural and suburban interests, are unsympathetic to the urban crisis and would, without question, siphon off most of the funds before they could reach city hall.

The main efforts of the Nixon Administration so far have been directed toward the review and systematization of existing programs. "We've got a spate of legislation on the books," says Finch. "Now we've got to rationalize it." Whereas Lyndon Johnson would sometimes propose legislation that he knew would get nowhere--just so Congress and the country would begin thinking about it--Richard Nixon is careful to suggest only bills that he thinks have a good chance of passage. Whereas Johnson would sometimes ask for programs that the bureaucracy was not prepared to administer--if only because he knew that he might not get them later--the new Administration is determined not to recommend anything that cannot be well managed from the start.

To that end, it has set up an Urban Affairs Council, which, like the National Security Council in foreign affairs, is empowered to coordinate the domestic programs and give an interdepartmental airing to problems that cut across bureaucratic jurisdictions. Often in the past, the various agencies were so busy fighting one another that they hardly had time to concern themselves with poverty or urban decay. To bring them closer together at the local level as well as in Washington, the Administration has reorganized field offices of five key divisions--HEW, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Labor Department, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Small Business Administration--so that they will all have mutual boundaries and common regional headquarters.

In the Labor Department, Secretary George Shultz, one of the ablest of Nixon's appointees, has combined job-training programs and the employment service, on the logical assumption that the two should be coordinated so that people will be trained for jobs that are available. Labor has taken over OEO's Job Corps. The Interior Department is working on a major reshuffling of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and will probably transfer it to HEW or OEO. Interior Secretary Walter Hickel believes Interior should concern itself primarily with natural resources, and let one of the other departments take on an agency that is committed to people.

In contrast with the Eisenhower Administration during its early days, when some programs were changed simply to give them a Republican stamp, the Nixon people have been remarkably undogmatic and, for the most part, have examined Democratic commitments with nonpartisan objectivity. The Model Cities program has not only been retained, but has also won high praise as the kind of decentralized operation that the Nixonites want. Federal aid to education, which Republicans opposed for years, is now sacrosanct. OEO will stay in business, though some of its branches, such as the Head Start program, will be shifted to other agencies. Among Johnson's innovations, only the Job Corps has felt the full brunt of the ax, and even that was cut back by no more than a third. The Republicans can be more than a little pompous in praising their organizational abilities, but if they can put the Johnson legislation--particularly HEW's new programs--in order they will have accomplished a great deal.

Pragmatic Theme

Already Finch has accomplished something in his own department: he has made quite clear that he is in charge. Like the Defense Department before Robert McNamara, HEW has a habit of slipping away from its bosses. So far, Finch, who hitherto had held no administrative post, seems to be on top. "There are two ways you can run this department," says Comptroller Jim Kelly, HEW's highest-ranking civil servant. "You can come in and leave the minor barons to run their own show, or you can try to shape their outlooks and decisions. Finch has come in with the idea of taking over."

No one has defined the Administration's overall approach more plainly and precisely than Finch. "As far as I'm concerned," he told TIME Correspondent Marvin Zim, "our theme is going to be pragmatism. The urban crisis means different things to different people. The time has come to start de-escalating the rhetoric and to start thinking about how to solve it. Since we weren't elected by the big cities, we can start with a new kind of candor. We don't have to kid ourselves about political obligations."

While he has accepted the Government's responsibility for society's problems, Finch, as a card-carrying Republican, believes in a greater role for individuals and nongovernmental agencies. "In the middle third of this century," he says, "social problems were looked upon as the exclusive province of the Federal Government. In the final third, we are going to have to mobilize resources far beyond mere federal dollars if we're going to deal effectively with those problems. We're going to have to engage a full cross section of the entire private or nongovernmental sector, individuals, institutions and other groupings alike. I think the Republican Party is far more likely to achieve that than the Democratic."

Absolutely Sweet

In outlook more than in anything he has planned or done in his short tenure, Finch gives promise of being a good, perhaps even a great general in domestic battle. On the surface he is super-ordinary, the all-American boy grown up. Blond, blue-eyed, ruggedly good-looking at six feet, he has been an Eagle Scout, prizewinning college debater, Marine officer. He is a devoted father of four (three girls, 18, 13 and 11, and a boy, 15) and the husband of his college sweetheart.

