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14 Presidential Matters
On Lincoln's birthday in 1961. President Kennedy had a cocktail party in the White House for black leadership around the country. For this party, the Kennedy's used the entire first floor, putting a bar and a buffet in every room. When the President and the First Lady made their entrance, they began to circulate among the rooms, shaking hands with everybody. When Shirley saw what they were doing, she left me and went to the room where the Kennedys were at the time and maneuvered herself into a position to shake their hands. As soon as she saw which room they were headed for next, she would circle the entire floor and get into that room from the other side and shake their hands again. She did that all around the building. She came back to me and says, "Honey, just now I shook his hand, and you know he said, 'I remember you'!" "Hell," I said, "if I had just shaken your hand six times in forty minutes, I would have remembered you, too." I had no particular love for John Kennedy, but Shirley certainly did. She was in love with both Jack and Jackie, as were many black people, and she got what we all at that time so badly needed: recognition. My own national recognition came in somewhat different form.
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Although as early as 1965 I had become a national celebrity of sorts because of the extremely close mayoral race in Cleveland, it was not until after I was elected in 1967 that my voice began to mean something. There are two organizations that serve as the voice of the nation's mayors: the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities. A quick glance at the two might leave the impression that they exist only to provide mayors a few days away from home a couple of times a year. In fact, though, the two organizations exert a great deal of influence on federal domestic policy, and their position papers on major issues are important. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the smaller group, about 750 strong. It is limited to mayors. The National League of Cities includes most of the smaller-city mayors, council presidents, and representatives from county and even state governments. The annual meeting of the league usually draws about five thousand members. Both groups are usually dominated by the mayors of the biggest cities, a group that by the late 1960s was so homogenous in its political philosophy that it was almost a clique. Chicago's Richard Daley, Henry Maier of Milwaukee, John Lindsay of New York, Thomas D'Alessandro of Baltimore, Joseph Alioto of San Francisco, Atlanta's Ivan Allen and Detroit's Jerry Cavanagh -- these men formed a central group whose most colorful and persuasive spokesmen were Cavanagh and Lindsay. They were all progressive, activist types, all bright and most young. It was an exciting time to be a mayor. As bad as things were in the cities, it seemed that there were some able men who understood the problems and that something could be done that would make a difference. Boston's new mayor, Kevin White, Pittsburgh's Pete Flaherty and I were warmly welcomed by the clique of big-city mayors, and each of us soon moved into leadership roles in both of the national groups. From the group of mayors and their organizations came the national thrust for revenue sharing, welfare reform, a guaranteed minimum income and tax reform. We formed what came to be known as "the Mayors' Traveling
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Road Show," which used as its prime drawing card the media's fascination with charismatic John Lindsay and his 1972 Presidential intentions. With the media in tow, we'd travel the slum and blighted neighborhood of one of our cities, pointing out the vacant houses, the unemployed men standing on street corners, the closed health centers and the insufficient and inadequate recreation areas. Then at a later press conference, we'd explain in detail our lack of local resources to create jobs, build housing, provide adequate health care and educational and recreational facilities. We took the "road show" to Washington, where we testified before congressional committees, had three meetings with President Nixon, and had two turbulent sessions with the Democratic leadership of Congress, whom we accused outright of failing to use their power to help the cities. The strategy worked. National sentiment and political support was built up. President Nixon and members of Congress raced one another to introduce revenue-sharing and welfare-reform bills. Tax reform was placed on the front burner. Though John Lindsay was our most valuable public-relations gimmick, he was not well liked by most of the mayors. Envy counted for part of the hostility. But Lindsay himself was responsible for the general dislike. He played the elitist and dilettante role at most of the national conferences. He'd fly into town, deliver his main speech, and fly out, leaving the grubby and tedious work to the other mayors. He always carried his New York entourage of assistants with him (which never included a black man), and whatever social time he had he'd spend with them rather than with the mayors. He got his comeuppance for that kind of behavior at the December 1969 meeting of the National League of Cities in San Diego. Lindsay ran for vice-president of the league against Mayor Richard Lugar of Indianapolis and was soundly defeated. It was no contest. Part of Lugar's big vote was due to President Nixon's support, but most of it came from the hundreds of small-city mayors who felt this was their chance to get back at Lindsay for what they felt was an Eastern
