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Good Morning.
I'm Geoff Shepard and I'm
here to welcome you on behalf
of the Richard Nixon Foundation to
what is our 17th Nixon Legacy Forum.
We cosponsor these forums with the National Archives.
And we bring people together who
created the documents during the
Nixon admininstration that led
to policy initiatives on a
number of domestic issues and on foreign affairs.
It's a real pleasure to be
here today at the Hoover Institution
because we have a wonderful program
that is focusing on the
peaceful desegregation of Southern schools.
My job is to introduce
the moderator and to get the program underway.
By way of very brief introduction,
in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled
in a case called Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
that separate but
equal was inherently unequal and
that schools should be desegregated
with all deliberate speed.
But from 1954 to 1969 when
President Nixon took office,
there was virtually no substantive desegregation
and it fell to the
Nixon administration and to
these people here today to
bring about the peaceful desegregation of Southern schools.
And we're going to hear about how
they did it and what
the issues were and what was accomplished.
To guide us through that
discussion, our moderator is Dr. Gerard Alexander.
He is a associate professor of politics
at the University of Virginia
and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
He's also writing a book
on the issues of race
and the modern conservative movement in America.
Before Gerard takes over, however,
we have a brief film clip
of President Nixon himself from August
of 1970. "Let me be
very direct and very candid
with regard to
where we stand on the problem school desegregation.
The highest court of the land has spoken.
The unitary school system must
replace the dual school system
throughout the United States.
The law having
been determined, it is the responsibility
of those in the
federal government and particularly the responsibility of
the President of the United States to uphold the law,
and I shall meet that responsibility.
Leadership, strong leadership, is
not limited simply to enforcing
the law when the law is broken.
We believe, all of us,
in law and order and justice.
We believe in enforcing the law.
But I also believe that leadership,
in an instance like this, requires
some preventive action.
We're trying to take some preventive action
and we're getting magnificent cooperation from
dedicated people in the seven states involved."
Thank you, Gerard?
Thank you and good morning.
We're here to discuss one of
the most dramatic episodes in modern American history.
Leave it to an academic to say
that those events are summarized by a statistical table.
But that is the case, and here's the table.
It shows the percent of African
American school children in the
South who were enrolled
in schools with white school children.
You can see that the Brown
decision in 1954 and
the later decisions in polices
through the 50s and most of
the 1960s had very limited
effect. That was true
even after the 1964 Civil
Rights Act gave the federal
government the power to punish
school districts that were not
complying with Brown, punish them
with law suits and punish
them with cutoffs in federal funds,
and also, after the
1965 Elementary and Secondary Education
act, which offered enough
funding to make cutoffs matter.
As late as even the
late 1960's and the closing
phases of the Johnson
administration, stark minorities of
black kids were enrolled in the same
schools in the South as
white kids, with the partial
exception of several rim or
peripheral South states. Then
came a sea change, which you
can see between the second to
last and the last columns in the table.
It happened especially at the start
of the 1970-71 school year, in
the middle of Richard Nixon's first term.
With incredible abruptness,
Southern and especially deep South
schools were at long last desegregated.
Many commentators omit to mention
that this happened under Nixon at all.
Others who note it treat
it simply as an outcome imposed by the Supreme Court.
Stephen Ambrose, for example says,
"Nixon had to be
hauled kicking and screaming into
desegregation on a meaningful scale.
And he did what he did not
because it was right, but because he had no choice."
That is obviously an analysis
and interpretation consisting with the
claim that the Nixon
administration was captive to
a Southern strategy that involved
easing back pressures for civil
rights on school desegregation as much as on anything.
I think close inspection doesn't sustain that argument in this case.
To over-simplify,
I think the administration experienced two
major decision points concerning Southern school desegregation.
The first set in after inauguration,
when the administration had to grapple
with a legacy of 15 years
of court decisions, and then the Johnson administration's policies.
Together, those had yeilded
sadly, frustratingly, little movement in the numbers.
In July 1969, Secretary of
HEW Finch, and Attorney General
John Mitchell announced a new
decision to reduce emphasis on
funding cut-offs and increase focus on lawsuits.
Many critics at the time
insisted that the shift to lawsuits
was an attempt to evade executive
branch responsibility for desegregation.
Since it was Mitchell's DOJ that
proceeded to file the suits,
I have never fully understood that argument.
Finch and Mitchell in that
same statement also accepted that
a deadline of complete desegregation
by the fall of 1969,
as had been speculated about
and proposed, but not enforced, really, by the Johnson administration,
simply wasn't realistic.
This, too, earned accusations of a
sellout, even though the deadline
was almost certainly politically impossible and
would have been so, even under a hypothetical Humphrey administration.
That summer and fall
of 1969, in some prominent instances,
the administration sided with some
white Southern requests for delay
in further desegregation, including in
a prominent cluster of Mississippi school districts,
in which the administration
requested a one year delay
in desegregation until the start of the 1970 to 1971 school year.
That was litigated, and
in Alexander Holmes, Alexander
vs. Holmes, the Supreme Court
in October of 1969 ordered
desegregation of those districts
quote, at once, unquote.
The See Change in the
numbers occurred in the twelve months that followed.
And many are content to conclude
that it was simply imposed by that court decision.
But that strikes me as a
pretty non-obvious interpretation of the
court's role and authority in
a matter that had by that
point been defying the justices'
will for a decade and a half.
I think a much better case can
be made, that the administration
had substantial discretion over how
to respond to Alexander, which
was after all an order
to lower courts, not an order to the
administration at all.
The extent of the
administration's discretion is not a
fact appreciated by many commentators,
but it is by many participants
in these events, as you'll see.
The administration appears to have decided on two main courses of action.
The first was to continue and
even ramp up extensive DOJ
litigation, Department of Justice
litigation, against non-compliant school
districts, pressing for court
orders in hundreds of districts beyond
the 33 Mississippi ones directly affected by Alexender.
Second, the administration launched an unusual
attempt to reach outside
the formal policy process, what President
Nixon referred to in that
clip as a preventive measure.
It formed a cabinet committee, nominally
led by Vice-President Agnew, but
in fact steered by Secretary of Labor George Shultz.
That committee sponsored the formation
of committees of citizens in each Southern
state whose members met
with key cabinet officials and the President.
The administration brought pressure
to bear on them to agree
on a desegregation plan for their state.
These committees lacked statutory authority,
but they commanded a strange legitimacy,
one that I suspect was powerfully
reinforced by the combined signals
of the administration and the
court that desegregation was unavoidable.
The result is the numbers with which I began speaking.
This project of Cabinet
committee coordination with Southern committees
culminated in President Nixon's
trip to New Orleans from
which we just heard him speak in
August of 1970, where he met
with the Louisiana committee, and the
chairs of the other state committees or community boards.
The result was massive Southern
desegregation at the start
of the 1970-71 school year, which
was what the administration had asked
for in its fall
1969 request to the court.
Along with the desegregation of the
public accommodations that had been
accomplished in 1964, this represented
the most sweeping change in
what had been, for two centuries,
the Southern organization of racial life.
It's a story worth telling and this panel has been to tell it.
Let me introduce its members.
Under President Nixon, J. Stanley
Pottinger was Director of the
Office of Civil Rights in the
Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, and then
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Today he is President of Barnstorm Books and a noted author.
George Shultz served President Nixon
as Secretary of Labor, as director
of the Office of Management and Budget, and as Secretary of Treasury.
In 1970, he was vice
president of the cabinet committee
on education that I just referred to.
