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This thing work today?
Yes.
Good.
I'm glad.
Sandy, on many occasions can
't get the sound system right.
I'm glad that he's got it right today.
Let me welcome you to
the Sixth Nixon Legacy Panel.
We are happy today that C-Span
is covering this event and we welcome them.
Clare Booth Luce told President
Nixon that in a
thousand years they will say Nixon went to China.
We all know that Watergate is
a part of our history, but there was much, so much more.
Not just a great foreign
policy agenda, but a lesser-known domestic agenda.
I think you'll be pleased to hear
the panelists today talk about some of those other initiatives.
Legacy moments, as we like to call them.
The past Legacy Forums have
been the organization of
the domestic policy program, the
use of the President' s time,
an environmental policy forum, and a forum on Watergate.
Our next panel will be in
September, and it's
the peaceful desegregation of
our Southern schools, which President
Nixon gets very little credit for.
That will be held here at the library.
In October, the Pat
Moynihan in the White House.
His story has never been told and his
papers have just been processed
by the National Archives.
So, with that, let me introduce our panel today.
I'm doing it in alphabetical order, not as they are seated.
Barbara Franklin, a very
distinguished corporate entity at
this stage, was a staff assistant
to the President and led the
task force to recruit women
into the Nixon Administration. Larry Higby was deputy assistant to
the President and Chief of Staff for Bob Haldeman.
He is also a new
member of the Nixon Foundation Board.
Tod Hellen was President
Nixon's domestic counsel and Associate
Director for Housing and Community
Affairs, later at the Department of Defense.
Fred Malik was the
man that was put in charge
of presidential personnel, he was
a Special assistant to the President
for presidential personnel, and I
think most of us give him
credit, as you'll hear
today, for the caliber of
people that were brought
into the Nixon administration, and
then subsequently went on to
many other presidents. He was
also the Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget.
So with that, Todd, let me start with you, and... Bobbie.
Bobbie.
Oh Bobbie, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Actually, I should have been doing it the way I was doing it here.
Bobbie Kilberg, excuse me, was
a White House Fellow, and she
was Staff Assistant to the
President of the United States and the Domestic Council.
Sorry about that, Bobbie.
And with that I'm going to
ask Todd to sort of,
set the stage for
what it was like in the
fall of 1968, as we were elected.
Presidents are defined by their times.
It's true in these times and it was true in those times.
After forty plus years
we tend to forget what it
was like in 1968 during that presidential campaign.
Let me just review some,
quickly, some of the issues.
The Cold War was raging.
The Soviet Union was the Soviet Union, not Russia.
We each had thousands of
warheads pointed at each other and our allies.
There was tension across the world
at every spot, and we
felt probably that China might
align with Russia, should
there be some kind of a conflict.
It was a very tense and
dangerous world, and the
probability of us having an
exchange frightened the entire world.
The Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia.
The North Koreans had taken down
a spy ship called 'Pueblo' in disputed waters.
So, this was a time
with the Soviet Union and the U.S. really squaring off.
Today, we look at Russia
as an economic competitor more
than a military threat.
Vietnam was raging, there with
550 thousand troops in Vietnam
when the President took office.
Tragically we were losing
a thousand military service people a month.
Just after nine
years in Afghanistan we just crossed
the thousand mark, tragically also.
We were losing a thousand a
month when he took
over. Student demonstrations
across the country were disrupting
campuses and communities.
There were riots at the
'68 convention, which I'm sure
we all remember, in Chicago,
which kind of set the tone for that campaign.
And LBJ, because of
the war, pulled out of
the nominating process and turned
it over, because Gene McCarthy was
making so much run, a good run for the nomination.
We had assassinations that year that were tragic.
Martin Luther King was assassinated.
That led to urban riots throughout,
racial riots, throughout the country
and just about all the racial
centers and we had,
those riots created a
loss of around 50 lives
in a very short period of weeks.
Racial tensions were high.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June.
So the country was a little bit in shock.
Vietnam was standing there, and we were losing our leaders.
There was disruption in our
youth and trusted me in our racial relations.
This was a tough time.
LBJ's Great Society was announced
with great flourish, but it
had left a number, it
first it had created vast bureaucracies
in Washington to make decisions
for the local level, and it
had left a number of issues unaddressed.
That welfare mess was, as
it was called frequently by
the press, was creating a 'culture of dependency'.
School desegregation had been
ordered by the courts, but hadn't really been undertaken.
We had women's rights
were coming into their own,
there was the ERA amendment, Equal
Rights Amendment for women, being proposed for the Constitution.
Native American rights, the
Indian movement, was taking form then.
Those of us who were in
the White House at that time remember
well, in '69 to '70,
the formation of AIM, the
American Indian Movement which was
a militant operation that was
formed in 1968.
Russell Means headed that, so
the environmental issues were just
coming to the floor, we were
continuing to pollute our rivers,
our waters and our
skies at an alarming rate.
America was just awakening to that.
In 1969, when the President
took office, but in the November
election of '68, it was not a landslide.
Forty three percent of the
vote, he won by five hundred thousand votes.
Todd, I can add a
little bit to that because we
were tracking every day how
the polling every day on how the election was going.
On Saturday, President Johnson came
out and made a statement that
he thought that peace was at hand in Vietnam.
On Sunday, Hubert Humphrey
went ahead of us in our tracking pool.
On Monday, President Johnson came
out and sort of recanted his
statement and backed off, and on Tuesday, we won the election.
Yeah, and you may recall, that actually
we didn't know that he had won until 11:00 the next morning.
That's exactly right.
Whole night of tracking.
That's a nice transition from
the- Let me make one additional
point, because politically the President
took office with both houses of Congress against him.
The first newly elected President
in a hundred years to take
office with both houses dramatically against him.
So the political climate was not
a walk in the park here, nor was the climate in the United States.
Right.
Right.
Larry, I think
it would be, at this point, January 20th.
He was sworn in 1969?
What did we do?
Well, actually, November 8th, I think it was..
we realized we won the
election at 5 o'clock in the morning.
I think we finally... we were
at the Waldorf Astoria hotel that night.
