it will never be the same. i can't speak to certain experiences. i can learn something momentarily working with the same persons. >> jordan smith, thank you. >> thank you. and now you're watching american history tv. every weekend, beginning saturday at 8 a.m. eastern, we bring you 48 hours of unique programming exploring our nation's past. american history tv is only on c-span3.

>> next on american history tv, the discussion on policymaking commissions inl american history. this talk from purdue university was part of the conference called making american history. i am the associate professor of instructions, a legal historian who has written about presidential commissions and administrative law from -- law reform. we look forward to

you can tell, today's session is being filmed by c-span, so do with that information as you will. frank will be first. >> yes, my name is frank popper. i teach city planning. increasingly i take an historical approach to city planning. i do that with rutgers. the reason i am here, nearly half a century ago i wrote a small book for the 20th entry fund, now the century foundation in new york city, on presidential commissions and it's one of the very few sources, i think, on them, and a they dug my ago, 49 --year-old book -- they dug

my 49-year-old book. they asked if i would participate. presidential commissions have a long history in the united states. there have been a whole bunch of others in the more modern p eriod, but they essentially work the same way. the president appoints a bunch of notables. they meet. they hire an executive director. the staff writes much of the report and eventually it is released. shortme spans can be as

as six months or as long as three years. -- nationallity literature has a couple meetings. look at the overall nation's running concerns. running concerns would be race, the role of women, public health, the organization of the federal government. there was a filipino insurrection in the mid to late 19 century and eventually filipino independence in the united states had to decide how to arrange that or work with that and more recently, in terms of big turning points there have -- the three mile

, 9/11, challenger rocket deepwater horizon -- not that long ago. these commissions give you a of how the sense nation's elite has changed. if you look at the early of 20th-century commissions there are very few women, very few blacks, very few latinos. commissions tend to represent more and they tend to have more people from the sun as the region grows and becomes more prominent and national politics. are onw poor people presidential commissions. you would say our middle class either. that's one kind of national literature. nationalay to look at

literature is the sense of national counterpoint. cultural meaningful theriences that mark country forever. things like have the kennedy assassination commission, the 9/11 commission. in these things are sometimes byated -- not necessarily politicians, but by a finer sense of the nation's culture -- a more refined one, if you will, as actual pieces of national literature that are reviewing in the wave they'll wolf is revealing or hamlet is revealing or the great gatsby is revealing. in the novel "libra," the author describes the warren

commission as follows -- is the joyce wouldl james have written if the move to iowa city and lived to be 100. the 9/11 commission, likewise has occasionally gotten that sort of treatment. the late, great harvard historian called it epic, not in hike, butof an epic the sense of an epic narrative, like beowulf. the miraculous deus ex machina intervention of beowulf to's they the american people or the towers from the attack and the lesson is clearly, the people themselves will have to come up with a response and this is what the response should be.

ok, two forms of national literature. they may not have great circulations. great impact,ake but they are in, they are out. there are accumulative profits. there's the background of the beowulf type commission or the at thewulf commission baseline. the basic processes of for the literature, researching it, riding it, editing it are part of a more ,echanical nitty-gritty sorts

but the end with sort of unclear outcomes, but clearly positive ones, too. in most of the they come upcases, with the sense that they accomplish things. importantplish things. they may not necessarily achieve great public acclaim or knowledge in so doing. there's a wonderful, wonderful ofcription of the mechanics how that particular commission worked and how it politics -- how it's politics works from the inside and it will do a terrific

job, i know because it recruited me. that's how i know. the more recent history of is -- well, about what you would expect. obama appointed a couple. most notably the one on the deepwater horizon disaster in the gulf. then more recently, trump made chris about appointing christie the head of an opiate commission. along with the from kansas state' about voter suppression. the kobach one crashed and burned pretty specifically. i should say no president ever appoints a commission on a topic

that is going well. the topic has to be something , where not going well there are serious conflicts and that is another reason why they resemble literature. would goe, likewise nowhere. there is this overlap. as i say, the trump commission of been rather disruptive previous patterns but i did notice a year ago in the atlantic, henry kissinger riding in article about artificial intelligence and concluding that this is a very weighty problem that requires -- guess what?

toresidential commission assess in terms of its likely effects. form in theturn to sense that henry kissinger riding in the atlantic went back to the notables of the sort -- in theg -- writing atlantic with back to the notables of this sort that write these things. there's an interim locking directive. a lot who were quite noticeable got pointed to multiple commissions. they were scored.

who else? there were a couple more like that. they were inward. not very incestuous. again, the kissing her proposal reverts to form in that sense. maybe somebody in the room -- although there're are not that many of you -- will serve on it. you or someone here will write about it. if you want to think in terms of literature, consider shakespeare's approach to richard the third. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. thank you all for being here.

