developing the legislative program, and i suppose as solicitor i played a rather key role in drafting and supervising the drafting of the legislation. we had many meetings on it. i particularly had an image of dividing the investigation and prosecution functions from the adjudicatory functions because i was viewed with tenets of the administrative procedures act which suggest to dictate the wisdom of dividing administrative and prosecutal prosecutorial functions, so we created the occupational health and safety review commission as

a separate body. the republicans supported that. democrats were opposed, and we ultimately compromised on that. also at issue of some controversy involved the development of the initial standards, and large industry had developed consensus standards. we provided in the legislation that the consensus standards would go into effect initially. it was probably now that i think back on it an example of a situation where large industry wants federal legislation that would reduce competition from smaller companies. since the consensus standards were agreed upon by large companies and imposed more of a requirement on small companies who weren't as safety conscious. the republicans were in favor of consensus standards, and the democrats compromised on that. then the big issue -- then one big issue on which we lost as i tried my very best to convince the congress to allow the

occupational safety and health administration, osha, in develops standards to take into account cost benefits. the naderites were strongly opposed to that, arguing there was no way you could put a dollar amount on a human life. i argued with the congressman until i was blue in the face that there simply was no way to

avoid that. you didn't -- so crudely as put in terms of a dollar value on human life, but you had to think in terms of the cost of certain safety or health measures, which could far exceed the benefits. i could not get that through in legislation. after i became undersecretary and jim hodson became secretary -- let me put it another way. after jim hodson was promoted to secretary and i was promoted to undersecretary, i was given largely the responsibility by the white house and jim to shepherd the occupational safety and health bill through the congress. >> to what extent was the white house interested in this bill? >> very. very. george schultz, of course, had gone over his own mb director, and the president i think was

reasonably concerned and interested about this. >> in working on this, did you ever interact with john urlachman? >> he was starting out as assistant to the president for dixz affairs next year, and i did interact with him on this. and ed morgan, who was his associate dealing with the labor department. but not as much as i did with respect to another initiative. that is related to the picture i showed you in the other office, and that was the legislation we introduced to deal with national emergency strikes. are you familiar with that? >> no. >> this is one of the initiatives that i'm most proud of. some of my initiatives i think

were mistaken, but think one i think was right. there used to be a terrible problem back in the '60 and early '70s of strikes in the transportation industry which caused a national emergency under the taft-hartley act. it the taft-hartley act provided that in the event of a strike in an industry that caused a national emergency, the government, the justice department could go to federal district court and get an injunction for a cooling-off period. these ultimately resulted in

often arbitrations conducted by 535 arbitrators, i.e., the congress, which was a bit of a nightmare. the congress would end up writing through legislation of the collective bargaining agreement for an industry. so george asked me to come up with a better approach, and i came up with the scheme which i designated final offer selection. which was a legislative provision whereby if there was an injunction granted and a cooling-off period created in a

transportation industry that caused a national emergency -- could be any industry, about the only transportation was considered to cause a national emergency, either long shore railroads and airlines. in that event, instead of arbitration by congress or anybody else, you would have a provision whereby you'd have a panel selected. the panel would be authorized to impose as a collective bargaining agreement either the final offer of the employer group or the final offer of the union. it could not compromise, it could not do what arbitrators normally do. my reasoning for that, which i wrote in an article with a friend, my reasoning for that was that if arbitration, classic arbitration is pending, it has the disincentive neither party will move towards the middle because they feel the arbitrator will cut the baby in half, so why not stay far apart? with the approach i was advocating, the incentives were exactly the option, because if both sides want to get to the most recent position, making it less likely it would ever be needed.

in the other room you saw the picture of my presenting that to nixon. as part of a subcommittee that urlachman had created to vet my idea, which included general counsel of transportation, general counsel of commerce, jim lin, and various white house officials. you saw i met with the president. we met with the president. sitting on the other side of the table was a white-haired gentleman who had been in congress with nixon when taft-hartley was passed and was quite conversant to the taft-hartley bit. there was a real engaged discussion about the pros and cons of this domestic initiative. when i went out of the meeting, i turned to ed morgan to ask who was the white-haired gentleman sitting on nixon's side of the table.