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Republican, white Anglo-Saxon privileged arrogance. Henry Maier and I had warned Lindsay that this was going to happen. But he insisted that we nominate him for the office, so we did. He lost. The next year, at the league's meeting in Atlanta, I was nominated for vice-president and elected unanimously. No one thought I was a WASP elitist. A national voice is sometimes, though, a voice in a void, through nobody's fault but the damn media. At the 1968 Democratic national convention I was staying in a suburban motel with a swimming pool, because I had taken my family, and I was spending part of each day with my kids. About six o'clock the night of the nominations, I got a call from Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey's campaign adviser, Bill Connell. He said that the Vice-President wanted me to be one of the nominators, to make a seconding speech. I said, "I'm not even coming down to that convention tonight -- I'm going to watch this one on television." He said, "Well, it's what the Vice-President wants, and he asked me to ask you." "I don't know," I said. "The convention gets under way at seven-thirty, doesn't it?" He said yes, and I said, "Well, hell, it's six o'clock now and I'm well over an hour from the convention and it's rush hour. I don't see how in the world I could get there." "Will you talk to Senator Fred Harris?" he asked. I got on the phone with Harris and he said, "Carl, we'd like awfully much for you to make one of the nominating speeches." "It's just so late, Fred. When did you guys put this together?" "It's been a hell of a fight putting votes together. We haven't had time to even think about what we would do once we got them together." Hubert Humphrey was a great friend of mine. I believed in him, I believed he could beat Nixon. I agreed to make the speech and hastily changed clothes, and Sid Spector, John Little and I started down to the convention center. We got there just at seven-thirty and went to Humphrey's headquarters above the arena. I talked briefly with the guys and they told me to keep
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my speech to three minutes. I went over to a seat and there was Julian Bond, writing his speech for Eugene McCarthy. I said, "Well, Julian, we'll each have one going." He said, "Yup." Julian was making the nominating speech for McCarthy. So we came out. San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto nominated Humphrey in a very fine speech, and the delegates went into their demonstration routine, with the horns and rattles and what not, and then I came out. I launched into a fervent speech on behalf of my man. I wasn't talking to the few thousand in the arena. There were more than twenty million Americans watching this on television, and I was trying to reach them. People of all walks of life, all colors, were watching and listening to Carl Stokes. I was determined to reach into their hearts. When it was over I got back into my car, and they told me as soon I was got on the podium the cameras had switched to the street action outside the arena. I worked hard for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, both at home and on campaign trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles. When Nixon was elected, I stated that the election was over, we had a new President, and we all had to help him. I received a call from Daniel P. Moynihan, telling me he was considering going with Nixon to the White House. I suggested to him that the President-elect should meet with the big-city mayors and let us tell him some of the things he needed to know about the cities. We had to live with this man for four years, I told him, and we should get off to the right start. Moynihan said, "I think it's a hell of a good idea. Let me get back to you." He did call back, and we arranged a meeting at the Hotel Pierre in New York. I then turned to Pat Healey and John Gunther of the National League of Cities and Conference of Mayors, and we put together a list of mayors for the conference. A group of us, mayors of small and large cities, had the initial meeting with Nixon one morning in December. We met in a small sitting room in the President-elect's beautifully decorated penthouse apartment. We were with him for about an hour and a half. I sat next to him and was surprised at how fresh and
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vigorous he looked after having just gone through a tough campaign. The talk was very general, he could make no commitments, he hadn't even been inaugurated yet. We made it clear to him that the men there reflected the leadership of the mayors of the country. After some talk about general problems that affect all of the nation's cities, I told him that there are some unique problems that the twelve to fifteen largest cites have that differ not only in intensity but almost in kind from the problems of smaller cites. I urged him to schedule a full-scale conference of big-city mayors, men who could bring these special problems to him. He said, "Well, I think I understand generally what you men have told me here today, and if there are no objections, we can plan for that meeting on the largest urban centers with what you think are the unique problems." The problems of America's smaller cities had pretty well been spelled out, so there was no objection to the future meeting on bigger cities. With that we closed, and he graciously showed us out. Nixon is a very disarming man. What you may have read about his being a good listener is quite true. Some people can look like they are listening, but they are really not. At no point where some response was indicated