(FORTUNE Magazine) – We approach this item with mixed emotions, as it will require us to speak ill of our 37th President, a man we genuinely liked and admired and voted for at every opportunity. Your servant is in this fix because of one disastrous policy initiative undertaken by the Nixon Administration -- an initiative that has gone essentially unremarked in the avalanche of commentary on RMN and his place in history, possibly because few members of the commenting classes even know about it. Incredible but true: It was the Nixonites who gave us employment quotas. American business has lived with government-monitored quotas for almost a quarter-century, and they now look to be no less permanent than sex and basketball. Trying to recall how this ever happened, many folks have a hazy recollection that the Johnson Administration did it all, and it is true that Lyndon's guys famously proclaimed that federal contractors -- a term effectively covering all large companies -- must practice ''affirmative action'' in employment. But Johnson's Executive Order 11246 cagily never said what, exactly, affirmative action was. It was Nixon's Department of Labor, then run by George Shultz, that in 1970 issued Order No. 4, making things all too clear: Affirmative action required companies to create goals and timetables for the increased hiring of minority-group members, whom they were presumed to be discriminatorily ''underutilizing.'' A Revised Order No. 4 in 1971 extended this deal to women. Why would a generally conservative Administration do this? Even more incredible but also true: for rather idealistic reasons. Nixon certainly had nothing to gain politically by installing racial preferences in labor markets. Quotas were never popular, and during the 1972 campaign, even George McGovern disavowed them. Soon after that campaign, your servant interviewed a number of the Nixonites involved in the whole process and satisfied himself that the noose of goals and timetables was placed around the corporate sector's neck because of (a) the Administration's genuine determination to combat job discrimination, and (b) its fears that without the rope, business might simply go through the motions of reaching out to minorities. ''It would have been too easy for them to make patsies of us,'' said Laurence Silberman, then Labor Department under secretary (and now a federal judge). Also because those involved delusionally persuaded themselves that ''goals'' did not have to turn into outright group preferences, even in a world where executives had their bonuses, if not their careers, dependent on a showing of compliance. Said Revised Order No. 4: ''Supervisors should be made to understand that their work performance is being evaluated on the basis of their equal employment opportunity . . . results . . .'' By 1972 Silberman and others were persuaded that the Administration had made a ghastly mistake. Unfortunately, it was already looking irreversible. The Nixon White House thought hard about abolishing goals and timetables during the 1972 campaign, but ultimately felt it had to rule out anything that could be construed as anti-civil rights. The Reaganites went through several similar exercises, one of which, in 1985, featured a long-drawn-out argument between Attorney General Ed Meese (who initially favored abolition) and Labor Secretary Bill Brock (opposed). In the end, the decision was again to stand pat on quotas. They could outlast basketball, at that.