Joseph Califano Jr. was once just "a kid from Brooklyn," as he puts it. Eventually, though, he came to play such a crucial role in enacting Lyndon Johnson's social programs that The New York Times Magazine called him "Deputy President for Domestic Affairs." He served under Presidents John F. Kennedy, Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. Between administrations, while representing The Washington Post and the Democratic National Committee, he headed up the lawsuit that revealed the extent of Watergate and shattered the Nixon presidency. As Carter's health, education, and welfare (HEW) secretary, Califano -- formerly a four-pack-a-day smoker -- initiated the nation's first anti-smoking campaign and turned the HEW offices into the first smoke-free government building. In 1992, he founded The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, where he serves as chairman and president.
His memoir, Inside: A Public and Private Life, has just been published by Perseus Books.
How did you arrive at your political philosophy?
As a young, young person, I was essentially a conservative Republican. That was when being conservative meant being anti-communist. My mother was very conservative, very anti-communist. I've always had a strong sense of social justice and a sense that American society was too materialistic. I thought we had an obligation to help poor people that I attribute to the Jesuits.
And then I started to get interested in John Kennedy. He was a marvelous model. He was anti-communist. He expressed a strong sense of social justice, not just with respect to people at home but also with respect to people in the world.
So it evolved from there. I think my sense of the importance of using federal government to help the most vulnerable in our society really came from Lyndon Johnson. I had had a sense of the civil-rights movement when I was in the Pentagon with [Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara, and I had a sense of it even before that, because that was a big issue among liberal Catholics in New York. But the idea of aggressively using the federal government for those Great Society programs -- that came from Lyndon Johnson as much as anybody else.
How did Lyndon Johnson explain your position to you when he brought you onboard?
I was working for Secretary of Defense McNamara. In July of '65, I got a call from [Jack] Valenti or [Bill] Moyers and went over there, and I was offered a job to be [Johnson's] special assistant to handle the legislative program. I was supposed to handle domestic crises and be a utility infielder -- in effect, to be a domestic aide. I came back to the Pentagon, and McNamara said to me, "That's fine, but you've also got to have a role in coordinating economic policy because the war is going to get more expensive and economic policy is going to be very important in the context of funding the Great Society programs."
And I said, "What a job!" And [McNamara] said, "It's not a job. It's not even a job description -- it's just an opportunity with this guy."
I still had not yet met the president. Then I went down to the ranch in Texas. The president was in the pool, and he called me into the water. He was at the deep end, where he could stand. He was 6 feet 3 inches; I'm 5 feet 10 inches. I'm treading water and he's standing, and he started banging on my shoulder and saying, "The transportation system in this country is a mess. We need a transportation department." And he'd hit me and push me down. And he'd say, "We have to show that we can rebuild the cities of America, and we need a program to do that." And then he started saying, "We need a fair housing bill, whether people are black, yellow, white, green, purple, whatever." And with each color, he'd push me down in the water. "They oughta be able to live wherever they want to live, wherever they have the money to live. Can you do all that for your president?" I was gasping for air. I said, "Yes, Mr. President." I had no idea how I was going to do that.
That sort of attitude carried throughout the work you were doing for him.
Get it done -- not tomorrow, not next week. We were in a race against high expectations. Poor people, and particularly black people, had accepted certain things as inevitable. Once they saw the light at the end of the tunnel, they found the situation intolerable. So that was it with respect to everything. Getting Medicare off the ground. The law was passed, but then we had to get it off the ground: We had to get the doctors to agree and get the programs set. We were also working on getting schools desegregated: I was calling mayors and governors around the country to get their reports in.
Today, if a president passes one major law in a Congress, it's a big deal. [George W.] Bush passes the No Child Left Behind Act; Bill Clinton passes welfare reform. In those days, we were passing a hundred laws in each Congress. The first Clean Air [Act], the first Clean Water [Act], the first noise pollution [bill]. The Civil Rights Act of '64, and then the Voting Rights Act in '65 and [the] Fair Housing [Act] in '68. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts. All the consumer laws -- truth in lending, truth in packaging, which were designed to level the playing field because the average American was walking into a supermarket with packages designed by the cleverest, most sophisticated designers and accountants and lawyers.
And all of those programs are still in place with one exception: one of the jobs programs. And the issue with Medicare and most of these programs is not whether to continue them or not. It's how to bring them up to date and, with Medicare, how to put a drug benefit in. With education, it's not whether to continue the aid to elementary and secondary education but how do you do more with it.
The work we did was well-organized, but it was also driven. I mean, Johnson was a revolutionary, and I felt very much I was part of a major revolution in this country.
While you were at HEW, you had to deal with ethical and social issues. How, as a devout Catholic, did you approach these issues?
There are a lot of issues where both God and Caesar claim controlling jurisdiction. And abortion was the first one I faced. These issues come up at two levels. One is, should society permit it? Just allow people to do it if they want to do it? And the second is, if people have a right to do it, do they have a right to have the government pay for it?
Both Carter and I opposed abortion, except where the life of the mother was at stake. And Congress passed a law that permitted abortion in that case, but also in cases of rape or incest, promptly reported. Those were the words of the statute: promptly reported. It was my job to interpret that. This was 1977. We talked to doctors and police and women and what have you, and basically found out that women in 1977 did not report rape or incest, by and large, unless they thought they were pregnant. So I said, "60 days is prompt reporting." The Catholic bishops were very much opposed to that and angry about it. So was President Carter. But I left the regulation in place. And, at President Carter's direction, I sent a letter to Congress saying that if they wanted to change that, that was up to them. They didn't.
So that was one kind of issue. The other issues, such as sterilization -- I found out that sterilizations were going on and that we were paying for them. In one case, in a southern state, a welfare program was insisting that women were sterilized if they had more than two or three kids. At a prison, some prisoners were being sterilized -- with federal funds. I put out very tough regulations that said you can't sterilize people that are incarcerated, or people that are under pressure; for example, someone seeking an abortion, or someone who is an alcoholic or a drug addict. And again, the bishops, the Catholic bishops, who believe in a complete ban on sterilization, attacked.
I think in a pluralistic society, you can argue for what you believe in, and then the society makes the decision. At that point in time, you either enforce the law or you get out, and I was not about to get out. I was prepared to enforce the law; I wasn't going to go off to some Vatican Hill or Walden Pond.
If the 33-year-old, four-packs-a-day Joe Califano was still in Washington, what would he be working toward?
Well, first I would be trying to take care of the people who lack health insurance. And I'd do it in a simple way. Every country that's covering everybody did it out of their existing system. I would press to have the federal government pay for the old and the poor, and I would mandate a minimum health-care benefit. That's the way most Americans get their insurance, the way we have a minimum wage. And then I would have unemployment health insurance for a time when somebody's laid off. I think you could get that passed.
And you know, when [President Franklin Delano] Roosevelt passed the minimum wage in the 1930s, it only covered large corporations that were already paying more than the minimum wage. It wasn't until Lyndon Johnson's time that farmers and small businesses were covered by the minimum wage, but Roosevelt got it started. You've got to think: We can get something started here.
Jeffrey Dubner is a Prospect editorial intern.
