JP: That sounds good to me. If you don't mind if
I'm a little bit discursive if you trigger something that a... TN: Please be
discursive. JP: Okay, okay, whatever works. TN: Hi, I'm Timothy Naftali. I'm director of the Richard Nixon
Presidential Library Museum. I'm here today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with
John Price. I'm very fortunate to have this opportunity to talk to you about
your experiences in the Nixon Administration for the Richard Nixon
Oral History Program. Thank you for joining us. JP: Thank you, Tim. TN: Let's start with, um, how
you went from Grinnell to the White House. How did this happen? JP: There are a couple of interesting little historical asterisks on it
vis a vis Nixon. I went to grad school, then I came back to, from England, to law
school where it happened to be 1962, which was a time when a handful of
people in the Boston-Cambridge area were struggling with what they thought the
Republican Party should become after the Eisenhower years, and we formed something
which was called, finally, the Ripon Society, which was modeled on the Bow
Group which was a sort of ginger group, or a think tank group within the British
Tory or Conservative Party, and I got recruited for that by a fellow who's
gone on to greater glory, an Emil Frankel. There was a professor at MIT
and a bunch of young graduate students who felt that it would be great if we could
somehow create a conveyor belt between the world of academia and the Republican
Party. So, with that general principle in mind
we held program meetings. Guy named John Chafee who was a freshly minted
governor of Rhode Island, a long time ago, came and had dinner with us, and Doug
Bailey who worked with Henry Kissinger at the International Studies Institute
was active. Long story short, about a year later, when Kennedy was
assassinated, the thing really gelled and we gave ourselves a name, the Ripon
Society, and we became deeply interested in,
particularly, the issue of the day within the party, which was the Civil Rights
issue. Because after the Nixon defeat in '60, the Conservatives had stood up and
and very positively, and very aggressively said they were going to
take over the party and sought to do so. So, by the '64 convention things were
fascinating because you'd had Strom Thurmond walk across the aisle in the
Senate. A lot of other Dixiecrats had done the same. So, the the party's fault
lines were changing, and a lot of us youngsters were still on the
moderate or liberal side and wondering what in the world was the future of the
party. Nixon wound up in '64 stumping heavily for Goldwater, and was, as always,
sort of a, I think, a centrist figure within the party. So, long story short, I
then went to to actually, it won't be too short (laughter) if you don't mind. TN: No, no not at all. JP: I went to work, leaving law, to a
community development corporation in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and it
was co-founded by the Bobbsey Twins, by Democratic Senator Robert Kennedy of New
York and Republican Senator Jacob K. Javits, and I was the token Republican
that went on the staff there, and I cobbled together financing for home
ownership in a transitional neighborhood where the traditional, you know, Irish,
Italians, and Jews were fleeing, and the blacks and Hispanics were trying to buy
homes, and were being put into homes with a lot of water in the mortgages, and
unfair practices. So, I was into urban development, but I was also into politics,
and I wound up working for Nelson Rockefeller as his delegate, director
of delegate intelligence for the '68 presidential campaign. So, I ran the staff
that built the dossiers on the thirteen hundred and thirty-three delegates and
alternates for the convention, and, uh, we lost, as you may remember. And so, I
went to lick my wounds, and I had overtures from the Nixon people to come
and work with the campaign in the general election, and here's
where, I think you'll find, as an historian, you'll find a lovely little
asterisk. At the time of my being recruited for the Nixon campaign, and
before at the Rockefeller, I was working for a man named John Doar who was
running the Bedford-Stuyvesant Development Corporation. The self-same
John Doar who later was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee which
impeached, or was going to impeach, Richard Nixon, but go back to 1968 right
around now, Labor Day, week after Labor Day, when I was asked to work on the
Nixon campaign. I had breakfast with John Doar at Junior's on Flatbush Avenue in
Brooklyn. I said, "What do I do?" and he said, "John" he said, "you're a Republican, aren't
you?" and I said yes. He said, "Don't be squeamish about it." He said, "Of course you
work for Richard Nixon." He said, "The other side is Dave Dubinsky, John Connolly, and
Dick Dale, he said, "of course you work for Richard Nixon." This is the guy who
basically managed the impeachment proceedings later, but so I did go to
work for Len Garment, on the campaign, and then because of my interest in and some
experience in urban affairs and so on. When they were talking about someone to
run that, they were seizing on Pat Moynihan and Len said to me, 'Why don't
you go run the traps and sort of do a G-2 check on whether Moynihan would work
out, whether he'd be loyal, whether he'd be effective, and so on.' So, I spent a week
talking to everybody I could find who either had worked with or knew Pat. Pat
was given the job, and then he gave me lunch on my 30th birthday, December 20th
1968, at the Pierre Hotel, and he said, "I don't know any Republicans." He said, "I
would love it if you would become my counsel," and that's how I got there.
TN: A couple of questions. JP: Sorry, that was very long. TN: No, no it's great... JP: But there it is. TN: Ah, one. Let's go back to the '68 campaign. JP: Yes. TN: Since you were
on Nelson Rockefeller's team... JP: Yes. TN: How'd you count the race for for us, how
close was the race? JP: Not at all (laugher) Ultimately, not at all. Rockefeller was
coy and he had a false start. Agnew, for example, had been an early, an
ardent supporter of Nelson Rockefeller's, and then when Rockefeller basically
pulled out, even though he never formally announced, but he basically pulled back
and said to the party, 'court me,' you know, 'tell me you love me,' and Agnew felt
betrayed and many others did too, and that was one problem with the Rockefeller campaign. There were several others, one beyond that one, that the list
of supporters or names he had was like an antiquarian bookshop, and all
handwritten, by George Hinman, on cards which were dog-eared, and many of whose
names had died as I tried to, you know, get to them, and so on. So, there
was a very disconnected tie-in to the people who really were the powers in the
party at that time. In addition, the Rockefeller campaign was structurally
totally different from what Nixon had the wisdom to put into place that year.
Nixon, with his scar tissue from '60, when he tried to run it all himself, had
John Mitchell be basically, I gather, the czar of his campaign. Rockefeller had
four or five different sort of parallel tracks up through which you could come,
and if you got a rebuff at the top of one silo you'd go and start up the next
one, and it was disorganized and ineffective. TN: Did he have any shot at
being chosen for the Veep slot? JP: I don't really know. I think Nixon wanted someone less controversial and I think he picked Agnew as a non-controversial candidate,
even though, later on, you might say he developed a little bit of skills along
those lines. TN: Well, at the time Agnew also had a image of being a
moderate. JP: Yes, well, he was a sort of centrist, urban state, kind of a
governor, that's right. TN: How did a Rockefeller Republican view Richard
Nixon? JP: Well, at first, the reason why John Doar had to talk to me that way, was that
I had a natural feeling that, you know, he was not a moderate, particularly, or a
liberal. I had a feeling that he was a tactician maybe,
but this was, I was thirty years old and I hadn't watched an
administration unfold. I think, looking back on it, my summary conclusion of the
Nixon years was that he was probably the last of the more or less moderate
Republicans. TN: Um, is it true that Moynihan was interested in being Secretary of Labor? JP: I couldn't answer that...
