Interview with Thacher Longstreth

December 5, 1976

My name is Thacher Longstreth. I'm 57 years old. I live at thecorner of 300 West Highland Ave with my wife, Nancy. I'm the father of four children, all adults, and 11 grandchildren in the process of becoming adults. I've resided in Chestnut Hill since September of 1950, when I returned;after four years with Life magazine in Detroit. I was born and brought up in Haverford and my family has lived in the Philadelphia area ever since Bartholomew Longstreth came here with William Penn in the late 1600's. We are ninth generation Quakers and have been closely affiliated with many aspects of Philadelphia life for a long, long time.

I was educated at the Haverford School in Haverford, where my father had also graduated and was the first Longstreth in four generations to not go on to Haverford College. Traditionally the family had always gone on to Haverford. I had illusions of athletic grandeur, which were never realized, but I wanted a forum that was slightly larger than that of a small Quaker college in which to strut my stuff, so I ended up in Princeton where I played three major sports and where I enjoyed the advantages of a scholarship which enabled me to go through Princeton at a time when my family had no money whatsoever and where I was involved in a great deal of student employment to make that education possible. I sold sandwiches. I waited on table. I was involved in a number of campus agencies, both from a management and from a sales standpoint. I spent my time fairly evenly between that work necessary to raise the money to go through college, pursuing my present wife, who at that time was a young lady of considerable talents and great beauty, and engaging in a very strenuous athletic career and occasionally doing something from the academic standpoint I had to maintain a B average to maintain my scholarship and I did that, but little more. I majored in the classics - Latin and Greek — and ended up with a relatively successful athletic career. I got letters in several sports and was honorable mention on the All-American football team in the fall of 1939. I held the Princeton record in the high hurdles for about 20 years and enjoyed a number of extra­ curricular activities, including being Chairman of the Honor Committee at Princeton, Chairman of the Undergraduate Council, and President of the Senior class. 2.

I was graduated in 1941 and went to work for a short time with the Insurance Company of North America before going on to four years in the U.S. Navy, about half of which was spent on board various aircraft carriers in the Pacific. I was in Torpedo Squadron 14 on the Wasp for about a year and then was Assistant Operations Officer on the staff of Admiral John Sydney McCain for an additional year and we flew our flag on four different carriers during that period. I went to work for Life magazine immediately following the war and stayed with Life from 1946 until June of '53 when I joined Geare-Marston advertising agency here in Philadelphia. I was with them for about a year before taking a year's hiatus to run for Mayor of Philadelphia against Dick Dilworth — a campaign which I lost. I went back into the advertising agency business with Atkin Kynett and spent approximately 8 1/2 years with them. I left in the middle of 1964 to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and I've been there ever since.

You ask "what were your earliest political activities and interests and how did they lead up to your becoming a candidate for Mayor in 1955?" In 1952, after no previous interest of involvement in politics whatsoever, I was asked by Tom Wood to become a speaker for Citizens for Eisenhower and I spent several months moving around the city on a sound truck, speaking for Eisenhower. And there's an interesting tale there because I think it points out how frequently you have to really fight your way into a political campaign. Citizens for Eisenhower had headquarters on Walnut St. and there was appropriate fanfare, Signs, banners, etc., urging people to come in and work. And so one day I came in and said I wanted to work. I was greeted with great enthusiasm by a lady at the desk who put my name on a card in the file and said I would be hearing shortly. That was in the early summer of '52. Nothing happened. So I went back again about a month later. There was a different lady at the desk this time. I said I would like to volunteer to help General Eisenhower and she said I should fill out a card. I said I already had and she said well I would be hearing from them shortly. Another month went by. So I went back again. There was a third lady at the desk. I told her I really wanted to work and didn't want to go on filling out cards till the election was over. So finally, more or less in desperation, she said if you are all that anxious to work, the warehouse where we keep all our materials is out in back of our headquarters and is in terrible shape. How about going out there and cleaning it up? I guess she figured she was calling my bluff. So I went out into the warehouse, which really looked like the Agean stables. I took one look at things, and I knew that it was far beyond my powers, but

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when I was asked by Phillips T. Sharpless, who was the Chairman of the Republican Finance Committee of Pennsylvania to assist him in setting up a fund-raising division of the Finance Committee to cover advertising agencies, printers, publications, and other media in the 1954 gubernatorial campaign which was backing up the efforts of Lloyd Wood, an undistinguished Republican candidate for Governor. So I worked for the Finance Committee during that campaign and raised a surprisingly large amount of money, which didn't do much good because George Leader beat Lloyd Wood for the second Democratic gubernatorial victory in this century. However, once again I got a chance to become involved in a political campaign and this time instead of being in a very active, vociferous, speech-making kind of activity I was engaged in the behind-the-scenes role of raising money and got some feel of the role that finances play in a political campaign. In 1955 my involvement in the campaign with Dilworth was so extraordinarily accidental that I wonder sometime if it really happened that way, but it did. One day a number of young Republican leaders, particularly John Pomeroy and Frank McGlinn, who were active in the Republican Finance committee of Pennsylvania at that time from staff positions, were in the Racquet Club discussing whom they were going to run against Dilworth for Mayor in the 1955 race. At that time the Republican City Committee had indicated that they were going to run organization politician Wilbur Hamilton for Mayor. They had run a Protestant minister named Dan Poling against Joe Clark in 1951. Poling had been dragged out of nowhere and thrust into a very tough situation and then had disappeared back into nowhere when the campaign was over. City Committee apparently felt that Wilbur had a chance of winning and apparently Sheriff Meehan, who was one of the four leading powers within the Republican party then, had committed himself to Wilbur Hamilton. The Republicans were still relatively powerful though they had been beaten in '49 and '50 and '51 in Philadelphia by the upsurging Democrats. The Republicans had won an upset in 1953, the Republican organization was still fairly strong and they had four men — Sheriff Austin Meehan, Bill Meade, Bill Hamilton, who was Wilbur's brother, and Mort Witkin. These four men were the principal architects of Republican policy and they directed the Republican activities. Dave Watson was the head of the 22nd ward, which was one of the two largest wards in the city. Watson was essentially a field commander and the strategy and the direction of the party was being dictated by those four, with Meade in control of the River Wards, the Downtown wards; Hamilton with very strong control of the 21st ward; and Sheriff Meehan with the enormous 35th ward, which was practically the entire Northeast area. Witkin didn't have big numbers in the 20th 5.

ward, but he was the smartest of the four and I think his position of influence was based on the fact that he had a Machiavellian mind, was constantly coming up with good ideas of campaigning and was the King of Dirty Tricks, which was an important part of big city politics in those days. The good government Republicans had responded to the Clark-Dilworth victory in '51 with an effort to set up a reform movement of their own, within the structure of tie Republican party and this was called the Republican Assembly. It had been put together with much encouragement from Jim Duff, who was then United States Senator and Congressman Hugh Scott, who was the only congressman still representing a congressional district in Philadelphia -- and the last one, I might add — when he left the Congress to run for the Senate in 1958. There have been no Philadelphia . Republican Congressmen since then. These gentlemen, together with people like Steve McLoughlin, who had been a candidate for city controller, Walter Miller, a former mayoralty aspirant and Ray Speiser, who had been a candidate for District Attorney, and a number of other people of this calibre had decided to select someone who would run for mayor in the primary and at least represent the reform movement. This particular day I happened to wander through the Racquet Club dining room. Bill Churchman, a Democrat who knew me and was aware of the Republican search, stopped at John Pomeroy's table and said, "Here's the guy you ought to run for mayor. He's a big extroverted sort of fellow and he's been involved in politics a little bit and was an athlete in college and had a good war record, makes a lot of noise, and is pretty good on his feet. That's the kind of guy you ought to run.'Vv Apparently this struck a responsive chord, with Pomeroy and Frank McGlinn and with several of the others, so a couple of days later they came around to see me.They were joined by Bill Rawls, who is a particularly close friend of mine and who was a Republican committeeman in my district at that time. They asked me what I would think about the possibilities of running for Mayor under the aegis of the Republican Assembly. They hoped that if the Assembly selected me, the Republican party would endorse the choice and would incorporate that selection into their formal candidate's slate and that there would not be a primary fight. They weren't really looking for a primary fight. They didn't feel they could win one, but they simply hoped that the Republican organization would regard my selection as a desireable move and would support it accordingly. There was also a fellow named Bill Butler involved, who appeared on the scene for a while and was a very very devious fellow. Then alongvith John Pomeroy was his close friend Herb Fogel, who from very early in the game appeared to me to be the most intelligent, knowledgeable and capable of the persons involved. I became heavily/dependent on Herb Fogel for 6.

advice and direction in that campaign and in the other mayoralty campaign 16 years later. We had some fascinating early day reactions from various people as the concept of my running against Dilworth began to come to a head. Initially, Scott and Duff were very enthusiastic and threw their support and their prestige behind my candidacy. My wife was perhaps most enthusiastic of all and I would say that if there was any one single factor which drove me into the political scene at that stage of the game without really very much background or knowledge it was the extraordinary enthusiasm that Nancy showed and her insistence that I make the try. I can't overstate her role because it was a very important factor. I was much less sure than she was and much less anxious to do it, although I must admit that after I was involved I got bitten by the bug just as badly as she. We found that the people who controlled the Republican Assembly, which was more of a paper organization — more of a public relations activity than it was a real political group — were rather easy to sell and they endorsed me almost immediately. I then told Senator Duff and Congressman Scott that I wanted four or five days to think it over and particularly to discuss it with my business associates in the Geare Marson advertising agency where I was employed. The Senator used an old gambit which I didn't recognize at the time but would today. He did not want to give me time to think the matter over and then perhaps decide that I did not want to do it. So the day after he and Scott had promised to give me four days to think it over, they leaked the news to the newspapers and it broke as a front page story. Thus, I became a declared candidate four days before I meant to become one and was given really no opportunity to think the thing through. And more damaging, from my own point of view, I was never able to discuss it with my partners in the advertising agency. They bitterly resented it and never forgave me. Later I lost my job as a result of it. This was the first political disillusionment of many that were to occur over the years. They leaked the story to the papers. They didn't come out with a formal statement. But then when the papers asked them for statements they said yes, they felt that Mr. Longstreth would be a fine candidate, would be willing to support him, etc. My -selection was then presented to the Republican organization with Hamilton, Witkin, Meehan, and Meade and they talked about it and then decided that I would not be the candidate, because they .wereinot willing to support me. On the other hand, the other three convinced Sheriff Meehan that Wilbur Hamilton could not be the candidate, that they would have to match the "clean-cut, young American boy" that the Assembly was presenting with a clean-cut American boy of their own. 7.

So they came up with George Williams, who was a young lawyer who had been active in some prosecutions as an Assistant District Attorney and who was an attractive fellow and had rather close ties with the organizations through the Hamiltons and Judge Tom Eagen. George Williams was selected by the regular Republican organization and I was left with no support at all. Then, having gotten behind George Williams, the Republican organization called in Jim Duff, who was going to run for the Senate again the following year and said if you want our support next year you'd better get out of town fast. So Senator Duff did get out of town fast and this man who had led me up on the mountain and had urged me to run and had been primarily responsible for me agreeing to run promptly disappeared and was seen no more.

Meehan and Hamilton did the same thing to Congressman Scott with the same results. Congressman Scott went to Washington and stayed out of sight until after the primary. So almost immediately in the very early stages in deciding whether or not I wanted to get in the political scene I found out that commitments that people make to you — these men had made very strong and vociferous commitments to me — obviously count for nothing as soon as pressure is brought to bear. Away they went. The same was true with most of the rest of the people in the assembly. The moment the Republican organization started to put pressure on people in the assembly — Ray Speiser ran; Judge Winnett, who had been very active in promoting my entry in the assembly, ran. And we had a meeting at Hugh Scott's house where 15 of 16 of my strongest supporters gathered together to see what we should do and almost without exception they all recommended that I get out. As soon as they made this recommendation, they left the room. Finally, everybody had left the room except for Steve McLoughlin, Walter Miller, John Pomeroy, and Herb Fogel. And they were the four who said I ought to stay in there and fight. Well, I really didn't know what I was going to do. I was obviously quite shocked at the fact that all of this support that I thought I had had suddenly vanished and as I began to realize that the organization that presently existed — the Republican organization — was still pretty formidible, I really thought how can I get out of this without showing the white feather. When you really want to run for cover how do you run for cover without appearing to be yellow? I was just looking around desperately for some way of saving face and retiring gracefully to the sidelines when Sheriff Austin Meehan and Bill Hamilton called and asked me to have lunch with them, and Bill Hamilton told me: "If you don't 8.

get out of this race I'm going to ruin you. I'll get you fired from your job. You won't be able to show your face here in Philadelphia again, and I will personally see to it that you will have to move to some other city." Sheriff Meehan was far more conciliatory but in the long run said pretty much the same, except in a nicer way. This made me so angry that I ended up the luncheon by telling them that I had been looking for a way of getting out of the race, but that my reaction to this kind of pressure had always been the same and that I felt like a Christian being told I either had to change my religion or go into the lion's den. I told them — "I don't care if I get beaten by 100 - 150,000 votes. I'm going to stay in this thing and I'm going to stay all the way. I'll do my best to beat youffellow." I didn't do it in a vain-glorious way, because I didn't think I had a chance. I just did it because I had been goaded and pushed to the point where I wasn't willing to withdraw any further. And I think if the matter had been handled any differently I never would have gone ahead with it. If instead of pressuring me they had helped me find a way out, I would have liked to have had a way out. But I figured I had to stand up and fight.