Under President Reagan, of course, he
went on to serve as the 60th Secretary of State.
Since then, he's been a senior fellow here at Hoover.
And Paul O' Neill started his
public service career in the
Veteran's Administration before joining
the Office of Management and Budget,
ultimately becoming OMB's Deputy Director.
After chairing ALCOA, he became
America's 72nd Secretary of Treasury.
Let me turn first to
discuss these matters to J. Stanley Pottinger.
Thanks, Gerard.
As Gerard has just said, one
way to look at the history
of school desegregation is through
the eyes of the United States Supreme Court.
There's good reason for that, because
it is the court and our
constitutional system that determines
what is and is not the meaning of the United States Constitution.
And for many years, the United
States Supreme Court had determined
that separate but equal was
the law of the land and
the law of the constitution, not simply
congressional mandate, but constitutional.
After 200 years or so
of slavery, and then a
Civil War that was fought over
the issue, national constitutional
amendments, 13th, 14th, and 15th
amendments that involved everybody in
the land, reconstruction, Jim Crow laws.
There had been a major shift
on the part of the outlook
of the country on the issue,
but the Supreme Court still, as
late as 1896, in Plessy vs.
Ferguson said separate but
equal is still the law of the land.
When we get to World War II, things changed.
We discover that the segregated
fighting units, black and
white, that were in Europe
in particular, ended up fighting
together,
in some cases integrated in the
same unit, but frequently strategized together.
The Defense Department itself was
split about whether this was
wise or not, but Dwight
Eisenhower said, "We're doing it, it makes sense, it works."
And it did.
That gave President Truman an
opening in 1947 to say
we're going to start our first public
integration or desegregation in
the United States as an official
matter and that was the United States military.
Now in fact, not
a lot happened at that point,
but it was the beginning of
something, until the Korean
War at which point,
especially in 1952 when we
have a recycling of Dwight Eisenhower back into the presidency.
United States discovered that there was integration that worked.
Not only units fighting together
side by side, but integration in fighting units itself.
Only one year later, Brown vs.
Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court,
and it said, in effect,
that we're part of
a general mosaic on this constitutional issue.
By the way, segregation is as constitutional as it gets.
It's part of the way our
country was constituted and how
to deal with it was constitutional for the same reason.
And once we got into schools and
transportation and other issues,
as Mr. Shultz, as Secretary Shultz
will talk about briefly, jobs
Philadelphia plan, it was
part of general rise of
understanding that the
country needed to deal with the issue generally,
and specifically with
regard to schools, which is why
we're here. Between 1954
and 64, a decade, very
little occurred in terms
of actual Supreme Court changes
or directives, and as
the President said a moment
ago and as Gerard pointed out,
it isn't the Court that
has the marshals or the
army or anybody to effectively enforce the laws.
It is the President, it is
the executive branch, and of
course Congress weighing in with laws.
So you have to have,
there is no such thing as just
looking at school desegregation through the eyes of the Supreme Court alone.
Everything gets done only with the executive branch enforcing.
But in 1964, President
Johnson, in a bipartisan
move with Everett Dirkson and
the Republicans, passed the Civil Rights Act of '64,
broad based, dealing heavily with education.
1965 passed the Voting
Rights Act, making sure that
black Americans had the right
to vote, and then you
began to see this new movement again.
But again, as Gerard said,
very little happened between 1964,
when Title VI of
the Civil Rights Act permitted, or
mandated the government to cut
off funds from school districts
who did not comply with desegregation orders.
In fact, as Gerard has
pointed out, there wasn't a
lot of money to cut off at
that point. That came a
little bit later. But very
little happened, but we
had this rise, this tide
of expectation, this recognition that
we were dealing now with coming
to grips with one of the
greatest Constitution of conflicts
in America's history.
We were coming to deal with it because of
these reasons, and from a period from 1965
to 1968, although
very little happened, a groundwork was set.
That is to say, very little happened,
as we've seen, there was very
little actual desegregation. In 1968, a
very important case came down
called Green against New Kent County.
And in that case, the court, in
an unanimous decision, in fact, virtually
all of the Supreme Court cases
on school desegregation have been
unanimous 9 to 0 decisions,
and it said you have to
use whatever it takes
get school desegregation and you have to do it now.
All deliberate speed, which in
Brown too was the standard
of the Supreme Court, was abandoned.
All deliberate speed was considered to be slow
and the court said, no, you have
to do it and you have to do it
now. That happened in May, I
believe, May of
1968, in the middle of a campaign for
the Presidency. Nothing was
happening in the school districts.
In all national campaigns, most
of the civil rights enforcement, Democratic
or otherwise, tends to get constrained
because of the pressures that are political and realistic.
Nothing happened and then we
come to this grand moment
when literally hundreds of
years of experience in
America comes down a
large funnel to a small
moment, and that moment
is when Richard Nickson becomes President.
Of all people, it wouldn't matter who was President I suppose, but of all people,
Richard Nixon as a consummate
executive President,
someone who knew how to execute
as well as anyone I've ever
seen, gather together his
people, not just here
on the stage, but others, to say
we now have something that we have to deal with that's historic.
It's not short term, it's not
small, it's not transitory,
this is the end of a
major conflict that has
taken place, and in some
ways become a badge,
has continued to extend the
badges of slavery, as the
Supreme Court put it, that
had gone on for over two hundred years.
Major, major issue, and
for anyone to assume, whether
it's a writer about the subject,
Steven Ambrose or anyone else,
that this is a simple and
easy thing to do is
simply beyond the possibility ability of recognition.
This is extremely difficult.
And everyone who was
involved, whether they were my
colleagues in the Democratic
administration before me, whether
it was my immediate predecessor Leon Panetta,
who I'll tell you
about later, did some very
interesting and helpful things,
or whether it was the group who you see here now.
When it came to 1970,
and the chart that
you saw a moment ago, that
was a moment, an historic moment
that because of the President
and how he did it, and we'll talk about how he did it,
we'd like to talk about how
he did it because how he
did it is a major part of the story.
The President did it and he
not only did it, but
he did it peacefully, he did
it effectively, and as
Gerard suggests, I for one
believe that he deserves historic
credit for this major accomplishment.
Secretary.
Please, George Schultz.
In all the time
time that I served in the
Nixon administration, I learned
a lot from President
Nixon, and about him.
And two of the things I learned
very early on, even before
we took office, he was
President, me Secretary of
Labor, was, number one, he was a strategist.
If there was a problem and
you came to him with a
kind of tactical solution, he really didn't like it.
You said, "Mr President, here's this
problem and it's part of
an ongoing thing and here's
the strategy we need and
here's the way I would handle
it in this particular case," he liked that.
He wanted a strategy.
The other thing I learned from discussions
with him, when I
went to see him and
to tell him what kind of
a Secretary of Labor I
would be, what my beliefs were,
and we discussed the issue of
fairness in the workplace.
So he was for a fair deal.
And I knew in a sense,
from that private conversation, where he stood as a person.
Then in office, we had
the problem of discrimination in the
work place, and with
his approval we set
out, I as Secretary
of Labor, with what was called the Philadelphia
Plan, to allow
some blacks to work in the skilled construction trades.
And people said I was trying to establish a quota.
I said "No, I'm trying to replace one.
It's been there a long time and very effective."
Zero was the quota.
So it came to a big battle in the Senate.
And that's where the chips are
down and the President
stood with me,
I remember, I went to the vote in the gallery.
Hugh Scott was our Republican
leader, and he gave me his
tally sheet afterwards, and we won.