TN: Was he offered that? JP: Because by time that I was checking on him, I can't
remember if Shultz had already been announced. Um. So, I can't give you insight on that.
TN: Okay. JP: He never disclosed that to me. TN: Tell us about what ideas he wanted
to bring to government, Moynihan. You get the job with him and
obviously you start talking a lot. JP: Yeah, well he, there were two things about Pat
that were relevant on your question. One, he was very interested and was seen as a
proponent of welfare reform. We'll spend a lot of time on that if we could. The
second was he was process oriented, and Pat believed passionately that policy
should follow analysis, and this is one thing he had in common with Paul
O'Neill, for example. Both them are process oriented and analytic, and I
think that for both of them, one of the things they really admired in Nixon was
that, when he chose to exercise it, he could be very, very analytical and very
logical. Pat sought and saw the federal government as a candy store for him in
the sense that there was so much social science research that either was being
done, had been done, or could be done, which could be harnessed to making
policy, that he was thrilled to be given the opportunity to be in a coordinating
role. I think, to answer your question earlier about Secretary of Labor,
I think he saw the White House as the right place for him because his views
clearly were beyond the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or workforce demographics, or
something like that. He was interested in policy formulation. TN: Did he talk to you
about Disraeli? JP: Benjamin? TN:Yes. JP: Sure, and I'd read already two or three biographies of
Disraeli, including the huge Moneypenny and Buckle late-19th century version,
plus the Blake one, which you probably are familiar with. Yeah, I mean it
wasn't in every conversation, but yes, he he did mention him. TN: I mean but did he really, is the story accurate that he went to President Nixon and said you
could be... JP: Be the Disraeli, yes, I'm sure it is, from what he had said to me. Yes, just it fits with his both sense of history, his
being a courtier, to some extent, not as good a one as Don
Rumsfeld, but Pat was a courtier, and so he would have felt that Nixon would
respond (finger snap) to an analogy like that. TN: Why did you make the reference to Rumsfeld?
JP: Because I watched Don also in meetings. He was brilliant, you know, and certain,
you know, flattery which was not over-the-top but got there and
not speaking when it was appropriate not to speak, and so forth. Interesting guy. Smart, tenacious, aggressive guy. TN: Talk to us a bit about the role of Richard Nathan, at this early stage. JP: Nathan had been in the Rockefeller orbit also and a wonderful guy. He'd worked for Kenneth
Keating upstate in the, whom Bob Kennedy defeated, for the United States
Senate, and Dick was a, is a policy wonk and remains so, and he came down as
assistant director of OM... of BOB, the Bureau of the Budget for Human Resources,
I think it was, where Paul O'Neill first fell into his ambit, and Dick was
broadly interested in social policy. He was very interested in the welfare reform issue, and he and I had major disagreements on it, because Dick took a view that we
should, in welfare reform, that we should basically, simply adopt a national
standard for the program then called AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent
Children, and we'll talk, as I say, more about welfare, but my view was that the
President needed to be presented with other options too. Moyihan's view on
welfare, at that point, was mired a little bit in a very European attitude about
welfare reform, because he was for a sort of, what was then called, a family
allowance or a capitation grant where whatever your income level, whether you
were Andrew Mellon in this town or, you know, someone at minimum wage, and if
you had six kids you'd each get a payment for those six kids, with the
assumption that for the wealthier people the excess payments would be taxed back,
and that didn't seem, to me, to fly. I've been intrigued by negative income tax,
and, here again, even I and Dick differed, and, when I was in the Ripon Society, I became
the first paid employee of Ripon as their research director while I was in
law school. So, I was working 20-22 hours a week while I was in my second and
third year of law school, but we pushed an idea of the negative income tax, and a friend at Yale actually drafted a negative income tax statute in '67, '68, and
the clincher was when I was invited, in January '68, to a dinner in New York City
with Maurice Stans and guy named Fred Alger and Dan Lufkin and maybe two or
three others with Nixon, we talked a little bit about welfare reform, and I
said to Nixon that, I said, You know, Mr. Vice President, I'm intrigued by the
convergence of views on a negative income tax because, on the one hand, you
have Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago saying negative income tax
it the right way to go, and then you also have Tobin at Yale and Joseph
Pechman, or whoever he was, at the Brookings Institution,
from the liberal Democratic side saying negative income tax. So, I think it's
something that, if you get in office, you should look at," and he said absolutely, that
welfare reform is on the agenda, it's dysfunctional. And so, I came in with
a negative income tax predisposition. Moynihan came in with a family allowance
capitation grant predisposition. Dick was a sort of incrementalist, saying well
we've got national standards and let's make it work. So, that set the stage for
the debate around welfare reform. TN: Debate within your group. What about
outside? JP: Broader? Yes... TN: Broader debate. JP: Well, we'll perhaps come back to the create, the
structuring and creation of the Urban Affairs Council, but for this point, there
was a committee which was formed, which was chaired by the Secretary of HEW, one of three or four committees of the council at Cabinet level. So, Bob Finch was the chairman of it, Nixon's friend from California days, and
on it also were Secretary of Agriculture, because of food stamp and income kinds
of questions, Secretary of Labor George Shultz, I believe, Secretary of Housing
George Romney. And so, that group started to look at alternatives to develop an
options paper, and Dick came in with his AFDC national standards, and then I
prepared a draft decision paper for him which included that as the less
preferred option, and a negative income tax as the preferred option, based on
work that Cabinet-level group supported by not just me, and oh and Dick, but by
George Shultz's guy Jerry Rossow, Assistant Secretary of Labor, and by two guys, one
from OEO and one from HEW. Guy named Jim Lyday, from OEO, and a guy I believe named Bateman, from HEW, along with Bob
Petrocelli, and the Under Secretary there Jack Veneman, who was deeply into this,
up to his armpits. So, it was a broad exercise by that time, yes, but in, but I'm,
what I'm saying is that the, at the get-go, when Nixon was first starting to
think about it, you had these three sort of competing strands that then found their way into the more formal debate. TN: So, let's talk a little bit
about structure then. Urban Affairs Council... JT: Fine. TN: How does that happen? JP: It was very
interesting because Nixon always keyed a lot of things, I believe, off his time in
Eisenhower's White House. You forget all the resentments or the issues, I think
structurally, and in terms of a leadership style, he was interested in
what Eisenhower had done. And so, what he said to Moyihan, and who passed it on to me,
was as we think about urban affairs I would like to create some sort of entity
which would emulate the National Security Council. And so, Pat said dig,
suggest, do this, and Pat then had me go and talk to a host of people, among whom
were people who had been on the Eisenhower National Security Council
staff. I think, I believe, I even talked to Bobby Gray, this is a long time ago, Boyden's father and, or Gordon, Gordon...