John Pomeroy turned out to be an extremely capable, sagacious, and clever political opportunist and very early in the game John took me to see Jay Cook. Jay Cook at that stage of the game was furious at Austin Meehan and at Senator Duff because of the gubernatorial campaign of several years earlier, when Jay Cook had run against Duff and where the PMA had supported Cook and where Meade had been for Cook and Meehan had been forEUff and Cook had lost because of this. I think that Cook, who was a Princetonian, who had been in my club there, and with whom I had hit if off personally right away felt a personal affection for me which brought him into my camp, plus the fact that I think he looked at this as a way of getting even with some of his political enemies. He threw himself into this and brought a lot of heavy artillery with him.

Cook, in turn, brought lawyer Jim McIntosh in. Jim McIntosh attracted Tom McCabe, (the President of Scott Paper Co.). Tom McCabe brought in some financial people and the first thing you know I began to have some money, and we took the first money that we got and we put on a special television program which was aimed at the Republican committeemen and we used local television almost like a closed circuit program. 9.

We advertised the program in the paper and said we wanted all Republican committeemen to hear what this new candidate was going to do and why he was running, and then I delivered a savate attack on Meehan, Witkin, Hamilton, and Meade and told how they had led the Republicans down the trail of defeat. We were never going to get anywhere unless we reformed ourselves. And I pushed this concept hard and that initial television show — I used the medium successfully and skillfully — made a tremendous hit. Of course television was brand-new in those days, so the impact was many times what it would have been today. And it created such a stir, that almost immediately we began to find a great many committeemen coming in to support us. Also, we began to find a lot of money coming in. We raised $100,000 in the next few weeks, while the Williams people were raising and spending no money and doing nothing, depending entirely on the ability of the organization to carry things through. I began to use a lot of television and used it steadily. We began to generate a lot of interest in the electorate and after several weeks of this one day Witkin, who was always doing things behind the scenes, called Jay Cook and said your candidate is really getting to a lot of our committee people. And he said "I've got five ward leaders who say they want to be for Longstreth and they've gone to Bill Meade tonight and they are having a meeting with him and I think if you call Meade around 10 o'clock you might find that he may be willing to do something with you." So Cook got together with Meade and they discussed what would happen, and then Meade and all of his committeemen and all his ward leaders turned in for me. That gave us the Meade committeemen, who were mostly in the controlled wards and it left the independent wards more and more in my camp because they felt that I was more desireable than Williams. And then magistrate James Clothier, who had wanted the nomination for mayor from the organization and had been ignored in favor of Williams threw his hat in the ring and although I've never been sure of this, I'm told that Jay Cook raised some money for him because he was taking votes away from Williams, not from me. And as a consequence it became an open primary between the three of us and during the last several weeks everything broke my way and much to my amazement I got about 52% of the vote and won the primary election. That was a very exciting thing because for the first time the Republican organization was beaten in the primary. It was really literally a 100 to 1 shot that no one ever expected to come off. I found myself in the very heady situation of having won this upset victory and being at least for the moment lionized everywhere. Dilworth, in the meantime, of course had had no opposition so he was playing it pretty quiet and we thought that we would have a pretty good chance of winning. 10.

About a week after the election we had a luncheon down in the Racquet Club with Herb Fogel and myself and John Pomeroy and John Pomeroy told me: "I think we've got a wonderful chance of winning, but the way we've got to win is for you to take over city committee and to name the city chairman and to run the city committee structure as well as your campaign. Let it be known that if you are Mayor you are not just going to run the city but you are going to run the political organization as well." I don't know whether this was good strategy or not but I accepted Pomeroy's recommendations — I didn't know what else to do. Pomeroy then talked me into refusing to accept Bob Duffy, who had been the Chairman of city committee and who had been Meade's choice, who had resigned from city committee to work for me and who now expected to be reappointed. Pomeroy said, "Instead of doing that, have,me, John Pomeroy, appointed as Chairman of the city committee. This will be acceptable to the Meehan forces and we'll be able to present these new young faces as having accomplished this coup d'etat and taken over control of the Republican party. We will have a good chance against Dilworth in the fall because there are still Republicans in Philadelphia."

We went ahead and pursued this and it was a mistake. The Meade forces reacted very adversely. They thought that I had double-crossed them, because I had not yet woken up to the fact that if someone supports you in the primary, they then consider that in return for the support you will support them in anything that they do thereafter, and that if you don't do that you are a traitor. So I was looked upon as an ingrate and traitor by the Meade forces. The Meehan forces, on the other hand, who had been against me two weeks earlier, now declared for me and agreed to support Pomeroy for City Chairman. I finally got so totally overcome with all this that I made an appeal to the Republican City Committee at their annual meeting, asking for Pomeroy to be made Chairman. I said that if her were not made Chairman, I would not run. I was going to resign as the Republican candidate and they would have to find another candidate. This created a tremendous stir, and for three or four days the reporters and the newspapermen and radio and television men followed me everywhere I went. I never have had before or since such an enormous dose of concentrated public exposure, which was very good in making my name very well-known in Philadelphia in a short period of time, but which of course created a tremendous fight within the Republican organization itself. 11.

Again, my wife had the final word in this. I was all set to go over and resign and Jay Cook, John Pomeroy, Herb Fogel, and Jim McIntosh met with me in Jay Cook's office for about three hours to try and change my mind and I was absolutely adament that at 4:30 I was going over and resign. At about quarter after four Nancy called and said that there were hundreds of telephone calls coming in at home from people trying to get me on the telephone, but everybody said stay and fight. They did not want me to withdraw, and she was almost hysterically aggressive on this thing — saying that she thought it would be a terrible mistake. Please don't do it. Please don't do it. Whether she was right or wrong I'm not prepared to say. I am prepared to say that her comment was the factor that changed my mind. As far as Pomeroy and company were concerned I knew enough ..already to know that they had their own chestnuts for which I might or might not be a cats paw. But as far as Nancy was concerned, she was doing it because she felt it would be for my own best interests. So as the result of her pleas, I agreed that I would not withdraw, but that I would run outside the structure of the Republican organization.

I decided to run an independent campaign. Jay Cook was the head of it and John Pomeroy was the campaign manager. It was ^reasonably successful campaign, except that the Meade committeepeople never forgave me. And if you examine the vard figures in the 25 or 30 wards that were controlled by Meade at that time, what happened in the primary and then what happened in the general election, you find that there was an enormous shift away from me in favor of Dilworth. And quite a number of these committeemen, who in essence were Hessians, had been Republicans who became Democrats during that -year and produced votes for the Democrats in the fall election. Now one major reason for this is that in 1954, the previous year, George Leader had been elected Governor and of course during 1955, he kicked all the Republicans out and put the Democrats in their places in the patronage jobs that the state had in the Philadelphia area. And any of the good Republican committeemen who had important divisions were told that ehy could keep their job if they changed their registration. Many of them did so. The classic example of this was a fellow named Scotty McDonald, whom Clark and Dilworth used to whip up and down, right and left, about what a rotten no-good bad man he was -- all the terrible things he had done. He was the epitome of the bad old Republican organization. And the moment that Leader came in, McDonald was offered his job under Democratic auspices if he would simply change his registration — which he did. And I remember this particularly well because Scotty McDonald turned in a majority for me in theprimary of about 450 to 7. In the general election he turned in a majority for Dilworth — exactly the same one, 450 to 7, he just reversed it. He told me afterwards, "I only needed to give you 5 votes, but I gave you 7 because I wanted it to be an exact reversal of the situation that 12.

existed in:the past." You ask what were the issues when you ran for Mayor against Dilworth. First of all I have to admit that I came into the mayoralty race in 1955 with no idea at all that I would be involved in the general campaign. Almost from the very beginning when it was obvious that the Republicans were not going to accept me as a candidate, I was certain that I would be beaten in the^primary and my continued efforts in the primary were brought about by sheer stubbornness — I wasn't willing to be pushed out without a fight. Also I felt that I was at least providing "good government" reform Republicans with some jlace that they could go besides the Democratic party. We felt from a long-term standpoint that this would be a good way of at least retaining some semblence of a Republican party in Philadelphia. But it was very hard for m during the summer when I began to plan to know what the issues were because I really knew absolutely nothing about Philadelphia government. They couldn't have found anybody who knew less about Philadelphia city government than myself. And to be the candidate for a major party in the fourth largest city in the country and to be as ignorant as I was on the subject of city government was really a very very difficult thing.

First, you must recognize that in the period immediately after the primary there was a month or so when I was fighting Republican city committee, and then several weeks afterwards when I was trying to put the pieces of it together, so it wasn't until about the middle of July that .1 began to look at the city and say now what are the issues and why should people vote for me instead of Dilworth. And in effect, I was also running against Joe Clark, because all Dilworth had to say in essence was that Joe Clark has been a tremendous mayor. "Here's what he has done. I'm going to do the same thing, only better." That was a pretty easy platform on which to mn because most Philadelphians did feel that Clark had done a superlative job and they also felt that Dilworth was close enough to Clark that he would be an extension of the Clark philosophy. It was very very difficult for me, both through my youth — I was only 34 years old, and my obvious lack of knowledge about city government to compete very effectively against an aggressive and seasoned campaigner like Dilworth who hpfd the patronage, the money, the incumbency, the experience, and who was a very intelligent, charming man. 13.

The first thing I did during the summer of 1955 was to hire Prof. Ed Shills from Penn as my tutor. Ed Shills knows a great deal about city government, and he tutored me three, four, five hours a day for the rest of that summer and well into the fall. I spent over 100 hours with him, and he taught me a lot about the city for I am a very fast "take." So I obtained a broad-based superficial knowledge of government in the city about as rapidly as anyone you'll ever find. And it's good that I did this because I had 18 debates with Dilworth and I gave more than 300 talks on the city of Philadelphia during ihat four-month period and while they were pretty difficult at first because my knowledge was superficial at best, I still was a lot better than either I or anyone else thought I would be. One of the most flattering things that happened was that I had about 25 debates scheduled with Dilworth and after he had creamed me in the first four or five I learned fast. I learned how to debate, and I learned enough facts about the city and I learned how to use those facts against Dilworth in a way that was sufficiently impressive so that Dilworth told me afterwards they cancelled the last 6 or 7 debates because I got too good too fast. They felt that the advantage they had enjoyed in debating an inexperienced person whom they could eat up was no longer useful to them so they abandoned it. Early in the campaign, Dilworth was constantly urging me to debate him on television. He picketed my headquarters with his daughter in order to bring this about and pushed it very hard. I resisted because he was beating me so badly in the debates I didn't want a whole lot of .people to see us on TV, or my campaign would fall apart totally before it got started. About the middle of October, however, I realized that I was getting good fast and that I could handle myself against him and that I needed that extra exposure so I accepted the TV debates, at which time he of course walked away from them as fast as he could.

One of the aspects of our debates that used to amaze me was Dilworth's ability to quote all kinds of information and date about the city. It seemed that on any point I made that he wanted to rebut he could instantly call on information about the city or the port or the airport or the police force or whatever that made my points invalid. If he wanted to establish some points of his own he always had facts and figures that he could use but which I simply wasn't prepared to rebut. I commented on this to him afterwards. We had a breakfast together after the election and we were discussing the campaign, and I remember Dilworth laughing and saying tone, "I made up all that data. I knew you didn't have the correct answers, and I figured that there wouldn't be anybody in the audience that would probably know either. And there's an old axiom that if you invent a fact or figure and say it often enough or convincingly enough it becomes a legitimate statistic in its own right. So that's the way 14.

