Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [67]
The President thought well of Shultz. Nixon had a collection of favorites who would go up and down in his level of interest, depending on his priorities at the time. Early on, at least, Shultz was one of them. “Keep your eye on Shultz,” Nixon told me at our meeting in Key Biscayne. “He’s going to be a star.”
Shultz skillfully moved the heated debates about school desegregation away from emotionally charged, confrontational discussions toward more practical approaches. Our effort to peacefully desegregate schools in the South, supported by the President, deserves to rank high in the Nixon administration’s domestic record.
In addition to dealing with policy matters at the Office of Economic Opportunity, we often had to face the raw public emotion provoked by the thorny social issues of the time. A day at OEO without a protest, a demonstration, or a bomb threat was a good day. There were times when my courageous secretary, Brenda Williams, would have to move her desk in front of the door to prevent protesters from breaking into our office on M Street.
On one occasion in November 1969, some fifty people barged into a conference room during a staff meeting, protesting the hiring policies of the Legal Services program. Terry Lenzner, the program director, escorted the group to a room on another floor so our meeting could continue. A pugnacious young Democrat, Lenzner had captained the Harvard football team some years before. He was not one to back down from trouble. When Lenzner tried to leave the group, the protesters blocked the door, effectively holding him captive.
I was notified of the problem and went down to the room. Wedging myself in past those blocking the doors, I took Lenzner’s arm and told him we were leaving.11 I then told the protesters they had the right to express their views, but we were not going to conduct the government’s business under threats or intimidation, and that if they didn’t leave the building, they would be arrested. That, of course, was exactly what some of them wanted. I obliged them and called in the local police. I was later told that I had caused the arrest of a major fraction of the graduating class of Howard Law School. As it turned out, among them was a young law student by the name of Jerry Rivers, later better known as Geraldo Rivera. It was but one example of the hostility and divisions that some of the OEO programs had caused in the country.
Considering the many issues in the agency’s purview, I had to delegate enormous amounts of responsibility to keep OEO operating. As a congressman, I had not had a large staff. But at OEO I understood well the importance of having talented assistance. Among others, the group I recruited and worked with included Christie Todd Whitman, a future governor of New Jersey and later administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); Bill Bradley, then the talented New York Knicks basketball star and a future U.S. senator; Ron James, who later became a senior official in the Department of the Army; and Max Friedersdorf, an outstanding director of congressional relations in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations.
Two others stand out. Frank Carlucci, for one, was an enormously capable man I lured from a promising career in the Foreign Service. I first knew Carlucci when we were on the varsity wrestling team at Princeton during