Gray TN: Gordon Gray and Bob Cutler JP: Maybe, that was, forgive me, yes, and they, you
know, obviously there was a style in terms of staff support and so on, which
had atrophied under Kennedy and Johnson, because they
just didn't run it in a sort of chief of staff mode the way Eisenhower had. TN: Go ahead, we'll stop whenever you'd like water. Eisenhower brought, I think it's said that he brought a military
approach to, you know, he believed in committees... JP: Yeah. TN: He believed in staff, he
believed in good staffing... JP:Yes, exactly TN: He believed in paper trails. JP: And I think
Nixon basically, on policy issues, bought into that, you know. As I said to a friend
today, he read his brief, he would read the decision papers, but coming back to
to how we got the thing on the road, it's sort of a fun story, because
I said, okay let me look at that, which is a Cabinet-level, statutory, entity to shape
policy, and let's see what else is out there, and what I turned up were two
things. One was over at the Poverty Program. The OEO, Office of Economic
Opportunity, the statute had created something called the Economic
Opportunity Council. Never heard of it, and it was to be chaired by the director
of OEO and all the domestic Cabinet Secretaries were members, but he was the
chairman, and there was also, in the HUD Act, the Housing and Urban Development
Act, back in '65, or whenever it was, '68, something called the Convenor Power of
the Secretary of Housing, where he had statutory authority to convene his
Cabinet peers to shape urban policy. So, anyway, I went to visit with people
who've been involved in both, and what I learned about the Economic Opportunity
Council was that Shriver had prevailed, Sargent Shriver, had prevailed on Lyndon
Johnson once to come and chair a meeting of it, which he did, and then Shriver
tried to hold a second meeting. Johnson wasn't interested, it never was held nor
was any other meeting ever held. I went to HUD, and I talked to folks there, and I
said, "Well, how was this power used?" Answer: never utilized, never used. So, I wrote a
memo through Pat Moynihan, I hope it's somewhere in the archives, though this
was before January 20th, and I said in the closing paragraph of the memo, I
said, after citing all this, what it shows is that Cabinet members are heliotropic,
they like to turn and face the sun, said this will be successful only if you
chair the Urban Affairs Council meetings, and, in fact, before the Urban Affairs
Council transmogrified into the Domestic Council 18 months later, Nixon chaired 21
out of 23 meetings of the Council. TN: He did? JP: Yes, absolutely.
TN: So, he was... JP: Where you aware of that? TN: No. JP: You know, there was a guy who's got a recent book
on Nixon and Kissinger out, and I started to read it, and I reached a point in it
where he asserted that there was something called the Urban Affairs
Council and it was sub-Cabinet level and Nixon never came. Well, it was Cabinet
level, Nixon chaired 21 out of 23. I threw the book away. I figured if you're inaccurate there, you probably are about a few other things. TN: So, Nixon was up to
his ears in discussing the... JP : Very much. TN: Details... JP: Mm-hmm TN: Of, what would be, the Family
Assistance Program. JP: Absolutely, and in fact, he asked us to have a Saturday
session which went on for four and a half hours, with sandwiches, to just have
the Cabinet members noodle on it, which we did. Moynihan wrote him reams of memos,
which you've perhaps come across. They're certainly in the library, about welfare
reform, and I'm a historian, as you are Tim, and though no longer at all, never a
professional, and the Burns staff, and I hadn't mentioned how Nixon set up
this counterpoint between the Moynihan staff and Arthur Burns staff, because, I
think, Nixon always being the trimmer or the leveler, sensed the outrage of the
right wing that how would he vest this radical liberal Democrat from Harvard, of
all places, you know, with formation of domestic policy. So he put... TN: With other
Harvard people. JP: Well, Kissinger and yeah that's right,
and so, Burns had Martin Anderson working with him who was, and remains, a rather
ideological conservative type. And so, Marty began to zero in on elements of
the proposal which he found problematic either mathematically or philosophically.
So, this series of memos started and Marty wrote a memo to Nixon saying this
sounds like the English Poor Laws, Speenhamland 1834, you know. (laughter) So, Moynihan and I, Moynihan
calls an historian, an economic historian, in Cambridge, England. I'm on
the phone to a buddy of mine who just stepped down from Kenyon College where
he'd been provost and acting President, English historian. So, Richard Nixon was
reading pieces of paper, over the transom, from me
and Moynihan, and from Marty and Burns on the English Poor Laws. I mean, this is the
God's truth, and he would read them, you know, there'd be notes coming back, and
this is not George W. Bush, you know. Anyway, this is a man who likes getting
his teeth into policy. TN: So, tell us more about the how the debate, you know, went back and forth. JP: Yes. TN: Because we have this interesting eight months before the speech. JP: Yes. TN: And that's fascinating and important. JP: Yeah. Well, it was, and what,
as I say, I started out with a bit in my teeth, because I believe that
welfare reform was timely, and as I say, I had a view, but I tried to balance that
view. I wasn't just saying, you got to do this. I wrote a decision paper which had that in it, and, um, here, what happened was, it became part of a sort of
Easter package that Moynihan set down to Nixon at Key Biscayne. Pat came in
scrambling one day saying, we were already hard at work on it, but he came
in scrambling saying, "The President wants a domestic message," you know, "wants a domestic
policy." So, we worked on that, we worked on the Washington DC, you know, clean up from
the riots, and we started talking about revenue sharing. So, Pat went, took down to
Key Biscayne, a folder for Nixon which included in my decision paper on welfare
reform, two or three other things, and then what Nixon, I think, frankly, very
rightly deciding with, I'm sure, Ehrlichman's help, not just for the
politics, but again, on the substance. Shultz was a part of the group as I
said, and Nixon said, we have to take account of the working poor. In
other words, the negative income taxes was, as it was outlined, would
zero you out if you were at the poverty line or above it, and Nixon said no. He
said, you know, the fact is that people are working hard but they're not taking
home much, and so you have to find a way to continue on through the poverty line
to help people at a lesser amount. And so, Shultz then got much more into the act,
and Ehrlichman, at the same time, also was, I think, saw this as an opportunity to
move up the food chain or be more direct. Because if I were Ehrlichman, what
I would have done, and he probably did, was to say, going to the President and
say, 'Mr. President you've got Arthur Burns and you've got Pat Moynihan and
they're advocates, and what you don't need, Mr. President, are advocates. You
need someone who can process things for you,' and so on. And so, it was all caught
up, I think, in in the internal changes within the White House as well as the
substance of what was going on, but Shultz emerged, and rightly, as a very
strong figure in the debate. Then Marty popped up, Marty Anderson, as I mentioned
before, and also Spiro finally focused in on it, the Vice President, and, to me, while
we hammered away and looked at marginal tax rates and so on, and the President,
after Ehrlichman is, you remember, finally briefed him on the Romania trip, I
believe, and got his buy in, basically by that time the President had decided.
And so, we then all met at Camp David right before the August 8th or 9th
speech or paper, and Safire was working at it already, and the "New Federalism"
speech, and the welfare reform thing, but fascinatingly, I was asked to go, and did
go, to the Camp David meeting where it was an all-hands meeting with Finch, and
Moynihan, and Burns, and and Petrocelli, and me, and Nathan, I think, and the Vice
President, and Spiro Agnew, the sitting Vice President, turns to the President as
the President was saying, you know, this is the idea,
Agnew turns to him and, if there's a transcript I'd be fascinated, but my ears
remember him saying, "Mr. President," he said, "I'm going up right now. I'm leaving
by helicopter from here to go to the Senate to cast what will probably be the
tie-breaking vote on the ABM Treaty. I'll call you before, you know, before I go
onto the floor and see whether you've had further thoughts on this." Had you heard that story? TN: I read it in John Osborne. JP: Is that right? Okay. TN: But you were
there for that. JP: I was there for that. TN: We're gonna change tapes and move to the next one. JP: Mm-hm TN: Thank you. JP: Are the answers too long? Okay.
