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My name is Chris Demuth.
I'm a D.C. Searle Senior
Fellow here at the American
Enterprise Institute and I
am delighted to welcome
you here this afternoon for this
symposium on Moynihan in
the White House.
This symposium is sponsored
not by AEI, we're
happy to be hosting it, but
the sponsoring organizations are the
Richard Nixon Foundation and the
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
It is one of a series
of Nixon legacy forums in
which these organizations are gathering
some old lions from
the Nixon administration to reminisce,
recollect, reflect on
their experiences in the Nixon administration.
A few introductions, these are
going to be very brief, there are
complete biographies at everybody's place.
But I want to say
that the, the Nixon
library and the Nixon
Foundation always have a
moderator who is from
the outside, a disinterested expert,
who will try to
keep everything on the up and up
and to try to keep it
from descending too far into
war stories and hagiography.
And we're really delighted that
for today's session we've been
able to get Steve Weisman
to come over from the Peterson
Institute to moderate our forum.
A distinguished journalist, correspondent,
bureau chief, senior writer for
the New York Times for many decades.
He has just come out
with a book that has been getting a deal of attention:
"Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A
Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary."
Now, today is a Moynihan
fest, not a Weisman fest,
but I want to say, this is
a sensational book, and we
have a copy for everybody
here to purchase as soon as the session is over.
In the ante room, please,
please, please stop by,
we're eager to help Steve
with the merchandising part of this wonderful project of his.
Before that we're gonna hear two initial words.
Geoffrey Shepard, my old
friend from White House
days, who was a White
House fellow in 1969 and
went on to be a Associate
Director of the Domestic
Council all the way
through 1974, will make remarks
on behalf of the the
Nixon Foundation, but before
that, it is a particular
honor that we would
have with us today, speaking
for the Nixon Presidential Library,
David Ferriero, who is
the Archivist of the United States.
He was for many
decades with the MIT
libraries, he was the
University Librarian of Duke
University, and Director of
the New York Public Libraries before his appointment
by President Obama in his
confirmation just a year ago.
And he's the kind of person who
when they come into public
service, you think that
there is real hope for our
government, that we can attract people of such distinction.
I'm going to call on Mr.
Ferriero to make initial
remarks, we'll hear from Geoff
who will turn things over
to Steve Weisman.
Mr. Ferriero, please.
Thank you Chris.
I'm very pleased to be here
today to welcome you to
our program about Daniel
Patrick Moynihan's tenure in the Nixon White House.
Senator Moynihan and the National
Archives had a very special relationship.
At one point he lived across
Pennsylvania Avenue from our main building
and was known to call one
of my predecessors about cleaning the
pigeon poop off the
heads of the statues of the
future and the past in front of the building.
And for decades he was the
driving force behind the creation
of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation
and its work to revitalize
that stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue
between the Capitol and the White House.
The result is what I
see out my window every
day, a magnificent avenue lined
with stately government buildings, museums,
restaurants, apartments, embassies and commercial establishments.
There's nothing else quite like it in the country.
Senator Moynihan was a champion
of openness in government and some
years ago authored a bill
that suggested creation of a
National Declassification Center.
That center was finally created
about a year ago within the
National Archives and it
is up and running, charged with the
task of reviewing more than
four hundred million pages of
classified records with the
intent of making more of our
nation's history accessible to the public.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's career of
public service stretches for nearly
half a century and throughout
that period he was a
source of provocative and controversial
ideas, as well as
insightful and workable solutions to the nation's problems.
He served in the administration of four presidents.
He was Assistant Secretary of Labor
under Presidents Johnson and Kennedy,
and a Counselor on Urban
Affairs and Ambassador to India for President Nixon.
President Ford then sent him to the United Nations as our ambassador.
In 1976, he won the
first of four terms as
United States Senator from New York.
In the Senate he was Chairman
of two powerful committees and played
a major role in many major pieces of legislation.
And he retired from the Senate
in 2001 and died in 2003.
Pat Moynihan was a
prolific writer of speeches, books, articles
and memorandums to presidents.
His papers from the Nixon
White House years including messages
to the President were opened this past July.
The complex interplay between these
two very important individuals is what today's panel is all about.
And today's panel is
exactly the sort of cooperation between
the National Archives and the
Richard Nixon Foundation that is
the essence of what our presidential
libraries and their foundations work for.
In this case it's a cooperative
effort designed to facilitate
research into the ideas and
activities of two prominent Americans
- Pat Moynihan and Richard Nixon.
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and
Museum in Yorba Linda, California
became part of the Archives'
Presidential Library system in 2007,
and is one of
the 13 Presidential Libraries maintained by the National Archives.
The groundbreaking for the
building that will house the
13th Presidential Library, the
George W. Bush Library, takes place in Dallas next week.
This past summer, the National
Archives moved more than
42 million pages of
Nixon Administration documents from storage
in the National Archives in College
Park to the Nixon
Library in Yorba Linda, California.
At the library our
archivists are continuing the
process of opening them for
review by academics, researchers, and the general public.
I know firsthand that the
Nixon Library is pleased to
assist scholars, the general public,
and the Nixon Foundation in encouraging
discovery and discussion of
the policies, events, and achievements of the Nixon era.
Now that the Nixon Archival Collection
has been assembled in one place,
under the auspices of the
National Archives, we can look
forward to a wave of
new work on this important man and his times.
I was in Yorba Linda not too
long ago and had the
an opportunity to talk with
researchers from around the
world, hard at work on dissertations and books.
I want to recognize two people
from our archive staff who are
involved with the Nixon records;
Tim Naftali, the first Federal
Director of the Nixon Library;
and Sharon Faucette, our Assistant
Archivist who oversees all
13 Presidential Libraries for the National Archives.
Now let me introduce Geoff Shepard
who is representing the Nixon
Foundation and who will
tell you a little bit
more about the other panels
that we have sponsored earlier this year.
Geoff?
Thank you, David.
As David said, the Archives,
which the Nixon Library now
belongs to, has moved
42 million pages to the Nixon Library.
And in celebration of that, we've
been putting on a series of panels.
In the great scheme of things, the Archives owns the records.
And if you remember Warren Beatty's
famous quote from the movie
"Shampoo," "We've got the hits."
We know where the alumni
are from Richard Nixon's staff
and we assembled these panels
so they can talk about the
why and the how these documents were written.
It's a wonderful combination.
It's forty years late,
but you see they're relatively young people.
So it works.
This may be our best
panel because this is almost
all of Pat Moynihan's young staff.
And each of them, as you
can tell from the program, each
of them has gone on to a significant career.
It was a magical time, and it
was a very talented group of people.
You'll get to hear from them in just a second.
Richard Nixon may have been
the best prepared individual to
be President in our lifetime.
Congressman, Senator, Vice President
for two terms, and then
seasoning as a private citizen for 8 years.
He knew what he wanted to do.
And he wasn't afraid of new ideas.
This is a man who had
been on the public scene for decades.
And he brought to
his staff senior capacities,
the most senior capacities.
Three individuals who hadn't supported him in his campaigns:
Henry Kissinger, who was a
Rockefeller protege; Arthur Burns,
who was head of
the Council of Economic Advisers under
Eisenhower, and we believe his heart was still with Ike;
And Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
a liberal Harvard professor.
And Nixon brought them in
because he wanted an exchange of ideas.
And what we are going to have
today is reminiscence of
one of those, of two
extraordinarily strong individuals
and the interplay of Pat
Moynihan and Richard Nixon is what this panel is all about.
With that let me introduce our moderator.
We're just tickled to death to have Steve with us.
You can show your appreciation by buying his book.
Steve?
Thank you, Geoff.
And thank you
for the generous offer to have you buy the book.
Well, I am so honored to be here.
This book, which
I want to talk about for
a few minutes before we go
into the panel, has been
a labor of love but it
also was made possible
because of the tremendous
existence of these wonderful
institutions: the Library, the
Foundation, the National Archives,
and of course, the Library of Congress.
I don't think I
realized, and I don't know
that Americans realize what jewels
in the crown of our government
these institutions represent.
They preserve our history,
they make it possible for us
to build on our experience collectively.
The people who work there are
generous with their time and
effort. They helped me,
many of them, on this
book, to try and understand
Pat Moynihan's life and
his times, and I'm so
grateful that they exist,
that they will always exist, and
I'm grateful for AEI
for playing host today
to this panel.
And I look forward to hearing
the panelists in a minute.
But I just wanted to, before
I introduce them, tell you
a little bit about my experience
with Pat Moynihan over the last couple of years
and what brings me here today.
When Senator Moynihan died in
2003, he left the
largest single collection of
personal papers at the Library of Congress.
I mean, going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.
They are spread in
more than 3,700 boxes at
the library and out in Suitland.
And they take up nearly
1,500 feet of shelf space,
which the library points
out is the equivalent
of two Washington Monuments laid end to end.
So, you can imagine,
try to imagine, what happened
a couple of years ago as
I was leaving the New York
Times when the publisher
and the Moynihan family came to
me and said, "Well how about
a collection of papers from this?
A repository, this vast repository."
And the library
staff helped me figure
out which boxes were going to
have the letters, cause they
were spread through not all
3,700, but through 700 or 800 of the boxes.
And Pat, well,
I'll get to that in a second.
And they helped me navigate
this project and also one
other fine institution I salute
is the Maxwell School of
Syracuse University which helped
to pay for the
graduate students and graduates
and students at Syracuse to
actually go through the boxes,
find the letters, photograph them under my supervision.
And as many, as some
of you know, Pat taught at
Syracuse before, it was
his first job, and it was also his last job.
He was an adjunct professor after he retired from the Senate.
So it's no surprise
that such a vast repository of
papers exists for a
man as productive as Pat
Moynihan, who served four
Presidents, and served four
terms in the Senate.
He delivered endless speeches and
essays and public commentaries,
and he wrote or co-wrote or
edited more than eighteen books,
and they, as you
all know, cover a staggering range of subjects,
which we'll discuss today.
