Bill Moyers Journal; 713; A Conversation with Clark Clifford Part 2

You Funding for this program is provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Sometimes we seem careless and casual about it, but basically Americans love this country deeply. And the one man who stands more as a symbol of government than any other is the President.

A man who understands the power of the presidency, who understands the potential of the presidency, can get almost anything accomplished. Harry Truman saved the free world. That's his great monument. From behind this desk across from the White House, a man once described as Washington's most powerful private citizen has advised and observed our presence for more than 30 years. Tonight I'll talk with Clark Tifford about Presidents and Power. I'm Bill Moyers. Few men in Washington have exercised power for as long or in as many ways as Clark McCattam's

Clifford. He came from Missouri to Washington in 1945 as a young naval aid to Harry Truman, who soon made him special to the President, a job that placed Clifford right at the center of the most critical decisions of those crucial years. He was a principal agent in shaping American foreign policy from within the White House and defined the armed forces under a single Department of Defense. During the Eisenhower years, he became one of Washington's most successful lawyers. Super Clark, they called him the most powerful private citizen since Bernard Baruch. While advising many of the nation's mightiest corporations, he also became an advisor to Presidents. He planned John Kennedy's transition to the White House, and while still a private citizen, became Kennedy's chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He was an intimate behind-the-scenes advisor to Lyndon Johnson. Until in 1968, Johnson named him Secretary of Defense. A hawk until he arrived in the Pentagon, Clifford decided the war in Vietnam couldn't be won. According to most participants, he played the key role within government

in persuading LBJ to reverse his policies. He returned to private practice in 1969 until President Carter sent him on special assignment to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and India. Now at the age of 75, still putting in a full day in his office, he looks out across Lafayette Square at the White House and reminisces about Presidents and power. You once said that Harry Truman had seemed a rather ordinary man when you knew of him out in Missouri until you actually met him in the White House and he seemed a much more substantial figure there than he had prior to his being President. And you attributed it to this to the mystique of the presidency. What is it that happens to a man, a rather ordinary man, upon arriving in the White House that suddenly makes him appear to be 10 feet tall? First it's the pride that every American has in his country and the devotion that he has to our form of government. Sometimes we seem careless and

casual about it, but basically Americans love this country deeply. And the one man who stands more as a symbol of government than any other is the President. And the American people feel that that man has their hopes. He has their future in his hands and they want very much to see that he is a success. It seems to me that that's the that's the main way they go at it. Yet they can turn on him very quickly. Yes, they can. And I think that part of that is that actually every American has an ideal in his vision and concept of a President. And they reach very high for that ideal. And as a matter of fact, no human being quite reaches that ideal.

Basically, however, the people want their President to be the kind of man, maybe that they hope they might be. They want their President to be better than they are, more intelligent that they are, better educated than they are, better understanding of government, more diplomatic than they are. And they take great pride when President Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy went abroad and were guests at a very formal dinner that President DeGole gave. Oh, they showed to such wonderful advantage at that time. They looked like the American people wanted their President first lady to look like. And then the next day on national television, Mrs. Kennedy made a speech to the French people and absolutely flawless French. Why would a surge of pride came through the American people over there? You remember when your President Harry Truman was in office and

somebody said, if Harry Truman can be President, then the fellow next door can be President. Yes. Well, the fact is, that happens to be incorrect. Because something that maybe the American people don't know, and I didn't know for a while, President Truman had the best knowledge and understanding of American history than any President who ever served in the White House with the exception of Woodrow Wilson, who wrote one of the very fine books on the American government and American history. The reason for it was, he explained it to me one time because I'd commented on it. And he said, well, I'll tell you about it. He said, you don't understand it. But young people, particularly young boys, are interested in sports. And every sport they're interested in has a moving ball. But he said, my eyesight was so poor when I was a boy that I couldn't engage in sport. But he said, by great good fortune, I had access to the Encyclopedia Britannica. He said, I'm one of

the few individuals who has ever read the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, what he did was absorb American history beyond anything I have ever found in another human being, no matter who he might be. It meant something. It lived with him. I remember one weekend we went down on the boat with him. And he something came up about some monetary and financial problem. And he started in to talk about the conflict between President Andrew Jackson and Oldman Biddle over who was to control the financial future of this fledgling country. Biddle thought it ought to be private bank. He was the leading Philadelphia banker at the time. Andrew Jackson was determined that it would be a national United States bank. And President Truman talked an hour about that. And he took each party, told what the position that Jackson took and the position that Biddle took. And he actually made it live. And that's what history was to him. And so as problems came up, he filtered these problems

