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The present director is Kenneth R. Cole Jr., 35, who this week is being promoted to Assistant to the President, the title that Ehrlichman once had. Although an earnest and competent aide, Cole has little of his predecessor's bulldog force of personality or, more important, his influence with the President.
Aides who have been studying the murky and shifting power game in the White House expect that Cole's territory will be infiltrated by Roy Ash and his Office of Management and Budget, which has a staff of 428 economists, lawyers and planners. Ash already has an office near the President's in the small West Wing of the White House; Cole is determined to get one.
Ash also has a valuable asset in Fred Malek, his deputy. A power in the White House on his own, Malek is an experienced, savvy and tough operator. For three years Malek was Haldeman's agent—some would say hatchet man —assigned to straightening out messy situations in the Executive departments. After the 1972 election, Malek helped to revamp the Nixon Administration, and now has the prime staff responsibility for pulling together the new budget. While conceding that the OMB is basically stronger than the Domestic Council, Malek says: "It's not in the President's interest to overrun them. We try to work with them as a team."
Little Contact. The outcome of any power struggle between Cole and Ash will depend upon who has most access to the Oval Office. And President Nixon has shown that he wants very little contact with his aides, except Haig and Ziegler. Working on the budget at San Clemente, Nixon asked Haig to put a call through to Ash one day. The discussion lasted for nearly an hour. Afterward, the Wall Street Journal asked Ash if he had actually talked to the President.
"Well," Ash replied, "he and Al [Haig] had just talked, and then Al had talked to me, Al talked to him, Al talked to me again. So Al was working with him on subject matter, and I was talking to Al ... In fact, I talked to Al, I guess, three times, interspersed between ... where he was talking to the President on the issues." Why had not the President simply talked to Ash directly? "Maybe it's less convenient to him than talking to Al," suggested Ash. "But certainly he was part of the discussion."
With the President governing by remote control, the strong men in the Administration are bound to have more freedom to act on their own: Kissinger, Simon, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and Treasury Secretary George Shultz, who has the top responsibility for the economy. Ironically, this diffusion of power is just what the President's critics wanted when they were protesting that a highly centralized White House staff was exerting too much influence in the affairs of the departments. But that was long ago, long before the eruption of Watergate changed everything for Richard Nixon.