McGoverning

Reader mode
McGoverning: Chapter 12
  • Index
    • Yes

    Yes

    Best Laid Plans​

    Never kick a man when he’s up.
    - Tip O’Neill

    To disagree, one doesn’t have to be disagreeable.
    - Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)

    The history of American politics is littered with
    bodies of people who took so pure a position that
    they had no clout at all.
    - Ben Bradlee    ​

    It was simple, said President McGovern. The great virtue of it, when we first put it out there, was that it’s simple in both concept and practice. Vice President Hart let his eyebrows drift up over the big frames of his glasses, philosophically, then said that there’s no thing that can be done that Congress cannot make more complicated. Face unmoved, Frank Mankiewicz tacked on. Man plans, he said: Congress laughs.

    On reflection, the president said later, we might not have pushed as hard. There was enough on the docket with ending the war and collaborating with Congress on as many issues as we could, plucking them out as they came up by opportunity, that we might have buried it in the middle somewhere and made some deals first. It might have been another way. At any rate we can’t dismiss this as failure's orphan; it’s going to take the whole bunch of us to raise it back up and get some substantive legislation done. If it gets buried, well, Pat Caddell’s run the numbers on that ever since the election, there’s no issue more central to our relationship with the voters than changing the economic situation of the country. I’ll admit my surprise there was no honeymoon, no consideration, but after this election that may have been naive of me.

    In the West Wing’s trenches, they had known very early. When the Office of Policy Development, run by the imperturable Jean Westwood, sat down to business on the package the Monday after the inauguration, some policy wag had snagged themselves a sheet of onion paper and a portable and bashed out the text of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” then tacked it up on the board in Policy Development’s conference room. Suspicions varied, but Westwood’s crew all knew why it was there. As the music from the inaugural balls faded the administration had made very clear that it had two top priorities. One was the war and its end, the other was this work. The administration’s comprehensive tax plan would hit the ground as House Resolution 1, with a little aid from Carl Albert. That set it out as the top priority of the Ninety-Third Congress, and of the McGovern administration. Everyone at Westwood’s confab knew what had happened to the Ninety-Second’s H.R.1, Dick Nixon’s own plan for reform of social services and his Family Assistance Plan wounded by swarms from right and left until it died in silence with no vote on the Senate floor. As Doug Coulter later put it, “we understood that this was a foundation stone for what the president — what all of us — wanted to get done while we had the chance. At the same time, we could also look through the door at the last guy who’d walked into the room and make some suppositions about what lay in store for us.”

    As Ken Galbraith put it, both an author and a critic of the great edifice of policy McGovern’s small army of top economists had built, calling H.R.1 a tax plan was like calling Wagner’s Ring Cycle a collection of popular tunes. First, it built on the Mills-Mansfield revenue review of the Ninety-Second, the plan to wade through every line of the tax code looking for dodges, shelters, loopholes, needless duplication, and inefficiencies, with sunset provisions to kill some exemptions on principle and others as part of a broad strategy to simplify and harden the revenue structure. But there were also key adjustments and substitutions baked into the process. Notably it contained vague, general language — the administration wanted amendments because they wanted room to maneuver for support — that would replace individual and family deductions with a system of credits, logic drawn from Nixon’s “negative income tax”-with-conditions model in FAP and from the “McGoverners”’ own Demogrant proposal of the campaign season.

    To that the Treasury Secretary had added his own provisions, and no one in the administration was as adamant about the danger posed by inflation, from Fed Chairman Arthur Burns’ glut of easy money and price shocks from various commodities. In went crackdowns on credits, loopholes, and exemptions in financial transactions and commodities trading, a steeper grade on capital-gains taxes, and a phaseout of the oil-depletion allowance. Galbraith also emphasized, long hands weaving his logic in Oval Office conversations, that the answer on income policy needed to be simple. Not easy, sure, this was Congress — but simple, clear, readily calculated. If you didn’t know what people, and corporations, had in their pockets, you wouldn’t know how to channel and control their use of it in company with fiscal policy. Too many variables, he said in his high brahmin baritone, and the inflation fight gets to be like punching fog.

    The Treasury Secretary was not the only one to raise a hand. As an early February meeting of The Group on Southeast Asia broke up, William Fulbright took a moment to polish his glasses and crossed the president’s path so as to draw the two men aside. After congratulating President McGovern on speeding the plow with the Endangered Species Act, Fulbright turned to a very different subject.

    “George, I wanted to take a moment about this whole tax program, or the economic program, whatever your boys with the slide rules are calling it at the moment. Now, in my mind this is a very good thing. The system’s riddled with holes, and it’s unfair, and people who draw wages and try to get by ought to do a whole lot better out of it. I wish you luck.

    “I have to, though, I have to say this about it. Given that the American people had the great good sense to kick Dick Nixon out of this office, it might seem to you, to anybody, that this is a brand new day. Let me just say for the sake of clarity that it is not one over where I work. All those folks whose voters didn’t vote for you? They are looking for an issue to punch your lights out. What with all the stock market’s been doing and ordinary folks’ troubles at the supermarket I think they like the looks of this one. You will do as you’ll do, Mister President. But I want to walk out of this conversation able to say that at least I warned you.”

    The president nodded, thanked Fulbright as he always did, and took the words in stride. At the same time, as the mad rush of February turned in the spring into a legislative program, once again McGovern’s backroom friend from Arkansas looked like an old-fashioned prophet. A slow tide of letters, and calls, and reports rolled in from the major unions about how any substantial increase in the tax burden — either by upping rates or the elimination of deductions — on top of Galbraith’s targeted industrial income freezes would lay down an undue burden on the rank and file, and right before the midterms, too. In a steady stream out of the late Sixties, there was deep friction between black community organizers in the South who saw opportunity for economic security and real political independence from white employers in any plan that raised income among black families across the region, while the mostly northern, mostly urban National Welfare Rights Organization, raised from the ground up by affiliated local bodies of poor black women on the welfare rolls, argued that citizens of the ghettos, far out of the run of work, would see their benefits dry up and blow away. The NWRO had been stalwarts for the president since when his presidential ambitions were hardly even that — McGovern’s own desire to test the waters in the Senate especially, then regroup around a version of his old friend Abe Ribicoff’s proposed amendment to the FAP back during the Ninety-Second Congress, one vetted on the basic-income front by McGovern’s battalion of economists, was crosswise from birth with the women organizers.

    Most of all, it seemed, the process was sandbagged by the administration’s own desire for normality, the desire to behave and be judged as any reasonably liberal Democratic administration might have been. To go with the other big initiatives floated on congressional waters, especially success stories like the FFRA with farm policy, after brainstorming sessions in Jean Westwood’s office H.R. 1 was officially labeled the Revenue Reform Act. It was sweeping but neutral, sounded practical, and got at the heart of what the McGovern crew hoped to do. Instead fire poured in from every angle. Across the publishing cartels of the newspaper world every would-be Austrian economist seemed to have been handed column inches to condemn the whole thing as grandiose, impractical, a bait and switch to kneecap business investment and buy the votes of the poor, and a travesty of variation on flat taxes with a negative income tax phased in. Milton Friedman himself damned deftly with faint praise, saying that the McGoverners had taken one step forwards towards the negative-income revenue approach, then leaped backwards to “safeguard liberal shibboleths” on spending and prop up welfare programs, tagging the administration as too weak to overcome its own friends. Republicans who had voted against Nixon’s FAP now praised his wisdom and hammered McGovern for “killing the culture of honest work” like there was no tomorrow. The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists, led by new hire and Nixon’s former literary hatchet man Bill Safire, condemned McGovern’s plans from Demogrant days out of Hubert Humphrey’s mouth, and a dozen other Cold War liberals’ likewise.

    All things considered, that was nothing to the Southerners. This had been the real point of Fulbright’s aside: he was one, and knew what they were about when the old rules were endangered, not just the rules of race and class and manhood, but also the knee all had to bend to the committee grandees. Gary Hart, full of passionate intensity about transforming clumsy New Deal models and undercutting interests that got in the way of good ideas, kept the wrong guest lists as H.R. 1 was drafted and went to committee. He met with congressional bright young things, with clubbish analysts from Brookings and the New School, with liberal Republicans afire with public-private hybrid incentives or ambitious juniors on congressional committees who could flatter Hart’s vanity by seeking an in with the administration. Tip O’Neill could see the Southerners coming too — in best Boston Irish he told McGovern, “Mr. President, your boy Gary Hart’s gonna have to buck up his ideas or we’re all in a fix on this thing. You got Hale and his boys on the farm bill and they don’t even mind gettin’ the hell out of Vietnam. But we’ve been down basic income before and if the groups don’t get you the committees will. Hasn’t even really started up in your old shop, either. Just wait for that.”

