by Leon Panetta
Over the next nine months, the pattern of the first South Carolina debate was replayed time and again—the Civil Rights Office, now under my leadership, pushed hard to enforce the law in Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, even a few northern school districts. Local representatives pushed back and put pressure on the White House, which invariably tried to reassure us that it was committed to the law while winking at our opponents and hinting that they could get time or substantive relief and suggesting that the office—and I—were out of step with the administration.
Occasionally the mask would fall away and the politics of the situation would stare at us directly. That happened during a visit from a group of Mississippi politicians who came to complain that we were pushing too hard. I explained our determination and responsibility to enforce the law, and the head of the delegation, a man named Charlie Reed, responded, “Look, we had a commitment from Nixon that he was going to back off. We expect you to follow through on that.”
I replied the only way I could: “I have a responsibility to enforce the law, and I’m sworn to do that.”
The work was tense and frantic and sometimes frightening. When my staff and I visited particularly hostile communities in the Deep South, we would put Scotch tape on the hoods of our cars before leaving them; when we returned, we’d check to see that the tape was still there to make sure they hadn’t been tampered with. Bombs were on our minds.
I was called periodically to testify before or otherwise communicate with members of Congress, and no less an ardent racist than Senator James Eastland, the immensely powerful head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, once chomped on his cigar, looked me in the eye, and coolly informed me of what I was up against: “Let me tell you something. It is never going to happen. You are never going to integrate schools in the South.” I guess it goes without saying that he said that without a hint of apology or admission that his determination defied the law of his country and his oath to uphold it. Such were the tensions of those days.
As the pressure mounted through 1969, I tried a couple of times to reach out to the White House, hoping for support or, failing that, at least clarity. John Ehrlichman agreed to meet with me. We had lunch at the White House mess in June. Ehrlichman didn’t show much that day, asking more questions and playing with me like a prosecutor grilling a witness. He asked me about the law and the room for flexibility. At one point he pressed on the issue of “free choice,” districts that purported to be integrating by allowing students to choose their schools; in practice, very few blacks chose predominantly white schools, and virtually no white students volunteered for historically black schools, so “choice” really was a mask for continued segregation. I explained that. He nodded without comment, nibbling on his hamburger and cottage cheese, which was already known to be President Nixon’s favorite meal.
I left the meeting feeling I had not accomplished much but that at least I had helped make clear that the law offered no options other than desegregation, even if the administration preferred options for political purposes. A few days later, however, Finch confronted me in his office and told me that my conversation with Ehrlichman had confirmed his impression of me as a “bloodthirsty integrationist.” I could tell that Finch was growing impatient with me and with the pressure that this issue was putting upon him and his relations with Nixon.
As the pressure mounted, Sylvia gave birth to our third son, Jimmy, on October 1, 1969, at Sibley Hospital in Washington. Both he and a new collie pup—we named her Lassie, of course—joined our family at about the same time and gave us great comfort during those difficult days.
Work, however, was growing more and more difficult. In desperation, I drafted a letter of resignation to demonstrate how serious I was about doing my job or leaving it if I was not allowed to. I worried about that. I wanted to prevail in these debates, not run from them. Besides, I was a young father with three sons, so I was hardly in a position to simply walk off a job. After a few stressful days, Finch checked with the White House and reported back to me that my offer to resign had been rejected. I breathed a little easier and kept on with the work, though mindful that I had few friends at the top levels of the Nixon administration and thus could hardly count my position as secure.
One morning, that became abundantly clear, in uniquely Washington fashion. I woke up early on February 17, 1970, and opened the Washington Daily News (this was back in the days when Washington had several morning papers) to discover a story that caught my eye. NIXON SEEKS TO FIRE HEW’S RIGHTS CHIEF FOR LIBERAL VIEWS, it announced. I didn’t need to be told who that was about. It was attributed to “Congressional sources,” and indicated that I was all but finished.
Partly puzzled and plenty worried, I raced to Finch’s office to make sure he hadn’t heard anything. “No, no,” he said, “continue to deny it.” He promised to call the White House and inquire about how to respond to this false report.
The first response was an ominous silence. The next was a staggering falsehood: Asked about the report at an afternoon news conference, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler responded, “It is my understanding that Mr. Panetta has submitted his resignation to Secretary Finch. . . . I think it has been accepted, and HEW, as I understand it, will have an announcement on that sometime today.” At that point it didn’t seem like there was much reason to fight on, so I offered to spare the secretary any further embarrassment by writing out a resignation letter and submitting it to him.
He was chagrined and apologetic—and mindful, I’m sure, that this was a pretty stark demonstration of the White House’s disregard for him as well. “I’m sorry that this happened,” he said to me. I believed that.
I was allowed to meet briefly with the press, and that was a tricky affair. I tried not to inflame the issue and did my best not to add to Finch’s embarrassment, but reporters understood that this wasn’t my idea, and correctly concluded that I’d been the victim of pressure from Nixon’s political team, which wanted slower progress on desegregation in order to shore up Nixon’s southern support. The coverage was respectful of me and skeptical of the White House, a precursor of the power struggles—and public response—that would eventually sink Nixon. It goes without saying that I was one of the least surprised people in the country when details of the Watergate scandal began emerging a few years later.
