George W. Romney - Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

After the election, Nixon named Romney to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The president-elect made the announcement as part of a nationally televised presentation of his new cabinet on December 11, 1968. Nixon praised Romney for his "missionary zeal" and said that he would also be tasked with mobilizing volunteer organizations to fight poverty and disease within the United States. In actuality, Nixon distrusted Romney politically, and appointed him to a liberally-oriented, low-profile federal agency partly to appease Republican moderates and partly to reduce Romney's potential to challenge for the 1972 Republican presidential nomination.

Romney was confirmed by the Senate without opposition on January 20, 1969, the day of Nixon's inauguration, and was sworn into office on January 22, with Nixon at his side. Romney resigned as Governor of Michigan that same day, and was succeeded by Lieutenant Governor William G. Milliken. Milliken continued Romney's model of downplaying party label and ideology, and Republicans held onto the governorship for three more terms until 1983, though Michigan was one of the nation's most blue-collar states.

As secretary, Romney conducted the first reorganization of the department since its 1966 creation. His November 1969 plan brought programs with similar functions together under unified, policy-based administration at the Washington level, and created two new assistant secretary positions. At the same time, he increased the number of regional and area offices and decentralized program operations and locality-based decisions to them.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 mandated a federal commitment towards housing desegregation, and required HUD to orient its programs in this direction. Romney, filled with moral passion, wanted to address the widening economic and geographic gulf between whites and blacks by moving blacks out of inner-city ghettos into suburbs. Romney proposed an open housing scheme to facilitate desegregation, dubbed "Open Communities"; HUD planned it for many months without keeping Nixon informed.

When the open housing proposal became public, local reaction was often hostile. This included Warren, Michigan, a blue-collar suburb of Detroit where many blacks worked but could not live owing to the zoning practices, refusals, and intimidatory actions of white property owners, many of whom had come there from the city as part of white flight. HUD made Warren a prime target for Open Communities enforcement and threatened to halt all federal assistance to the town unless it took a series of actions to end racial discrimination there; town officials said progress was being made and that their citizens resented forced integration. Romney rejected this response, partly because when he was governor, Warren residents had thrown rocks and garbage and yelled obscenities for days at a biracial couple who moved into town. Now the secretary said, "The youth of this nation, the minorities of this nation, the discriminated of this nation are not going to wait for 'nature to take its course.' What is really at issue here is responsibility – moral responsibility."

Romney visited Warren in July 1970, and emphasized that affirmative action rather than forced integration was all that HUD was demanding, but the local populace was not satisfied and Romney was jeered as a police escort took him away from the meeting place. Nixon saw what happened in Warren and had no interest in the Open Communities policy in general, remarking to domestic adviser John Ehrlichman that, "This country is not ready at this time for either forcibly integrated housing or forcibly integrated education." Open Communities also conflicted with Nixon's use of the Southern strategy and his own views on race. Romney was forced to back down on Warren and release federal monies to them unconditionally.

When Black Jack, Missouri, subsequently resisted a HUD-sponsored plan for desegregated lower- and middle-income housing, Romney appealed to U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell for Justice Department intervention. In September 1970, Mitchell refused and Romney's plan collapsed. Under Romney, HUD did put into place stricter racial guidelines in relation to new public housing projects, but overall administration implementation of the Fair Housing Act was lacking. Some of the responsibility lay with Romney's inattentiveness to gaining political backing for the policy, including the failure to rally natural allies such as the NAACP. Salisbury State University historian Dean J. Kotlowski writes that, "No civil rights initiative developed on Nixon's watch was as sincerely devised or poorly executed as open communities."

Another of Romney's initiatives was "Operation Breakthrough", which was intended to increase the amount of housing available to the poor and which did have Nixon's initial support. Based on his automotive industry experience, Romney thought that the cost of housing could be significantly reduced if in-factory modular construction techniques were used. However, HUD officials saw it too as a means to spearhead desegregation; Romney said, "We've got to put an end to the idea of moving to suburban areas and living only among people of the same economic and social class". This aspect of the program brought about strong opposition at the local suburban level and lost support in the White House as well. Over half of HUD's research funds during this time were spent on Operation Breakthrough, and it was modestly successful in its building goals. It did not revolutionize home construction, and was phased out once Romney left HUD, but side effects of the program did lead to more modern and consistent building codes and to introduction of technological advances such as the smoke alarm. In any case, using conventional methods, HUD set records for the amount of construction of assisted housing for low- and moderate-income families. Toward the end of his term, Romney oversaw demolition of the infamous Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St. Louis.