thank you to nicole. thank you for putting together this -- sorry, putting together this conference. thank you to leah, nicole, and katie for putting together this conference. this is our public policy school. this is specifically in the context of equality. the commission was created by lyndon johnson. the commission has been mentioned before, but no scholar has explored this particular commission in depth. lyndon johnson created it in 1968 and charged it with

investigating "any and every planned to meet the income needs of all american people. challenge --our income needs of all american people." johnson said our challenge was to provide for americans to may need protection. it was specifically looking into universal bake -- basic income. e-cig income was not a radical idea during 1960's. there was a broad consensus across the political spectrum. that consensus include martin luther king jr. and milton friedman. much of the interest was driven by the reality of the historical moment. in 1968 hadoverty focused on the long run creation of opportunities in employment,

housing, and education rather than transfer programs. but that failed to eliminate poverty, which had been the expectation of many americans used inrhetoric johnson fighting the war on poverty. in 1960 nine, african americans out of poverty rate of 32% compared to the white poverty rate. factorsnumber of conspired to keep poverty rate hike, automation was a central culprit. automation had uprooted americans for decades. in the cities, african-americans those employment

prospects. , thompson grew and others have written extensively about this phenomenon. they concluded that the promise employment remained relatively illusory. when richard nixon was inaugurated, they decided to the commission. theushed forward with johnson era commission that focused on poverty, partly policy, and guaranteed income. that story is not worth one. story is anission important one in the inception of our project. researched daniel moynihan's

involvement in the family assistance plan. .t never became law as it turned out, part of the basis for this proposed family systems plan could be found with on next commission maintenance. investigative processes had not generally been the focus of .cholars they focused on why they focused on these in the first place, was less attention to how the commissions reached their conclusions. they visited 17 cities and towns across the country.

in each location, the commission convened local hearings and invited activists and advocates experienceabout the and circumstances of poverty. in addition, commissioners physically beat -- physically visited the homes of the poor. a set of interactions between commissioners, the poor, and their advocates, which were remarkable in three ways. in front made a case of commissioners for the value of their expertise about the lived experience of poverty, while challenging the professional authorities who had policy.ctated poverty one witness testified that any would have policies no meaning unless they participated.

thinking and theorizing in an office somewhere is not enough to deal with a problem. poverty policy needed to be shaped i those who had experienced policy firsthand. they challenged a system that had created significant barriers to employment. one witness told commissioner secure this to through persistent letter rating campaign. campaign --ghting letter writing campaighn.

third, by painting a week picture of structures and , witnesses challenged commissioners ideas that poverty was theverty consequence of individual choices. where tobacco farms were the primary industry, mostly african-american agricultural workers faced low wages and sporadic unemployment. at the same time, owners punished workers who sought employment away from farms in months when there was no crop to cultivate. families had to borrow from their employers to survive in the off-season. activist testified the poor man had to buy the white man's money. he is enslaved.

four inentration of inadequate schools and numerous ther areas covered by testimony of witnesses and other cities and towns. there was another important element of the commission strategy. commissioners visited the homes of the poor. the conditions in which the poor lived exasperated commissioners. trained economist described the houses of the tobacco harvesters he visited unpainteded "we saw wooden shacks up two or three or for rooms and which 14 people lived." in addition, cracked ck ofws and doors and a la running water exposed residents

to disease and illness. another discipline, sociology offers jules -- i'm sorry. question.sion poses a studying the commission poses a question. how and why did the home visits affect commissioners. another discipline, sociology offers tools to answer those questions. the sociologist irving kaufman for example proposed that the circumstance in which people see conditions can cause them to see these conditions differently. he said the process, called keening plays a crucial role and our ability to determine what is going wrong -- going on. they argued that changing the framing of circumstances can

motivate new kinds of action, new values are nurtured and old meanings and understanding jettisoned. it can galvanize decision-makers to push for reform. while circumstances may not resonate with an extent lames it can have a significant impact. we see this phenomenon play out in the president of austria's commission on income maintenance. when otto eckstein was brought face-to-face with the conditions of the poor, his perspective shifted. while he was skeptical about the usefulness of home visits, he was struck by what he saw in quincy. said, provided an

invaluable reference for understanding poverty. north carolinaom was also disturbed. he said, what i saw there, i have not seen any place else. the chairman of ibm called the conditions intolerable and appalling. this could be seen in the final they concluded that poverty was not the result of a personal failing, but being born to the wrong parents or lacking the ability to become not poor. commission tothe

recommend a basic income. how does the commission in form and reshape our understanding of political history? in the case of the commission on -- there were new dynamics that had an effect on policymakers. it helps to eliminate how those dynamics work. second, i argue that the commission should push us to think about where social movements begin and where they in. douglas mcadams wrote that the -- movementse not are much more ephemeral. in some ways men as the views of

commissioners became realigned with those of the poor and their advocates, commissioners could be seen being a part of the late 1960's social movement that pushed for better outcomes for the poor. third, and finally, it left behind a rich archival record of poverty, created by those who experienced it. in a bottom -- in a broader inse, they are provocative capturing the voice of ordinary citizens. these archives have led me to materialer source document the experience of non-elites is more plentiful than we have acknowledged. should we be more vigilant about tracking down those sources in order to pursue the inclusion of all material voices in historicl analyses, even in administrative histories, with even greater

attention paid to not privileging the voices of elite? -- of elites? thank you. >> great. i'm going to ask some broad questions. first, presidential commissions are a very conventional topic. i want to start by having our speakers talk about how will we rethink political history. there's reports, there's memos. they are generally kept and preserved in a presidential library or at the national archives. they have a start date and a end date. so the records are there and they are greats. .hey can be statements

they can say that this is a great statement of what they thought they could say or what would be received well from the audience. internalorts, they are still valuable for certain articulations of ideas. the disadvantages -- if we put presidential commissions at the center, we will put that at the thatr -- i wonder/worry if expresses an importance that is not there? these institutions are created. they have a life. they have been executive

director. they have a staff. they file a report. the report goes to the library and then it sort of sits there. they may not have altered political conversations or incentives on the topic. thus, they can change the conversation in ways that i will get back to, but that does not always happen. in studyingwe get presidential commissions? how do they help us think about our broader political history story. of legal history is focusing on where decision-making authority takes place. if there is actual decision-making authority, what should we do with these entities and what should we make of them?