And we immediately realized we
had a whole 90 days
to set up the largest corporation
in the world - the United States government.
And one of the first
things my boss, Bob Haldeman,
asked me to do was go out
and find all the books
that had been published on how to set up presidencies.
And there were a grand total of two.
And the one that made any
sense was a guy named
Andy, Andy Goodpaster who was
the staff secretary during the Eisenhower administration.
And basically he had set
up a government and
a White House that was
really focused on the cabinet.
It was a cabinet run kind of organization.
You go then to President
Kennedy who just had, sort of, a circle of advisers around him, but no sort of
formal process and frankly a lot the same thing as Lyndon Johnson. Everything was wherever Lyndon Johnson went.
This president
wanted to get a lot of
things done, had a lot
of problems on his plate, as
Todd clearly laid out
and it became very clear that
you had to set up a different
kind of White House if you were going to be successful.
Probably the one thing we
took from the past
administrations was the National
Security Council, which was an
organization that worked very well on
foreign policy and defense matters in this sort of thing.
There was nothing that was even
an equivalent to that in
any prior administration on the
domestic side, including the number of
domestic problems and issues we wanted to deal with.
We had to have some mechanism for
getting that done, which led
to the establishment of the
Domestic Policy Council, which Todd
served as the deputy on for a period of time.
But this allowed us to begin
to organize the agenda, initiatives
we wanted to get done in
the White House in a very different way.
The other thing the President did, is
he clearly looked at the government differently.
He thought, decisions should be made
in the White House and executed by cabinet members.
Prior to that, cabinet members
had each run their own fiefdom
and just sort of reported periodic meetings into the White House.
So it was going to
be a very different White House,
one that was very White House-focused
in terms of decisions
and actions and how we were going to get things done.
The other piece that was unique,
was setting up what I'll call
the office of the presidency, which
was something nobody had ever thought of before.
And this was an organization
that Bob Haldeman really started as
chief of staff to really
combine all of the
disparate functions that usually
go on in a Presidency, from
how you do accountability, how you
track papers through a staff
secretariat, how you get
your speeches done, what press
relations should be, what congressional relations should be.
All of these things coming together,
particularly in terms of
how you move the president, how
the president spends his time, he really thought about it.So
you had a very different, very
professional White House that
was being set up to deal
with the complexity of issues that Todd realized.
And we had a whole 90 days to get that done.
So it was a very exciting and
very furious kind of period
as we went into January 20th.
Now once we did that, we
had to also have a government
that was organized along those same kinds of lines.
And that's where Fred became infinitely
valuable, because Fred and
his team really were the
people that the government
got to be organized, but more
importantly, how it got to be staffed.
The kinds of professionals, really meaningful
people, we wanted to bring into the organization.
My friend, that's you.
Well, the personnel process was a very fascinating one.
In fact, Ron, I think
mentioned, or Todd, the first
thing I remember about the
administration, I'm just a
humble tool manufacturer in Orangeburg,
South Carolina, running a company.
I'm 31 years old.
And I tune into television,
and there's President Nixon announcing in
early December, his entire cabinet
stood behind each cabinet member,
talked about them, why he
selected them, what their qualities were,
and what he expected them to do in in the new administration.
It was very inspiring to me, it truly was.
And little did I know
that three and a half months
later, I would end up
coming to Washington as the
Deputy Undersecretary of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Well, it was a poignant moment
too at the Shores Hotel when
he did that, and it was televised
nationally, and it was
just one of those moments I think everybody was captured by.
And it has never been done since, which was kind of interesting.
I haven't seen anything like that
with the whole cabinet was there
and pretty much in place at a very early stage.
The quality was breathtaking.
About eighteen months later,
my experience with personnel
really started. I was recruited over from ATW to become the presidential assistant for White House personnel.
And President Nixon's premise
was that we can't
just rely on the people we know.
The people that have supported us
politically, the people that other
political leaders, senators,and governors, recommend.
We had to go out beyond that universe and broaden ourselves.
and find the best quality people
in the country to come in and
staff the government, because that's
the only way we are going to truly be effective.
Someone else would have to judge whether we're successful.
But let's look at some of
the merits of the people
that we did have in
that government and what they went on to be.
Most, or I shouldn't
say most, but an abundance of
modern day and recent
leaders in political history
were a product of Richard Nixon's selection.
We had future presidents.
We had future vice presidents.
We had future Secretaries of State,
Secretaries of Defense, Secretaries of Commerce.
We had future supreme court justices,
future senators, future CEOs.
Let's look at a couple of those.
I remember in, maybe three
months into my tenure, maybe two
months into my tenure, the White
House personnel, I was
meeting the President and Bob Halderman and were discussing various appointments.
The President said, "We
have a very talented young man we recruited to run for the senate.
He lost in Texas."
George H. W. Bush.
I think we have to make
him Secretary, Ambassador to the United Nations.
He did.
He made him ambassador to the United Nations.
Without Richard Nixon reaching
out, there never would have
been a President Bush, there never would've been a President George W. Bush.
Others who were in that White House.
There was a very young assistant to Don Rumsfeld.
Don Rumsfeld was a councilor to the president.
A very young assistant who
we didn't pay much attention to, at the time.
His name was *** Cheney.
He went on to be Vice President of the United States.
We had future Secretaries of State.
Henry Kissinger of course, George
Schultz, Al Haig and
my OMB executive assistant, Colin Powell.
Four Secretaries of State came out of that White House.
Then, you look at the future economic leadership of the country.
Herb Stein was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
One of his junior associates was a man named Alan Greenspan.
He was in that White House.
Of course, there was the speech writing staff.
They didn't amount to whole lot,
but you had guys like Pat Buchanan and Bill Sapphire.
Bill Sapphire who probably was
the best political columnist I've
ever read, bless his soul.
And David Gergen and Ray Price.
I know I'm missing a lot of
good people, I better take a
peek my notes here to make sure I didn't.
Paulson.
Hank Paulson.
Yeah, two secretaries of
treasury, Hank Paulson and Paul O'Neill.