did I not find him coming in with a reaction. He seemed to me inordinately at ease. If I were approaching Presidency and had just come through a tough campaign I'm not sure how liberal with my time I would be, but he seemed to have no problems. I was impressed. We had our meeting in April in the Cabinet Room of the White House. I was sitting immediately across from the President, to the right side of Vice-President Agnew. Dick Lugar sat next to the President. Some distance down the table sat John Lindsay. On the other side of Agnew was Dick Daley, and Joe Alioto was next to him. For about an hour we talked about what I thought were the unique problems. For instance, I went into the subject of Glenville. No small cities had had the kind of guerrilla warfare we were facing. Lindsay detailed the ambushings of police in New York. We talked about the problems we were having in dealing with state legislatures controlled by rural
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interests and our need to bypass them and go to the federal government for help. But more than anything else we talked about the black-white confrontation and the terrible class struggle going on. The people with enough money to live on but not enough money to enable them to move out were pitted daily now against the ever-increasing numbers of very poor. The movement of the black people into the formerly Jewish neighborhoods and the clashes between what had traditionally been allies in the civil-rights struggles were occurring more and more often. Jews had been important in the fight for open-housing laws and equal-employment laws. Suddenly those very laws were the source, legally at least, of the clash. The blacks were moving into the Jewish neighborhoods because they were the neighborhoods economically closest to them. And the economic competition was creating great hostility among the classes of people, even within minority groups themselves. These problems just don't exist to a significant degree in little towns. The President's responses generally were of the type to elicit more information. He did not try to profess knowledge or understanding of the problems, he seemed to want to learn. The man impressed me as a guy who really wanted to understand what we were saying. He asked a lot of good sound questions. Then came the interesting part. We had talked for about an hour, none of us felt rushed, and at the point at which he asked to be excused we really thought we had got the basic issues on the table. He asked if we could continue the discussion with Vice-President Agnew, and we all rose and he left. Now, I had led those mayors there. When I walked with the President to the door, I was able to se the press room outside. It was as if they were in tiers. There is no press corps in the world like the one in Washington. I went back into the room. Vice-President Agnew suddenly stood up. Up to that point the whole meeting had been conducted comfortably, with everyone relaxed around the table. Agnew launched into a fifteen-minute set of remarks, some of which were even facts, based on his own experience putting through a
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revenue-sharing tax plan as governor of Maryland. But he went further. He said something like "Carl, you and people like Lindsay and Alioto are going to have to at some point stop trying to understand these people and start doing something about them and put some of them in jail and do whatever else is necessary." He said the same thing in two or three different ways about housing and welfare, mixing in a few good things he did do as governor to give his diatribe a patina of authority. We endured that for fifteen minutes. Then I said, "I've talked enough today gentlemen, but I assume there will be some responses here." Joe Alioto stood and gave the automatic mayor's response that we all shared. Agnew then retorted, in a sense putting Joe down, and that's not easy to do. Joe was one of the brightest people in the room, but he refrained from indulging in a head-to-head clash with the Vice-President. But there was one man in the room who was ready, and that was that blue-eyed, white wavy-haired patriarch of the Old South, Ivan Allen. I saw in that moment what writers mean when they talk about his eyes flashing. Allen stood up and with the protection of a couple of centuries of American tradition behind him said, "Mr. Vice-President, I came to this meeting concerned about my city. But after listening to you here, I am now worried about my country. Everything we have said here has gone in one of your ears and out the other. You have no more understanding of what we are talking about than the man in the moon. I think this meeting ought to adjourn right now." Agnew's face flushed bright red. Very angry, he told Allen, "Don't tell me I don't understand, you're not listening. The whole trouble is you people think you have the only approach and it is the right way and that is what has gotten this country into trouble." Then he went back over his remarks about people not obeying the law and what not. Here I am trying to keep order, saying, "We ought to let the Vice-President talk." But by this time Tommy D'Alessandro wants to take him on. Lindsay is enjoying the whole thing, sitting back with that bemused smile on his face. Alioto was really quiet. He had been very much the gentleman and he had been handled