So, then comes along this
question of desegregation of the schools, seven states.
And the President made
his decision of what to
do, and he
appointed a cabinet committee
to manage it.
How do we manage this process?
It's going to potentionally be explosive,
so what can we do?
And he appointed Vice President Agnew as the chairman and me as the vice chairman.
And the Vice President didn't want to have anything to do with it.
He said, "This is a disaster.
I'm not gonna touch it."
So he was basically out.
And the people
that I worked with particularly were
Pat Moynihan, was counselor in
the White House, Len Garment
was a White House lawyer, and
both of them were very involved with me in this.
And then Morgan.
What was his first name?
Ed Morgan, he was
a lawyer and a friend of Nixon's.
He was a very good guy.
Anyway, we and others
worked at this. And President
Nixon had made it clear
that he wanted this to somehow
be brought about strategically with
involvement of the people
in some kind of constructive way.
That was what he told us.
So we decided,
and he approved, that we
would form biracial committees in each of the states.
And we said, we're not gonna
pay any attention to the politics of people.
What we want are people
who carry respect in their respective communities,
so that if they decide
something, people will pay attention.
And they'll stand up for what they believe.
And so we managed to
get people to serve, blacks
and whites, to serve on these
committees, and then we brought them to Washington.
The first one was from Mississippi.
And we assembled them in the Roosevelt Room.
So here we are around that
table in the Roosevelt Room, blacks
and whites, and I'm chairing this meeting.
And of course at first, they're arguing.
The whites thought desegregating
the schools was a terrible idea.
They said why and so on,
a lot of the blacks thought it
was essential. They argued.
And I thought, well, let them blow off steam for a while.
Then by a pre-arrangement when I
thought they'd had enough of that,
we had John Mitchell standing by, and he would come in.
And John was very gruff, Attorney General.
The whites thought he was their guy somehow.
And I'd say, "Mr. Attorney
General, what are you going to do when the schools open?"
He'd say, in his gruff voice, "I'm going to enforce the law."
"Thank you very much."
He leaves.
So I'd say, "Well, it's
been a fascinating discussion we've had
all morning long, but it's really irrelevant.
Because it's gonna happen.
Whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's gonna happen.
And you're all familiar with
your various communities and you
have a stake in having
it happen in a way that's
constructive, that allows the schools to operate well.
That's where your children are going.
And to have this take place without violence.
And how's that going to happen?"
And gradually we got them
to shift away from talking
about what amounted to matters
of principle to talk about solving problems.
I'd learned from my labor relations
experience that if people
are arguing principle, you never get anywhere.
If you can get them to
transfer it into problems,
then you can solve a problem.
So that's what they started to do.
And gradually as the day went on,
they started to talk constructively
together and often go off on the side.
We let them do that.
Anything to get them to
talk about what are the
problems and what are we going
to do about them.
And when the time was
right, usually about 3 or
3:30 in the afternoon, again by
prearrangement, we gave a
signal and we'd go across the hall.
Roosevelt Room's right across the hall from the Oval Office.
And we'd just go across the hall for a meeting with the President.
And he was sensational.
He said, in effect, I
wish I could remember, "I've made
my decision, but in
our country that's not enough on an issue like this.
This is something that affects communities that affects states.
And you have to make your decisions
if this is going to work, and we have to work together."
He'd say, "Think of the decisions that have been made in this office.
So this is an important
one, but you have your decisions to make."
And it was really inspirational.
And those guys went out of the Oval Office on cloud nine.
And we had a little money,
somehow or other. We told them, we
have some money, we can put it on the very fast track.
We don't have to go through a
lot of stuff. If you
need some money for something, let
us know and we'll have it to you in a week.
And that helped a little.
So we did this with six states.
It went well.
And we were feeling pretty good about it. It
was getting up to, close to school opening.
The last state was Louisiana.
So I think it was
Pat Moynihan that had the
idea, and I liked it.
He said, "Why don't we have
the last one in
Louisiana down in New
Orleans, then after it, have
all of the co-chairmen, black
and white, come to New
Orleans and we'll have
a general session as the kickoff to the school year."
So the President called a meeting
in the Oval Office. Vice President
Agnew was there and he said, "Mr. President, don't go.
There's gonna be blood all through the streets of the South.
The blood should not be on your hands.
It's on the hands of the liberals who have been pushing this.
Don't go."
He looks at me, I don't
know if I'm remembering this exactly, but
I'm a non-politician in the room and
I say, "Well, Mr. President whatever happens,
it's on your watch. And you've
met with these people and they're
good people and you inspired them
and we've been working with them.
They're working.
So we think you ought to go."
So, he was going
to go no matter what, but he
had the meeting sort of
pro forma, let everybody have their
say. So Pat
and I and Len go down the
night before and we
start meeting with the Louisiana delegation
that isn't going so well,
and I'm suddenly beginning to realize,
it's one thing to bring people
into the White House, it's
another thing to have them meet
in a hotel room in New
Orleans. It's not the same. So I'm
struggling, we're getting somewhere, but we're not there.
And all of a sudden I
hear, the President has landed,
the President is ten minutes out, and
so on. So we have
to adjourn the meeting and I go
to the President, I say, "Mr. President,
always before we had this
teed up when we came
into the Oval Office, but it's not quite there. You're
going to have to do this yourself." So
he came into the Louisiana meeting
and took it over, and really did a beautiful job.
By the time we finished,
they were very pro.
So then we go to the general
meeting, and it went very well.
We all felt really good
about it and the
clip of the President's speech you
saw was made after the meeting.
It was interesting, we get
on Air Force One to fly
back and the President has
his cabin, and we're sitting
in a little place and we're having a good time talking about it.
We're all feeling pretty good about
it because it went so
well, and the
President got lonely I guess, and
he comes back to join our discussion.
Bryce Harlow was there, he
was the only guy with
any Southern background in our
crowd, and the President says to him,
"Bryce, how do you think it's going to go?"
Bryce says, "Well, Mr. President, I
think it's going to go well
in the South, but where
you're going to have problems is when it comes to the North.
He said, "Why's that, Bryce?"
He said, "Well, in the
South we have
this view of
the *** as a race, but
as far as human beings
are concerned, we love them, they're with us all the time.
They live in our houses, take care of our children.
They're our friends.
We have lots of human contact.
In the North, it's the other way around.
They're always talking about
desegregation, but they have
no human experience, so they won't be able to handle it."
It turned out to be a very prophetic remark.
We also were conscious
of the media, particularly Len Garment,
so he went around to the
media and he said, "Now,
suppose a hundred schools open
and there's a little violence at one of them, what's the story?
We think the story is schools
open peacefully, got it?"
Actually, they all opened peacefully, we
had no violence, and the
process worked, and
I think it worked because there
was a strategy, because the
President was firm, he
made his decision, and everybody
could see that was it.
There was no wavering.
And then there was a strategy for
unfolding it and bringing people
in and making them
part of the decision in a sense.
And the wisdom
of having real people who
stood up and had respect
in their communities was borne out
because they were respected
and when they said, "Look, this is going to happen.
We've got to solve the problems,"
then everybody tried looking
at it as a problem to
solve, and that made all the difference.
So once again, I come
back to the fact
that this was an
illustration of the
strategic instincts of Richard
Nixon on how to go
about something and also,
of his personal conviction
that people deserved a fair
shake, regardless of their color.
Secretary O'Neill?
So, people who don't
know a lot about the government probably
wonder what in the
world is OMB doing involved in this?