if no one is reading them, what do we do with this? question that may be the intellectual history is a better approach them political his three? i don't believe that, but i'm on that out provoke conversation. i did this with the running concern commission and the turning point commission. ,here's multiple volumes appendices. in they do make a difference a way that some of the worthier, but more technical ones do not. -- i'm not really an historian, but it occurs to me it is possible that historians might view commissions as really

whatate barometers of people of the time were thinking ? what kind of person gets a presidential commission, considered as a class of people are thinking and that can be you -- that can be useful regardless of what happens to their proposals. the documents that they were first drafts of the section that may or may not get written tells you a lot about the deliberations of the commission, and these may or may not come policy, but it can tell you what that person was thinking and that can be useful in itself. i have in my book some .ecommendations

i reread the thing with great trepidation. i had two recommendations i like that still work today. the people who were appointed to presidential commissions ought to have had some actual early with the problem they are talking about, and looking at presidential commissions all these years ago, with find very few people the all volunteer army who had ever then drafted. and the various public health commissions who rarely had any sign in their life of lacking medical care or -- what's another one? commissions.iot

there's very little evidence i can find that any member of the commission had ever been affect awry ita of i or around or in the neighborhood of her riot, much less participated in a riot and i thought that somewhere there, there ought to be the experience that doug was talking about where, you know, harvard professors discover a kind of poverty that never showed up in this, in the statistics. was there anyone from a maintenance commission that came from a poverty that ground that you know? >> not that i know of. not that i know. discoveriesay the worked, so with this particular commission by design, those who had served on it had not taken a public position on income transfer programs and thought very little about it, the idea being they would have a clean slate coming into the commission

. >> it sounds like they filled that slate very dramatically. >> exactly. ones, you the other one. not see much of maybe one or two members. but they never seemed to talk about this and that the liberation's of their commissions. deliberations of their commissions. interestinge most things that happens with a presidential commission as an institution is the dynamic among the commissioners themselves. the reason article about commissions that argued that commissions by design aim to create consensus among elites and decision-makers and that

process matters less than bringing those commissioners together. my particular issue or question. shifting thes in focus away from my the intentions of a president in creating a focus in the first place, on whether the recommendations of the look at theinto a document production and source production going on over the course of the commission so not all commissions have testimony at hearings, but all commissions are producing an enormous amount of paper over the course of their tenures. like joanna said, it is typed and usually neatly organized, often in a national archive or presidential library so that we have sources about levels of decision-making and various interactions with the commission and various dynamics that's available for researchers to bring light to a particular historical moment. >> following up on one of the

threads in those papers is this question of how we think about these as profoundly on representative entities. the elite nature of this staffing of these commissions, who gets to be on the commission? it was in your paper, more about who actually was on the commission you are talking about. what's in it for the president and for the commissioners? who gets to be on these commissions, how seriously are the views taken, how seriously do they expect their views to be taken? what kind of expertise are they bringing? that picks up on the point frank was making, what kind of expertise do we, looking at these commissions, think that commissioners should have versus what expertise is seen at the educationing valuable l.a., employment background, veteran status, et cetera, and what might be relevant but not

valued. getting to the point of frank's question, do you have people who have grown up in poverty or experienced poverty, is that not considered expertise? a bigger question about thinking about presidential commissions. they are not strictly speaking the kind of bureaucracies we talk about when we mean bureaucracy and when we talk about expertise in that context. but at the same time, there are some similarities. the people that get to be on presidential commissions are the people that get to be on presidential commissions. i believe heineman was on multiple commissions. sort of having been on a commission for one thing validates your ability and makes you an expert on being on a commission for something different. i wonder if you can talk about this question of expertise. yeah, so, the presidential commission on income maintenance

-- it may have been an outlier -- but it drew together expertise from politics, industry, and even organizations like the national mental health association. jerry joseph was the president of the national mental health association and served on this commission, in addition to robert solow, who was an economist, won the nobel prize in economics. someone from the afl-cio was represented. the ceo of westinghouse corporation. the chairman of the board of ibm. this particular commission had representation from social industry,politics, and several other sectors. heineman made a conscious decision when he decided to hold the hearings that the reason he was going to do that was precisely to challenge the expertise of the experts.

, insisting theed hearings were going to be part of the investigative strategy, both to destabilize the idea of expertise coming from statisticians in washington, but also to legitimately try to educate commissioners who had not grown up with experiences of poverty. sense -- first of , but a agrees with yours lot of these people are chosen for general wisdom, general sagacity. they have impressed other notables like themselves with this particular quality that not everyone has. myselflooked at it in for years and always come up empty, and i suspect a lot of people who don't get appointed to presidential commissions are

likewise lacking, as i am. you praised it nicely -- you phrased it nicely, the kind of people who get appointed to commissions are the kind of people who get appointed to commissions. there are also the kind of people who ascend in university life to become chairs and so forth. they do have this particular quality, very different from technical expertise, very necessarily real , butty in their own past they are able to by means of this sagacity ascend in organizations and move them. it is a magical trait, at least to me, and i have never seen any good academic studies of how this works, even from my daughter, who went to business school. -- this is her