I developed a great deal of the data that I used in our campaign." Dilworth didn't consider that this was wrong in any way. He always told me that in politics or the courtroom, you used any advantage that you could gain. Another story that illustrates what you are up against when you really don't know very much about the tactics that are going to be used against you took place in one of our 18 debates. We had our first debate before the real estate board in Philadelphia, and we had our second one before the University of Pennsylvania Law School. And in those debates I was totally unprepared for the very aggressive adversary stance that a trial lawyer takes. If you are not a lawyer this is quite surprising. I had never before been so aggressively attacked or insulted in a public meeting. It was something that amazed me and I responded first with timidity and then later with anger which caused me to lose the fact that there were certain limitations that you operated within. I made an ass of myself. Then there was the very famous debate that we had one night at the Temple Beth Zion, where Dilworth attacked Bill Knauer, and where he displayed a loss of temper and an irrationality that was almost akin to some form of mental abberration. I thought he was crazy. He was screaming and the spittle dripped down the corners of his mouth, and his demeanor was one of total loss of self-control. I remember questioning publicly whether the man had the sanity to handle a job as important as that of Mayor of Philadelphia and I really meant it. I had never seen a public exhibition of this kind. It was actually pretty funny. Bill Knauer-had been going around and attacking the Dilworth people and the Clark administration and every time Dilworth would make a speech on the street corner, Knauer would come up afterwards with a trailor and loudspeaker and they would play this song, It's a Sin to Tell a Lie. This got on Dilworth's nerves. So his people found some data on Knauer, which went back to the days when he had been in state government some 15 or 20 years earlier. They had some either real or fancied scandals in which he had been involved, plus the fact that they found out that he hadn't paid his wage tax for several years. So they laid this attack on him. And apparently they had five points and each week for five weeks they were going to release one more point in this barrage of attacks on Knauer, who was the Republican candidate for District Attorney. But Dilworth got so mad that night that he let all five of them go at once. That got Bill Green very mad at him. 15.

But the debates were really the focal point of the election. I can remember coming back to my house, for example, after some of the earlier ones so emotionally upset at the trouncing that Dilworth had given me that I actually cried. My pride was being ripped apart and I felt totally inadequate. It was like getting into the boxing ring with a guy who could slug so he could hurt you and at the same time was such a good boxer that you couldn't touch him. And you would come out of that ring all bloody and hurt and he would be totally unmarked. For example, we held our fifth debate in a synagogue in Germantown. At that stage of the game and it is dtill true today, the Jewish people were over­ whelmingly Democratic. They have always been overwhelmingly Democratic in the national elections but this was true in the local elections as well. The Clark-Dilworth concept of things really appealed to the Jewish people and they were heavily supportive of Dilworth. Since half of our debates were held in synagogues, the audience was always 75% Dilworth and 25% Longstreth. Dilworth had learned the stunt of always putting your most vociferous and supportive people in the first 10 or 15 rows. So the first 10 or 15 rows would always be filled by Democratic committeemen or people who were assistant district attorneys for Dilworth, etc., who would applaud wildly at everything he said and laugh at the things I said or boo or pretend they were asleep. They really gave me a hard time. You are more apt to see the first 10 or 15 rows and so you think the whole hall is against you. Also you want to make your pitch last because the guy who goes last gets to rebut the other's points. Dilworth was just a master at taking everything I had said and ripping it apart. .This would not only lacerate my^self-confidence, but also it would ruin any chance I would have at coming back at him later on. I would be so flustered or so angry. Consequently, I was very anxious to go last myself so I could take some shots at him — use some of his techniques which I was beginning to recognize. He had gone last in all of the first ■r four debates. By the time we came up to this fifth debate I was really anxious to go last. The moderator of the debate called us together and said now we're going to flip a coin to see who goes last. So he flipped the coin and I won and I said, "Ok, I guess I get to go last." "No," he said, "you go first." And I said, "No, I won the toss so I get to go last." "Oh no," he said, "Here whenever you win the toss you go first." And I said, "Every other debate we've had the guy that wins gets his choice." And he said, "Well, I'm the moderator and this is how we do it." So I said to Dilworth, "that's not fair. You know the way we've been handling it." And Dick says, "When we're at his place he has the right to call it." So I demanded another flip. The guy flipped a second time and I called heads and instead of catching it he let it fall on the floor. He looked at it on the floor and he said, "It's heads." I said, "Ok, I 16.

win." "Oh no," he said, "it doesn't count when it falls on the floor." So then he picked it up and he flipped it again and Dilworth won and he looked at Dilworth and said, "Ok, you have your choice." So Dilworth said, "I'll go last." It was so obviously a crooked call that I was just livid with rage. I remember I went on first, and I was so mad that I could hardly make my voice heard for the first three or four minutes because I was so busy trying not to cry with rage and frustration. And Dilworth told me afterwards that that moderator was a local Democratic committeeman and that he had talked to him before the affair and asked, "Where do you want to go?" Dilworth said he wanted to go last and the guy said, "Ok, I'll take care of it." And he did. It was a set-up. We would go in with myself and John Pomeroy for example. Dilworth would come in with 10 or 15 people — assistant district attorneys, people from Democratic city committee, etc. They had plenty of money. We had no money at all. We were so hard up during the summer that I sat on a packing case in a room with a big box in front of it. We didn't even have a desk or chairs or anything. And that aspect of the campaign prevented our really developing much in terms of issues. We did have a concept — "progress without waste." That was our slogan. It was hard to attack the Clark-Dilworth record in terms of the progress they hadmade because it was very substantial. But of course taxes had gone way up. The most substantial increase in taxes had been put on business, and the city government was spending much more money than they had. Most of the drones that the Democrats attacked as Republican drones had become Democratic drones and were still"on the job. There hadn't been any wholesale firings at all. As a matter of fact, in that four-year period the number of employees actually went up very substantially so that there were such points that we hammered away at, but not very successfully because overall, of course, the Clark-Dilworth image of the job well done came through pretty loud and clear.

Another frustration was my appearance before the AFofL- CIO Council, which theoretically listened to both candidates and then made their decision on who they were going to support. I had come out with a pretty pro-labor position. It was the strongest pro-labor document any Philadelphia Republican had ever made. I thought at least that would be recognized, and I would get some form of lip service from the AFofL-CIO if nothing else. I guess that was the first time I ever realized how totally biased that group is. I had a friend who was in the AFL-CIO who served on this council who used to call me up and tell me what was going to happen. I remember him calling me ahead of time and saying they're going to vote 17 to nothing for Dilworth. And I said neither of us have appeared yet. 17.

He said,"That doesn't make any difference. This was decided a long time ago. The appearance of you two guys is a charade. It gives Dilworth a chance for a front-page headline -- AFofL-CIO Supports Dilworth." The idea that "we listened to both candidates, and we felt that Mr. Dilworth had the most to offer" sounds a lot better than saying, "We made up our minds ah ■Sad of time that we're for the Democrat, we don't care what he says." This was the truth of the matter. So he said, "When you go in there don't give anything away -- it won't do you any good." The AFofL-CIO did go 100% for Dilworth. I did get, for some reason, the support of the Transpprt Workers Union and the fascinating thing is that that was 21 years ago and to this day every time I ride on a subway or a bus, and I do it all the time, I will invariably get a very friendly reaction from the drivers and the TWU continues to look on me as a friend. In fact there have been several instances when they have been engaged in labor negotiations that they called me and asked me to enter into those negotiations because they feel that I am sympathetic to their cause. You have a question — did any reorganization of the Republican party take place as a result of your having run for mayor in that year? The answer is yen and no. In terms of formal reorganization, no. We persuaded the Meade forces to break away from the Meehan group and because of their support and because of my independent backing, I won the primary. We then completely reversed ourselves in thefight that took place with the organization after the primary, at which time I sided with the Meehan forces and was defeated by the Meade forces who reelected Bob Duffy as Chairman of City Committee.

However, although the Meade forces had control of City Committee because of their large number of small wards, the Meehan forces controlled far more votes and in the late spring of 1956, the force of Meehan's control of the large wards and the very substantial amounts of money that Meehan put into this organizational fight that he was having with Meade finally resulted in his gaining control of the Republican organization in June of 1956. Together with his son, Bill,:.the Meehans have controlled the organization ever since.

Obviously, my presence, my impact, my campaign had very little effect on this. Where it did have effect was that we attracted a very substantial number of young people 18.

to our campaign. Both my youth and the hoplessness of my cause attracted young people who frequently will attach themselves in a sort of Quixotic way to lost causes. And Nancy's presence in the campaign was very visible and enormously popular. She attracted a great many younger women and they stayed on. And quite a substantial number of Republican committeepeople, particularly in the Chestnut Hill and Germantown areas, some in the Northeast, some in West Philadelphia, in the period of the next ten or fifteen years were people who first became involved in Republican politics because of their affection for me or their attraction to my cause. In that respect I can say we did play some role in the reorganization of the party. When the campaign was over, Nancy became involved in an abortive effort that was made by 10 or 15 people who put up the money to start another "from within" reform effort. It was not successful, although it was a forerunner of a much bigger effort several years later through the Republican Alliance — to bring about reform in the local Republican organization. Following my election in '55 and the Meehan takeover of the party apparatus in 1956, the Republicans went through the '57 election where Emil Goldhaver ran for DA and was beaten. Then in '58 McGonagal got creamed in Philadelphia and- then 1 in '59 Stassen got murdered in Philadelphia. And then in 1960 Nixon got overwhelmed in Philadelphia and following the 1960 Presidential campaign, where I was Chairman of Citizens for Nixon, Bill Rawls, Herb Fogel, and Austin Lee and I got together and developed a concept which we felt would have successfully reorganized the Republican party from within.- Our concept here — it was beyond its time -- was that we would set up a Republican Research Foundation, and that the foundation would have a tax-free status. Thus corporations and individuals could support the foundation for the purpose of developing information. The employees who worked for the Republican organization could also be employees of the foundation and we felt we could raise a good deal of money to run it. Then when the campaigns came we could spin off a certain number of those employees -- they would take leaves of absence and be paid for by campaign funds. They could come back to their permanent employment with the Republican foundation after the campaign. We got Jay Cooke to help us and we got some substantial monies behind us and we were all set to go with it. The idea was that if you had that kind of an organization and you controlled the money and you controlled the day-to-day apparatus of developing information, it was just a matter of time before we would also control the party apparatus. 19.

Thus we would take over among a number of us the role that Meehan was playing. I think it would have worked out all right except that two things happened. One, the Democrats, as soon as they realized what we were doing, made sure that our application for approval, etc., fell intfc the hands of a political judge who never turned it down — he simply tucked it away out of sight. We waited and appealed and appealed and waited, but the case never reappeared. It still has never been acted upon, which is often the way our legal system operates in this country — if you are against something you don't give an opinion against it unless you absolutely have to. You simply kill it by going through all the legal procedures and delays and mumbo-jumbo where nothing happens.

After the Nixon defeat of 1960 Bob Johnson, who was the former President of Temple, and had been active in the campaign, and Milton Baker, who was the head of the State Citizens for Nixon, were so bitter and angry about what happened in Philadelphia that they started the Republican Alliance, which I thought was a stupid move. Then they tried to take on the Republican organization in the primary of 1961 and got their ears pinned back. Shortly after that Sheriff Meehan died and Bill Meehan took over and there has been no challenge at all of Meehan's supremacy in controlling the Republican party since that period. He put in Bill Devlin very shortly afterwards and the two "Bills" have run things for the no-so-successful Republicans ever since.

