 Say again? You may begin. Good day. I'm Jeff Shepherd, your host for today's Nixon Legacy Forum, co-sponsored by the National Archives and the Richard Nixon Foundation. We've done over 3 dozen of these legacy forums since 2010. They feature former members of the Nixon administration discussing various public policy initiatives undertaken by our 37th president, former national archivist David Ferriero, was very supportive of these forums, introducing many of them, and enthusing about how they made the documents come alive. Today's focus is on the establishment of the Domestic Council and the Office of Management and Budget by Reorganization Plan number two of 1970. This triggered a change from what has been characterized as cabinet government where cabinet members largely determined the direction of their respective departments and the president focused on a handful of important issues to one where the president and his immediate staff are in a position to make most policy determinations, which cabinet departments are then expected to effectuate. In essence, this better enables the president, with about 1,000 Senate confirmed appointments, to set priorities and give direction to the vast executive branch of our government. It's not a perfect system, but the systems put into place back in 1970 largely remain in place today. To help tell our story, we have five former members of President Nixon's staff. I'm going to introduce each of them and then ask each to tell us how they ended up at the Nixon White House. And if our AV team will show the first PowerPoint slide, we'll go from there. So first to arrive is Ed Harper. Ed, tell us how you got there. It's a complicated story, but briefly, I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. Then I taught at Rutgers for two years and decided to take advantage of the National Academy of Public Administration's graduate program where we work in government for a year. And I was recruited by Andrew Rouse, whose name you'll hear again later in this program, to work for him in the Bureau of the Budget. And Andy went on as he'll be introduced subsequently. And my work brought me the attention of John Ehrlichman. We had lunch. John said, what do you know about the Appalachian Regional Commission? And I told him what I knew about it. And he said, you're hired, when can you start? And I said, Monday. So you were in on basically John Ehrlichman's staff as counsel to the president before the domestic council came into effect. Then you were on the domestic council itself and then you returned to government under President Reagan and you headed the domestic council. And at the same time, if I understand it, you were Senate confirmed as deputy director of OMB. So you were president at the creation and then you circled back. I was glad to be back and gave it up. Good for you. For Susan. The next to arrive is Bobby Kilburg. Bobby, how did you get there? Well, my husband and I together became White House fellows right out of law school in August of 1969. And I was assigned to Ken Cole, who was the White House staff secretary. And Ken and Ken reported to John Ehrlichman as counsel to the president. And they all, they shared a suite of offices on the second floor of the West Wing. And over time, I just kind of migrated to John and John kind of adopted me and I still work for Ken, but I reported directly to John. And that kind of evolved. You're technically assigned to the staff secretary, but John's doing many of those functions. Correct. Supervising. And we should point out, you were Bobby Green. What did you do? For a while, yes I was, till September 1970. You dragged Bill along with you. And Bill came at the same time, but didn't make the White House staff. Bill, where were you? Didn't apply to the White House staff. I was like Bobby, I was appointed a White House fellow in the fall of 1969. And I went to work for George Schultz, who was secretary of labor at the time. And then stayed in and around the department of labor. I was general counsel of the federal mediation and conciliation service for a year, 1970, 71, then was recruited to come back to the labor department as associate solicitor of labor for labor relations and civil rights. Did that from 1971 to 1973, when the president appointed me solicitor or general counsel of the US Department of Labor. And I served in that capacity from April of 1973 until January of 1977. So Bill is our current living expert on George Schultz and we'll get back to him directly. I was next to arrive. I was a White House fellow in the same class as Bobby and Bill, but I was assigned to treasury for my fellowship year. And then at the end of the fellowship year, it was a chance conversation with John Ehrlichman. We had earlier discussed Seattle law firms where John came from. And he asked me if at the end of my year I was gonna go back to Seattle. And I still can't believe I said this, but I said, well, you know, I'd really like to get a job on the White House staff, but I don't even know how to apply. And I didn't know John had just been named head of the domestic council and had 30 slots, paid for and everything. He said, oh, that's simple. You come see me. And eventually I did and I, so I think of myself as the first outside hire onto the newly established domestic council. And shortly after my arrival came Jim Kavanaugh. Jim, how did you get there? Jeff, I was assistant secretary for health at scientific fairs at what was in the department of health education welfare sitting in the secretary's office. It was Elliot Richardson on a Friday evening talking about some legislation we were having trouble getting through the Senate committee chaired at the time as I recall the ranking member, Peter Dominic from Colorado. And the phone rang and Elliot took the phone and talked and nodded his head and said, yes, yes, yes. I think I've got an answer for you, Jim Kavanaugh. There's another pause. He said, eight o'clock tomorrow morning. He said Saturday. And Elliot said, all right, I'll talk to him. It's up to him, but I'll talk to him. And with that, Elliot hung up and said, well, I've got a assignment for you if you want to take it. And I said, what's that? He said, you have to be at the West Wing of the White House at eight o'clock tomorrow morning Saturday and ask for Ken Cole. He'll be expecting you. And I said, Ken Cole works for, and he said, John Ehrlichman, da da da da. I certainly knew the name and I said, all right, I'll be there. Any idea what he wants to talk about? And he said, well, yeah. He said, John Ehrlichman came to talk to Ken and said, you know, Ken, I'm a Christian scientist. So is Bob Haldeman. We've both decided that we're going to get ourselves out of the health policy business. And you report directly to the president on health policy and that's what Ken wants to talk to you about. So I went over at eight o'clock next morning, saw Ken, we had a great talk, he asked me about the background of health policy, told me that the president was interested in developing a national health insurance policy program and he Ken wanted my help and would I be willing to do it? And I said, sure. And he said, I've got to unplug myself from what I'm doing over at HEW and Ken said, oh, that will be a problem. I'll call Elliot and take care of that. I said, how long an assignment do you think it'll be? He said, well, it's a complicated thing. So it may take you a week or two or three. I said, when would you like me to start? And he said, how about Monday morning? And I said, fine. He said, great. He put his hand across the desk and said, you're on. And he said, come with me. So we got up from his office on the second floor of the West Wing, took the elevator down to the ground floor, walked across Wexings Avenue, walked into the executive office building and said, I've got to find an office for you. And we took an elevator up to the first floor and walked a couple of feet down the corner. He said, this office right here, it's kind of small, but you won't need a lot of room and you're not going to be here very long. So how's this? And I said, it looks fine. He said, just for your information, it's sort of the cross-haul of the executive office building right across the corner is the president's hideaway office. I said, all right. I'll be here at 8 o'clock Monday morning. That was a start. And then your TDY of two or three weeks turned into staying through the entire Nixon administration and then becoming deputy chief of staff for the Ford administration. Correct. So either you didn't get your work done or you hung on quite a lot. Well, I was a complicated issue, Jeff. Certainly