Post midterm depression, Nixon fails to get his original treasury secretary, David Kennedy, to resign. Nixon apportioned blame to Kennedy and the rest of his economic team for the political losses Nixon had just suffered. They were “gradualists,” content with responsible tinkering around the edges of monetary and fiscal policy. “They just don’t get in and fight,” Nixon complained to Haldeman. Nixon had by then become convinced that one of the reasons he had to serve a full eight years was because he grasped what was true in the intimations of the apocalypticists on the bestseller lists: the imminence of America’s decline as the world’s number one power. He believed Nixon, and only Nixon, in a second term, safely removed from the requirement of ever winning another election, could cushion the blow by teaching Americans to live within limits. The conclusion he drew from this was paradoxical and astonishing: he would have to win the election by doing whatever he had to do to make the economy appear to boom in the run-up to the 1972 elections, no matter the longer-term consequences of the techniques it took to do it. The problem was cautious, fiscally conservative economic advisers such as Kennedy, who refused to make fiscal decisions for political reasons—just like Dwight D. Eisenhower’s in 1958, who had cooled off the economy and cost him, Richard Nixon was convinced, the 1960 presidential election. Bretton Woods was going to go.