TN : There are there are no right answers. JP: Okay, all right. TN: This is great.
I hope you're enjoying this. JP: I love... TN: It's a, um... (beep) TN: You look great. TN: Was it-- Did the Easter package include a statement about New Federalism? Was Moynihan-- JP: I'm trying to remember that, to be honest
with you. Again, I didn't have a chance to prep for this the way I would like to. TN: That's okay. Actually, my point was to what extent was Moynihan... JP:I doubt it, I doubt it, because as, I'm sorry, as I look back on
it, it was more what our staff was working on. So, that would have included
by then, I think, I think, Blumenthal had joined or Chris DeMuth, and we were
starting to look at the Washington, DC 14th Street corridor thing, but the welfare
reform thing was the heart of it. TN: I was just interesting in the extent to which Moynihan and the staff were interested in New Federalism, in that idea. JP: Well, I was
because of the Ripon Society connection. Again, because one thing we had done as
Ripon was we had sought to work with the Republican Governors Association and
we were trying to get them to buy into revenue sharing, federal revenue sharing.
So, I was aware of the subject and was delighted when Burns grabbed it and
ran with it a little later. Anyway, so, we got the the bill up on the Hill, then there followed unsuccessful efforts to get it passed.
Even before it went up, Nixon wanted to brief Reagan and others on it, and he,
through Ehrlichman, asked me to, we're talking about summer of '69, because Nixon
was very sensitive to the fact that Ronald Reagan might not have, you know,
might not have inhibitions about running against him in '72. And so, he
asked, through Ehrlichman, if I could check on the incidence of use by, you
know, working poor white families, minority families in different parts of
the country. Just so he had a sense of whether Reagan's constituency would be,
you know, potential constituency, in an intra-party battle, would be able to be
brought to bear on this issue. Because, I think, Nixon wanted to keep his flank
safe, but he went into it, Nixon did, I think, almost as a conviction
matter, not just as a, not as a political matter. I think he felt the politics were
not in his favor, and anyway, we briefed Reagan. Petrocelli
and Dick Nathan and I went out and briefed Reagan in California that summer
and, you know, he took it all in and was noncommittal in his response, and he had
one of his techies talk to us later in the year. Then, Nixon, on Christmas Eve, December 24th of 1969, said something to me which
was interesting. Because there had just completed the White House Commission on
Nutrition and Health, a guy named Jean Mayer, who was a professor at Tufts Public
Health School, or something, had been chairman of the group, and had prepared this report. And
so, it was given to me to implement, and I brought Dr. Mayer into the Oval Office
on Christmas Eve, just the three of us, Nixon, and he, and I, and we talked about the
report first, and then Nixon said to Mayer he said, "You know," he said, "we've got
this proposal up on the Hill for family assistance and," he said, 'you know," he said,
"it's going to be tough for us Republicans because," he said, "frankly.
annually," he said, "the Democrats will try to roll us and raise the base, and the
Republicans may wind up resisting it but," he said to us, "the important thing is
that we will have established the principle," which I found very Disraelian.
The principle of... TN: Yeah, no... JP: A negative income tax of income maintenance. And then many
years later, I was in San Clemente with with the President after he had gone in
exile, and he said to me, "John, what do you think about that in retrospect?" I said,
"You know, that's a tough one. Because," I said, there had been a Trenton OEO, Office
of Economic Opportunity, experiment income maintenance, and I said to him,
"frankly," this was six this was 19, gosh, 70-something, '79, '78 I said, "frankly, it showed
there was a lot of recidivism," and I said, "You know, I'll be perfectly honest with
you. I don't know whether it would have been right." But at the time, he and I did think,
but then he backed off and and he basically finally walked from it because
it just wasn't, it had no political traction. TN: Well, let's talk about his
backing away from it. JP: Okay. TN: When do you think that's, that happens? JP: Well, it passed the
House of Representatives twice and I think that when it just couldn't get
leverage in the Senate, and when Wallace Bennett was sort of lukewarm about, he was chair of Senate Finance through whose
committee it would have had to come, and then you also had a ganging up of the right
and the left against the middle. You had Karl Mundt of South Dakota saying it's
socialist, and you had, you know, George McGovern or Gene McCarthy saying it was
niggardly, you know, it's socialist or it's just, you know, sort of crumbs. And so,
the center didn't hold. You may know more than I. TN: No. JP: But that's my take on it TN: Um, no.
JP: From your other conversations with the more political people in the White House.
I wasn't involved in lobbying for it. TN: But you would-- I'm interested, I think people would
be interested in and seeing how optimistic your boss was as time
went by, or how pessimistic he became. How did, what was Moyihan saying? JP: Well,
when we, when it first went up, of course, he was euphoric. Nixon called him after
having had a couple of pops, we were all together, I think at Steve Hess' house
or something, Pat, and I, and Steve, and a couple of
others, and, um, it was right after the announcement, and Pat had talked about it
on the Sunday morning show, and Nixon called him to congratulate him. So, that
was sort of a high-water mark, I think. Then it, when it passed the House the
first time, I went down to Moynihan's office, which was in the basement of the
White House and which had a translucent ceiling with translucent panels in it,
about a foot or 18 inch panels, and Pat, in his
typical fashion, had in his credenza, you know, some refreshment. And so, we sat down
and he reaches over and he pulls out a bottle of champagne,
you know, peels off the wrapping of the cork (pop) and it went right through the glass and then
there was a dark smudge there for a year where the cork had settled on the pane of the translucent protection there, (laughter) and so that was a constant reminder, and Pat would say, "I
went up see Wilbur Mills today and I," he said, "I addressed him 'Mr. Speaker, oh, Mr. Chairman.'" (laughs) As I say, the courtier in him was wonderful, yeah. And so, he and we were hopeful through at
least the first House passage but it became clear that it was going to be
heavy sledding after that. TN: Do you remember working with Bryce Harlow? JP: Of course. Yes,
and Bryce - two recollections of Bryce who was a wonderful man, well, three. One, on
December 5th 1969, when I was appointed Moynihan successor as Executive
Secretary of the Council and Special Assistant, Moynihan and Bryce were
appointed Counselors to the President. They stood next to each other, you know,
six-foot-three and five-foot-six, or whatever, both having been born in
Oklahoma. I don't know if you realize that, but they noted that for each other
and for the benefit of the White House Press Corps, but I remembered Bryce, as we
all first came in the White House, giving us a very, very avuncular and very sound
advice. We were all kids, I mean, you know, here's Ziegler at 27, and Chapin at 29, and
Price at 30, and youngsters, and Bryce came in and talked to this assemblage of
White House staffers and he said, uh, "You know, you you may not fully realize the
the blessing and the special character of where you now work but" he said, "other
people are for many reasons, everything from, you know, penetration for, you know,
espionage reasons reasons to personal gain or deal reasons, they'll be trying
to cultivate you, and to, you know, get to you." And so, he said, "Just be prudent and
careful." It was a very, in more detail than that, but some practical things to do.