was. Now I should add, as we're going to go back to full screen, if the AV people will take us back to full screen, the four of us, Bobby and Bill and Jim and I were, well, Bobby, Bill and I are all currently board members of the Nixon Foundation and Jim just retired as chairman. So the only person not currently on the Nixon Foundation or immediately passed is Ed Harper, but he lives in Florida and can be forgiven for that. But Ed played such a significant role in putting it all together. Now, if you will recall, when Ed was explaining how he got there, he mentioned the name of Andy Rouse. Andy was at the Bureau of the Budget and then worked for the consulting firm Arthur D. Little. Correct. And then brought back in to help with executive organization and he became the deputy of the Ash Council and then ultimately became the full-time executive director of the Ash Council. The Ash Council was established early in the administration to help reorganize and rationalize this burgeoning executive branch. And if we go back to the next PowerPoint slide, the AV folks will take us back, we will see the members. This is the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization. And it was headed by Roy Ash of Latin Industries. That's why it's called the Ash Council. But also members were John Connolly, who was four times governor of Texas as a Democrat. This is how Nixon met Connolly. Frederick Cappell, who was chairman of AT&T, Dick Padgett, who was founder of Crescent McCormick and Padgett, a very, very prominent consulting firm. George Baker, who was dean of Harvard Business School and a gentleman named Walter Thayer, who had been past president of the New York Herald Tribune. This was a heavy group of people. And their job was to help rationalize the organization and management of the executive branch. If we go to the next slide, AV, go to the next slide. There. The executive directors were Murray Camero and Andy Rouse, but Andy was deputy and then executive director. So he was there throughout. There is no Ash Council report as a single entity. There's a series of 14 different recommendations. And I gave you the site here. You can get it right off the National Archives. But they're responsible for the creation of the Office of Telecommunications Policy, the creation of the Domestic Counseling OMB, and then the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And then you can read their various memos on rationalizing the organization. The one we're most concerned with today is dated October 17th of 1969. And it discusses how the president deserves the ability to influence the policies throughout the executive branch. And they suggested the creation of what they call the Office of Executive Management and the creation of the Domestic Policy Council. And all of their memos, those are the two names they use and they justify it. They met with the president in August of 1969. We thought we would have Andy with us today, but he's 94. He remains a dear friend, but he said he just couldn't do this program. So I'm parroting Andy's words. They met with Nixon out at San Clemente on August 20th and pitched him on their ideas. He gave tentative approval. So they submitted this far more formal memo on October 17th. And that mutated into a presidential message to the Congress dated May. I have it here in my pages. I have all the paperwork. March 12th, 1970 was a formal admission, submission to the Congress of reorganization plan number two of 1970. And at this point, the Domestic Policy Council was formerly named the Domestic Council. And I'm told it's because the National Security Council, its counterpart didn't have the word policy in the name and they wanted to parallel that. So the National Security Council was created in 1947 and consisted of sector of state and defense and the CIA and the Treasury. The Domestic Council consisted of the entire cabinet except state and defense and the post office. Now, they never meet as a whole. They would work on particular issues in cabinet committees. And while we talk about the Domestic Council, most of the work was done by the staff, the Domestic Council staff, that supervised the assimilation of policy recommendations and the submission of policy papers to the president. The organization plan went through, the Bureau of the Budget became the Office of Management and Budget. The Domestic Council was created out of a whole cloth. And what we're gonna do in turn is talk about each of those. But we're gonna go now to the next slide, which is on the Domestic Council. And I'm gonna leave that up for a minute and Ed Harper was actually there and got a running start on this because he was doing Domestic Council work in June. Confident they would come into effect on July 1st. Ed, do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Yes, be happy to that. The Mason Domestic Council was pretty much in place before the legislation was finished. And so under John's leadership, we developed a series of position papers. In fact, a whole presentation, which John and I gave to the president in San Clementi. And it was paired with a presentation by Henry Kissinger in the National Security Council staff. They went first, took up about a day with their presentation. We went second and spent a day talking about the domestic issues and what our recommendations were. John Erickman and the Domestic Council's recommendations were the president's priorities for the coming year. And in fact, these priorities pretty much held up as the agenda, the domestic agenda for the Nixon administration in its first term. So I think that in many ways, this was the realization of the model that John Erickman and the president had hoped to create. Now let me just let me interrupt for a minute because I wanna dispose of this slide. We show you on the slide the technical leadership for under Nixon and Ford, but we're really only gonna talk about two people who were so key at the beginning. John Erickman, who is the original director and Ken Cole. Ken has shown down at the bottom as being deputy director and then ultimately he succeeds Mel Laird as actual director. But Laird was pretty much a figurehead and the real work, the seminal work was done by John and Ken. I think all of us remember how the leadership keyed off of John. And I'd like to switch. I mean, the Domestic Council was hugely influential and we'll see in a minute that the folks at OMB were more public and in more visible positions. But the Domestic Council staff was staffing the presidency itself, the president. And they were in the background. Their job was to offer up to the president the policy choices and the rationales. So we'll switch to Bobby and ask Bobby to discuss John Erickman's management style, the way it ran in the beginning, if you would. Because you were working for John even before the Domestic Council. Yes, I was. And of interest to me is that the consolidation and the formalization of a domestic policy staff was very important. But I always wonder what it would have been like if John had not been the executive director because people in the personnel and personal relationships are everything. And John had the conversation with the president and John had the confidence of the president. So even before there was a Domestic Policy Council, John was in charge. There was no question about that. John was the one who determined with the president, obviously under the president's leadership what the priorities were and how we were about to put them into play in the sense of defining them more than just simply an idea or an initiative. How would it actually work? And I will always remember that we had something called Memorandum for the President. And back in those days we had, what do you call the paper when you write something and it comes out underneath? A white paper? Yeah, no white papers, but they were. Papers that were literally papers that were literally had carbon copies. That's what it is, carbon copies. And every Memorandum on a Domestic Policy issue would be eventually entitled Memorandum to the President for the president. But before we go to the president, it would go through a very elaborate system, again, starting before I even got there, which was August 1969. And a number of those Memorandum to the president were sent back by John before they ever reached the president because he felt that they hadn't been properly vetted by the cabinet departments or that the cabinet members had not had their adequate say. And so I would send them back and tell the cabinet member, you have till X, Y or Z time to put in your input as to what you think about this initiative. And