4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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selective inattention
under Nixon. Other items added to the crisis: the disagreement
between Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller over aid to New
York City, the growing feeling nationally that Ford was stupid and
indecisive; and, perhaps (though there is no direct evidence), Ford’s
feeling that he was not the master of his own administration. The
redressive action, as described in the New York Times of Monday,
November 3, 1975 was typically dramatic:
President Ford has dismissed Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger
and William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, in a major
shuffling of his top national security posts. Administration officials
said that the President had also asked Secretary of State Henry A.
Kissinger to relinquish his post as national security adviser in the
White House, but to stay on as head of the State Department. White
House officials said that Mr. Schlesinger would probably be replaced
by the White House chief of staff, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and that Mr.
Colby’s likely successor would be George Bush, the present head of
the American liaison office in China.
This redressive action did not end the crisis, but led to further surprising
developments – as is often the case (“one thing leads to another”).
Rockefeller told Ford that he would not in any case be a candidate for
the vice presidency in 1976. And, in the Washington scheme of things,
this apparent resignation by the Vice President was probably a firing by
the President – the reversal of roles being a common face-saving device
in American politics. Or it might have meant that Rockefeller would
actively campaign against Ford for the Republican nomination. Finally,
the Secretary of Commerce resigned and was replaced by the one person
in the Nixon administration whose reputation was not only
untarnished but enhanced: Elliott Richardson, the man who – when his
Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was fired – resigned as Attorney
General. The reintegration phase of this social drama took some
time, as Ford established “his own” government in preparation for the
1976 elections.
The characteristic structure of this Turnerian four-phase operation is
that the breach exists for a long time, the critical corrective action is
sudden, even unpredictable because a precipitating event is often not