But I've often been asked,
"Okay, what do these letters add
to what we know about Pat Moynihan?"
And he wrote to
so many people, not just
statesmen and politicians and
constituents, but to celebrities.
I mean, I came across letters to
*** Allen and Yoko Ono
and Saul Bellow and John
Updike and Alexander Solzhenitsyn
and to Brooks Brothers,
to whom he complained about holes
in his socks that he had just bought.
I think that the letters
do not paint for
us a different Pat
Moynihan, but a Pat
Moynihan who was more
anguished about his controversies.
More self-absorbed, more vulnerable, more
filled with both a sense
of pride, and on occasion
a sense of grievance, than has
been publicly, than the public perhaps understands.
And so many of these emotions
come out in the Nixon
era letters.
Which, and we are going to talk about that period.
So I just want to say a
couple of contextual comments, about that.
The emotions that
we see through Pat Moynihan
and his mixed feelings
and his probing, his intellectual
probing into issues especially of
family and culture, actually
begin in his diaries
when he was a student at
the London School of
Economics in the early 1950s, after the war.
And, we learned from those
writings that he had
this troubled and complicated
relationship with his parents.
His family suffered when his
father abandoned the family at
the height of the Great Depression,
when Pat was only ten. He never saw his father again.
And in public, Pat
never talked very much about his upbringing.
And we'll hear from his former
colleagues, but I think
it's also true that he
didn't talk very much about it
at all even to his own
family and his intimate friends.
But in the letters we can see
how he suffers feeling let
down by his mother and
father and how he
talks about what he
calls his emotional attachment to
father substitutes, and fear
of rejection from them.
Now why am I going into this?
Well I have, I think
that what comes out
of his personality is something
of what Pat represented and
what a lot of us loved him for.
First, he was obviously
passionate about the family.
And only twelve years, about,
after he was writing
about his own broken family,
twelve years later, he was
an Assistant Secretary of Labor
writing to Lyndon Johnson, saying
directly to Johnson, "You were
born poor, you were
brought up poor, you came
of age full of ambition, energy,
and ability because your mother and father gave it to you.
The richest inheritance any child
can have is a stable,
loving, disciplined family life."
And clearly Pat was taking
his personal experience, transmuting it into his policies
and talking to President
Johnson as a young
man about something that he never had himself.
But there was
another aspect to this,
which brings us to what we're going to talk about today,
which is really a rare quality
and especially now in this contentious time.
And that is, that out
of this unstable life, Pat
brought a lifelong devotion
to the stability of institutions,
and of government, and of Presidents.
No matter which party they belonged to.
There's a really striking moment, Checker, I guess you were there.
Following President Nixon's resignation
in 1974, when Pat addresses
the embassy in India where he was ambassador.
And he talks about
how President Nixon was
the third president in a
row to be destroyed in office.
He used the word "destroyed," but
of course assassination, Johnson driven
from office, Nixon effectively driven from office.
But he adds, "There is,
I think, an institutional dimension
with which we, who are
in government, whose concern
is with such institutions who
are part of them ought to be concerned."
The letters remind us how
hard it is to shore
up institutions by trying
to occupy the fractured center
of American politics.
There's been a lot
of attention paid to one
particular quote, which George
Will in one of his columns
cited as a great quote.
And I'll close with this,
from Pat, in 2003
when he was quite sick
and, perhaps knowing that he didn't have that much time left,
he took the trouble to sit
down and write a
note to himself, which we
found in the papers and
it recalled in turn some
thoughts he had composed in lectures
he had given to Harvard in the 1980s:
"In some 40 years
of government work I have
learned one thing for certain,"
he wrote in the last month
of his life. "As I
put it, the central conservative
truth is it is
culture, not politics that
determines the success of a society.
The central liberal truth is
that politics can change
a culture and save it from itself."
And then, the killer final sentence:
"Thanks to this interaction,
we are a better society
today in nearly all
respects than we were."
Not only in this comment
does he define sort of
the yin and yang of our
politics, which we were
all reminded when we...having gone through this election,
but what I love about this
quote is that Pat
sees this interaction, which
we all have a
tendency to say is
ugly and deplorable and isn't
it awful that we're having these
messy debates, that Pat
felt that the debates
over these questions are what make us healthy.
We can't avoid them.
Their interaction strengthens us and it strengthens our democracy.
So I think that's
what he brought to public life
and, I think when you
hear the stories that we're
now going to hear from our panelists,
what he brought to the Nixon
administration where he was a hybrid.
He was an interloper in some ways, a Harvard professor.
Not the only one, since Henry
Kissinger was there as well.
They didn't always get along
so well.
And he saw
things in that period
that, when we look
at them today... He told Nixon
about global warming in 1969.
He tried to find
new solutions to family and racial divisions.
He advised Nixon to
understand the, what was
just starting as a feminist movement.
And yet he also
talked about preserving institutions, and
the stability not just of
families, but of American institutions,
its institutions of higher education in particular,
at a very contentious time.
So with those few introductory
remarks let me, first introduce
our panel which I will,
which does not really need an extensive introduction.
But we'll first hear from
Chris DeMuth, an old friend,
who was not only,
of course, President of this
great institute, AEI, from
1986 to 2008, but
he was a Staff
Assistant to the President
from '69 to '70 and
worked for Pat Moynihan on
model cities and other programs.
Later he practiced law, taught
at the Kennedy School, and was
a top official in the
Reagan administration, where I think we first met, Chris.
Steve Hess, another old friend,
was Deputy Assistant to the
President in 1969 and
was Chief of Staff to Pat Moynihan.
He later served in the administration
as Chairman of the White
House Conference on Children and
Youth, and he joined
the Brookings Institution in 1972.
And he's been
a Fellow on Faculties at
Harvard and George Washington University.
He's written so many books about
journalism and politics and
leadership, and he served
at the UN general assembly
and the UNESCO general conference.
John Price was counsel
to Pat Moynihan in 1969
and later succeeded him
as Executive Secretary of the
Council for Urban Affairs
and was Special Assistant to the President.
He was a key staff member
for Pat Moynihan on welfare,
hunger, nutrition, urban growth policy,
health care, insurance policy, health
insurance policy, and he
worked in New York for many
years in finance, and he's
now President and CEO of
the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh.
And finally, Checker Finn, Chester E.
Finn, who was Staff Assistant
to the President in
'69 and '70 and worked with Pat there.
He had been a doctoral student
of Pat's at Harvard and later
worked in New Delhi and
then in the U.S. Senate.
And I think when you were
working for him in the Senate was when we first met Checker.
He's been a Professor at
Vanderbilt University and Assistant U.S.
Secretary of Education, and a
Fellow at Brookings Hudson Institute,
Manhattan Institute, and President
now of the Thomas Fordham
Institute at Standford's Hoover
Institution and a prolific
writer, about one of
the best in the country on education issues.
So, let's go
to the panel.
And first, Chris, we'll hear from you.
You want to come here, right?
I'll leave the mic on.
Thank you.
As a minor
addendum to the collection
and to Steve's book, there
is in the handouts for
this conference a transcript of
Pat's remarks on the
week he left the White House,
Christmas week 1970, with some
minor editing by me with
due regard for Pat's stylistic idiosyncrasies,
and I think it repays reading.
We think 2010 has been
a tumultuous political year, but
it has been a genteel Tea
Party compared to 1968,
the year that brought Richard Nixon
and Daniel Patrick Moynihan together.
In April, Martin Luther King,
Jr. was murdered in cold
blood, igniting race riots
across the nation where dozens of people were killed.
Here in Washington the anguished
mobs numbered in the tens
of thousands, buildings stretching many
blocks up 14th Street burned for five days.
Fourteen thousand Marine and
Army troops, the largest
military occupation of a
city since the Civil War,
patrolled the streets and finally
held the rioters at bay
two blocks from the White House.
Two months later Robert Kennedy
was murdered, point blank, the
evening he won the California
Democratic Primary, which would
have sealed his nomination for the President, for the Presidency.
In another 11 weeks at
the Democratic Convention, Chicago was
once again seized by bloody riots.
That violence was merely the
worst of the mayhem running
throughout the year, the result
of furious divisions over first
the Vietnam War and second
the circumstances of black Americans
and poor city communities following
the heavy days of the
Civil Rights Act of '64
and the War on
Poverty and Great Society programs.
Pat Moynihan, Harvard professor,
Director for the Joint Center
for Urban Studies, was a
liberal Democrat and had
been campaigning with the anti-war
Robert Kennedy the week before he was shot down.
In the course of the year, Pat
published two astonishing essays in Commentary Magazine.
In May, after King's ***,
"The Democrats, Kennedy and the *** of Dr. King."
Then in August after Kennedy's
***, "The Professors and the Poor."
"We," he wrote, "we
liberal intellectuals have since
1960 been at the center of
political power and have
had our way on virtually everything we cared about.
We began with supreme confidence in
our ability to control events
abroad and in our
own society through bold interventions
guided by our brilliant ideas
and idealism that would confront
injustice, right wrongs and
set the world swiftly on a better course.
Not only better but more
stable, more united, more harmonious.
And after eight years what have we got?
Some historic achievements to be
sure, the Civil Rights Act,
but overwhelmingly, national disintegration.
Riot, bedlam, angry disillusionment
especially among the poor and
the black on the one hand,
and the privileged educated young on the other.
The rise of new forces of political radicalism and militancy.
In sum, a republic, quote, "approaching
a condition of instability."
Were we perhaps a bit too
sanguine about the willingness of
the world to accede to the
rational theorizing at which we excel?
Quote, 'We liberal Democrats
had best begin asking this
question of ourselves or else
others, Richard M. Nixon
for one, will surely be asking it for us.'"
And of course, Pat was himself
bristling with answers to get that conversation going.
The architects of the War
on Poverty and Great Society
had been disconnected from the
actual harsh circumstances of
black urban poverty and
oblivious to the intrinsic
social pathologies that any
serious anti-poverty effort would
need to confront, especially joblessness
and family dissolution.