whether you agree or disagree, and John was exceptionally good in the Memorandum to the president that eventually went in under his signature to have the views of everybody with an interest in that subject matter represented. And also with, you know, agreed or disagree. And so the head of HEW could disagree with the head of HUD. And that would all be reflected in the memo so that when the president saw it, he knew where every relevant member of his cabinet was on any particular topic. So there weren't any surprises. If I could add, this paralleled the way the National Security Council operated. They had two sorts of memos, National Security Study Memorandum and National Security Decision Memorandum. And it was when Nixon first got together with Kissinger, he said, I want a National Security Council that runs like Eisenhower's. So let me introduce you to General Goodpaster and describe the way it was done when I was vice president. And what they would do, the foreign affairs decisions were made on paper. There was none of this personal pitch. And the memos consisted of four parts. What's the issue? Why do we have to decide? What are the president's options? And what do people think that the president respects? Think about these options. And that where Bobby said, you know, HEW could disagree with HUD. But the issue that John was pioneering on the domestic side was being sure everybody was heard fairly, but in writing. Nixon had sat through all these meetings of the Urban Affairs Council. When- I wasn't gonna do it again. And Arthur Burns were debating all kinds of stuff, but no decisions were made because they couldn't agree on nomenclature or options. And John came up with this wonderful idea. Why don't we do it in writing? That's what Nixon preferred anyway. So Bobby, you're saying he was doing that before- Oh, he was doing it before the domestic policy council existed. He was doing it from the very beginning. And initially the emails or the memorandums would be memorandum for John Ehrlichman. And John, a lot of that was on paper as well, though there were committees that met throughout the cabinets and throughout the departments on topics. But it would often be back from John to the cabinet members saying, okay, one last shot, what do you think? Or I need this more vetted out or I need this more thoughtful, more of a thoughtful response. And the other part of it was that under each of those four sections you described, the president was asked to approve, disapprove, see me. And you'd have, you'd get emails back from or memory copy the, not the Xerox, but the carbon paper copy back, which would say, signed by RN approved, RN disapproved, RN see me. And that was for each of the specific subsets of the topic that you were making a decision on and we were making a decision on. So you then had follow-up emails from to the president saying, okay, this is topic that you did not like an answer for. You wanted to have a better discussion. Here are some more options. So John actually was very inclusive of his cabinet. And I jokingly say his cabinet because in many ways it was John Ehrlichman's cabinet in that every domestic policy step member, when you got to the formalized domestic policy, each person on the domestic policy step of a certain level had a cabinet member that they liaisoned with. So if it was the secretary of HEW, he had to go through and I can't remember who that would have been back in the early 70s before Jim Kavanaugh, but they had to go through that person in order to get to see John Ehrlichman. So it was a very stratified system, but it worked and it worked well. Except in the case is, pardon? I was asking Ed Harper to chime in. I would just chime into this extent that I think the written memoranda laid out, as Bobby said, is a powerful tool to discipline thought of everybody who's involved. So there's not a lack of clarity as to anybody's position because in the end you've got to say yes or no or write in exactly what you would do instead. And I think that was certainly in line with the president's thinking in mode of thought because he was famous yellow tablets, he would sit down and go through and seriously look at these memoranda and the attachments to them. And he was in some ways an intellectual or a very good lawyer at heart that he knew the case very well as a result of these memoranda. And I think they were a great aspect of the Nixon administration. And the other reason, if I may, Nixon didn't like personal salesmanship. No. He wasn't a back slapper. He didn't think policy ought to be made because someone had a more pleasant personality. He was like a judge. He wanted to see the brief so he could think about it. And Ed is absolutely right. It is a big effort to put something into writing to make it clear and succinct. I mean, those memos, the cover memo was very short with attachments if the president wanted to learn more. But we used to say it took six months for a new member of the domestic council to learn how to prepare a written submission because it had to be absolutely objective. Anybody can load a memo. But the striving on the domestic council was, you know, Nixon didn't care what I thought. What he wanted to do was, me in particular, but he wanted to understand the issue. Well, go ahead, Ed. I was gonna say kind of the ultimate of an example of some of the decision papers we got was Martin Anderson, who worked for Arthur Burns, had office next to mine. So he and I talked a lot about policy analysis, things like that, presentation of the president. And he said, you know, we challenged HUD on one of its programs, the junk automobile program. Here we were spending millions of dollars to get junk cars off the streets. And let me show you what they've sent us as justification for the program. And Martin had two huge cardboard boxes in his office and they were filled with three-ring notebooks with photographs in it. You open the notebook and there's a picture of a junk car parked by a curb in some metropolitan area. You turn the page and it's gone. That was the proof that HUD was offering as the effectiveness of the junk auto program. Turn the page and they're gone. Well, you need to remember if I could, when Nixon took office, January of 1969, he was opposed by every single institution in Washington. The Congress had been in Democrat hands since the depression. All of the congressional staff, almost all of the federal bureaucracy, all of the media, all of the law firms, you couldn't find a Republican because they'd been out of power so long. And Nixon's got all these ideas and the question was, how on earth does he cause his government, his executive branch to respond? And the first issue, and it's put forth by the domestic council, by the ash council, is you've got to have clear policy directives. And you've got to have inclusion on how you set them, Bobby. Okay, and I was just going to say, I don't want to leave the impression that John didn't fully analyze all different policy initiatives. He had lots of committees and working groups where he sat around the table with cabinet members and discussed issues. It was the final step when it went to the president, which it had to show exceptional discipline and where it had to show very clearly, this is our decision points. We're at the decision time, guys, and you have to decide where you're gonna go. There's also in each of those four sections that you discussed, Jeff, you'd have to have a pro-section and a con-section. So not overall, did a cabinet member have a chance in writing within this memo to say I agree or disagree, but for each section, they could give their own pros and their own cons. So the president had a broad view of what everybody thought. And just to clarify, the statement of the issue is very key. It's the issue that they took over the BIA building and we got to go rush them to get them out, or is the issue how we've treated Indians for the past 100 years? Correct. Why do I have to decide? Because Nixon was big on not deciding too early. He only had a certain number of major decisions he was gonna be making, he didn't wanna waste any. And then, of course, you get the full presentation of the options. Now, I wanna get to Kavanaugh for a second because this, I think, illustrates how influential the Domestic Council became. Jim, you told a story once that I want you to repeat that shortly after you got there, up came this issue about the war on cancer. And the rest of us were staffing the State of the Union and somehow this idea reached the top very quickly. Well, it did. The president had a birthday party for an old friend of his by the name