What does this have to do with the Office of Management and Budget?
Well, I was going to get to that.
So, before there was an OMB, there
was a Bureau of the Budget, which had
existed since 1921 until
it was replaced by the
Office of Management and Budget in June of 1970.
So I make
that point because the reason OMB,
at least in those
days, was involved in everything
is because anything that goes on in the government costs money.
Sometimes it's a small amount,
but everything had some attention attachment to money.
And so OMB people or
Bureau of the Budget people were always
involved in anything that was
going to result in having to
find money or spend money on something.
And the secret of working
in the place was, if you
mastered the numbers you had
a seat at every important policy table.
Itgave you access
and an ability to learn
from people like Secretary Shultz
about good governance and policy making.
So one of the things
the Secretary didn't say, is it's
not as though this was the
only thing going on in the
government at the time. So
he came, with President Nixon,
as Secretary of Labor in January of 1969.
And in the months
from January until August the 8th of 1969,
there was an enormous effort made.
The Philadelphia Plan was happening,
forming in this time.
The work to create the Family
Assistance Program, which I
would argue had a direct
connection to the whole
question of desegregation and
a fair shake for people in society.
The ideas of general revenue
sharing and reorganizing off of economic opportunity.
All these things were melted together.
And in the middle of all
of this, was the creation
of the Office Management and Budget, which
brought Secretary Shultz from being
Secretary of Labor to
being the first ever Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
So, it's not as though
there was just one thing and
everybody was paying attention to
how are we going to deal
with peaceful desegregation of the schools.
There were an unbelievable number of
things going on, including trying to
figure out a way to wind down
the Vietnamese war.
So my direct involvement was
first of all, getting Secretary Shultz
sitting around the table
as the arguments were made
and debated about what were
the right principles of equity
with regard to what some
people called, in a pejorative
way, the negative income tax in the Family Assistance Program.
I would argue that the principles
about fairness and equity
that were hashed out around
those other subjects and around
the Philadelphia Plan created something
that was really very useful for
the administration throughout its
entire tenure, which was
a value base that you
could count on, so that when
we had questions, and OMB
was always asked to
comment on prospective legislation, whether
an idea was in accord
with the President's program or not,
it was a powerful lever. And
because there was this consistency
about the application of value ideas,
with the passage of time,
in fact with every passing month,
it was clear what the President's
program and thrust was
about virtually everything, so there
was no mystery, and it
became firmer as we went through time.
So my first immediate assignment, as
I recall, was Secretary Shultz
saying, "In order
to make this community leadership process
work, we need to
be able to facilitate leaders
getting together behind the scenes
with no media present in a
way where they can talk honestly with
each other about how they,
the leaders of the community, are going
to cause this process
to happen in a peaceful, constructive way.
And Paul, what you need to
do is figure out
where we we can get some," I'll
never forget, "where we can get them walking around money."
Now, there's not a lot of money.
This is money so that, we
can, as he said, we
can say to leaders, if you
need ten thousand dollars to rent
a meeting hall and a hotel and
get some pastries and coffee,
that's the kind of money we need.
This is not about huge grants to buy people off.
It's just to facilitate the
process. And it was
fascinating to watch this happen
with the direction from the President
and with George Shultz's
understanding about how to
bring disparate warring parties
together as he had learned
in his work in labor relations
and get them to work in
this constructive way. And the
walking around money sounds kind
of trivial, but it was
an important part of actually
causing good things to happen.
It was not just about
talking, it was about being
able to show, you're going to
do this together and we in
the administration are going to help you.
I think, just draw that,
it was part of this notion of
a collaborative approach that the
President said in the Oval Office to them,
"I've made my decision, but that's not enough in our country.
You have to make your decisions."
And we wanna
collaborate and actually, we
have a little money to help do that.
It wasn't a big amount of
money, but it was quick money. If
you needed something, you got
it.
Thank you each, we're going
to have a discussion now amongst yourselves.
But I wanted to start
if I could by quickly reviewing
who the major players were.
We have some photos that
we want to bring up. Who was
who in these various affairs, other
than the three of you, they're
White House staff, they were
Health, Education, and Welfare people and Department of Justice people.
I think we have photos we
want to bring up to identify
some of the players and I
may ask for your help on this.
Vice President Agnew, of course
This is not
an editorial session, just a quick photo array.
He was frank about his view.
Yeah. He didn't want anything to do with it.
Give him credit for candor.
We went and briefed him
about the Family Assistance Program, he said, "Dismissed."
Secretary of Labor, Shultz,
Bob Finch, Secretary Finch, Secretary
of HEW, John Ehrlichman,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, help
filling in, Bryce Harlow,
Bob Mardian, secretary of,
excuse me attorney, excuse me
general counsel of HEW and
an assistant to Mr.
Schultz in the running of the
committee on education, and
Leon Panetta, my immediate
predecessor who today is Secretary
of Defense and who,
maybe we'll get into this, was a
pivotal figure in the transition
from the position that
President Nixon inherited to the
position that he reached in 1970.
Leon was a very
important figure in that period
of time if you want to go through it later.
Would you mind, just because the chronology
could be useful for this, do
you want to talk about that briefly,
of Mr. Panetta's role in
this and what he helped do and what he left you?
Yes sure. Leon Panetta was
a Republican here in California,
his home is in California.
He was a Tommy Keekal, Senator
Keekal Republican, worked
on his staff, had done
some other things in the party,
and when President Nixon was
elected in 1968, Bob
Finch brought Leon Panetta
into HEW as Director of the Office for Civil Rights.
Now there are two major agencies, as we've discussed here.
One is HEW, which has
oversight over schools, the other is the Department of Justice.
Sometimes their work overlaps a bit.
HEW was there to say if
you don't comply with school
desegregation, we cut off your money.
That was the Title VI remedy.
The Department of Justice, which
I actually went from one to the other,
the Department of Justice has court
capability and the ability
to fashion relief in the courts.
You had both of these, but the focus of
attention at that period
of time, initially, was on HEW.
Not initially on the Justice
Department, but became, as Secretary
Shultz said, it became critically important under John Mitchell.
Leon Panetta ran that office
and did a
fine job, but came to
blows with a number of people in Congress over
the speed with which the
administration would pursue school desegregation,
and he came to loggerheads
with a number of people in the White House.
And after approximately one year,
almost exactly a year,
he resigned or was fired.
Leon says I was fired, John Erlichman said you resigned.
The two of them used to argue
about it, and sometimes laugh about it.
In any event, he departed.
I took his place then
because Secretary Finch brought
me from California. My home is San
Francisco. I was
regional counsel of HEW at
that time, I'd done some
work in the field and Secretary
Finch brought me in to take his place.
Because of the turmoil that
occurred, and because of
Holmes vs. Alexander, and whether
the administration was allegedly
dragging its feet deliberately or
whether it was actually helping to
program the court and
program the education committee
to get the job done, and
that's a very important
debate. Regardless of which way you go on that, and we can talk about that, what happened was
that there was tremendous turmoil when Leon quit.
He had a press conference and he
accused the administration, or the White House,
of being duplicitous and putting
undue pressure on him.
I arrived in Washington, D.C.
to take this job, from San
Francisco, over a red-eye,
came in, flew all
night, I'm still a little blurry eyed.
I see Secretary Finch.
He says, "Are you sure you want to do this.
If you haven't brought
asbestos pants, don't take
this job." And I
said, "Yeah, of course I want to do this. I mean it's a great opportunity."
I didn't know anything.
