Nixon, Weber & Shultz on Job Corps and Government administration

3:19:08Oh, I'm sorry.
3:19:09I didn't mean to go over the deal.
3:19:12Yes, sir.
3:19:12I'll be right down, Mr. Chairman.
3:20:56pretty soon.
3:20:58September 1.
3:21:00September 1.
3:21:01Well, I won't be here.
3:21:07Get your formal picture here.
3:21:15Thank you.
3:21:16Got others?
3:21:17Sure.
3:21:17Get three.
3:21:18Get the three of us, please.
3:21:19They've worked together so much.
3:21:31Well, I'm grateful, and we wish you well.
3:21:52Thank you very much.
3:21:55Nothing will ever be quite as grinding, quite as hard, quite as frustrating, shall we say, on film.
3:22:05That's right.
3:22:06I suppose that's one of the things.
3:22:08I'll find out how I react to that.
3:22:10Well, it's been a great pleasure serving you and the administration, both down in the pit in the department and up here.
3:22:21Down in the pit?
3:22:22Yeah, well...
3:22:30I'm still in George.
3:22:32I don't think my lectures will ever be the same again.
3:22:38You've been here back a while, haven't you?
3:22:42Yeah.
3:22:42Charlie is one of our teachers at the university.
3:22:50And I'm sure his class will be going well.
3:22:52Oh, yes.
3:22:52They have more blue books, correct?
3:22:53Yeah.
3:22:55Real books, did they still use that for design?
3:22:57Still did, yeah.
3:22:57They're a traditional variety of writing.
3:23:00Real books.
3:23:00Law school.
3:23:01About a fortune.
3:23:03They are.
3:23:04Law school.
3:23:05It's almost as bad reading them as I recall.
3:23:10How did that one get to where it's now?
3:23:12And I'm ready to speak.
3:23:14Mine was a precious article.
3:23:20I don't know how the hell it ever ended.
3:23:21George was a very good manager at the end of the business school.
3:23:24And if you're an effective teacher, he lets you teach in something we call the executive program, where they had classes of 75.
3:23:30And you'd give them a three-hour exam at the end of the year, and you'd have to read 75 blue books of 75 disgruntled businessmen.
3:23:40And I always thought that was a terrible job.
3:23:43That's very interesting.
3:23:44People are very bright.
3:23:54Thank you very much.
3:23:57So it was encouraging to me what they didn't know, and even the bankers didn't have any real understanding of the monetary system in the United States, but how money came into being in the role of the Federal Reserve, in the role of the commercial bank, and how it happened.
3:24:20And it was like that.
3:24:23It was like opening a curtain to them.
3:24:25They showed them how it happened and they sort of couldn't believe it and they thought it was some kind of magic.
3:24:31But it's just surprising how many bankers don't know how the bank exists.
3:24:38They don't know how they act.
3:24:42Well, I think another thing, you know, an area of ignorance that hopefully I can help fill is thinking
3:24:50Everybody has this great deficiency in their understanding of government in terms of importance and how it works and the normal businessman thinks in terms of his interests and his contact in Washington and not in terms of the establishment of problems and priorities at the national level and just the enormous effort it takes to get things done.
3:25:15And a great challenge it is to try and do it well.
3:25:20And I think that's a message worth conveying, to make the processes of government, you know, meaningful and relevant to these people.
3:25:30I'll try.
3:25:31I'll try.
3:25:34Yeah, yeah.
3:25:47Well, I think that's right.
3:25:54They certainly do.
3:25:56You know, I have a great definition that I consider a definition of a conservative.
3:26:02It's someone who comes in and tries to manage a program started by a liberal.
3:26:07And that's...
3:26:09And that's the way I felt when I was Secretary of Ed.
3:26:13You know, my job here, I was a student of it.
3:26:16There were all sorts of inferences in terms of impact and how it's set up.
3:26:20And then you get in there, and it's a mess.
3:26:23And nobody was really concerned, you know, because it was essentially viewed as a distributional device of income, not in terms of helping to equip people to function over a lifetime instead of, you know,
3:26:36providing some short-term service to a mayor, or disgruntled black group, or some employment service.
3:26:43In the past, the Ministry of the Land Power program was scandalous.
3:26:48But Charlie and I found out almost immediately that it was scandalous.
3:26:55And the strides that made to try to make the program actually work to do something for people.
3:27:01And I guess our biggest initiation of this was the Job Corps thing, which Arnie really managed.
