A year later this Wednesday-morning quarterbacking seemed to have been forgotten. In a 2013 speech to small businessmen, Thomas Donahue, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, sounded like he was channeling Lewis Powell. He exhorted the audience to “defend and advance a free-enterprise system” whenever it “comes under attack” and to give politicians in Washington a piece of their minds. “It’s about time,” he thundered, “that our leaders in Washington start making the tough decisions that we pay them to make!”
Corporations had long used the revolving door between the corporate suite and government offices in Washington to shape policy by sending top executives to advise presidents, and offering corporate jobs to departing public officials. In 1953, for example, General Motors president Charles Erwin Wilson became Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. Wilson’s famous quote, “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa,” demonstrated the belief that there was no conflict between the interests of the country and of a corporation. Later, Ford president Robert McNamara left Detroit to become John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense.
What changed in the 1970s was the extent to which politics and business interests became entangled. In 1973, in an example that symbolized the revolving door, President Nixon appointed Earl Butz, then a director of Ralston Purina, a major company that produced food for people and animals, as Secretary of Agriculture, replacing Clifford Hardin, who then became head of Ralston Purina. Nixon, and later President Ford, gave the new Secretary Butz two explicitly political tasks: first, to help resuscitate a declining economy in order to win farm-state support for Nixon, and later, to bring down the rising cost of food to increase Gerald Ford’s popularity.