And then there is
Pat Moynihan, Nino Scolia
and, oh yeah, there
was this young assistant in the press office.
She was kind of pretty but nobody returned her call cause she was too junior.
We do now.
That was Diane Sawyer.
But, you
know, the President wasn't content
just to rely on the strength
of personnel, they also wanted to
organize in a way that would make government effective.
He had one basic premise that
guided a lot of his
thinking, and that is: the government was too big.
Sounds familiar?
The government is too big, too
cumbersome, too unwieldy, too bureaucratic.
So, he coined the phrase
"The New Federalism"- I think he
coined the phrase, I guess he and Moynihan did.
And the idea was, "Let's delegate
more to the states, to
the cities, to the other
authorities in the nation,
let's take away from the federal government.
We shouldn't have that much power.
We're too cumbersome.
We're too unwieldy.
We 're too complex.
Let's put more out to the states.
Well, also right on that,
what was happening was the accumulated power in Washington.
The decisions were being made
by bureaucrats on what kind
of sewer systems were going into San Jose.
I mean, it was really- He also
believed that the level of
government closest to the problem should be making the decision.
The Federal Government had
this stainless steel tax machine that could accumulate money.
He created the revenue sharing, which
is going to push money from the
federal government back to the
communities and have them make
the decisions, given very
broad guidelines instead of specific regulations.
Exactly.
I think that takes us into
Barbara, former Secretary of
Commerce and things that she
did in the White House to recruit women.
And then there it's just as
extraordinary as what Fred talked about.
Oh, yeah, let's talk about women.
I think that what President Nixon
did. I'm going to give you my bottom line first, then tell you how it happened. What he did to advance women in the federal government, actually served to bring equality
for women, which was kind
of a bra-burning contentious
movement over here on the left.
He brought it right into the main stream of American life.
And that rippled through our society, changed our society.
Terribly important.
Now how that happened is, I
think Pat Nixon was right in there, lobbying.
But what happened at an early press conference was that Vera Glasser, who was a very attractive person,
stood up and said, "Mr.
President, out of your
first 200 appointments only three have gone to women."
And then she said something like this, I'm going to paraphrase.
"Are we going to see
more equitable representation of women,
or are we going to continue
to be the lost sex. And she
said the President seemed a little surprised.
But then he said, "You know, we'll have to do something about that."
and things started to happen after that.
And then by the time we got
to April of 1971, there
were three things that happened.
I mean, Fred was crucial
to this, but the President
said, to each cabinet
secretary and agency head, a
request, well not a request.
It was, you will send me an
action plan about how
you are going to train and
advance women in your department,
and I want them in a month.
And then I was brought in.
Again, Fred recruited me to,
in turn, recruit women for high level jobs in government.
And then James Spain was put
at civil service to look over the career service.
And we started out, it
was a managerially-oriented effort here.
And we set a goal of doubling
the number of women in these high jobs in a year.
Well by the time we got
to a year, we had nearly tripled those numbers.
And some of these people,
in fact most of them, in jobs women had never held.
Breakthroughs.
And you hear names
like Helen Bentley, and Virginia
Knauer, and Katherine Bodell and I could go on and on.
Carla Hills.
And Carla Hills, and Marina
Whitman, yes, who went
on to other things.
It was a great, great
start and that just
opened Pandora's box and it
continued, but maybe even more
importantly during this time
we had the first admirals and generals who were women.
We had the first FBI agents
and forest rangers and tugboat captains.
These jobs.
Park Service Ranges, we
made a huge move on the Park Service.
And that's when it happened.
A lot of things like this
happened and I think it's totally
escaped the American public
that this is where we went.
I remember one particular instance
and that has to do with the Supreme Court.
In 1971, there were two vacancies.
I had all kinds of women's groups coming to me.
Liz Carpenter came with bunch of names.
I had a lot of women's groups who were angry anyway visiting me.
My job was a little more
than recruiting, which was
doing some of Well, you were
a sounding board because I can
remember them coming down the hall at the old EEOB.
See you.
I was down the hall.
Oh, yeah.
The pounding on my door.
You, I Yeah.
I guess they thought you were
in our offices and we had to fend them off.
The other day Just walk in and pound on the door.
You didn't go through all kinds of security.
So, I got into all kinds of other issues.
But anyway, we really tried
hard to find women candidates
for those two slots.
And really, there just weren't
enough women in the
pipeline who were philosophically
compatible, and really qualified.
However the Justice Department was
in on this, and they
floated the name of a
woman, from actually his area,
Mildred Lily, if anyone remembers that.
Oh, yeah.
The American Bar Association took
her apart and that
was kind of the end of that effort.
However, the seed was
planted that there would
be a woman on the court
and Ronald Reagan ended up doing it 10 years later.
Now, we understand also that
Pat Nixon was very much for this.
And that when her husband didn't
appoint a woman, she let
him know about it.
And so, we thank Pat,
but, bottom line here, I
think President Nixon really did
something of great importance
in our society that started there and has just continued.
And now equality is a given.
That's a great legacy moment.
I want to hold up one thing.
We decided, a few of
us, almost 15 years ago,
to try to document what happened because it's not known.
So we started an oral history project.
We have fifty histories from the women who were there and were appointed.
Some of the men who helped
to make this happen, Fred and
Bobby are both in it, and
it's called "A Few Good
Women: Advancing the Cause
of Women in Government 1969-74."
The collection is
at the Penn State archive, it
would've probably been here but
then the library wasn't equipped to
do that at the time but we're linked.
We are now.
Web is now linked.
Okay.
We have a book coming out
to document, this is a
coffee table type book, and
because young people don't have
a clue of what happened or
how it was back then, we
have teaching aids that are
already out, Grades 6 through 12.
Modules that can get
stuck into civics and history .
So that this legacy of
Richard Nixon which I think is really important should live on.
That's great.
Right, a couple of other legacy
things before we move on
if I might, what we didn't
mention pioneering in the environment.
We Republicans are often looked
at as not being for the environment.
But who created the Council of
Economic Quality, Council on Environmental Quality?
Who created the Environmental Protection Agency?
It was Richard Nixon.