    He was right enough. Bill Fulbright’s evil twin among the sawn-off senators from Arkansas, John McLellan, took a lead from that enterprising anarchist of Dixieocracy, Jesse Helms, and convened an investigation by McLellan’s Appropriations Committee into welfare fraud and abuse. Helms had watched the Nixon takedown, and taken notes. He knew what made good theater and, better, good television. Armed with the satisfying crack of the whip in his own hands, McLellan rose to the occasion, a devil’s mirror of the part Sam Ervin had played in the fall. To that Helms, backstage, drew in reports and polemics and wild confabulations from every sort of fevered source, from racist evangelists to arch libertarians, from the Birchers to the Liberty Lobby. The sheer time and effort it took to parry back and correct bogged the administration down.

    Atop that, the very model of good-cop, the baby-faced businessman’s populist from Louisiana, Russell Long, bestrode Senate Finance and offered a kind hand for the worthy. Armed with lean and dapper proposals for reform from Ronald Reagan’s own welfare expert Richard Carleson, Long put lipstick on a truncated “working man’s credit” in the tax code as a feint towards the unions and said he would be happy to discuss drafting a bill that would “trade welfare for work,” or at least the expectation thereof. For this Russell was feted on the sober Sunday programs by dedicated parsers of middle opinion: every Long a king, indeed. Indeed he seemed to be enjoying himself, the rejuvenated Russell who’d been dried out and (re)married off by the elbow grease of Sam Ervin, in the latter case to Ervin’s longtime secretary at that. He seemed especially determined, given McLellan’s stridency and Helms’ sheer frantic enterprise, to have set himself on the game board as the dean of Permanent Washington, the man who would tell all the marchers and shouters and tambourine men in the van of George McGovern’s unexpected presidency that the Sixties were done and now sober men who knew the real rules would get on with things.

    Thing was, the president’s staff knew the same thing — that the Sixties were done — but drew very different lessons. Ken Galbraith was, in Galbraithian fashion, as calm as he was blunt. The rate of inflation, the skittishness of investors, the self-justifying lethargy of the corporate technostructure, the grotesque imbalance of work and income away from women and minorities, he said, these are simply the facts as they are. It is going to be a slog, a hard one, but we can achieve our ends or leave the country to be warped around senatorial egos. If they mean to break us on some parliamentary wheel, we’d better hurry up and figure out how to break them first.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    While the great wars over taxes and jobs went on, the onrush of other legislative business passed over the conveyor belt between the Capitol and the West Wing, dappling the schedules of administration chiefs (and keeping their secretaries in a fury of action), drawing effort in a dozen places at once.

    The themes were just as varied. From the administration’s first days, as thick reports thudded against West Wing desks bidden from Graham Claytor and George Romney, the McGoverners grappled with transportation. The urban-rural divide on transport appropriations had a sharp and painful edge, and no amount of spitballing from Gary Hart and his acolytes sitting Indian-style on West Wing carpets with the annual statistics strewn about them moved the needle in the House very far. With time, and encouragement from Frank Mankiewicz when March rolled around without substantive drafts for house sponsorship and the farm-to-market mafia, with their seniority, run amok in committee. President McGovern pulled in two indispensable Texans, the vigorous, prickly Jim Wright in the House and stentorian Lloyd Bentsen in the upper chamber, to knock some drafts together and get something before the body that could work.

    In combination the Texans put together complementary bills for the Federal Omnibus Transportation Fund Act, simply enough the Wright-Bentsen Act in annotated United States Code and the Public Laws record of the 93rd Congress once it passed. The president liked it — just as important Jean Westwood liked it too — as it set out designated floor and ceiling lines for transport funding, guaranteed a first option to fund public transit measures in urban areas and secondary-road connectors in rural ones, and most significantly contained Wright’s one-for-one giveback whereby a state or municipal body could pass back its allocation, provided for a given project or set of projects, in return for general-fund money for any other proposal. This passed muster with committee stalwarts, which got the bill out on the floor at an opportune moment.

    When it came to railroads, President McGovern had more of a personal stake. From boyhood fascination to a grown politician’s certainty about their economic and strategic importance, McGovern wanted an overhaul and renovation of both the physical infrastructure and the corporate makeup of US freight rail. A whole series of major players starting with the Pennsylvania Central — arguably the most dire case — foundered foundered with high fuel costs, brutal debt loads, and postponed capital investments. McGovern sat both Harts, Phil and Gary, down with Graham Claytor and Lester Thurow from OMB — “our Big is Beautiful man,” quipped Frank Mankiewicz — to draw up proposals for a FreightTrak structure as an operator of last resort if rescue packages for key carriers were likely to kill the budget by a thousand cuts.

    Claytor, encouraged by Phil Hart once Claytor started to run the numbers, came to Wilbur Mills his own self about what Claytor described as a “possible hybrid solution.” The president had his own fondness for it. McGovern hoped to preserve the old names and thought this was just the ticket to save them, and the world’s greatest freight network, from themselves. FreightTrak would be conjured up as a government-owned corporation that would take possession of foundering firms at nominal cost to the old owners (through which they would dodge bankruptcy) and then sort out the economic and infrastructure situation of the firms. Once rationalized either the government would continue to operate the outfits and pocket all profits, or sell them off in parcels under their old corporate names. In return there would be an industry-wide tax to fund FreightTrak operation of key tertiary lines where Transport approved an economic case that the line needed to be maintained for local industries. For that McGovern neatly lined up a cab rank of farm- and timber-state senators to lock down passage of the reconciled Railroad Renovation and Rehabilitation Act.

    Much else was on the docket too. Despite a rattle of grapeshot in the editorial pages from George Meany, who’d been the hammer of union corruption for years but who had bosses that wanted the old flexibility on pension plans, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) moved steadily through Congress in the first hundred days with the dogged — some said downright tetchy — midwifery of Gary Hart. It took time to line up the committee votes but two of the stalwart advocates for the rights of children in Congress, Hugh Carey of Brooklyn and Fritz Mondale of Minnesota, drew up the Federal Handicapped Child Welfare Act (mostly just the Mondale-Carey Act to its friends) that was a quiet revolution on several fronts. It defined such handicaps in powerful new language as “loss of one or more significant life functions classed as a medical condition or as a diagnosed result of abuse or neglect.” It laid down one free school meal a day guaranteed, and federal funds to state and local authorities for the genesis of special education provisions, together with forms of care both physical and psychological. President McGovern was high on it — this was humane legislation if ever was — and figured it was no bad thing for Hubert’s protege, nor for Carey who with a sick wife and army of kids had an eager eye on Albany in the midterms.

    On it went. There was home rule at last for the District of Columbia, and legislation on the privacy of education records, and after years of striving a Federal Evidence Code that unclenched lawerly shoulders abroad in the land. Rep. Yvonne Burke, the first black woman to represent a West Coast district and Congress’ first new mother, put forward a bill backed again by Hugh Carey and by the wry, lovable jack-Mormon Mo Udall, that would become the Federal Maternity Leave Act. This granted working mothers ninety days of unpaid maternity leave under the law (up to twice that for certain defined medical conditions of mother or child) with the guarantee of a job to come back to. The National Chamber of Commerce had but unhinged its jaw to hue and cry when Nelson Rockefeller from his Albany perch, and in Washington both the mahogany-toned Chuck Percy and the unexpected heft of House Minority Leader Gerald Ford told them to knock it off, that against an administration so determined to tighten the tax noose on Big Business the latter could use some softer hues in which to cast its image. So it was Mrs. Burke’s plain-spoken creativity buttressed the mothers of a nation.

    Big businesses did fairly seem to have its hands full. Given the reins on a policy matter dear to him, the keen-eyed wisp of Phil Hart (backed by the spadework of Jean Westwood’s Office of Policy Development) drew together fist-shaking Democrats and the tuts and hums of moderate-to-liberal Republicans to carve out a Consumer Protection Commission as a permanent executive committee of the Federal Trade Commission, a head office for the pursuit of price-gouging, product liability and adulteration, and a dozen or more other tawdry offenses against the buyer’s republic of modern American life. The president was happy to grant the lead as well. When it came time to sign off on the enabling bill George McGovern took it out of the Oval Office, to a plain-faced conference table where the Vice President could sit beside him, rather than stand behind him, as McGovern signed the bill and grinned his plowshare grin and said this was Phil’s baby, after all.

    Consumers were the subjects of great congressional affection, at least on the face of things. There were other regulatory bills pushed through on their behalf, and on a grander scale acts of supervision and deregulation both, intended to favor the ubiquitous, perhaps mythic, American consumer. One such bill that topped off the administration’s list was the Airline Deregulation Act of 1974, drawn out into the second year of the Ninety-Third as hearing after hearing put warring companies on the subcommittee stands in support or opposition. What mattered most to the McGovern crew, other than the philosophical support of the Vice President for giving fliers lower fares and broader options, was the firm support of Ted Kennedy. This was not without skin in the game: the Kennedy clan’s vast business interests had direct stakes in several parts of such a deregulation process. But it was also redolent of trust-busting and so caught the fancy of progressive administration officials who helped ensure West Wing support for the congressional wave in its favor.