So, that was one thing. The other recollection of Bryce as Head of
Government Relations for the President with the great shingle of having done
the same thing for President Eisenhower and very widely known and respected in
Washington, was a revealing episode. It was a Cabinet meeting and I was sitting
on the wall and Bryce Harlow was sitting next to me, and at the end of the meeting,
Nixon turn to walk back into his office and he said with sort of a cheerful
playful look on his face, he said, "Well," he said, "today, I'm in a good mood because," he said,
"tomorrow morning is the last one of my breakfasts with members of the House." He
said, "I've invited, as you know, in series all the members of the House. So, he said,
"But tomorrow is gonna be special," he said, "because tomorrow, Bella's coming." Meaning Bella Abzug.
TN: Yeah. JP: Bryce Harlow, Assistant to the President
for Congressional Relations, leans over and nudges me and he says, "Who's Bella?" Who's Bella? Of the hat. TN: Yeah. JP: Of the
wild-eyed, left-wing, you know, West Side Manhattan politics. I was absolutely stunned.
TN: Wow. JP: Anyway. TN: What happened in the Senate? JP: I really can't tell you more than
what I said. The center didn't hold against the extremes, and Bennett was
cool, who was the key player, I think, for the first bottleneck. TN: What role, if any,
did Donald Rumsfeld play? JP: On the welfare? TN: Yes. JP: I don't believe he was a
member of that Cabinet committee. I don't know, I don't remember him piping up, you
know, an awful lot in the full debates. He may have talked to Nixon privately. TN: To what extent did Moynihan, and you, and the staff look at the Model Cities Program and try
to give some advice on what to do about that? JP: Just the last couple of thoughts on welfare,
if I might. TN: Oh, go ahead. JP: If I could, Tim. Because not only after the President
publicly proposed it but earlier, there had been points where the plane might
have gotten into a stall, you know. And so, one of those was late spring, very
early summer, and I got worried. And so, I said to Moynihan, I called, I think I
called Finch, or certainly Veneman, and I said, "I'm worried that we're losing some
momentum and we need to do something." And so, we organized a trip, and Moynihan and
I went up to see an interesting trifecta: David Rockefeller, whom everybody would
go to see on everything, probably, as a member of the establishment, but then the
other two were Terence Cardinal Cook, at the Archdiocese in New York, who was a
man out of the social services world, and a lovely, quiet man, parenthetically of
whom, after we came out, Moynihan asked my opinion, and I said, "Well, he seems like
a very nice man. He seems like almost just a teacher but he's quiet. He's sort
of, you know, low-key," and Moynihan said, "Yes," he said, "after Cardinal Spellman," he
said, "few acorns grew in the shade of that mighty oak." The third of the
trifecta was Bill Buckley who Moynihan had never met, and Buckley had invited us
to dinner at his home, and we had a dinner with Buckley, and some of his
acolytes, but Pat was trying, Pat and I were trying to get a multi-pronged
movement mounted on the President, and on the administration to resolve the
debate. One other thing was in the middle of it all... TN: Sorry, just to be clear, resolve the debate?
JP: About about whether and in what way to go forward with the welfare reform.
TN: This is before... JP: Pre-August speech. TN: Pre-August, this is pre-August. JP: That's why I said. It was going back to the period when there was a lull even before the speech. Um. A couple of
other things just-- There were two incidents where we had council meetings,
one of which was when the National Alliance of Businessmen had a meeting.
Don Kendall, again, a long-standing figure around American business, then the CEO of
PepsiCo, was apparently a reasonably close friend of the President's, and he
was coming in to speak for the National Alliance of Business. And so, I called up his people, and I said, "I'd like to to fill you in because the
President is debating about welfare reform." So, I went over to his hotel suite
the night before the council meeting and we sat on the floor together drinking
Pepsi colas, and I spread out the decision paper and walked him through
the stuff just so he would be prepared to answer any questions, should Nixon ask
them. And another one was, I can't remember, Burns and somebody else, and
Nixon was just watching the debate back and forth like a tennis spectator, you
know, it's fascinating just, he was avid, you know, he loved the, he loved the
conflict and the argumentation between the sides. He was reveling in it. TN: Um. The back-- So, you associate the backing away with the change in the
politics on the Hill? Or do you see that, do you link that to the '72 campaign? JP: I think
it's partly, the latter, sure. Yeah, because, I think, that, as I said earlier, he was
worried even in '69 about what Reagan and the right might make of this issue.
Because Nixon never saw any political advantage to him in it. It started out
being a substantive, yeah I think we need to do that, but I don't think he ever was
convinced the politics was going to work greatly in his favor. And so, I think,
as we got further away from the the excitement of the intellectual victory,
if you will, and the, and the initial praise of folks who weren't often in his
camp then, then, I think, he became more true to form and more political. I will
say, again, after the announcement in August, Moynihan and I went over to
see the National Civil Rights Leadership Coalition, and this included everybody
from the American Society of Friends, to the American Jewish Congress, to you name it,
and they were just pounding on on us, and on the proposal, and Moynihan finally
said, he said, "You know, just because this is Richard Nixon, doesn't mean that you should
be pounding on this." He said, "This is a progressive proposal and Hyman
Bookbinder finally spoke my mind. He said to the group, he said, "Don't let the best to be the enemy of the good." So that, but it was fascinating, you know, the-- TN: I know there was a debate over what the minimum level should be. It was 1,600... JP:Yes TN: to begin with and Nixon, or the administration said, what, to
2,400 or so. Some people were asking for over five thousand. JP: Mm-hmm.
TN: We don't see a lot of centrism in American policy making. JP: Right. TN: People were
talking about the center then but yet... JP: People were. TN: Well, why didn't the center hold?
JP: Well, again, it was so... For the, for the Conservatives this was a bridge too
far, I think, and as I said earlier, you know, McCarthy, to whom I later
spoke about it years later in London, just felt it was insufficient and wrong,
and they weren't willing to give the political credit to Nixon either, I think.