of Elmer Boomst. Elmer took him aside at the birthday party in the White House and said, I just want you to know that the scientific community that I come to talk to me to see me and said there's a great opportunity to expand the knowledge that we have about the fundamental understanding of cancer, but it's gonna require some frontal money and I hope you take a look at it. And with that, a note came out and I think it went eventually to N. Cole and sent it over to me and said, we all talk about this and we did. And I said, well, I'll call Elliot Richardson and we'll get someone from the answer rooms to it and we'll get right on it. This was about 10 days before that year State of the Union message. And we put together a program, had outside people talking about it inside consultation and send it up with a decision memo that you referred to Bobby that the president had to take a look at and checked off what he was gonna do when he did. And he made a decision that he was gonna put an extra $100 million into the basic research and cancer research program. Help us for a second with Elmer Bob's position. Pardon me? What was Elmer Bob's position? What was he had? What organization? Well, Elmer had a number of positions. He had one time head of the U.S. operation for Hoffner Oates, the pharmaceutical operation. He founded the Water Lambert Company. He was a founding member of the American Cancer Society. Took a long interest in cancer research and had become a friend of the vice president when he was vice president and that continued on through the presidency. Okay, and then I want you to, I want you to talk about your chat with Bill Sapphire. Well, the president made his decision on, I don't know, Tuesday or Wednesday when I heard about it. I saw the paper with the check off and the mark and about two hours later, a fellow appeared at my door there at the corner of the ELB wing and knocked and came in and said, I'm Bill Sapphire. And I said, great to meet you. And I, of course, knew who he was. And he said, I'm helping the president with a state union message and he had an actual draft of it there. And he said, the president would like to include something about his cancer program. I mean, I understand you're working on it. I said, I am, what would you like? He said, well, I need a paragraph or two to fit in there. And I said, well, let me go to work on it. He said, one day you need it. He said, well, it's two o'clock now and I'm gonna see the president again at four o'clock. I said, all right. So I put on the phone and worked with a couple of people and put together a paragraph or two and Bill came back and took the paragraph and said, fine. I said, now you understand that hasn't gone through in the clearance process. He said, well, it's gonna go through the only clearance process accounts when I walk across the hall. And with that he left and that was a Thursday evening. State of the Union message was gonna be at seven, I think it was nine o'clock Friday evening. President was gonna go to the Capitol and do it live. And I did not see another draft of the speech. Friday went by. I left to go back home about, I guess, 637 o'clock. Thought, well, I better watch this address and see if by chance there's gonna be any mention of it. And, well, behold, the president started at nine o'clock. About 9.30 he came to this section and there was the cancer program that he announced. And that address was to be on like six great goals and revenue sharing and moving power from the federal establishment back to the states and to the communities. And that was hopefully gonna be the major impact of it. The next morning I showed up in the West Executive Avenue parked my car and someone showed me the headline of the New York Times and topped the fold and a story about the cancer program. And I turned around, Paul O'Leal was walking across the avenue and I said, quite a story. And he said, yeah, quite a story, quite a clearance process. And with that we talked about it and everything went out fine. But it was a good example of how when the president has initiatives he wants to move along fairly quickly. Well, John used to lecture us as domestic council members that our job was to get the government out of the way of good ideas. That you get it tossed over to the bureaucracy and you'd never hear from it again. And they wanted to pick, we did roughly the same thing on drug abuse treatment. I mean, we had a good idea and we ran with it and had full White House support on doing it and it worked out rather well. Well, this was a good example of it, Jeff, because the president very strongly felt that he wanted the cancer program responsible in one person and that one person would be appointed by the president. But he didn't want to see it lost in the bureaucracy that he felt that one of the things that had to be done was the goals had to be clearly set out and a program had to be identified and the funds had to be allocated to that program. That's what happened. I remember one other thing about Ehrlichman and his staff was the admonition toward creativity and new ideas. And people, John was open to new ideas. They didn't have to come from just his own staff. And I remember one instance of someone, they happened to be in congressional relations and he actually hung around outside in the hallway of the second floor of the West Wing so he could run into Ehrlichman by chance. He couldn't get an appointment, but he could run into Ehrlichman by chance and share this germ of an idea. And John was like that. John was approachable. He wasn't highfalutin and unduly formal or anything like that, a fine sense of humor but really supported his staff, believed in his staff and was looking for innovation and different answers. Lyndon Johnson was a legislative tactician and he'd gotten 65 bills through that constituted the great society but lots of them were just throwing money at a problem. And in that era, nobody cared who was gonna get credit because the Democrats had two thirds majorities in both houses and the committee chairman wasn't elected by the committee. The committee chairman had incredible power so you could go to see a chairman and say, look, this isn't a budget issue. You've already got $20 million, you're spending on this but we think it could be more efficient. And the chairman had no interest in stopping that at all because it wasn't a fight over credit. If it was really a good idea, you could sell it. And that was a much happier time, Bobby. Now I was just gonna say, John actually was a huge, big teddy bear. He liked people, he loved creativity, he loved inclusivity. And what Jim was talking about in the cancer war reminded me precisely what happened in Native American policy. The president had decided personally, he wanted to redefine the relationship between the United States government and Native American tribes. And he was gonna do it and he did do it and everybody on the domestic policy or the domestic policy staff kind of left out it a little bit and at the 730 meetings they would say, oh, what do you even do now? What are you gonna do now? But the day after the president had the Tows Public People in the cabinet room to present his new Native American policy, it was the next morning above the fold on the first page of the New York Times and said Richard Nixon redefines Native American policy. And the one person, two people who believed in it in addition to the president were John and Len Garment and me, obviously. But the president said, run with it. He took a lot of risks. He had the senator from New Mexico, senior Senator Clinton Anderson, who was a piece of work say he was gonna vote against the anti-ballistic missile treaty if we dare return Blue Lake to the Tows People. And it's not printable nor is it sayable on a public forum but the president said, you go tell Clinton Anderson to go himself because we're gonna do this because it's right. And so thinking outside the box and being creative was one of John's really big suits. I'm gonna focus on this, Bob because I've heard the story but I wanna told again. Indians were considered these separate nations and we had treaties with the Indians. Correct. And these treaties hung over and they were inconvenient because we'd given them oil land and lots of land and all kinds of other things. So what had been the policy before Nixon was called assimilation. That's right. And we were going to get rid of the Indian problem by paying them to leave their rights, sell their birthright, move out of the treaty and get some money to go into the center city and live in the slums of a big city and become assimilated in the rest