3:27:09Now, Job, there was a program that, once you look into it, it just was demonstrably, clearly, unambiguously not working.
3:27:20Whatever you may say about the glory of the objectives and so on, it just was not working.
3:27:24There was a record, and we laid that record out.
3:27:27Oh, boy, the...
3:27:30The square root of that card operates on the Congress line.
3:27:33After the Congress day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, after the day, Well, you know, the percentage is the fact that you, as I recall, you find out the number of people that come into it.
3:27:52And, well, first, the cost of training, and I'll let you know, that's just one thing.
3:27:57The second percentage is the
3:28:00Just compared to other programs, it was lowest tutorial.
3:28:0317 out of 100.
3:28:04They start with 100, and by the time you come out at the end, you've got 17 left.
3:28:08And the program is really ministered to effectively.
3:28:12And their performance was 2% better than a control group of the same agent characteristics that hadn't gone through the program.
3:28:21And the average cost was $7,000 per hit.
3:28:27So you got a price of 2%.
3:28:29And it was sort of interesting, George, you often commented on that.
3:28:32It was just a big political slap.
3:28:35And in a way, it was sort of salutary for us because we came in and this happened to us in the first three months.
3:28:43Everything else that's happened to us, you know, is relatively vile by comparison in this adversary proceeding that you have with Congress.
3:28:54Well, actually, we came off well.
3:28:55Well, I think we did well.
3:28:57I mean, they tried.
3:28:59Sure.
3:29:00Right.
3:29:00But the thing was, we didn't.
3:29:03We started out to do it, and we got through, and we closed, and they're all closed.
3:29:0859 centers that don't exist.
3:29:10$100 million dollars.
3:29:12hundred million dollars per year.
3:29:14Well, and the interesting thing is, you know, since that time, that whole area of the Job Corps has been diffused.
3:29:23You don't read stories in the paper about riots at the Job Corps.
3:29:29New centers have been set up.
3:29:30We've made some progress.
3:29:31The country's a bit cooler.
3:29:35There's still a lot of problems.
3:29:41I'm rather accused by other than Usani this morning.
3:29:46Usani had a new economic policy.
3:29:48We thought we needed to do that so that we could get back the prosperity we'd had in the two previous administrations.
3:29:54Well, I would sit there at one point and say it's time to say which one he wants.
3:29:59Does he want to pick the three Kennedy years on an average 6%?
3:30:02Or does he want to pick the five Johnson years when we have lower on the planet, but at the cost of water?
3:30:10Which kind of prosperity do you talk about?
3:30:16Well, we need to move it down.
3:30:50Hyde Park, Hyde Park in Chicago.
3:30:53Oh, they're super, super liberal.
3:31:02Well, the thing that, you know, I particularly enjoy is the quietness.
3:31:09You don't have a house or park?
3:31:11No, I have a house.
3:31:13It's the same house.
3:31:14It's just a residential area.
3:31:15The house is out in the lake.
3:31:17It's a little of both.
3:31:18It's right around the university and it's all around the corner of the lake and the Museum of Science and Industry.
3:31:25Yeah, I visited the university once.
3:31:28I heard you then.
3:31:31No, Alan Wallace invited you once.
3:31:34Oh, no, no, no, no, when I spoke to the faculty.
3:31:36Yes, the faculty.
3:31:36Oh, that was there.
3:31:37No, I had forgotten that, but I also, I went there and spoke to the faculty and asked you some questions.
3:31:46Yes.
3:31:47The other time I went there to take you out to school.
3:31:52For what?
3:31:54dedicated one of their units, one of their units, I remember, I don't remember much about it, except it was, you know, so they had a lot of glass in it.
3:32:00Yeah, so they lost the building, yeah.
3:32:01Yeah, so it's a Saturday night, very lovely.
3:32:03Well, that's a great institution, I must say, right?
3:32:05Well, who knows what is the most important thing to you?
3:32:10Many of the most important things to me.
3:32:12I would say the most important thing is to run a city, or something else, something.
3:32:24Of course, the real message for everybody is that they're all important.
3:32:30I tend to kind of buy this arrogance of some that only what he does really matters.
3:32:38And it's really the sense of pride in doing any job well, any damn job, teaching at a primary school.
3:32:47Who knows if that primary school teacher may have a whole lot more effect than you may have on that
3:32:54the person who is the potential leader.
3:32:56We never know.
3:32:57We never know.
3:32:59Maybe the minister is.