TN: But he didn't say that to you did he? JP: No. TN: Were you on the wall watching these
debates? JP: Well, yes... TN: Where you brought in the room? JP: At that time, until I became Pat's successor when I was at the table. TN: But you... JP: September 5th of '69. TN: So this must been great political theater. JP: It was fantastic. It was fantastic. TN: Tell us some of the other priorities, I mean, that you were... JP: Yeah. TN: The staff was working on other things too. JP: Yes, and there was a very small staff. I mean,
there were only about seven or eight of us and you later had guys like Checker Finn start up on
educational issues. As I said, you had Blumenthal working on District of
Columbia issues, and then Chris DeMuth and others started working on the Model
Cities program, but Dick Nathan was deeply involved in that and very
knowledgeable about Model Cities, and I think we were trying to square the
circle because maybe he and some of us felt that there were some important
elements to the Model Cities Program that Nixon ought to continue, or think of
continuing. As I stepped back from it, and talking to academics later about
the Model Cities Program, it was sort of a Nixonian response by Lyndon Johnson
to the excesses of the Poverty Program. Because, in the Poverty Program, what had
happened was that the federal government gave money to antis, and to critics, and
to advocates outside of the structure of units of local government. So, what the
Model Cities Program did, in Johnson's mind, was he sort of began to ignore OEO
and began to move the funding back through city hall. And so, it was a more
normalizing kind of a program than had been the Poverty Program. So, for that
reason, some of us thought Nixon might be appealed to by it, but I think it
probably, the reaction of a lot of folks, and they they weren't always so
forthcoming as to say this to me, within the White House staff would have been
it's a Johnson legacy program why do we want to, you know, do anything except
either ignore it or deep-six it. TN: Um, community action? JP: That was interesting
because, again, Rummy brought in one of his old college buddies, Frank Carlucci,
to be the senior line guy at the OEO. He ran the Community Action agencies, and
tried to tone them down, as I say, tried to manage through the excesses. Cheney,
I, that's when I first got to know him, but I didn't see him,
you know, central in the discussions, but then that's not his way, I guess, as
we see. He's more oblique or more behind the closed doors, but Carlucci worked
very hard at it and I remember, you may have come across this, I'm just thinking
about it now for the first time in years. There was a meeting convened at Blair
House by Ehrlichman, after I wound up basically falling more in the Ehrlichman
ambit, and we, I had pulled together a paper on trying to get HUD and the
Poverty Program more on the same page in terms of what they could do in support
of these efforts, and Carlucci said to me, "You're a brave
guy." But I can't remember, to be honest with you, the the outcome or the
substance of that discussion. TN: Why does he think you were
particularly courageous? JP: Well, because I just was saying, you know, here's what's
going on, and here's what we might do about it, and putting on paper options
which might take things away from here or from here and do things differently, so... TN: Tell us about about falling under Ehrlichman's control. JP: Yes. What happened when
in December of '69 I took over from Pat, Pat was basically without portfolio at
that point, and Ehrlichman was because of his increasing role in that area of
domestic policy, you know, really shepherding it.
And so, while Pat was still there and I was still doing most of my work with Pat.
Nonetheless, Ehrlichman was very much in the wings and I would start having
breakfast with him and Todd Holland every morning, his three soft-boiled eggs
at seven o'clock in the morning, and but Pat continued, and I did through '70, early
'70 to work on national urban growth policy, and Ehrlichman was perfectly pleased, at
least seemed so, to let us continue with that, and that played out through a
series of different meetings and papers that I put together or worked on.
TN: Did you work on the black capitalism issue? JP: No, not directly. That was more Maury Stan's initiative at the Commerce Department itself where EDA was, the Economic Development Administration, was the relevant agency. TN: Were you working with HUD on the subsidizing low-income housing? Did you do any of that? JP: It was more the Model Cities Program and urban growth policy and New Towns was where I spent more time. Henry
Cashen, again, had come in and was beginning to build the portfolio of more
of the HUD programs. So, I wasn't doing multifamily stuff, and I wasn't
overseeing FHA, you know, that began to be Henry.
TN: Where you thinking... JP: It was more, it was more, as you look back on it, more sort of, new
policy initiatives, longer range, somewhat more strategic planning. Len Garment had
sort of gotten started something called the National Goals Research Staff. Don't know if you ever came across
that, which were futurists, you know, and he hired a couple of guys that worked
on that. I can't remember their names, but they did a lot of speculation about
demographic trends and things of that character. So, it was more over the
horizon, as I say, and Moynihan was also very interested in trying to cull the
various pots of social policy research that had been funded by a HEW, or a Labor
Department, or HUD, or OEO, and just try and bring them to bear on on policy.
TN: You describe the FAP as actually ultimately an amalgam of different strains of ideas
with Moynihan's being one of those strains. JP: Yeah. TN: Did you see an evolution... JP: I think, I think you'd have to say, not that they were an amalgam or a potpourri, but rather that
one, more or less, one over the others. That is, the idea of a negative income tax... TN: Negative income tax. JP: One over, one over the family allowance, which would have been a hundred billion
dollar program or over pure national standards, with the working poor element and also with a work requirement which Nixon insisted people do. TN: And that really came from the Arthur Burns side, the work-- JP: And Nixon, and Nixon, absolutely.
It was the President himself. TN: And do you remember him talking about that when he was chairing these meetings or? JP: Yes. Yeah. TN: Did you see an evolution in
Moynihan's thinking about some of these issues in the time that you, you know, the
period you worked with him? JP: Well, I think that more than an evolution of his thinking was his sense of his changing and gradually diminishing role. I think that
at times he was very frustrated. I think he was very, I think he was very loyal to
the President. He loved to talk to the press, but I think he was very,
I think, he he liked the President personally. There's a picture I'd love to show
you which I have of the two of them. It's a black-and-white photo in the Oval
Office and the two of them are standing together in suit and tie, and Moynihan
has this sort of puckish, impish look on his face, you know, and the President, he said something obviously, and the President has his shoulders and his head thrown
back just braying with laughter, and there was a mutual almost an affection
between the two of them, but I think that Pat was a little too outre for, you know,
most the folks who'd been longtime Nixon loyalists, and who worried about
the politics of his still being there and, you know, just he was different. TN: Was it a steady erosion? Or would you see that, see it as... JP: Linked to something? TN: Yeah, are there, yes. JP: I can't give you an answer to that. TN: The high point, would you say the
high point was in August '69? JP: Yeah, in many ways that's right. TN: For him. Um. JP: Yeah.
TN: Does the "benign neglect" memo factor in some of this? JP: That could be, I'd forgotten it.
That was the memo, for those of you in the audience, which was written by
a Governor General of Canada in the 19th century suggesting a posture that the
British government should take of benign neglect, and Moynihan suggested this
about the ruckus regarding race relations. You know, people forget, you're
too young probably even yourself, Tim, but when the inauguration occurred in 1969,
it was following a year of major urban disturbances going back as far as the
Watts Riots in '67, major, major urban and often racially connected disturbances in
cities like Omaha, Detroit, you name them, and, if I correctly remember, when the
inauguration was held, there were water-cooled machine guns on the steps
of the Capitol building. It was, it was very tough, and
one of the things that we faced early on, and that Moynihan reported to Nixon on,
was that the degree, the level of suspicion of Nixon in the black
community was appallingly high, and Moynihan reported to him that the
clear conviction of many, many African Americans was that there would
be no more elections for president. That elections were going to be suspended.
So, this kind of air of complete distrust. And so, Moynihan came in, was very
concerned about it. Things may have cooled down a little bit by the end of
'69, but I had the benign neglect thing foots into that, that he just didn't want
to fan the flames a lot more of all these excessive thoughts that were out there.