of society. And this was federal policy. Yes. And Nixon came and helped by Bobby but I accused her of majoring in Indian affairs at Yale Law School. But Nixon said, we can't do that to these people. They have treaty rights to be treated with respect and he reversed that policy which was not only correct but astounding in retrospect that it had been pursued. Absolutely astounding. And it was a policy of self-determination rather than termination or assimilation. And you still, to this day, if you go up to Taos and you go into the Kivas and you go into the homes on the Pueblo you will see photos of Richard Nixon on their mantle pieces because they have such a continued have such a respect for what he did. And he changed the direction of a major, major hundreds of years of destruction to do something right because he knew it was right. And he didn't care what anybody else thought. He was gonna do it and he did it. I would add, he always spoke about his football coach at college. Yes, his football coach in college. I've been to the store many times. Yes, it was Coach Newman. A guy named Chief Newman. Chief Newman from La Jolla. Yeah, from La Jolla. He would have coached at a major university but for the fact of discrimination against Indians. Yeah, and he thought that was very interesting. He had lots of papers buying about Newman. It was so intriguing. He was a huge influence on 10 years of football players. Nixon was too slight of Bill to make the team. He never stopped trying. I mean, he fought like mad but he wasn't physically strong enough. So he managed to... He always talked about Newman and the inspiration and the lectures and all this kind of stuff. And what came through to me when I was doing this work and this was years later after I left the White House Chief Newman didn't remember him. He had coached a lot of kids and been a big influence on their lives but after the first 300 students, they all meshed together but he never once took credit for being that kind of influence on Nixon. He would speak in general terms and he wasn't eager to tell people he couldn't remember him but he wasn't gonna claim credit for recognizing him early on. I mean, that takes a lot of stature when the president is going on and on and on about how influential you were and you're not going awashucks. You know, it was really nothing I'm doing. And it was a tribute to his stature. I wanna switch because we didn't practice this. You can make just one quick point and then I'll let you switch. And that is that the president really did believe in self-determination. And if you draw a parallel to historically black universities, the president put a lot of money into historically black colleges because he believed that not everybody had to fit into the same mold and that you needed to respect differences. And so again, it was the concept of self-determination and integration but not forced to simulation. And he carried that over to higher education when he really put his money where his mouth was. And we're gonna switch back to that when we get to L.A. and B because that was George Shultz's promise to confidence. But I wanna focus on the environment. John was a land use lawyer in a firm in Seattle when he wasn't helping the president to campaign. Remember, John was in the campaign. None of us were. But the, oh, Bill, okay. I didn't know. Well, we'll get to you in just a second. Let me finish my thought on the environment before I forget it. John was huge on the environment and it was a budding issue. It was not huge. It wasn't in the campaign. It was Rachel, whatever, Silent Spring and the first Earth Day. But we take today huge credit for the administration being so enlightened on the environment. And from my viewpoint, it was all John. It was John who pushed the president, John who made the points. I don't think any of us worked on that though. Jim, Ed. No, I watched it. I saw what John Whitaker was doing on the staff side. Yeah, Whitaker was the one who was in charge of the staffing of it. Right. And Helen worked for him in that area and so did the other White House fellow. We're trying to get his name earlier. He came from 3M. Meet God. Oh, Judd Dixon? No, no, that was IBM. See, all these fellows pass in there. No, I'm not sure his name was there. Well, maybe not. His wife's name was Gay. I remember that. I would see him at all the reunions, all the fellows in the union. He became ultimately vice chairman of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. And he did the environment. But there was a huge amount of environmental legislation, not just creation of EPA, but the clean air, clean water, marine mammal, and ocean dumping. The creation of NOAA was every bit as influential in the environment as EPA. Okay. We've been holding off of the complement of OMB. And what I'd like to do is I have AV put up the slide on the OMB management. There we go. And the first director of OMB is George Schultz, who came over from the Department of Labor. And his, if you drop down to deputy directors, his deputy director was Cap Weinberger, followed by Fred Malek and then Paul O'Neill. And I really want to focus on those four because I think they set the tone. And you remember what happened? The domestic council was supposed to help the president to set the policy, the president's decisions, but then OMB was supposed to effectuate it. And it was called in the Ash Council memos the Office of Executive Management, but the decision was made if you were going to transform the Bureau of the Budget, you needed to keep the name budget. And they said afterwards, we take the slide down and go back to the full screen now, they said afterwards that it was the money that OMB controlled that gave that agency their slack, their swag. I mean, they talked management to you or blew in the face, but when you're withholding funds until certain things happen, it gets people's attention. So let's go if we could, first at Harper on the idea of Office of Management and Budget and then to Bill Kilburg on George Schultz as a manager. Well, the Office of Management and Budget was seen, I think by the people from the Bureau of the Budget as well, this was one more incarnation of the Bureau of the Budget. It's kind of expanded and recognized something that we did at the Bureau of the Budget and that is we have big influence on management. And so they weren't too unhappy with the role because they knew whatever else happened, it was still going to be the President's mark generated through a fairly traditional process, but it was the Domestic Council working with the Office of Management and Budget coming up with that mark. And- And they had, this isn't a rehearse, so we gotta be careful. There was a guy whose only job was the budget, the federal budget. Sam Cohn, he's- Sam was- They banned smoking in the office building so he would eat cigars if you want them. And they would rank the intensity of the debate over the money by whether it was a three cigar meeting or a four cigar meeting. Sam would sit there and chew, he couldn't smoke it. He'd surely spit out parts of the cigar, but he was the, I think the acknowledged expert. And then there really was an Office of Executive Management in the old VOV. And remember that was run by Dwight Dink. Yeah. I don't think it had nearly the influence that the agency had, but the agency was pretty much the cream of the civil service crop when we got there. I mean, those were top people. They were, they were absolutely top people, tremendous experience. And even though some people on the domestic council and the White House staff questioned their loyalty, I worked with them all the time and I didn't because I saw that they were really implementing the president's program. I mean, Dwight Dink, he still says the greatest accomplishment he ever had was getting rid of the new communities program. And of course, he had played a role in birthing it in the first place. There was this great quote, I think it came from Paul O'Neill who said, if the president wants a pig on every porch at three o'clock in the afternoon every day, our job is to figure out how to do it. And that was kind of how the OMB people saw their role. Bill, let's go to you and talk about George Shultz and his management style. Happy to do it. I would note that, and first off, I'm one of many mentees of George Shultz. He mentored a lot of folks during his very lengthy and distinguished career. I think it's important to note that George and John Ehrlichman got along very, very well. I had a mutual respect like each other. I'm the beneficiary of a gift from John Ehrlichman some years ago where he gave me