through that phenomenal knowledge of American history. What about Harry Truman's temper? I asked that particularly in regard to a story that in 1946 during the nationwide rail strike, he got furious at some of the unions and sat down at his own desk and wrote a really tough long hand draft of a speech in which he was going to say, quote, let's hang a few traders. Let's make our own country safe for democracy. Let's tell Russia where to get off. Come on men, let's get to it. And that the staff pennicked and came to you and said, Clark, you've got to stop him from making that terrible speech. Is that a true story? Well, partially. He was deeply angered by these two railroad union men because he felt that they'd been offered a fair wage increase. And a railroad strike at the time was going to have the most grievous result as far as our economy was concerned. And he'd pleaded with him and used every possible argument and

persuasion that he had. And they'd been really pretty abrupt with him. So he wrote out this long hand memo. And it really was his means of getting rid of steam. I'm sure he didn't mean for those things to go in there. They brought the speech to Charlie Ross and me and we felt that rather than go to the president when he was as angry as he was, we thought the proper course of action would be to sit down and write the speech. So Charlie and I went to work that night and worked on the speech most of the night and wrote a speech. It was still a tough speech. But it was a speech that I think would not have had the reverberations that his would have had. And he went up the next day and delivered the speech to a joint session of the Congress. I request the Congress immediately to authorize the president to draft into the armed forces of the United States all workers who are armed strike against their government. And about two-thirds of the way through the speech

was handed a note that the unions had capitulated. Word has just been received that the rail strike has been set on terms proposed by the president. Now that was a very valuable incident to President Truman. Up until that time people were regarding him as sort of a pale carbon copy of Franklin Roosevelt. And it was hard to get out from under the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt. He had such an enormous impact. His personality was so all enveloping. And this mean speech which ended up by forcing a powerful union to capitulate began to project President Truman as a president in his own right. And he said later privately he said I think that speech did a

great deal for me. And the story goes on to say that at the gridiron dinner after that. The gridiron dinner is where Washington reporters, lampoon, public officials in town. One of the skits that the reporters put on had a ventriloquist named Clifford holding a dummy named Truman on his lap making him talk. And that you and Truman were both in the audience when that occurred. And you were profoundly embarrassed because of the skit. Is that true? Yes it was really mean too. I was deeply disturbed by it. I went to him the first thing the next morning. And he was simply wonderful. He said they weren't after you. You're just an instrument. They were after me. And being president they're going to continue to be after me. Don't think about it again. You had absolutely nothing to do with it. They're going to stay at me and they're going to vilify me and denigrate me every chance they get. So he said forget it. Well I was greatly comforted by that. But that's the kind of fellow he was. Should White House assistants have a

passion for anonymity? Oh yes it's so important. And we've gotten away from it particularly in the person of the national security assistant that has grown up. When you were in the White House you were the national security council. Well it came it came about I was counsel at the White House and then I had a close personal relationship with James Faristol who was the first secretary of defense. And I had an intimate relationship with Dean Atchison who was secretary of state. So naturally as we worked together they would contact me send papers over get reactions to them. I'd check back with them and very naturally they grew up a relationship by which I became the liaison in the White House for the State Department and the Defense Department. I had one assistant, a very able man named George Elsie who'd been a history major at Harvard. One assistant. One assistant. But later on that developed to the point

where for instance under Dr Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration he developed a whole other state department in the White House. He had 144 people working for him. His answer to that would be well it's a much more complex world than it was back in 1945, 46, 47, 48 when Clark Clifford was a one man national security council. Sure there is some merit to that. But if you are going to improve the machinery and increase it so that it can handle a larger volume of problems do it within the State Department and don't build another State Department in the White House. We've just been through that in the Carter administration. I think it was terribly unfortunate to have a competent Abel Secretary of State like Cyrus Vance constantly contending with Dr Brzezinski to see who was going to state American policy. I have friends abroad

they didn't know who was really enunciating that oftentimes it would be different. Brzezinski was taking a much harder nose position with reference to the Soviet Union and Cyrus Vance was and I think that was one of the facets of the last administration that lent a sense of uneasiness to many thoughtful people and in fact I think to the American public. When Harry Truman left office he wasn't very popular he'd been ridiculed his policies were controversial. There was a general disapproval of him. What do you think his lasting legacy is today? Harry Truman saved the free world. That's his great monument. As time goes on it becomes more apparent all the time. Here's what happened. After the Second World War Europe was prostrate. Look at England, look at France, look at Italy, look at Belgium, look at Germany you see and

