Minister Without Portfolio

Friday, Feb. 07, 1969

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Arthur Frank Burns was chairman of Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers when he first met Richard Nixon in 1953. Burns made no secret of his admiration for the then Vice President. In March of 1960, after he had returned to his old professorial post at Columbia University, Burns went down to Washington to alert Nixon to his own reading of the economy—based on his knowledge as a top expert on the business cycle. His warning: a recession was under way, and would reach its nadir in October, just before the presidential elections. "Unfortunately," Nixon later wrote in Six Crises, "Arthur Burns turned out to be a good prophet. The bottom of the 1960 dip did come in October. All the speeches, television broadcasts and precinct work in the world could not counteract that one hard fact."

Their mutual respect has grown ever since, and now Nixon has given Burns, 64, a job without peer or precedent on the White House staff. As "Counsellor to the President," he will be the only Nixon staffer with Cabinet rank, assuming broad responsibility for shaping the President's legislative program. Burns' mandate reaches into every cranny of domestic policy. He describes the job as an American equivalent of the European minister without portfolio: that is, a top-ranking government official liberated from the bureaucratic burdens of a specific departmental command.

Didactic Evenness. Taking over the reports of Nixon's 21 post-election task forces, Burns prepared a fat book analyzing their recommendations. He turned in his summary the day after the new President took office. "Nixon was eager to get the machinery started so he could move ahead a little faster once he assumed the reins of government," Burns explains. His next most urgent task is to frame the first proposals that will be sent from the White House up to Capitol Hill for congressional action. In large measure, Burns could thus set the tone of the Nixon presidency.

The responsibility is well placed, for Burns is known as a trenchant economic analyst and a man of formidable composure. His powers of concentration are legendary, his manner ineradicably professorial. His pewter grey hair is parted down the middle. His brown eyes squint slightly through rimless glasses. His voice is somewhat reedy, worn to didactic evenness by 40 years of lecturing. "I regard myself primarily as a scholar interested in government," he says, teeth clenching one of the hundred or more pipes he owns.

Few Clues. Politically, Burns characterizes himself as "a moderate Republican," though he was once registered as a Democrat in New York City in order to vote in important primaries. His role on the CEA was essentially apolitical; while he was deeply involved in policymaking, he remained in the background as a confidential adviser to Eisenhower. He is unlikely to be much more visible in his new post.