They had been too smitten with
fancy abstractions, especially the
community action idea at the center of the War on Poverty,
and too uninterested in practical
necessities, especially the need
to get large numbers of black
adult males into the world of work.
And we good liberals have
been too dismissive of conservative policy ideas.
Here, he mentioned Milton Friedman's
negative income tax and Melvin
Blair's proposal to replace categorical
federal grants with general purpose revenue sharing.
Above all, the intelligentsia had
been too little interested in
mundane questions of program
design, effectiveness, evaluation.
That is to say, too little interested in results.
These essays, addressed to
political liberals filled with largeness
of spirit, ardent to recover
meaning and purpose from the
ashes, were instrumental to
Richard Nixon and Pat Moynihan
finding each other.
After the election, I was
working at the Nixon transition
office at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.
The President-elect was intent on
finding a general Democrat or
two who might be induced to join his administration.
He had been greatly
stirred by the two articles
and commentary by Professor Moynihan
of Harvard, where I had recently graduated.
Did I know the man?
Might he be suitable?
What did he go by?
Was it Daniel or just Dan?
I did know him slightly, at
least well enough to specify his proper familiar name.
And so I was dispatched as a
secret courier to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And I'm sure that historians will
one day recognize my mission
as the progenitor of Henry
Kissinger's secret trips to Peking.
Preliminary discussions were held.
Possibilities explored.
There was an exchange of documents.
Pat was receptive and when
the President-Elect and the
professor met at the
Pierre, they hit it off instantly.
Let me emphasize three general features
of the Nixon/Moynihan alliance.
First, it was not
only the traumas of 1964,
but also the
circumstance in that year, but not very much longer,
that both the Republican and Democratic
parties had both liberal and
conservative wings, which made
bipartisan collaboration natural and
genuine in a way
that is difficult even to imagine today.
Still, there is no
other recent example of a
prominent party activist of
one party, ranging freely around
the top councils of a White
House of the other party, and
being its spokesman on central
issues of domestic policy.
Something more was at work in the chemistry of the two men.
Steve Weisman has said a
bit about this and Steve has,
I believe, will have more to say.
Second, both were intellectuals
with strong practical streaks, acutely
aware of constraints of the
inherent difficulties of things,
interested in administration and
political tactics, interested in results.
This disposition earned each of
them the contempt of many
intellectuals before they met.
Nixon from the start of
his political career, Pat in
the angry reactions to the
Moynihan Report on the *** Family in 1965.
Both felt the hurt
of those experiences very acutely
and surely shared and sympathized
to a degree with each other's hurt.
But what really brought them
together was something positive: a
shared fascination with the
interplay of ideas and action,
with the challenge of translating plausible
ideas into practical results.
Out-flanking the yakety yaks
and the media and the universities
was only one aspect of that practical challenge.
And Nixon was not all averse to the professoriate per se.
His first term in the White House
was dominated by them as never before or since.
The heavyweights with access and
influence were Pofessors Moynihan,
Kissinger, Arthur Burns, George
Shultz, Paul McCracken, and Herb Stein.
Third, the criticism of
Pat as an opportunist, happy
to go with the flow of
political power, which sometimes you
heard back then and sometimes
still echoes today, was and is a calumny.
To be sure, Pat was
a highly ambitious man, aware
of his extraordinary gifts and
determined to use them to move the world.
But he was also, and from
the beginning, long before he
achieved any sort of renown,
as principled a man as has ever practiced politics.
Continuously assertive and argumentative
in his captivating Irish way,
on behalf of propositions he regarded
as vital, and who routinely
took enormous potentially career-ending
risks on behalf of those propositions.
Thanks to Steve Weisman's magnificent collection,
we can see Pat dropping notes
to candidate Nixon and to
his speech writer confidante Ray
Price, in the course
of the 1968 campaign.
These were not the letters of a pandering office seeker.
For one thing, they were
congruent with his arguments to
Harry McPherson in the LBJ
White House at the same time.
Even more, they were congruent
with Pat's "Professors and the
Poor" essay to which I have alluded.
There he had lamented the
omission from the poverty programs of
an energetic effort to increase
employment among black men.
Read the essay and then
read his letter to Nixon of October 24th.
He praises the candidate's recent
campaign address for making
it clear and explicit that
employment is the key to social stability.
Then he pivots to urging resistance
to Republican businessmen who would
tolerate more unemployment as
the price of fighting inflation, on
grounds that would translate into
far higher black unemployment with terrible social consequences.
Pat, in private, among kings
and courtiers, was utterly at
peace with Pat the public intellectual.
I've called Pat's relationship with President
Nixon an alliance, and it was genuinely such.
The conventional wisdom is that
Pat conceived his White House
mission as saving the
Great Society and poverty programs
from retrograde Republicanism,
that he was a big spender constantly
at odds with the flinty tightwad Arthur Burns,
that he invoked Disraeli to seduce
Nixon away from genuine conservatism.
This is a confusing oversimplification.
For one thing Pat could envoy
against government extravagance with the best of them and
as in his vigorous opposition to
the President's advocating government financing
for a civilian supersonic airplane.
For another he would spend
hours on the telephone with
Nixon's liberal critics advocating the
administration's policy and decrying
their opposition carnivals as defecating in the streets.
Actually he used a different word than defecating.
That's my expletive deleted.
For another, although he and
Arther Burns did indeed conduct
a battle royal over welfare
reform, the conservative-liberal
divide was very different things
in those days and Burns
himself was far from
a tightwad, as we were to discover.
Burns' tenure at the Federal Reserve, 1970
through '78, was an ignominious
failure, precisely because he
followed the counsel of Pat's
campaign letter to Nixon,
gearing monetary policy to the
short-term unemployment rate rather
than long-term price stability, and
thereby producing a devastating
upward spiral of both prices and unemployment.
But I would like to make the
point with a concluding war story of my own.
My primary assignment in 1969
was to immerse myself in
the model cities program and figure out what to do with it.
Although President Nixon had told
Pat to get rid of
model cities, neither the
President nor Pat nor anybody
else in the White House had
much idea of what the program was really about.
And my charge from Pat was
characteristically open-ended and amorphous.
Model cities, enacted in 1966,
had been the apotheosis
of the Great Society programs.
Its crowning, grandiose failure.
This program promised to transform
selected cities around the
nation into gleaming, happy,
problem-free Shangri-las,
succeeding where urban renewal
and the War on Poverty had failed
through a combination of rational
planning at the local level
and massive concentration of funds
from the federal level in response to those plans.
I approached the program with the
earnestness of youth and was horrified by what I discovered.
The local plans were nothing but boiler plate grant seeking.
The promise of vast, fat, federal
funding had prompted frenzied
expectations and summoned for
not a few hucksters and frauds.
And there was not gonna
be any concentration of federal resources.
To the contrary, the federal
agencies administering current grants
for job training, education, transportation
and the like were watching model
cities coast and when model
cities made branch to the
cities, the agencies redirected
their own programs elsewhere.
So Model Cities was effectively
just writing checks to
other Washington agencies with no effect on the ground.
When I summarized my dissolution findings
to Pat, I concluded that
President Nixon had been
right in his initial policy
prescription, and I added
a neoconservative twist:
If our sole aim is
to improve the circumstances of
the urban poor, we should
start by abolishing the model city's charade.
Pat responded by arching his
great eyebrows and saying, "Aha!"
Silence.
And just how did I propose to do this?
I hadn't a clue.
I had done my homework.
I produced a brilliant incontrovertible analysis.
Wasn't that enough?
It was not.
Indeed, my position as I
came later to recognize, was
the perfect mirror image of
the heedless liberal hubris of
the poverty warriors that Pat
had criticized in those 1968 essays.
But Pat did know what to do.
Mel Laird's idea that he'd
written about of broad federal
revenue-sharing with states and
localities, although addressed to
the old pathologies of the
categorical grant programs, was even
better suited to the new
pathologies of Model Cities.
A distinguished task force was
assembled and commissioned, chaired by
Edward C. Banfield, his Harvard
colleague, and staffed by
me, consisting of leading
experts on federal, local, fiscal,
and management issues.
Following weeks of deliberation, and
then hours of Cabinet meetings,
the Model Cities experience became the
forge, the touchstone for
formulating the administration's "New
Federalism" initiative, combining Model
Cities and innumerable other
federal programs into new,
large, general-purpose revenue sharing,
enacted with bipartisan support in 1974.
Pat did not reflexively save
the Model Cities that we had inherited.
He recognized its excesses without
dwelling on them, and engaged
sort of decentralizing ideas to
the task of transforming it into
something better, more realistic,
more politically sustainable.
Four years later, sitting in
a law school student lounge watching
the Watergate drama unfold on
television, I thought to
myself, "There certainly had
been a very large number of
very young men running around the Nixon White House."
Young men with capacious assignments,
and often more testosterone than experience and judgment.
We Moynihan junior staffers had been part of all that.
It was Pat's lifelong practice
to throw eager young academics and
activists into big ponds
to see if they would sink or swim.
But in our case, we never lacked for adult supervision.
Working with Pat, the incandescent
intellectual, was an experience
never to be equaled.
But more important was working
with Pat, the astute practical
politician, affable yet intently
focused on engineering ideas into
results, guided by his
own highest ideal of maximum
feasible betterment.
For us, the lessons of a lifetime.
For Pat, the harbinger of greatness to come.
Very beautiful and
very moving, Chris.
Steve Hess.
Okay, I should just say,
Chris, that when Pat
Moynihan moved to Washington
at that time, in December, and
took over Averell Harriman's mansion
in Georgetown as his own, drank his wine as his own
and Ed just said in a sense, "Here's your staff"--
I was to be the Chief of Staff--
and I said, "My God," to myself,
"I'm gonna be sitting on a nest of hummingbirds."
I mean, it was 22 year old Chris DeMuth.
You just heard...and we were just about the staff.
There's a couple missing, one who's
not here, is *** Bloomenthal,
who's also 22 years old,
the Senator-elect from Connecticut.