    The administration played a deeper role as well. Abroad, in the long game of Cold War arms control, both London and Paris noted that their role in that process could be more fulsome if the United States proffered some economic quid for nuclear quo. A part of that was the vast and deeply costly Anglo-French industrial program for the Concorde supersonic airliner. A proposed noise ordnance in New York, meant to be a hub of Concorde flight for several international carriers, threatened to strangle the beak-nosed high flyer in its crib. With some hesitation over environmental concerns — and an extra budget line at Interior for climatic studies of supersonic transport exhaust — the president decided where the greater good lay. Anyone who assumed McGovern was just some Midwestern milquetoast, said Gene Pokorny later, hadn’t sat in that back room in Gracie Mansion where the president introduced New York City councilors to a muscular brand of federalism. The ordinance passed away in its sleep, the British and French saved some of their order book as legacy carriers looked for any glitzy edge over cut-rate startups, and in a rare case George McGovern hit two birds with the same stone.

    Elsewhere, when it came to the ins and outs of the great corporations, caution and indeed muckraking was the watchword. The legal travails of the CREEP crew washed back into the ITT Affair of 1972 and a series of hearings by Senate Commerce that reopened concerns about the whole meshiver. Those in turn dovetailed with the extended — sometimes televised, Public Broadcasting had its uses — interrogations of the Gavin Commission, run by the lean, spry, polymath ex-general with a special interest in the disruptive and transformative role of multinational corporations in the Cold War world. Several titans of the Dow Jones, from IBM to General Motors, from Bechtel to Lockheed, chafed and squirmed at pointed discussions about overseas subsidiaries, backhanders with foreign governments, and rampant tax dodges. A pernickety and empowered public took notes; so too, on the opposite bleachers, did the National Chamber of Commerce.

    Computers and airline tickets and meat past its sell-by were not the only sorts of things affected. As the calendar rolled over into 1974 America’s new favorite pastime found itself in a fix. The National Football League faced short odds on a players’ strike, the most chronically underpaid in any American professional sport. At the same time a new league, maybe even two, were stumbling towards a debut rushed forward in hopes the claim-jumpers could pick up NFL strikers at loose ends to put fans in seats. It was a hell of a muddle, especially when the neighbors to the north who regulated the Canadian Football League pushed Ottawa into protective legislation that would ban American-rules clubs north of the border. This set several nascent teams in search of homes in the States; the NFL feared such moves would sandbag the older league’s expansion plans for the Bicentennial season.

    In the end, Gary Hart observed, Pete Rozelle and the NFL owners should have read more Oscar Wilde, and so been careful what they wished for. Instead the administration sat down Vice President Hart — a good Lions fan, after all — along with Secretary of Commerce Andreas and Leonard Woodcock at Labor, plus Hart Gary to leaven the dough, to collaborate with a few interested congressmen and League leaders. The result was a big enough deal in itself but since it affected the nation’s Sunday afternoons it drew more press than little bagatelles like tax reform and arms control. The administration laid its hands on and blessed what the annotated United States Code abbreviated as the Heinz Act. This was named for the handsome young Rockefeller Republican ketchup magnate in the House who represented Pittsburgh’s suburbs, where black-and-gold fans bet on a banner year for their Steelers, led by a defense already half the distance to myth and the dynamic, bi-racial quarterbacking platoon of Terry Bradshaw and Joe Gilliam.

    The Heinz Act did in effect for the NFL what had been done two generations past for baseball. It established the League as a “benign monopoly,” at a price. That price was federal oversight: of team ownership, of infrastructure and location, especially of labor with a Football Labor Relations Board (instantly “The Flurb” in sports bylines) and collective bargaining for the long-neglected grunts on the sidelines. There was room for lesser includeds also. From the putative “World Football League” hereby strangled in its crib, the feds gleaned two franchises that had sound enough financials to include in the NFL’s planned expansion for ‘76. This raised the total of new teams slated to come in from two to four. Seems only fair, said the president at his sit-down with John Heinz and Gary Hart. When pressed by reporters on the matter, it even gave Ken Galbraith at Treasury a chance to wax philosophical: “in our modern society propelled by the engine of centralized mass consumption,” said Galbraith, eyebrows cocked to ponder, “the National Football League is as much a privately-held public monopoly as AT&T.” The logic spun out from there as the big basketball leagues floated a merger, and junior lawyers at Justice discovered even the carnival-midway atmosphere of professional wrestling had its shady cartels and oppressed workers. It was a new day.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    We didn’t come in on health care, said President McGovern. Not that I object in any way to us pursuing the subject directly. It’s an important goal and honorable work. I mean only that if we sat down and lined that up on this table — here he tapped on the Federalist knock-off with a glass surface where his Oval Office coffee sat perched — lined it up with a root-and-branch reform of the tax system and Southeast Asia or full and equal employment or arms control, I don’t know that we’d see it line right up there for the weight we’ve given it. I mean, we have a default position to work with, yes? The default position is still the Kennedy-Griffiths bill?

    Kennedy-Griffiths is where we probably are, said Frank Mankiewicz, I don’t think anyone imagines that we’re beholden to it especially since we’ve looked to Congress on this issue. Andrew Young, the voice of Health and Human Services, said that there was a lot of attachment to the principles of Kennedy-Griffiths, though the legislative process was what it was, the key things were that it should be comprehensive and that it should be fair. The president nodded: and what’s the point otherwise, he said. Then we’re back to the Nixon proposition and I can see its merits but it doesn’t do enough, not for the people who really need it, and it just hands the whole thing back to the Republicans. It makes us look like we can’t run our own house, said Gary Hart, looking down his narrow face like a spear point.

    Every man who’d spoken was right enough. Congress and the press were abuzz with health care, had been since the decade’s start. Now here came a freshly delivered president in the job with a party platform full of bold and noble language about government as a force for good. It looked to the distinguished press mob who trampled around after President McGovern eyeing him at a downward angle, noses well upwards, like a grand opportunity to size up “Mr. Magoo” against what the press still called Nixoncare and find the incumbent about a foot short. There were maybe four notable, rival propositions out there at the moment. For the Democrats the sentimental favorite was the Kennedy-Griffiths bill, named for the scandalized survivor of the brotherhood in the Senate version and Martha Griffiths of Michigan in the companion House bill. Rhyming versions of the design had come up out of the think tanks of the United Auto Workers and the AFL-CIO and the labor seal lay heavy upon them, there for all Democrats with designs on long-term incumbency to see.

    Its troubles, as troubles did, came by the rule of three. First, out where everyone could see, the tax burden — especially on employers — would be a hard sell atop the McGovern administration’s tight-handed plans for general revenue reform, especially when you had business-league paladins and rank Friedmanites waving the bloody shirt of the Dow Jones nightly on the evening news or in Sunday sermons aboard Meet the Press. Second, when you sat down the more mathematical policy hands, and the young administration surely had done, you started to run into trouble with the models you built getting providers, especially the big hospitals and the pharmaceutical outfits, to hold down costs when they had a captive market. On top of that came the whole mess of economic reconversion for private insurers — the reason why a good liberal like Abe Ribicoff had bolted, he didn’t want the job market in downtown Hartford lit on fire on his front lawn. Then there was the Senate. There just weren’t the votes, even Teddy would tell you that if you waited through the first couple of drinks then asked him softly. They couldn’t rely on the liberal Republicans, not with Jack Javits’ Medicare-for-all plan out there too wearing Nelson Rockefeller’s factory label, which meant there was no getting a reconciled Kennedy-Griffiths anywhere through the process because you could forget about cloture, much less the up-or-down. So there they were, stuck with a nice idea.

    President McGovern did what made most sense to him when he decided to puzzle it out: he sat down with Teddy. With Ted Kennedy and Andrew Young and Ken Galbraith, with Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart. All right Ted, said the president with chipper reed-like timbre, what do we do here. Tell me straight because if we sleepwalk through health care the public have every right to hold us to account. The last Kennedy brother leaned forward from the pale yellow Oval Office couch, elbows on his knees, shoulders bunched. Nixoncare was the best shot we had, Kennedy said in the plain low voice he used to admit the truth. Now, I could get Kennedy-Griffiths out of my subcommittee tonight, that’s not the problem. Pete Williams (it said “Harrison” on the New Jersey senator’s nameplate but nobody called him that) could probably get us all the way out of Labor and Public Welfare for that matter. But there’s no way on God’s earth we’d see cloture and someone like that bomb-thrower Helms will filibuster. Kennedy carried on: I sat down with Dick Nixon when this was his office, said Teddy. I did it in secret. We talked about Nixoncare and I said that’s our way forward. But it would be hell with the unions. I expect Leonard — here Kennedy referenced McGovern’s quietly invaluable Secretary of Labor — would have to resign if he ever wanted to show his face in a union hall again. We can get it done, I think; there are enough men on the other side who would rather see a Nixon plan work than kill it just to spite you. But it will drive that wedge between you and Meany, and you and most of the rest of them, that much deeper. Andrew Young added that he thought the unions had a point.