And he said "Fine," and I thought, well that's it I must be hired.
And he said "Now you go over to the White House, you'll be interviewed by John Ehrlichman."
Really?
Alright.
So I went over to the
White House, West Wing, met Mr.
Ehrlichman, and he did interview
me and after I
was hired and I passed,
I realized I was really being hired by the White House.
He said to me, "I want
to tell you something about Leon Panetta."
This is John Ehrlichman saying to me.
He said, "When he left, I was
furious with him because he
said that the administration,
here in the White House
people had mislead him and
pressured him not to apply
legitimate tools of law enforcement.
And I was furious with him because I knew that wasn't true.
But after he left, I decided
to look around and see, do a little investigation of my own.
And I did investigate what was
going on, and let me
tell you something, he was telling the truth.
I didn't realize it, but there
are various people here in the
White House who were putting ungodly
pressure on him not to enforce the law.
He was transmitting resistance from
the Congress, through the White House to him.
And here's what I'm telling
you, Stan Pottinger: starting today,
you will meet with me once
a week, privately, in the White House mess.
You will tell me everything that's going
on, and I will
support you and I will make
sure that no one interferes
with your ability to do your job.
Number two, Ed Morgan
will be assigned by my staff
to work with you on a day-to-day
basis if necessary. Number three,
any question you have whatsoever
about how to get something
done or a political or
other problem, you tell me
and I will have an answer
to you on how to
solve that problem within twenty-four hours."
And on and on he went, and in fact I
privately did go to the
White House, I did meet with
him, I did give these reports,
and we developed a rapport.
Now what does that mean?
Why is that important?
It's important because it meant
that the person who was directing
the Office of Civil Rights in this controversial area.
Where I was, I wasn't in the lofty
position of my colleagues on my right.
I was sort of down in the
trenches, where
you have to say to
someone, either you do it
or you lose your money, you do
it or you get referred to the Justice Department and they'll sue you.
And the person who has to do that, or the staff that has to do that,
to have the backing of
the second or third most powerful
person in the United States
Government, namely John Ehrlichman,
meant a tremendous, tremendous amount.
And I will always thank Leon
Pennetta for having created
the conditions and, in a
sense, set up the opportunity
for me to follow him in
a way that gave me that kind of authority.
It made a huge difference, and we can talk about that some more later.
Ehrlichman was very helpful in all this.
He wasn't out front, but he was very helpful.
I remember one occasion, kind of funny.
That Vernon Jordan was appointed
head of the Urban League.
So, Vernon and
I talked about it. I said,
"Let's get him in here
and have him meet the President and
see if we can't have a friend."
So Vernon comes in.
As you know, he's very recognizable.
And we introduce him to the President.
The President says, "Glad to
meet you." And Vernon says, "Well, Mr. President we've met before."
And then he stopped.
And Nixon had great pride
in remembering faces and names, he was
marvelous at it, but he
obviously didn't remember, and he
was struggling, and Vernon
milked it, he loved to do that.
And then he said, "Well, Mr. President,
you remember when you were
out of office, you came to
De Paul University once and gave a talk
and had a dinner afterwards?"
He said, "Yeah, I remember that," he said.
Vernon said, "Well, I was the waiter on your table."
That's a good story.
But anyway, we did make a friend out of Vernon Jordan.
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
I'd like to ask
about the role of Nixon himself in this.
There are two ways I want to ask about that.
One is, I wanted
to ask you about your experience, not with
the policy staff like Ehrlichman or
others, but rather the political staff
in the White House and people who
had politics and the optics of all of this on their minds.
And secondly, I'd like to ask
about the President himself, who
had to think about policy, but
had to think about the politics,
including the politics of his
own reelection, and I wanted
to ask how you think those
political factors played into your
actions on this matter of school
desegregation, to the extent you
think they did or that you
detected that. Well in my case,
I thought I was working for
the President, and the
political business was somebody else's problem.
It was obvious what he
wanted to do, and he
approved of the way we
wanted to go about it.
In one case, what was the
name? Dent? Harry Dent
was one of the political operatives in the Southern case.
So we got some help out
him, as I remember, in identifying some
real people, who weren't
just people who always
agreed with each other, but
were genuine good people
that had great respect in their community.
So that's the kind of people
we wanted on our committee.
So I think we did get some help from Harry Dent
on that, but basically, as I
said earlier, we tried
to take the politics out of
this, and we didn't
ask anybody, whether Republicans or
Democrats. We just wanted people
to come who had some following in their community.
Surely the President must have
had concerns that if this
went badly in the South, it could hurt him in that region.
No doubt, and Agnew underlined the
point when he advised not
to go to New Orleans.
But he also realized that
if you didn't do anything and
things went badly, as I
said in that meeting, it's on his watch.
So he has to
work at it and he was a believer in processes.
Mr.
Pottinger, you were both, as
you said, at the Office of
Civil Rights at the HEW and
then in the second term, you were
heading the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.
In both those jobs dealing
with civil rights, you could have
been subject to great political
pressure from Mr. Dent or
others in the political staff.
The insulation you
described from Mr. Erlichman, did that endure?
Well yeah, I became Assistant Attorney
General of the Civil
Rights Division in the second
Nixon administration and there
was... The political pressure, as
it is for every President of
the United States, was less because
he was not facing reelection again.
But in the first administration, as you were talking about,
yes, it helped to have John Ehrlichman there.
It helped to have Elliot Richardson, who
was the Secretary of HEW who followed Bob Finch
and who was terrific in the
way he handled matters and
his sort of steadfast attitude
toward following the President's
directive of the so-called March
24th, 1970 memorandum, which
was a policy directive that
said from the White House
to the nation, as well as
to those of us who were
working for the President and
working in the administration, here's what's going to happen.
And as Mr. Shultz said, it
said, the policy statement
said, we are going
to desegregate, we are going
to follow the law of
the land, we are going to
follow the Supreme Court's dictates in
this area and we are going
to do it as cooperatively as possible.
It also said that busing,
as a tool, was not
a desirable tool for desegregation,
but to the extent
that the court had to use
it or did use it and
not use it, then you
had a gray area, but
the President said the bottom line
would be you have to desegregate.
Should I take a moment to talk?
I'd like to get back to one note.
Go ahead.
I think it was always clear
to me the President believed in
neighbourhood schools and you
had to make the neighbourhood school good
and busing, maybe you had
to do it, but it was
not desirable to bus kids all over the place.
Better to have them in the neighborhood, if you can.
That's exactly right, and here's
what happened, and this is sometimes lost.
Let's pretend that this circle
here is the court of
a town, and the
rest of the map is rural
area, because we're now talking about the South.
This is a critical distinction that
the President understood. When the
kids are out here
in the rural area, they're all on buses.
They can't walk to school, it's too far.
They're in farms, they're in areas,
inside the city you have
neighborhood schools, but out here in area, they're on buses.
Busing as a word did not
mean transporting children from point
A to point B. Busing as
a word meant transporting kids
in order to desegregate schools.
And that's why it became a buzz word.
The superintendent of schools
in Jefferson County, Kentucky, a
very big place, it's
Louisville, Kentucky, had Louisville
here in the center, and then
he had a few hundred miles of kids outside,
all of whom were obviously on
rural roads and going to school.
And when he said to us, I
can't engage in a
desegregation plan here because
we don't have busing.
I said, "I beg your pardon."
He said "We don't have any
bus, we have no experience with busing. We just can't do it."
I said "Well, how do all these
thousands of children out here get to school?"
He said, "Oh, we have hauling.