I should say that *** had,
Pat and I had offices
in the basement of
the West Wing, and the others
were in the, now the Eisenhower
Executive Office.
*** had a desk outside my office.
His, speaking for
him since he's not here, he
had the most, the most
minor part of our agenda,
which happened to be the District of Columbia.
Washington, D.C. did not have
home rule, and if it
were ever known, I think
publicly that we had
turned over the District of Columbia
to a 22 year old,
I think we would have been in a lot of trouble.
But he was a very smooth 22 year old.
At any rate, I had,
I think I have
the unique position of
having been the only
person who was a friend
of Richard Nixon's and Pat
Moynihan's before they knew each other.
And so I'd thought I'd
like to start where Chris
put us, and that's where
they actually meet in
the Hotel Pierre in early
December in the
transition in 1968.
Pat has come down
from Cambridge to hear
what the President-elect is going propose
for him in urban affairs.
I've come up from from
Washington to have dinner
with him immediately after he
sees the President to review
whether this makes a lot,
any sense for Pat.
He comes down from the meeting.
We go into the dining room and I say, "Well?"
And he says, "I can't believe it.
How ignorant he is!
He doesn't know anything about domestic affairs."
And that should not
have surprised some of the old timers.
*** Nixon, this terribly smart
person, had been consumed through
his life by geopolitics
and by international affairs.
In fact, I can remember
when on election day
in 1962, running for governor
of California, and he called
me and I said,
"***, do you think...you still think you're gonna lose today?"
And he said, "Yeah,
but at least I'm never gonna
have to talk about crap like dope addiction again."
This was not...so ***... Pat
Moynihan instantly learned something
that was a very, very valuable lesson.
He learned as a professor
that he was going to have
a student who was the President
of the United States, and it
was a tabula rasa that he
could work on that remarkable
mind of Richard Nixon's.
So, on January 20th, Nixon
becomes President, Pat Moynihan becomes
the Assistant to the President for
Urban Affairs, the executive secretary
of a new institution which supposedly
was modeled after the
National Security Council, which
would have the President, the Vice
President, and appropriate Cabinet, domestic Cabinet members.
At that time, or I
should say on August 8th of
that year, Richard Nixon
proposed the Family Assistance Plan,
a guaranteed income for families with children.
Perhaps the most radical proposal
of our lifetime, and from
a President who had opposed
it in the campaign.
And what I will
try to do in a couple
stages of how this
friendship, or this collaboration
got from here to there.
I should say at the same
time, the President appointed
Arthur Burns, distinguished Columbia
University economist to his White House staff as well.
And in his memoirs, says that
he had appointed Burns as a
conservative as a balance to Moynihan, the liberal. Perhaps
it did work out that way.
But the memoirs came 10 years later.
And memoirs, we know, are a way of tidying up history.
Actually there were two
unrelated reasons for the appointment for both.
Chris has mentioned one in the case of Moynihan.
Clearly Nixon, a
force in politics through his
career, who had
just won an incredibly close
election and was going
to have a "bring us together"
theme, really importantly needed
a prominent Democrat on his staff.
He had wanted Scoop Jackson
to be the Secretary of Defense.
Jackson, the Senator didn't want the job.
And he approached Moynihan, who
was receptive for the reasons that
Chris mentioned.
In many ways, after the Moynihan
Report, he was something of
a pariah in the political
arm of his own, the Democratic Party.
Arthur Burns was a different situation.
An old friend of the
President's from the Eisenhower power
years, and he
was penciled in to be
the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The only problem was that job,
a term job, was not to
be available until January of 2000...1970.
And what do you do
with Burns in the meantime?
Well, the answer is you treat him with great respect.
He put him on the staff, he made him counselor.
He was the only member of the staff who had Cabinet rank.
And he gave him
a broad jurisdiction of domestic
affairs, which was of course
greater than Moynihan's of urban affairs.
Alan Greenspan last week,
in another session like this
that Steve was running, said,
"Well, of course, in this competition
Burns was gonna win."
He just expected that would be.
That was not the
way it ultimately ended up, at
least with the Family Assistance Plan, which
is really what I'm gonna
touch on, the various elements
that went into this.
The first one, by the way,
is very clearly in this
remarkable book that Steve Weisman has put together.
Beautifully edited, and if
you go to the section that
includes the "memoranda" that Moynihan
sent to Nixon, you
will see what I think are
the most remarkable set of
documents that anybody in
the West Wing, a staffer, sent to the President of the United States.
They are called "memoranda."
That is clearly mislabeled.
Memoranda for the President usually are one page long
and are powerpointish and
easy reading for the
busiest executive in the world.
These, on the other hand, they
are long, they are
complicated, they are convoluted,
and what is so interesting when
you read them, they are written to an intellectual.
They are written not to a politician, but to an intellectual.
And Nixon loved this!
He read them, he started to
write marginal notes, he started
to send them to other people, which
was a disaster for Pat because they leaked of course immediately.
And I don't think
that this was a plot,
a strategy, on the part of Pat Moynihan.
It is just the way he is.
He wrote these things, he sent
them to the President, and this
is the set of argumentation that
you can read that based his
first year at the White House.
That was the first thing, the element.
The second thing was the process.
John may wish to talk more
about it because he was more
intimately directly involved in
the Urban Affairs Council.
But this was a way in
which Pat could suggest
to the President what issues should
be taken up, then
set up committees to do
that, and the chair
to run that, and the
staff to run that, and
it meant that all of this,
including the Family Assistance Plan,
came through the Council,
so that Arthur Burns and Marty
Anderson, his very talented surrogate
deputy, were defensive.
They had to respond to proposals
that had come from the Moynihan operation.
This was very important strategically.
I should say, by the way, you
who know the intra-administration's
struggles through the writings of
Bob Woodward really need to
be reminded that this was not like that at all.
This is as it should have been really.
This was dueling Ivy League professors.
They were not nasty, they were not mean people.
Pat, I think, truly respected Arthur Burns.
I assume Arthur Burns did as well.
The only thing is that
they disagreed, that's all.
The discussions, John may remember.
There was a discussion,
for instance, about late eighteenth
century British poor laws.
Can you imagine sitting in the Cabinet room arguing about this?
Yeah, and where both
sides are rushing out to get
distinguished historians to back us up.
I mean we have got Gertrude
Himmelfarb on our side, we've
got Jack Pulmer from Cambridge
on our side, and this is what is going on.
I don't mean that these folks were
not above a little
banter that, that can
move their point, making a point or two.
Remember John, ah, Marty Anderson
wanted to push Pat
into a position to say
his proposal was a negative income tax.
Of course it was a negative income tax,
but those were dirty words that you
shouldn't use and so at one
point Marty was saying,
"Let's call a spade
a spade," and Pat
says "As Oscar Wilde
said, 'Anyone who calls
a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.'"
Now, I thought he made
that up, but actually I looked that up and he didn't.
That was Pat Moynihan.
We didn't win all of them
by the way, let me make sure.
Pat at one point was very
concerned about American Indians
who were moving from the reservation into
the cities, and to
take over that piece
of the action, he needed
the Secretary of the Interior on the Urban Affairs Council.
And he would send a memo
to the the President to
put Walter Hickel on,
and the President ignored it.
He sent another memo
to put Walter Hickel, the
President ignored it, and then finally he
wore down the President and he
agreed, "Okay, you can have Walter Hickel if you want him."
And so the two of
us, Pat and I, go over to the Department of the Interior.
If you have ever seen the office
of the Secretary of the Interior,
it is probably the largest office in Washington.
It looks like a football field
with a desk in the middle.
And so we go in there,
and Pat greets the Secretary,
the new member of the Urban
Affairs Council, and he said,
"We would be honored, Mr. Secretary,
if you would chair a committee on the Urban Indian."
And Hickel says, "The Indian?
No, no, no.
Water, I've got water.
Indians, I don't have Indians! Water, I don't have Indians."
And the two of
us looked at each
other and tried, I mean,
we wanted to turn around and run out
of there, but we back out
of it, and so we never,
Pat never got a chance to
do anything about the urban Indians, I'm afraid.
Okay, we had this process
going, we had the memos,
and the next thing we had, which
is very interesting and shouldn't really
figure in many White Houses,
but was there, and that is Pat's humor.
Pat's humor was a major asset in that White House.
Remember we are not talking about
Aaron Sorkin's West Wing,
full of people running in and
out and so forth with quips.
This was Bob Haldeman's White House,
a very great place,
very quiet, you know,
the feeling around it was, "Shh,
the President is working,
let's be quiet," and there
was Pat Moynihan, who,
as the President later said,
"I didn't agree with him but he was, he would light up the sky."
Everybody on the panel, should
have at least one Moynihan story.
One of my favorites is in
the summer of that year,
'69, the President had
gone off to San Clemente, which is
of course wonderful, it means
that it's quiet and you can
get a lot of work cleared off your desk.
Pat has gone off to
the White House swimming pool to take a dip.
That was before Nixon did something dreadful,
he put a roof on top
of it and made it
more room for the reporters.
And so suddenly, I get a call at my office,
"Quick, come up to the Oval Office."
So I go up to the Oval Office, the door is open,
Pat is standing there.
We look into this Oval Office,
which has been remodeled while the
President is away, and it
looks like an MGM
technicolor set of how an Oval Office should look.
The gold is so bright
that my son, who's over there,
may remember when he was
a little kid walking in there
and he was sort of blinded by the gold.
And on the seat
of every chair there is the Seal of the Presidents.
There's a phone right at the door to the Oval Office.
He picks up... Pat picks up the phone.
He says to me, "Hi, get Mr. Haldeman, please.
Bob, I'm standing at the Oval Office."
And he says to me, "Yeah,
yeah, yeah, famous interior decorator
from New York...yeah yeah... Great friend
of Mrs. Nixon.
Yeah, yeah."
"Pat, unless you do
something, members of
Congress are going to be farting on the Seal of the Presidency."