a copy of a sketch he had done. John used to, John drew a lot. He sketched at meetings. And he had a meeting, one meeting with George Shultz and Shultz's office. Shultz had a clock on his wall, an old clock. And John sketched the clock. And knowing my relationship to George, he gave it to me as a gift some many years ago which I framed and still cherish. So they had a very, very good relationship. I think Shultz would say that in terms of his professional life he was most influenced by two sets of experiences. One in the United States Marine Corps and the other as an economist, Dean of the Chicago Business School, labor, arbitrator and mediator. Those kind of all go together. On the Marine Corps side, you saw it. And then Shultz was very soft-spoken. He had a very strong sense of right and wrong and he would express his views very calmly. You have to listen to him very, very carefully. There were, as he said, no empty threats. He used to say, empty bluffs are not a good idea. They carried over later to a new Secretary of State but in all of his roles, Shultz was very down to earth and very soft-spoken but very clear and very brief. He had a view of the federal bureaucracy. He said they're not to be feared, but they are to be led. He did not believe in big staffs. He used to say that the people who have a line organization are my staff. So at the Labor Department, it was the assistant secretaries. At OMB, it would be the associate directors. He let them structure their organizations in a way, again quoting from him, that he said was suitable to them so long as it's also suitable to me. He had not, didn't believe in too many direct reports. This was something he did at Labor very early on. We took over from Bill Wurz who had been, Bill Wurz had been Secretary of Labor and in the Johnson administration. Shultz and Wurz were good friends. They'd known each other for many years. Wurz had taught at the University of Chicago Law School. They had worked together across business school, law school lines, but he had a very different view of things than Wurz did. And he streamlined, reorganized the department and streamlined it so that there were much, many fewer direct reports to the Secretary. Shultz was not political. He got criticized in the early days at Labor because so many of his appointees were Democrats. Jim Hodson, his deputy secretary had been a Democrat. Libby Kohn, the women's bureau, Jeff Moore was an independent but not a Republican. Arnie Weber, who'd been his assistant secretary for Manpower and came with Shultz over to OMB to head the management side, were all Democrats. One of the reasons that Larry Silverman got to the position he did as solicitor at a very young age was because Larry was a Republican and one of very, very few. Shultz didn't look at political party, but he did look at ideology. He was very, very close to Arthur Burns. He had worked for Burns in the Eisenhower administration on the Council of Economic Advisers and he had been very close to Milton Friedman. And Shultz used to say proudly that I'm a Friedmanite. Under his breath, sometimes he would say, not a Friedmaniac, but I am a Friedmanite. That was also his sense of humor. And he had a great faith in markets and that leads me to the discussion of his training at MIT as an economist and his work as an economist. Shultz was, like the president, bought in terms of strategy and he always gave that credit to his being an economist. He said, as an economist, I understand that there's lag time. You do something, but it doesn't happen right away. There's a lag time. You have to be thinking in advance. You have to be thinking in strategic terms and large terms. And when he became secretary in January of 1969, we had a long shore strike going on in the United States on the East Coast and on the Gulf Coast. And Shultz would tell this story many, many times as an example of strategic thinking. The Johnson administration had issued a Taft-Hartley injunction. The injunction had been challenged by the unions, gone all the way up on a fast track to the Supreme Court. Let me interrupt and just explain what the cooling off period is. It's an 80 day cooling off period. And the president has the authority to do that. If he has the authority to do it, if he can show that there's a national emergency. He has to go to court to show there's a national emergency. And it's renewable one time? It's renewable one time. It had expired a few days before Shultz became secretary in January 21st, 1969. So the administration was faced with this strike now taking place. It had been held up because of the injunctions. And it was now the injunctions were off and the strike was gonna occur. And there's a lot of media pressure on the president, a lot of political pressure on the president. Take action, bring them into the White House. Get legislation if you need to. We can't have this strike, it's a national emergency. Shultz went to see president Nixon and he said the Supreme Court is wrong. The Johnson administration was wrong. It is not a national emergency. It's a serious inconvenience. There's gonna be some economic effects but it is not a national emergency. If we bring these folks into the White House, if we force a settlement, it says you will be hanging out to your shingle and saying come here. He said nobody will in any major industry will bargain in good faith. They'll all hold back their final offer, their best offer until they get to the White House. He said, we need to encourage the market to work, the parties to solve their own problem. The president supported him, took a lot of heat for it. Supported Shultz, they did not bring the unions into the White House, they didn't do anything. Said, go ahead and bargain. Few weeks later, the strike was settled. There was never a national emergency. And Shultz would always point to that. He would point to other examples out of his background. He would talk about the Hawthorne experiment. Hawthorne was a general electric plant in Hawthorne, New York. And where an experiment was done, they found that if they increased the lighting in the plant productivity improved, then they found that if they took the lighting out that they had put in productivity improved further. And Shultz said this was because, they said, but Shultz always cited this example, that somebody was paying attention to the workers. Yeah. And Shultz took that as a lesson that you should listen. He said, listen to what the other side has to say. Listen carefully. He said, also he believed that people like to learn. He said, so let's engage in a learning exercise. And he used that very effectively when the president asked him to had an effort on desegregation of Southern schools. This is why he was at OMB. And he had to deal with governors from the Southern states. And you remember, this is 1969, 1970. And we still had secondary schools since the 1954 Brown decision to hadn't changed a whole heck of a lot. And Shultz got the confidence of all of the players because they recognized that he was listening, hearing what they had to say, responding and educating on what the administration was prepared to do, what had to be done. He delivered a strong message as only a former Marine could do it. It was one of Shultz's proudest accomplishments was the peaceful desegregation of the Southern schools. And we have a program, we have a Nixon Legacy program on it featuring George. And they said, we brought in the leadership in the Southern states, individual states. And said, look, it's gonna happen. You can do it easy or you can do it rough, but it's gonna happen. And you're gonna rue the day when you could have done it peacefully and you didn't take advantage of it. By the way, we have some money for you here if you do it our way, because he had an OMB. I think what they did was buy buses, but I'm not positive. Now, let me switch just for a second. Somebody mentioned one other thing in that. That Shultz used to talk about, George would talk about a great deal. While he was in the labor relations world as Dean of the School of Business at the University of Chicago, he co-chaired with Clark Kerr, a automation committee for the Armour Meet Company dealing with displacement of workers as a result of automation. They had to go to a plant in Fort Worth, Texas. The executive from Armour was African-American. They went to check into a hotel. Shultz checked in, Clark Kerr checked in. This fellow went to check in, they said, I'm sorry, we have no more rooms. Shultz said, well, that's all right, he could stay in my room. And the desk clerk objected to that. And Shultz put his foot down. He says, you have