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CHAPTER 15 "Troublemaker" at the Federal Trade Commission WHILE I WAS IN THE SOLICITOR GENERAL'S OFFICE I had reviewed FTC cases and I had had occasional contact with lawyers at the FTC, particularly the assistant general counsel who handled the appellate matters . But for the most part these contacts were rather brief. The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department also reviewed FTC briefs, and I dealt mainly with the lawyers in the Antitrust Division. It was better to have them negotiate revisions in FTC draft briefs with the FTC lawyers rather than having me do it. My general impression of the FTC was that it was a sleepy, secondrate agency. Their lawyers were mediocre. They didn't compare at all in quality with the lawyers in the appellate sections of the Department of Justice or other regulatory agencies like the SEC and the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board. The FTC was coupled in my mind with the Interstate Commerce Commission, the ICC. Both were agencies that for the most part had come through the New Deal without having been visibly affected or perceptibly improved. So, when I was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission and broke the news to people like Justice Frankfurter, their reaction was that this was a great opportunity for me to bring to an agency that had great potential, which had never been realized, whatever talents I had as a creative lawyer. I think perhaps I ought to describe chronologically my education about the FTC and the problems which existed at the commission in early 1961. The first thing, of course, was that the White House staff had not bothered to discuss my appointment with anybody up on the Hill, or rather anybody up there who mattered. "Troublemaker" at the Federal Trade Commission I was told that Dixon was going to be the chairman, that the president was expecting me to be the lawyer on the commission, that he expected me to be the brains and the lawyer on the commission, while Dixon would be the spokesman, the man who was out front. And I was at his side, his junior partner, and so on. I was told this by all ofthe people at the White House that I knew, and I knew quite a lot of them. I hadn't known Ralph Dungan previously, but I knew Richard Goodwin, who had been a Frankfurter law clerk. I knew Ted Sorensen, Myer Feldman, and also Lee White, who later became chairman of the Federal Power Commission. These were all lawyers who were either my age or a little younger, who had the same kind of background, and whom I knew one way or another on the Washington lawyer's scene. They were all on the president's staff at the White House. And I of course knew James Landis, who was the president's assistant for regulatory agencies, and it was from my conversations with them that I learned how little they expected of Dixon and how fearful they were that he might fall flat on his rear end and in the process embarrass the president . They expected little of Dixon but they told me that they expected a lot of me. The trouble was that while they were telling me this, they didn't tell Dixon. He never understood what I saw as my role and what I saw as his role. And that was the source of difficulties which I had with Dixon all during those years, particularly at the beginning. Well, I called Dixon to congratulate him and to tell him I wanted to meet him and get together and talk about what we would be doing at the commission. To my chagrin his response was yes, I'd like very much to get together with you, but I'm busy right now. He was then chief counsel of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and of course he was very busy getting ready to be chairman of the commission and lining up staff appointments and so on. And so he was certainly genuinely busy. But he kept putting me off, and I didn't get to meet Rand Dixon until several weeks after it was announced in the papers that I was being appointed to the FTC. That should have given me sufficient notice that I had a problem, but I was very naive politically. I was uninformed about the political [3.135.190.101] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10:18...

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