That was Pat Moynihan.
By the way, they came
off, the seals came off instantly.
That was Pat Moynihan.
This humor was very, very useful.
There was another...the next thing... So,
we have the memos, we
have the process, we have the humor.
Then there was the chemistry.
Given that this was the
oddest couple in public life
that wasn't scripted by Neil Simon,
you have to think of the
fact that something unusual was happening.
Now, old Nixon hands knew
the phrase, "The boss is in love."
The boss is in love was
something that... very often
the President just had
to have some special character
around who was contributing something to him.
It might have been John Connolly at one time.
It might have been Pete Peterson.
In the spring of '69
it was Pat Moynihan.
And they went off for conversations
and they talked about books and
the President said "What should I be reading Pat?"
And Pat will say, "Well, why
don't you try Blake's biography of Disraeli."
Okay.
Now, things are going
like this except that every
President knows that he's got 100 days.
And after 100 days the press is looking down and "Where is your program?"
And now it's May and
June and July, and Pat
Moynihan and Arthur Burns are still fighting.
And this is getting very irritating to the President by this time.
He can hardly wait to sort
of get rid both of them
and bring in the calm that John
Ehrlichman will bring to
the Domestic Council.
And so we get to August 6th.
John knows this better than
I, and the President takes
the whole Cabinet to Camp David.
And he's going to tell them that he's decided for the
Family Assistance Plan and the
meeting is six hours.
And the one who was strongest against
it, who had always been strongest against
it, was the Vice President, who
says, in effect, "Mr. President, this is political suicide!
You're giving money to these
people who have always been
against you, and are gonna continue to be against you."
And the President leaves
there and concludes, you
know, "I've only got three
members of the Cabinet with me."
I mean, this is Lincoln-esque almost.
Fortunately for him, one
those three members was the
only truly brilliant
mind in his
Cabinet, and that was George Schultz.
Now that was a great help to him.
George Schultz was so
unknown to Richard Nixon that
he didn't even know how to spell
his name when he appointed him.
He was the Dean of the Business School of the University of Chicago.
Probably the most marginal
position in a Republican administration
is Secretary of Labor,
but George Schultz
was the little man who sat at
the end of the Cabinet table
and after very windy
former Republican governors had
said whatever they had
to say, he somehow would quietly bring it all together.
And the President got more
and more interested in him and
gave him a special role in
helping to bring together the
Family Assistance Plan and then
ultimately, of course, made him
the Budget Director and the Secretary of the Treasury.
Okay.
We go to the next day, which
is now the 7th of
August, and the President
tells the senior White House
staff that he's going
with the Family Assistance Plan.
And he muses, "Well, as
Randolph Churchill said of
Disraeli, 'It's Tory men
with liberal principles that shape the world.'"
Okay.
The next day, he goes
on television and announces
that he's going to make this
proposal to the Congress.
What's the result of this? Well,
Arthur Burns was a wise man and he asked all of the right questions.
He would say, "How do you
know that this is going to stabilize families?"
And the answer is we don't know.
But he was proposing caution and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was proposing
the possibilities of greatness.
And that was very important to a
President who was in interest of his legacy.
And that's where it sort
of remained in my mind,
until fast forward to a year later.
I'm now the National
Chairman of the White House Conference on Children.
December, 1970. The President is
coming to a big hotel
here to give the first address.
I'm only concerned in
introducing him that I've
got an audience that may not be very friendly.
And the President starts his address.
So we are here, December
13th.
And he says, "Over a
year ago I proposed
that for the first time in American
history we in this
great, rich country establish a
floor under the income
of every American family with children.
We called it the Family Assistance Plan.
It has, in turn, been called
by others the most important
piece of domestic legislation to
be introduced in Congress in two generations.
In terms of its consequences
for children, I think it
can be fairly said to be
the most important piece of social
legislation in the history of this nation."
Then Richard Nixon goes on,
in a way - and I had
once been a speech writer - that
goes more deeply into himself
than I had ever heard him before.
He says, "I remember back
in the Depression years, the 1930s,
how deeply I felt about
the plight of those people my
own age who used to
come into my father's store, where
they couldn't pay the bill, because
their fathers were out of work,
and how this seemed to
separate them from the others in our school.
None of us had and money in those days.
But those in the family where
there was no job, and there
was nothing but a
little relief, they often
suffered far more than simply going without.
What they suffered was a hurt
to their pride that many carried
with them for the rest of their lives.
We were poor by today's standards,
and I suppose we were poor even by Depression standards.
But the wonder of it was that we didn't know it.
Somehow my mother and
father, with their love, their
pride, their courage and their
self-sacrifice, were able
to create a spirit of
self-respect in our family, so
that we had no sense of
being inferior to the others who had more."
Now this, of course, is the
nub of Moynihan social policy.
Pat was a child of the city poor.
Richard Nixon, of the small town America.
I doubt that they ever
talked about this, ever, but
I think that Pat somehow appealed
to something that was greater
than a President's place in history.
He is also appealing to Richard Nixon's own history.
I think that entered into it too.
I should add a P.S. to
this, by the way, because I
found out later that
the President got up in
the middle of the night and started
to make notes for this speech,
and the next morning,
it must have been 5 or
6 in the morning, there's a
call, the phone rings,
I wake up, and the operator
said "The President wishes to
speak to you," and I got on the line, "Yes, Mr. President."
He says, "Steve, how come my
speech is on page 8 of The New York Times?"
I hadn't seen it at all, so I started groping.
I said, "Well, how did the Washington Post do it?"
"Oh, yeah, it's fine.
It's the lead story in the Washington Post."
And I said, "Well, who, who, what's the byline on the Times?"
And he says, "It's the AP."
I said, "Oh".
You see, the Times had assigned
Nan Robertson to write the
story, but her husband
is desperately sick and she's
in the hospital and they wouldn't
lead the New York
Times with an Associated Press story.
Thank you, I got that.
I mean, it meant so much to him,
that this message got out as he delivered it.
Well, the end of
the story, of course, is that
the Family Assistance Plan got easily
through the House of
Representatives and then lost
in the Senate Finance Committee, the
committee that Pat in later life would change.
John Price, Richard Nixon and tabula rasa.
I don't think so.
But Steve was closer to
that stage certainly than I.
It was late in November of
1968 and my campaign boss,
Len Garmet, told me
that the President had been intrigued,
a little earlier than the points
that Chris DeMuth talked about,
intrigued when Pat Moynihan,
a Democrat who was viewed principally
as an academic, but also had
sought elective office as a
Democrat in New York City, wrote
a piece following the 1966
elections that had come to Nixon's attention.
And as Moynihan put it to,
in a memo to John
Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman in July of 1970,
Moynihan, quote, "I proposed
that American politics were approaching instability
and that liberals who understood this
should seek out and make
alliances with their conservative
equivalents in order to
preserve democratic institutions from the
looming forces of the
authoritarian left and right."
This offers deep insight-- and
goes to the points made by several of you already--
to me this offers a deep
insight into one of
Moynihan's core beliefs, which was,
if not the sanctity, then the
urgent necessity of institutions
commanding, that is, deserving
and receiving respect.
This was surely his view of the presidency.
The memo I just mentioned
of July 24th, I think,
1970 is one of
the most important Moynihan wrote while in Nixon's White House,
and discussion today has turned
around a lot of the points
in it.
Back to 1968, Len Garment
told me the President was about to
offer Moynihan a position
in the White House.
Len asked that I run a few checks about Pat.
And as I say here,
I'm sure others were asked to do so.
And you heard a little
bit more from different sides of
the screen, but Len basically
said, "Please run the political traps on Moynihan."
And he'd obviously offered the
other job to Kissinger and he
was... The President might have
been wondering whether, yet another
Democrat could be a
bridge too far for the
White House.
He wasn't not sure whether Moynihan
would be solid or incendiary.
And so, he wanted...the
President wanted someone to help
to try to shape his response
to the urban crises that had
shaken the country for several
years now in a
more considered and structured way.
And he thought that the head
of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center
for Urban Studies might be a valuable ally.
And after a few days
of phoning around, I told
Len I thought Moynihan would be
serious about wanting to help.
He as a vivid personality,
but profoundly respectful of the institution of the Presidency.
And I felt he would
continue to be a
deep and devoted observer of
the social and cultural underpinnings
of our country, and of
trends and data which social
policy needs to take account of.
Everything I would say, again, these
42 years later about Pat.
The offer was duly made, Moynihan
accepted, and the array
of praise and criticism from
many in the party, which Nixon
no doubt expected, occurred.
Len then suggested that I
might be a fit for Moynihan's
White House staff and he cobbled us together.
Some weeks later, I met
for my first time with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
It was December 20th.
It was lunch and it was my 30th birthday.
When he learned that, I quickly learned two key things about Pat Moynihan.
The first was his warmth and generosity.
He immediately ordered a half
a bottle of wine and he
drank a toast to my birthday
and he offered me the job and I accepted.
The second was central to what
he would bring to his new job.
He talked of race relations.
He told me that the American
version of slavery was among
the most pernicious the world
had ever seen, beyond the
ancient Greek or the
Brazilian, because of its wrenching apart of families.
This was a concise summary for me
of his noted report on the
American *** Family from the
mid-1960s, but he went on to say something that I will never forget.
It was partly because of the beautifully Irish turn of phrase,
but more due to the hope and the passion with which it was said.
"But John, America has
it within its gift to
become the first truly multiracial
society in history."
I think it was his fond
hope that he would now
work from the highest perch
in his career, for a
President who he felt had great intellectual curiosity.
He sensed, he, Moynihan, could
have charge of an institutional
structure which he would
shape and which could
give him a formal leg up
in the internal wars, which as
a realist, he knew would be part of the landscape.
Finally, he came to
the job with a strategic sense
of what was to be done.
We needed an incomes strategy.
This would help us make sense of all kinds of problems.