But that was still in the future. For now, I was out of work and chiefly consumed with how to support my family. Thankfully, Sylvia never wavered. As the walls were closing in on that fateful day of Ziegler’s press conference, I confided my fears to her. “I’m worried about you and the kids and our future. What’s it mean to us?” She was calmer than I was. “Don’t be worried—we’ve always managed before,” she said. “You did what was right.”
I learned some lessons from my first firing. I’d been naïve not to cultivate a better relationship with the White House and instead to rely on Finch to run interference for me. And I’d made the rookie mistake of assuming that because I believed so strongly in our mission others would come around. I filed those realizations away.
But I’d also been able to reinforce some old values. Helped by my wife and supportive colleagues, I tried to be clear on the difference between being personally accommodating and philosophically consistent. I’ve never set out to be deliberately antagonistic or to embarrass those with whom I disagree, but I also felt that there were lines I wouldn’t cross. I would not refuse to enforce the law because of political calculations any more than Tom Kuchel would endorse Goldwater or Reagan when he thought they were ill-suited to the offices they sought. Those decisions had cost Kuchel his position permanently; for me, the setback was more temporary, though I had no way of knowing that as I left the HEW building a few days later with a cardboard box full of the contents of my desk, including pictures of Kuchel and Nixon—one who gave me my start in government, the other who kicked me out the door.
There was one other observation I made
from my run-in with the Nixon White House, and it influenced my next career move. As I mentioned earlier, I supported Nixon in 1960 in part because I believed that he and I shared a common political heritage—the moderate Republican tradition that was so influential during my youth. But governing in that tradition was not compatible in 1969 with nurturing the Southern strategy, and it seemed clear to me that Nixon was being pulled to his right. Moreover, the demise of moderate Republicanism was afoot elsewhere too. In 1964, Goldwater had bragged that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”5 Those boasts were deliberately intended as a repudiation of Eisenhower’s moderation,* and even though Goldwater was trounced by Johnson in that election, the party had commenced a cleansing of its moderate elements, a self-immolation that eventually claimed the likes of Charles Goodell, Jacob Javits, and Edward Brooke, among so many others. Those Republicans who survived it were forced to change, and onetime moderates such as Reagan, who talked tough as California governor but also repeatedly raised taxes and cut deals with Democrats, reinvented themselves as heirs to Goldwater. It is striking to realize that Dwight Eisenhower, the commanding and immensely popular Republican president, would have a tough time winning his party’s nomination today.
In 1970, the purge of moderates was under way but incomplete. And as I was looking for a place to land, there was still at least one promising Republican centrist with national ambitions and seemingly a chance to advance them. John Lindsay was mayor of New York. He was an attractive leader who rode a flashy, patrician image from his years in the House of Representatives to a successful mayoral run in 1965. He reminded many people of John Kennedy—he was witty and cultured; he enjoyed the company of celebrities yet also roamed the streets of New York in shirtsleeves picking up trash or scolding limo drivers for double-parking.6
Few people were immune to Lindsay’s charms—interestingly, one who found them easy to resist was New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who used to drive Lindsay crazy by calling him “Johnny.” I certainly saw promise in Lindsay. At the same time, he saw an opportunity in me as well. Lindsay was positioning to run for president as a liberal alternative to Nixon’s rightward drift, and I’d just been offed by Nixon after a struggle over the pace and direction of school integration. For me, Lindsay represented a job, which I was desperate for, and another opportunity to join a politician who espoused my values; for him, I was a potential aide with Washington experience and a reputation for fighting on behalf of the party’s waning liberal values. He tendered a job, and I accepted.
I didn’t go immediately. My minor celebrity over the Nixon flap generated a book offer, and I took it, working with Peter Gall, a friend and former colleague from HEW and Kuchel’s office. We holed up in an office lent to us by Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund and pounded out an account of my brief, heated tenure at HEW. Titled Bring Us Together, it wasn’t the great American novel, but it was well received and helped establish me in political terms as an early foe of Nixon, an investment that would pay off when the depth of Nixon’s dishonesty and lawlessness was revealed to the public.
Once Peter and I had finished the manuscript, we shipped it off to Lippincott, our publisher, and then I headed for New York to begin work with Lindsay. Sylvia and I found an older home on the northern tip of Staten Island, not far from, of all things, Nixon Avenue. The home looked out toward the newly built World Trade Center towers at the southern end of Manhattan. I took the Staten Island Ferry to work—not a bad commute. I passed the Statue of Liberty every day on the way to city hall.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I’d overestimated Lindsay a bit, and that his mastery of his office wasn’t as impressive up close as it had seemed from a distance. That may have reflected his route through New York politics.
As a young lawyer and World War II veteran, Lindsay had impressed Herbert Brownell, a close adviser to Eisenhower and later his attorney general. Brownell had brought Lindsay to the administration, and he nurtured him as a potential candidate. In 1958, Lindsay saw his opportunity and ran for a congressional seat on Manhattan’s East Side. He built a solid record there: He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the war in Vietnam, and refused to endorse Goldwater for president. In many ways, he resembled Kuchel.
