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| | dividuals [committed to] social reform and a mechanism for the amelioration of social ills. There were, finally, also persons of substantial character and high ethical standards who led an administration remarkably free of the scandal, personal pettiness, and adventurism which, unfortunately, came to characterize the presidency that was to follow. (Ibid., 209)
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Nixon's personnel staff, determined to establish its own recruiting operation, spurned any guidance from LBJ's outgoing administration. Lack of institutional memory meant that they had to start from scratch and, being fragmented and disorganized, they did not do well, according to Macy et al. (1983).
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An early and fundamental problem was the president's personal indifference to and dissociation from the selection process. In this regard, he and Lyndon Johnson were polar opposites. Nixon rarely suggested possible candidates for vacant positions, consistently delegated final selection authority to his chief of staff, and almost never took the time to meet with his nominees before their names were sent to the Senate (Mackenzie 1981, 44). According to some of his personal aides, Nixon possessed a ''consuming desire" to master the government and its servants. It is ironic that Nixon's administration, so intent on controlling the government, was
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| | so poorly organized to do it. . . . Indeed, in some ways the personnel operation interfered with, rather than facilitated, the accomplishment of that objective. By keeping his distance from both the selection process and the nominees it produced, Nixon constrained the ability of his personnel staff to clarify the criteria he deemed most important and lost the opportunity to imbue his new appointees with his own order of priorities and objectives. In the long run, this course of action weakened his administration's efforts to "get control of the government." (Ibid., 45)
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The result of Nixon's delegation of authority was that the White House lost much of the initiative and had great difficulty centralizing appointments in a way that supported administration policy objectives.
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| | The combination of an inexperienced personnel staff, ambiguous selection criteria, presidential noninvolvement, conflicts with the departments, and an opposition Congress constituted a nest of trouble for the White House personnel operation. It was soon acknowledged both inside and outside the White House that the personnel function was dysfunctional. (Ibid., 46)
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