And as we shall see it
led to early and coherent related
policy changes, such as
abolition of income tax on
families below the poverty line,
to food stamp increases of dramatic proportion,
and most visibly, as you've
heard, in August of '69,
to the proposal on welfare
known as the Family Assistance Plan.
But Pat brought with him
not only a coherent strategy which
had program implications; at least as
important was his conviction
about the central role of
sound social science research.
This was an approach or discipline,
not a package of particular programs.
Setting the problem correctly would help get the right answers.
And Moynihan felt the government had to get right answers.
It went to the root of one of his cardinal convictions,
that the institutions of society
needed to be doing the right
thing to continue to enjoy the support of the people.
One of the most pointed pieces of
broad advice he gave to
the President in a long
memo of January 3, 1969,
to the President-elect, was
simple: "Your task, then,
is clear: to restore
the authority of American institutions."
He felt that harnessing solid research
was the starting point for getting
things right, which would lead
to a public conviction that their
government had its wits
about it.
We see this time and again,
Checker Finn will illustrate this
in his talk about education and Moynihan's engagement with academics,
about the impact of economic and social factors in achievement.
Early also in the administration, Pat
got deeply involved about early child development.
And he went to a Bruno Bettelheim,
who had written a book
called "Children of the Dream"
about the effects on young young children in the Kibbutz in Israel.
And Pat wove that
into an argument for the
President, which lead the President,
immediately almost in his
administration, to declare the
emphasis on the first five
years of life and to create
an Office of Child Development in
the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
One of the most delightful recollections I
have of Pat, was on
occasions when he would talk
with great excitement of the
research resources of the government.
His excitement was first that so much had been done.
There was so much out there.
Even though a lot of
it was admittedly silly or
worthy of things like... famous
then, Senator William Proxmeyer's Golden
Fleece Award for preposterous
misuses of tax payers funds.
So sure there was a lot of that.
But beyond the academics
pleasure at the sheer volume
of good social science research was
Pat's determination to harness
it, to make use of
it in looking at policy options.
Yes, Pat was an experienced bureaucrat,
and yes, he was a publicist,
and knew how to keep himself in front of the people.
But there was always in him
an excitement about finding the
relevant nuggets in social science work.
He kept up a massive correspondence
with academics and social scientists,
to pick their brains and sift competing theories.
With the right underpinning, policy could be right.
In that same July 1970 memo
to Ehrlichman and Haldeman, he spoke
of the principle of policy-oriented government.
That's initial caps.
He and the President seemed to share some of this excitement.
Although the President necessarily would add
a dash of politics in his
own conviction when a major
policy decision was at hand, like Welfare Reform.
Yet in that debate, as we've already heard,
there were memos going over the
Presidential transom on Speenhamland,
the 1834 British poor laws.
I remember walking out one Sunday
afternoon, lunch time, I
was working on the stuff supporting the welfare reform.
Arthur Burns and I happened to
walk out at the same moment, each
of us contesting for the
President's attention on welfare reform and its direction.
We walked over to a little cafeteria on the North side of K street,
had a great lunch.
I learned of Arthur Burns' vehement
opposition to the Vietnam War
at that point in mid 1969.
We said not a thing about welfare
reform, went back to our desks and continued the battle.
Anyway, Pat could see and would argue
that there was coherence in the
President's program, he was,
after all, proud that this
was true. He was all
the more deeply frustrated when he felt that policies were neither well understood
nor well promulgated by other members of the President's administration.
Pat would occasionally, with the President's
blessing, assemble groups of
assistant secretaries to brief them
on the outline and the
detailed program proposals, which the President had decided.
He felt that a clear exposition of
policy would help them
to get out as the janissaries
to sell and clarify the President's program.
Steve talked for a little bit about the creation of the Urban Affairs Council.
Let me just take a moment on that.
Yes, it was modeled on the National Security Council.
I mentioned in the panel on
Welfare Reform some months ago
that Pat had tasked
me to go out and see
if there were any analogies other than the National Security Council.
I vetted an OEO, Economic Opportunity
Council and the HUD convener power with the Secretary.
And I concluded in a
memo to the President through
Pat that he's going
to have to sit there that Cabinet
members are heliotropic: they like
to turn and face the sun and not each other.
And Nixon did in
fact chair twenty-one of
the first twenty-three meetings of the Urban Affairs Counsel.
So Pat had his
machinery, this point was mentioned earlier.
He had the bureaucratic mechanism by
which he could set the agenda to a great extent.
And we even had, a
little bit later, something called
the "Undersecretaries Group," which Pat asked me to chair,
which was a direct analogy
to a subsidiary of
the NSC, of the National Security
Council, called the Operations Coordinating
Board, which I had done
a paper on in the Summer of 1960.
It was sort of the
implementation arm of the
NSC, and so we did
that with the Undersecretaries Group, designed
again to make sure the policies rolled out.
As Steve mentioned, committees were created:
Internal Migration, Welfare Reform,
Food Nutrition, later New
Towns and Urban Growth, not
one apparently on Urban Indians.
Also, there had been proposed
initially a sub-committee on crime.
You may remember the former law
partner and campaign manager of the President, was a man named John Mitchell.
And John Mitchell said simply, "Veto."
We never had a committee on crime, it never met.
So, that was a
very instructive lesson for Pat.
So, he took comfort that he had some bureaucratic machinery.
And yet, finally, it
was undercut in the debate around the welfare reform.
What became obvious was that
there were competing power centers and
players pulling at the
President's sleeve. Yet, in
that first spring, it was enormously exciting.
Let me go back to
Pat's own words written later,
maybe a year and a half
later. Pat said, "I
am sufficiently professional about political
ideas to have had
some feeling for what could
be done and, by and large, we did it.
Those Urban Affairs Council meetings
might have seemed chaotic and
ill-staffed to some, but
in about four months, I would
dare to argue that we
gave an intellectual raison d'etre to the Nixon administration.
I was trying to put together
something more than a random collection of programs.
I was looking for programs based
on Republican ideas or precedence,
or barring that, which would make sense to Republicans."
That's very much what
he tried to do with the
welfare reform, and we
were mentioning that the President
got impatient about a domestic program.
Actually it was sooner than July
or August because right before
Easter, mid-March, the President
began sending dunning notices to
Steve and Pat and he said, "Where's my domestic program?"
And so, April 1st
of 1969, this tome went
down to Key Biscayne to be
the President's Easter weekend reading.
And in it, Moynihan summarized
the basic content of
it by saying that
there were eight proposals but they
had three fundamental themes
and one of which is the
one we are dwelling on here
- the reduction of poverty
through employment and income support,
and a couple of others. and then
in the polemicists gift
or sense, which Pat certainly had,
he said, "I call your attention
above all to the Family
Security System,"-- which the
was earlier name for what became
the Welfare Reform, FAP or Family Assistance Plan--
"For two weeks growth in
the gross national product you can
all but eliminate family poverty
in America and make history."
So, he knew where to appeal
to his man.
The details weren't yet worked
out, but the battle
lines were only beginning to take shape.
One little personal story... The
draft before the one that
went down-- I had done
this, taking it out of
the work of the Committee of the Urban Affairs Council on Welfare--
there were a couple of opposing
options, which again we gave the President.
Here's one option, here's another option.
You choose.
And I gave it to
Pat and on the
morning of March 23rd, I
think it was, and he then
called me into his office at
the end of that day, and he said
to me, slapping this thing
in front of me, "Bryce, your prose is opaque."
So I stayed up all night
long and he had on his
the next morning at seven the draft which went to the President.
This is another wonderful side of Pat.
He had this volcanic temper, it was a little stronger than what I said to you.
Like towering cumulus clouds in Summer, but then they would so quickly dissipate and there would be the warmth and the charm and the friendship and the encouragement.
I remember he was so generous to us.
I suspect Steve would recall,
but that first Christmas, Pat had
made for each of us cuff
links of silver at Schraff's
jewelry store in Boston.
And on the outer part
of the cuff link were our initials,
and inside were "DPN."
Just a wonderful sweet touch
of his warmth.
Pat also showed flexibility.
Having come in, and this is
important, as an advocate of the
children's allowance, which was basically
what George McGovern had proposed in 1972,
extraordinarily expensive with the
notion that it would all be
taxed back, you would give the
children's allowance to John D.
Rockefeller IV but he'd tax it back.
You know, huge price
tag on it, but very much
in fashion, very much thought to
be the right answer by some
of the "Goo-Goo" groups,
the business groups and others who were focusing on this.
But he showed flexibility
because he was willing to leave that.
And when we reverted to the
basically Republican idea of
Milton Friedman's, and of
the Ripon Society, a Republican
think tank which had helped
to gen up a negative income tax
statute in 1967-68.
He bought into it
immediately, and he became
an absolutely tireless advocate for it.
He and Nixon saw eye to eye
on the divisive implications of many of the services programs.
He liked the income strategy, he
had this wonderful phrase, which to
a kid who spent summers on his
grandfather's dairy farm, is intelligible.
He said the services strategy is
like feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses.
Now, if you think that through, you sort of get the picture.
Anyway, it was a typically
Moynihan-esque, colorful way
of making the point that you
don't want to go through a lot
of intermediaries and other things,
let's get to the point of
income and disposable income in the hands of families.
What do we say to summarize Pat?
He was an intellectual in politics,
but very much a politician
who could sing "Goodbye my Coney
Island baby" while munching
a Nathan's famous hot dog in the middle of a campaign.
He was a man in remarkable synchronization
with the President he served.
A man who spoke truth to power.
A colorful, even flamboyant wit,
and yet a man passionately committed to
his country.
And now Checker Finn to talk about education.
I think we're making your life
easier as a moderator, but I was about to say
always available airtime without making remarks.
Those are three tough acts follow.
I'll do my best and I'll go as fast as I can.
When I sat down a couple
of weeks ago to write these
notes, who should be on
the front page of that day's
New York Times but, Pat Moinahann,
seven and a half years after his death.
The immediate context that
day was a discussion of the
culture of poverty, and how
it is now legitimately indeed
important to attend to
this ticklish topic that had
been taboo for such a long time,
especially since the ruckus that
began with the Moynihan Report in 1965.