We have a lot of hauling, but we have no busing."
And it became instantly clear
that he meant busing meant hauling
kids for the purpose of
desegregation, if you're hauling them
just to get them to school, that's not busing.
Now because the South
was so rural, frequently you
ended up with less busing,
less transportation than before because
when you have a segregated school
system you run the kids
past their neighborhood school to
a distant black school or distant
white school and if you
make it a unitary system they
actually have to go less distance.
However, when you get to
an urban area whether it's
South or North, whether Charlotte-Mecklenburg
or Boston, or whether
it's Detroit, or any
other, or Kinston, North Carolina,
you have a different situation because,
as Mr. Shultz points out, you have kids who are able to walk to school.
They aren't on buses.
They are literally in a
neighborhood school, and to
take those kids out of
school and put them on
buses for the first time
to go someplace else presented all
kinds of cultural and political problems for everybody.
It doesn't matter if you were Republican or
Democrat, it means you're
losing control of your kids,
where they go, what happens to
them during the day, black or
white. We keep forgetting how
many black families were nervous
about school desegregation too.
They didn't know what was going to happen to their kids.
They were going to be a minority in a white school.
So everybody, whether you were
a black parent or white parent, you worry
about going away from your
neighborhood school to get on a
bus to go into an integrated school.
That distinction between rural areas,
which were true all over Louisiana,
Texas, all over the South,
and the urban areas, some
of which were in the South, but
all of which were in the
North, was a major,
major distinction that happened
after the success of 1970.
Because after the success of
1970, the Supreme Court
in 1971 came down
with a case called Swann against Charlotte-Mecklenburg
in which the United States Supreme
Court said if you're in an urban
area and the local
district court judge decides that
the only way to get rid of
de jure segregation, legal
segregation, is to use
busing, you must do it.
And that created
a lot more additional tension,
and in my view, it
created another wave of
the need for executive capability and
adroitness that President Nixon
delivered a second time.
And then as Mr. Shultz
points out, and then I'll stop
talking, ultimately, however, as
you went in from rural areas,
which were relatively easy to
desegregate if people had
the will to do it, as
I said, less busing, not more,
to urban areas where it's much much more complicated.
As that happened, it meant that
the whole subject of school
desegregation was moving from the
South, where people knew each
other, to the North.
You know the corollary to Mr. Shultz's comment, Bryce Harlow's
comment was it didn't matter
in the South how close you
got, as a white person, how close you got to
blacks or blacks got to you, but it mattered how high blacks got.
And in the North it was the
opposite. It didn't matter how high
black people got in society
to whites, but it mattered how close.
It was the same point, exact same point.
And what you found is
that as you moved into the North,
the appetite for school desegregation,
busing, taking kids out
of their neighborhoods, as the
President himself was not in favor of,
as that appetite was tested
in the North with Washington Post,
New York Times, all of the
editorial pages all of the
civil rights groups that were
community oriented, not to
mention parents, voters, and school
systems, the appetite disappeared.
We'll talk about that at a later point.
I'd like to make a point that
builds to a certain extent
on what you said. I
believe in courts and the rule of law and all that,
but you can have court
decisions and the rule of
law and so forth, so
hell will have it.
Nothing's going to happen unless
people will in some way collaborate.
And that fact is dramatically shown by the table you showed.
There was a Supreme Court and
all those decades went by and nothing happened.
And what it takes is somebody
high up who understands
the process of governance.
And that was so
visibly on display in the
Oval Office when we
brought those groups in from the different states.
And the President said, "I've made
my decision, just like
the Supreme Court has made its decision.
And that's important, but that's not enough.
In a country like ours, you
have to make decisions too, that
you're going to work collaboratively
with us to solve this problem."
That's governance.
And that's I think there's another point here that's important.
What we're talking
about in 1970 was not a one-act play. So
that if you... I have to
give you a context.
So we first passed at
the federal level the annual budget
level of $100 billion
in the last year of the Johnson administration.
Now the reason I give
you that reference point is because
in 1965-66 when title one was
created, which was the first
federal entitlement to
send money, compensatory
money to states for
school districts to help improve the quality of education.
I think the number in those
years was maybe $700 million.
Seems pretty trivial now.
In, I think, 1972, President
Nixon recommended $2.3 billion,
which was an enormous increase,
to try to help make good
on this idea that we
need to create equal educational
opportunity, that we
need to work on this
issue of providing a
basis for our children
to get an equal education,
an equal start in life.
And so, these things
weren't just out there and
standing alone. They had consequences
for other policy development
that was really very important to
support and backup, not just
following the law, but making it
possible and underneath it,
accomplishing something one could
argue is more important, which is
to equip young people for
a life. An important
point.
I'd like to back
that up a little bit too, from the enforcement viewpoint.
We talked a little
bit about how critics
of the administration were so present
in 1969, early '70.
There's a reason for that. Those
people who had been fighting this
battle for years and years
were angry that nothing had happened.
They weren't angry at Richard Nixon,
they were just angry at the world
that so little had happened.
Most of them were civil
rights people who had worked hard in the vineyards.
Most of them were Democrats, whether
Southern or otherwise, and they
were at the sort of end of their ropes.
So no matter who came in,
it might have been Hubert Humphrey.
If he had won, he would
have faced the same anger.
Who knows how he would have dealt with it, I don't know.
But you had this fresh
approach that Richard Nixon had
that I happen to think made
a huge impact on our
ability to deliver, at last,
on what so many people had
teed up, the Civil
Rights community had teed up for success.
Let me give you an example:
Kinston, North Carolina.
I mentioned this.
It's a town in North Carolina that's very much like an urban area.
It's a town and right through the middle of the town is a railroad track.
On this side is all white schools, a white
high school, this side is all black.
And yet it was dual school system
that had been created as
a dual school system, therefore the court said you have to desegregate it.
Now, when I looked
at that and saw this first
urban area of this
kind, I immediately saw
a certain amount of conflict between
the President's decision in the
March 24th statement, we're
going to do this, we've got
to do it, and we've got
to get it done, and, but I don't like busing.
Because, unlike these other districts
that I've been talking about where everybody's on a bus anyway,
now we're gonna have to put kids
on a bus and run them
across town, go out of
your neighborhood school, and cross town.
What do we do?
I went to Elliot Richardson. I said, "
Elliot, I just want to give you a heads up.
We're going to face something here
that is going to
hit the press and it's
going to, the people are
going to exploit the position
in the President's statement that he
doesn't like busing, but on the
other hand, we do have to get
rid of dual school systems. We've got some inherent conflict here."
And he said, "You know what I think we should do?
I think we should go do John Mitchell at the Justice Department."
Remember, I was at HEW then.
"Let's ask him about this.
He has a lot to
say about enforcement, he has a
lot to say about the President's policy.
Let's go see him."
So we packed up.
Jonathon Moore, Bill Hastings,
either *** Darmen or Will
Taft, and I went over to the Justice Department.
I made a little presentation briefly to
the Attorney General and he
sat there smoking his pipe
and said, "What do we do here?
On the one hand, we've got
to desegregate the dual
school system, on the other hand
the only tools we've got that
we see and the school
district sees is to put
kids on buses to cross that track.
What do we do?
He said, "Well, there is
no... You haven't read
the President's statement right.
You have to desegregate.
That's the end of it."
We said okay... You could see
Elliot Richardson, and we we're
looking at each other, is it really quite that simple?
And then the Attorney
General said, "Elliot, when are you going to bring me a tough one?"
And that was it!