the great aim and the great ambition that Harry Truman had was to find a way to work together with the Soviet Union and develop a permanent concord in the world. It was not to be the Soviets didn't want it that way. They started in as soon as the Second World War was over to do everything they could to further their own future. You'll remember they started in and took all of the nations on their western periphery. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, later on. They just took them all. They wanted to have a bridge against the Soviet Union and the West. After doing that then they set up the common turn which was a communist sale in every important country in the world. And at that particular time it was nip and tukas to whether you're going to

save the countries of western Europe and keep them from going communist. Harry Truman came along first with the Truman Doctrine, March 1947 in which he said to the whole world it should be the policy of the United States to prevent the communism by force of these countries that they now have put pressure upon. That saved Greece and Turkey. Greece and Turkey were going down the drain just as sure. And they were the southern anchor of the line in the Mediterranean. Then the next he comes along with is the Berlin Air Lift. The Soviets thought that they could squeeze us and they lies out of Germany. And they didn't squeeze Harry Truman out of there. He started and he supported Berlin with these air flights. And they got more and more and more efficient all the time and it showed him, showed the Soviets in the world that he could not be pushed around. Then came one of the greatest of all NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We signed

that treaty with the main nations of western Europe and it said to the Soviets, if you attack any one of those nations, you are attacking the United States of America. And you know what NATO has done? It's kept the peace for 31 years since it was passed. Because the Soviets had a very clear signal, you attack any one of those nations, you are at war with the United States. Well, that's kept the peace. You wrote the famous memorandum in 1946 that helped shape those decisions. You pushed the Truman administration toward many of those decisions and I'd like to quote from it because some people claim that it declared the intellectual framework of the Cold War. Here's what you said in part. The key to an understanding of current Soviet foreign policy is the realization that Soviet leaders adhere to the Marxian theory of the ultimate destruction of capitalist states by communist states. The language of military power is the only language which disciples of power politics understand. Compromises and concessions are considered

by the Soviets to be evidence of weaknesses. Now today many revisionist historians look back and say you're exaggerated that the bellicosity of that language which led to these policies you described forced the Soviets to become belligerent because they saw you arming all the nations around them. Do you feel that analysis still holds 30 years later? Yes, nothing could be more wrong than the suggestion that we took the lead and then the Soviets followed and adopted their policies because of our position. President Truman wanted terribly to get along with the Soviets. He had met Stalin, he felt they could work out an arrangement, and at Tapotsdam they started down that course. The Soviets violated every single agreement they had made at Tapotsdam. The President still worked when we came up with the Marshall Plan which came then as another

maybe the fourth great leg in this policy to save the free world. Most people have forgotten if they ever knew. President Truman offered the Marshall Plan to the Soviet Union and said we will treat you the same as the nations of Western Europe. You've been through this Holocaust, the worst world in history, war in history. You lost 20 million of your men in this war. We will help rebuild you. They turned it down. But this was his suggestion and the pressure that they were putting on the European countries is what necessitated our going into the Marshall Plan. And now historians are saying that perhaps the great accomplishment of this century has been for a nation such as we without any hope of personal or practical gain to come in and save the world as it existed at that time. And that's what did happen. Now mind you,

do you see? What Stalin said and what you read continued to be the policy, the Soviet Union. Do you remember when Mr. Khrushchev came here? In one speech he said we are going to bury you. Well that's the same way it goes. Do you think that attitude existed? I mean general hagg and present writing are using much the same language that you used in that memo back in 1946. I think so but I would hope that we wouldn't get into name calling now. I don't believe that helps very much. I was in Moscow two months ago and I had a number of meetings with top Soviets. And I might say there is a real opportunity for us there today. They'll be hard to get along with but the Soviets are sorely pressed today. Economically. Economically they're pressed and they've got lots of problems as they look at the world. They've got problems with Afghanistan. They felt they

had to go in and clear that up. They are deathly afraid of what's going on in China. They know that China has the nuclear device. They know that they're working on a system of delivery of the nuclear device. That's a very great concern. China has a billion people. They're deeply bothered by the neutron bomb that's going to be distributed to the allies that we have in Europe. And now with all of those pressures on them and problems they have Poland. And Poland might be the most difficult problem of all. As a former secretary of defense do you think that either side will let the other gain military superiority in this kind of situation? No. No they won't at all. Doesn't that mean the arms race is just bound to continue? No. No it should not. It is absolutely insane. It's the ultimate end of absurdity for this race to go on. But how do you take the nuclear field for instance?