Thejnext question — was there any serious effort on the part of others to reconstitute the Republican party in Philadelphia resulting from the defeat suffered in the Clark-Dilworth days? I've spelled out some of the efforts along those lines. A couple of other factors have to be considered. I remember a famous statement that is attributed to Bill Meade when Meade was told in 1956 when he was fighting with Meehan this this fighting would kill the Republican party. He is alleged to have said, "Yes, but I'll own the bones." In effect this is what will so often happen with a minority party. You can maintain a minority party in a place like Montgomery County and have a fairly strong minority party simply because there are a lot of people who like to be involved in politics and who are willing to do it without any compensation and who can afford it. When you get into a big city, the interest in politics iis usually one that has a direct "quid pro quo" attached to it. A person who is active in politics usually wants either a job or money or power in return for their participation. And since only the party in power has this to give, the losing party in Philadelphia has no position at all unless they control the 20.

governorship. And you will find if you examine the performance of the Ifepublicans since 1954, when we lost the governorship, that in the years when we have it we do pretty well in Philadelphia And the ^ears when we don't have the governorship we just get creamed in Philadelphia. There used to be certain centers of patronage. City Hall was an important one. The state payroll was an important one, but you also had the judges and the Controller's office and the DA's office, and up until recently the Republicans always controlled a part of these. Now, however, they have lost the state, lost the city, lost the controller's office and the judge's and have absolutely no patronage left at all. And with that kind of a situation, I would suspect that they don't have more'than 3 or 4 hundred working committeemen in the city today. My wife is a working committeeman. She is probably one of the best committeemen that you will find in terms of keeping her registrations up to date, getting her vote out, keeping her people informed, and servicing her people. When I say "servicing her people," she is not called on to fix tickets, she is not called on to get people out of jail, she is not called on to pay bribes to Senator Cianfrani to get people's kids into medical school. She doesn't have the involve­ ments which are much more characteristic of other committeepeople * in otherparts of the city, where to be a committeeman you have to do a whole lot of fairly rough things, and where in return you can expect those voters to vote the way you want them to because they are afraid to run counter to your power and influence Nancy has no power or influence at all. Her success rests on persuasion and organizational strength. The 9th ward is an independent ward and cannot be handled like a controlled ward. The number of persons who are willing to work-..a division like Nancy in Philadelphia is extremely limited, and as a consequence if you examine the ward structures and division structures, most of them are controlled by Democratic committeemen or produce substantial Democratic majorities. When I ran for mayor in 1971 the Republicans still had almost 40% of the wards with Republican registration. Today there isn't a single one. And the difference between Republican and Democratic registration in Philadelphia has widened — it is better than 3 to 1 Democratic now. And it will be 4 to 1 by the next time the mayoralty race takes place, or 5 to 1. As a consequence, I think that the chances of the local Republicans playing a major role in a continuing basis are relatively slight, until they get the governorship back. When they get the governorship back that will give them something between 2 and 3 thousand patronage jobs, which means right away they can take care of the ward leaders, they have some 21.

jobs for them to give out to their star committeemen, etc., and I think you'll see some resurgence when that takes place. Bill Meehan feels to this day that if we had had the governorship in 1971 I would have been elected mayor. I you get within 40 or 50 thousand votes of winning, that many jobs can swing it. Out of 900,000 votes cast, Rizzo had about 52 1/2% and I had 47 1/2% of the vote. So if you turn 2 1/2% of it, you've got a victory. And if you examine where we lost, we lost every Republican ward except my own — the 9th. And that has some relationship to our inability to reorganize the party so that it has any strength at all during those periods when we do noimave the governorship and the patronage that is avail­ able to the party in power at the state level. Here you ask me to describe the Republican leaders at that time, indicating their political base and their effectiveness and the quality of men that they were. I've indicated there were four men — let me just tell you a little bit about those four men. They are four fascinating men. Sheriff Austin Meehan was for a good many years thefnost powerful and influential Republican leader in the city. His major interest for being in politics was his love of power and his love of people. He enjoyed both. He had a hold on people that had to be seen >to be believed. He was an enormously popular man, popular because he simply did so many things for so many people. The only other person that I've known that I think operated the same way Meehan did was Bill Barrett. Meehan would hold court every night of his life from right after dinner until midnight — there would just be a steady stream of people coming in to see him — all with problems. And in all instances if he felt there was ariy chance or if he wanted to, he would try to help them. And most of them-were little things -- people looking for a job, or trying to get a son into college, or trying to get a street fixed — little things. And Meehan worked at them all the time. Now while Meehan was sheriff, of course, he could do a lot of things and even after he was Sheriff he enjoyed such a friendly relationship with the Democrats that frequently he could get things done just on a personal basis. And as a consequence, he had his own personal following, based on his remarkable leadership qualities and his desire to help people.

Meehan, in essence, represented to the outside world, the worst aspect of the old Republican bosses because he was fat, he smoked a big cigar, he looked corrupt, although he was not, and at a time when reform was sort of the order of the day, Joe Clark, Dick Dilworth, etc., lean, young, handsome men appeared on the scene, and here was this fat old boss; it was murder from an image standpoint. And then of course Meehan made the profound mistake of engaging in the famous Academy of Music debate with Dick Dilworth, which 22.

probably did more image-wise to destroy the Philadelphia Republicans than any single thing that happened. As you will undoubtedly know, Philadelphia stopped being a Republican stronghold in the true sense of the word in 1928. 1928 was the last time that the Republicans carried the city in a presidential election. And 1930 was the last time they carried it in a gubernatorial election. Ever since then we've lost Philadelphia in every state and national election. We have not gone for a governor or a president or a United States senator since that time. So this means that the local organization was strong enough to hold Philadelphia in the Republican column from let's say 1928 to 1951 in spite of the fact that the majority of Philadelphia voters were philosophically Democrats. This was donethrough chacanery and through fear, fraud, and favor. They applied these tools against an electorate which was Republican in the local elections only. When the state elections or the local elections were on, where a man's job was involved, then you the committeeman put the screws to the person with whom you had the influence — you said, "you better vote for us or I'm really going to give it to you." On the other hand, when they were running for President, particularly in the Franklin Roosevelt years, you just went to the ballgame or something. You didn't bother. There wasn't any sense in trying to do it. You said, "I'll give you Roosevelt, but ‘give me the local guys." So what happened finally, because of Clark and Dilworth and fellows like Walter Phillips who got involved light after World War II, these "good government" Democrats appealed to many independent Republicans. And in 1951 a very substantial number of those Republicans instead of voting Republican like they always did, voted Democratic just for that one year. Then they went back to voting Republican again — most of them — either in the next election or the election after that one. But in the meantime all of the Hessians, the job-holding committeemen in the organized, controlled areas, changed the foment the jobs changed. So the Democrats didn't need the independent Republicans anymore. They only needed them that one time. And from then on they had the control that the Republicans had previously enjoyed. And there were 700 or 800 committeemen who changed their registrations. This made a different kind of a political scene in Philadelphia. While this was going on, there was a constant stream of WASPS in the middle and upper income groups moving out of the city, predominantly Republicans, being replaced by low-income Blacks, predominantly Democrats and that of course completely destroyed both the economic balance and the political balance of the city. The only time there was an approximately equal party balance in the city of Philadelphia in history, politically, was 1951. The two sides were close that year in terms of registrations. Had the Republicans in '51 stayed with their party the way the did in '47 Polling probably would have beaten Clark. But when 50,000 Republicans switched over and voted for Joe Clark because they very properly felt that he was a better man for the job, that enabled the Democrats to come in and from then on it was all over.

Austin Meehan was a remarkable political figure. One of the stories about Meehan that I will never forget — Meehan died in 1961 and I went to his wake. I've been to many wakes — anyone in politics has been to wakes. And I've been to wakes of most of the important politicians who died in Biiladelphia in the last 20 years. And there always is a pretty good-sized crowd of people there. For Meehan there was an enormous crowd. You couldn't believe it — not Dilworth, not Bill Green, not Hamilton — nobody here had ever had a crowd like that. I remember I got there and I parked my car and then I went up to the house and when I got there I realized there was a line and I thought it appropriate that I should go to the end of the line, so I turned around and walked back and I walked nine blocks to get to the end of the line. I stood in line for two hours and I had moved about five blocks when Cookie McCusker, who was a relative of Meehan's, was going back to his car and saw me standing in 'line and he said "what are you doing here? Come on in with me." So he took me around to a special door and saved me a couple of hours. I'm sure that there were at least 50,000 people who were standing in that line. I've never seen anything like the following that Meehan had. And here was a fellow who at that stage of the game really didn't have any political power at all. He was years past his prime as a political leader, but he had a lot of friends. I always felt that while some say that Meehan led the Republicans down the path to defeat, that's not true. He happened to be there at a time when they were going to get defeated and it didn't make a damn bit of difference — nobody could change that situation. Bill Meade was probably a smart fellow. I remember Aus Meehan told me one time, "I'll tell you a funny thing about politics. Anybody will tell you that Austin Meehan never breaks his word, is never vindictive, is never cruel, is always constructive, is generous, is kind. And what do they say about r.him? They say he is stupid. He's a dumb .politician because he is all those things. On the other hand, Bill Meade breaks his word, he lies, he cheats, he steals, but he is a smart politician." And that really is true. You always would hear people say that Meade was smart and that Meehan was dumb. But the iact was that one was honorable and one was not. And unfortunately that is the interpretation . you get on the streets sometimes. Honesty is balanced against deceit when it comes to political leadership. Honesty is stupidity, deceit is wisdom. Meade was a remarkable fellow who controlled the small wards, which because they were so many in number (though small in size) controlled city committee. City Committee was on a per ward count and a ward with 500 people counted for as much as one with 50,000 people. As a consequence Meade did enjoy a degree of influence and control of Republican politics greater than he should have. As you may know, he was 3iot by a jealous husband or suitor and it created quite a scandal. From, then on, Meades influence was never so great, and he died fairly shortly after I entered the political scene. But next to Meehan, he was the most important Republican force in the city. Witkin was the most interesting Republican leader because he was so smart. Witkin was always filled with clever schemes and had a way with words and the Republicans themselve always credited Witkin with the strategy which won that upset election in '53, when Foster Dunlap was elected Controller two years after Joe Clark had taken over. Apparently Witkin was the fellow who went to the dissident Democrats and told them that one of the ways to hold Clark in tow was to elect a Republican controller. So Witkin had to be looked at with respect because he was clever, and he was also a very smart trial lawyer. Bill Hamilton was a dogmatic, unpleasant man who ruled the 21st ward as a feudal lord. His family all had political jobs and over a period of 20 or 30 years controlled politics in Roxborough. The 21st ward was really the last major ward in the city to go Democratic. This happened only recently when A1 Perlman, Rizzo's crony, moved tip there. The people in the 21st ward went for Rizzo in a big way. Life-long Republicans liked Rizzo. I was the first Republican to ever lose the 21st ward and I lost it very badly about 3 to 1 — because the people were "law and order" people and scared to death of Blacks. Many of them had moved there from South Philadelphia and more recently there have been quite a few Jewish people moving up there into the new apartment houses. So the old traditional conservative White Catholic, White Protestant vote which made the 21st ward Republican and gave the Hamiltons their base of power disappeared and now the 21st ward is just like any other ward in the city. i Bill Morrow should also be mentioned. He was another powerful Republican in the early '50's. He was the city chairman prior to Bob Duffy. He was an automobile dealer in town. He saw the change coming and he did what a lot of Republican leaders did -- he up and moved. He closed up his automobile dealership and moved over to New Jersey and didn't play a role in Philadelphia thereafter. Charlie Smith was another fellow that did the same thing. Charlie was the speaker of the house and was a legislator 25.

from Germantown. Charlie ran for Auditor General of the state in '56 and was beaten, and after that he accepted the fact that Germantown was going Democratic and he had no chance of winning. He moved out of the city into Montgomery County. Hugh Scott did the same thing. Hugh Scott was an important Republican leader at the time. After he won in '56 from Alec Hemphill by about 400 votes, Hugh Scott realized that no Republican was ever going to win that congressional district again and that's the major reason he ran for the Senate. He had no choice in the matter. He knew he was going to get beaten. And Dave Maxwell, who ran after he left just got creamed down there because the make-up of the neighborhoods changed and the Democrats gerrymandered the district. Scott showed this remarkable ability to persuade the Jewish people that he was for them — he became an ardent Zionist. And as long as Germantown and Chestnut Hill was essentially Jewish, he didfine, but he was never able to transmit that same kind of empathy to Blacks, and when they began moving in heavily that finished him. Scott doesn't run in the city anymore, he ran at the dtate level. But he got creamed in Philadelphia every time. Scott never had any constituency in the city at all after he ran for the last Congressional seat in 1956.

