Mr. Malek Comes to Harvard

Two years ago, Harvard politicos would have hemmed and hawed and clawed at the turf on learning that Fred V. Malek, a reputed former hatchet man for the Nixon White House, was arriving in Cambridge to give an Institute of Politics seminar. Malek served from 1970 through 1972 as an aide to Nixon in charge of personnel management and later moved on to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) as deputy director after the Watergate break-in. During this time he organized and ran the Nixon "responsiveness program," which reputedly worked through Federal departments to dole out White House favors and punish White House enemies in legally questionable ways.

In the spring of 1974, Institute administrators made plans to bring another controversial Nixon aide, "communications chief" Clay T. Whitehead, to Cambridge, and the Institute's student advisory board made a huge fuss. But two years ago students were still morally outraged about the sordid revelations that a summer of Senate Watergate hearings had produced. This year, two weeks ago, when Malek arrived to conduct a study group called "Politics and Public Management," no one seemed overly anxious about, or even particularly aware of, Malek's past.

"I sort of expected to see this guy brandishing a meat cleaver and wearing a string of shrunken heads around his waist," Jim Hayden '77, the head of this year's student advisory board, says. The board knew all about Malek, of course--about his responsiveness program and his appearances before the Senate Watergate Committee's closed sessions--and they were conscious of the controversy Malek might arouse. "But we found Malek really isn't like we expected; he's very competent in management and makes a good impression," Hayden says. "We thought things would go all right--and as it turned out no one's really challenging him on Watergate."

Hildy Simmons, a member of Malek's study group and a Kennedy School of Government student, also says she knew about Malek and "responsiveness." So what did she think when she saw his name posted among the study group leaders? "I thought it was sort of amusing--peculiar. But I guess everybody's opinion has to be heard," she says. Besides, Simmons says that Malek leads a good study group.

Who, then, is Fred V. Malek? Was he indeed a hatchet man under H.R. Haldeman who devised schemes to illegally circumvent the Civil Service and other federal departments in rewarding Nixon's friends and punishing his enemies. Did he con the Ervin Committee when he denied having authorized a White House grantmanship proposal drawn up by his staff, which he himself admitted would have proved illegal if implemented? Let's call this dossier number one on Fred Malek.

However, according to dossier number two on Malek (prepared largely by Malek himself) he is at heart a can-do management expert who, he claims, spent only about one per cent of his time on "responsiveness" while at the White House and CREEP. Watergate was the last strand in a web that entrapped an efficiency-minded businessman and his brilliant ideas, according to this picture. Malek was, he points out, one of the few Nixon aides to avoid indictment. "I still don't think anything I did was illegal," he says.

James Hamilton, a southern lawyer who questioned Malek closely in Ervin Committee executive sessions as assistant majority counsel, knows the book on Malek as well as anyone. Hamilton says that all the suspicious information on Malek's role in the White House and "responsiveness" lies in the Senate Hearing reports.

The picture of Malek that emerges from the committee questioning is one of a shrewd operator who, although his involvement seems awfully suspect, managed unlike his colleagues to avoid any traceable connection to illegal activities.

Malek began to report to Haldeman on plans for a "responsiveness" program in 1971, about a year after he came to his post as White House personnel aide from a term as under-secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Malek made his intentions for "responsiveness" clear in a December 23, 1971 memo to Haldeman--through pressure from the White House he planned to use federal departments to provide political favors and exact punishment. In a section of a memo headed "Politicizing the Executive Branch," Malek wrote Haldeman:

As you know, we have already initiated programs to derive greater political benefit from grants, communications, and personnel. Also, as discussed above, we will soon be establishing firm White House control over the handling of key issues and constituent groups. These White House directed efforts will control the key Executive Branch operations having the highest potential political pay-off... We must establish management procedures to ensure that the Departments systematically identify opportunities and utilize resources for maximum political benefits.

And in the same memo, Malek suggested, "next, we will form a task force in each Department chaired by the Under-Secretary and containing the politically reliable Assistant Secretaries and sub-Agency heads."

Then, when Malek pushed this general plan harder with Haldeman in a memo early in 1972, naming names of the people he thought would "ride herd" on the White House efforts, Haldeman began to warn him to stay clean. "You should try to stay almost completely out of this except at very top level," Haldeman scribbled on the memo. He underlined Malek's suggestion that his staff members carry out "Patronage and Personnel" responsiveness action "with a minimal amount of direction" from Malek himself.

In the same memo, Malek, thinking big, suggested that Nixon might hold a cabinet meeting (possibly after the China trip, he said) to discuss the responsiveness program. Haldeman, however, tactfully rebuffed the zealous Malek from bringing his program too close to the Oval Office doorstep. "Don't worry about a Cabinet meeting," Haldeman wrote beside the suggestion.

