by Leon Panetta
Admittedly, he could come off as high-handed in his fencing with the right. After Reagan won the Republican primary in 1966, for instance, Kuchel barely could stomach a congratulatory remark, and the state’s party chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, warned the senator that he expected his support in the fall. Failing to give it would “be a disappointment to me and all loyal Republicans,” Parkinson warned.
I’ll never forget Kuchel’s reply: “Who the hell is Parkinson?”
That was a fair question, but it didn’t help patch things up with California conservatives. By 1968, Kuchel was fairly alienated from his own party, and that made Rafferty unexpectedly viable. Still, those of us working for Kuchel assumed he would pull off a victory in the primary, and we busily fed position papers to his political consultants to make sure that his record was accurately portrayed and that the absurd questions about his patriotism were put to rest.
We thought we’d made the case, and on election night we gathered in Los Angeles for the returns. At first the news was good. Precincts throughout Northern California showed him with a commanding lead in that part of the state, in those days its more liberal half. But as returns came in from the south, Kuchel’s lead shrank. Orange County, where he was from, went solidly for Rafferty; Los Angeles was closer but broke in Rafferty’s favor. The crusher was San Diego, where Kuchel had hoped to hold his own. Instead, it went heavily for Rafferty. In the end, with more than two million votes cast, Rafferty won by sixty-nine thousand.
We glumly absorbed that news—my recollection is that Kuchel took it better than the rest of us—only to be shocked from our sulking by a report from across town. Bobby Kennedy, who had just won California’s Democratic primary for president, had been shot at the Ambassador Hotel and was gravely wounded. Kennedy lived through the night and the following day before being pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, a little more than twenty-four hours after the shooting in the hotel pantry. In a sense, the shock has never faded.
It’s sometimes said that you don’t really understand politics until you’ve lost. If so, 1968 was my real immersion in politics. We had won what I considered important victories in the Senate and produced bills of lasting consequence to protect the environment and remedy discrimination. But it wasn’t enough. Progress on civil rights wasn’t enough to allow the nation to peacefully absorb the death of King, and legislative progress wasn’t enough to protect Kuchel against political retaliation. As usual, he handled it better than I. His farewell to his colleagues captured his essential philosophy of government:
Some of the votes I have cast I know have been very costly to me politically. I think, however, if there is one measure of satisfaction in the life of a legislator, it comes at the time he tallies the votes which he believed in his own mind were right, just and appropriate, even if he knew that the balance of public opinion was against him, and, sometimes, violently against him. . . . I think it is not only permissible but, indeed, vital that the Senate of the United States lead public opinion instead of following it. That is the difficult path but the only one to tread if our republic is to remain.4
At a time of growing turmoil in politics, Kuchel remained true to himself. Integrity mattered more to him than survival. It was a lesson I would not forget.
THREE
“You Did What Was Right”
I was out of a job. It was tempting to ditch politics altogether. Kuchel offered me a position in the law firm he was joining, and there was always the option of returning to Monterey and practicing law there. I considered both, but it’s in moments such as those that the lessons of youth matter. In this case, I reflected on the perseverance of my parents—their steady commitment to the restaurant and their children, their abiding gratitude to the country that had made that possible. With those notions kicking around my head and with Sylvia’s support, I decided I’d try to stick around Washington a little longer.
I had a couple of options, including an appealing invitation to join the Senate staff of Ed Brooke of Massachusetts. Brooke’s politics were reminiscent of Kuchel’s, and Massachusetts seemed less likely to rise up behind the Birch Society than California had. And I’d gotten to know Brooke a bit during my time in the Capitol. Still, it felt a bit like a continuation of my work for Kuchel rather than a new challenge, so I hesitated before accepting.
In the meantime, Nixon won the general election in November, and began building his cabinet. One promising selection was Bob Finch, a California politician and longtime Nixon supporter who had been serving as lieutenant governor of California. Finch, whose plainspoken style and steely blue eyes made him a media favorite, fit squarely within the moderate Republican tradition that I considered myself a part of, and I was encouraged to hear that he was the leading contender to head the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Finch was a successful political figure—in 1966, he actually received more votes for lieutenant governor than Reagan did on that same ballot for governor. And his ties to Nixon were long and deep, since he had first worked with him in 1948, when Nixon was up for reelection to Congress. Finch helped persuade Nixon to vote for the Marshall Plan and put together a pamphlet for the young candidate entitled “The Amazing Richard Nixon.”1 Their friendship was sealed from that point on.
So in the fall of 1968, when I got a call from John Veneman—a former California state legislator and friend of Finch’s—asking if I’d be interested in helping organize a transition team for Finch’s HEW, I accepted. Veneman promised to create an “action team” that would put HEW at the forefront of the Nixon cabinet. On December 13, 1968, I found myself in the lobby of the agency’s headquarters, a bit awed by the black-and-white photographs of HEW employees around the country delivering medical services, helping children in school, working in labs. I was impressed.