father's impression, not what she said to me -- that this kind of sagacity was a certain religion among the people who had it, this intangible quality of being drawn together and ascending in leadership through large organizations because they displayed this eerie but very tangible quality. some people have it and most people don't and that's why most people are not on presidential commissions. joanna: that's a good transition to my next question, which is based on the fact that that intangible quality is often whiteness and maleness. yesterday, we talked about the need to desegregate policy history. another doctor was urging us to turn our attention to the incentives and the self-interest to understand the white supremacist roots of american policy and institutions. there hasn't been much work on

the nature of these commissions. they are focusing on whatever racist characteristics might be inherent in presidential commissions. i think nobody could look at the history of most presidential commissions and called them affirmatively antiracist. frank: there have been plenty of commissions on race. joanna: but is not the same thing? frank: not at all. joanna: right. so a general question, what would looking at presidential commissions with a race, gender, class analysis as the center, what would that look like and how might that change the way we think about the role of presidential commissions in political history? frank: i have a simple, quick answer about the race commissions and also commissions on the status of women, and maybe a few other commissions as well. if you are going to have a commission on race, make the clear majority of the appointees to the commission representatives of the races you

are worried about. seems very simple, very straightforward. has never happened. in any of the long history of presidential commissions on racial subjects. there have been a number of state commissions in places like california and i believe illinois as well, looking at racial conditions, and always the racial minorities were racial minorities on the commission itself. maybe that would discredit the it would be ant interesting experiment to try, and it has never been tried at all. dov: again using this commission as a case study, in the personnel of the commission, there was representation from people like clifford alexander. morrow, an academic at

notre dame in the 1960's who was one of the founders of latino studies. representation, not completely diverse, but some diverse representation on the commission. i might argue that in the findings of the commission, though perhaps not antiracist, the finding that there were discriminatory mechanisms built into the structure of american society in housing and ,mployment and education printing bat finding as part of the commission's work is part of a project that one might argue leads to progress on issues of equality. the commission's final report was called poverty amid plenty, 150 pages, and many of those pages were spent talking about discrimination and bias in the structures and institutions of american society that had led to systemic and cyclical poverty.

joanna: i want to push this just a little further. to, say, going back the 9/11 commission, the hoover commission, some of these commissions and really thinking through the kind of expertise, the people who are on the panel, the kind of proposals and the assumptions those people were starting from. again, my first question was premised in the fact that maybe these don't matter that much, but assuming they do, and again, they have been important in the writing of policy and political history, how might going back and looking at them through that lens change the way we think about their role in political history? dov: i think there is a normative implication to the question, which is a good one, which is if we think about how one might put together presidential commissions going forward, are there possibilities

we could use the experiences of past presidential commissions to diversify the makeup of current presidential commissions, to give them more voices or give more kinds of people a voice in deliberations and recommending policy? the second part of it is it becomes even more important to understand why the recommendations of presidential commissions do or don't shape policy, because if a commission is diversified, there are many voices coming up with a consensus recommendation, it doesn't matter so much if there is an opportunity to turn those recommendations into policy. then't know if you meant question as normative, but it has important implications for thinking of the structure of presidential commissions going forward. frank: i have somewhat of a different answer, not really a historian's answer.

one of the great problems of american society, as we are aware of at this conference and across the country, is this you dislike and distrust of government. this is beneath all the sessions we have had here in west lafayette and purdue, political polarization and the roots of the radical right and the origins of violence. all of these have at their core what seems to be a native american hatred for government that is particularly verlander these days -- particularly vir ulent these days. if i had one presidential commission that i would suggest forming, the president or his successor would look into a commission on why people hate government and what government

,ould actually do to tamp down within legitimate democratic norms, how government could change to create a less alienated population. this is an you norma's problem and it underlines all the policy problems, whatever they are, style perhaps the beowulf national turning point commission, but certainly the middle ones. the alienation of the american population from government, its disapproval of politicians, a bureaucracy, of government in general. that comesof hooting up with almost any clinical speech, the people on the fringes of the speech who are obviously there to get laughs or express vitriol, rather than participate in the political process.

that would go a long way. on that commission, i think i would be less worried about who was appointed, as long as they did a decent job of actually looking at my americans hate government so much. dov: i was going to go back to your original question. i think in a way, you are right to point out the composition of presidential commissions historically give us an idea of which voices were privileged and which were marginalized. that is a super important framework for thinking about american political history. they also give us a sense of who is making -- who is creating national priorities. frank spoke a little bit about this before. president reagan had a commission on national aspirations and objectives in 1980, which is really interesting to read, but it is one particular voice of what the national project should be in

1980. joanna: that does go back to my question. also there is the question of composition, going back to what endi was talking about yesterday. change the people, change the institution. the presidential commission is an institution. what value does it bring? the follow-up question i was going to ask frank, we said if there was one presidential commission, it would be to pursue a solution to the problem of current polarization. why a presidential commission? frank: that's a good question. there has got to be other ways to deal with the problem, too. joanna: i think it gets to the heart of the question, what advantages, what disadvantages do presidential commissions have in politics? frank: they do have the some extentnd to they still have the advantage, of prestige.