"Bob doesn't have any enemies," says one of the President's aides. "He's just too nice a guy. He walks into the room, and you just instantly like him. Even people who disagree with him--and I'm one--think he's a charming character." There was reason enough to believe that he and Pat Moynihan, head of the President's Council for Urban Affairs, would fight for dominance in the domestic sphere. Both extremely strong-willed men, they have instead developed a close rapport. "Bob Finch," says Moynihan, his Irish speaking, "is an absolutely sweet man."

Born in Tempe, Ariz., a little agricultural town south of Phoenix, Finch was introduced early to political life by his father, a cotton farmer and one of a handful of Republicans in the state legislature. Three bad harvests in a row forced a move across the state line, and in 1930 Robert Finch Sr. took a job as a sales manager in San Francisco. Two years later, the family transferred to Southern California, where his son has lived ever since. Young Bob was deeply influenced by his father, and when he died of cancer in 1941, Finch struck out almost fanatically to fill the void in his life. Emulating his father, Bob became a fervent campus politician at Inglewood High, winning his junior and senior class presidencies, and later at Occidental College, where he organized a Republican club. No one doubted that he would make politics his career.

At 17, he joined the Marine Corps, which sent him to nearby Occidental under the officer-training V12 program. As the man of the family and rather awed by that responsibility, he dispensed spine-stiffening advice to his twelve-yearold sister, now Mrs. Kenneth Schechter. "You know, Sue," he wrote once, "I have been here about two weeks, and already it's quite obvious which are leaders and which are those of poor caliber. The leaders, the ones that are respected, are those that have a fine background, such as we have (you and I). But more important, they have lived and do live a life of which they can be proud. It has helped me immensely to listen to Mother (your conscience), pray often, and think what Dad would say."

At Occidental, his wife Carol, two years his senior, remembers him as a strait-laced type who neither drank nor smoked--and once wrote a poem urging her to give up cigarettes. She did--only to see him succumb. Until he took his present job, where he feels he has to set an example, he was smoking three packs a day.

After a stint at the Quantico Marine base--he trained as a platoon leader for an invasion of Japan--Finch returned to Occidental. He became student-body president, and married Carol, who had worn his fraternity pin for two years. Even then, recalls classmate Don Muchmore, the California pollster, "he was a practically invincible campaigner because he was--and still is--curious about people and he always wanted to know why they do what they do. The why, in Bob's thinking, has always been as important as the how, and perhaps more so."

During his senior year, Finch plunged into the successful congressional campaign of Norris Poulson, later mayor of Los Angeles. Only 21, he went to Washington as Poulson's executive secretary, and soon struck up an acquaintance with another freshman California Congressman down the hall. At the end of the day, Nixon and Finch would talk politics--"war games," in Finch's words--and found that they generally agreed. For Finch, 13 years Nixon's junior, it was, as he recollects, "all very flattering." On Nixon's urging, Finch returned to California two years later to get a law degree from the University of Southern California. Against Nixon's advice, he decided, at 26, to challenge veteran Congressman Cecil King in a strongly Democratic district. Two years later, he tried and lost again. In 1962, he returned Nixon the favor, advising him against his disastrous run for the California governorship. For once, he stayed out of a Nixon campaign.

With three U.S.C. classmates, Finch formed the law firm of Finch, Bell, Duitsman & Jekel in Inglewood. They were no overnight success. Bell had to moonlight at a dietetic-ice-cream factory; Duitsman worked in the post office; Jekel was a scenic artist at MGM; Finch, who had been called back to the Marine Corps by the Korean War, commuted between Los Angeles and Camp Pendleton, 75 miles distant. However, his congressional campaigns had not been entirely wasted. The publicity brought his fledgling firm more and more work, and by all accounts he was an excellent lawyer. The law, however, was not Finch's metier.

The Campaigns Begin

After two years as chairman of the Los Angeles County Republican Committee--a big post for a man in his early 30s--he was invited to Washington by Nixon in 1958 to handle the then Vice President's bid for the 1960 presidential nomination. That year he became Nixon's campaign director. Many observers of that contest maintain that if Nixon had not persisted in meddling with every detail of the campaign--an unfortunate tendency he learned to master in 1968--he would have become President eight years sooner.

In 1964, Finch shepherded George Murphy through his victorious senatorial campaign. Two years later, in 1966, he won his own election as Lieutenant Governor of California, after what then-Aide William Callender calls a "slide-rule precision campaign that for timing, vigor, and calculation was classic." Finch polled the biggest majority any California Republican had ever achieved in a statewide race, and 92,000 more votes than Ronald Reagan received for Governor. As the returns piled up for his first political victory since college, Finch cried: "How sweet it is! How sweet it is!"