Which is not the same as saying that I accepted the position without at least some reservations. Like many close political observers in 1968, I was unsure where Richard Nixon stood on some of the preeminent social issues of the day, especially in the area of civil rights. As vice president under Eisenhower, he was associated with some of that administration’s solid, if underappreciated, work on racial discrimination—eliminating segregation in the District of Columbia and on federal military bases, as well as support for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the appointment of a number of judges and justices committed to the cause of ending segregation in schools and other public facilities. At the same time, however, Nixon had actively courted the support of leading segregationists, including South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, during the presidential campaign and had consequently run well in the South. That was the much-discussed “Southern strategy,” and it naturally raised the question of what commitments Nixon had made in return for that support. So while I was optimistic about Finch and his priorities, I was torn over what to think about Nixon and where he might lead HEW.
Although nominated, Finch still had to be confirmed. There didn’t seem much doubt that he’d be approved—he was popular in Congress and with the media and a favorite of the president—but his comments would be closely watched for evidence of the administration’s resolve on school desegregation. Finch traveled to the Hill to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on January 14, and at first it seemed to go well. His transition team had prepared a meticulous binder of briefing papers, and Finch had studied well. “We must keep the pressure up,” he said of the school integration efforts, “and it must be constant pressure.”
So far, so good. But then Finch improvised a bit. “Each community is a different slice of America,” he noted. “Each area has a chemistry all of its own. You don’t just come in with a meat-axe and bludgeon somebody into compliance.” That was the sort of equivocation with which I was soon to become painfully familiar.
With his nomination secure, Finch then asked me to join him at HEW as a special assistant. I accepted, though again with some hesitation about how much latitude the departm
ent would have to pursue its mission. Key to that question was the role that HEW had when it came to enforcing school desegregation. Essentially, the lever that Congress gave HEW was school funding. In order to receive their share of federal education money, districts were required to submit desegregation plans to the department for approval. HEW’s Civil Rights Office would review those plans and determine whether the federal money should continue or be cut off. That gave school districts—most, but not all, in the South—a powerful reason to comply and to end the long stalling game many had entered into in the 1950s and 1960s.
Underlying HEW’s role was the Supreme Court’s landmark rulings in Brown v. Board of Education. The first Brown decision, handed down by the young Warren Court in 1954, less than a year after Earl Warren became chief justice, concluded that separating students by race in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. It famously held that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”2
The Court declined in that first ruling to issue a specific order to guide school districts, but returned to the issue the following term. Then, in what became known as “Brown II,” the Court directed that desegregation proceed with “all deliberate speed,” an unfortunately vague formulation that led, as scholars have noted, to much deliberation and not much speed. Indeed, the decade or so following Brown saw monumental efforts to avoid desegregation—the best known being the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus cynically obstructed integration of Little Rock’s Central High School until Eisenhower responded by sending in the 101st Airborne. Notably little progress was made.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first federal law since Reconstruction to place the federal government in defense of the rights of ordinary black Americans. Though that act accomplished relatively little, it did allow the Justice Department to enforce voting and other rights. Then, in 1964, President Johnson picked up the civil rights efforts that Kennedy had pursued halfheartedly and ham-handedly and secured passage of a much more far-reaching bill. The act he signed that year was meant to eliminate segregation in public accommodations, and it also included language under Title IV and Title VI that affected schools—in the former case, through the use of a carrot; in the latter, a stick. Title IV allowed HEW, through its Education Office, to lend assistance to school districts in their desegregation efforts; that was hardly controversial. Title VI, however, forbade the federal government from spending money on any activity that discriminated on the basis of race, color, or national origin. In practice, that meant the federal government, again through HEW, was obligated to cut off funds from any school district that segregated its students.
Still, there was no overstating the tenacity and creativity of segregationists. They fought in the courts, in Congress, and in school boards across the South, bitterly contesting any effort to allow black and white children to sit beside one another in classrooms. By 1969, there still were far too many communities with a pair of high schools—one named for Booker T. Washington, the other for Robert E. Lee.
The job of evaluating school district desegregation plans fell to HEW’s Office for Civil Rights, which was headed in early 1969 by Ruby Martin, a strong black woman who was rightly admired within the department. In my role as special assistant, I worked closely with Martin, and we were confronted right away with challenges from southern officials who believed that Nixon would grant them more time and latitude when it came to the integration they so virulently opposed.
In the closing days of the Johnson administration, the departing head of HEW, Wilbur Cohen, had notified Congress that five South Carolina school districts were about to lose their federal funding because their desegregation plans were inadequate. The money was scheduled to run out on January 29, nine days after Nixon took the oath of office. The timing and location of the districts ensured that their fate would send an early signal of the new administration’s approach to these questions: South Carolina was the home of Senator Thurmond; no man was more instrumental in persuading southern segregationists to trust Nixon, and no set of school districts mattered more to him. It was, as Veneman put it, “cashing-in time for the southerners.”