^There were some other fellows that were important that ought to be mentioned. I mentioned. Judge Thomas Eagen. Judge Eagen was an important Republican leader in the early 1950's. There were a number of highly political judges who continued to have a major role in politics and Eagen was one of them. Before he was judge, he was campaign chairman for George Williams and made a bitter vitriolic attack upon me during that primary campaign. He was made a judge for this later by Bill Hamilton. Generally speaking , even though they didn't do it publicly, a number of the highly political judges on both sides were and still are involved in campaigns on a frequent basis — sometimes raising money and sometimes assisting people through their influence and contacts. Most of our local judges are mediocre at best and almost always selected by the City Committee of the party in power. Robert McCracken was a very powerful force within the Republican party. He raised a great deal of money. So was Tom McCabe. He also raised a great deal of money and had a great deal of influence in the city political situation. There was a man named Charlie Hagan whom I mention simply because Charlie was in effect a detail man for City Committee for a great many years, going back into the late '30's when Jay Cooke first became city chairman. Charlie's influence was in his knowledge — he knew who everybody was. He knew all the committeemen. He knew the structures of the wards. He knew the neighborhoods and he was an extraordinarily valuable 26.

man because he kept so much data in his head before the days of computers. Charlie Hagan was a crippled fellow that worked at Republican City Committee. He was the most foul-mouthed man I ever knew and a very dear friend of Nancy's and mine. He was smar|:t, hard-working, and loyal. When we fell apart in the late '50 's, he moved over to New Jersey and was seen in Philadelphia no more. You ask, "What did you do to keep your own political career in motion during Dilworth's tenure in the Mayor's office?" That's easily answered. Nothing. To understand this, you must realize that I came out of nowhere to run against Dilworth. I in essence was an accident of the times. I am not the kind of person that the Republicans would ordinarily have chosen to run. I had to fight my way into the primary. During the period that I was involved as a candidate, I watched a substantial segment of my own party sell me out (the Meade faction) — not that there was any way that I was going to beat Dilworth under the circumstances. However, I probably would have come somewhat closer if the Republicans had continued to support me instead of switching over to the other side. And I came out of the campaign with a certain amount of disillusionment that you might expect from a young man on his first try. From a financial standpoint I was absolutely 'impoverished. I had four little children, I had a job where I earned $25,000 a year, and when I became a candidate after the primary my company fired me so that I had no income for six months. I went $11,000 into debt. It took me five years to pay off my debt after the election was over. These were not debts for money that I put into the campaign. I've never put any of my personal money into a campaign. They were debts for the money that was required to support a wife and children at a time when one was not working. As a consequence, when I came out of the campaign, whereas many people thought I had an excellent future in politics, the truth of the matter was that there was no way that I could afford to continue to be activein politics. As soon as I found another job I went to work and strenuously resisted any effort to run for public office again for a good solid ten years. In 1956 Hugh Scott asked me to run for the Congressional seat from which he was retiring, and I was wise enough not to do so because I would have been creamed, as Dave Maxwell was. In 1959 the Republicans asked me to run for Mayor against Dilworth a second time and again I was wise enough to know that there was no prayer of winning that one and Harold Stassen ran and he got creamed. In fact, he broke my record. Dilworth beat me by 135,000 votes, but he beat Stassen by 210,000 votes. In 1958 I was asked to run for Lt. Governor on the M:Gonagle slate and turned that down because again I couldn't afford to take the time out and my company was very much opposed against my running for public office. 27.

In 1962 I made a determined effort to get the Republican nomination for the Senate to run against Joe Clark. I figured that year correctly that Bill Scranton was going to waffle Dilworth. And I figured that if you could put a fellow with Scranton who could successfully ride on his coattails that Clark could be beaten. At that stage of the game Clark's actions on gun control and his opposition of the gang elements in western Pennsylvania had made him very unpopular there. I figured that he would be beatable for someone like myself. I was probably right. I figured if Schweiker, for example, had run against Clark in '62 he would have beaten him in '62. I think if I had run against him in '62 I would have beaten him in '62. On the other hand, by running Jimmy Van Sandt, who nobody could take seriously outside of Blair County, the Republicans simply guaranteed to Clark that he would be returned to the Senate. I remember, I rode out on the train with Joe the day that the Republicans announced that they were going to run Van Sandt. And I remember Joe Was all grins -- just jubilant! He said "I was so afraid that you fellows might run Allesandroni or yourself and if that had happened I knew I'd have a tough fight on my hands. But I know I'll eat this guy up." And he did. In all of those periods except for the '62 campaign when 1 really wanted to run for the U.S. Senate and in '67 when I really wanted to run for Mayor, I simply turned down a great many opportunities because I didn't think I would have the chance. And in terms of my own political career or non-career, two extremely interesting things happened. One in 1957 and one in 1958. In 1957 Joseph N. Pew, who of course was the President of Sun Oil and who was an ardent Republican, asked me to have lunch with him. This was two years after I had run for Mayor. He said in effect, "J think that you ran a good campaign for Mayor, it was the first time around, you didn't know very much, but you conducted yourself admirably and I think you have a brilliant future in politics and our family is very fond of you. The Pews were very good friends of my family — close personal friends. Joe Pew's sister was my godmother. She was my mother's roommate in school. And they had given me an enormous amount of money in the '55 campaign. Much more than they gave me in '71. The Ifews would give' :you a lot of money even if they thought you were going to lose because they knew you weren't going to get it anywhere else. If you were going to get a lot of money somewhered.se, they wouldn't give you so much because then you didn't need it. Their idea was, particularly in a race where you needed money to kind of hold the party together, they would contribute that way and they were very generous in that respect. 28 .

Joe Pew actually saved the Republican Party in the Alf Landen campaign of 1936 against FDR. Without his money the party would probably have gone down the tube. But he said to me, "I don't think you have any chance at all of ever being successful in politics in Philadelphia. The Republicans are finished there and if you want to be active in politics I would suggest two things and if you will do either of these two things my family will be helping youfinancially to get yourself established. One would be to move to Montgomery or Delaware counties and we will groom you for the Congress." At that time they had some awful fellow named Millikin who was the Congressman in Delaware County, and they had a nice quiet totally invisible stockbroker in Montgomery County, whose name I forget. And Joe's idea was that I would come in and replace either one of them. He felt that they could be eased out, that they could get me the nomination, and that the nomination in either of those counties would be tantamount to election. Or he said the alternative would be to move to one of the Western states like Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arizone, or New Mexico. Once there he would put me into a position where I would get a good deal of exposure and then eventually be in a position to run for either Governor or United States Senator. "Incidentally," he said, "there is another young man whom we are talking to along similar lines. He is a lawyer from Connecticut — his tame is Peter Dominic. And Peter Dominic did this -- went to Colorado under the Pew auspices and became a United States Senator. It was an interesting offer. But I told him I didn't want to do it. I wanted to stay where I was. At that stage of the game I was doing well in the advertising business and I didn't really want to get back into politics. But that was the end cf that as far as Pew was concerned. I wasn't willing to pay the price and he washed his hands of me. .\ In '58, the following year, Bill Green took me to lunch at the Bellevue and I remember he put it to me in a very typical Bill Green direct fashion. He said, "Are you interested in elective politics?" And I said, "yes". He said, "Do you think you can ever be elected to an important position as a Republican in Philadelphia?" And I said "Yes." He said, "ok, Thacher, you are either a liar or a fool." And I said, "what do you mean?" He said, "You can't seriously think that you, as a Republican, can ever be elected to an important political office in Philadelphia. You can't. If you think you can, you are a fool. On the other hand, if you tell me you are interested in elected office and you are going to remain a Republican in Philadelphia than you are lying to me because you are not really interested. If you were interested, you would do either one of two things. You would either move out of Philadelphia or you would become a Democrat. Are you willing 29,

to move out of Philadelphia?" I said, "No." He said, "Then the only alternative if you are interested in elected politics is for you to become a Democrat. I want you to know we would be very interested in having you." And I said, "To what degree are youiinterested?" And he said, "To this degree: Dick Dilworth's term will be up and he's going to run again in '59. He will be reelected and his second term will be up in '63. And he said in '63 if you become a Democrat now, I will see to it that you get some good visibility in the city and you will be our candidate for Mayor in '63 and you will be elected and you will be our candidate for Governor in '66." He said, "That's what we have planned, and I've discussed this with Jim Clark and others. I can do these things and this is the program I have for you." I asked Bill Green, "Now let me ask you a question — why in the world do you want me? You've got the presidency, you've got the governorship, you've got the mayoralty, you've got everybody you want, you can put your finger on 100 different guys. Why do you want me?" He said he had three reasons. "Number one, you are a WASP. Particularly at the state level we need WASPS. We don't have any very good WASPS in our party right now. We have Clark and Dilworth and they are getting older. And ve have Alec Hemphill, and he's a fool. Second, your philosophy very easily can relate itself to the Democratic point of view. Third, you love Philadelphia and you have a good reputation and we'd be very happy to have you." And I said, "No, I don't want to do it." And he said, "well, I'm going to come back to you again because I can't believe that you can pass up an opportunity at this time out of simply being stubborn or being loyal to something that makes no sense. And for three years — '58, '59, and '60, Bill Green took me to lunch and made the same offer. And particularly I remember the one in '60 because it was in December — just after Kennedy had been elected, but before he had taken office and of course Green was really riding high at the time. That was the last time. He didn't talk to me the following year and then he died right after that. But those were interesting possibilities as far as political involvement was concerned. I have no regrets about the things that didn't happen to me. I was never willing to pay the price. The price was either to move or to change my party. There is very little conceivable chance that I could have son an important elections by being a Republican in one of the biggest Democratic strongholds in the country. I was unwilling to make the change or unwilling to constantly be involved in political movements as a candidate. In essence I was always the manager of the local campaign, always being the good guy, the guy that did everybody else's work but didn't really seek very much for himself. You find out pretty quickly thatis not the way to get ahead in politics. If you haven't got a self-interest that's being generated and worked at all the time, you are not apt to get anywhere. I loved playing at politics, but it was never the "be-all" and "end-all" for me. Now you ask, "When did you become the chief executive of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, and who were the business leaders in the Chamber when you were selected?"

In December of 1963, Dick Bond and Fred Potts took me to lunch. I thought that they were going to ask me to head up the Advanced Gifts Committee of the United Fund. It turned out they were asking me to become the head of the Chamber of Commerce. After they talked to me five minutes and I understood what they wanted, I knew I was going to do it if the job paid me enough money so I could afford it -- and it did. I went through a kind of two-week charade where I went around and talked to all of the members of the Executive Committee because I wanted to make sure that this was not just a two-man decision, that they were all equally anxious to have me there. They were. I then took advantage of the fact that they didn't need me on board until July 1, 1964, and in that interium period Nancy and I took three months and went around the world. This trip was as much fun as anything we've ever done, and I'm very glad we did it. I might add that the decision to hire me was made as part of a several-year commitment by the Greater Philadelphia Movement to reorga­ nize and strengthen the Chamber of Commerce, and, in effect, I was selected originally by the suggestion of Bill Wilcox, who was the Execu­ tive Director of GPM. He suggested me to Bond and Potts, who had been part of a committee that had been looking all over the country for about six months for a successor to Keeton Arnett in the job of Chief Executive of the Chamber. At that time they were pretty well in control of things. Those two men really made that decision along with Gus Amsterdam. Albert Greenfield was pretty much out of power by that time, although he was still alive. Potts and Bond were essentially the guys. Thornton Bradshaw was another factor. He was then President of ARCO. Cal Pontius, the head of Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company and Bill Bradshaw, the Chairman of Provident Mutual Life Insurance Company, were also involved in the decision to hire me. v

You ask me to characterize the state of the Philadelphia economy when I took the position with the Chamber.

Things were really going along at a great rate in '64. That was a good time for Philadelphia, because the great programs that both the Republicans and the Democrats put into effect, starting around '47 or '48, were beginning to manifest themselves. The Chinese Wall was down, the new buildings were going up, the Society Hill movement was gener­ ating some new momentum, the Food Center had been shifted down into South Philadelphia and all of these things were beginning to generate plenty of action for Philadelphia. There were also some disastrous things that were taking place that we did not fully understand. I think the biggest single disaster that took place in Philadelphia during the

30 1960's was the election of Jim Tate as Mayor. I think that Tate was one of the worst Mayors that the city ever had, and having him for 11 years was a real disaster that reduced the momentum and strength that the city had generated from '47 to '64. I must say that, while Clark and Dilworth had a profound effect on the city and their great contributions to Philadelphia cannot be overstated, it is very short-sighted as a historian to lose sight of the fact that a lot of what happened during those years started well in advance of Clark and Dilworth. There was a reform movement going within the Republican party and within the structure of Philadelphia's civic leadership that predated Clark and Dilworth. Many of the plans that came into fruition during their administrations went back to the period immediately after World War II and have to be credited not to Barney Samuel, whom I regard as nothing more than a political hack, but to the people who were beginning to plan things, particu­ larly in GPM. A very, very substantial share of this credit belongs to Harry Batten and to Stewart Rauch and several of the others who worked with them in the late '40's and early '50's. I particularly feel that Stewart Rauch has made a contribution to Philadelphia that is appreciated and understood by very few but is hard to overstate. He has been an outstanding civic leader for 30 years.