It was the first Clean Air Act, the first Clean Water Act.
Who created the Office of
Management Budget, The Domestic Council, the Office of Telecommunications policy?
Richard Nixon.
Bobby, you were instrumental with
John Ehrlichman in the domestic
council, with Todd and
all of that crew.
But you were also very important
in the development of the Native American.
Among other things.
But I just find that very interesting.
People don't know what President Nixon did.
People don't know what President Nixon did.
No, they don't.
But before we get into that
I think it is really
important to understand that I
personally believe, and I think
probably everybody on this panel
agrees,that there has
been no presidency since who
has brought the caliber and character
of individuals to government that Richard Nixon did.
I mean, it's just extraordinary.
That's true.
And that's not a partisan statement.
That's Republicans or Democrats, it
was really an extraordinary
time with an extraordinary group of people.
And two of those, I had the privilege of working for as a White House fellows.
My husband Bill was a
White House fellows and Geoff Shepard was here, who was a White House fellows.
I had the privilege of working for John Ehrlichman and Ken Cole.
And they are no longer.
Sorry, I don't mean to cry.
But they are no longer with us,
but I think we all
ought to recognize the wonderful job
that they did and the commitment
they had to America, both of them.
Good for you.
Well stated.
I was a very young staffer.
I was a White house fellow.
I was right out of law school
and so in contrast to these
guys, I didn't see President Nixon very much.
I think maybe I had five
conversations within a 22
month period, I stayed, about
10 months over my White House fellows year.
But my first 5 or 6
months, I was in the
staff secretariat and therefore,
I saw every piece of paper that went in to the president.
And then I moved over, with Todd,
to the Domestic Policy Council, so
I saw it from a different perspective,
i.e. developing the policy vs moving the paper
to the president.
But from both of those perspectives,
I came to a conclusion that
Richard Nixon was, number one,
one of the most progressive Republicans of
his generation, and number two
, that he really did
believe in attempting
to further a just society in America.
And I think people don't focus on that.
They focus only on the foreign policy.
But Ed *** and I
were talking on the plane this
morning about a law
professor of jurisprudence at Duke
that the president had and what an
impact that those discussions
that the president had with this
law professor about the elements of a just society.
And then you think about his Quaker
background and the fact that
his grandparents or great-grandparents
were a part of the Underground Railroad.
And all of that, I think, had a major impact on him.
This is looking at it from an outsider.
And so I made a list, it's
not a comprehensive list, but I
made a list of the
domestic initiatives that I most remember.
And if you look at each one
of them, they are all
parts of an element of a
just society that enables
you to have empowerment,
to have choice, to have
opportunity and also to
have protection for your citizens and
some of these agencies which we've
created have gone a little overboard over time.
But nonetheless, they were clearly
needed when they were created and they still have important roles to play.
And I bet there are
not 40 historians who
even know that he did
all this, as Fred said, The
Environmental Protection Agency he created.
Arisha, Arissa, Pension Reform,
he laid the groundwork for OSHA.
In the Labor Departments, protection for workers.
The first affirmative action plan in
the construction trade, the Philadelphia Plan.
Welfare reform, H.R.1, the
Family Assistance Plan, negative income
tax, revenue sharing, healthcare reform.
We may not like HMOs now but,
before they went, they couldn't creative,
they were revolutionary in the sense
of reforming healthcare.
Family health insurance plans, Native
American policy, the National
Endowment of humanities, the National
Endowment of the Arts, he implemented that.
That had been passed just
before Johnson left office but it had not been implemented.
And he put a specific emphasis on
participation in the arts and humanities by young people.
He was very worried, I think,
that young people were not having a broad liberal arts education.
School desegregation in the South.
and major increases in funding
to historically black colleges
so people actually had a choice.
And black capitalism.
And then if you take a look at Native Americans.
And if you want me to I can talk
about that now or I can
wait more for Q and A, whatever you'd like.
Let me ask you something.
Go right ahead.
Thank you.
If you wanted just one stand point.
Someone mentioned this morning about
Ted Kennedy before he passed away on Healthcare.
Was that you?
One of the things he said, I guess, a few weeks before he died.
One of the things he said was
one of his biggest regrets was not supporting Nixon on healthcare.
And had he, we could
have gotten that through the finance committee in 1977.
It wouldn't be the albatross we have now.
No, it wouldn't be the albatross.
But also, you know, the
18 year-old vote.
People forget that.
We were... The draft.
And we got rid of the draft.
Volunteer Army.
Volunteer Army.
At the time we were pulling in
several hundred thousand a year
into the draft and the 18 year-olds didn't have a vote.
And the rallying cry was "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote."
So President Nixon established the 18 year-old vote.
He eliminated the draft
and we have now the all volunteer
force, which I think by
any measure is the greatest fighting force the world has ever known.
And has been for quite some time.
Yeah.
Are you done?
Wait.
I just, one other thing going,
I think the thinking behind
some of his policies, both on
foreign policy and domestic policy
was innovative thinking and there
was an empathy throughout on the
domestic policy that people don't talk about.
This president, the one who indexed Social Security to inflation.
Inflation was going up, we
were in a war time economy, and
inflation was over 6% a year.
So it was really sucking dry
the elderly in this country which
relied very heavily at the
time, more so than now, on Social Security.
So there are a number
of things that he took from
principle and drive into
policy and drove into
politics, even with both
houses against us. Barbara, you were gonna make a point?
Well, besides the women initiative,
consumerism came to the forefront there.
And he appointed me, and
consumer products Safety Commission was one of the things that came into being.
Nixon created.
Created, absolutely, yeah.
So, that's just one more to add to your list.
Yeah.
Larry let's move a
little bit, just for a
moment's sake, on foreign policy.
Well, I think everybody, when you
hear the word Nixon, the next word is China.
And I think that
China will be remembered for a 1000 years.
But in terms of real impact
upon our society and
upon the world, I think you
have to take a broader view than that.
First of all he had an
incredible vision of the
world overall, where it
was headed and the issues that you had to deal with.