you may not like government, but you look at the people around presidential commissions, these are busy, successful people who have made interesting, buried lives for themselves -- interesting, varied lives for themselves. you may not respect any one of them, but the group of them, 10 or 15 or whatever, might as a group carry some weight that a president would not, a president is arguing with congress about this or that or doesn't like the last three supreme court decisions or whatever. this group of people with this magic sagacity might carry some of saying wems understand your problem, we understand where you are coming from, there are things that can be done to reduce this polarization. the next follow-up question, what would those things be,

please don't ask, i don't have an answer. joanna: i have one more broad question that is not that question. as political historians, what should we be looking for an be skeptical of when we turn to presidential commissions, read the reports, the letters, the editorials the members write in support of their findings? how might we read against the grain? frank talked about conflict and it is true we don't have a presidential commission created without some sort of conflict. if you have read the materials on presidential commissions, they are drained on conflict. how might we try to find that tension, how might we try to find that conflict when it is missing in the formal materials? where is the violence that must be there? where is the conflict? dov: i will take a shot at that. i think in two places, the dissent that comes in the

production of the final report. sometimes the dissent is published at sometimes it is not. frank spoke a little bit about that. sometimes the commission writes a dissent to particular parts of the commission report, so there is rarely complete consensus. i think in the relationship with the executive who appointed the commission, and oftentimes correspondence in internal memos from presidential administrations sent -- shed different kinds of light on the work of the commissions, especially pointing out where the abrasive moments are. frank: two answers on that. one of the lines that recurs a lot that originates with a presidential commission was a commission lyndon johnson appointed on the race riots of 1967, of the kerner commission,

and the particular line that resonated was that america is in danger of becoming two societies, one black, not equal to each other, and so on. black, onees, one white, not equal to each other. that's a paraphrase. i think that has stayed in the national memory, not necessarily creating any particular policies to undo the divide or even to explore it further. andcond moment of dissent, this may be something that some of the older people in the room remember, came when the challenger rocket exploded in i and there was986, appointed a commission with the richard nixon's secretary of state, william rogers, as the

chair of the commission. it had a lot of technical peaceful and some political people and some business people. there had been a lot of business investment in the challenger. to theo appointed commission was a physicist named richard feynman, who may have been the greatest american born physicist of the 20th century. he would certainly be in the top three, top five or so. and heon the commission actually had two forms of very nasty cancer at the time, was dying. but he smelled a rat in testimony of the nasa people had sent the rocket up. not so much from the testimony, but inferring from the testimony that it was

this decision to send the challenger up in relatively cold weather was a very risky decision. nobody actually had said so in the testimony, but he had done some -- feynman, who had great practical sagacity apart from scientific sagacity, figured out that this had to be a riskier decision than it looked, and over a weekend while the commission was meeting, he hunted around through a department store where he got some very simple equipment that enabled him to show publicly in front of hundreds of people and on the daily news, basically forever, and of course it is on youtube as well, what it is specifically that went wrong with the shot.

rain,cture called the o which was made of rubber and held together two metal parts of the rocket, had disintegrated, and he showed, right here on this scale, as a witness, right in front of everybody, with the stuff you bought in the hardware --re, when it got too cold cold water in the vial he had gotten -- when it got too cold, the rubber would snap, and the challenger would blow up. it was a long chain of events leading to the explosion, but the basic break in the chain was the o ring disintegrated, breaking. that was one of the great moments of dissent on any commission. rogers had, by the way, gotten quite furious with feynman through the whole thing.

they were clearly not temperaments that would ever come to understand each other. many feynman, who did hidden services for the american government, for once did something in public that thatlly displayed the idea it was not a wise decision to agree to send up the rocket in the first place, and it was based on a risk, a gamble. the people who made the decision knew the gamble. it was something like a 70-30 decision, at least in their minds, about the risk assessment, and the 30% came up. , a very form of dissent effective form. forced the commission, primarily by means of this desktop demonstration,

to be much more critical of the space industries and their testing requirements. the actual story is a little more complicated and technical, but there is opportunity for a certain kind of person, expertise, or temperament to dissent. increasingly, i think they do. this is again part of the polarization or the sense of rising individualism to the -- well, nobody quite anticipated. there are ways for dissent, for lack of consensus, veiled consensus, or consensus that his blog to be demonstrated. joanna: thank you so much. i would like to elicit any questions from the audience. >> [inaudible]

josh participation in antigovernment, because i am not sure it commission is going to work. the thing that is interesting to me when you look at these commissions and presidential taskforces, a log of blue-ribbon people named don't do anything. a great example is a book on lbj, the idea of task forcing. and a lot of that was government bureaucrats, but not the big-name people. clark kerrof that, , when he is being fired by ronald reagan, did not show up at all. there is the idea that who is left behind are the nameless bureaucrats. a log of whois actually participates in who is shaping that we need to think

about. to theseing appointed commissions are not actually government officials. is it any wonder that we have no real sense about men and women in civil service who have done so much, how does it work? does our focus on these commissions, which very rarely lead to any effective policy change -- a lot of interesting ideas -- but those are not the people on the ground actually trying to implement policies. just a thought. frank: one possible answer -- not a complete answer. the staffs are frequently people who are seconded by their agencies at the request of the executive director so that the lifetime civil servant often makes up a half, a third, something like that of the commission staff and they are sort of nameless and the nature

of these things. dov: the staff is distinct from the commissioners themselves. andk: their full-time job they are there all the time, can influence what the report says a lot. they are the people who pull the all nighters on this stuff. i gather all nighters do happen and it is not the commissioners for the most part doing it. stafffetime civil service does have this reputation of being influential in the commissions. part of the larger problem of the united states is we don't respect civil service the way we should. they know things and they have been there and have reality and so forth -- >> [inaudible] -- because who is actually