He said exactly what Paul O'Neill
and George Shultz
are talking about. The
President had made an executive
decision: we're going to
comply with the law.
Everybody tracked, whether it was
the Justice Department, HEW, OMB,
Department of Agriculture, everybody
tracked and of course
we went forward with it
and it worked remarkably well.
Some people there might disagree, but
it worked. And it was
a perfect example in my
view of how to resolve
these problems when you have
leadership, when you have a
President who says, here's what our
policy is going to be, and here's what our bottom line is.
He did it, we did it.
I thought it was a salient moment in the process.
You must have gotten buses on
Elliot's mind because, you know, he
was a gifted artist. It's true.
Doodling.
And he always brought to meetings
what amounted to a little sketch pad.
And presumably, this was for him to take notes.
If you watched him in the meeting,
he'd always lift it up,
and he was making doodles or sketches underneath.
And I remember one time he was doing it and I peeked over.
He was sketching a bus.
Initially, not once it was
all working, but initially in
your own efforts, what kind
of reaction did you get from
Southern officials and officeholders?
You dealt with Southern officials in
the field, and to some extent, no doubt, in Congress.
You, during the period
of the Cabinet committee, must have
dealt, at least at some points,
with members of Congress, and I've heard very conflicting stories.
If memory serves, at, I
think it was the Mississippi meeting, the
Mississippi committee, some of
the congressional staff, the congressional delegation was invited
to eat with them and
with the Committee members and at least one
of the Senators refused to
do so, saying that he'd never
eaten a meal with a black person and he wasn't about to start now.
On the other hand...
I don't remember that.
...there are other stories of sitting members
of Congress who understood that history
was changing out from under them and they had to change with it.
I'm curious to
ask you what your own experiences were with Southern officials.
Well, I can tell you from
the field and being in
the ruts, being where you
go. The President made a
decision, as Mr. Shultz
said a moment ago, to go
to the people who were
affected, not always have them
trundling up to Washington, D.C.,
to bring their hat in hand
with their plan and
have us approve it.
Now sometimes that did happen and they were fine with that.
But when this massive effort took
place, the President hired some
military jets and put
Jerris Leonard who was then
Assistant Attorney General and myself
and others on a
plane, and we literally flew. I
was gone two hundred and twelve days the first year
I was at HEW, I was traveling all over the South.
And we went from place
to place to place, all over the South, hit every capital.
And we invited all of the
school districts to come in. Now what's the relevance of this?
They all knew what the Civil
Rights community was about and
they'd all been confronted in one
way or another, in court or otherwise, with that community.
What they would do is, almost universally,
as if they all had the
same, even though they didn't
do this, it was almost as
if they had a menu and
they all read the menu and
the playbook and came in, even though they all thought they were different.
First comes the school board,
which is mostly white and has one black there.
That one black person, possibly two,
says, "We don't want disruption either.
We'd like to delay this for another two years or so.
Here's why we're different."
They would go through this whole thing, and you'd listen
patiently, even though you know where it's headed.
And at the end, you said
to them, "We understand how
difficult this is. This is not easy.
We are not here
to come into your town and
go to an Exxon station and
grab a map and put four
bottles on the corner and turn your town upside down.
That's not this President's way of doing business.
But what we have to tell you is you have to desegregate.
And if you read the March
24th opinion, if you
read the President's statements, if
you see what he said in
Louisiana, you will see
that it has to be done now.
Let's move to it."
As Mr. Shultz said, get
as quickly as possible on the
subject of how to get a solution
and get off the subject of arguing the principle.
Now, what they would do at that
point, generally, was to
say, "We've got to think about this."
They would not agree.
But I learned to watch them.
They would take their plans and
their people and say thank you and they'd go outside.
You could look through the window
that way and you could see
them on the hood of a car. They'd
put their plans down and they're arguing with each other,
what to do, and you could see
it. And sure enough, about
half an hour later, they'd come
back into the room
and they would say, in
effect, if Richard Nixon
says we've got to do this, we've got to do this.
It was because Nixon was
not seen as a
professional civil rights activist,
but as someone who believed that
there were shades of grey
in the sense of how to get
the job done, but who was steadfast in what that job would be.
The bottom line, you got to do it.
It was because of that
credibility, it was because
of his saying, "Here's what
happened in Alexander vs. Holmes,"
that a lot of people who
would otherwise have continued to
drag their feet, because you got
to remember, we're only dealing in
1970 with the hardest,
most difficult, intransigent districts in America.
We're not dealing with the people decided
three, two years earlier to do this voluntarily.
These are the people who said, "No way. I'm
in the doorway of the school.
Not going to happen." Because President
Nixon had some credibility there,
in my view, it
is one of the critically important
reasons that the job got done.
They would then come back in and they would say it.
They would just say this is the end of the road...
If he says it,
it's got to be done.
In that sense, how important do
you think it was that, so
to speak, the Court had
the President's back in the
sense that the Court, one
can easily say that had it
been only for the Court, without the President, it wouldn't have happened.
If it had not been for the court... That was demonstrated by your statistics.
Can we say the inverse though?
That without the court, it might
not have happened under that Presidential
watch, that that spur was also essential?
Of course. On the
other hand, there are great limits. Look at Prohibition.
We had a constitutional amendment: people
weren't allowed to drink. Get lost!
It just didn't work.
And there are limits to
what you can force people
to do if they don't want to do it.
Is there a counterpart in any other area of public policy...
Therefore, if you're going
to get people to change, and
this is a big change, there's
no alternative but to
get them to work together
to try to solve the problem
of how you're gonna manage the change.
It's gotta be a human
interrelationship if you're going
to work. And Nixon understood that very well.
Was this a unique governance challenge under Nixon?
You said that his attitude in
this matter was that it's not enough that he's decided.
The people have to agree as well.
They have to have decided themselves.
Could we see that at work
in any other area of
public policy during the Nixon
presidency, or was this really
unique, where that kind of
buy-in by locals was essential?
It wasn't needed to change tax
policy, it wasn't needed to
change employment laws, it wasn't
needed to change other things.
But was that kind of reaching out into the population,
was this a unique event?
Well, it was unusual, but
I don't think it was unique.
But I have always looked back
on it as one of the
most inspiring experiences that
I've had in governance and all the things I've done.
You know, I think there
are parallels here with
what the Secretary did when he
was Secretary of Labor with the
Philadelphia Plan, and it's
a little different, but there's a
parallel in what began to
happen in housing in
that same period and in
urban development, and I
think Pat Moynihan had a
significant influence in talking
about urban decay, and our
friend Martin Anderson had
written some really important
things just before this period
about the unfortunate aspects
of urban renewal and how it
had created unbelievable urban
blight in major
places like Chicago and St. Louis.
And the Nixon administration began
to work on those issues in a really serious way.
And, to me, there was a parallel.
The involvement was more
about fair housing and the
like, and I've been called
to think about this a little
bit lately because when President
Nixon decided, I think,
in 1972, that he was going
to recommend that we
shut down the urban renewal agency,
I was given the task
to go tell Secretary George Romney,
just before he went to
the annual Houston Home Builders
Convention in January, that he
had to go tell them this bad news.
He was not particularly pleased.
And on another occasion, it's
just coming back into my
mind, Secretary Romney was wanting to go give a speech
because he was fired up
about the consequences of
segregation, the housing patterns,
and he was going to go give
some Congressional testimony. And
in those days every secretarial
statement went through OMB for
clearance before they could
give a testimony, before they
could give it. So when I
saw this thing, I shook
my head and I went over
on a Saturday morning and
Secretary Shultz had a
little office up on the
second floor of the White
House, and I went
in and said to him, "I've got
this thing that George Romney wants
to do, and I think
it's going to inflame passions
in a really unfortunate
way if he said these things."