And he put a lot
of that together in what Henry
Kissinger later described as The
Linkage Theory: understanding the
common needs and how people
operate and how countries interact
with each other to really make something happen.
Probably the biggest example of
that that was really successful, wasn't
just China but one that
nobody talks about, which is
the strategic arms limitation agreement
or SALT talks as we liked
to call them then, which was
the first attempt and became
successful in limiting nuclear
weapons and limiting warheads in
the world and led to
a complete change in terms
of how the Soviet Union viewed
us and how we viewed the
Soviet Union and when
you combine that with what
he did in Europe plus what
he did with China, you
have a complete reordering of the world.
And the template that got established
there is how the world operates today.
And I think people say well,
Regan ended the Cold War and on and on and on.
The fact of the matter is, all
this got changed because the direction
got changed during the Nixon administration.
So we can talk
about foreign policy all day,
and I'm not a foreign policy expert,
although I did go on all
of his trips with him, but
I think that just that reordering
really sets a very different
world today than what we had.
Well, it was also very important with the relationship that he had with Indira Ghandi.
And not only that, but Golda Meir.
Those were, I mean, Yom Kippur
War, even at the
height of the problems with Watergate
and stuff, he moved right
in there to help Golda Meir.
If you go to that room we have here with the great leaders that he has met.
I mean, he's one of
a few statesman that was
able to know all the
people from World World
II, from the time they come
up all the way through
till they came to leading
countries and really what their point of view was.
And was able to deal with
all of them on a totally
different basis because he had
known them for so long and
interacted with them on so many things.
And Larry makes a great point
about the original SALT
(Strategic Arms Limitation Talks)
with the Soviet Union to
reduce the level of warheads on each side.
I was at a luncheon
in New York where Henry, I
mean, in Washington, where Henry
Kissinger had a Q
and A and he was
talking about, he was going
up the next day to testify on
the nuclear rod
reduction that Obama had put in place with Medvedev.
And Kissinger's point was he
supported this, he thought it was a really good deal.
But with the U.S.
today and with its
relationship with Russia there was
a virtually zero chance that
they would go into conflict with each other.
Back in the 1970's the probability was much higher.
Yeah.
That first Strategic Arms Limitation
Agreement was huge and
it did order the psychological
impact of the West and the East.
And it started a cascading going
down, of separating as
potential military adversaries and then
it ended up becoming into economic competitors.
A very, very big change.
Can we talk China for a minute?
Sure.
Its a nice segue.
And this is
going to be fast forward to
show you how current President
Nixon was even when he was out of office.
I think the China Initiative
is the most stunning stroke
of foreign policy, and now
economic policy that I think
I've ever seen that we will,
you're right, in a thousand years,
this will still be talked about.
And the relationship that was
built has continued to
grow over forty years through
different administrations, Democratic and Republican.
And it's now one
of the, well it is
the most important bilateral relationship in the world and part
of the economic fabric and
for peace fabric that we have in the world today.
Just stunning.
He should be remembered for this.
Fast forward 20 years to 1992.
I was Secretary of Commerce.
Now, while this relationship has
grown, there have been some hiccups along the way.
And one of them occurred in
June of 1989 at Tienanmen Square when the Chinese government cracked down forcibly
on the democracy wall movement.
One of the sanctions, we placed eight
sanctions on China after that.
And one of them prohibited high
level people from talking to each other.
Which meant that some wonderful
thing called the U.S.-China Joint
Commission on Commerce and Trade,
which was a Commerce Secretary to
Commerce Secretary thing, couldn't function,
and it was building business.
President Bush lost the election
in '92 and then he
decided that I should go
to China on a special
mission to reconvene this
entity that was more abound at that point and take away the sanction and give a gift, in effect, to the new administration.
This was controversial.
This mission was going to be controversial.
There were people who really didn't like China a whole lot.
The politics were very different then than they are now.
Well, as I was about to go, we threw this mission together.
There appeared a lead story
in the New York Times, on
the front page that called
this trip a boondoggle. Well, President Nixon saw that article. He called me and said, "see the New York Times? Ignore it.
You're doing the right thing, go."
That was reassuring.
Then I asked him if he
had any words of advice,
and he gave me
one liner, "Don't slobber over them."
Do a little rewind on China. It was
interesting when you talk about
vision, actually the thought
of going to China occurred in 1970.
And it took him
almost two years to put that whole thing together.
And several times when Henry
was supposedly going over to
Paris to do peace talks,
he actually was talking with the Chinese.
And I'll never forget the time
he came into the office and
said he had to see Bob for a
minute and walked out and left.
I said I understand Henry's on his way, once again, to Paris.
And Bob said, no, he's going to China.
I said, you've got to be kidding me.
And he said, you're one of four
people that know it, and if
anybody tells, you're gonna be in really big trouble.
But can you imagine the difficulty of
trying to get Henry Kissinger into
Pakistan, to go into China,
to begin these negotiations .
Well *** Allen tells the story that.
The time that it took to really put it all that together.
When that came up and everything, he
walked into the office and
said to *** Allen, he said,
"The President's gonna go to China?
This guy's crazy."
Henry was the one that was crazy.
Well, wait a minute, we need to.
Tell them what Vance said.
We need to say something.
Well, you were there.
About Ron Walker, who advanced, yeah, that trip when there
was nothing there, no communication
activity, no diplomatic relations.
Why don't you tell the story about that?
Well, Dwight could help me on that.
It was probably the toughest advance I ever did.
I mean, we arrived with 100 men.
Had no Embassy.
We took a Xerox in.
We took a suitcase satellite
in that the Chinese could not
fathom what it was like.
They wouldn't let us hook it up.
I had to drive for the
first four days out to the
C-141 at the airport,
which is about an hour's drive, to
be able to talk to Dwight in the morning and then in the evening.
Four days into
this, I was still trying to get the suitcase satellite.
We had an incident at one o'clock in the morning.
One of the chief warrant officers in
the communications came flying into
my - and he was an
African American - and all
I can see was his white
t-shirt, white pants, and his
white eyes and he said the hotel's on fire.
I got up and there was smoke everywhere.