"What were the programs of the Chamber at that juncture? What programs did you institute in order to improve the economy of the city and to help business institutions locate here?"

Let me say that one of the most important things that the Chamber did in the last 20 years was the development of PIDC. Now, that was before me. I had nothing to do with it, but, in effect, Dilworth and Freddy Mann and Keeton Arnett were the three instigators of PIDC in '57 and '58. It has been a very successful and very well-run operation. It was originally headed up by Dick Graves, who was extremely effective in the job. He was succeeded by Dick McConnell -- even better in the job. We then had a couple of interim appoint­ ments which weren't so good, and today it is run by Walter D'Alessio, who is perhaps the best of all. PIDC has done wonders.-- In 1965 Keeton Arnett, who was my predecessor as head of the Chamber, was the leading figure in putting together the Philadelphia Port Corporation (which was patterned along similar lines to PIDC) and has really reconstituted our port to the point where today it has never been in better shape. The port is making an enormous contribution to the city and is going to get better and better for the next five or ten years. I am very proud of the role the Chamber played in developing the Philadelphia Port Corporation, a partnership between the Chamber, the City, and the State of Pennsylvania. I think the most important thing that we have done during my tenure is to change from activities that related directly to the business community to activities that are much more concerned with the community at large.

It has been said that Chambers of Commerce historically fight to keep the taxes down and the tariffs up, which is an oversimplification, but there is truth in it.

When I first came in, the Chamber was made up of several councils, each one with its own board of directors and its own operating procedures developed by Keeton Arnett. They concentrated on such things as government affairs, commerce

31 and industry, safety, traffic, and transportation. Since I've headed the Chamber, we've gotten involved in manpower, with particular emphasis on employ­ ment of blacks and women; health care, which is a totally new thing for the Chamber; and education, putting particular emphasis on the fact that increas­ ingly today economic development has a direct relationship to the strength of the educational system in the area. Is it going to provide the kinds of schools that businessmen will want their kids to go to? Is it going to provide the kinds of graduates that can be fed into the business and manufacturing systems and make good employees for the future? We're involved in the judicial system -- and crime -- particularly working with the Crime Commission. We're very interested in energy. We had no problems with energy ten years ago. We were exporters of energy in the world scene. Today, I consider it the biggest single problem the nation has to face, and what is going to happen in the PENJERDEL region in the next few months is going to be totally affected by our ability to either have or not have sufficient energy for our needs. We've turned to the environment. We got into Earth We ek in a big way in 1970 and we've been involved in the environment with a position of trust from both the environmentalists and the business community ever since that time. Another important achievement was to develop PENJERDEL because we wanted to have something that would expand the efforts of the Chamber into a broader arena than just Philadelphia. We realized that by calling ourselves "Greater Philadelphia" we affronted the suburban communities that always suspected and hated Philadelphia. (They think we are going to try and absorb them and are scared of the Blacks and scared of what we might do to their educational systems, etc.) By going to the whole region around Philadelphia as PENJERDEL, following the marvelous image that had been developed with the earlier PENJERDEL by Walter Phillips and John Bodine, we found that particularly the educational institutions all over the area were very much involved and excited about the possibilities that are inherent in PENJERDEL. Thus, we are developing a regional approach to some of our area-wide problems through the PENJERDEL organization, an extension of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. We found also that the larger corporations in Delaware and New Jersey, which had no interest in the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, became interested in PENJERDEL and participated financially and with our board and committees.

PENJERDEL is essentially staffed by the same people that staff the Chamber of Commerce. There is almost total overlap there. We have different boards, and I'm President of both organizations. In effect, PENJERDEL is today a regional Chamber of Commerce made up of about 400 members, principally some of the larger corporations in the suburban communities in southeast Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey and some within Philadelphia proper. We are involved in activities that relate either to the region or to the suburban communities outside of Philadelphia proper. The Chamber of Commerce, on the other hand, has roughly 2,000 members, is concerned only with what goes on in Philadelphia proper and provides the major share of the funds that are required to run PENJERDEL. However, I think in not too many years that PENJERDEL will be the dog and the Chamber will be the tail, instead of the reverse situation that exists now. PENJERDEL is being emulated all over the country. Large Chambers of Commerce are setting up regional affiliates or are becoming themselves regional. It is an essential part of meeting our problems in areas that include large cities and surrounding suburbs.

The outstanding example of this with which I'm familiar is called Metroplex, down in Texas, which is the area which bounds Fort Worth and Dallas and the

32 airport that lies in between the two of them. That is being prompted as an over-all region. Then once industry and people have been attracted into the area, Dallas and Fort Worth fight over who is going to get it.

You ask what sort of general programs I fostered and what methods did I used in support of our goals?

I've touched upon several already. I'll carry it a little further. One of the things that we've done - primarily because of my own involvement in radio and television -- is to provide all kinds of programs promoted or sponsored by the Chamber, and/or PENJERDEL, over the last 15 years. I had one TV program called the VIP's, for example, on Channel 17 for two years, which each week took prominent civic leaders and talked to them about a particular subject. It might be the port, it might by the airport, it might be the political system, it might be the judicial system -- but it was a half-hour program in which I acted as the interlocutor with guests of broad knowledge and prestige. The VIP's developed a pretty good listening audience of the kind of people we were interested in. It was never a broad audience program. Recently, I have had a weekly television program called the World of Work, which looks at various segments of business and industry and then offers the listening audience, which is essentially high school young­ sters or young people out of college, rather extensive backgrounds of all these different industries and how they might get into them from a work standpoint. These shows did so well that they were taped and shown in all the schools as a part of their career counselling.

We went through a period where the Chamber ran the Academy for Career Education, with an annual grant from the federal government that enabled us to develop an educational system which bore a very direct relationship to what kids were studying and what they would be doing once they entered the business world. This established a relevancy in the kid's mind as to why he is studying math or English or physics and the kinds of things he wanted to do later on when he went into the world of work. We had radio programs. I had one called Spectrum on the Economy, for example, which is a series of spots I do each month, talking about our economy and what is taking place in it. I did a consumer affairs program as sort of a business alternative to Herb Dennenberg on WCAU for a year and a half -- an hour program once a week. He would do it from one point of view, and then I would do it the next day from a different point of view -- the consumer point of view vs. the business point of view.

We'd done lots of public information activity of that kind. Now we're most deeply involved in energy. With the development of off-shore drilling, and the fact that Philadelphia is probably going to be the energy capital of the northeastern part of the United States, we are trying to set up the proper governmental agencies here. We're trying to get the distribution factors for pipe and other equipment that are used in the construction of the rigs that will be used off-shore. We're trying to tie it in with our refining complex (this is the second largest refining area in the United States) so that the impact of these finds on not just our distribution for petroleum products, but also upon the petro-chemical industries that are so prevalent here will have an enormous effect upon our economic future. Also, we get very deeply into such things as the refurbishing of the airport. The Center

33 City Tunnel is another development in which we've been extremely involved. We were deeply concerned in the Crosstown Expressway, which, incidentally, we lost. We felt that the Crosstown Expressway was essential to completion of the Center City grid. We feel that the tunnel will make a very major contri­ bution to Philadelphia and that it has been totally misunderstood and misrep­ resented particularly by what the radio and television stations have done by erroneously stating that the tunnel would only benefit a small number of suburban riders. Across the board, we now have become, as the Chamber of Commerce, a civic force of major importance. Next to state government, the Chamber of Commerce is probably involved in more projects, is more highly respected and believed, not just by business people, but by governmental people and, believe it or not, more particularly in the Black community than any other single organization. Our involvement in the black community is one that relates primarily to myself because, prior to coming to the Chamber of Commerce, I had been President of the Urban League, President of the NAACP, and President of the United Negro College Fund. So I had a record of working with Black people and an acquaintanceship among Black people which was considerable. Since that time we have been deeply involved with Leon Sullivan's OIC. Bill Wilcox and I, in effect, founded the Black Coalition, which later became the Urban Coalition. We put that together. Obviously, we had a lot of help in doing it, but it was our idea following a meeting with Bill Coleman, and we acted immediately after the assassination of Dr. King back in 1968. All of these things have brought the Chamber of Commerce into a position today of moral and political and economic influence -- not .power (there is no power) -- but influence. That is fairly extraordinary for a civic agency that does not have very close ties either with Harrisburg or Philadelphia because of our primary Republican background.

Since the situation among Chambers in other areas is changing very rapidly, in the next few years most will come our way. Some already have. When I first started to change our Chamber, I went down to Washington and met with the U. S. Chamber, and they held a meeting of big-city Chambers from all over the country, and I spent an hour making a presentation of what we were doing. It is interesting that, at that time, Pwould say fully half of the fellows thought I was wrong. They said, "You are diffusing your effort too much. You are putting too much money into too many projects." Then we began to take federal grants. We did things with federal monies. Instead of getting all our money from the traditional Chamber dues pattern, which other cities have used, we went to foundations, we took on special projects, we began to do things for which we earned income -- made money -- and we got grants from the state and from the city and from the federal government. You pay a certain price for that because you get an awful lot of governmental interference for some of the things that you are doing. Now the other Chambers are following suit, and I would say that the Hartford Chamber probably was ahead of us. I think Lumsden out there was always ahead of us. The Chicago Chamber, which is the best Chamber in the country, I think, has -- while they haven't gotten as completely involved in civic affairs as we are -- been very deeply involved in economic affairs. They worked closely with Mayor Daley, which has given them an advantage which we don't enjoy. It couldn't have worked with Tate. The guy was impossible. With Rizzo you live dangerously -- sometimes it is fine, and sometimes it is not so good.

We raise about $700,000 a year in memberships and we raise about $400,000 a year in other sources of revenue, which may be advertising in our newspapers

34 or publications that we sell, processing of international documents, and various grants that we have. So that our total budget last year ran about a million and two. When I came in, the total budget was about $350,000; so it has increased about four times in the 13 years I've been there.

You ask what were the considerations which led me to accept the nomination for Council at Large in *67? How did the directors of the Chamber of Commerce feel about my doing so?

I was very anxious to get the nomination for Mayor in 1967. I thought that Tate was eminently beatable, and I thought that I could beat him. I told Bill Meehan that I wanted the nomination. He told me I was going to get it. That was in 1966. During the '66 year Arlen Spector, who had just been elected DA in '65, came along very strongly. The research data, which had demonstrated very conclusively in '65 and '66 that I was far and away the best-known Republican and had the best chance of winning, changed dramatically. Spector passed me. So I went to Meehan in February and told him that I was prepared to go all out for Mayor, and I was ready to fight a primary and do other necessary things. I had a lot of people supporting me and a lot of money. Meehan said to me, "Well, look. I've got a series of polls and I want to show them to you." He showed me the polls which had been made in the latter part of '66 and the early part of '67, which indicated that, if the election was held tomorrow, Spector would beat Tate 2-1 and that, with me and Tate, it was 6-5 and take your choice. > This poll plus the attitude of the Chamber Board changed my mind. The Chamber people told me, "If you are nominated for Mayor, we will go all out and support you and we will keep your job warm for you; but, if you insist on going into a primary, you are on your own." The combination of those two things -- the impact of the statistical data and the attitude of the Chamber -- cooled my resolve. When I did not get the nomination, and when Meehan selected Spector on the basis of these polls, I was not happy about it, but I didn't fight it. Meehan then asked me to be the candidate for Controller, and I emphatically told him I wouldn't do that under any circumstances. He then asked me to be a candidate for Councilman At Large. I told him I wouldn't do that under any circumstances. At that stage of the game, I was bitter and disappointed and I didn't want any more of it.

Meehan then, very clearly, went to Skinny Wolf and a couple of other people and said that it would be very helpful to the ticket if Longstreth were on it because I had a following in the business community. I was the only WASP in Philadelphia that had gotten any real press exposure which would be very helpful in raising money, and I had a great deal of appeal to the Blacks, which Spector didn't have. Meehan really wanted me as a candidate for Councilman At Large.

