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 protégé, 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.