I attended a seminar three years ago. Every top nuclear scientist in the United States was there and for four days we discussed all these problems. Some said if we had 100 nuclear devices that were deliverable to the Soviet Union that would be enough. Particularly now that we murve them we used to have only one warhead in each missile. Now we have as many as ten. I've seen those tests out in the Pacific. They send one of these over. They have ten separate targets. The accuracy is incredible. Ten separate warheads come from this instrument and each zero is in on ten separate targets. Some of these men said if we have 100 of these missiles that's enough. We destroy anything of value in the Soviet Union. The one that said the most said 400. If you have 400 deliverable missiles that's enough. You know how many we have? We have ten thousand. But there you are. Jimmy Carter's budget was plenty big and now

Ronald Reagan's defense budget is going to be even bigger and the Soviets are going to match it by your own admission. Of course. What's going to happen? There's only way to do it is to sit down as we were preparing to do with the Soviets and agree upon the end of the arms race. You must have arms control. The Soviets wanted. We should want it. I don't know what's going on in people's minds when they say forget salt to get on with the arms race. You give up whatever there is in salt to even if you don't have complete confidence in it. You give up something. You know what Churchill said one time it's haunted me ever since I read. He said if you go on with this nuclear arms race all you're going to do is make the rubble bounce. We can destroy each other at a thousand a piece. We can destroy each other at five thousand a piece and make the rubble

bounce intermittently. We're way up now way above that. Let's stop it. Let's stop it right there. But wouldn't it just continue to? I would hope not because salt to would stop the arms race where it is. Salt 3 is the one I'm looking at. Salt 3 I want more than any almost desire I've ever had. Salt 3 begins to cut back how much we have. Starting reducing our arms. So we shouldn't expect immediate results. This is a long term process. This is a long returns process. The happiest I ever saw Lyndon Johnson in my life was on one of our Tuesday lunches. Every Tuesday the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense Chairman of the Joint Chiefs head of the CIA met and had luncheon and that's where the rail policy was made. This particular day in August of 1968 we gathered outside of the upstairs dining room and he said gentlemen I'm going to relax a

rule. We said what's that? He said we're going to have a drink before luncheon today and everybody got a glass of sherry about that big. That was the relaxation of the rule. We said why? He said tomorrow morning simultaneously in Moscow and the United States we're going to announce a summit conference and I'm going to Moscow and we're going to announce the beginning of the negotiation for arms control and he said it will be my monument. It'll be the greatest contribution that I've made to this country into the world and it was as excited as a boy. Finally we agreed on the protocol that would start that process of limiting arms at five o'clock that same afternoon the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and all his dreams crumbled. You couldn't do a thing after that. You know you make me think also of the paradox of you're having been a halt through

the sixties about Vietnam and then Lyndon Johnson finally almost forcing you to become secretary defense and you're going over to the Pentagon and discovering that we couldn't win that war and convincing him that he couldn't win it and he had to start cutting back. He listened to you and yet he turned on you. I'd had a long and very friendly relationship with him. Went back 25 years at that time and I had worked with him before going to the defense department and went because I was interested in it. It's the field in which I had been trained and I had felt that our policy was correct. I was guilty of the same misdiagnosis as practically everybody else in public life at the time. If you remember the Tonkin Gulf

Resolution, Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed by the House and the Senate and they authorized the President to use military force in Vietnam. A practical declaration of war. You know what the vote was? Only two against it. I think the vote was 412 to two in favor of that resolution. We all thought that what we had to do was face up to what was going on. We thought that there was a joint effort by communist China and communist Soviets to engulf the area there in Southeast Asia as the effort had been made before by the Soviets after the Second World War. How do you explain that so many people were so wrong for so long? Well, I've got my own theory. We saw what happened to the world when Hitler began to move. Now that we went through that horrible holocaust. When they saw what was happening in Southeast Asia, they thought it was another kind of aggression

and that we had better profit by the lesson that we had not followed with Hitler and that we had better get in early. It's just as though it were a cancer and the thing to do would be to go in and excise the cancer early before the metastatic process took place and spread through the body politics. I know that was the diagnosis but what do you think there was an Indian Johnson's personality that made him become so obsessive about the war? Well, because we were in it and to a certain extent attacks against our forces in Vietnam or attacks against Lyndon Johnson and he took it personally and he just said, by God, this is not going to be. That's very dangerous isn't it to confuse the identity and fortune of the president with the success and fortune of a nation. Yes, but I am the state. Yes, but to ameliorate that feeling, that was the attitude of