    I don’t think we have to just pick up Nixoncare off the shelf as-is, said Gary Hart. There’s a lot of room there for innovation and some more efficient structures. We could do a lot with a capitation option for people in good health, tied into teaching hospitals through some of the big HMOs. Also we could have a more plain-faced, efficient set of federal standards on Medicaid so we can get commonality in the states and use that to bid down costs. More than just that of course, but they’re smart places to start. Ken Galbraith said he worried that this reinforced the treatment of health care as a commodity, rather than a right under the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” model. There might be ways to build a central, federal technostructure out of private providers, Galbraith went on, the West Germans have largely done that on the insurance side. But the three central issues are access, equity, and cost containment. We can’t ignore the last, as Nixoncare very largely does, because it will sink our effort to defeat inflation. Kennedy nodded; cost containment is the long war, he added. We shouldn’t roll out anything without a model for that.

    I don’t mean to be that guy, said Frank Mankiewicz, but have we considered Javits here? I mean we’ve looked at the Javits bill as an adversarial thing here because it splits the Senate liberals, or because it’s too much for the right and not enough for the left. It seems like a lot of animus comes because it’s out of Rockefeller’s think tank and, fair enough, who doesn’t hate Rocky…

    … Jackie Robinson? Said President McGovern with a raised eyebrow and a wiry smile.

    Mankiewicz chuckled and carried on. We’ve treated it as a Senate problem, that it’s all about cloture or bust. Maybe that’s the wrong chamber. If you hand this Medicare-for-all thing to Wilbur Mills, I think he knows what to do with that. Ol’ Wilbur created the tax structures and the trust funds for Social Security expansion in the Fifties, he built the fiscal guts of Medicare and Medicaid in the first place. He can get us a viable revenue structure with a program he understands already.

    Heads nodded, or paused to hear more. It took us twenty years or more to get Social Security right, Mankiewicz went on. But if FDR hadn’t laid the foundation there would be nothing to build on. Maybe we can do better than that here. Jack Javits has a structure here that can get liberal Republicans on board. It’s weak on how you administer the operation, and it’s weak on cost sharing. But that’s where we can look to our own experts for some answers. If we get on the key things — what are the key things?

    Kennedy chipped in like he’d turned on a tape spooled in his own head. He listed: cost sharing, cost containment, billing processes, coverage of specific conditions, Medicaid integration, prescription costs. There’s more at work but those’ll sneak up through the grass and kill you. Mankiewicz tilted an open hand in Kennedy’s direction. Like the man said, Mankiewicz went on. If we can fix what’s wrong with the Medicare model, we get something that’s federal, where we have say-so about its strategy and operation rather than a bunch of private companies managing insurance through private brokers. If we can keep it simple — Ken Galbraith laughed gently at the thought — all right, Ken, if we can make it less obtuse, then we cut down overhead. If Wilbur gets us a clean tax plan we can sell that to Russell Long and that might even get him off our goddamn back some on incomes. We ought to try, right?

    President McGovern agreed. Out went Jean Westwood to sit down in Javits’ office and talk through the plan as it sat, drifting in the limbo of committee paperwork. Though rich in legal detail it was straight enough. The plan relied on boosting the Medicare payroll tax, what Frank Mankiewicz had seen as Wilbur Mills’ point of entry. From there on Javits’ bill bore the familiar Rockefeller sigil of big government and big business in holy matrimony: Medicare would run on as-was, with block grants from the federal level to the states, whereby the states would contract with major private insurers to run the actual benefits process. After Jean Westwood spent a long, productive afternoon with the bustling firecracker Javits himself, with special attention to the goals of the legislation, she reckoned there was a place from which to start. All right, the president replied. Then start.

    By the time they had a draft, Mankiewicz marveled that it was a wonder nobody’d been killed so far, which was an achievement in itself after all. Really the ruckus was the president’s fault if it was anyone’s, though as Doug Coulter noted in his later memoirs no one liked to say. The grunt work, the real field labor, fell in the organizational plan of McGovern’s Office of the Presidency to Domestic Policy which was Jean Westwood’s bailiwick. Her staff churned out statistical studies manfully and exchanged paperwork with the staff of potential congressional cosponsors throughout. But with the early dogfights over jobs policy and welfare reform under the West Wing’s belt, President McGovern continued to seek the purification — redemption? — of Gary Hart in at least two ways. The first was to make use of something Hart did all right, which was ideas. The second, probably, though no one but perhaps Eleanor or Mankiewicz and maybe not even them knew, was to keep the Chief of Staff where McGovern could see him. As a result Domestic Policy ran the health-care work as policy, down in the footnotes and subsections, while they made the trains run on time with production of documents. Gary Hart on the other hand drank bourbon with Wilbur Mills, confabbed with Senate grandees, and dabbled in grand strategy like Talleyrand.

    That made it all a bit of a mess. Domestic Policy could build brick houses of procedure, sift through potential legal challenges with Ramsey Clark’s staff, craft job descriptions for new administrative divisions full of personnel out of whole cloth, and it could all disappear in an afternoon, replaced by something else as the Chief of Staff cashed in on political leverage, caught a wild hare on a policy concept, or curried favor in the informal cliques of the Senate to which he clearly wanted, in the long term, to belong. The damnedest thing about it, said Frank Mankiewicz to his unexpected soul brother Clark Clifford when Clifford was in town from Europe on arms-control business, was that Hart had some really good ideas. Bringing in the HMOs on terms that could work, quantitative policy processes based on evidence about medical practices in the field that were index-linked to program block grants, capitation systems tied to teaching hospitals, plus tying teaching hospitals to demographic catchments where you could get a high rate of HMO subscription in the service area … Hart was good at this stuff. He just tended to not think through process issues, didn’t much like statistics whose research he didn’t own, and tended to dance with whatever senator winked at him on draft language. Clark Clifford smiled a wan, knowing smile and nodded slowly. The young man’s even made friends, Mankiewicz went on: Goldwater says Gary’s the most truly honorable man in the administration. With his gravelly Missouri drawl Clifford replied, “I think that qualifies as ‘all the wrong people are cheering,’ Frank.”

    They had it ready as the holidays popped up on the far horizon. On the face of it the principal elements remained: Medicare Part A was Part A and Part B was Part B, though in both cases Jean Westwood’s staff had done yeoman work to streamline the processes whereby the program’s administrative body itself could call for and hear recommendations on potential additions of categorized conditions to coverage and present those recommendations to Congress. Domestic policy also had waded through and itemized the many, many additions of obstetric and pediatric procedures and categories to Part B, the great bulk of what was new. There was the new administrative structure, a singular Medicare and Medicaid Management Administration, very quickly the “Triple-M-A,” with a Senate-confirmed Administrator under the aegis of Health and Human Services. Principally the MMMA would administer Medicaid state grants, manage the use of Medicare by the public, and operate the investigative teams that would explore and assess evidence-based judgments on medical and procedural practices in pursuit of efficiency and good effect.

    That was, all things considered, the easy part. While it would likely increase federal Medicare costs by a factor of six, the authors had as Jean Westwood put it privately “chased Wilbur Mills right down his current bottle” for House Ways and means to fund a restructured trust fund fueled by a three-point-two percent payroll tax — a universal one, no ceilings or floors on income or business size including self-employment calculations under Form 1099 — half paid by workers and half by their employers. Where things went from there was, in the argot of the folk Hunter S. Thompson called “the ghoulish health-care geeks in the sub-basement,” Sup One, Sup Two, and Sup Three. This was shorthand for the programs intended to supplement the gaps, cost sharing, and premium requirements for Medicare. The first was quickly dubbed “Medigap” coverage by the terpsichorean brain of Gary Hart and some of his favorite White House correspondents who normalized the term. This would be provided by private insurers in two ways, most often through a federal mandate for employers who carried above a certain payroll level on employees to buy group coverage, and secondarily through federally-structured brokerages for individuals to purchase policies for themselves and family members.

    The second category of support was a bit of sleight of hand: several large categories of citizens who met specific baseline health requirements could swap traditional Medicare coverage for a capitated plan designed to meet their basic needs plus key emergent health issues. The capitation plans would be run through a cluster of major HMOs — Kaiser Permanente’s hand of blessing lay upon many a West Coast congressman thereafter, and other operators likewise — and linked to teaching hospitals that pioneered preventative care in particular.