Skinny Wolf talked to several of our people at the Chamber, and they called me in and said, "What would you think about running?" I said, "I don't want to run!" They said, "Simmer down." I said "No" very strongly. It's hard when you have been the candidate for Mayor, and you expect to be candidate for Mayor again, and you don't get it, and then you are expected to run for a much lesser position. Frankly, I have nothing but contempt for the power and position of CounciIman-At-Large, particularly the minority Councilman-At-Large.

35 I've always said that, if Angela Davis, when she was wanted by the police, really wanted to hide out, she should have come to Philadelphia and been elected CounciIman-At-Large and nobody would have ever found her. So when they asked me to do it, I said "No." They said, "We'd really like you to do it." So I agreed that, if the Executive Committee of the Chamber formally asked me to run, I would do it. They formally asked me to run. Now, the idea behind this was very simple. They felt, and I felt, that, if Spector were elected, I was a shoe-in, because at no time since the new charter was approved in 1951 has the minority party ever gotten more than its two minority councilmen.

In other words, the five always go in with the party that elects the Mayor. We figured if Spector were elected, I was certain to be one of the five. I also had an understanding with Meehan and the Republican forces that, if we won, I would be President of City Council. Now, I think Foglietta may have thought that he had the same understanding, but there is no question in my mind at all that, if Spector had won, I would have been President of City Council. Then I would have resigned from the Chamber and worked full-time at being President of City Council and would have run for Mayor at the conclusion of Spector's one or two terms.

Spector, in the meantime, had told me that if he were elected Mayor, he was going to quit to run for Governor at the end of his first term so that this, again, indicated to me that I had a pretty good chance of becoming Mayor under those circumstances. I also thought that if Spector lost, Virginia Knauer and Tom Foglietta, who had been in there for eight and 12 years each, would have been re-elected because they were spending a good deal of money. They were making a great deal of effort, and I didn't think I would be one of the two minority Councilmen-At-Large to be elected in the unlikely event of a Spector defeat.

I didn't spend a nickel. I never made a speech. I never lifted a finger in my own behalf. I campaigned for Spector the whole time. Much to my amaze­ ment, I ran 6,000 votes ahead of anybody else on the Republican ticket and became CounciIman-At-Large. As soon as I became Councilman-At-Large, I then determined that I was going to be the candidate for Mayor the next time around and told this to Spector. I said, "I think we ought to understand right now that I'm going to run for Mayor next time. If you want to run for Mayor too, ok, and we can take each other on." He said, "No, under no circum­ stances am I going to run for Mayor again. You get yourself ready, and when the time comes I will support you."

So my four years in City Council were spent with that in mind. In the meantime, Foglietta also had similar objectives and was very disappointed when I was selected in '71. Prior to my selection I went to Meehan and I said, "Last time I played the good boy and I did what you told me to and I supported our ticket. I just want you to know that this time I'm going to run for Mayor, and if you try and put up somebody else, I'm going to beat them in the primary just as I did in '55. Meehan said, "You are probably going to get my support anyway." I did.

You ask what kind of role was I able to play in City Council during those four years and what causes and specific legislation did I espouse?

36 My role was almost zero. Obviously, it is impossible, with the situation that we have in our City Council, for a minority councilman to do anything except get a little ink by getting up now and then and complaining about the things that take place. In order to have a bill or even a resolution passed, it has to be brought out of committee, and, out of the 27 resolutions and bills that I put into committee during my four-year effort, not one ever came out. So it is impossible for me to do anything. Then when you run for office they say, "Well, this guy was in for four years and never did a damn thing." Then you have to explain, and it has kind of a hollow sound: "I couldn't do anything." That makes it sound as though you were personally weak. Actually, the system is such that a councilman on the minority side has no power and can do nothing, particularly when the count is as it was when I was in there -- 14-3 for the Democrats. Now, if it were 10-7 or something like that, then you could make deals, because each side would need some votes from the other. However, not under these circumstances. The only time I ever cast a vote in the four years that had any significance at all was in my next-to-the-last year there during Christmas week. Seven council men were away on vacation, and we had a bill come up where my vote was the deciding vote.

You ask, "What causes and specific legislation did you espouse?"

I really don't remember now very well what they were. I had a list of them for a while. I remember one that was funny -- it was one of the least important ones, but I believed in it and got an awful lot of abuse for it. In New York Cit/ they passed a bill that no materials made out of alligator could be sold -- it was part of an environmental bill. I thought that made pretty good sense so I put in a similar bill here. George Schwartz made a speech that I cared more about alligators than I did for people. Actually, I spent most of my time being a critic (and a fairly effective one) because I did have a skill with radio and television that the other counciImen did not have. I was involved continuously in floor fights with Izzy Beilis and George Schwartz, who are very intelligent, knowledgeable guys, and I enjoyed that very much. I learned to hold my own with them — my training from the Dilworth debates helped that. I did enough homework. I had one good thing that happened to me: In addition to the one person that City Council allowed you to hire as a staff person, you could pick up a number of volunteers or people from the universities who would be assigned to your office. I always had three or four people that were assigned to my office. So I had more staff than a minority councilman could usually expect.

You ask, "Was not Tom Foglietta, the other minority Councilman-At-Large, elected that year?" (Yes.) "Did you feel that your voices were adequately heard?" (No.)

Foglietta was a lousy councilman. He was in the Council for 20 years, and very early in the game he realized that there wasn't much he could do. He was never really a Councilman-At-Large. His only interest was South Philadelphia; so invariably what he did was to play ball with the majority so that he could get some extra things for South Philadelphia, and maybe, under the circumstances, that is what he should have done. He did do some good in the South Philadelphia area, but Tom was essentially lazy and never did his homework. Tommy let me come in, and, in spite of the fact that he was a minority leader (elected by

37 the three of us), he let me take over, as far as visibility and as far as action were concerned, by his own laziness and by the fact that Tommy was scared to get up there and take on Schwartz, and Beilis and D'Ortona. He was afraid of being made to look bad.

You ask, "To what extent did Bill Meehan maintain an interest in what was happening in City Council? Were you and the other Republicans in fairly continous contact with him?"

I was amazed, absolutely amazed, at how little contact we had with either Bill Meehan or Bill Devlin while we were in City Council. I wouldn't think that we had five meetings with him in the four years that I was there. I can only remember one bill where they asked us to vote a certain way, and it seemed to me that they were absolutely right in the way in which they asked us to vote, and we all did. There were a number of other instances where I think I would have voted the way they wanted me to if they had asked me, but they never asked me. I was surprised afterwards to find out that Meehan wished that I had done something else. I felt that they just bent over backwards to avoid influencing us in any way. The fascinating thing about it is that at the same time I know that Meehan was constantly involved in the voting patterns of state senators or legislators that the Republicans had in Harrisburg. However, I think the reason was that the Republican vote in Harrisburg could be signifi­ cant. The four or five House votes or the one or two Senate votes that we had in Harrisburg might be the deciding vote, but here in Philadelphia our three vote’s made no difference whatsoever, and, as a consequence, Meehan had no interest in us at all and kept no contact with us.

You ask am I right in my impression of Bill Meehan as a man who is predomi­ nantly on the level?

I think he is as on the level as anybody I've ever met in politics. I have not only great admiration for him, but respect for him, and my feeling is that we ought to be damn thankful for Meehan because he is totally honest and he is a very decent, generous man. Without him, there would be no Republican party in Philadelphia or there would be a Republican party that in essence would be a straw party that would be supported and run by the Democrats, the way, for example, that the Democratic organization was run by the Republicans in Delaware County for years. I feel that Meehan plays an extremely important role, and I think that he is damn good for Philadelphia. He is attacked sometimes as playing too much footsie with the other side. He has no choice. He had to play a certain amount of footsie with the other side, but I think that it is a damn shame that the Democrats don't have the same kind of people running their organization.

You ask would I recount the events of your campaign in '71 against Rizzo, saying how in your opinion it was possible for Mr. Rizzo to win the election?

I think the election was decided before either of us ever ran. I never saw an election where the results were more inevitable and more clearly established. The moment that Rizzo stated that he was going to be the candidate for Mayor you could tell exactly who was going to vote for Rizzo because Rizzo had a

38 constituency, which at that time was about 50-51% of the people in the city, which was going to vote for him. It didn't matter whether I ran against him or Foglietta or Spector or you or anybody else. Those people were going to vote for Rizzo. Now the question was would I get all the others? When it started off, Rizzo was going to get 51% and I was going to get 19% and the other 30% didn't know what they were going to do. Then, as the campaign went on and as I began to develop strength, etc., I got practically all of those people so that I ended up with a 52-48 split. The polls told us all the way through what was going to happen. In the early stages of the polls Rizzo had a 200,000 vote lead. Then we began to cut it down and cut it down, and finally we had it down, in the middle and late October, to 30,000. When you get something down as close as 30,000, it is just about up for grabs. Of course, we got very excited then. I think two things happened that had a bad effect upon us at that stage of the game. One was that we had our debate. Rizzo did very much better in the debate than I ever thought he would do. He surprised me. It was unlucky in a way, because we actually had three debates, but only one of them was on television. We had a debate on Monday of the second week of October at the Bulletin, where various editors from the Bulletin questioned Rizzo and myself on various subjects relating to city government and where I absolutely destroyed him. It was one of those kinds of confronta­ tions that I used to have with Dilworth where it happened the other way. I knew all the answers. I knew about all the departments. I had far more assurance in my answers. I was much better than he was. Not only was it a devastating thing, but he was devastated by it. I happened to come out from behind him as he got out to his car (he didn't know I was there), and he was just giving those guys hell. "What the hell do you mean by letting me get in there and letting them make a monkey out of me? What the hell did you schedule these things for? I don't need these things. I've got this thing in the bag. The only thing I can do is lose it, and the only way I can lose it is to get in there and have this son-of-a-bitch show off how much more he knows about the city than I do. I don't want any more of this, blah, blah, blah___ " I was elated. That was on Monday.

On Wednesday, two days later, from 2 until 5 we*went up to the Inquirer and did exactly the same thing. There were some different questions, but on the whole the questions were pretty much the same. I would say I probably won that, but by an eyelash. The improvement that he made between the Monday morning confrontation and the Wednesday afternoon confrontation was really extraordinary. I found out afterward that they took the tapes of the Monday debate -- we both had tapes of it - and they went to a room at the Bellevue and stayed in that room for about 40 hours. They went over each question, and they had a whole series of experts from the city brought in, and they briefed him on the answers to these questions. The next day he was correcting me on answers that he hadn't even known on the day before, and it was a virtuoso performance. Then on Thursday night we had our television show, and at this stage of the game, both of us had been thoroughly briefed and thoroughly rehearsed, and it really becomes a question of if-you-are-for-Rizzo-you-think- Rizzo-won and if-you-are-for-me-you-think-I-won.

Now this had two very important effects. One, as far as Rizzo's people were concerned, it really gave them confidence -- because they saw their guy go in against the college guy. Frank really held his own. So, as far as his constituency was concerned, Rizzo won a victory -- because Rizzo did so much better against me than his people had expected and so much better than my

39 people had expected. Except for the Blacks. Our great surge of Black votes came as a result of this debate. The Black people had thought all along that Rizzo was a Police Commissioner and 011 Stretch is a nice fellow, but he's kind of weak, a Chestnut Hiller. What chance does he have against that guy with the club, etc? When I stood up there and picked Rizzo apart and particu­ larly when I insulted him with a certain amount of cool and humor (some of which was carefully selected to appeal to the Black point of view), they just loved it. I could tell the moment after that debate when I went down Columbia Avenue. I felt like a conquering hero. That was pretty significant, and it meant that I got 80% of the Black vote. So that had a profound effect on us. We knew all along that, if we could get out the Blacks, they were going to be for me. If we could get out the White liberals, they were going to be for me. If we could get out the traditional "I-wi11-vote-for-a-Republican-come-hel 1 - or-high-water's," they would be for me. We were in trouble with the South Philadelphia Republicans, the Roxborough Republicans, the Northeast Republicans who were anti-Black and who were "law and order" people. We knew we were in trouble with them. We knew we weren't going to get anywhere with the tradi­ tional Democrats. And when we looked the thing over, the way it split up was Rizzo had about 51% of the vote, with a little that we could take away from it but not much. I had about 47 or 48%, and the only part of it that looked like it might be movable were the Northeast Jews. They were the only swing vote that we could identify. The downtown Jews, the rich Jews, were all for me. They are almost all liberals. The West Philadelphia Jews, which are heavily professional people, were mostly for me because they were educuated people. The Northeast Jews had gone for Rizzo against Green; so we knew that we were in trouble there, but we also figured that no Jewish community is ever going to pick a guy like Rizzo over a guy like Longstreth. I had spent so much time in the synagogues, and I had so many contacts with the Jewish people, particu­ larly in that area. This is where we were counting on Spector to be very, very strong for us because that's where a basic part of his strength lies. In the '67 vote he creamed Tate in that area, which is usually Democratic. So we thought he could bring a certain amount of that vote. That's why we felt we could win the election. That's where we lost it. We got beaten 2-1 up there. Rizzo creamed me up there. That essentially decided the election.