he said, that's george mckinnen. at which point i had judge mckinnen? he was a judge on my court now he said yes. you can't have a federal judge sitting in on the development of legislation. why not? don't you remember what happened with fortis? federal judges can't be involved with developing policies matters. neither morgan nor urlachman were litigating lawyers, so they weren't as sensitive to this. one called me back afterwards and said not to worry. he won't be it there again. >> this sort of thing would get them into trouble years later. >> after i became a colleague of george mckinnen's, i wrote the opinion in the morrison v. olson, the independent counsel case, and mckinnen was very annoyed. he came down to my office

because i had been critical of his behavior as the chief judge of the special division that appointed the independent counsel. he came down to my office, and he started to complain. he looked over my shoulder and saw that picture. he turned absolutely ash white and said i would have recused myself if figure would have come up and turned around and walked right now. he realized how inappropriate that was. in any event, nixon approved the initiative. we submitted it to the congress. we came within two votes of

getting it passed in the senate, and it was -- bob packard led the fight for us. and it was -- it looked like it was a good chance of passage until 1972 when colson got the teamsters to support nixon. one of the quid pro quos was to drop support for that legislation. i got a call from, i guess, it was george schultz to tell me that -- exactly what happened. i was disappointed, but the president had every right to make that policy call. i remember having to call bob packwood to say we were throwing support after i had persuaded him to take the lead. that was not a pleasant conversation. >> we'll get back to mr. colson in a moment. tell us about changes in the department. >> on that legislation, although it never passed the congress for emergency disputes, actually emergency disputes went away, and we hadn't had one in years and years.

that idea was picked up by baseball, and it's now called baseball. that's the way they arbitrate -- not arbitrate, but they decide between baseball teams and individual players. it's also picked up by municipalities for municipal unions. it's amusing, because when we came up with the initiative which george schultz liked, arbitrators hated it. "the new york times" editorial page was supportive. they raised questions as it to where the devil this idea had come from. george, i think, was rather reluctant to say this. it came out of the young kid and the solicitor. he called me up on the phone and said, can't you find any incident where this idea was used before?

so i commissioned three lawyers in the solicitor's office to look everywhere, whether the idea had ever been used. and i'll be darned if they didn't find that it was briefly discussed in the vymar legislature in 1922 or '23. so george was able to tell "the new york times" editorial page where it was in the vymar republic. they were really impressed. >> where did you get the idea? just thought of it one day? >> well, i'm a lawyer, and i try to think about why tort cases are settled.

tort cases are settled because both sides see the risk of litigation as too high. the plaintiff thinks i may come away losing with zero, and the defendant thinks i may come away with a massive liability, which since both parties see a risk there, you can often settle tort cases. so i was trying to create the same dynamic in the labor context, in the labor arbitration or nonarbitration context. >> i wanted to ask you about -- to use the description, the dynamics or quality of the nixon -- the domestic side of the nixon administration in the first years. people watching this will know that the republican party moved away from regulation and from -- away from some of the issues that we're discussing now. was there a discussion about the cost of osha, for example, as a source of regulation on the u.s. economy? >> shamefully, no. partly because the labor department was running the show. we had enormous clout. george had enormous clout.

as you recall, he was so well respected by nixon and the administration he was actually put in charge the oil import task force. we were -- most of the appointees were pretty liberal in terms of pro-regulation. as i said, i was the most conservative, and nevertheless we were active and wanted to solve problems, and that's very dangerous. the process of developing many of these initiatives have made me considerably more conservative. i've seen the cost on society. for instance, on occupational safety and health, i was just given instruction by george, we have to come up with an initiative there.

there was no discussion at all except the arguments that i kept making for a cost benefit in the legislation. >> i'll circle back, if i may, to affirmative action. i know you wrote about it, and people interested in this interview should go and look at what you describe as your mia culpa. i would like to see if we can unpack for the viewers, how you think goals and timetables became inflexible quotas, numerical quotas? how did that objective that you had and described as such at the time become quotas? how did this system develop out of what you set out to achieve? >> well, as i have subsequently

confessed, goals and timetables were simply soft quotas. it's just a question of how much pressure you put on a company to reach their goals and timetables, at which point they become quotas. the underlying rationale, which was profoundly wrong, was my rationale as well as others, was if you eliminated discrimination of all kinds, you would end up with a roughly proportional distribution of ethnic and racial groups within any employment sector in the economy. i subsequently realized and i think in part because of the writings of tom soul that that wasn't true, even in a completely nondiscriminatory world, there were various

cultural and ethnic and other reasons why you would have distributions within the employment sector which did not represent proportional representation. but calling it goals rather than quote it kwaish quotas was a device to provide a certain certainty so as to meet the comptroller-general's concern that it was too indefinite to bid against. yet, not run afoul of 703-j of the civil rights act that prevented quotas, but it was a thinly disguised gimmick, which i justified in my own mind at the time because the legal environment in the country, in the supreme court, elsewhere it was, almost agreed to anything that would encourage

assimilation, integration rather than simply nondiscrimination. integration rather than simply nondiscrimination. >> i was wondering whether you recalled a discussion you had with heimann bookbinder in the summer of 1972 when jewish groups were thinking about quotas and the issue obviously for jewish-americans quotas. on the other hand, these groups wanted it to support civil rights legislation. could you -- there was a question of what the nixon campaign's position would be on this. please tell us what you can recall. it's very interesting. >> i can, actually. i recall discussing matters with heimann bookbinder at the time.

