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205 twenty-eight The Nixon Years There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded. —Abraham Lincoln Shortly after the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, I received a call from William Rogers, his secretary of state designee. President-elect Nixon had asked him to contact me and request that I come to Washington for a meeting. When I arrived at his office at the State Department, Rogers came right to the point. Nixon had recommended me for appointment as legal adviser to the Department of State. It was an intriguing offer. The legal adviser, comparable to the general counsel of Defense or Treasury, had at his service an elite cadre of lawyers that rivaled the best law firms in the country. I used to kibitz with Adrian “Butch” Fisher, former Frankfurter law clerk and legal adviser to Secretary of State Acheson, about some of the fascinating international legal challenges he had confronted. There was a catch, however. Rogers wanted me to say yes on the spot because Nixon had planned to make the announcement on television the next morning at the Pierre Hotel in New York, where his transition team was ensconced. If I had been given the opportunity for further reflection, I might well have accepted this position. But I felt pressured and uneasy about the motivation underlying the president-elect’s offer. I was wary of the Nixon campaign’s socalled Southern Strategy, and I feared I was being used as the token person of color in a senior position in his administration. Unlike President Johnson , Nixon had not appointed an American of color to his cabinet. The legal adviser certainly was high among the second-tier positions in the federal government , but I politely declined the offer. In the ensuing months I was to realize that I may have badly misjudged Richard Nixon on this issue. As president he took significant aggressive steps to improve the conditions of minorities by adopting strong affirmative action programs, hiring and recruiting blacks for key government jobs, and ensuring that minorities had a fair shot at government contracts. He appointed cabinet 04-0488-1 part4.indd 205 9/9/10 8:28 PM 206 / a philadelphia lawyer officers like Elliot Richardson as secretary of health, education, and welfare and George Shultz as secretary of labor, men who were firmly committed to continuing the progress initiated under the Eisenhower and Johnson administrations . He appointed distinguished civil rights leaders to key subcabinet posts, such as Arthur Fletcher at Labor, James Farmer at Health, Education , and Welfare, Samuel Jackson at Housing and Urban Development, and General B. O. Davis at Transportation. Later in his administration he offered me the position of undersecretary of commerce with an implied commitment to promote me to the top job in six months, when Pete Peterson planned to leave. I even learned from listening to his notorious tapes that he considered me for appointment to the Supreme Court. Nixon never held it against me that I had turned down his offer of legal adviser. With three children in private schools, two of them in college, I had practical financial reasons to turn down a full-time government job. The Nixon administration nonetheless reached out to me for advice on several other occasions. In 1969 the president appointed me as alternative delegate to the Twenty-Fourth General Assembly of the United Nations.This exposed me to foreign policy issues and enabled me to work with the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and Shirley Temple Black on United Nations resolutions to free Namibia from South Africa. Faced with spiraling inflation, the president later appointed me to a productivity commission. Our job was to recommend ways to reduce inflation by making American business and labor more efficient and competitive internationally . Invoking the theories of the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, I worked with both George Shultz and Don Rumsfeld, then on the White House staff, in helping to fashion government policies that would promote technologies to hold down costs and prices. About a year later President Nixon established the Price Commission and the Pay Board. I was one of seven members on the Price Commission, which included J. Wilson Newman, the chief executive of Dunn and Bradstreet Company, and former governor Bill Scranton. The much-maligned commission , a futile exercise in inefficient price controls...

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