    That took a cook’s tour of the House and Senate bills through to Medicaid, and that was the catbird seat. Medicaid would still be supplied in block grants to participating states, structured on the basis of large data sets gathered and analyzed by MMMA on each state’s foreseeable demographic needs — to who they likely would need to cover and for what. The states would now be required to retain private contractors who would run managed-care plans for the Medicare systems of the states, carrying out the Medicaid obligations in terms of claims and coverage based on preventative coverage models. That was an effort to smother cost spikes by promoting health in small financial doses rather than showing up at the emergency room to foot the bill. It was also a sly and comely love song to Republican liberals and tight-fisted Southern grandees who held the congressional purse strings.

    But it came with an ask. First of all, Medicaid itself was not universal. There were still states holding out and the relationship there between absent programs and past resistance to civil-rights advances was, as President McGovern said in a rare moment of open sarcasm, uncanny. Beyond that Medicaid was a categorical system, that granted its support to classes of person labeled both needy and worthy — the duality at the heart of American welfare policy that accounted for the bruises on West Wing heads banged against that wall already. The states, or rather their lawyers, had dug deep into the grit and grain of detail and defined downward through precise exclusions just what human pegs fit in Medicaid’s cubbyholes. This plain, in its virgin form, wanted something different: a federal standard, sole and universal, for benefitted classes, medical status, sliding-scale income requirements based on regional cost of living, and so on. The same rules for everyone who played the game plus a requirement to suit up and get on the field: for states that did not take a Medicaid grant, there would be no brokerages where genteel retirees or self-employed professional folk could buy policies.

    It was a lot. Everyone slung over the Oval Office couches in the strategy meeting near the ides of October could agree on that. But as the president said if you gave up first, why go into battle at all? In thorough and uncommon agreement, Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart said they could get it out of the subcommittees, which was probably enough.

    Thus into the fight they trudged, with so much else up in the air and now this whole fucking mess with oil and the Arabs atop it. And there were perils, sure. A House bill looked manageable. Hale Boggs was populist enough that he backed smoothly out of the way, satisfied that either the Senate would kill universal norms on Medicaid, or the whole thing would come unstuck and the eager do-gooders across the street would scramble towards a managed-Nixoncare model without Boggs having to blow any political chips. As it was ol’ Wilbur rode herd on the revenue model and Tip O’Neill, bless the big Irishman, whipped with a fierce shrewdness, conscious of every private bill a liberal Republican wanted, good at shoring up the Midwesterners, eager to press the Appalachians to stand up and be counted because this was their people who’d have care at last, and wasn’t that worth a little welfare for brown folk in the cities too? As it was they got the whole damn thing out of the House in November at 242-174. Mankiewicz was on the phones to the unions that day: yes that’s why there was language in both bills about extending union-negotiated health plans across large employers, now get the rank and file on the phones to their senators.

    Mankiewicz had called it; the Senate was where the action was. Sure, after a quick dog-and-pony show the original draft shot out of Ted Kennedy’s health subcommittee 10-3 for Labor and Public Welfare’s review. But the grandees had their guns trained. McLellan was at the point of throwing the whole goddamn kit and caboodle of Fiscal Year ‘74 over the side if he didn’t get to pull Medicaid into Appropriations’ welfare-fraud floor show. It took shunting the whole U.S. Air Force training apparatus for its C-130 fleet, including building funds for new barracks, to Little Rock Air Force Base — compensation for deactivating the Titan II missiles based in large part in Arkansas — and a wincing product-deregulation bill that would favor Arkansan poultry farmers, plus at least four heart-to-hearts with McLellan’s compatriot Bill Fulbright, before the Appropriations chair let up. The bigger challenge was over at Finance. While Pete Williams ran an energetic lineup of witnesses before Labor and Public Welfare about the great advantages of Medicare expansion, Russell Long slipped the ace out of his sleeve.

    Who in the hell knew Russell was going to pull this, was President McGovern’s first question, not a philosophical shrug but an interrogation. Mankiewicz’s response was that Long kept it unusually close, such that a lot of his own staff didn’t know and those who did only had pieces in their hands. Andrew Young said that it was brought into Long’s office mostly as-is by an outside policy staff. It’s Russell and his fucking Californians, added Gary Hart through grinding teeth. It was, indeed, The Fucking Californians: in shrewd anticipation that the administration would either throw Kennedy-Griffiths into the cock pit or do something, as it turned out, to get the Republican liberals aboard, Long had for months held two separate sets of meetings with his Reaganite hired guns. The second, quite far off the books, covered health care. There to his credit, if credit was the word, Huey’s boy had added more than a few well-developed personal touches. Now as Pete Williams dutifully played up the first-draft bill and cut off any individual maneuvers to slow the move to a vote, with a Louisianan sense of public theater, Russell Long plunked down his own bill, like a grotesque paper weight, beside his gavel at Senate Finance, there to be inspected while he waited to debate the Medicare revenue plan and thus slay the whole damned thing.

    Long didn’t shy from flattery; what he liked about the administration’s proposal he kept. The capitated HMO system would be run wholly through private insurers, as an available option within standard group plans or tax breaks for individual subscribers. The mandate was back to the land of Nixoncare, where also Long nixed the collective-bargaining language to sandbag union plans and created an agricultural-work exemption, balanced out by juicing his earned-income credit plan for workers to purchase discounted plans according to a new set of regulations. Long too extended Medicare to all states, with managed-care contract models besides, but left it to the locals to quote the block grants and to make the rules about who got covered and who didn’t. Of course it did nothing for cost inputs, and with that hammer in hand Fritz Mondale and Mike Gravel chanced their privileges on Senate Finance to batter the chairman. While Pete Williams brought the main bill out of Labor and Public Welfare with a powerful 13-3 vote, for which Williams even snagged the genteel Robert Stafford of Vermont, in Finance that accomplished Dixiecrat Herman Talmadge sat on the revenue proposal in his health subcommittee until Russell Long said it was time. Long’s competitive bill went to Williams’ crew, and the standoff began.

    The counsels perched on the president’s shoulder all had feet more clay than not. Gary Hart proposed targeted alterations in Long’s bill and a federal managed-care mandate on Medicaid. Frank Mankiewicz and Ted Kennedy both counseled getting the unions back into the picture on the insurance mandate if anything was to be achieved, and tagged along with Hart on Medicaid. All preferred something over nothing as the coming winter rained down troubles on the McGovern agenda. As Long bought time for the opposition with hearings on the revenue plan and his health bill arrived at Williams’ committee, Long bought oxyen too for Jesse Helms’ anticommunist tirades about Medicaid and for Bob Taft the Younger, earlier an unlikely administration ally on child care, to decry the budgetary implications of the Medicare approach.

    The winter soldier, it turned out, or rather their field marshal, was the Vice President. In particular Phil Hart, together with Jean Westwood and Rick Stearns, saw that Russell Long’s home turf was the point of decision, that the way forward was not to scratch out victories in sub-clauses but rather to tie the big ideas together and come to Long in person. What people tended to forget about Phil, said President McGovern as he reflected on the process, is how diligent he is, and how decent. It took both. It took convincing as well: Ken Galbraith huffed and flustered at “patching up tatters” to which the Vice President’s response was that quilts tended to be lovelier to the eye than whole cloth. Hart also had the advantage of appearing as a double act: in her self-appointed role saying what administration officials couldn’t, Jane Briggs Hart bustled neatly off to Jack Javits’ offices to thank him for sponsoring the legislation. When pressed by reporters who wanted more than where she bought her windowpane overcoat, Janey said that “Senator Helms can thump on his Bible all he wants — he hasn’t the least notion of Christian charity or Christian community” at which point she quoted the Twenty-Fifth Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew at length and told the stringers to print the whole statement.

    After Thanksgiving it came together, enough so that with his eye for the main chance Hart Gary jumped aboard Hart Phil’s express. Then over to Russell Long’s suite went the Vice President, trim as a missionary with the snowy ruffle of his beard beneath a tidy household of square-framed glasses. He was backed by what Jack Germond was the first to call the “Gang of Five,” who were Teddy Kennedy, Jack Javits, Fritz Mondale, Bill Fulbright come to show willing even against his own tribe on behalf of his former protege now in the Oval Office, and Bob Packwood of Oregon. In bright and mellow tones the Vice President led, given the space generously by Kennedy and Javits.

    We keep taking these things on as though they were separable, discrete, Hart started. They’re not. We fight over taxes and jobs and health care and the truth is, rather like the faith of my fathers says about life itself, they’re a seamless garment. And because they are you, Russell, said the Vice President with the ready grin of a kind father, you sit in the seat of decision. We think there’s a way to do these things, not perfect I’m sure but much better than we have now. Surely better than doing nothing.