writing this and shaping this? authorial intent is so important here. there is this lack of conflict in them. that is the foundation to it. are these presidential commissions, do we learn less about the administration? in higher education, you can see a huge difference in which administrators they bring in. ivy leaguend -- hi once. but who fundamentally is left at the end of the day writing this stuff are the civil servants there throughout the administration. frank: they are the people who write the middleist reports, not the epic months. ones, by the nature of the situation, draw more attention. dov: would you argue that the report -- maybe there are two

ways to think about your question, that the report itself would be different if it were the civil servants writing it, and. . , the effect that would have on the recommendations. >> or the attention and respect on the civil servants. the reason we know so much about what is going on right now in this white house and the nixon white house was civil servants screaming to woodward and bernstein and all of these reporters. i think we might need to think about how historians have been complicit in not giving the nameless bureaucrats, the civil servants, respect as opposed to focusing on the headline names that are picked by the president in these fancy rose garden ceremonies. are we complicit in our very on frustrations of how little we understand about these blue-ribbon commissions and what they represent for american political history? frank: certainly the present

white house doesn't seem to have a staff, whether political or civil servant, that would score very high on self impression. , atnch of blabbermouths least to read the papers. these are not people who have the passion for anonymity that was so prized in franklin administration. when the white house was starting to grow, often with people seconded from the existing executive agencies, and where people like louis brownlow , the great public administrator, talked specifically about how the ideal civil servant had this passion for anonymity, this does not seem to be a problem for the

current white house. >> wasn't that also the title for his memoir, which does cast the anonymity aspect into some relief? >> -- the appointees are out there for a name, but i am talking about the ones right now who are letting us know about all the evils going on in the epa, that kind of stuff. it's true, i have not had a chance to read the really the mueller report. we don't know who talk to him or even what we now know in terms of how poorly the epa was being run. those people are quiet about our coming for murder and jazz coming forward and saying there is something truly wrong. frank: things like michael lewis's book. >> exactly. dov: you make a really good point that thinking about presidential commissions historically, we think about how to add underprivileged voices back into the conversation,

which is important, and we have already privileged the elite voices. with presidential commissions, we know the civil servants to whom you are referring are, because they are in the reports, their correspondence and documents and their significance to the commission are also in the archives. you are making a good point that we overlook the middling group, even though we have the sources as historians to see what their role was. area,wing up in the d.c. i know this is not true before the civil rights act, but some of those civil servants are women of color. this is good employment for them. we could actually add some of the diversity questions in terms of who as the civil servants would grow, especially to be more inclusive, especially easier to push for equal opportunity in public employment than the private sector.

that is an interesting way to think about how things might have changed over time. joanna: let's get some more questions. >> my experience with presidential commissions is that the library and specializing in history, political science, when i get the chance to introduce students and faculty to the products of their time, you can look at their findings and determine whether their policy recommendations are good or bad or indifferent. a lot of them are available online. you don't necessarily have to go to the presidential library. it can also be helpful to look at the hearings that were held by these commissions. we should also go beyond just presidential commissions to look at congressionally appointed commissions, even because i governmental organization commissions, like the national academies of science, because they all can influence

policymaking. one thing i would caution about, there should be experts -- for these reports to be credible with the public, they should be based on substantive technocratic expertise regardless of the ethnic or gender or political background of the appointee. beingis perceived as just appointed as diversity for diversity's sake, it is not likely to resonate with the general public outside of the policymaking and historical circles. you were also talking about this trust in government. we have made the mistake in this society and many other countries of wanting to deify government. civil servants can make mistakes. they can also do great things. we need to have realistic expectations of what government can do as well as should do. joanna: i agree with much of

what you said. i would push back a little bit -- i don't think any of us were suggesting that diversity in and of itself. but to say the kind of expertise that has been dollarized -- val orized has often been non-expertise, this person who went to harvard, that alone cannot be expertise, or having been on a nongovernmental commission. one of the chances of -- one of the questions i did not get a chance to ask dov is the kind of expertise that was valorized. it was clear these hearings opened the commissioners to experiences they had not heard and they took it seriously and it influenced their organizations. thet those people have expertise that the commissioners laughed. i am not going to say why worry those people on the commissions instead because i think we know,

but those were the experts. to be re-conceiving what we think of when we talk about expertise as knowledge and background, that that helps us realize how very limited it has been in the past and what do we actually want people to know and to have and to have done on commissions. going toefinition is result in a very different look for presidential and agency committees. >> -- ethnic or gender is not necessarily going to hear to one prescribed view. thing is how often the commissions are repeated. if you go through u.s. history, there have been tons on illegal immigration. there was the challenger commission report and two decades later, there was the columbia investigation.

