Trump was not the first American president to accuse the bearer of bad news of conspiring for the other side when he fired Erika McEntarfer from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on August 1.
When Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president in 1969, my uncle Harold Goldstein was the Assistant Commissioner of Manpower and Employment Statistics. He wrote in his memoirs (which I edited and self-published after his death in 2007) that Nixon was the only president he worked under in his 35 years at BLS who came around to meet government workers.
George Schulz, the Secretary of Labor, introduced him as the man in charge of the unemployment statistics. Nixon smiled as he shook Uncle Harold’s hand and said, “Keep them low!” Uncle Harold said he thought the president was kidding.
Whenever the unemployment rate went down slightly, the administration urged the BLS to tout the good news, but Uncle Harold asserted that these declines were not statistically significant. Finally, in July 1971, after another such dispute, Nixon ended the press conferences with BLS staff, and the task of reporting the unemployment rate was taken away from Harold.
Harold wrote in his memoir that Nixon was convinced that all civil servants were holdovers from Democratic administrations and were out to defeat him. He described, with a touch of pride, an incident described in Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman’s diaries. Nixon remarked to his cabinet, “Beneath you, you have a whole department full of vipers and they’ll strike because they want to beat us … For example: Goldstein at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a left-wing radical who hates us.”
Of his reassignment, he wrote: “I resigned. I was eligible for retirement, so I retired. Not much later, President Nixon resigned too in the midst of Watergate. So the government lost both the viper and the vipee.”
Uncle Harold knew when he wrote his memoirs that Nixon had also accused Harold and his colleague of being part of a “Jewish cabal” who were deliberately trying to make him look bad. When he wrote his memoirs, Harold chose not to mention the reference to the “Jewish cabal.”
This anti-Semitic slur became the more famous part of the story. But my best explanation for why Harold did not dwell on that is that to him the more outrageous part of what happened was the distrust in the rigorous work of a dedicated civil servant who had served Democrats and Republicans alike for 34 years.
In his ambiguous play on the word viper, Harold suggested who the real vipers are. Let’s hope that Trump’s use of such dictatorial and vindictive techniques will ultimately work out for him about as well as they worked out for Nixon.
Aviva Goldstein is the niece of Harold Goldstein and the editor of her uncle’s memoirs.
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