Yet, Pat might also
have been, as easily have been,
in that day's front page story
in the Times about education reform
because of his role in
another transformation of American
society that, as it
happens, began just one year after the Moynihan Report.
I refer, of course, to the
Coleman Report on Equality of Educational Opportunity,
a report that, as Pat often
recalled, was quietly released
over the Fourth of July weekend
in 1966 by a Department
of HEW that hoped nobody would notice it.
Well, Pat noticed it.
And American education these past
four decades has been profoundly
altered as a result of that noticing.
No, Pat didn't write that report.
Jim Coleman did.
But Pat swiftly grasped it
significance and began a
multifaceted, multi-year campaign to get it noticed.
From an article in the public
interest, to the Harvard faculty seminar
that he got Carnegie Corporation to
pay for, to the important
book that he and the distinguished
statistician, Frederick Mosteller published in 1972,
and of course, his work in the Nixon White House, which I'll turn back to in just a second.
The Coleman Report and its data
have been exhaustively analyzed and
reanalyzed and interpreted and
reinterpreted over the years, and
have been invoked in any number
of debates about any number of education issues.
I won't rehearse all that here,
but one key finding has really never been challenged.
And it's the one that has
probably, and I think
profoundly, transformed our elementary
secondary education policies.
It was, of course the finding
that school inputs-- things like
money, and teachers, and teacher
credentials-- have almost no
correlation with school outcomes,
namely pupil achievement,
and that differences in achievement could
not be accounted for by differences in school resources.
Before Coleman, everybody assumed that
if you wanted different results from your
schools, you would invest more money in them
or add more teachers
or buy more books or computers or whatever,
because you assumed you could effect outcomes by changing inputs.
Coleman showed that by and large that just isn't true.
And of course that conclusion, along
with some complicated and ambiguous
findings about peer group
and race and family, is exactly
why HEW found this report so
awkward in 1966, where Lyndon
Johnson was still President at
the time and he had spent
much of the previous two years
persuading Congress that the way
to end poverty and equalize achievement
in America was to lavish
federal dollars on the education
system through a host
of unprecedented new government programs
like Title One and Head Start.
But if Coleman was right, these programs wouldn't do much good.
Which meant of course that if
you cared about boosting achievement in
schools you had to find
other ways to do it, beginning
with a new focus on achievement
itself, rather than on the resources of schools.
It's taken a while for that
lesson to sink in in American
education and it hasn't
still totally, at this moment, sunk in.
Yet I submit that
the single greatest change in
American K-12 education these past
four decades is that
we now focus overwhelmingly on the
results themselves, on measuring
them, understanding them, comparing them, fretting
about gaps in them, setting
standards for them, creating assessments
and accountability systems keyed to
them, and devising new strategies to alter them,
strategies that today that range
from charter schools to online
learning to Teach for America and so forth.
And that change can be traced
pretty directly to the
Coleman Report and its foremost
interpreter, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Now to the Nixon White House, where
I worked with him on education policy.
Although what Nixon proposed to
Congress in March of 1970--
we're about a year after
the Family Assistance Plan at
this point in the chronology.
Though what Nixon proposed to Congress
in March of 1970 did not
have much immediate effect on
what Congress did in the education
sphere (both the House
and the Senate at the time
were still very much in the LBJ mode),
a couple of key proposals did
come to pass in ensuing years,
and I think far more
important, the basic analysis
underlying the Nixon proposals
is today taken for granted
in federal education policy and
in most states and districts as well.
And that was Moynihan's Coleman-based analysis
put into the President's voice, transmitted
to Congress, and spread across the landscape.
Far from continuing in the
Great Society mode, Moynihan via
Nixon began to point
the country in a very different
direction with respect to our understanding of our schools.
Let me quote from the President's
message to Congress on Elementary/Secondary
Education from March 1970.
This is from the White House documents.
"We must stop letting
wishes color our judgments about
the educational effectiveness of many special compensatory programs.
We must stop congratulating ourselves for
spending nearly as much money
on education as does the
entire rest of the world when
we are not getting as much
as we should out of the dollars we spend.
Apart from the general public interest
in providing teachers an honorable
and well-paid professional career, there is
only one important question to
be asked about education: What do the children learn?"
Less than four years after Coleman's
study, his central finding had
made its way to the
nation's foremost bully pulpit and
had become the basis for a substantial White House initiative.
I will confess I do not
know how important this was to Richard Nixon himself.
I know it was important to Pat though.
And I know that on these key
issues he prevailed in
a White House working group that
included Ed Morgan from
the Ehrlichman team - Ed
was my other boss at the
time after the White House staff
got reorganized - the
very able Lew Butler from
HEW, Jim Allen the Commissioner
of Education at the time,
the smart, tough-minded *** Nathan
from OMB, and a bunch of
others, and the working group's
recommendations prevailed with the President.
There wasn't much pushback from
other parts of the Executive Branch either.
These recommendations didn't cost very
much - indeed, they can
also be described as a
response to a Congress that wanted
to spend lots more on education.
And it also needs to
be noted that the White House
high command had plenty of
other things on its mind ranging
from school desegregation to,
as I said, the billions of
dollars that Congress wanted to spend.
It seemed, through a different lens,
these Nixon recommendations from
1970 were a very big deal.
They were part of a fertile,
open-minded, do-the-right-thing-
even-if-it-upsets-apple-carts,
Reformist era during the first couple of years of the Nixon Administration.
We've already spoken here of
welfare reform and and revenue sharing as other examples.
They were very much a part
of the intellectually honest and
policy-minded approach that Pat Moynihan brought to the White House.
A little bit more quotation, if
you'll bear with me, from the President's message in March 1970:
"What makes a good school?
The old answer,"--this is Nixon
40 years ago-- "was a
school that maintained high standards
of plan and equipment that had
a reasonable number of children
per classroom, whose teachers had
good college and often graduate training.
This was a fair enough definition as
long as it was assumed that
there was a direct connection between school
characteristics and the learning that takes place in the school.
Years of educational research,"-- I'm
still quoting Nixon-- "culminating in an
equal opportunity survey of 1966
have, however, demonstrated that this
direct and complicated relationship does not exist.
And yet," observed the President
in words that are italicized in
the White House Press Office
document, "we know that something does make a difference.
The outcome of schooling, what children
learn, is profoundly different for different
groups of children in different parts of the country."
I could go on in this vein, and Nixon did.
But the point, I think,
worth underscoring, is that
three decades before George W. Bush
put the achievement gap and
the soft bigotry of low expectations indelibly
onto the national education agenda with
his No Child Left Behind Act,
the next big event, of
course, for the next Congress'
how and when to reauthorize
and alter it, Richard M.
Nixon, of all people, was deploring the same thing.
Linking equity concerns to weak
academic performance, decrying the
education system's tendency to
focus on inputs and insisting
that school's instead be judged on their results.
He even demanded that the
new National Institute of Education
that he proposed, and this did
come to pass a couple of
years later and is now the
Institute for Education Sciences within
the Department of Education, he even
demanded that the National Institute
of Education devise new
measures of educational output by
which, quote, "accountability could be assured."
And he went on at
some length in this message about
the importance of results-based accountability
for teachers, principals, and schools.
He even tip-toed onto the
treacherous terrain of national education standards.
He never quite called for them,
but this is what he said: "For
years the fear of national
standards has been one of the bugaboos of education.
The problem is that in opposing
some mythical threat of national
standards, what we have too
often been doing is avoiding
accountability for our own local performance.
We have, as a nation, too
long avoided thinking of the productivity of schools."
Well, that's what today's educational debates are all about.
Productivity of schools, national standards,
results-based accountability.
Now, I can't stand here
and tell you that Nixon transformed
American education policy.
He was, in fact, way ahead
of his time, and the transformation
took decades and it's fair
to say we're still in the middle of it.
But he rolled this ball forward
and that would not have happened
had Pat Moynihan had not placed
it in his hand, explained what
it was and why it mattered
and encouraged the President
and his administration to give it
a good, firm shove in the right direction.
Thank you very much.
We're going to, I would like
to go to questions before long,
but I wanted to
toss a question at the
panel if the audience
will indulge me and see if we can mix it up a bit.
One of the things that struck
me in the letters is that
Moynihan, in later years
after serving in the Nixon
White House, wrote an interesting
letter to Tony Lewis, Anthony Lewis
of the New York Times, saying, you
know, that Nixon was more
liberal than we supposed at
the time and that you think now,
and he cited the creation of
the Environmental Protection Agency and
of course the Family Assistance Plan
and revenue sharing and a
number of other things.
But while he was at
the White House, Pat Moynihan
was struggling to also define
what conservatism was,
and wrote these very interesting
memos saying that there
was not anyone trying
to pull together a conservative
philosophy of government the
way a liberal philosophy had been put together.
And why can't we, instead of
being opposed to programs
in the Nixon Administration, embrace a
philosophy of conservatism that
is out there among many
intellectuals, but they aren't
welcome in the White House
enough, and they aren't appreciated.
And he wanted to bring
coherence to what he
saw as the conservatism of the administration.
So on the
surface these are two contradictory,
yet again, contradictory impulses of Pat Moynihan.
But I wonder if you
could address this issue since
we've just come through another
debate in an election where
it seems fairly clear now
what's conservative and what's liberal,
but it didn't seem
so clear back then maybe.
What do you think, Chris?
The times were different in several respects.
The first is
that as far as liberalism was
concerned, it was
still in 1968 the case
that civil rights issues were
dominant in a way that's
kind of difficult to recall.
Desegregation was just in the course of being dismantled.
Everybody in memory knew of
segregated theaters and
trains and public accommodations
in the south.
And the conservative... it's very
crude, but the divide was often defined in those terms.
John Price mentioned the "Ripon" society.
John and I were "Riponners,"
and we called ourselves liberal Republicans.
John Mitchell called us juvenile delinquents.