you have very interesting themes and currents in american political history through governmental examination of them. frank: one shines through. dovincome commission that talked about seems to be a very important exception. in the 1960's, the commissions that i was looking at, and even today in all of american politics, one of the rarest things you hear and the entire big chunks of government, you never hear it at all, is the voice of the poor person. the greatest thing in american politics. was then, is now. we have to find better ways to do this stuff. we have all this experience that dov and i represent in a very small way, studying commissions, but it is the lack of people who have really suffered from

american society and commissions , it is throughout government. somehow when they do get into government, they are minimized, marginalized, whatever the term is. i wish we could face this directly. again, i don't want to be asked how to do that directly, but i can dohis may be -- you the usual professor's copout. students, solve it, your generation can do it. we never have, but you, the golden generation, go get it. joanna: patiently waiting for the microphone. >> first, thank you for doing this panel and for revitalizing presidential commissions or the significance of presidential

commissions. i greatly appreciate that. i have a lot of thoughts and i am going to try to boil it down because i know other folks have questions. there are a couple of things i would really like for the panel to think about. in particular, i find myself andinced by the panelists their significance, placing a significant amount of attention on presidential commissions and using presidential commissions to specific ends. i find that this is actually, particularly when we frame it in specific ways, this is actually a useful tool for historical analysis and for historians to think about the intersection of traditional models of political history and nontraditional models, but also bringing social

history, ethnic, race history, what have you, these marginalized perspectives and voices, into conversation, traditionally elite spaces representative of the state. about also treating some of these spaces as representative voices that disrupt this idea of elite. to this question of, say, whistleblowers, speaking about whistleblowers as under representated voices or civil servants within the apparatus of the state, so distilling the idea of power within the hierarchy of the state. i also think it is useful for questions of class. frank, to your point thinking about how presidential commissions can be useful in rendering an understanding of elite perspectives on a broad

array of issues, in this case particularly by dov's point by all of these elites basically going into poverty or venturing into the unknown territory and being deeply influenced by their experience they otherwise would not have had. i think that is useful in telling a story about that. next, i do think presidential commissions are useful in talking about the significance of failure in history. not simply an issue for the discipline of history. it is very much a problem for particularlyence, the subfield of american political development. but the idea that failure therefore vendors something insignificant is the wrong way

of looking at it. we should be thinking about what is the story this failure tells us? what does it mean the kerner commission puts out this explosive report and the only two things taken out of it greatly increase mass incarceration and the impossible state. ,ll the other things structural, institutional, get tossed out. that is a story that tells us something about the foundation of contemporary problems of inequality, race, things like that. one of the last points that i think it is useful in teasing out here -- actually, maybe i will rephrase it. i am really interested in the panel thinking about the, not just the intentionality of these

presidential commissions, because i think the story changes depending on what presidential commission you are looking at, but perhaps using presidential commissions not as some objective truth or archive as anrces, but instead analytical way of looking at a particular moment and then extrapolating it out, using the toolkit to extrapolate out. i am thinking of trump's presidential commission on electoral integrity. if we take that at face value and go into the future and say, in 20 years historians are looking at this, that doesn't actually tell us what we need to know about that particular commission. it is owes me -- it is only in using that commission within a specific context and looking at

the intersection of the applicable history with social and cultural history that we get a fuller narrative that tells us this is a sham commission with a very specific intent at a particular moment in time. panelistsring if the can comment on this in terms of how you see the purpose of using these commissions in a way that speaks to the overarching significance of the intersection of political and social history. dov: i think you're right to identify commissions -- thanks for the questions, they are really good. i think you are right to identify presidential commissions and the materials produced as tools to do political history, but not necessarily artifacts of themselves. i think you are second and third questions are related in interesting ways, understanding a presidential commission only

in the context of a historical moment is the value of looking at that commission as an object of study. the question becomes, looking at that commission in relation to what and which other groups and events? to the second question you asked about what happens to the recommendations of those commissions and whether commissions are considered successful or not, it may get us to a better understanding of the way the power flows within governments and societies at particular moments. understanding commissions in historical contexts to various moving parts of the way in which decisions are made and resources allocated and why were why not particular recommendations have an impact, whether that is in the process of their rejection or actually shaping policy, it is interesting to think about. they are not just lenses onto

historical moments, but lenses onto the way in which power works at any moment. >> to your point about failure, i think it is key and we need a lot more work on failure in political history. in paths notome up taken, where you can see alternatives, but the eye is on where we could have gone, but where we went. about really centering, here is what people wanted to do and here is why it didn't work. we tend to talk about the things that mostly work and we don't really dig into what the constraints were, the institutional or political constraints, the incentives, et cetera, that made something failed. i think it is such an important thing that we don't spend nearly enough time talking about. frank: i would start with the

last example about the voter suppression commission, which i suspect sounded plausible to 40% of the population, the national population. likehe other 60%, it looks just another trump stunt. that 20 years from now will be the metaphor of the trump administration. the only presidential commission in history that got appointed, got money, and collapsed anyway. now that's a failure. that's a meta-failure, really. maybe failure studies, if historians start doing that, they could start with that one. it is a meta-failure and it does sum up a lot of the context of the time and it does sum up what lots of people think of the trump administration. dov: i think there is also an important critique in your

question of the way historians and scholars have written american political history in two ways, maybe. if we know the sources are in the archives for the voices of the not powerful, but also civil servants, but we have chosen largely to write about them, that is a conscious decision about what we write about and don't write about so what we privilege not just the result of archival materials available, but the decision we have made about who should have a voice in the history we write. that is an important critique in the way we think about writing voices into american political history. joanna: -- frank: one more thing, coming back to failure. ourand i are both in respective public-policy schools. schools do a lot of what's called policy analysis.