    With carefully punctuated comments from the Gang, Phil Hart laid it out. We like where your tax credit for poorer workers goes, Hart said, but you should be much bolder. We need to reach across the whole of the tax system, not just categories but income levels of working families. And not just work per se, he went on: folks on Social Security spent decades earning their retirement, they deserve individual credits, even more so for grandparents who do the good, hard work of raising their grandchildren. Hart knew his quarry: Long’s soft spot for the elderly poor was a mile wide, his “grandma amendments” in the federal tax code well known. So a hook then. Slow phase in for poor workers — slower, frankly, than any of us here would like, said Hart gesturing to the Gang about him, but there’s room and time on that — long plateau, then a phase out level with provisions to amend in hard times. Credits per child, up to three and a phaseout credit for four or more, individual credits for workers and married couples, Social Security earners to be classed as workers, up to two thousand dollars in investments allowable because now of all times we need people to save not spend.

    With lean, tutelary arms, the Vice President gestured as he drew it all together. This model dovetails with job creation: whether these are government jobs or private, where they come in at the low end of income we will adjust based on the fact people are working. If a father earns enough the credits will help the mother stay with the kids, if both work they’ve earned to provide income and care for them. On the child credits and Social Security earners’ credits, two separate federal trusts will hold a percentage of the credit refund. For the elderly that’s to pay in on Medicare supplementals and cost sharing. For parents, the right to spend on supporting their children at home or purchasing the services of federally regulated private child care — in each case the trusts would work like bank accounts for approved expenses.

    That gets us to health care, said Jack Javits to another pastoral Phil Hart smile. Earned income credits also phased to support the ability of poor working families and the elderly poor to purchase brokered supplemental insurance regulated by the states, managed-care models optional for Medicaid, state control of eligibility, collective-bargaining option on employer supplemental plans tied to state law. We knock a tenth of a percent off workers and employers on the payroll tax, Hart wound up, and manage the rest through the worker tax credit system. MMMA stays as well. You get more room for the states and private insurers, we get Medicare and cost controls. And a private child care market federally funded and regulated. And did I mention an employment policy that provides and encourages work if we get the RRA to pay for it? Now Phil Hart smiled just because he wanted to.

    The new bill arrived just at the Christmas break, a present for the new year. Labor and Public Welfare shot it out quickly for markup while Senate Finance held hearings on the Earned Income Credit Plan. Paul Fannin and Peter Dominick pointedly attacked both, while the tireless Jesse Helms funneled talking points to religious foundations he knew well from Massive Resistance days to decry the creeping Sovietization of “government mandated child care.” But Long brought the finance plan and earned-income out of committee at 9-7 and 10-5 with Lloyd Bentsen’s abstentions. That put it all on the floor for debate. Barry Goldwater in particular cautioned conservatives to let the talking shop happen rather than rush to filibuster, that it was important to make their case which Paul Fannin and Ed Gurney in particular did with vigor. One exchange of note passed between Peter Dominick and the Oregonian liberal Mark Hatfield, in which the latter used expressly Christian language to back the bill. For just over a day the conservatives looked to back cloture in hopes they could kill the bill, though when that notion passed they scrambled to block the way. It was not to be: Teddy wrangled the chamber himself and cloture came in two votes over the line. The voice vote followed.

    They crowded in, not to the Oval Office itself but George McGovern’s private side office, the auxiliary space where Gary Hart sat on the desk as he was wont to do and Frank Mankiewicz occupied a nearby chair, Ken Galbraith paced and Andrew Young stood at the president’s shoulder, Jean Westwood leaned against a bookcase and the usual aides clustered unsure what to do with their hands as Terry McGovern, daughter of the regiment with her long flaxen hair, stretched on the floor eager to be near her father on this issue they both cared for. The first half of the alphabet was a long slog — it was when they hit the “M”s that the tension slowly bled away. Fulbright from loyalty, Long from vanity, and Lawton Chiles of Florida for his many voters back home poor in both income and health up in the Panhandle and the inland north, were the Southerners who signed on. In the end it was 56-40.

    The president smiled and lowered his head gently; Terry hopped up and pecked her father smartly on his balding dome while Andrew Young clapped him twice, solidly, on the back. Ken Galbraith clapped once like a rifle shot and walked out to make plans. Frank, McGovern noted with blessed assurance, was Frank. Two days later, with a dusting of white in the February background beyond the French doors, President George McGovern sat down in the Oval Office, Teddy at one shoulder and Claude Pepper of Florida at the other — the Floridian had been one of Tip O’Neill’s best sergeants on the House bill and a valuable corrective to Hale Boggs’ blithe indecision — and right behind McGovern Jack Javits himself beaming like a Fourth of July sparkler over the president’s ministerial lowered shoulders as the Medicare Expansion and Consolidation Act of 1974 (”MECK-uh” to initiates) became law.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    Should we do the hard part first? asked the president. Seems like we usually do. It makes sense, answered Gary Hart. It does, added Ted Kennedy: Paul Hays is one of ours, he said with a proprietary air about the justice appointed by his elder brother to the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Hays’ll take senior status, Kennedy went on about the genteel mostly-retirement of appellate judges, whenever we need him to. So that first, repeated the president. Yes, said Frank Mankiewicz. Kennedy chipped in again. Eastland will sit on it as long as he can anyway, at least until he thinks he’s got his lies straight, and then … well.

    Oh, goodness, yes, said President McGovern, is wide and cheeks lean in resigned anticipation. Now if we could get Bill to ease off his grip we could take it all on in one fell swoop.

    It was a fair point and preferred. The McGovern administration approached the bench — the federal one — with care: Hunter S. Thompson went called it “not unlike the look on a man who just popped the top on a basket of snakes.” This was a White House that wanted basic income, an end to tax loopholes, at least one less dollar in every five on defense spending, new horizons in desegregation. A rash of activism even down in the dozens of Federal Districts, or among the United States Attorneys of same, would bring the old Conservative Coalition out in both hives and force, results the “practical idealists” of the West Wing did not need.

    There were exceptions. Well, two at least, and large. William O. Douglas, the vast, prowling paper tiger of individual liberties, a name floated for the vice presidency in Douglas’ youth, now sported failing health wed to his willful vigor at alienating both political allies and old friends. It was time for Wild Bill to walk behind the curtain and everyone had feared that just meant another Nixon judge — like Rehnquist, God save us, said Teddy in full flow. Now wild fortune granted another way. There was room to save Douglas’ principles in firmer hands, even to make a new mark on the High Court. Just as Jack Kennedy and Lyndon had known, of course, that came with a “but”: the vast bespectacled malevolence of James Eastland, nigh-feudal master and commander of segregation’s last ditch and by virtue of the ailing New Deal Coalition Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It would have been enough, as the words say at Passover but with opposite ends, if that just meant Eastland stood athwart Bill Douglas’ seat shouting stop. But there was another appointment in the mix, with the Second Circuit up in New York state and environs, a seat whose intended occupant had history with the Mississippian. As the president said himself, it shaped up to be a hell of a dilly.

    While the administration moved quietly to array itself for that battle, the more prominent case moved ahead. Thrust together by Ed Muskie in the heat and rush of the autumn campaign of 1972, the working relationship between President McGovern and Clark Clifford had taken root and borne fruit in several ways. Among the best was that Clifford, one of the tall, dapper lords of Permanent Washington, was also one of the last true friends William O. Douglas had left after stubborn decades of driving them away. That made Clifford something of a secret weapon for the McGovern administration, with afternoon drinks the battlefield and Wild Bill’s seat on the Court the prize. It took a few months of work, time to see that, whatever McGovern’s faults, he was surely the kind of liberal president who Bill Douglas wanted to name the heir to, well, Bill Douglas. The bigger trick was keeping Douglas’ own hands off the succession process, which Clifford did ably. By the end of May, after Douglas had strode forward a couple of times only to fall back in disorder, the longtime justice finally said in public that he was done, that it was time for someone — something — new.

    Just what that was, the McGoverners had to ponder. While Douglas hemmed and hawed the president’s West Wing staff together with Attorney General Archibald Cox managed to get the candidate list down to three names. There was Irving Kaufman out of New York: a living legend, a chance to renew the “Jewish seat” on the Court, still a sore point for the Old Left since Kaufman had sent Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to their deaths, but a hero to younger reformers for decisions on everything from the right of foreign torture victims to standing in an American court to the right to parody. There was the Vice President’s favorite from the Sixth Circuit, George Clifton Edwards, Jr., a native Texan who’d made his legal career in Michigan, a friend to Phil Hart and Hart’s political mentor Mennen Williams, and also a winter soldier on civil rights in the Detroit area. Both solid, said McGovern’s conclave, both men who can stand in the gap for the values this administration holds dear. No fault in picking either of them.

    Then there was Shirley Hufstedler. Out of hardy German pioneer stock, Hufstedler had grown up on the move in the Rockies and the high plains, hardly in one place long enough to make friends but encouraged by a family friend — the legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle — to make the most of her agile, stalwart mind. At the top of her class at Stanford Law, no one was hiring smart young women in the fusty boys’ club of the California State Bar so she’d been a stringer for other lawyers until the public sector did her well: the California Attorney General’s office, then the Los Angeles bench, then the California Court of Appeals. Lyndon, ever ready to make a mark and, thanks to Lady Bird and his daughters, readier to see a smart woman get ahead than he otherwise would’ve been, put her on the Federal Ninth Circuit, that frequent bastion of West Coast liberalism where Hufstedler was incisive and quietly relentless in her diligence.