If you go back and you look
at what the Ripon society
was for, it's not liberal at all in modern terms.
We were pro-civil rights libertarians.
We were for the voluntary army,
for the negative income tax.
We were very much Milton Friedmanites,
but revenue sharing, but
the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and Barry Goldwater's
decision to vote against
it was just defining
of categories in very important ways.
Liberalism was out-flanked in
those years by the emergence
of real radicalism.
Black power was displacing the
moderate civil rights leaders.
James Farmer, the founder
of CORE, the engineer of
the freedom riots in the South,
was an assistant secretary in the Nixon Administration.
And the new left and the
Port Huron statement was starting
to, as Tom Whittaker said,
make liberals feel tired and old and out of shape.
Conservatism for its part...
National Review had been around
for a decade and a half,
but it was very much
a cultural, its conservatism
was quite cultural, and it was quite libertarian.
It did not have an affirmative philosophy of government,
and what you see
Pat struggling with is the birth of neo-conservatism,
which was a more practical form of conservatism.
In the old days, neo-conservatism actually was about domestic policy.
It came to have very different meanings in the Bush administration.
But it was people who
were serious about their,
about liberal intentions to
make the world a better place,
but extraordinarily interested in
practical questions of results.
So it was a form of conservatism,
which actually grappled with difficult
problems of government, rather
than simply opposing them all.
And so all of
those things worked to change.
I think that today the fact
that we have parties that are
institutionally liberal and
institutionally conservative affects our
views of what those ideas
consist of, not always
in positive ways.
The two doctrines are
influenced, and I think
in many ways, by the needs of
the party to which they are
now lock, stock and barrel attached to.
You make an interesting point about race, too.
John, did you want to talk next?
But let me throw that into the mix.
I mean, I felt in reading
these letters and editing these
letters, a strange
feeling which was that the
'70s were so toxic
and full of racial anxiety,
that for all of
the poisonous and acrimonious
debate that we have today,
we don't have that same kind of toxic politics.
So maybe the overlay of race
is what made, maybe it
was an impediment to thinking through some of these philosophies.
Does anyone want to comment on any of this?
Just to add don't forget Vietnam.
Just a few months
after the 14th Street corridor
was burning, the buses
were surround the White House
complex in order to
keep the protesters from literally
invading the White House.
It was a very, very angry time.
Of course, Nixon's
intervention or invasion of
Cambodia in 1970
led to some resignations from his own staff.
I mean this discussion is primarily
focused on the legacy
of the domestic policies
of that era, but Steve, Vietnam and
Cambodia really coursed through
your office, you know, you
had some people resign.
And Pat Moynihan was, as
you said, supporting Bobby,
he had supported Bobby Kennedy and then Hubert Humphrey.
He was against the war.
He advised Nixon not to
make Johnson's war into Nixon's war.
What was that like?
The question of the students too.
Kent State and so forth.
We were right in the in the midst of that
and there were some real
demagogues in the administration,
importantly the Vice President of the United States, and
I've never seen a
letter or two such as
you have in your volume where
a staff member takes on the Vice President of the United States.
So you have that as well.
Certainly, it was very difficult
because I went on
to become the National
Chairman of the White House Conference
on Children and then the White House Conference on Youth.
And how could we
keep our youth involved,
how could we be a government
that wasn't excluding our young
people? And there were plenty
of young people on the White House staff
who were making the same effort as well.
But I must
say there wasn't much support when
some at the top were talking
about these students as bums.
What about Nixon himself?
You know, we've been talking
about him for the last bit,
but he remains as confusing to
me and in some ways as ever.
Do you, I mean, you've made
a very provocative statement saying Nixon was a tabula rasa.
I, that kind of, I
don't mean to exaggerate it because
I'm sure you didn't really mean
it in the way that I've exaggerated it,
but he couldn't have been, obviously, he'd been around.
And No, no, no.
Nixon, this was in a particular area.
He wasn't around.
So where does Nixon fit in?
What did we learn about Nixon
in all of these stories? Let me just tell an anecdote
about that for a
moment and then you'll see what
a complicated person Richard Nixon
was, and a fascinating man.
We'll be writing about him as long as people will be write about Presidents.
My daughter-in-law happened
to be the casting director of Oliver
Stone's movie on Nixon.
And she asked if
I would see Oliver Stone.
And he called and said
that he was coming to Washington
and I thought, "Well, that's very nice."
I will put together four people
who knew Nixon, and he will put together four people.
The four people that I
had, in addition to myself,
would be a speech writer
for him and a biographer, were Len
Garmet, his law partner,
Ron Zeigler, his press secretary,
and John Sears who had
been an important political strategist for him.
His people, by the way, were
Anthony Hopkins, James Woods,
the producer, and himself, and
about midway in this
conversation, Anthony Hopkins,
who had said, "Call me Tony,"
I said "Tony, note that
here are four people who knew
Nixon or thought they knew
Nixon very well, and each
person is describing somebody else."
A different person.
From, all the way through.
We're going to worry about that.
We're going to worry about that
as it becomes complicated when
in fact Pat Moynihan was having
his own problems of what he really wanted to be.
He desperately wanted to keep
the label liberal although it
was far from where he
was at the time.
He rejected the neoconservative label
that constantly comes through, yet
in fact they were his closest intellectual friends.
So an awful lot of this
was going on to a man
who is so, put these
things together and wow,
you have riddles within riddles.
A question from a distinguished member.
Yeah, go ahead.
This is the time for questions.
Yeah.
This is the Nixon administration.
You want to identify yourself first.
Yes.
I'm Bud Krogh and I
had the honor to be
in the White House with all
of these gentlemen during that period of time.
And I just want you to know that you've brought back some wonderful memories.
Pat Moynihan played a huge
role, I think, in the
lives of many of us on the White House staff.
And Steve, I think you put
in your book, one incident
that I'd like to tell, right
after the President's decision to invade Cambodia.
We all know about what happened at Kent State.
And I was having lunch over
here at the Ritz-Carlton at the time,
and a messenger came over with
this information that four students had been shot.
And it was just overwhelming .
And I ran back to the White House.
The first person I went to see was Pat, Pat Moynihan.
And I said this is what's happened Pat.
I know there's going to
be some kind of statement that
will have to be released about this.
And he said, "Well, let me go to work on it."
Some of you who worked with
him know he would wheel around
and he'd start typing immediately.
And he typed up
this extraordinary statement that
I think took into account what had happened.
It was very compassionate, very direct.
I said, "This is great!"
And I took it from him and I
ran upstairs where they were
working on a statement that was going to go out momentarily.
Unfortunately, Pat didn't go with me.
I think Steve, you point that out
in the book that if he
had followed me up there, we
probably could have prevailed with
a statement that was more reasonable,
more fair, and correct at the time.
I also remember just other
staff people Friday afternoons
going to Pat's office about five o'clock.
And he'd open the bottom drawer and
a certain liquid potion would come out.
And he would begin to
share ideas with us because
he knew a lot of us were
not only young, testosterone-poisoned
as Chris pointed out, and maybe
we needed some kind of help and counseling.
And those Friday afternoons were wonderful.
I've often thought that if Pat
stayed on that staff
over the the next one to two
years, after he left,
and some of us could have consulted
with him, at certain times
in history, that history might have been different.
I just want to thank you, Steve,
for writing an excellent book and
for what you've given us today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
John?
Thank you.
I didn't, the book is great because I didn't write it.
Pat wrote it.
Could I just make a comment
on the question about, who was Richard Nixon?
Steve knew him well.
I had a fascinating evening flight
in the summer of 1969 out to San Clemente.
And sitting next to me in
the back of this small Air
Force plane was the wife
of Bob Finch, who was
Secretary of Health, Education,
and Welfare, but who had had
a remarkable career.
He'd been, I think, one of Nixon's assistants while he was Vice President.
He'd been Lieutenant Governor of California.
He was a very prominent, very
strong figure in California moderate Republican politics.
And I said to Mrs. Finch,
I said, "What is he like?"
And she said, "John," I said
"You know him, you and your
husband Bob know him very
well." And she said, "John, we don't know him at all."
They had known him for 15
to 18 years or so.
I think he was elusive, but
I also loved seeing the lawyer in him.
Because of these many Urban
Affairs Council meetings, we would do major job briefing.
And then I saw, I felt Nixon, during this meetings, it was as though he were hearing the oral arguments after reading the brief.
It was fascinating.
I remember one time when we set
up a dialogue; it had to do with the Welfare Reform.
The head of the National Association of
Businessman at that time was Don
Kendall, the President of Coca-Cola.
I had gone over
and briefed him the night before on the Welfare Reform.
Kendall and Moynihan got into a dialogue, and perhaps also Arthur Burns.
Nixon was watching this dialogue
as though it was a tennis ball
being fired back and forth
over the net by two good arguers.
I loved seeing that side of him.
There was obvious at times
like that the intellectual eagerness of him was seen.
But Nixon was very complex.
He was someone that
was very hard to know
except through history; we will figure it out.
John, I think we're going to
have to end on that as
a concession to the shortness of life.
We could go on for hours.
We should.
I wonder if we could just ask
them, ask one
question that's been championed a bit.
Well, alright Ben and
then, but we have a promise to cease, Ben.
Go ahead Ben.
Here you go.
I haven't yet had the pleasure
of reading Steve's book.
I am writing a book called
"Pat and Scoop," about Pat Moynihan.
Those of us who have been
speechwriters have our own
motto which is that "rhetoric
yields reality."
And with Pat we should not forget that.
He had this, great Irish
gift of blarney.
And what he said
particularly at the time
of the Zionism with racism thing,
reverberated around the world.
And the rhetoric thing,
when Reagan said it
was an evil empire, "Mr. Gorbachev
tear down this wall."
Nathan Sharansky tells us
of how this was telegraphed through the Gulag.
And that these things, the words
meant as much as
the actions and the military power.
Thank you.
I want to thank everybody for a
wonderful panel and again say how honored I am, Geoff.
And thank all of you.