Mike Schroth, one of our
other advance men was in
the other room, and I said,
"Mike, we've got to get that suitcase satellite."
So I went running down the
hall, and as I'm going down,
there are Chinese coming down, and
there's a water hose going down,
and water's coming out of every one of these hoses.
I mean they hadn't moved, used that hose since the hotel was built.
So I got back, got the
suitcase satellite, came back,
went to the fire escape to
get out, and the fire escape was chained.
I took the suitcase, tore the
door down, and as we
got into the hallway, it was
stored with chairs and tables
and we had to work our way get out of that hotel.
It started in one room.
It was one of the Hughes' satellite.
You have to realize,
China had never, largest delegation
they had ever had in their
25 years since the
Great March was one
from Pakistan, and there were 30 people in that.
And we're bringing 300 plus.
But it was interesting.
Which hotel were you at, Ron?
It was the Hotel of the Nationalities .
You own it now?
We have several hotel
ventures in China now and
I go there frequently and in fact
we have an association, a partnership
with the largest hotel company in China, Jing Jang.
And this is where the
celebratory dinner, I believe
the first treaty was signed in the Jing Jang Hotel.
That's correct.
But the point I wanted to make
is, you go over there
today and you talk to the
Chinese people and you say
you work for Richard Nixon, you're on a pedestal.
He is revered over there.
Trisha and Ed's
son, Chris, is running for the Congress in Long Island.
If he went over to China, and
they had elections and he ran
for us, he'd win in a landslide.
Ron, can I use that as
a segue to go back to domestic policy for a second?
Sure.
Absolutely.
Talking about a place where
President Nixon is revered, and
that is among the Native
Americans, the Pueblo Indians in northern New Mexico.
No demographer can ever
figure out why it is
that there's this pocket in northern
New Mexico and come heck
or high water, they vote Republican every time.
And that is because of Richard Nixon,
and it goes back to
also you talked about the SALT
treaty and his focus on foreign policy.
But he also, it seems to
me, had a streak of stubbornness
in him that if he
felt something was right, even
if it was gonna have an impact
on something else he thought was
important, he would stick with
it on a matter of principle and
that goes back to Native Americans as well.
The President had
a coach when he
played, I guess Ed said
it was fourth string football at
Whittier, but they let
him go in every once in a
while for some plays and he
had a coach named coach Newman, who was Native American.
And in one of the
few conversations I had with
him, he looked me in the
eye and he said, "Bobby," he said,
"That coach should have
been playing in the big, should
have been coaching in the big," what do you call it, I'm not a football person?
NFL.
Top ten, NFL, whatever, top
ten in the college, and he
couldn't because he was Native
American, he was discriminated against, and that's wrong.
And he said, "And the
policy that we have towards Native
Americans is paternalistic, and is
wrong, and is preventing them from
having the opportunities everyone else
had, and I am going
to do something about it."
And he did.
And you know, and it was in a way a variation of the New Federalism.
And I'm gonna go through
that just very quickly, but then
I want to focus on Blue Lake which
is something he's known for particularly
and which effected foreign policy in some interesting ways.
But what the President basically said
was that we wanted to
have self-determination without termination.
That meant, without ending the special
trusteeship relationship that we
had, that the Native
American tribes have with the Federal Government.
But he wanted to be
able to give people an
opportunity without forcing them
to be assimilated into the
broader Anglo society, if you will.
If they did not want to, if they wanted to that was fine.
But he believed in self-determination.
He believed in the right and he put all this in legislation.
The right of Indian tribes to
contract and control and operate federal programs.
He was determined to
do something about Indian education.
The average number of school
years that an Indian child had in 1970 was six.
And they were
dropping out two times
the national average from high school.
He put in a number
of proposals to improve economic
development, both in
urban Indians and in tribal reservation entities.
He did a major Indian healthcare initiative.
The average death age
of Native American men and
women was, in 1970, 44 years old.
He established an Indian Trust Council Authority which was very controversial.
And Jeff would remember this, he believed
that independent of the Justice
Department and the Interior Department.
The Indians had the right
to have independent legal representation when
they were seeking to protect their natural resources rights.
And he eventually made a
very major settlement that enabled
us, indeed, to have oil
come flowing from Alaska and Alaskan native land claims.
But, I wanna talk about Blue Lake.
Blue Lake was something that
caught the President's attention and his
determination and his spirit, and his just emotion.
It was a lake sacred to
the Taos Pueblo people, without
which they cannot practice their religion.
And they had 48,000 acres of land around it in the water shed.
That land have been taken from
them, unfairly and unjustly, 64
years before they put into national forest.
Thank you very much.
They desperately wanted it back.
The president said that land belongs to them.
They need to have it back.
There was absolutely no, as there
was with all all the
other measures of the Indian policy,
there was absolutely no political gain for him in doing any of this.
The western states didn't like the Indian message.
They didn't like the concept of
turning anything back to the
Native American people, but he did it anyway because it was right.
One particular Senator, Clinton Anderson,
this is in New Mexico
by the way, one particular senator, Clinton Anderson, was very senior.
He was a Democrat.
He was on the Foreign Relations Committee.
And I was taking this
message, the day it
was actually delivered was July 8,
1970, but I was taking it
about two weeks before that to
the press room to be released.
And I was literally tackled by
a wonderful guy named Ken BeLieu,
who was head of
the President's Senate Legislative team.
And he literally pinned me against the wall and says, "You cannot."
All the papers flew up in the air, he said,"You are not releasing that."
And I said, "Why?
Why?"
He said, "Because Senator Anderson,
Clinton Anderson is gonna vote
against the ABM Treaty if this goes forward."
And I said, "You've gotta be kidding me."
He said, "I'm not kidding you."
And he turned around and he kind of pushed me towards The Oval Office.
And he called up in the
outside office, I don't know if that was where you were.
And he said to John Ehrlichman, "You better get down here."
And John Ehrlichman went down there, and I wasn't allowed to go in the Oval Office.
But John Ehrlichman and Ken BeLieu went in the Oval Office.
They turned around and came back
and John had this big smile
on his face and Ken looked like he'd been hit with a ton of bricks.