the house. That was the attitude of the Senate. These people are not going to push us around when they fired on the destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin if they did. So we all rose up at the time and there seemed to be justification for it. I accepted it mistakenly till I got to the Pentagon and after a month in the Pentagon, I knew that we were wrong and I knew that it wasn't really communist aggression. What we were dealing with was a civil war in Vietnam and I knew we had an absolute loser on our hands. We weren't ever going to win that war. But why did Johnson, President Johnson, turn on you after you had told him we had to reverse our policies in Vietnam? This was a very difficult time for him. I had accepted his policy. He sent me over there

in order to continue with this hard, stern war-like policy as far as Vietnam is concerned. And then here's his friend he'd known all this time and he'd trust him. His friend comes back to him and says, we are wrong. Who's we? That's mainly the President. In effect, without being too blunt, Mr. President, you're wrong. You've been wrong from the very beginning. That's a very bitter pill for a man to take. He didn't like it. He didn't want to hear it. And yet he had the courage and he had the character and he had the resolution. From that time on, we met almost every day. Not alone, but in that cabinet room, we met almost every day talking this thing out. And those first two or three months were as difficult days as men ever spent together. What did he say to you? He just said, this isn't right. What who sold you on this? Explain it to me. Now the reason why my attitude worried him so

was, he knew that I had sincerely supported him before. And we'd worked together for so many years that he knew that something had happened. And then I explained the whole thing and I brought the joint chiefs over. I sat in the tank with the joint chiefs for three days while we tried to talk this thing out. There's where I finally learned they had no plan to win the war. Why didn't your predecessor, Secretary McNamara, come to this conclusion? Was it because he too, like Lyndon Johnson, had such a commitment to the commitment itself? He was in the process of softening his attitude. But Lyndon Johnson would never take it for McNamara. He would not. And as he began to soften his attitude because he was getting the feel of this thing, President Johnson felt that he ought to have another job. So it was kind of a mutual arrangement that Bob McNamara left. And I think the President, he's a sigh of relief, said, now I've got a man there who's going to be really hard-knows. And it was very disappointing to him. And he had this

unfathomable feeling about people who left him. I remember one interesting incident gave you a wonderful indication of the general attitude of the press toward President Johnson, who was a very powerful man and who booked no opposition and who ruled from on high. And when he would be down at the ranch on vacation, his press secretary would hold an afternoon press conference and the press would gather around. And at that particular time, his press secretary was named Bill. In fact, his name was Bill Moyer. And the story came back to me. I don't think we've ever talked about it since. But at that particular time, President Johnson and Bill Moyers had had a number of difficulties. And the relationship was terribly strained, if President and one of the men working for him differed. It got pretty testing.

So this afternoon, one of the men in the press corps said, Bill, and you said, yes, he said, where is the President this afternoon? And you said to the pressman, he's down at the lake. And so the pressman said, is he boating? No, Bill Moyer said he's taking a walk. I should have followed Clark Clifford's policy of the passion for anonymity. Well, I learned later that the President had admitted that he thought that was as unfunny a joke as he'd ever heard. And I think you could almost count the days from that incident until we learned that Bill Moyer was out looking for other employments. I took my own walk. When you persuaded him otherwise on Vietnam, he began quietly around town. Didn't stay quietly to say ugly things about Clark Clifford. Yes, as time went over, he got over.

Because I'm gratified at the fact that his time went on, he wouldn't ever come right out with it. But his time went on. He also accepted the conclusion that the war in Vietnam was hopeless and we were never going to win it. Johnson was the third President you served. The second, we haven't touched upon. And that is John F. Kennedy. And that was an accident because somebody told me the biggest political mistake Clark Clifford ever made was in 1960 to support Stuart Simmington for President instead of John F. Kennedy. Why did you do that? The number of reasons one is that Stuart Simmington and I were very old friends, both in Missouri. Both from St. Louis. He'd come from the east and come out to be head of one of the largest companies in Missouri and we'd become friends and our wives had become friends. We both came to Washington by entirely different routes and then resumed our friendship here and it became

closer and closer as it has down to the present day. So when he told me in, oh, I think it would be 19, early 1959 that he was going to run for the presidency. I said it once. I would be foreign. And I worked for him and tended meetings and worked on the organization and all. During that period of time and for some years, I had been John F. Kennedy's lawyer while he was in the city. While he was in the Senate and we had become really quite good friends. And I remember the time that I first learned that he also was going to run for president. How'd that come about? ABC Network had a program. ABC Television. ABC Television. How did it work? Which it ran every Monday night. And Mike Wallace was on that program. It's a long time ago. And he would have different people on one evening on a Monday night. He had drew person