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pretty roughly. As far as Ivan Allen was concerned, the meeting was over. He sat down, did not look at Agnew or anybody else. He had said his piece. He had said that as far as he was concerned the meeting should be adjourned and he had personally adjourned it for himself. I then told them I thought we had met sufficiently and we weren't going to get much further. I thanked the Vice-President for being candid with us and sharing his views and said we would take only a few minutes more with the press officer to work up a statement for the media. The Vice-President went around shaking everybody's hand, including Allen's but Ivan wasn't really in the room. Amazing. You can do that only with a certain kind of security. The press secretary then came in and asked if Ivan Allen and I would come into the President's office. I asked Allen and he said certainly he would and I told the fellows we would be right back. We went down the hall and into the oval office. It was late spring, but he had a fire going. He was seated at his desk, working. We sat down in front of this desk and he said, "I've just been informed about what occurred in the meeting after I left. I want you to know I am very distressed about it. I think that probably it was the result of misunderstandings of positions on everybody's side, because I know of the Vice-President's concern for local government. We all have a big job ahead of us and we want to do it together. I know you gentlemen are going on to a press conference; I don't think it would help the causes of any of us if we had things like this spread across the front pages. I just wanted to know if you felt in your judgement this had to be discussed before the press." I said, "Mr. President, I think that Mayor Allen has to respond to that." Allen then looked across at this man who, when compared with Allen's lineage, is an immigrant, and said, "Mr. President. Are you asking me not to say anything about the discussion I had with the Vice-President when I go out to the press conference?" "Well, Mayor Allen," the President replied, "I just don't see
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how that would help the causes of any of us. I just thought I would raise the issue with you." "Mr. President, I am not going to promise you what I will say or not say. I am really not sure myself. The only thing I can say to you is that Vice-President Agnew seriously concerns me." "Well gentlemen," the President said, "I just appreciate your having come in here and I hope we will all continue to have out minds on our central problem, which is trying to bring some relief to the cities of this country. As we have indicated, we expect to have more meetings of this kind." We got up, shook hands and left. I didn't know what the hell to do next. We went back to the room with the mayors. We explained that Agnew would lead off in the press conference. I would make some remarks and then we would throw it open to questions. We went out. Agnew opened things and made a point of saying, "Now, of course there were some matters on which we had basic fundamental disagreements. There are some feelings the mayors have that I don't share and there are some that I have that they don't share." Whatever else he had to say, the first reporter who asks questions is going to zoom in on that one. I didn't even get a chance to make my remarks. As soon as Agnew finished, the press jumped in on those disagreements. Agnew fudged on the issue and said, "Well, they concern all kinds of things. After all, I've been a local government official and I have my own ideas about revenue sharing and about law and order and such things." The can of worms was thus opened, but he did not dig into it. Then the fellows turned and said, "Mayor Stokes, can we ask you?" I stepped up and they asked me about those areas of disagreement. I said, "I think the Vice-President has fairly well delineated the areas." Pure crap. Then a fairly alert reporter said, "With whom was he disagreeing?" I said, "I wouldn't call it a disagreement that relates to one
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specific individual; we're just talking about difference in philosophies of government." All the time I am thinking, Should I let this exchange between Agnew and Allen really come out? Finally I just figured that a headline that said Allen had called down the Vice-President would only alienate a President who had no real allegiance to any of us in that room. Apart from the mayors of Phoenix, Wilmington, Indianapolis, and New York, all of us were Democrats. And of course the mayor of New York was no friend of his. I decided that unless Ivan Allen insisted, I wasn't going to let him get to the mike. He was standing next to me. But he chose to keep his own counsel. Normally, I wade right in. I like to put a man up front, make him have to live with his attitudes in public. But here we had been able to get Nixon to do something that could mean a great deal to the big-city mayors, most of us Democrats, most of us from cities that voted against Nixon. To let that impact with the President degenerate because of Agnew seemed irresponsible. Subsequently Nixon introduced his revenue-sharing bill and gave us the specific authority to write the formula for it. The welfare reform bill was written right in the White House, not at HEW, and he brought our people in on every stage of it. When we were having trouble getting HUD money released (this was especially true for Joe Alioto, who had some low-income housing programs that were stalled), we went right to the White House, and he did release it. I am an issue-oriented, confrontation politician -- that is the only kind of substantive politics there is, as far as I am concerned -- but a public fight with Agnew would have served no purpose. Allen's remarks reflected what all the rest of is in the room felt (and it was great that it was Allen, not somebody like me, who chose to do it -- there are things we can do to them, but there are other things they can do to each other), but Agnew just wasn't the right target to take to the public. Nixon's strategy in his first term was to introduce bills that were personally repugnant to him, knowing he could depend on conservative Democrats to block action. They would ruin his