And I said "What happened?" He
said the president said that Clinton Anderson can go.
We are going to have Blue Lake.
And he did.
And Clinton Anderson voted against the ABM treaty.
But the President believed in this firmly.
It was the first time that
I guess, those of you
who know congressional relations better than
I do, in those
days when a committee voted on something, that was it.
The Senate Interior Committee had voted against return of Blue Lake.
President looked at us and said, "Go up there and turn that around".
And we did, we overturned a
Senate Committee which had never, ever happened before.
And then it was a very interesting bipartisan coalition.
Everybody says, "Oh, the President Nixon couldn't work with Democrats".
The coalition was: Richard Nixon,
Senator Fred Harris - Democrat
from Oklahoma, his wife LaDonna
Harris - a Comanche Indian from
Oklahoma, and Ted Kennedy they
were the oddest quartet I
have ever seen, but they
were extraordinarily effective.
And when we signed the
bill on December 15,
1970, again I was this young
kid, it was my first signing ceremony.
The President sat in the
East Room and he sat
at the table and the Cacique,
who's the old religious leader who
must have been ninety six years
old at that point, stood there
next to the tribal secretary, a guy named Paul Bernau.
And it was this ceremony,
and the Cacique would say maybe
ten words, and then Paul would
translate for about ten minutes.
Then he goes, and the President was sitting there I went, "Oh gosh, I'm going to be fired.
I know this."
And he just sat there
and he looked totally attentive
and totally inspired and he
signed the bill and we
had lots of other pleasantries and then he said, "Walk with me."
And I thought, he never asked me to do that before.
So I started walking down the
collonade, and he said Jenelle,"
he said, "I'm really late for
my next appointment, I'm supposed to
the at HUD and I have a thousand
people waiting for me" and I went "I'm sorry."
He said "No, never be sorry."
He said "that was the most wonderful
ceremony I have ever participated in".
He said "those people deserve to
have the ability to celebrate and
practice their religion and I
am proud that our White House made that happen."
And I just was, I
mean, it was overwhelming
and there's just an, there
's a humanism to Richard
Nixon I think people don't see and understand.
But he would stand up for what he believed was right.
I have a follow up to
that because, while director
of the National Park
Service, any number
of Native Americans have since
been brought into the Ranger ranks.
And Blue Lake was part of the United States Forest Service.
Yes.
The Park Service, thank you.
I'm sorry.
But, I've had any number,
there was one individual that was
a fifth generation Cherokee, a John
Cook, who's now mayor of Page, Arizona.
That when I became President
of the Foundation wrote me a
note and said I want
you to know I'm a Democrat
but I think Richard Nixon
did more for the Native American
than any other president in the history of the country.
He did.
He also pioneered, aside from
the women, by recruiting the
Hispanics to high level
positions in the government and he was very successful.
I think it'll be the FPA.
The one that I most plainly remembered is this one though.
He called me in one day
and he said we need more
women in - of Hispanic,
we need more people of Hispanic
heritage and we need more
women of Hispanic heritage in this administration.
There is an opening in a high
level position at the Department
of Treasury, the Treasury of the
United States, I want you
to find me a qualified woman.
Yes, Sir!
So we went out and we went,
I got a couple of my recruiters
together and we start looking for
a qualified woman to be Treasurer of the United States.
And, lo and behold, we
found out that we had
a woman named Romana Banuelos
from California right near here.
Romana Banuelos ran a
big food company she had started.
She built it up.
Went big.
It was maybe 10, 12 million revenue.
It was a very successful business women, who had built this business.
So we thought we'd
really struck gold, and we
had, actually and we went
in, we recommended Romana Banuelos to
president and he nominated her.
This is a position that has to be confirmed.
Well, after that great victory, Merline
and I got in our car
and we drove across the country to Illinois to my brother's wedding.
On the way there, unbeknownst to
me, state troopers all over the
states between Washington and Illinois
are looking for me, and it
was Bob Haldeman on the phone
saying, "Did you realize that
they just raided her plant and they've got all these illegal aliens?"
Well, they
were all democrats, we thought.
But nevertheless, she was treasurer
and she did a really good job.
In fairness here, Bill
Marumoto, who is no longer with
us, was the minority recruiter and
he was working on the Hispanic side.
I got into it, but really
I would credit Mo and Fred.
We have Romana Banuelos in our
oral history series and
I have to say something also about
minorities and the whole women effort.
We really focused on minorities as well.
Hispanic and African American and whatever else.
And we were fairly successful
on that, too, which I think
it sort of escapes, escapes recognition.
And One of the most prominent African-American was Bob Brown.
Well, yeah.
He was just elected into the Nixon center board.
You know, you're just sort of
tying all that together, I
mean what Fred did, and Barbara and all the recruiting and stuff.
There was a real different feeling in the country then.
Executives who are making
a ton of money would leave and come and serve.
That's right.
And come and serve.
Oh, good point.
Yeah.
People, I mean, I'll never
forget the first
week we were in the White House,
we were setting up the White House staff .
These people have to be paid something, you know.
It's not cheap to live in Washington, DC.
And I was absolutely struck
by how many top-level people like
Bob Haldeman, Henry Kissinger, and
these guys that are in the
White House staff were making $28,000 a year.
That was their salary.
Now the most they ever made the whole time they were there was $42,000 a year.
That was the high water mark.
So you can imagine all of
the people who came who made less than that.
But they came to serve, and
I think it was because the President
really had put a culture together
that suggested service to this
country - this country being great.
When you see as you walk
in out here in the exhibits singing God Bless America.
There was a genuine feeling that
he created like that of service.
We've lost some of
that and the other
thing that was in play
there and why what he did
to advance women created this
climate in which a bunch
of other things happened, like Title
Nine; the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission got more
power, and you could name a whole series of things.
Government was a model then.
A model that states wanted
to follow and that the
private sector wanted to emulate.
Somehow, I give him
credit, but somehow we've lost
that in this country.
Well, I think we can blame part of the confirmation process on that too.