more rooms and you're going to find this gentleman a room. He says, we're all leaving. Shultz always pointed to that, not in terms of the pride he legitimately could take in his own actions, but as kind of a rude awakening race relations in the United States. And it was instrumental in the views he developed with regard to affirmative action, the Philadelphia plan when he was Secretary of Labor and his actions and his activities was in regard to desegregation of schools. There's one of those stories we often tell. Let's clarify that just for a second. It wasn't just desegregation of the Southern schools, the Philadelphia plan was desegregation of the Northern trade unions. Right, labor and the continuation of that because the discrimination wasn't just in the South. Well, that's right, it was in the construction trades, skilled trades throughout the United States and when Shultz testified in Congress and he was asked about imposing a quota for the employment of black workers in the construction trades, he said, no, he said, I'm removing a quota. He says, right now there's a quota of zero and mine is to get rid of that quota. Your comment about Hawthorne, the Hawthorne experiment reminds me of something that Don Rumsfeld said, maybe you guys ran into this years ago. He said, whatever you measured will improve. You just have to, unless you measure everything, you just have to be sure you're measuring the right thing because if you're measuring the tons of waste coming out of a plant, that will improve. The product may not be safe or something else may not work right but you need to be very careful when you start measuring stuff. All right, now I wanna make a point on numbers of people. And then I wanna go back to Jim on his appearance before the Congress. I don't have the early headcount but I have come across a 1971 press release from the Nixon White House, April of 1971 that lists all the members of the White House staff, all the members of the National Security Council and all the members of the Domestic Council. And I think it's very instructive because there are 128 members of the White House staff, Congressional Relations, speechwriters, advanced teams and the First Lady staff, just all kinds of people, names that we all remember from the glory days. And there's the list of people from the National Security Council that I don't remember because I worked on domestic affairs but there's 128 on the White House staff, there's 55 on the National Security staff and there's 19 on the Domestic Council, 19. And it's because we were supposed to help John and Ken but the president to decide upon the policy and then it was, we were supposed to follow through but OMB was supposed to execute. I didn't come up with a phone directory or a list of people from OMB but of course it was huge. It was a big, big agency. Now, Jim, having said that we never testified, we were the president's private army, you had an exception. I did. I mentioned earlier the cancer program the president had as one of his priorities. We were working on differences of the program between the House and Senate version. The Senate was in the committee that Ted Kennedy chair. The House version was in a committee that Paul Rogers, a congressman from Florida here who was quite interested in health and programs and legislation. And I had worked with Congressman Rogers and Anchor Nelson, a Republican member from Minnesota to collaborate on what the president would wanted in his final legislative package. And he wanted to get it done that year in the legislation we were in now early December. And I thought I had it pretty well agreed with the House and I was having lunch in the White House mess one day. The phone rang, my secretary said, Congressman Rogers on the phone. I said, well, I'm sitting around some people. Can I call him back? She said, he wants to talk to you right now. If you want your legislation today's the day and you need to talk to him. So I said, what can I do for you? He said, we're in executive session. We're getting ready at four o'clock to go meet our counterparts from the Senate. Ted Kennedy's got some things that he wants that none of us agree with, but I need some help to what the president would agree to. He said, you gotta come up and meet with the Republican members. He said, I'll promise you there'll be no transcript. It'll be an executive session. So I said, all right. And flashed through my mind, executive privilege. Watergate was going on. People were not going up to testify. And I just decided we were gonna get this legislation. And I knew Rogers enough that if he said he was gonna keep a confidentiality would. So I said, I'll be up, hung up the phone, went around the corner of the motor pool. Said, I don't wanna go up to the house. He gave me the number of the house conference room over in the house side. I went in and he had the whole committee there. He said, I just, I promised you we're gonna keep this an executive session and keep it between us, but we've got seven points that we need to go down through. And he said, my members will confirm if we share the presidents behind you. So we went through point by point. I gave him what the president's position was. He said, we've got just what we need. We'll go over and wish us well and see what we can do. So they went over and had their meeting. He called me up later and said, all the Senate succeeded to solve what we wanted to do. And with that, they passed out the bill the following week and that was December 23rd in 1971 in the East room, the president signed it. So we call that back channel. Back channel communication. Back channel for sure. But you can measure what was going on with Watergate and executive privilege. Congress wanted to get certain members of the White House up to testify how we were in it. And what went through my mind is, do I call Bill Timmons and talk to him about it? Do I call the council's office? I knew in a minute that if I had done that, the answer probably would have been, well, let's talk about it. Let's think about it. And as I said, I had the confidence that Paul Rogers and Akron Elson both were dealing with a straight deck and they wanted this legislation passed. And so that's what happened. So it came to be. Well, you said the magic word, you said Watergate. I was intimately involved in the president's defense and I've done a lot of research on the special prosecutors materials since and I wrote three books and it's my obsession. I really liked because he's passed away, John Ehrlichman. I just thought the world of him. And I don't think anybody got shafted worse than John in the issue. He wasn't in the chain of command. He did not do anything demonstrably evil. And it just ruined everything. I mean, it ruined his life. It ruined his marriage. It ruined his relationship with his kids. I really worry about that because I don't think anything close to justice was done. I'm very biased in this and this isn't the place to debate this but I think the one who was most at fault, there was a break in the break in people were gonna get punished, not worry about that. But the one who ran the cover up, I think to protect himself when it collapsed and it should have collapsed then pointed the finger at others who the Congress and the press were bigger fish. And John's difficulty was that he was the bigger fish. Bobby, do you have more to say? Well, I was just gonna say that you're absolutely right and going back again to Native Americans, the Native American community was so grateful to John for what he had done in redefining Indian relations that they went to the judge that the 15 tribes of the New Mexico Pueblos went to the judge and asked the judge if John could please instead of serving time in prison could please do community service for the Pueblos. The judge said no, but John was just so overwhelmed by that that after some long discussions that Bill and I and he had, he decided to move with his wife, Christine, to New Mexico and they moved to Santa Fe and we got to know him even better as a friend over 15, 20 years and he immersed himself in the community. He continued to work with the Pueblos on environmental issues, on legal rights issues, on water rights issues. And he did have a second marriage to Christie. He did have a wonderful young son and Michael who was the same age as my children were who is now my goodness, some of them in this early 40s. He reconciled with his own kids and he died way too young at age 73 in Atlanta. But I know deep in his heart that his respect for Richard Nixon, for the initiatives that Richard Nixon believed in and that he believed in and that