now, i recall by '71 and '72 i began to have -- i particularly began to have more and more doubts as to what i had done in '69 and '70 was right. i was trying to figure out ways to extricate ourselves from the almost drive towards quotas. i realize once you use quotas i realize once you start using numbers there was no basis important numbers other than proportional representation. i don't know how you disguised it. which leads, of course, to preferential hiring based on race. and quotas. it is not just quotas. preferential hiring. based on a knew mayor cal standard.

it was quite ironic. a jewish group, i don't know which one it was wrote a letter to both mcgovern and nixon asking for their position on quotas, goals, affirmative action. it was amusing because i saw this as taunt to provide a path back from the mistakes we made and a way of putting mcgovern too far left. sure muff, mcgordvern's respons was full-throated embrace of

goals and timetables. i sat down with lyn gardner. lynn was responsible for responding to that and came to me, and i wrote and we wrote together, but i remember writing a draft in which of the letter to the jewish group, whichever jewish group it was, in which i tried to suck out of the goals and timetables it's worst evils by saying we shouldn't be in this and that and this. that letter went off. i don't have a copy of it. you probably do. but i do remember lynn and i reading it, and i remember also lynn was more inclined to the left at that point than i was.

i was very hard trying to pull back. you asked about art fletcher's role. the more, of course, we spread affirmative action, the more art was major expostor of our policy. he was the face of the policy. interesting enough, arnie weber, who was george's protege from business school at chicago, was someone i tended to clash with constantly, was strongly opposed to the affirmative action goals and timetables. he adopted views which i think now were correct. but it was a bit chaotic because arnie at one point -- oh, no. first, art fletcher went to

chicago and gave a speech strongly in favor of our affirmative action policies sometime in '70. arnie followed with a speech critical of the policy, and i was to appear the next week at a gathering in chicago. the chicago papers were focused on the difference between these two assistant secretaries. so i called george. i said, george, i need guidance. what am i to say? i explained what the two had said and what the papers were treating it like in chicago. george said, larry, weave them together, which was priceless.

>> now, fletcher leaves, doesn't he? >> i can't recall when he left. he did leave, but before he left, he appeared on "meet the press" when i was undersecretary, so it had to be '70 or '71. he came to me first to get permission. i said, yes, but, art, be very careful not to go too far. i was watching it on television when i was up at my house in west virginia -- my summer place, a little cabin in west virginia, and i just got out of the shower when my son screamed there was a snake down by the water. so i went and grabbed a pistol, and i was just walking with a towel around me watching art fletcher on "meet the press" say something really awful.

my wife came in, and she say the gun pointed at the television. she said, "don't shoot the television!" that was the last time i agreed to fletcher going on "meet the press." there was tension between fletcher and weber. >> was fletcher let go? >> no, i don't believe so. he was too well-known and well-thought-of. i can't remember why he left. >> you're watching american history tv where every week we bring you eyewitness accounts of the people and events that have shaped our nation. saturdays at 8:00 a.m., sundays at 3:00 p.m. and mondays at 4:00 a.m. eastern on c-span 3.

the single largest and most impressive civil war monument in washington to a military officer is the statue to general grant. even though he was president of the united states, it's really his service as the commanding general of the union army that made him famous. it's a very unusual statue. it faces down the mall from the lincoln memorial, and it's right at the base of the capitol. it's actually several statues together, and it was constructed over time. it was constructed and designed by a man named henry schraddy who was not a professional artist. he was a wealthy man that went into art and literally gave his life to making this statue which took decades to do and it was built in stages. first the marble base was erected around 1910. with a bronze lion. then in 1912 a depiction of the artillery in the civil war was added and in 1916 a depiction of the cavalry was added, and in 1920 the enormous statue of

general grant. the statue itself is 17 feet tall. it's on i think a 20-foot pedestal, and the statue weighs something like 10,000 pounds, bronze horse with the figure of general grant sort of slumped down. people have said that the horse looks more alert than general grant does. the horse's ears are up as if he's hearing battle. but grant had a pose and indeed he seemed to be unfazed, he was sort of waiting in the distance for the report of what was going on i guess, that's what the sculpture was trying to show. the two statues on other side are not glory to war. the artillery is in the mud. it's raining, everybody looks wet and uncomfortable. one of the reins has broken loose and some of the horses are bolting. it just looks like a miserable day.

the cavalry, one of the horses is falling. and a rider is being thrown to the ground and he's clearly going to be trampled to death by the other riders. and schraddy used his own face for the fallen rider which was somewhat symbolic, because doing this, these magnificent bronzes, took years and took its toll on him, and they were going to dedicate the monument in 1922, about the same time that the lincoln memorial was dedicated, it was going to be general grant's 100th birthday and he died two weeks before the statue was dedicated. so he literally was trampled by that statue.