We were able to get a
number of people who came into the
cabinet and sub-cabinet that Fred
recruited that were going
to make 10 or 15 percent
from the Government salaries what they
were in private with law firms
and companies and they took that sacrifice to come in and serve.
They got confirmed and they served.
Nowadays, the confirmation process
is so difficult and ugly
and if you're an executive,
lawyer or something like that
coming in you get really hammered and it's very expensive.
You say no.
You just say no.
And you also, you can't make a living when you leave.
Right.
Because everything is you can't do it.
Confirmation process, just a financial,
I mean it's thousands of
dollars for some of these individuals just to do the paperwork.
Right.
I talked to somebody who took a
senior economic job in
the Bush Administration who is a prominent financier.
He took the job eventually. He
spent over a million dollars of
legal fees getting all the
papers in order to do everything
he had to do in order to take that job.
By the way, remember, we
have very few turn downs, very
few people we offered jobs to,
take 10 percent or 15
percent of what they were making, very
few people turned this down, I
would bet that we, I'll bet
you that three out of four accepted when we made them an offer.
Well, there was a different ethic.
Given the tone that was in the country at the time, which was hostile.
We were in a war, and
we were having racial problems and
crime rates and high inflation
and to have those kinds of
people not say no, but come and serve.
It was really a patriotic
thing to do and there was an honor to it.
Now.
We didn't leave
and turn around and immediately write a book either.
No, that ethic has changed too.
We've got about five more minutes
and I'd like to take that five
minutes and have each of you,
in your own way.
How should President Richard Nixon be remembered?
Tod, I'll start with you.
Well, sure, we have a lot of work to do.
Clearly, China and the SALT
talks and the foreign side, I think, are going to be preeminent.
I think legacies are things that, Presidential legacies are
things the Presidents
do that lasts for generations.
And I was recently
talking at this forum here with
Bill Ruckelshaus and I
think on the environmental side, Bill made
the comment, he was the first
director of EPA, made
the comment that Richard Nixon's
environmental policy has touched every
American and improved their
lives forever, and that's
a very big deal.
It's very powerful, and I
think when you combine the things
he did on the minorities, for black
colleges, and for senior citizens.
His whole empathetic work on
changing policies to work for those disadvantaged.
I think that's where he should
get credit and we have
a foundation of those
who are to serve, need to
work on that, because that's getting put aside.
It think now, 40 years after
this, and the hysteria is
down even though the country
is more divided, right and left, than before.
We have a chance to lower the tone and look at the substance.
I think on the environment.
He was innovative on health care.
His healthcare bill was really sensational.
His welfare bill was one
where that had work incentives
and didn't penalize work and helped
the working poor, set a national income floor.
Got it through the House, but not getting it through the Senate.
It later became law
under Bill Clinton, with a Republican Congress, by the way.
So his innovation,
he set the mark that other
Presidents and other administrations accomplished.
But he did the thought process
and he and his team put together
some really innovative, far-reaching, long-lasting
things that made this country better, on the domestic front.
Well stated.
I can't really improve on that.
But I'd like to see his
vision in a number
of arenas, both the domestic,
and I mean the women thing
is just piece of that, but the foreign policy piece also.
The vision and then the
implementation, the execution of
actions that made the vision a reality.
We haven't seen quite
the likes of that since,
and I'd like to see all of that recognized.
Plus, I think the
empathetic side, which has
come out here as we've
been talking here.
I think all of these things need to come to the fore.
Larry.
I think they've all said it very well.
I guess from my
standpoint, I think one thing
we forget, this was a bipartisan President.
He had a Democratic Congress practically
the whole time he was here, yet he
passed amazing amounts of legislation,
got the country through a war
and successfully concluded it and
did a number of things
on the foreign policy scale that will last for a lifetime.
I thought one of the most
interesting, sort of picking up
on the theme of bipartisan that I
heard, was when Bill Clinton
was out here and actually gave
one of the eulogies at the President's funeral.
He talked about, I think the quote
was, I won't get it exactly, but
"It's time that the American
people realized the fullness
of his contribution in all that he made."
Fullness of his life is what he basically said.
As the rancor of of
the 60's, pro-Vietnam,
anti-Vietnam, all this sort of stuff sort of goes by.
And people begin to take a
much more scholarly and objective look
at his presidency and at his life.
I think that you're going to find
him one of the truly extraordinary people
that ever walked this earth.
If I might insert just on what you said on Vietnam.
As I mentioned earlier there
were 550,000 troops at the time he took office.
In May, 1972 there were 70,000.
It's a massive deescalation.
All combat elements had ended.
Richard Cohen from Washington Post
wrote a column a few
weeks ago where he talked
about how Nixon massively deescalated
and ended combat operations and did
all these different things in Vietnam
and were all the protesters
outside talking about his magnificent peace efforts?
No, they were still anti-war.
But he made amazing progress in
what we called then Vietnamization, which
is basically what is happening
in Iraq and at some point, will happen in Afghanistan.
Bobby.
Back on the domestic side, a
progressive innovator who furthered the concept of a just society.
Well stated.
Good.
Hard to add to all of that but let me try.
He dealt with a Democratic Congress.
He was one of the
most intelligent visionary men and
women we've ever had in office.
But he dealt with a Democratic congress
and he got all these things done.
He wasn't, what you would
call a 'hail fellow well met' people person.
He was a serious, serious guy.
But yet, somehow or
another, he was able to
bring people of both parties,
senators and congressmen both the
parties together and forge consensus
and get things done.
It doesn't just happen.
You can't just dictate when you're in the Oval Office.
You need to build a consensus
and he was able to do it
and he was a great
model for, I think, present day
Chief Executives could learn a lot from him.
He did not grandstand.
When you don't grandstand, you can get things done.
The present administration should maybe learn
In the 1972 reelection after the,
after this squeak through. After
the very close election of '68,
please remember the '72 election
was one of the greatest landslides in
presidential history.
Real progress had been made and the American public noticed.
We need to do that again.
Ladies and gentlemen it's one more notch
in the Nixon legacy and if
we can get this message
out, maybe one day,
he'll be appreciated like we do. God Bless
you and thank you panel.