Richard Nixon enabled him to push for, he, John Ehrlichman to push forward is something that was obviously the central part of his life. And so I guess we're near to closing. I just wanna say that to me, John Ehrlichman had a profound effect on my life and I hope on the life of everyone else because he was just an extraordinary individual. And I'll tell you one last, I know you're sick and tired of hearing about Indians but I'll tell you one last Indian story because it emphasized the role of OMB and George Schultz in relationship to domestic counsel and the kind of deference they needed to show us. Two story, quick stories. One, there were two assistant directors of OMB who hated the Native American policy, they knew Native American policy and were determined to undercut it and they did everything they could budget-wise and structurally to just deep six it. And finally their boss, Don Rice came over and saw me and said, Bobby, this was the president's initiative. We are not gonna stand in his way and I've told these two guys to stand down and shut up. That was number one. Number two, in the spring of 1971, there was the Alaskan Native Land Claims Settlement Act which would provide 44.5 million acres of land back to the Alaskan Natives as well as $962 million in cash through a royalty system. $962 million in cash was real money back then. And the president had called Erlichman and just Erlichman into the Oval Office and he'd said, well, I don't know. Well, John says he called him into the Oval Office and he said, I want this to be settled. I want it to be settled now and fairly and I need to get the Alaskan Pipeline built and I can't do until we solve this so we're gonna solve it and we're gonna solve it justly. Erlichman called into his office, Roger Morton, who was Secretary of the Interior, George Schultz, myself, Don Rice, Brad Patterson and said, this is what the president wants to do. Do any of you have any objections? And nobody, not a single person in that room had a single objection, though no less than two hours before that, Roger Morton had me on the phone screaming at me about what a terrible possible settlement this was and how the president should never be part of it. But as soon as John said, this is what the president wants, that was it. There's no more discussion. What's unique is John didn't have say it very often but when John said it, it was true. That's right. And well, I'm not even sure that John, I asked John after that, I said, John, did you really go and ask the president and he had this twinkle in his eye and he said, for me to know and you to think, it didn't matter, John was the president in this sense. And when John said something, everybody knew that that was what the decision had been made and that was what we were gonna do. And it was the domestic policy council that was ruling. Okay, we've got about 10 minutes left are NASA narrow people. Tom, can you feed me questions? I don't see them on my screen. Ah, there's one. There have been no questions so far from the audience so I'm gonna add something at this point. Thank you, Tom. I've done reunions of the policy planning staff. None of us except Bill somehow snuck into the campaign but none of us were campaigners. We were people who helped to govern and it's people who do well in the campaign aren't necessarily qualified to help run the executive branch. And so the reunions I have and I was in law school like Bobby and Bill so I was not involved in the campaign. And so I remember as my closest colleagues and friends, people from the domestic council and people from the office presidential appointees and by default some people from the national security council who were keeping us all safe. So I've been hosting annual reunions of what we call the White House policy planning staff for almost 40 years. We're the only White House staff that has regularly scheduled annual reunions of the governance people. And make a possible exception for the NSC people. But I think to a single person, everybody in that reunion group would say that John Ehrlichman was the one they liked the most that they felt treated people fairly more so than and was most approachable than anybody else. We, the proud, the few, we banned the brothers including Bobby, we had the best jobs in the world. It was fun to come to work. They were tough issues. But John understood the lawyer's admonition that lawyers work with each other. They don't work for each other. And that was very clear in the domestic council work. And John wasn't afraid of letting you sign your own memo and get credit for your own research. I mean, he may have the cover memo, but if you wrote the definitive memo, it went in with your name on. And that was unique on the White House staff too. Now we're gonna, in the last six minutes, we're gonna go ring around the rosy and get final thoughts from each of you if you care to contribute. And we're gonna start with Bobby because she's the most articulate. It was an honor and a privilege to serve in the Nixon administration, to serve for President Nixon and especially to work for and with John Ehrlichman. I love you John, we always will. Thank you. Bill, you follow your wife? Oh, my wife. But I would second everything she said in it because I'm a great admirer of John Ehrlichman as well. And a great admirer, of course, of George Schultz who played such a large role in my career. Just as a footnote, because I did work on the campaign, I worked with people who came into the administration. I worked on the research staff. So there was, I was the gopher for Pat Buchanan, Will Sapphire, Alan Greenspan, Arton Anderson, the whole crew of really exceptional people who did come into the administration in a variety of positions. I was the guy that went to the library and did the research for them. That allowed them to write the position papers and speeches and so on that they did for the president during the campaign. I wasn't the only one, but I was certainly one of the gopher's. Go to Jim. Well, I didn't work directly with John. I saw not a lot of them, but I had great respect for the organization he put together and people that he had, namely his deputy, Ken Cole, who I worked with daily and some days hourly on key issues. And John kept to his word, he delegated to Ken what Ken was gonna do in the health area. And Ken was just a superb guy to work with and a great member of the president's staff. It doesn't get mentioned a lot, but I just thought the world of him thought he was a great member of the staff and was a privilege to work with him and all of the people on this call. Thank you, Edward. We're gonna let you have a final word. Thank you. That I echo Bobby's thoughts about John Ehrlichman as a man who was a great man and had great love for other people. And I think many people loved him for all the things that he stood for. And it reminded me, Bobby's talking about John's time in Mexico that Lucy and I visited him and his wife they're at their home and he said, you see this big picture window and the picture window kind of looked around a tree and you could see this beautiful valley of the town and great expanse of New Mexico. And I said, I guess that was a tough decision, John, not to take that tree out so you get an advantage of full view. And he said, no, that was an easy decision that I talked when we were looking at the house and thinking about buying it. I talked to a guy and he said, you know, how much we charge me to take that tree out? And he said, I don't think you're gonna wanna do that. Trees 350 years old. Wow. And it was only about six feet high. Fast into Mexico. He said, no, we gotta leave it there. Well, that's super. I think in retrospect, I looked through all these names when I was helping prepare for this. It was a time of giants. I mean, the Nixon people brought in really toweringly professional, effective people. They had great leadership. Not just John and George, but even the president himself, he wanted to do the right thing. He felt very strongly about stuff. He was leading, so he wasn't sitting there waiting for proposals. I think he would get up every day and say, we're wasting time. We're not moving forward. So I wanna thank you, the panel participants for joining us for this. I wanna thank the narrow people, Tom Nasdik and his crew for helping to staff us. And we bid our audience now and in the future a good day. The documents we have alluded to at some point will be available and we'll put the links up with the posting of this video. It's a project that's ongoing, but we will do that when we move into the future. So thank you all and to all a good night. Happy-