an economist. Now you'll remember that Senator John F. Kennedy had written a book Profiles Encourage. Excellent book. And it won the Pulitzer Prize for it. On this ABC Television program, which Mike Wallace put on, Drew Pearson said, it is a national scandal that John F. Kennedy got the Pulitzer Prize for that book because he was not the author of the book. Well, no. The roof failure in the Kennedy family. I did not understand why they were also excited about it at the time. President Kennedy came to see me right away and we got to work on it. He was the Senator Kennedy. Yeah, excuse me. Senator Kennedy. His father and bastard Kennedy called and said for me immediately to sue ABC for $50 million. Get the complaint in that day and all. We had to go some links to quiet him down. So as we got into it, I decided after talking to ABC, the President, Senator Kennedy and I

should go to New York. We went to New York and spent two days with a Mr. Goldinson who was head of ABC and may be still, but still yet. And we took a long, long hand notes of Senator Kennedy that he'd written down in Florida when he's having a back problem and then showed where his long hand notes appeared in the book. And then some research had been done by Ted Sarnson, a very able lawyer and assistant to Senator Kennedy. But every book has research that's gone into it, but it was Senator Kennedy's book. By the end of the second day, they agreed that they would retract the chart. You proved that Kennedy had written the book. And the book. That's right. And so we sat down, the lawyers did, and we worked up a retraction statement. Well, Senator Kennedy was delighted with it, because it was a very ugly situation. Uglier than I knew, because they didn't want to carry that millstone around their neck.

That afternoon, the second afternoon, he said, well, of course, I understand why this is so important to us. And I said, you'll have to explain it to him. He said, I will tell you in confidence, I am going to be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Then it all became completely clear to me. At that particular time, he said, we've worked together well. He's passed years. I would hope that maybe you might be able to support my candidacy. And I said, right away, I will not be able to. I said, Senator Simington, and I've been friends for 25 years. And he talked to me months ago about it. And I said it once that I would support him. Senator Kennedy's reaction was absolutely typical. He said, of course, I understand why you're doing it. He said, if I had had a friend for 25 years and he didn't support me, I wouldn't think he was much of a friend. And so it made me feel much easier. And you wound up, even though you supported Simington, heading Kennedy's transition

between the election and the inauguration. Again, it was absolutely typical of him. Out in Los Angeles, we had a very spirited struggle. But after we finished this very spirited struggle, a week went by and my phone rang. It was Senator Kennedy saying, I don't want you to come for breakfast. I went for breakfast at eight o'clock. We sat there at 12 o'clock. He said, I want you to start in an most meticulous detail. Go through the entire 1948 Truman Dewey campaign. And I did. He asked a lot of questions. At the end of that, he said, thank you very much. This has been very useful. Now he said, I want you to spend this summer riding up a plan of takeover. He said, I'm going to win this election. He said it that flatly. He said it that flatly. I'm going to win this election. And I don't want to wake up the morning after being elected president. Look at my father and my brother Bobby and my staff and say, now, what do I do? I want a book right there in hand. So we'll know exactly what to do. Well, it was real presence because that's exactly the way it did. I worked all summer on that book and it ended up 70 or 80 pages.

And the next morning after he called, the next morning after election, he called and said, you have the book ready. I said, I do. I said, I'm a cop. He said, I said, 20. He said, I'll send the secret service by and they'll pick it up and bring it up to high on us. Then the next morning, he also went on the television and announced that I would be his transition man to work with the Eisenhower administration. And I gave full time to that from election day until the 20th of January. And through that period and prior during the campaign, I became so impressed with Senator Kennedy's professionalism. What do you mean? He went about everything in a professional manner. Sure, some mistakes are made. But if so, then he'd admit the mistake and get right on. Speaking of mistakes, do you think he should have appointed Bobby Kennedy to be Attorney General? Because the day after the election, and Johnson said to me, Clark Clifford is going to be Kennedy's

Attorney General. Well, that certainly wasn't in President Kennedy. Well, that's a very interesting story. I'll make it short. After he was elected, he went to Palm Beach and he rested for two or three days and called and said to come down. And I went down and stayed four days with him. And we went all through this document of the takeover, which jobs are the most important, which must be appointed first, which reports have to get in first, like the budget report, the economic report. We went through all of that until he understood it very well. He had said that his experience had been in the legislative branch and mine had been in the executive branch. Then about the third day, we got to the cabinet and discussed that. And he said, I have one thing I wanted to tell you. He said, my father wants me to point my brother, Bobby, as Attorney General. But he said, I'm just really not completely comfortable with it. Bobby's bright, and he's been done a marvelous job as campaign chairman. But I'm just not comfortable about it because Bobby hasn't practiced long. Well, I said, I agree with you. And I said,