After four terms, he was still only forty-three years old, but when Mayor Robert Wagner decided not to run for reelection in 1965, Lindsay took a chance and announced his candidacy, despite no real experience in urban politics. He won a very close race, threading the needle between Democrat Abe Beame and William F. Buckley’s Conservative Party candidacy, and then faced the far more difficult challenge of governing the ungovernable city. It did not go especially well.
Yes, he had charm and charisma, but he often seemed overmatched by the rough politics of New York. By the time I came to work for him, he’d already bumped up against those politics, memorably during the snowstorm in the winter of 1969. The storm paralyzed much of Queens, where city plows could not get through. Stranded residents blamed Lindsay, and with some good reason, as his relations with the city unions were famously raucous.
My job was to coordinate his intergovernmental relations, and Lindsay kept me busy. His presidential campaign wasn’t official at that point, but the people around him were pushing it, and he warmed to the national stage. He was often testifying in Congress or giving speeches, and looking for opportunities to offer big, creative ideas. He had me play around for a while, for instance, with a proposal for New York City to break off and become its own state. That didn’t go far, but it was illustrative of Lindsay’s leadership—grand, provocative, but not so great at the basics. When New York’s garbagemen struck, Lindsay sent me out to talk with them on the theory that they might listen to an Italian. They didn’t.
I only stayed with Lindsay for a year, but I did learn some things. Even in the chaotic, combative politics of New York, relationships matter. Lindsay thought he could lead by intellect and ideas, and he neglected the more basic work of making allies. It’s impossible to imagine John Lindsay calling up the mother of a city council member and wishing her a happy birthday, the way Johnson did with Kuchel. I also came away with a deeper appreciation for the complexity of urban issues—the labor relations and service demands that lie at the core of municipal government. At a fundamental level, the work of local government really isn’t political, ideological, or even particularly intellectual. It’s about picking up trash and clearing streets of snow, and there really isn’t a Republican or Democratic way of providing those services. In fact, local government can teach federal officials a great deal about what the public wants. At the local level, politics can be heated, but constituents have a way of grounding it. They’ll get mad at any politician who puts them at risk or lets them down, and responsibility is far easier to fix than in Washington’s more abstract debates.
Lindsay and I parted on good terms. He turned to his presidential campaign, which didn’t go far, and I headed for home. Sylvia, Jimmy, and Lassie flew on one of the new 747s back to California. My father had located a home for us to rent on Valle Vista in Carmel Valley. Sylvia settled in and waited for the rest of the family to arrive, as the older boys and I set out on a cross-country car vacation. Christopher and Carmelo joined me in our family station wagon—we still had the VW, and this time we towed it—for the drive west. Like my parents before me, we stopped in Sheridan, Wyoming, to visit our cousins. The morning after we arrived, there was twelve inches of new snow on the ground. After a pleasant visit, we set out again, but struggled. It took several tries on icy roads, but we finally made it out of Wyoming and back to California.
We were home in Monterey, this time for me to join my brother’s law practice. He and I would work together for the next five years. But it would not be long before public life would call again.
FOUR
“No More Excuses”
After a
rough couple years, it was a relief finally to be home. And after a lifetime of admiring my older brother, it was a treat to practice law with him. He already had a healthy practice and an office in one of the properties my father had bought with the money from the sale of the restaurant. Along with two other partners, we operated in a modest two-story building right across from city hall in Monterey (my brother’s office is still there today).
As was true for many lawyers in those days, we did a bit of everything—criminal, civil, corporate, probate. Given my background with the Civil Rights Office at HEW, I was drawn to civil rights cases, and clients with discrimination grievances naturally sought me out. One group of prospective Latino students and employees sued the newly opened University of California at Santa Cruz, and we settled with the university after agreeing to hiring and admissions standards that would encourage ethnic diversity. I also took on the local NAACP as a client.
One thing about practicing small-town law is that it’s a foolproof way of getting to know people and their issues. My brother was already well known in the area, and gradually I developed a reputation as well, as someone who understood politics and the community and who knew the law. It was professionally and personally satisfying and a welcome change of pace. Leading a normal life with my family in one of the most beautiful spots on earth was not bad. But politics still tugged at me. Indeed, it seems in retrospect as if it was just a matter of time until I was drawn back into politics, though I didn’t intend it at the time.
I did some political soul-searching upon my return home. I remained committed to the ideals that initially animated my interest in public service—duty to country and a conviction that government could play a constructive role in the lives of its citizens. But some of the officials I most admired had passed from the scene: Eisenhower died in 1969, Warren retired from the Court the same year, Kuchel was back in Los Angeles practicing law. The party of Eisenhower and Warren had become that of Nixon and Agnew. Those tidal shifts—the ascension of the more conservative wing of the party and the evisceration of its liberal faction—convinced me that while my principles had not changed, the party to which I belonged no longer had room for me and people like me. The Democrats, by contrast, seemed to offer a bigger tent, with more room for disagreement among members united by broad principles. In 1972, I changed my registration to Democrat in time to vote for Hubert Humphrey in California’s Democratic primary.
