Bipartisan cabinets have mixed track record

In 1969, at a time when no other liberal Democrat would have dreamed of working for the newly elected Richard Nixon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard University sociologist and former Kennedy administration official, agreed to serve as his domestic policy counselor.

It wasn’t a Cabinet post, but it made news, because Moynihan defied his fellow Democrats by serving President Nixon, who most Democrats loathed.

Moynihan had a mixed record in the Nixon administration: His welfare reform plan failed in Congress, but he later did useful work as ambassador to India.

Another Democrat who worked for Nixon was former Texas governor John Connolly, whom Nixon appointed as secretary of the Treasury Department in 1970.

Connolly was an ardent advocate of the administration’s $300 million bailout for Lockheed Aircraft. In 1971 Nixon pondered replacing Vice President Spiro Agnew with Connolly as his running mate, but in the end bowed to Agnew’s popularity among Republicans.

Neither Moynihan nor Connolly were able to assuage liberal Democrats’ hatred of Nixon. Partisanship remained intense, and grew even more toxic after the Watergate scandal.

He liked Ike — and Kennedy too
In 1960, the newly elected John F. Kennedy picked Wall Street investment banker and Republican campaign contributor C. Douglas Dillon as his secretary of the treasury.

Dillon had served in Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s administration as ambassador to France and as a State Department official. He had contributed heavily to the presidential campaign of Nixon, the man Kennedy defeated in 1960.

Despite this, Kennedy admired Dillon, and he became one of the Democrat's most influential advisors.

But crossing party lines to pick a Cabinet member sometimes leads to an unhappy end.

In 1952, Eisenhower chose Martin Durkin of Chicago, head of the Journeyman Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, to be his labor secretary.

Durkin was the sole Democrat in a blue-chip Republican Cabinet. “Ike has picked a Cabinet of eight millionaires and one plumber,” said one columnist in the New Republic.

By trying to make labor law more friendly to union members, Durkin clashed with Eisenhower’s other appointees. When Ike rejected his proposals, Durkin quit after only nine months on the job.

Some ideological divides are just too big for bipartisanship to bridge.

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