The Insider

After four decades working among the power elite, Joe Califano '52 tells his remarkable life story.

By Maria Healey

There is an astonishing passage in Joseph Califano’s new memoir, Inside: A Public and Private Life. In the summer of 1965, newly appointed as chief domestic adviser t.o President Lyndon Johnson, Califano is called from Washington to Johnson’s Texas ranch to discuss the framework for the country’s new legislative program.

Johnson was in the pool when I arrived; he signaled for me to join him. We swam for a couple of minutes, then stopped about two-thirds of the way toward the deep end of the pool. . . . Poking my shoulder with a strong finger as though punctuating a series of exclamation points, Johnson started talking. He saw America as a nation with many needs: . . .

‘One, I want you to straighten out the transportation mess in this country. . . .

Next, I want to rebuild American cities.

Third, I want a fair housing bill . . . I want a bill that makes it possible for anybody to buy a house anywhere they can afford to. Now, can you do that? Can you do all these things?’

‘Yes, sir, Mr. President,’ I responded, not having the faintest idea how.

At the time Califano may very well have felt ill-equipped to set in place the Great Society programs Johnson envisioned, but readers of Inside will see the pieces fall into place: “the kid from Brooklyn” - Jesuit educated, first at Brooklyn Prep, and, then, at “The Cross” - graduating in the top of his class at Harvard Law School (along with two other Holy Cross classmates: Dennis Lyons and Myles Whalen). Califano then served as an attorney in the Navy, starting a litigation career when discrimination and inequality began to expose the need for the enactment of civil rights legislation. He left the Navy for New York, where he worked at a Wall Street firm which he at first found exciting and financially rewarding, but then “grinding” and void of significant social contribution.

At the same time, Califano grew increasingly active as a socially aware Catholic in New York, getting involved in Jubilee, “A Magazine of the Church and her People,” which focused on social issues, education and civil rights. Influenced by the Catholic Worker movement and the work of Dorothy Day, and deeply moved by what Califano describes as “the verge of some kind of golden age of Catholicism” and “a greater recognition of the relevance of (the) individual conscience,” the young attorney’s imagination and sense of service were caught by the vision of John F. Kennedy. Califano registered as a Democrat and “scratched around New York” for ties to someone in the 1960 Presidential campaign.

Proud and inspired by Kennedy’s victory, Califano sent a letter and resumé to Cyrus Vance, then general counsel of the Department of the Defense. Vance offered him a job as his special assistant, counsel to a group of military advisers on legal issues in the Office of the General Counsel. Quickly, he was recruited by Robert McNamara; dubbed by the press as one of the “whiz kids,” he joined the secretary of defense’s monumental Cold War effort to reorganize the Pentagon using an “energetic team of young
civilians.”

“Within days I felt as though I had stepped into a Pentagon version of the kind of revolution that Arthur Schlesinger had described in his books on the New Deal,” Califano writes in Inside. He cites “an air of invincibility” about the whiz kids and McNamara, who were then “imposing hands-on civilian control on the military.”

An excited, enthusiastic Califano worked hard, made good decisions - excelling at negotiation among other things - and, at a particular crossroads, faced an opportunity to work for McNamara as general counsel for the Defense Department, or for Vance, as his special assistant to the Army. His decision to remain with Vance kept him out of policy decisions that led to Vietnam and thrust him instead into the civil rights events of the 1960s, leaving Califano with a profound sense of “how critical it was to change the culture - the hearts and minds of men and women - to make progress.”

Throughout his career, and throughout Inside, Califano returns to a meditation on his faith. It was while working for Johnson that “it was all in sync,” he says. “It was a moral crusade as well as a political crusade. Everything we did was social justice loud and clear. Everything was in line with the concept of social justice I’d got from the Jesuits at Brooklyn Prep and Holy Cross.”

In discussing his early life, Califano points to influences in add-a-bead fashion: witnessing the Depression as an only child; the faith and discipline he got from his parents; the tough fun of growing up in Brooklyn; his education, first with the Jesuits, then complemented by a “powerful secular component” at Harvard.

He praises Brooklyn Prep as instilling in its students an early sense of social justice and the notion that “there was something unique in being a Catholic.” Holy Cross impressed him with its discipline and its focus on ethical debate. For a young man already skilled in negotiation from the streets of Brooklyn, he was compelled as an English major to “do battle in order to write my thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald” - then an author more likely to be listed in the Index of Forbidden Books than on a syllabus. He cites Fr. Henry Bean’s rhetoric class as where he learned to “think on my feet, write and speak publicly.”

Holy Cross was where he learned “how to organize,” and in a political way. He ran the student presidential campaign for his roommate, Ike Lancaster, (though his candidate lost). As a third-year student, Califano saw the potential of the Outing Club - a group of students that went on ski trips - as a platform, a “shell,” for a bigger movement. Using a free auditorium, Califano rented movies like Gunga Din and Frankenstein for 15 dollars; charging a dollar as dues, he gathered a thousand members. Doing eight movies a year for a little over a hundred dollars, Califano enhanced the Outing Club’s constituents and activities considerably. In his final year, concerned with the absence of a serious job placement program for graduates, he created the Career Research Associates.

For all Holy Cross students, the connections they find with fellow alums can serve them almost as well as their education. In 1971, Califano’s friendship and partnership with Ed Williams ’41, along with Paul Connolly, who went to Loyola in Baltimore, became the stuff of a legendary Washington law firm: Williams, Connolly & Califano.

“One of the most notable things about that in retrospect was that we never had a piece of paper,” says Califano. “We just operated on a handshake, which is unthinkable now. We were all Catholic. We had all grown up in modest circumstances. We were all ambitious.”