    When the president expressed an interest they brought her in for a sit-down. She cut right to the point, on everything, with her low, matter-of-fact alto and sardonic brow, a compact justice bright with energy behind her round German face and dark hair in a perm. With a thoroughness leavened by a wry, sarcastic style she covered all the issues on civil rights and liberties President McGovern wanted to talk over. Her High Plains dedication and reserve was, for the president, like going home again. Frank Mankiewicz said afterwards, “I don’t think any of us doubted after that she was the candidate. My only concern was I might have to tell Eleanor that the President had proposed.”

    Up the street to the Capitol they went, not two weeks later. Senator Eastland gaveled the hearings in, a storm front of disdain on his burly plantation owner’s face. Justice Hufstedler took it in stride. From her own line of work she knew how to play the committee, not the chair, and did it in a way so ordinary and straight that only a few of the grey old chauvinists up on the senatorial bench noticed the calm guile in it. She’d grown up in the West, she told Senate Judiciary; out there when you brought in the cattle or saw off a bear what mattered was the job got done right, not whether the person who did it wore a skirt. But — she said with a smile right at Sam Ervin over her contralto rumble of humor — she would hate to think she’d been discriminated against on account of her region. It brought out a lithe, drawling chuckle from under Ervin’s famous jowls, and from the chairman’s seat James Eastland suspected he had been had.

    Constitutional rights she covered in meticulous detail. Roman Hruska of Nebraska bustled up the question about whether the spotlight glare on everything the Supreme Court did would affect her capacity for judgment; she trod right over the delicate-woman question saying that at nineteen she’d been Burgess Meredith’s secretary, in the full flush of Hollywood, and decided she liked taking shorthand notes on tort law much better, after all several of the most distinguished (male) lawyers in California had passed their classes at Stanford thanks to those notes because the boys seemed to spend more time chasing starstruck after clerkships with famous judges.

    When it came to it, the administration enjoyed the unexpected pleasure of a candidate who made her own luck. While the press fretted and frooed about her dress sense and whether she was too opinionated or opinionated enough and her decades-long romance with her husband, her time in the backrooms of Hollywood or her friends with the League of Women Voters, Shirley Hufstedler got on with pinioning Senator Eastland against a committee majority in her favor. Interested in greasing the wheels of the Senate process, notably in farm subsidies and assurances that at least six of the big Tarawa-class amphibious assault ships for the Navy would be built at Ingalls Shipbuilding down in Pascagoula, Eastland decided he’d fight on firmer ground elsewhere. The candidacy came out of Judiciary at 11-4 plus Eastland’s own abstention, then carried on through cloture buoyed by the same folk who’d backed the ERA. That trailed off a hair after the floor debate as the Senate considered her views on civil rights set against national security and police powers, but it still came down to a tidy 70-24 in the end. One of the unforseen “yea”s, Barry Goldwater, said with a hint of satisfaction, “so here we are, with a liberal president who wants to replace a liberal justice with another liberal. You’ll excuse me if I suspect no one will die of shock at this arrangement.” (After, President McGovern himself explained it clearly to his staff: Barry wants to kill the ERA, he just can’t look anti-woman while he does it, so this is his out.) And so all five-foot-two of the proud granddaughter of German migrants across the troubled prairie stood opposite Warren Burger with the McGoverns as a couple come to witness, Eleanor tenacious in her satisfaction, when Shirley Hufstedler was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

    Frank Mankiewicz was right. Eastland, cagey old bastard that he was, sat on the Second Circuit seat twice over, first with discreet threats about tying up the committee with hearings if it seemed like any justices had been forced out early, and second with sheer official indifference as the summer wound down and Justice Hays took his senior status up with a twist of lime. That left only the great contest ahead: James Eastland, gatekeeper of “Anglo-Saxon civilization,” against the McGovern administration by and through their candidate for the Second Circuit, from the Federal Southern District of New York, Constance Baker Motley.

    Tall, foursquare, and striking, Motley was the daughter of bootstrapping Caribbean immigrants, a graduate of Columbia Law School, and the most prominent woman attorney of the Civil Rights movement. Author of the original complaint in Brown v. Board of Education, Motley had dueled Eastland directly and Eastland’s body man in the Mississippi governor’s mansion, Ross Barnett, besides over James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss. She had fought dozens of civil rights cases, served as Manhattan’s Borough President, and reached the federal bench through the teeth of fairly massive personal resistance from Eastland when Lyndon still held sway. Now, with the earnest surety of the McGoverners behind her, it was time for Motley to strike out for the thin, appellate air.

    Patience was the watchword. Motley, a nine-time victor in open argument before the Court (her tenth case had later turned her way on further review), was cool and unmoved, comfortable as she turned to the same arguments with which she dismissed every attempt to haul her off any case that smelled faintly of racial or gender discrimination. She had ruled both ways from the bench, for plaintiffs and defendants alike based on the substance of the law, and her background no more made her incapable of hearing those arguments fairly than all the Southern District’s white, male justices couldn’t hear cases with white, male litigants. Eastland, with thin gruel to serve up against her — even the lone witness who’d decried her Southern District appointment for supposed Communist Party ties, failed to show — hemmed and drawled and stalled, counting on a strong faction on Judiciary hesitant to put a “headstrong negress” on the bench, to quote John McLellan’s antebellum disdain. By the same token, Mike Mansfield could run down the Judiciary membership with gimlet eye and see he probably had at least eight “yea”s out of sixteen for Motley and Marlow Cook of Kentucky, a “Lincoln Republican” on most sunny days, to work over.

    McGovern let them get on with it: he was happy to speak out when asked and say Motley’s appointment was not only timely but fair and sensible, based on recognizing her already tremendous capacity with the law. But he preferred to make space, to let Mansfield chat in corridors and let Eastland carry on, hoping for an unforced error. Not everyone was a fan. NAACP elders noted McGovern was less forward and fulsome than he had been with Hufstedler. Even Ben Bradlee at the Post, in his inimitable way, dickered over it with Frank Mankiewicz on the phone. “Frank, look,” said Bradlee, feet ever up on his desk and in well-chosen earshot of his staff, “I don’t expect George to go wave his dick around on this one until he gets tired, but it’d be nice if he at least flashed somebody.”

    In the event, whether the West Wing staff had been eating their Wheaties as the president suggested or not, a moment came. In a three-man confab outside the Senate chamber, Jesse Helms buttonholed Eastland and the passing John McClellan to take stock of several issues that piqued their interests. That they did so within about sixty feet of an able young journalist testing out the high-priced directional microphone on his tape recorder was, to be fair, a problem hard to spot coming. But so they did — Frank Mankiewicz enjoyed an entire second scotch that evening as he meditated on how the firebrand television editorialist Helms had tripped over a loaded mike as the content followed on the stentorian rumbles of Cronkite and Howard K. Smith:

    “Now Senator, Jim, I think this all comes together… I think it all comes together very well. I don’t think we have a lick of trouble ahead gettin’ people lined up correctly here, not in the chamber and definitely not out there among the public. We’ve … I think there’s no problem at all. Our people understand. Our people understand already that this whole McGovern health plan business is Niggercare pure and simple, they don’t even … don’t even need Andy Young to get up there and tell ‘em so. I think the same applies to Mizz Constance. She is what she is plain as day. You give them some credit, let them see things laid out as they are and they’ll on come around. Our people will write letters, they’ll show some attention to this, and they’ll come around.”

    President McGovern was too resolved of purpose to get any joy out of the segregationists’ misfortunes; other folk in the administration, however, took their pleasure where they had it. Not content to let Janey have all the fun Vice President Hart, when buttonholed the next day in the Capitol lobby, had the time to say, “I would like to say that I am surprised and disappointed by Senator Helms’ remarks. I’d like to, but I have always hated to dissemble in front of men and women of the press.” And with a lean Irish grin he was on his way.

    So was the nomination. As Robert Byrd’s ambition for Mike Mansfield’s job, along with growing qualms about whether a judicial appointment was the best place to refight segregation, the best Eastland now could hope for was a draw. Here Mansfield had a chance to put in a quiet word with Marlow Cook about all that legislation Cook hoped to tee up in this Congress and how well that might go, or might not. So then the most hotly contested judicial nomination yet made by George McGovern moved bodily out of committee on a 9-6 vote with Byrd’s “present” and onto the floor. A few stern conservatives who could say their piece without a Southern accent stepped forward to rail about activist judges and a weak-willed administration that positively encouraged social disorder. That brought some discipline back to the right-hand ranks but not enough to stop cloture. Then the resistance folded. As she had done in 1968, Constance Baker Motley’s promotion to the appellate bench went through on a voice vote.

