Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse

Transcription

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 Negro 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 Dick 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.