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How much of this was campaign oratory and how much a blueprint for a Nixon Administration remains to be seen. On Viet Nam, Nixon has promised to provide "fresh ideas and new men and new leadership" to end the war. He prides himself on his grasp of foreign policy and is expected to act pretty much as his own Secretary of State— after a thoroughgoing shakedown at Foggy Bottom. According to his staff, he will increase Government spending from the current annual level of $185 billion to $220 billion by the end of his four-year Administration. Defense spending would increase by $10 billion (to $87 billion), notwithstanding an anticipated halving of Viet Nam expenditures from the current $30 billion annual level. The extra funds would be used to finance a volunteer army and costly new weapons systems.
Nondefense spending would rise by $26 billion, with sizable increases projected for social security and Medicare but not for any sweeping new domestic programs. All this could be financed, he has suggested, by growing prosperity and resulting higher tax income. Domestically, Nixon favors greater emphasis on private and local efforts to resuscitate the nation's blighted cities and ailing rural regions. He has advocated a mixture of "black capitalism," private investment, tax credits and Government loans to rebuild the ghettos. He emphasizes a similar dispersal of power away from the Federal Government in tackling poverty.
In the law-and-order field, he promised to increase spending for police training and equipment, emphasized that "if the conviction rate were doubled in this country, it would do more to eliminate crime than quadrupling of the funds for any governmental war on poverty." He also promised to appoint a new Attorney General who would fight crime with the "kind of aggressive leadership that Ulysses S. Grant brought to the flagging Northern cause in the Civil War," and hinted that his Supreme Court appointees would place less emphasis on the rights of criminal defendants than has the Warren Court. An Activist View
Nixon will bring to the office undeniable gifts as an organizer and as a recruiter of top-notch talent. He has a valuable, no-nonsense appreciation of the presidency as a job that requires the self-discipline of what he calls a spartan life. Though he spent eight years under a man who was wary of the powers of the office, he declared in a speech on the presidency—one of his best—on Sept. 19: "The days of a passive presidency belong to a simpler past. The next President must take an activist view of his office. He must articulate the nation's values, define its goals and marshal its will."