I think there's a good deal of merit to that. Well, he said, I tell you what he wants to do. When you finish down here, I want you to go to New York and have a meeting with my father. And see if you can persuade him that we ought to put Bobby someplace out. And so I did that. I flew from Palm Beach up to New York, had lunch in. The father couldn't have been nicer. He said, we'd all worked together so well and gotten his son, Jack, elected. And I said, I want to talk to you about Bobby. And I explained all of the reasons why I listened very plightly. And he said, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Now, he said, we'll turn to some other subject because he said, Bobby is going to be Attorney General. And so that ends that part of it, you see. And that ended that part of it. Well, now just to show you the graceful manner in which President Kennedy handled things, he named Bobby Attorney General. He got an avalanche of criticism. The night after he was inaugurated, they had a dinner here called the al-Falfa dinner. And in his remarks to that audience, he said, I have received a lot of criticism

for appointing my brother, Bobby, as Attorney General. But he says, folks, you don't understand. He says a young lawyer has got to get his experience someplace. Well, everybody just howled. And it took all the sting out of it. And as a matter of fact, Bobby made a good Attorney General. The story is that in many of the meetings that President Kennedy had with his Attorney General brother, you were present because the President wanted your legal advice since he knew that Bobby wasn't a very good lawyer. Is that true? And was Bobby jealous? Well, I can't fathom the President's reasoning. What he did was, as matters would come up that involved the Justice Department, he would call Bobby over. And he would also include me. Now, I think he felt he got something. He got something from Bobby and he got something from me. By that time, I may have practiced, been practicing 35 years. And I think he felt that from a combination, he got something.

It was perfectly all right with me, but I think that particular custom was just not too popular with Bobby. You know, you talk about that. And I'm thinking, as you talk of the time in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson decided that Bobby Kennedy really was going to contend for the vice presidential nomination. And Johnson didn't want this to happen. He didn't want to have to have a fight at the convention over Bobby Kennedy's desire to be his vice presidential running mate. So he said to me on the phone, get Clark Clifford over here. And he said to Jack Valeni, get Abe Fortis over here in the two of you came. And I remember you devised a solution. Do you remember what that solution was? Well, very well. We did not want the President to make an announcement that he had closed the door to Bobby Kennedy. With the President Kennedy being a national hero and Bobby coming up politically, it was very unwise for the President to get into an

embryo of any kind with Bobby. So he could not say, I've reached the decision that Bobby has no chance to be vice president. What we did was have the President within a couple of days make an announcement at a press conference that he'd given very careful thought to this whole subject of vice president. And he had reached the conclusion for the following reasons that no member of his cabinet should be vice president. And Bobby Kennedy was in his cabinet. And that took care of it. People accepted it. It was no particular reflection on Bobby. He was just one of 10 men. Remember what he said? I give up. He said, I took a lot of good people overboard with me. You were known as the liberal in in Harry Truman's White House. Has your conscience ever bothered you since because you spend so much of your time being the council to mighty corporations? No, I don't I don't believe there's any real conflict there. Corporations are rarely involved

in that type of governmental problem. Corporations have tax problems with the government, SEC problems, trade commission problems, power commission problems, energy problems, communication. It's in that great area. They have antitrust problems with the government, tax problems. It's in that area that we work. Now many of my clients will be companies that have Republicans at the head. The fact that I have liberal views regarding governmental policy in all those areas outside the can of their corporate policy makes very little difference to them. They'll tease me about it sometime. But at the same time, I think there is a recognition that over a period of years in the practice here, you get two great assets. One is you understand how the government really works. So when a tough problem comes up, you've got all these years of experience to know

where the chains are, where the paths are through this trackless jungle here, do you see? So you know how to work them out. Also, I feel that I have an asset and that is I tell a client I have absolutely no influence. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it means. I only know that I don't have it. What I do have is after all these years, I think I have the confidence and respect of the people in government with whom I deal and I wouldn't give that up for anything. For instance, I had an experience one time with President Kennedy that had a profound impression on me. I was in the private practice at the time. The phone rang. I went over. It was two days after the Bay of Pigs. He had a disaster at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. And he said, let me tell you something. He said, I've had two full days. I haven't slept. This has been the most excruciating