    When it came time for the swearing-in the president was moved to make a few remarks, and said so, and the cameras and recorders by a law of centripetal force moved in to see.

    “When he was young,” said President McGovern, “my father was for several years a breaker boy. Those were the boys, all but chained to their benches, down the end of a coal mine’s scuttle, who cracked open the raw rock and searched inside it for pure coal and tossed aside the other minerals and impurities. It was foul, hard work — it helped give us child labor laws — work that broke backs, broke lungs, broke dreams.

    “Now in time, my father got out of that work. But before he did, searching for coal in the dirt and cheap stone, choked on the dust, every once in a while the scuttle would shift, or a worker would come down the gangway of the main shaft, and a little light would break in. Not much, but just a little light, from lamps or the sun. Kept you going.

    “It seems to me that this ceremony, today, might be one of those places and times where the light shines in a little. The work is constant, and hard, but not without hope. Any time you see the light it helps. I hope also that Justice Motley, who has labored in a great many dark places in her career, sees a bit of it here too. She certainly deserves to. Now if you’ll excuse us, there are always more rocks to break so we’ll get on back to that, now.” With a smile and nod from Justice Motley, the president waved at the press crew and headed back into the warrens of the West Wing, weary and at work but ready to persist until light shone in again.
     
  • Index

    • wolverinethad

    Yes said:
    *Nudges thread*

    *Points at previous post*
    Click to expand...

    giphy.gif


    I think we've found next year's Turtledove winner for best quote already. This is positively brilliant.

    Yes said:
    Even Ben Bradlee at the Post, in his inimitable way, dickered over it with Frank Mankiewicz on the phone. “Frank, look,” said Bradlee, feet ever up on his desk and in well-chosen earshot of his staff, “I don’t expect George to go wave his dick around on this one until he gets tired, but it’d be nice if he at least flashed somebody.”
    Click to expand...

    That's something I'd love to see immortalized in a movie someday.
     
    Gonzo

    Gonzo

    *Starts applauding the update*
    *Doesn't stop until 'hands' are bloody stumps*

    Marvellous @Yes, simply marvellous. I'll hopefully get an actual 'full' response to all this later! :p
     

    Soup

    As always, I'm gonna need a second readthrough to fully absorb everything in another great update. It's hard even on a first time to miss the combination of how indispensable Phil Hart was in this chapter and the ominous descriptions of him being a "wisp", though...
     

    skaven

    Yes said:
    The administration played a deeper role as well. Abroad, in the long game of Cold War arms control, both London and Paris noted that their role in that process could be more fulsome if the United States proffered some economic quid for nuclear quo. A part of that was the vast and deeply costly Anglo-French industrial program for the Concorde supersonic airliner. A proposed noise ordnance in New York, meant to be a hub of Concorde flight for several international carriers, threatened to strangle the beak-nosed high flyer in its crib. With some hesitation over environmental concerns — and an extra budget line at Interior for climatic studies of supersonic transport exhaust — the president decided where the greater good lay. Anyone who assumed McGovern was just some Midwestern milquetoast, said Gene Pokorny later, hadn’t sat in that back room in Gracie Mansion where the president introduced New York City councilors to a muscular brand of federalism. The ordinance passed away in its sleep, the British and French saved some of their order book as legacy carriers looked for any glitzy edge over cut-rate startups, and in a rare case George McGovern hit two birds with the same stone.
    Click to expand...

    Ah, the Concorde. Always had a special place in the family mythology, as Grandad was one of the first ever passengers back when he was Tony Crosland's PPS.
     
    Yes

    Yes

    Bomster said:
    Also is it just me or does Phil Hart look like George H.W. Bush but with a beard in that picture? lol
    Click to expand...

    They come out of the same lean, probably coastal Scandinavian (e.g. Viking), British stock, WASP in Poppy's case, Irish in Phil's. Also the same bearing: Phil's family were relatively recent immigrants made good but he did grow up in Bryn Mawr, PA, a very, very Main Line (as they say in PA) place in which to grow up, then went on to Georgetown.

    rick007 said:
    Ron Dellums.
    Click to expand...
    Rosa Luxemburg said:
    I'm gonna boycott McGoverning for an hour if this doesn't happen
    Click to expand...

    I won't lie, the sentence, "It's George McGovern and Ron Dellums - BUT THEY FIGHT CRIME!!" has gone through my head before. One of these days, rather like a British-television Christmas episode or something, I might have to come up with a little vignette on that over in ASB or wherever would be most appropriate.

    Expat said:
    I also like how this administration is breaking the shameful streak of clean-shaven executives in this country. Let’s have more of that going forward!
    Click to expand...

    As a man whose beard is old enough to order its own drinks, I approve this message.

    Although, be careful what you wish for:
    220px-DornanF161988.JPEG


    I kid. Probably.

    Wayside said:
    Oh my God this is some good stuff.
    Click to expand...

    Isn't it just? I mean, there's a picture of Phil next to "down to earth" in the dictionary. He was a shockingly grounded, decent, and self-aware man for a United States Senator. Even in his day. And really that clip makes it official: George McGovern and Phil Hart are my very own Alternate History Granddads. They actually could have been, too, it would've been quite possible for their oldest children to have me as a kid, based on the relevant birthdays. I'd say George is probably more like my mother's side of the family, Phil more like my father's.

    Wayside said:
    I'm eagerly awaiting President Bobby Rush.
    Click to expand...

    P R E A C H

    Future President Rush thanks you for your support. (I kid. Probably.)
     
    Yes

    Yes

    wolverinethad said:
    giphy.gif
    Click to expand...

    :p:p:p you rang?

    I think we've found next year's Turtledove winner for best quote already.

    That's something I'd love to see immortalized in a movie someday.
    Click to expand...

    I don't know about all that but it certainly seems very Ben Bradlee of him. As we've talked about before, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradley may have sworn the most famous blue streaks in a foul-mouthed town.

    John Fredrick Parker said:
    Just to clarify - did McGovern ever get his tax-welform reform passed?
    Click to expand...

    We're getting there. That will actually figure in the next chapter also as we explore these themes further. Which is to say YOU CAN HAZ MOAR SAUSAGE, to the tune of employment policy, energy policy, some actual industrial policy (with some interesting butterflies starting to flap in several directions), etc. We are finding our feet in the new year, now.

    President_Lincoln said:
    Brilliant, as always @Yes! :D The level of personal and political detail you manage to work into each and every one of your characters and updates is nothing short of inspiring. In short, you the man.
    Click to expand...

    It's very kind of you to say, I don't know that I'd go that far but it's a lot of fun. Speaking of which I just yesterday discovered your ancillary thread for BSiC - love the concept. And the generosity of spirit involved.

    Soup said:
    As always, I'm gonna need a second readthrough to fully absorb everything in another great update. It's hard even on a first time to miss the combination of how indispensable Phil Hart was in this chapter and the ominous descriptions of him being a "wisp", though...
    Click to expand...

    Phil Hart is really coming into his own in this role, rather as he might have given such a chance. He's always been a lean, wiry fellow but time and effort wear at him. At least there's always Janey there knocking him on the head and telling him to take care of himself. My favorite McGoverning power couple there, even more than George and Eleanor.

    Avalanches said:
    oooooo

    love all the taxes stuff (the wagner bit was funny), and medigap is like all my birthdays at once
    Click to expand...

    It struck me as a Galbraithian thing to say, having hung around a little with his youngest son when I was in grad school and Jamie was a big wheel at the LBJ School of Public Policy. Glad you liked all the fun with MECA, a classic case of "not the policy horse we rode into town on, but definitely one that most people will remember fondly." There are still issues, and loopholes for malfeasance, and they're only just getting started on serious cost control given that managed-care Medicaid is still an option (constricted by a series of fairly bluntly racist states, too) rather than a mandate. But like Social Security before it, they're taking the Medicare model and putting their backs in to shove it the next stage down the line towards a true and proper health-care system. Actually I think I'll do a little post just below on some of the policy stuff since we're in a G R A N U L A R place with the narrative just now.

    Also, as someone whose first proper political campaign experience (other than carrying Mo Udall literature in the basket of my tricycle at age not-quite-four while my mother passed it out during the '76 primaries) was for outgoing Governor Jim Hunt in North Carolina in his famous race against Senator No in 1984 (Gentleman Jim was a good guy, tough enough to be effective but nice enough to be good, and other than his sad affinity for the death penalty much more genuinely liberal on the issues than most New South Dems of his era, especially on education), I rather enjoyed the irony of ol' Jesse failing to treat every corridor as if it were miked and every mike as if it were loaded, given that he rose to power as a fire-breathing editorialist on WRAL-TV in Raleigh.
     
    Reader mode
    You must log in or register to reply here.
    Top
    Top