TN: Did did he ever wonder about who leaked it? JP: Of course, he wondered. He never
asked me what I thought, or I think he assumed that people in the Haldeman
staff, but I'm not sure. TN: To hurt him? JP: Yeah, to mm-hm, to damage him in Nixon's
eyes, you know. Because of his being, you know, harmed by that. He was always very
sensitive about criticism from the black community, starting with the famous
Moynihan report in '65, I think it was, for Johnson, when, as he told me, in his
description of the demographics of the the African American community and the
impact, the terrible impact on them of slavery over the decades, he just said
that when the report was published, I guess he gave it in a speech at American
University, that Roy Wilkins and others called him privately on the phone to say
he was absolutely right, spot on, and they would go out and condemn him in a press
conference. And so, he was, it was very hard for him. Moynihan, when he, the day he
made the offer to me, on my 30th birthday, told me something lovely. First of all, he
bought a glass of, a bottle of wine for us when he learned it was my
birthday, but then he went on to say that the American form of slavery was the
most savage that the world had ever seen, because of the breaking up of families
and all these things, and he took, compared it with Brazil and Greece and
so on, but then he said something that's just beautiful. He said that America has
it, in a very Irish way, he said, "America has it within its gift to become the
first truly multiracial society in history." TN: Let's go to the next tape. JP: Okay.
TN: And I have a few more questions. JP: There's some wonderful memories you know,
just interesting memories. TN: Yes. JP: He was fascinating. He was fun! TN: He sounds great.
JP: He was incredible. TN: But you were there-- Unknown: If you could be quiet just for a minute. Let's get the room tone. please. Another minute. Room tone. Unknown: Okay. Good. Thank you. TN: Mr. Price let's talk about your work
shepherding the health insurance bill. JP: Thank you. Once I sort of went from one
trapeze the other, to Ehrlichman, I put up my hand and I said, "You know," as I felt
welfare reform was important and timely, "I'd love to work on whatever you're gonna
do in the health care area," and he said okay. And so, I began on two fronts. One
was there was a lot of commotion at that time around the acronym was HICFA, I
don't remember what it what it was, but over at HEW there was an area which
ultimately became the sort of managed care support area like HMOs. And so, my
first bite at the apple was working with them, and, I guess, BOB on managed
care, on ways in which we might support that. Because at that time, as
periodically occurs, there was real concern about the pace of growth in
health insurance, and healthcare expenses. And so, I began to work on that
and we finally pulled a paper together, HEW and myself and BOB, and gave it to
Nixon about two certain forms of support for managed care, and Spiro again
got into the act, and Ken Cole called me to say that he'd given the Vice
President a copy of my paper. Well, the Vice President was going out to Las
Vegas for a golf game or something and he called the President from the plane
reading the paper and saying, "My god! You're listening to this guy Price?" He
said, "This is crazy!" and Ken Cole said not to worry, the President said relax, but so,
he was on to it too. But on the other front, which is the health
insurance area, there we had a lot more running room, and a lot more interest, and
I'm sure that Paul can tell you more about it because he I'm certain was
deeply involved. TN: Very, very involved. JP: And so, all I did was, I sort of tried to pull together
the initial decision paper, and then they drafted the bill.
But it was fascinating given subsequent discussions because what
Nixon proposed was universal coverage of health insurance done, however, through
the private carriers, and I can't even remember the details. I suspect you've
gotten them from Paul, but it was a very, very interesting and historic try by Nixon, but again, what happened, couldn't get it passed. TN: You've mentioned
the Vice President a couple of times. He was viewed as a as a Rockefeller Republican. JP: Not by then, no. I mean he had... TN: What happened? JP: become, he'd become the point of the
spear for Nixon's politics, really. Plus, I think he was trying to carve out his own
role and maybe his own base within the party, either to challenge Nixon or to
seek the presidency himself later on. As I say, he was totally disillusioned with
Rockefeller's spurning of him earlier, but then, I think he just saw the way the
tide was moving and it stylistically it fit him, you know. He was, he loved word
weaseling, and he was a very impeccable dresser, and he was, you know, natty and, um, always hard for a Vice President, except
for this one, for Dick Cheney. So, I don't know what combination of things
drove him that direction. TN: Let me ask you about the shadow of
Vietnam. You're in a, you're in the White House in a particularly difficult
period. JP: Yes. TN: You're there when Kent State happens. JP: Yes. TN: You're there when the demonstrations are, seemed so threatening that buses are placed around the White House. JP: That's right. TN: To what extent is that
influencing the way you think about domestic policy? The the unhappiness over
the war? JP: Well, one thing was the rhetoric about a
so-called "peace and growth dividend," meaning, as the war would wind down, those
resources would become available for domestic needs and policy.
And so, there was a certain air of unreality about those expectations.
Moynihan made a wonderful comment at a press conference in San Clemente in
August of '69. He came out in front of the press corps and he said, "The peace and
growth dividend will be as evanescent as the morning clouds over San Clemente."
And so, that's one way which the war was in our sightline. Didn't directly touch me.
I mean, I wasn't NSC staff. I was involved when they had the mobilization
thing and they ringed the White House with buses. I did get a visitation from
my college president and a bunch of students, and I did arrange for them to
meet with Pat, and also with the Secretary of State in an attempt to sort
of diffuse some of the emotions, as many, many White House staffers did. There were
really, Ehrlichman's book it tells you about how, how many of us were involved
in trying to to dissipate some of the tension and fear there. Ehrlichman's own
daughter was on the phone calling him from payphone boxes in the West Coast
saying, 'God can't you, can't you get this man to do something about the war?'
At least, that was what I heard. TN: I was wondering whether Cambodia affected the...
JP: Yes. TN: Affected staff morale at all. JP: Yeah, definitely. May 1970, May 5th maybe, and I went on the airwaves that night with the guy from the Young Americans for Freedom and others
and talked about the Cambodian incursion. It was very, very, very discouraging, you
know, and I think we then realized that that it was going to be a drawn-out
process, and it was, what? Five years later we finally got out of Vietnam? I'm sorry I'm not... TN: No, but I'm,
but I wanted to know what. JP: Yeah, and we all were struck by his effort to go out and at night, in the middle of the night, go out to the Lincoln Memorial and walk among protesters and so on. And again, the wonderful, poor man,
you know, he, so one reads, was awkward and unable to,
to really engage in conversation, but was, God knows, talking about football or
something. He, he was trying to reach out because he, at his heart, I think, he felt
he had to, wanted to, but he couldn't do it effectively. TN: What can you tell us about why Moynihan left the White House? JP: Well. A, he had a tenure time up
at Harvard coming fairly soon, and I think, as I said, his role had been
diminished and John had really assumed the authority over and ran, in a
in a more structured way than Pat may have done, domestic policy formation, and
I think Nixon, by that time, saw less utility to meetings and more in decision
making, you know, on a more confined basis. TN: What about your own decision to leave?