And, you know, it was one of
the great life learning lessons
for me. Secretary Shultz said
to me, "Do whatever you think is right Paul."
He didn't tell me what the
answer was, he just gave me
the authorization, the "Hey
you're thinking about this. You
know what the President's ideas are
about fairness and if you
think this is bad, go tell
Romney he can't do it."
So I did. You know, with
great confidence that I would
be supported because I
understood, I thought, what the
President's ideas were about fairness
and about, not only what
the ideas were, but how
not to make things worse
with inflammatory rhetoric. And so
for me, there were endless threads
of this kind of things
coming back together and converging
on the value nexus of the Nixon administration.
I'll give you a completely different
kind of example. In
1968 during the, when
the campaign was on, there
was a strike of longshoreman
on the Eastern Gulf Coast.
And under the Taft-Hartley
law, the President has
the right to enjoin
a strike if he
thinks it threatens a national
emergency. So President
Johnson decided that, and he enjoined the strike.
And the law there is a
fast track
appeal to the Supreme Court. So
it went to the Supreme Court, and
the Supreme Court agreed with the President.
So the strike was enjoined for, I don't know, six months.
Then, about January 16th
or so, it starts again.
And I had been a critic
and written stuff about excessive
intervention in labor disputes
by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
And so I'm sworn
in as Secretary of Labor
on January 21, and the
President on January 20th of course.
And I had discussed this with him beforehand.
So he wanted to know, well what do we do now.
We've got this emergency dispute.
And I went to him and I said,
"Mr. President, your predecessor
was wrong and the Supreme
Court was wrong. This dispute
will not cause a national emergency.
It will cause a lot
of kerfuffle in
New York
and New Yorkers think
that's a national emergency, but it isn't.
And if you will hold
off, then the forces that come about in the situation and naturally lead people to want to settle will begin to take hold and I'll mediate this dispute and we'll get it settled. And if you do that, you'll send a big message to the
process of collective bargaining that every dispute is not coming into the White House, and people don't bargain with each other directly because they don't want to give up all their ammunition til they get to the White House. So the process from before has atrophied. So he hung in and we got the strike settled, but it was a matter of saying, we somehow have to get the government out of the collective bargaining process and let the
parties work out their own solutions.
It's much healthier that way.
The same kind of attitude.
So, Secretary Schultz codified this
idea for those of us in OMB
when he said, "Just remember
this: when the President hangs out
his shingles, all other lawyers go out of business."
My phrase was
when the president hangs-- this was
the critique of Kennedy and
Johnson in their interventions--
"When the President hangs out his shingle, he'll get all the business."
Right.
Nobody will settle anything until
they get to the White House. So
Nixon turned that around, as he did in many other things.
I'd like to ask each of you
in turn to look back
on the particular episode of the
Southern school desegregation and ask
what you think people ought
to find Nixon's legacy
there to be. What implications
it had for ways decisions were
made just for those sets
of events in particular, for race
relations and the record of race policy.
Whatever aspect of it you
think of as it reaches into the future, into our day.
I think the beginning of that
answer for me was, I
mentioned before, you would go into
one district after another and
you'd have the white power
structure that ran the
school district and a handful of blacks on that board.
I remember in Monroe, Louisiana,
it was after midnight, we must
have done 20, 25 different
district plans that day, we were all exhausted.
But one said, we've
got to see you, we've driven
80 miles, and we said okay.
They came in, they made the same
presentation, and the black
member of the board said I
just want to tell you,
speaking for the black community, we
would like to see a delay
take place also until next
year for all the reasons that have happened,
but he winked at me.
So after the discussion was over I went and sought him out
and he said a couple of things I'll never forget.
He said, "You understand
that what you're doing here is white people's problems.
So it has very little to do with me."
I said, "I don't understand."
He said "Right now, this is white people's problems.
This white board, they have the power.
It's a white President, it's a white Congress.
Everybody involved in this process is white.
So,those of us who are
black have got to
be agile and go along
with the process and just
go along with it and then
we'll sort of clean up the
mess after you white folks get through this."
He said, "But I will say this
about your President:
he is the only one who can
do this because it
is a white problem, whites have the power.
Only if they believe that
the President means it, only if
someone who's white says to
them, "You have to do it," will they do it."
He said, "I love all my civil
rights friends. I love them,
they're here, I'm part of
that community, but they can't get that done."
I think that's a, it may not
be the long term educational legacy,
but I think it's an important
thing for us to remember, is
that if you have leadership, even,
to do something right, at a
time when your own constituency, a
constituency that was ready to
go with George Wallace perhaps.
George Wallace was a dagger
pointed at the President's heart
when it came to the possibility
of not being reelected, of splitting
the South, splitting the party.
That's how important it was.
Let's don't kid ourselves about it.
This was a major threat to
the potential succession of the President into a second term.
And in facing that major existential threat,
for him to take leadership and
do it with his own natural
constituency and say you
have to do it, is a
kind of leadership that I
have seen very rarely from the
White House since, and I
think we badly need in this country.
I would say 3 things: first
of all, when you're
in government or any place, you
have a problem, think strategically.
So you have to think of long term.
That's what was done in this case.
Then second,
if you have a problem that involves
people, you have
to reach out and try
to include them and make
them part of solving the problem.
And as I said earlier, to
try to get them away from
arguing forever issues of principle
and into solving problems.
So if you do those two
things, you'll get somewhere.
And I think that applies in many cases,
but in this case in particular,
and also in others, obviously.
If you
feel confident that what
you're doing is the right
thing, you're strategizing, you're
reaching out and so on,
but underneath it you're doing the right thing.
Then you have conviction
and strength of character and you're going to get somewhere.
So for me, I think if
you look at the Nixon period,
the thing that is a
consistent thread is what
I call the architectural mind of
the President. If you
think about this particular issue,
court-ordered busing,
and you track it back,
this was really about changing
the architecture of the society, and
the ideas he put forward about
the Family Assistance Plan, and
revenue sharing, and special revenue
sharing, and reorganizing the government,
and the all-volunteer armed services,
and the opening to China.
These are all things that
come from an architectural mind, I think.
The thinking about where's our
society and how do
the pieces fit and how
can we move toward a better
place across the dimensions,
you know. Again, for me
the important thing about this is it's part of a pattern.
It's not a one-off thing.
It's part of a
set of ideas about how to
advance the condition of the society.
And I think it's the
common denominator of the Nixon period.
Very well spoken Paul.
I agree with you.
Well, all good
things must come to an
end and I think we're
going to stop there, but I
want to thank Gerard, I want to thank our participants.
And I want to end with an interesting observation.
We cosponsor these Legacy Forums
with the National Archives, and David
Ferriero, the Archivist of the
United States, couldn't be with
us today, but I
think he'd be exceptionally pleased at what we've seen.
He has the documents.
There are 42 million pages
of documents at the Nixon Library.
And what we have are the people who created the documents.
And these programs are done
for future researchers and future
scholars to give them
insight into why and
how the documents read like they read.
But I think you will agree
from today, if you
just had the documents and
you didn't have the insights from
the people who created them and
who were participants, you would
miss half the story. And that's
the rationale for these forums.
I appreciate your coming
and I hope you will tune in in the future.
Thank you again.