Through the first stages of the program's implementation, Malek's name continued to appear on responsiveness up-dates to Haldeman. In one, he authored a special favor arranged for Sen. John Tower (D-Tex.), who was then pumping Texas oil money into the Nixon campaign:

Senator Tower's office requested that the $2.2 million migrant-worker-program grant be given to the pro-Administration Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council as opposed to the consortium of OEO CAP agencies. DOL has already announced that the OEO groups have the best proposal. If the Development Council were to receive the grant, there would be a significant plus for the Administration, as OEO's negative voice would be silenced, and the Council's positive feelings towards the Administration could be stressed. DOL has told Tower that the grant will be awarded to Tower's choice. Tower will confirm his decision this week.

Yet Malek kept all potentially incriminating evidence a comfortable distance from himself. At one point, Sen. Joseph Montoya (D-N.M.) pressed Malek about the potential illegality of a grantsmanship proposal coming out of his office. Malek admitted that the proposal was potentially illegal, but he insisted that a staff member wrote it and said he forgot whether Haldeman had ever seen the proposal:

If it was implemented in this way, it would [be illegal] but this was a paper prepared by a member of my staff in 1971. This is one where I do not remember whether it was ever submitted to Mr. Haldeman...I don't have anything in my files to indicate it in fact happened.

In a later stage in the questioning, when Hamilton and others bore down on him about a memo he issued to John Mitchell about grants and special contract agreements for black groups that would in return support the Nixon campaign, exactly where the memo came from again slipped Malek's mind. He said:

My testimony is that I do not recall...giving any directions concerning the raising of campaign contributions from black grants or contract receipts...It [the memo] does say "From Fred Malek to John Mitchell." I do not recall signing or sending or reading this particular memorandum...I do not recall.

The Watergate Committee concluded in its report that, while the responsiveness program strained the limits of legality in its treatment of grants and personnel hiring, there was no hard evidence to incriminate Malek himself. Malek will tell you today he feels no qualms about his government experience (he served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget after leaving CREEP) and that his only regret is that he was not able to implement the hard-nosed managerial programs that he envisioned in 1969 as a headstrong young HEW undersecretary.

"I left Washington disappointed--had high aims--but I am not disillusioned," Malek says now. "And if I had it all to do over, I'd go into politics, again. I think it's a fascinating experience."

Malek's clipped, matter-of-fact insistence that Watergate didn't effect him or his outlook much reflects the Malek of dossier number two: an arch-typical straight arrow who sped up an upwardly mobile path in the military and in business, and found that political realities cramped his style and ultimately dragged him down into a quagmire he says he didn't see forming.

After graduating from West Point in 1957 and serving in the Green Berets, Malek attended Harvard Business School. "I had the good judgment to pick Harvard and Harvard had the good judgment to pick me," Malek will tell you.

When he received his business degree, Malek bided his time working for a management consultant firm in Los Angeles while he shopped around on the side for a business of his own--a business in which he could, as a student said he put it in study group, "find true manhood and success" by being his own boss.

Malek found his wish come true in the form of a sagging tool manufacturing business in Orangeburg, South Carolina, called the Triangle Corporation. To this day Malek beams as he relates how he applied hard-nosed management techniques to turn a $1-million deficit into a $1-million profit in his few years in Orangeburg.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare by that time had its eye out for him, and when it asked him to "come aboard ship" in 1969 he floated his Triangle stock, putting some in a blind trust, and went north to Washington. He says he thought trying to effect efficient management in HEW would "turn me on, make my adrenalin flow." And when he was called to the White House, well, "they hadn't seen guys with my kind of stripe before," he says.

Since he left government, one might say Malek has wrung the maximum marginal return from his experience there. His selection as a study group leader, in fact, was based partly, Hayden says, on an article Malek published in the Fall 1972 Harvard Business Review called "Mr. Executive Goes to Washington." In the article, Malek says he will relate "the political and bureaucratic quicksands" that confront businessmen, and shows how "some former businessmen have avoided entrapment and carried out their programs relatively successfully."

Fifty-five people showed up at Malek's first study group to hear what he calls his "war stories." "There's definitely a demand for Malek here," Hayden says. "Hell, I mean whatever you say about Nixon you've got to admit he tried some new things."

So perhaps students today would rather hear Fred Malek than harrass him. Maybe the take-charge Malek of dossier number two fascinates them more than the controversial Malek of dossier number one. Even Hildy Simmons, who charges Malek with "selective memory lapses" about his White House role, says she guesses it's important "to know the enemy."