On September 2, 1969, President Nixon held a short press conference at his San Clemente, California, home. The press conference was organized to push for a seemingly impossible task: postal reform. Standing to Nixon’s right, in a show of bipartisan support, was Lawrence O’Brien. Nixon and O’Brien did not agree on much. O’Brien was the consummate Democratic Party insider—he had run President Kennedy’s Senate and presidential campaigns; had served as a special assistant for congressional relations in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; had headed the Democratic National Committee in 1968; had overseen the Post Office Department as postmaster general under President Johnson; and had run Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential campaign—and a natural adversary for Nixon.
Yet on the issue of postal reform, Nixon and O’Brien agreed: Something had to be done. During his first term, President Nixon made postal reform a key priority. He sought to restructure the Post Office Department in a manner that would relax, if not entirely remove, political oversight and push postal service toward a more business-like footing. In an effort to build support for legislative reform, Nixon successfully prodded O’Brien to co-chair the Citizens Committee for Postal Reform, a newly formed lobbying organization dedicated to pursuing legislative change. Like Nixon, O’Brien supported overhauling the Post Office Department.
The San Clemente press conference was somewhat stilted. In his memoir, O’Brien recalls Nixon being uncertain as to whether he should call him “Larry” or “Mr. O’Brien” (he eventually settled on Larry). The press conference was designed to highlight the bipartisan support for reform, but the cause seemed doomed, or at least, unlikely to succeed. The Post Office Department was deeply entrenched in the day-to-day life of the nation and featured a bureaucracy made up of hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Reform was not a modest goal. As O’Brien wryly remarked during the press conference, “This bipartisan effort may continue forever.”
Yet, despite O’Brien’s skepticism, postal reform would indeed come to pass. The Postal Reorganization Act (PRA) of 1970 would transform the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service (USPS). The act kicked off a decade of infrastructure reorganization. Across seemingly all infrastructure sectors, political controls that had appeared stable gave way and were replaced with the logic of the market. O’Brien joined President Nixon for the ceremonial signing of the reorganization bill in August 1970. It was the second and last time O’Brien and Nixon would meet face-to-face. Their fates, however, would again intersect. In 1972 a watchman at the Watergate complex caught burglars breaking into O’Brien’s office. Agents working to reelect President Nixon had been tapping O’Brien’s phone at the Democratic National Committee headquarters (O’Brien was again serving as chairman for the Democratic National Committee). The ensuing scandal would eventually lead to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974.