3:33:01Maybe the local town justice of the beach or somebody who really makes the congregation.
3:33:10And of course, does something about the business tax and all of this.
3:33:17The tax that they offer.
3:33:24It's a good market test.
3:33:30Nobody.
3:33:32But nobody.
3:33:53must have run boys in drafts or something like that, and of course we have that, so they're voting.
3:33:58If they have a free choice, whether they're coming from free countries, and of course almost always from communist countries, the choice is to get the hell out and come here.
3:34:06They're running all over the world.
3:34:08It's such a sad sight.
3:34:10I remember going to Poland.
3:34:13One guy walked 200 miles to come out to try to get into the United States, and he said that, asking what he did, he said, well, he was a, you know,
3:34:23He was an editor of a small paper, one of our papers.
3:34:28He said, he said, I would rather, he was able to talk to each other in German, they would have been caught.
3:34:34And he said, I would rather, if I had reality, I'd rather be in the United States and sleep in Florence and edit a paper here.
3:34:45And that was right.
3:34:45That's a pretty eloquent statement.
3:34:48Except for the elite.
3:34:49And there is no elite class in all countries.
3:34:53If you're in the elite class someplace, you'd probably rather be there running a show than being here, not running.
3:34:57Although there are those who said in the early days of the Republic that they'd rather be a worker in the United States than be a king in another country.
3:35:12It's not true, of course, now.
3:35:14But be that as it may, except for the elite class speaking to totalitarian countries who
3:35:19Our, our, our, our rulers, we, uh, we, we, we just can't estimate how, how much, uh, met drawing power in the United States as a, as a fellow country.
3:35:35And, uh, people, people realize.
3:35:39I'll let you go.
3:35:40Well, I'll let you go through the psychological.
3:35:48I was just reading last night, it was on all over the world, it was right in 1875, almost a hundred years ago.
3:35:55The United States has probably seen its best days.
3:36:01Our attribute has always been, I think, the capacity to generate and regenerate hope.
3:36:07I remember in reading a book on the development of the American labor force, and they were talking about the colonial labor force and people they attracted.
3:36:17And this was back in 1789, and they talked about a Frenchman who came and went down by
3:36:22Ohio River near Kentucky and opened a French restaurant on the frontier.
3:36:27You know, and that just sort of summed up this capacity of hope for somebody to come from, you know, highly civilized environments into the wilderness that must have been to open a French restaurant, and I dare say with the linen.
3:36:43Any other questions?
3:36:47Yeah.
3:36:49Well, Americans don't care.
3:36:50It's all right.
3:36:52You look at a Western movie, and they did pretty good.
3:36:55They dressed pretty good on stage, assuming that they are somewhat true to life.
3:37:00They're all getting vests, and all the other friends, and they're dying to stick friends, and their ladies, of course, with their clubs and their clothes, and they can pick them up.
3:37:15Well, this is for the children, huh?
3:37:17There you go.
3:37:19You got three, four, three.
3:37:21This will be yours for all three.
3:37:25All boys?
3:37:26Yes.
3:37:27Fifteen, fourteen, sixteen.
3:37:33Okay.
3:37:34Well, you can do it again.
3:37:38There you go.
3:37:39You can do it again.
3:37:42Always the same thing.
3:37:44There's a six-year-old right there, the Apollo viewer.
3:37:46He's the last thing you can see.
3:37:50Is that something that's nice for your wife?
3:37:56That's the presidential seal and the compact.
3:38:00Now that's silver, so we're taking care of it.
3:38:03And this is, of all things, a money club.
3:38:06I think that's also one of our better items for a profession.
3:38:09Yeah, you know, there's no people that you want to stand on.
3:38:12Like, if you had money, you would enjoy it.
3:38:16It's a natural life.
3:38:18I've heard of it.
3:38:22You know, I haven't since I was in the student service.
3:38:26I've never heard of it.
3:38:27Feel that weight there.
3:38:35That's something.
3:38:37That's something.
3:38:44Well, thank you so much.
3:38:46You're welcome.
3:38:47We've got a standard version of the car.
3:38:49All right.
3:38:52You're welcome.
3:38:54You got any brave ideas?
3:38:56Out of the way.
3:38:59Save us three or four million dollars for us, huh?
3:39:02Yes.
3:39:03Well, I think we're well in the least comment then.

Nixon, Weber & Shultz on Job Corps and Government administration

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Also recorded on August 12, 1971

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