Office of Telecommunications Policy

After President Nixon took office in 1969, Clay T. Whitehead, Special Assistant to the President, pushed to establish an executive office dedicated to telecommunications policy. The White House Office of Telecommunications Policy (OTP) was established in 1970. In 1978, it was merged, along with the Commerce Department's Office of Telecommunications, into the newly created National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

The first director of the OTP was Clay T. Whitehead who served from 1970-1974. After Whitehead resigned, John M. Eger served as acting director from 1974 to 1976 until Thomas J. Houser was appointed OTP Director in 1976.

Under Whitehead's tenure, notable individuals who worked at OTP include Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who served as General Counsel, and C-SPAN founder and CEO Brian Lamb, who handled Congressional and press relations.

During Whitehead's tenure, the OTP worked to unfreeze and deregulate the cable industry and implement the "Open Skies" policy. "Open Skies" had emerged from months of study by the Domestic Satellite Policy Working Group, a group that in 1969, as Special Assistant to the President, Whitehead had suggested, organized, and headed. "Open Skies," announced as Executive Branch policy in a White House Press Conference in January, 1970 and approved by the FCC in June, 1972, functioned to privatize the satellite industry by allowing for any qualified company to launch a domestic communications satellite. "Open Skies" rejected the monopoly industry structure that applied in international communications.

The OTP was also responsible for Nixon Administration policy towards the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

OTP’s two major initiatives concerning cable included the 1971 Cable Copyright Compromise and the 1974 Cabinet Committee on Cable Communications Cable: Report to the President, or “The Whitehead Report.”

OTP took a strong interest in supporting cable’s development in part because Whitehead saw that “cable promises a revolutionary diversity and a fundamentally new system of communication.”

In 1971 and 1972, cable operators were blocked by copyright owners and broadcasters who demanded fees for distributing their programs. OTP facilitated a Cable Copyright Compromise that pacified cable opponents enough to permit some industry growth.

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