period of my life. He said, this is such a tragedy. I don't know if I could survive another one like it. He said, here's what happened. I made a very bad decision. The reason I made a bad decision was my advice was wrong. And my advice was wrong because it was based upon incorrect facts. And the incorrect facts were due to faulty intelligence. Excellent analysis of what had taken place. Now, he said, I know that you were the main draftsman of the law that created the CIA and you've grown up in that whole area. I'm appointing a committee and I want you to be a member of committee. I want to find out what's wrong with a foreign intelligence operation of this country. So, I served two years as a member of that commission and five years as chairman of the commission. Now, here was a fine opportunity. I would not have been given that assignment if I were in government. He wanted people to come in from outside of government. That's what Lyndon Johnson learned

after a while. Lyndon Johnson was such a powerful, overbearing presence that the staff oftentimes was at a very serious disadvantage. He wouldn't like it if you disagreed with him. Later on, after a number of unhappy and unfortunate circumstances, he learned the value of having people come in from the outside who wanted absolutely nothing from it. In 1962, this is something I've always wanted to ask you about. You got involved at Kennedy's request, President Kennedy's request, in negotiations to roll back the price of steel. You went up to New York to see Roger Blau, who was then running US steel, to tell him that the president wanted the price of steel to be reversed, that it was going to contribute substantially to inflation. Now, what tactics did you use with Roger Blau? Well, the president phone said, come over. And he was really angry. He said the steel

industry came down and talked to me. And they said they had a very tough labor negotiation. The union contract was ending. And they would have liked to have had some assistance from the government because we want to try to keep the price of steel down. And if we could get a reasonable wage settlement with the union, it would help hold the price of steel down because we were engaged in quite an economic buildup at the time. So he said, I listened to them. I worked with them for weeks, even months, with the understanding that if we got a reasonable contract with the union, they would not raise the price of steel. He said the contract was as solid and as unequivocal as two men can agree on. He said, I helped them. We got a splendid contract. They said, Mr. President, this is what we hoped we'd get. Thank you for the fine help. And the next day they raised

the price of both coal and hot steel. A substantial amount, eight or ten dollars a ton. Now he said, I'm not going to stand for it. I don't mean to have them go back on my contract. And I want you to go up there, get in touch with Roger Blow. I've already talked to him. I've told him you were coming. Go to New York and sit down and you persuade them to retract that price increase. So we went up and he had a suite in a hotel. Now be frank with me because I know you gave him some frank talk. I cannot go into the details. But we went all that day, had luncheon and talked it out, and all that afternoon, had dinner and talked it out. I decided to stay on in New York. We stayed on, went all at it all the next day. And the president had already begun to suggest certain things that he might do. There's a lot the government could do. The government, for instance, could stop buying steel from domestic steel company and buy all their

steel abroad. There were tax questions that could be very... Lots of tax and trust investigations that could be started. All kinds of things. And those were gone into. And at one stage they said, well, we'll go halfway. And that was passed on to the president because it was felt necessary to. The president said, absolutely not. I want them to live up to the agreement. By the end of the second day, why occurred what the president referred to in a press conference that he had as complete capitulation. They retracted all of the price increases and put the prices back where they'd been before. It was an excellent victory for the president. The public responded very well to it. What does it say about the use of presidential power? It means that a man who understands the power of the presidency, who understands the potential of the presidency, can get almost anything accomplished. The president is the one who fights for the people. There are interests in

this country and it's part of our system that are looking out for them. For instance, industry looks out for the interests of industry. Labor looks out for the interests of labor. Many times presidents have had to insert themselves into industrial struggles of that kind because the public was in the process of getting hurt very badly. But a strong president after a while begins to develop a reputation and these various segments of the country don't want to take him on. And the people are very popular. He gets very popular with the people. And it's very bad to get on the wrong side of a popular president. Your how old is here? 75. Is it the worst of times or the best of time? It's a mean tough time, which is one of the problems that President Carter had. It's a very difficult time to be president of the United States. As I watched all these smiling faces come in to the Reagan administration, I thought what those faces will look like a year from now.

I hope they're successful. It's important that the administration be successful. This is a mean tough year. They're going to look a lot older a year from now than they do now. I hope the abundance that they have will carry them for a while. But it's going to be awful tough. It's difficult to be president now. And they will find it out. It's difficult to serve in government now and make these close hard decisions. But I wish them very well. Thank you, Clark Clifford. This has been a conversation with Clark Clifford about presidents and power. I'm Bill Moyers. For a single transcript of this two-part program, please send three dollars to Bill Moyers

Journal, Box 900, New York, New York, 101. Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.