they look at particular initiatives and see how they play out. in truth, the vast number of policy analysis that get done in particular programs show failure, show shortfall, show partial achievement, but they should have looked a little more here and could have gone from 60% to 85%, or something like that. this may be the passage of time speaking or the light shining in my eye, but failure is a big part of life. one of 10 small businesses actually succeeds and is still operating after five years. why should it be any different for government programs? most of human life, a lot of human life, is about failure. sometimes the failure is structural, it was doomed to begin with, and other times it

is more situational. it could have worked if different decisions had been made at different times, but we shouldn't be surprised as such by failure. joanna: i want to see if there is a way to connect some of the themes of other panels to what you all have been talking about, in terms of the history of failure. i wonder if government officials and historians and political scientists are all able to somehow come clean about the importance, the significance of feed intoon't that the conspiratorial minefield that government can't do anything right? i am marrieding, to and related to a number of career civil servants, lawyers, scientists, and they can't talk to the press. when they talk about the need to

bring out the work a day voices of the government, it is not possible to. it is not possible to talk to people who are working for the census bureau right now, because of government regulations but also because the whole thing is in litigation. so there isn't as much access to the daily tasks of government and how they are being attended to as we would like to think there is. speak, even cannot off the record, in much detail about what they are doing, depending on the job they have. frank: and of course they far outnumber the political employees. >> greatly. like 2 million. a sore question. you are looking at the work they produce.

what kind of archival management is happening, what kind of retention is happening, that is getting at the point, what work are they doing? in 20, 30, 40 years, one could go to the archives and see at least some of the work they were doing and use that to figure out, along with oral histories and whatever after-the-fact, we would also just have the files. we know there are partial, we know they are limited, we know they are constrained, but we are reading them against the grain and doing what historians do. >> the record should have some content, i agree. those recordsrust to tell us the full story. you know that as well as anybody. joanna: you never can. frank: there is also a certain amount of the press -- and some

of my best friends are journalists -- i thought that was funny, but i guess not. inevitably given deadline, pay constraints, all kinds of things, often tends to simplify an actual problem. nuance of the problem, the complexity of the problem, from the people you are talking about, but the press operating on an deadline tends to graduate certain things, likes to focus on personalities. it creates man god's and monster women. it guns people out, if they are in a particular category, sort of like sports figures, for entertainment. all these gods and monsters have their fallibilities and the press delights in finding those as well. this is very different from the

life of the sober civil servant you are related to. it is the tortoise versus the hare. i think what i hear you saying is eventually the tortoise can win. dov: your first question is really interesting and connects to lia's question about thinking more as historians and in conversation with political scientists about the ways we talk about success and failure and about how those are included or excluded by virtue of being failures from the scholarship that we write. i think it is a really important ,hallenge to rethink that wes that we think about the success and framework and how it affects research. >> in terms of skepticism about government, when i think about the 9/11 commission, which may have been more congressional than presidential -- frank: no, it was presidential. >> good, it fits.

about so many people did not trust what that commission produced. there were all kinds of conspiratorial convictions that grew out of 9/11 that the commission report did absolutely nothing to allay. nobody wanted to be pacified by that report. that i think is part of this larger problem of the sort of ideological conviction that you can't trust what comes out of the government or the digital equipment. joanna: unfortunately we are out of time, but i want to thank you all for coming and participating. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] isthe contingency sample

done. it is a little difficult to dig through. >> very interesting, a very soft but when i got the , i run intosample -- it appears to be a very cohesive material. >> tried to get a rock in here. announcer: you are watching american history tv, every weekend beginning saturday at 8:00 a.m. eastern. 48 hours of programming exploring our nation's past. american history tv is only on c-span3. >> i believe they are setting up the flag now.

neil, this is houston. radio check. over. >> i hear you loud and clear. >> loud and clear, houston. >> roger, buzz. announcer: this weekend on the presidency, former secret service agents talk about protecting the first family. speakers include larry boone dorf, who prevented a 1975 assassination attempt on president gerald ford. here's a preview. time wasition at the right at his left shoulder, so as he is walking along shaking hands, i am concentrating on his hands, kind of in a downward motion because you don't want anybody to grab too long, take his watch, whatever.

out in the crowd is a member of the charlie manson family, the next wiki from -- lynette happened toe, who be carrying a 45 strapped to her ankle. suddenly i see a hand come up with something in it. at that point i didn't know it was a weapon, but i stepped in front of the president and stop the hand from coming up because i didn't want him to get hit with whatever it was. i yelled out, gun. all my very best friends that were with the president, they leave with the president. [laughter] part of our training program. you are on your own, buddy. [laughter] the crowd is screaming and i got a hold of her hand and got the gun.

another thing, mr. director, i est on, so imy v am thinking i don't know if there is more to this, but i am not letting go of her. the crowd is screaming. got the gun, got the girl, she is screaming. i keep pushing her away. by then the president is gone with agents. i drop her down to the ground. some of the agents and police from the back of the crowd came forward. i noticed one of the agents from the shift and i hand him the gun her, which is happening now. i turn her over to the agent that was there from our intelligence division and the police. i went back and rejoined the shift. it was pretty fast and furious. a matter of seconds and you have a chance to sit back and think about how fast it went down. [applause]

>> you are watching american history tv. >> from the early 1960's until about filmmaker robert newman 1980, produced a number of documentaries on social justice for the united church board of homeland ministries, which was associated with the united church of christ. next, "open arms," a 1980 film on immigration that includes audio recordings of americans expressing opinions in favor of and against immigration, and scenes of the u.s.- mexico border, immigrants in new york city, and a cuban refugee camp. ♪