Meet the McCainiacs: Fred Malek, Jew Counter

Meet the McCainiacs: Fred Malek, Jew Counter
by Dallasdoc

Sun Apr 13, 2008 at 06:15:20 AM PDT

Looking at John McCain's campaign figures, it becomes apparent that McCain aspires to be another Ronald Reagan: a figurehead for the plutocrats who run his party. Their backgrounds show us what kind of president McCain would be. Meet Fred Malek, Nixon Administration alumnus and one of McCain's National Finance Committee Co-chairs for the past year.

Tim Noah at Slate recalled a citation about Malek from Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days:

summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The "cabal," Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau's methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

Jew counting was hardly Malek's only service for Nixon, but it did leave a particularly bitter aftertaste. Malek's services for Nixon, in fact, have a strangely contemporary flavor.

Marc Fisher, WaPo columnist, heard from one of the identified Jews years later and interviewed him:

Long since retired, the man told me the story of what it was like to be singled out by the White House staff as a Jew. "It was something I never could have imagined in this country," the man said. "It felt dirty. It felt like something--and I hate to use this comparison--it felt like Nazi Germany." Two of the Jews named on Malek's list were demoted to less important posts in the agency. All of the people on the list, this man said, felt demeaned by their own government, their own country.

Malek readily admitted to Fisher that he had done Nixon's bidding, though he claimed he had to be asked several times, and provided the names of some of his best Jewish friends who would vouch that he was no anti-Semite. And yet...

Malek described the incident to me as a youthful mistake, a failure to stand up against what he knew was wrong.... But when I asked Malek whether he had thought back then about defying the president, resigning from office, or publicly denouncing Nixon for his bigotry, the financier said that he had never seriously considered any such course of action.

Years after, the story came back to bite Malek when George H.W. Bush named Malek deputy chairman of the RNC. Woodward and Walter Pincus revived the story in the WaPo, and Malek was forced to resign. Bush still found Malek useful, however. He ran the 1988 Republican convention, organized the 1990 G7 economic summit, and was Bush senior's campaign manager in his losing 1992 re-election attempt. The Jew counting story also played a role in Malek's failure to purchase the Washington Nationals baseball team in 2005, so it has hardly been forgotten in Washington.

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Counting Jews was not the only dubious enterprise Malek pursued for Nixon, however. WaPo columnist Colbert King recalls Malek's promulgation of a responsiveness program, which King described as "a scheme designed, organized and implemented by Malek in 1972 to politicize the federal government in support of Nixon's reelection." King himself recalls his youthful experience in Nixon's Health, Education and Welfare Department, where one of the first pieces of advice he got was this:

Keep out of the way of deputy undersecretary for management Fred Malek. "Hatchet man" was the sobriquet most often applied to him because of his alleged ruthlessness in paring the workforce and ousting those deemed disloyal to the Nixon administration.

The purpose of the program, which was extensively investigated by the Senate Watergate Committee was this:

the program was aimed at influencing decisions concerning government "grants, contracts, loans, subsidies, procurement and construction projects," decisions regarding "legal and regulatory actions," and even personnel decisions that affected protected "career positions" -- all to advance Nixon's reelection. [It] also called for channeling federal grants and loan money to blacks who would support Nixon's reelection efforts and, conversely, away from minorities who were considered administration foes.

Malek, like all good Nixon flying monkeys, knew that the boss was to be shielded from blame for programs like this.

Malek wanted the program to be falsely structured so that Nixon and the White House would be dissociated from it in the event of a leak.
" No written communications from the White House to the Departments -- all information about the program would be transmitted verbally . . . documents prepared would not indicate White House involvement in any way."

Malek's program and loyalty earned him a deputy chairmanship in Nixon's infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). However the program, with its surprisingly contemporary flavor, was noted by the Senate Watergate Committee with disapproval. Again Malek's history came back to bite him when Reagan unsuccessfully named him a governor of the US Postal Service. In the Senate hearings, even Republicans were scornful. John Danforth:

"My understanding of the responsiveness program, whether it was legal or illegal ... is that it was wrong, just plain wrong. We know what we mean by responsiveness programs, by misuse of a public trust, by using a government office in order to win a political campaign: That was true of the Nixon administration, it was true of the Watergate era, it was true of the responsiveness program, you admit that it was true, you admit that it was wrong . . . you regret it and you will never do it again. . . . Am I wrong or right?"

Fred Malek: "You are absolutely right, senator."

Carl Levin was similarly uncomplimentary:

"Unethical, immoral and improper" was the way Levin described Malek's role, adding that Malek had "spearheaded a calculated, systematic effort to sell government favors to the highest bidder in the Nixon reelection campaign and to punish low bidders or the nonbidders."

Almost in passing, King notes in the same column that Malek had another dirty deed on his hands in his Nixon years:

The Post reported that in 1971 Malek had ordered the FBI to conduct an investigation of then-veteran CBS correspondent and Nixon critic Daniel Schorr.

To be fair, it should also be noted that Fred Malek is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran (airborne army ranger), and a financier who is chairman of Thayer Capital Partners, which he founded. However, he was also a deputy director of OMB under Nixon, where he wrote in a briefing paper:

All major grants and construction decisions for the next fiscal year were reviewed prior to the finalization of the budgets to ensure to the extent possible they impacted on politically beneficial areas.

Fred Malek is one more member of the Nixon political-criminal class who exists under the surface of Republican politics, and who provides one of the many connections between the Republican party and the big-business ruling class. His presence in a high position in John McCain's campaign has gone almost unnoticed except in a few corners of the left-wing press and blogosphere. Yet Fred Malek is as clear an indication as any you can find that President McCain would be just one more empty-suit figurehead, standing in for the grey-suited plutocrats who use the Republican party to run the country for their own benefit.