Romney was largely outside the president's inner circle and had minimal influence within the Nixon administration. His intense, sometimes bombastic style of making bold advances and awkward pullbacks lacked adequate guile to succeed in Washington. Desegregation efforts in employment and education had more success than in housing during the Nixon administration, but HUD's many missions and unwieldy structure, which sometimes worked at cross-purposes, made it institutionally vulnerable to political attack. Romney also failed to understand or circumvent Nixon's use of Ehrlichman and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman as policy gatekeepers and the consequent de facto downgrading of cabinet officers. Romney was used to being listened to and making his own decisions, and annoyed Nixon by casually interrupting him at meetings; at one point, Nixon told Haldeman, "Just keep away from me." A statement by Romney that he would voluntarily reduce his salary to aid the federal budget was viewed by Nixon as an "ineffective grandstand play".

By early 1970, Nixon had decided he wanted Romney removed from his position. Nixon, who hated to fire people and was, as Ehrlichman later described, "notoriously inadept" at it, instead hatched a plot to get Romney to run in the 1970 U.S. Senate race in Michigan. Instead, George came up with the idea of his wife Lenore running, and she received the backing of some state Republicans. But there was resistance to the move and initial suspicion that her candidacy was just a stalking horse for keeping his options open. She barely survived a primary against a conservative opponent, then lost badly in the general election to incumbent Democrat Philip A. Hart. He then blamed others for her having entered the race, when he had been the major force behind it.

In late 1970, after opposition to Open Communities reached a peak, Nixon again decided that Romney should go. Still reluctant to dismiss him, Nixon tried to get Romney to resign by forcing him to capitulate on a series of policy issues. Romney surprised both Nixon and Haldeman by agreeing to back off his positions, and Nixon kept him as HUD secretary. Nixon remarked privately afterwards, " talks big but folds under pressure." Puzzled by Nixon's lack of apparent ideological consistency across different areas of the government, Romney told a friend, "I don't know what the president believes in. Maybe he doesn't believe in anything," an assessment shared by others both inside and outside the administration.

In spring 1972, a major scandal struck the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which since passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the creation of the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) had been responsible for helping the poor buy homes in inner-city areas via government-backed mortgages. This was financed by mortgage-backed securities, the first issues of which Romney had announced in 1970. A number of FHA employees, along with a number of real estate firms and lawyers, were indicted for a scheme in which the value of cheap inner city homes was inflated and sold using those government-backed mortgages to black buyers who could not really afford them, and the government was stuck for the bad loans when owners defaulted. FHA was under Romney's purview, and he conceded that HUD had been unprepared to deal with speculators and had not been alert to earlier signs of illegal activity. The FHA scandal gave Nixon the ability to shut down HUD's remaining desegregation efforts with little political risk; by January 1973, all federal housing funds had been frozen.

In August 1972, Nixon announced Romney would inspect Hurricane Agnes flood damage in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but neglected to tell Romney first. Much of the area lacked shelter six weeks after the storm, residents were angry, and Romney got into a three-way shouting match with Governor Milton J. Shapp and a local citizens' representative. Romney denounced Shapp's proposal that the federal government pay off the mortgages of victims as "unrealistic and demagogic", and the representative angrily responded to Romney, "You don't give a damn whether we live or die." The confrontation received wide media attention, damaging Romney's public reputation. Totally frustrated, Romney wanted to resign immediately, but Nixon, worried about the fallout to his 1972 re-election campaign, insisted that Romney stay on. Romney agreed, although he indicated to the press that he would leave eventually.

Romney finally did hand in his resignation on November 9, 1972, following Nixon's re-election. His departure was announced on November 27, 1972, as part of the initial wave of departures from Nixon's first-term cabinet. Romney said he was unhappy with presidential candidates who declined to address "the real issues" facing the nation for fear they would lose votes, and said he would form a new national citizens' organization that would attempt to enlighten the public on the most vital topics. He added that he would stay on as secretary until his successor could be appointed and confirmed, and did stay until Nixon's second inauguration on January 20, 1973. Upon his departure, Romney said he looked forward "with great enthusiasm" to his return to private life.

The Boston Globe later termed Romney's conflicts with Nixon a matter that "played out with Shakespearean drama". Despite all the setbacks and frustrations, University at Buffalo political scientist Charles M. Lamb concluded that Romney pressed harder to achieve suburban integration than any prominent federal official from the 1970s through the 1990s. In 2008, Lehman College sociology professor Christopher Bonastia assessed the Romney-era HUD as having come "surprisingly close to implementing unpopular antidiscrimination policies" but in the end was unable to bring about meaningful alterations in American segregation patterns, with no equivalent effort having happened since then or likely to in the foreseeable future.