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Review: What is it to be a Washington insider? Consider this quote ': "? no legal fee can be too high for a large corporation with billions at stake on a phrase in the law ?" Meet Joe Califano: simultaneously General Counsel to the Democratic National Convention and Outside Counsel to the Washington Post during Watergate; and the reason you can't smoke in public.Joe Califano's career as a Washington insider began as a member of the Kennedy administration and continues to this day as that most celebrated but shadowy of creatures, the Washington insider. His book is a very personal account, easily read, of a man who has exercised power and enjoyed himself doing it. His is a quintessentially American not-quite-rags to riches story, the result of hard work and dedication. A heroic figure to many (and quite pleased with himself), Joe Califano is also a card carrying member of the society of arch devils who comprised Liberal America in its pre-Reagan heyday. Raised by a devout family, in a devout milieu, Califano attributes much of his social consciousness to his strict Catholic upbringing; Catholicism takes up a good part of the beginning of the book and a very large part of all of Califano's life; repeatedly woven into the story are the strength his faith gave him and the wrenching conflicts it forced him to face. Switching from the reflexively anti-communistic Republicanism of his family, and while working for Republican Tom Dewey's law firm, Joe's policy instincts were first evident in his early support for Jack Kennedy. Supporting JFK in debates at New York City's Reform Democratic Clubs, he recalls "In all my debates, I was never able to capture a single vote for Kennedy". Which led directly to his becoming one of McNamara's "whiz kids" in the new administration, the springboard for all that followed. He describes a level of intensity and excitement in his first days, in the depths of the Cold War, akin to what was ascribed to the early members of the New Deal administration: idealism, energy, commitment and controversy. A sample of the issues he faced: - Reforming the military administration at the Pentagon
- Army protection of civil rights and enforcement of desegregation as Army Chief Cyrus Vance's special assistant
- Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Assassination plots
- Kennedy burial duties
- Lawyer before an international tribunal on riots in Panama Canal Zone At first reluctant to work for Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination, he came to admire the man's programs and the man himself; because of his intelligence, because of his abilities as a politician, and because Califano passionately believed in The Great Society programs which he was eventually to run as Johnson's domestic policy advisor. If a mentor is someone whose influence is evident throughout later life, Johnson was Califano's mentor. Califano's role working with Johnson was central to the making of who Califano later became; all else was prologue or epilogue. Hate it or love it, Califano was the at the center of the greatest domestic legislative storm of our generation. He loved it: "? to me the public legacy of those years was nothing short of a revolution that saved the Nation ?" Following the 1968 Democratic Convention fiasco (the Chicago 7, Abbey Hoffman, et al) and Nixon's election, all the strains imposed by Lyndon Johnson's divisive social activism and the unpopular war in Vietnam threatened to rip the Democratic Party apart despite its continuing dominance of Congress. The 1972 Democratic Presidential nominating convention was a huge fight with McGovern's anti-war politics vs. Richard Daley's machine politics. These days, the convention is just a party but then it actually chose the candidate and a terrible battle ensued. Just as the Democratic Party seemed to be slipping into its grave, Califano filed a little-noticed lawsuit resulting from a little-noticed break-in at the DNC headquarters which would ultimately result in stoking the fires further but which probably saved the party from destruction, giving it a role as loyally opposed to governmental abuse. When Jimmy Carter became president, he named Califano to head the sprawling Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) where many of LBJ's Great Society programs were located. It had gotten a well-deserved reputation for waste and incompetence and Califano saw it as an opportunity to strike another blow for "his" programs. Califano is openly contemptuous of Carter's na?vet? and felt that success was impossible as a result. Obsessed with detail and not open to compromise, Carter contrasted very unfavorably with LBJ's great skill as a domestic politician. Some of the issues facing HEW Secretary Califano: - Handicapped access
- Title IX collegiate women's sports
- Federally-funded abortions
- Sterilization
- Recombinant DNA
- Fetal Research
- Hospice Califano's greatest contribution and his ultimate demise was his anti-smoking campaign. Commonplace today, no-smoking areas were both unusual and highly controversial then. Califano's differences with Carter and his inner circle led to Califano's resignation in 1979. Carter was looking forward to the 1980 election and he desperately needed the tobacco interests in the South which Califano had alienated.
Califano has been out of the limelight for decades and he describes his displeasure with this state of affairs. He's been making money, doing and repaying favors, getting remarried to a rich socialite; all of which he describes with a style that makes you feel you know him. His restlessness led him finally to retire from the practice of law and devote all of his energies to founding and running the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. He describes his various encounters with the evils of addition, and he has decided to devote his considerable energy and resources to fighting it. Apparently, the Secretary of Health, etc. neglected ever to get a colonoscopy and in 1993 he had bloody stool and now he has a considerably less lengthy colon. Almost immediately thereafter, he also discovered rather advanced prostate cancer. Ten years later, he seems still to be going strong and whatever difficulties he now faces because of his physical problems, they have not impaired his ability to write an interesting book about his exceptional life.
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