The Political Poet

The Lieutenant Governor was almost immediately at odds with Reagan and his retinue, who resented Finch's independence and his closeness to Nixon. "I'm sure," Finch once remarked, "that some of them think I go home and get on the phone with Dick every night." Finch bitterly opposed cuts in aid to mental hospitals, and initiated legislation to set up a state Department of Human Resources Development, pulling together such social-service functions as job training and the poverty program. As an ex officio member of the University of California's board of regents, he frequently angered the Governor by moderating Reagan's often simplistic, sometimes vindictive attitude toward the strife-ridden university.

Reagan should not have expected a rubber stamp. Even during the campaign, Finch had demonstrated his independence. He opposed, for example, the vote-catching anti-pornography legislation that Reagan vigorously supported. "Finch has adroitly managed to establish an aura of independence without really differing consequentially," said Assembly Democratic Leader Jesse Unruh, with a trace of admiration. "And that takes some doing."

During last year's campaign, Finch was almost constantly at Nixon's side, providing counsel on every key decision. The President's admiration for Finch's political acumen is almost unbounded, and he sometimes refers to him as a "political poet."

The close relationship has not changed since Inauguration, and Nixon still calls on Finch for comment on almost any subject that comes across his desk, from the ABM to the downed Korean spy plane and Viet Nam. Finch, characteristically, refuses to tell what either he or the President says. That is one of his strongest ties: the President trusts him totally. "The President knows that when he talks to Finch," says White House Aide Hess, "he's talking to someone who has his best interests at heart." Of all the Cabinet members who telephone the oval office, only two--Finch and Attorney General John Mitchell, who also has close links with Nixon--are answered immediately. The same cannot be said for even the Secretary of State or Defense. It is too early to predict with any certainty, but it is more than possible that Finch will assume the wide-ranging role that Robert Kennedy had in his brother's Administration. It would be surprising if Nixon did not share his burdens with Finch, who is in many ways like a younger brother to the President.

Still, Nixon may not be able to give Finch both the power and the money he needs to become a truly successful Secretary of HEW. He has allowed him to pick almost all of his chief assistants, some of whom would seem more at ease in a Democratic or a Rockefeller Republican Administration. John Veneman, his Under Secretary, has al ways been associated with the liberal wing of California's G.O.P. and was a Rockefeller supporter in 1964. Lewis Butler, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, organized the California Republican League, a group primarily concerned with urban problems.

Dr. James Allen, the incoming Assistant Secretary for Education, was Nelson Rockefeller's education commissioner in Albany and, according to former HEW Secretary John Gardner, the best state education director in the country.

James Farmer, a former national director of CORE, is Assistant Secretary for Administration, and Leon Panetta, a tough civil rights activist, is in charge of the Office for Civil Rights. Thus far, however, Nixon has not backed Finch on the politically delicate appointment of Dr. Knowles as Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs, a matter of considerable importance.

The Two Camps

For the immediate future, Finch will be sorely pinched for funds. The new regime can argue fairly convincingly that no more money is available this year for domestic programs--and even that a period of consolidation will prove beneficial. The showdown will come when Viet Nam spending diminishes. Nixon will then be confronted with demands by the military for hugely expensive new weapons systems. On the other hand, he will have to answer pleas for fiscal economy from men of weight in a conservative coalition. The cities--and Bob Finch--may get lost in between. Sooner or later, Finch will have to make the choices that he was not really confronted with this year. Already the lines are visible within the Nixon Administration. In one camp--the liberal, relatively free-spending one--are Finch, Moynihan, Shultz and George Romney, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. On the conservative, economy-minded side are Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, Bryce Harlow, a presidential assistant with a wide-ranging mandate, and, perhaps the most important, Arthur Burns, counselor to the President and a man of considerable influence within the Administration.

In three months, Finch has already angered some, just as Wilbur Cohen predicted he would. Whatever he says or does, he will anger many more in the next three years. To many liberals and moderates, however, he is the man of promise. Says Hugh Sidey, TIME'S Washington bureau chief, "Robert Finch is what everybody hopes this Administration will be. He is young in thought, liberal in tone, concerned in manner, and vigorous in movement. On the home front, he stands so far as the most inspiring, the most knowing, and the most caring figure in the Administration." HEW demands all those qualities and more. Any man who can use them even halfway successfully will play a special role in shaping the quality of American life.

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