Why did you leave the White House? JP: I wanted to go back and run for Congress,
and I did try, unsuccessfully, to get the nomination, but that, I, you know, I told
you when I was in grad school that I stayed less time than I might have
because I felt I'd get too embedded or too relaxed, and I had other dreams, other
things I wanted to do. So, I went back. Actually, my last year also, I worked a lot
on urban development and urban growth and the financing of urban development,
and I reached a conclusion which drove my career decision because, looking at
all these Model Cities Projects, or demonstration projects, or pilot projects,
I said, that's all great but they're just going to be froth on the surface unless
you get institutional capital to buy into whatever the the policy desire is,
and therefore, you need pension funds, you need insurance companies, you need Wall
Street. So, I said, "I'd better go back to boot camp" and that's what I did. I went
to an investment bank and, and tried to run for Congress at the same time, and
I've been in banking since. TN: You mentioned you felt that Richard Nixon was the last moderate Republican president. What happened to the moderate wing of the Republican Party? JP: Yeah. TN: It was making policy, at least, in 1969. JP: Yes it was. Yeah, and Nixon, again, how do I know because I'm an outsider. But unlike, let's say,
this administration, Nixon was inclusive. I mean, he brought me in, and I was, at the
time he hired me, chairman of the Ripon Society, and he brought in Tom Huston who later, you know, hatched the plans that the
Attorney General seemed to bless about extreme activities. And so, you had, and Marty
Anderson. So, Nixon was a moderate in the sense maybe of style, of the
analytical style, not so much an ideological style. I think of another
example, which was on this whole area of urban development and so on, that I was
so interested in. One of the issues that came in front of all of us was an issue
of whether there should be a federal taking, a federal eminent domain power
for purposes of realizing the value creation you make in zoning decisions, on
behalf of a city, or urban space, urban design spaces. And so, there was a hell of
a tussle around the Ehrlichman morning staff meeting table, around whether that
was right, and Marty Anderson was adamant saying, "That kind of option should never
even be seen by the President," and, and the rest of us and Ehrlichman said,
"Options papers are options papers. Let the President decide but it's not our
job to keep something from him." So, in that sense, I think Nixon was moderate. Um. Hugh Scott, one time talking up at law
school, Senator Scott, the minority leader in the Senate, said of Nixon, he said,
"Richard Nixon is the guy with the portable middle," and I said, "I know what
you mean. Like the bubble in the plumber's level." You know. And I think, a lot of it was
tacking, but therefore, he wasn't being an ideologue, he wasn't coming at it from a
hard right position. In fact, as I'm told by guys like John
Whitaker, and others who knew him much better, that Nixon bore with him the scars
of the 1962 gubernatorial election when, was it Joseph Shell ran against him,
Republican conservative, and just beat up like heck on him from the right, and John
Whitaker suggests that that left, you know, residue with Nixon of not great
affection for the hard right. TN: Um. What was-- JP: Is this of any? TN: No, this is a very, very interesting. Because you, again there is a debate among historians about the role
of pragmatism... JP: Mm-hm. TN: in that early period. JP: Yes. TN: What what would you say was
the... Who, after Moynihan leaves, who is providing some of the intellectual candlepower? JP: John Ehrlichman. Very smart man. John Ehrlichman, the guy who really
is responsible, I'm sure, for EPA being there and for Nixon's conversion, in part,
to being something of an environmentalist. I mean, the first Earth Day and the first government department devoted to environmental concerns was
Richard Nixon, as well as other things, but John, John was receptive to ideas, you
know. He liked his boss. Very political. Great sense of humor, which most people don't realize. Ehrlichman had a wonderful sense of humor. TN: From you vantage point,
what role did John Mitchell play in shaping any of these policies?
JP: Um, Mitchell was, I'm sure, very much involved. I mean ask Len Garment
about that. He'd know far better than I, because Mitchell, Mitchell and I
didn't have much interaction. He, um. When we were right before the inauguration, the Moynihan staff was all over at the office of the Pennsylvania Avenue
Development Corporation of which Pat was vice chairman, and Mitchell strolled
through and saw us there, and knowing I was a Ripon Society guy, and knowing me, he said, "So, what's my favorite juvenile delinquent doing?" Which was a play off of a public, you know, statement, a phrase he used, juvenile
delinquents, about all the left wingers, but he-- An example. When we
created the Urban Affairs Council, we created a series of standing committees,
Cabinet level committees, one of which was crime, and John called Pat and he said, "No.
No committee. That's me." Which is as good an anecdote as I could give you to tell
you about his powers. TN: Are there any other stories you'd like to preserve? JP: About John? TN: Not about John. Just from your time and that we haven't accessed through this discussion,
about Moynihan, or about the climate of the times. JP: Um. Well, Pat was, Pat was wonderful, colorful.
We, on Saturdays, would often be over at his office, and I remember one time, this
was around the time of all the Community Action agencies, and the Black Panthers
and, and there had been a lot of people saying they were going to liberate this
or liberate that. And so, Moynihan again reached behind his credenza and pulls
out a bottle of Black Label and a couple of glasses, and he said, "Let's go to the
White House mess and liberate some ice!" And then go up on the, as we did. It was
Saturday, the President was away. So, we sat on the porch overlooking the Rose
Garden and had drinks for an hour and talked, and that was just the way he was,
and he for Christmas the first year gave all of the men on his staff
beautiful silver cufflinks with our initials on the outside and his on the
interior part, and he was warm. He threw my bachelor party for me, and when
I got married to a woman on the Ash Council staff, and he was fun. He was also
demanding, and he was also very Irish, and and had this temper, which was like a
towering cumulus, you know, summer thunderstorm cloud which could dissipate.
For example, on the paper on welfare reform, which I alluded to, I did a draft
of this decision paper for the options paper. He called me in his office one
evening around 6:00. He threw the, threw it down on the table in front of me.
He says, "Price your prose is opaque!" He said, "Rewrite it!" And I spent all night, I
dropped the paper on his desk the next morning at 7:00 and it was the one that
went in the Easter package. But, you know, as I say, he could be very, very forceful
and very tough but very loving too. He was great fun, at that time. I mean, I didn't know him later when he may have been more cranky and certainly physically
suffering. TN: Well, they had... The, the Black Label became a problem. JP: Yes, I know. TN: Did
you ever see him interact with Kissinger? JP: Not a lot.
Kissinger, Moynihan though, let me tell you one more little story. It was a
Saturday, again, and I was with Pat downstairs in his office, and we happened
to walk out of his office, which door was right at the foot of the steps coming
from the level above in the White House, on which the Oval Office is and the Cabinet Room, and we literally, physically, bumped into the President, and the first thing Moynihan did,
his first reaction was, "Oh, good morning, Mr. President." He gets his hand behind my
backside and he pushes me in front of the President and said, "Mr. President'" he said,
"you remember John Price who's doing your work on welfare reform," and you think of
Henry Kissinger and the impression one has of his sucking dry of information
any of his staff, locking them in the closet, and then going in and briefing
the President. Just that, that instinctive human difference between a Moynihan and a
Kissinger I found interesting. TN: Mr. Price, thank you for your time. JP: You're more than welcome. TN: This was great, thanks. JP: I hope it gives you a little color. TN: It gives me a
lot of color. JP: Good. TN: Thank you, guys. JP: Yeah, I appreciate it very much. It's um...
TN: And that was, that was great. We have um... JP: About 90 minutes worth. TN: Ninety minutes. Unknown: Didn't say but meaning to say, it's the early days... (beep)