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strategy on any day they chose to pass his welfare-reform bill or revenue sharing. But he knew he could depend on them. And when they didn't pass the legislation, the responsibility was on them, not him. On the other hand, I've watched him go outside a conservative's ordinary approach to foreign affairs. Richard Nixon is a master of the art of reflecting the wishes of people, of ascertaining the significance of what they feel and want or think they want and then joining them, appearing to the head of the phalanx. It's a comfortable kind of politics. It is also the kind of secure comfortableness that led to Watergate and the other abuses of power that Nixon voters let us all in for. My kind of guy leads by initiative. Wayne Morse, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh -- these men have taken personal positions that make no sense as reflections of the general feelings of their constituents. These are leaders. Thomas Kuechel of California was another one. Eleanor Roosevelt. Michael V. Di Salle. One of the tragic failures of the Ohio electorate was the way in which they rejected Mike Di Salle. I mean to except the Kennedys from this group of leaders. I think that so far they have been shallow manipulators. I never felt John F. Kennedy was a substantive man. He never had the commitment to social programs that his Democratic predecessors had or that Lyndon Johnson subsequently demonstrated. I know of nothing in his record to distinguish him. He used the liberal and minority groups but was never truly their friend. History will hack away at his legend until the only thing left is the realization that he was the first of those of us who have learned to use the media well. He and Bobby gave us a bunch of racist Southern judges. It took him two years to sign the executive order on housing. A. Philip Randolph had to marshal the famous march on Washington before Kennedy would introduce the civil-rights bill. He escalated the war in Vietnam. As a Senator, he ducked being paired in the voting censuring Joseph R. McCarthy. Kennedy was a hawk, a Cold Warrior. He, too, was a dilettante. When he became President he tried to work his programs
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into law with the same methods he had used to get into office -- public relations. It didn't work. Kennedy was disdainful of the Congress, contemptuous of the men who served there, and he surrounded himself with men like himself, and so the style of the conduct of business was arrogant, often supercilious. And Congress, since it wasn't being appealed to in the traditional manner, through the trading of favors, the calling up of old debts or the creation of new ones, sat on his hands. It didn't actively fight him, it just did nothing. The public were the losers. People don't seem to remember that just prior to his assassination, Kennedy was at an absolute low. He wasn't getting legislation through. He was tremendously unpopular. Even the liberals had been turned off. The Kennedys understood the use of the executive power outside of dealing with Congress. They brought the steel industry to its knees and they used the Justice Department ruthlessly. In order to "get" James Hoffa, they were as abusive of the Constitution as any of the Watergate conspirators were. I have to believe that he understood how to deal with Congress, but he didn't care to pay the price for those things, and I take those things to be the things that mattered, the domestic issues. Hubert Humphrey is not well thought of since his years as Johnson's Vice-President, but that man was for so many years so far ahead of this time and yet had such a wealth of ability and drive that he was able to survive some of the most virulent attacks ever directed at a public figure. From 1946 to 1958, good men, I mean very good men, had to endure that sort of thing. He was an extraordinary mayor in Minneapolis. What happened to him? Perhaps it is easier to understand what happens to a man who wants a job like the Presidency very badly if you think about the extent to which you can humble yourself when you want a certain woman with whom you happen to love. When you have been and are a person of vision and of desire to do it your way, and it becomes so consuming to you that you begin paying prices (and you always pay price when you want something that others must give), once you start paying prices and move toward the goal, the more prices you are willing to
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pay, the less observant you become of how the prices are getting higher. Like water through the river, the level stays the same, but the water is ever new, ever different. For the introspective man of integrity it is comforting to believe, "If I can just get there, then I'll be able to turn around and do the things I want to do." but you can't. Those prices are irretrievable. It's pitiful. You must never want something so much that the essence of it becomes just being there, getting it. The process that occurs with an obsession to rule or to won or just to belong can cost too much and when the cost is too great, the achievement is empty. In Hubert's case, the paid the price and still didn't win the office.
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