Just two weeks after Califano joined the firm, Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post, asked the partners to represent the paper at the time the “Pentagon Papers” were released, and the Nixon administration sued to stop further stories. Though it was an ambition of the firm to be the lawyers of the paper, the partners were representing other clients at the time and had to decline. Graham pursued, though, hiring them after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the press, and Williams, Connolly & Califano represented the Post’s reporters when the Watergate scandal eventually broke.

Claiming at the time “only a law student’s academic appreciation of the First Amendment,” Califano felt as if he were on “a citizen’s crusade to protect Democracy.” He qualifies the experience as “the most exciting and satisfying as any in my career as a lawyer,” where the long-instilled Jesuit ideal of the ethical debate led to ground-breaking legal protection of free speech and, for Califano, an appreciation of “a free, aggressive, relentlessly skeptical press.”

In 1976, Jimmy Carter offered Califano a job as secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), and he left the firm to return to government service. Though his relationship with Carter hardly mirrored the like-mindedness he enjoyed with Johnson, it was his work with HEW programs, social security and welfare among them, that sparked - or re-sparked - Califano’s drive for reform. (And it is at this point in Inside that Califano quotes from the Special Ethics textbook issued to him at Holy Cross - citing a passage that calls on a graduating senior to “throw yourself into life at its intensest point. Be a doer of the Word.”)

In addition to welfare reform and work on national health insurance, Carter wanted Califano to set up a health promotion and disease-prevention program. Seeking expert research, Califano was made aware that “no credible effort” could be made unless the government “went after cigarette smoking.” Califano’s anti-smoking campaign, announced in 1978, would cost him his job due to the strength of the tobacco industry at the time, but it piqued in him a commitment to fight addiction of all kinds.

Having started his own firm after leaving the Carter administration, Califano got a call from the then governor of New York, Hugh Carey - who asked Califano to put together a heroin program to deal with the huge drug problem in the state. The research at HEW had made him aware of the longevity of addiction - how smokers get hooked as teenagers - and the research his team conducted concerning heroin revealed that more than half the hospital beds in New York were filled with people who were smoking, abusing alcohol or drugs. Profoundly affected by this, aware that there was “no good public policy out there,” newly reminded that God would hold him “accountable for how I used the talents He had given me,” Califano eventually quit law in 1992 and founded The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University.

CASA employs a range of experts - in medicine, law enforcement, anthropology, communications, economics, psychology, public health, social services and religion - in order to study, understand and treat the scourge of addiction. Convinced that the key to fighting substance abuse involves getting to young people before they get hooked on cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, Califano declares, “That’s where it’s at, and that’s where we should be putting our attention.”

In the process, he is giving back to his College. CASA is part of the Holy Cross Intern Program, and several graduates have worked for Califano as special assistants: Marcia Lee ’93, who, in 2002, received the Sanctae Crucis Award from the College for public service and now works for U.S. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware; and John Demers ’93, who currently works in the Justice Depar­tment. Califano praises the Jesuit Volunteer Corps: “People who go into the JVC come out very resourceful.” One such volunteer, Peggy Collins ’97, who worked with him on Inside, receives an acknowledgment in the book.

Having finished his book tour this spring, Califano and his wife, Hilary, traveled overseas, touring the famous D-Day beaches and joining in the June 6 ceremonies.

In Inside, Califano refers to his days with Johnson and the Great Society programs as rewarding because he felt certain of “doing the Lord’s work.” He still embodies that vision and energy, what he calls “spiritual adrenalin.” And, as he makes clear in his autobiography, while he spent his life walking the corridors of power in Washington, it was in the classrooms of Mount St. James that he learned the values and the principles that guided his route.

Excerpt from Inside

Where else could a kid from Brooklyn - who played punch ball on the street in Crown Heights, who at age 14 bought loosies at a penny a cigarette and sometimes stole cake from the back of a Dugan’s Bakery truck on the same day he served Mass as an altar boy at St. Gregory’s - walk the corridors of the Pentagon’s E Ring, the West Wing of the White House and the secret tunnels of Capitol Hill, sit in the suites of Washington and Wall Street law firms and Fortune 500 Corporate Board rooms, and represent the Washington Post and the Democratic Party during Watergate?

Only in America.

There are moments when I still pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming the life I’ve led. Of course, there have been plenty of ups and downs: the high of being tapped by President Lyndon Johnson to be (as TheNew York Times put it) Deputy President for Domestic Affairs and the low of being fired by President Jimmy Carter as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Fortunately I was blessed with loving parents who brought me up American with a capital A and Catholic with a capital C - and instilled values that helped keep the peaks and valleys in perspective.

This is a memoir of growing up in Brooklyn and Washington, government and politics, medicine and the media, law and religion in a tumultuous era of political and social change so swift and sweeping as to be unthinkable when I graduated from Holy Cross in 1952 and Harvard Law School in 1955. I write here of my role in the powerful currents that reshaped the contours of American life over the past half century and continue to do so to this day: the civil rights movement, the Great Society legislative explosion of the 1960s, the restructuring of the Democratic Party in the 1970s, the Watergate break-in, the miracles of medical science that revolutionized sexual conduct and blurred the line between Madame Curie and Dr. Frankenstein. These currents have swept over every American man, woman, and child, changing our culture, sparking hopes, ambitions, and fears, recasting the way we live and die.

When I went to Washington in 1961, I had no idea of the role I would play in shaping those changes, much less how the changes in my country, my church, my profession and my party would change me.

Maria Healey is a freelance writer from Northampton, Mass.