Finch could have met this threat with resolve. He could have let the money simply run out and forced the districts back to the table with a new plan. In fairness, cutoffs did hurt innocent people—some children lost programs and teachers, and sometimes it was black schools that were hurt the worst. So there were good reasons not to go that route cavalierly. But we all knew that if we didn’t fight now, we would only have to fight harder later, because any indication that these terms were negotiable would invite more negotiation. Unfortunately, Finch vacillated.
Stories in the press began to suggest that the cutoff was up for debate, and various congressional aides and others said a deal was in the works to postpone the cutoff while the districts prepared new plans. Finch’s response was to order the rest of us not to comment. The department’s official position was only that the matter was under discussion.
The problem with that was that it suggested there was something worthy of discussion. These districts’ plans had been rejected by the secretary of HEW, Cohen. They had been warned of the consequences, and now they had to face them, or the agency would appear to be driven by politics rather than the law or the principles it was required to uphold.
I suggested an alternative to postponement: Cut off the funds as scheduled, but also dispatch negotiating teams to South Carolina in an attempt to reach a quick agreement, and then restart the funds once the terms were accepted. Ruby Martin received that idea warily, and Veneman captured the mood of the staff when he broke it to her: “Ruby,” he said, “we’ve decided not to sell out completely.” When she heard the proposal, she was relieved, but still worried that we’d cave in the end.
What followed were days of grinding diplomacy—with Thurmond leaning on the White House in one direction, the Civil Rights Office and Finch’s deputies pulling in the other, and Finch desperately searching for a center. In the end, my proposal held. It was exhausting and largely successful, but it hardly reassured me about Finch’s core principles. Jim Batten, a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, who followed the debate quite closely, summarized it best: “If the lively jousting of the past few days is any indication, more behind-the-scene struggles can be expected inside and outside the Administration before Nixon’s own policy becomes clear-cut. . . . The end of the confusion is not in sight.”3
Finch’s reflection: “Christ, I hope we don’t have to do this every time.”
Well, it didn’t happen every time, but one consequence of that early deal was that segregationists figured it wouldn’t hurt to fight—and to call in their chits with members of Congress and the administration. Ruby Martin wearied of it quickly and left in March of that year. On March 28, Finch asked me to replace her. I’d been at the agency for just three months, and the offer carried immense responsibility as well as considerable prestige for a thirty-year-old lawyer who less than a year earlier had been a fairly anonymous Senate aide. Sylvia urged me to take it, and my friends warned of the inherent difficulties of representing the Nixon administration in this charged and conflicted area.
After sleeping on it, I told Veneman I’d give it a stab, but asked him if I could be sure of the secretary. Rather than speak for him, Jack put me through to Finch at home, where the secretary was recovering from the flu.
We exchanged a few clipped pleasantries—he was rasping and wheezy—and then I got to the point. “As you know,” I said, “there’s been a hell of a lot of pressure on this issue and I’m pretty committed to seeing the law enforced strongly. I hope I have your commitment for that kind of enforcement and wanted to make mine clear.”
Finch may have been sick, but he was clear: “Hell yes, it’s a tough area and we’ll have to walk some
thin lines, but there’ll be no relaxation of enforcement.”
With that, I took the job.
Tom Kuchel had cast one of the proudest votes of his life for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He’d gone to the Senate with a blanket and a pillow to ride out any filibuster of the bill. He’d prevailed. It was now my job to make his vote matter. For the first time in my life, I held a position of executive responsibility. I had a staff of 278 lawyers and others, most in Washington, the rest in regional offices around the country.
Before I could settle in to my new duties, Sylvia’s mother arrived for a visit and had news I had long dreaded. My mother, whose cancer had first been detected years earlier but had then gone into remission, was now gravely ill. Those years between were a godsend. They allowed her to return home and to get to know her older grandchildren. She cooked and immersed herself in her family, enjoying a respite from a lifetime of hard work amid the shade of walnut and peach trees in the Carmel Valley. As her health deteriorated, my father set up a bed for her downstairs in their home so that she could lie peacefully with her family nearby. They had no health insurance, but my father used savings to bring in nurses and to make sure she was comfortable—what we today would describe as hospice. But my mother could not hold off cancer forever. Hearing that she was failing, I booked a flight home. As I prepared to leave, my father called to tell me my mother had died. It was May 8, 1969. The obituary in the Monterey Peninsula Herald noted that she would be “remembered by her many friends as a lady of great beauty and gentle dignity.”4 Although I was too late to say good-bye—something I have always regretted—I flew home to comfort my father and bury my mother. I stayed a few days, and then returned to Washington.