Now there are two other factors that had a profound effect. They might have been decisive. One was the rain. Traditionally, Whites vote early and Blacks vote late. It is particularly true that, in any given election, about 40% of the Black vote comes out in the last hour. They come back from work, have a few drinks, party around a bit, and then, all of a sudden, they've got to get down to the polls. You'll always see it. I've been going to these elections now for 20 years. You go into a Black area in the morning and there's nobody there. At night there are people standing around, having a big party. It's a big community thing. In 1971, I needed the largest kind of turnout. I felt I had to get a big turnout because I knew that Rizzo's constit uency was a large, firmly established one and that they were sure to come out. The only way I could win would be if we got at the maximum amount of voters. Our people were more difficult to get out. For example, we counted heavily on the legislation which gave the vote of the 18, 19, and 20 year olders, and there were 90,000 of them in Philadelphia. I got 75% of them, but the trouble is, of the 90,000 only 30,000 registered. So I got 75% of 30,000 instead of 75% of 90,000. That was a very disappointing result. It rained off and on all election day and that had a very sad effect on me mentally. I really fell apart when I woke up and the rain was pouring down; I just decided I wasn't

40 going to win because I so equated a nice day -- heavy turnout — victory. Lousy day -- not so heavy turnout -- defeat. I was virtually in tears. Finally I went down to South Philadelphia about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I was just getting creamed down there. About 6 o'clock I went into North Philadelphia. Everywhere I went the Blacks were just all over me -- and still are, incidentally -- up in the Columbia Avenue and Diamond Street and that area. Even now, every time I stop at a light, there will be Black people who come over to the car or, if they are driving by, they will stop and shout and wave. The residual goodwill that I enjoyed from Black people is still extra­ ordinary, going back to that time. There were lines on the block; you couldn't believe it. At 20 minutes to 7, the heavens descended and it was a torrential downpour till 5 minutes of 8. It knocked out all of the late Black vote.

Now, I got 80% of the Black vote, and it was a heavy Black vote, but it would have been much heavier if that rain hadn't come. We don't figure that we would have won. We figure it cost us about 25,000 votes. It wasn't decisive, but it was very important.

There was a second factor in my loss -- and I'm probably a little paranoid on this, although it seemed almost as if it were a conspiracy of some sort. This election can be simplified as far as issues were concerned. There was only one issue: Black vs. White. Essentially, the law and order people equated "law and order" with Blacks. Face it, 75% of the crime that is committed in big cities is committed by Black people. About 85% of the violent crime is committed by Black people. Now, it is committed against other Black people, but'Whites don't know that. All they know is that every time you see a violent crime of some sort, the face is always Black. On several occasions women would walk up and spit in my face and call me a nigger lover. And phone calls would come in at night threatening us. And the press -- the press was just unconscionable in making this a Black vs. White thing. Longstreth was the Negro candidate. (Some people called me the White Nigger, because I was so totally associated with Blacks and the Black community city-wide.) For example, if the press were looking at the day of campaigning, always the day was shown as Rizzo shaking hands in South Philadelphia or up in the Northeast or out in Roxborough and as Longstreth in some Black area. The whole media made this a Black vs. White thing, and, I might add, that is what was going on in people's minds. Real or imagined, crime was the big thing that they were worried about. Crime was interpreted into a Black vs. White thing. So the White liberals, the secure Whites, and the Blacks all voted for me. The anti- Blacks, or the insecure Whites, all voted for Rizzo; and there were a few more of them.

On the last week of the campaign, we look good, we are closing fast. Now we are only about 30,000 behind. We've really got ourselves organized. We've got plenty of money. (We raised $1,200,000.) Everything is going along fine, and I know I'm going to get it. However, the major thing we are after are those Jewish votes up in the Northeast. I'm up there all the time. It never gets into the papers, but every day I'm up there. However, rather than show me up there, they will get a tape that was taken three weeks ago in a Black supermarket in West Philadelphia. I can't get them to display the fact that we are up there. This, of course, is when Spector kind of moved out of our camp. (We tried to get Spector to say things about me. He kept complimenting Rizzo. At this stage of the game he figured Rizzo was probably going to win.

41 He was trying to mend his fences for either running for Governor or re-running for the District Attorney's office. He didn't dislike me or anything; he was just trying to feather his own nest. He deserted us. There is still a great deal of bitterness on the part of a lot of my campaign people towards Spector.) We were still going pretty well up there. Then on the Monday -- eight days to go -- a White Jewish woman in Bustleton is murdered in front of her house by a Black man. Everybody sees it. He drives by in a car, empties a lot of shots into her body, and everybody see that it was a Black man. There were a dozen witnesses to it. Of course, it was all over Bustleton: "They are coming up and shooting our women in front of our front doors." Now, actually her husband hired the guy to murder her. That showed up six months later, but nobody knew this at the time. So that's on Monday. On Wednesday, a Jewish grocer, 72 years old, in his little place down in South Philadelphia, is stabbed and killed by three Black hoodlums, 17, 18, 19. All three pictures of them appear on the front pages of the Bulletin. So the headline: White Woman Murdered in Bustleton. Then on Wednesday, pictures of three Blacks in the Bulletin stabbing this grocer. Then to complete it, on Friday, a White Jewish lady, 67 or 68 years old, in West Philadelphia, is gang-raped by a dozen Blacks in her row apartment and then left for dead after being beaten to a pulp. It shows her face all beaten. The headline: Woman Raped by Youths. Black youths. I could just feel the Northeast falling apart up there. I could feel it because I was up there all the time. You could feel the hostility. That's when the people are spitting on you. That's when the people are calling you the White Nigger. That's when people are saying "I hope your daughter gets raped by a gang of those Black monkeys." I ran into that all the time. It was a rough time for me.>

Well, now you ask, returning to the subject of the economy of the City of Philadelphia, "Would you comment on the municipal programs which have been designed and implemented over the last couple of decades in support of bettering the city as a place to live and make a living?"

Well, I am in complete agreement with the effort that has been made to build up the Center City area, possibly at the expense of some of the neighborhoods, because I think for that reason we have suffered less of an exodus of both business and of our White community than that which has taken place in the other large, northeastern cities. I also refuse to become concerned, as some do, over the lack of building programs for residential housing, because we have almost 300,000 fewer people living in Philadelphia today than we had 30 years ago. People don't seem to realize that we have gone from a little over 2,100,000 to somewhat under 1,800,000 in that period of time and that actually there is plenty of housing available for lower-income people where they have chosen to take care of it. Besides, I can't really become too concerned over people who are constantly put into relatively good housing and then destroy those surroundings. As far as I'm concerned, sooner or later you reach the point where you say to them, "Look, this is what you've got, and, if you are not going to take care of it, I'm sorry, you'll have to live in what's left when you are through defacing it and tearing it to pieces." I also think that the economy of this city has really benefited from our expanded port activities. We've gotten rid of most of the finger piers. We now have at Tioga Street and Packer Avenue two of the finest general cargo facilities in the world. We are taking business away from New York and Baltimore and Boston all the time now, and the decision of city government to really put that port together and do a

42 job on it has been fantastically successful. I think that the developments in West Philadelphia, both industrial and residential, have made that a singularly nice place to live. They are going to provide rapid transit out into that area, and some of it will come through the completion of the airport highspeed line. That is going to be a very successful middle- and upper-income residen­ tial area as well as an important business part of the city.

I've already talked about the Society Hill program, which is working so successfully because you have the beginnings there which are government sponsored and then the private sector picks it up, begins to expand it. The same kind of thing is happening in the Lombard area between the Schuylkill River and 16th and 17th Streets. The same thing is happening in back of the Philadelphian, and 2601 Parkway, around the Fairmount Avenue. In that area private development of Black and White middle-class housing is building up.

I think that the building of ten million square feet of new office space in Center City has had a tremendous effect upon us, and we are going to have to build another ten million square feet sometime in the next 15 or 20 years to keep up with the demand that seems to be generating for first-class office space in Center City Philadelphia. This is primarily because of our good luck in being in the right place at the right time. Philadelphia is in the middle of the great eastern megalopolis, and I suspect that this advantage of location is going to be very helpful to us in any businesses that relate to distribution, such as warehousing, transportation, packaging, merchandising, marketing and advertising. I think all these things are going to be a growth area for Philadelphia.

Also, the economy of the city really benefits from the tremendous number of refining facilities that exist in the area. The refining of petroleum and the development of pharmaceutical industries and petrochemical industries are going to be worth their weight in gold to us in the future, particularly as the value of these products goes up and as we stop using them entirely for fuels and start using them more and more for agricultural chemicals and for apparel and textile fibers and things of that sort. Two of those refineries are in Philadelphia proper (Gulf and Arco), and the others are very nearby, including Texaco and Sunoco and British Petroleum.

You ask, "Do you feel that the Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia was well managed and generally successful? What do you think could have been done better?"

I think you have to answer those questions in two sections. It was my desire and hope that we put together for Philadelphia in 1976 the same kind of massive international exhibition that took place here in 1876. I would have liked that. I hoped that that was going to happen. I think that we would have had an extraordinarily successful and happy event had we been able to carry this off -- simply because we would have brought 30-40 million people to Philadelphia, and we would have put ourselves back on the map in much the same way that we did in the Centennial exhibition 100 years ago. Once the megastructure out in West Philadelphia fell apart, once we were unable to get approval to put it up in the Northeast at Byberry, once the people in Kensington shot down the idea of putting it out on the Delaware River, and once the feds refused to accept the West Philadelphia site down

43 at the airport because of unattractive surroundings (and the international part of it was dead), then I think we were moving in a totally different direction. Unfortunately, I think many people continued to look at what eventually happened in view of what had originally been planned. Although we officially abandoned the concept of the huge international exposition costing a billion dollars paid for primarily by the federal government, many people continued to think of it in that way, and they kept looking around and saying "Where is the Montreal? Where is the Osaka? Where is the New York?" So, if you measure what finally happened by what was originally anticipated, it is a disappointment. If, on the other hand, you measure what finally happened with what we expected to happen once we had abandoned those grandiose ideas, then I think we came up with a beautiful celebration — very well managed, very well handled. It was badly publicized, in view of the fact that the press constantly bad-mouthed everything we did, and disappointing, in view of the fact that economically we depended on getting about 20 million people, and we got about 6 million. Therefore, it did not have the economic benefits that we expected to get. However, I think that the job that was done was beautiful. It made me so proud of Philadelphia. I think that the 4th of July day that Nancy and I spent down at Independence Hall was as lovely a day as I ever expected to see in my life. It was a great day to be a Philadelphian. The President was here in town. The parades, with thousands of people, were there. I loved the peaceful surroundings, the beautiful way in which it was managed. I think that Dick Bond and Bill Rafsky did a fantastic job in carrying off an extremely successful Bicentennial celebration within the limitations of local support and local celebration that the Bicentennial became once the federal government in essence washed its hands of the whole affair. I think the city gave it tremendous support, both in terms of money and in terms of services that went along with it. I think that the benefits that we are going to gain are in the people who are going to be coming to Philadelphia in large numbers not just for this year but for the next ten years. I think you are going to find that, although the year itself (1976) was a disappointment in terms of tourist input, from here on in we are going to get far more than we ever got before -- because there are so many people around the country saying what a great job Philadelphia did.

The idea now is that we are not just going to promote the concept of a one- year Bicentennial, but it is a ten-year Bicentennail. We are celebrating the period between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

You ask, "What do you see as the major pressing needs of the city and what major advances over the next decade or two?"

The Center City tunnel is certainly one of the most important things that we need. I think we need another flight of building developments -- some more big buildings to take care of people downtown. I'm speaking primarily of office buildings, but I'm also thinking of apartment houses because what is happening now is that younger people are finding it increasingly desirable to live in the city, particularly in the Center City area, where the action is. Older people, whose children are born and raised and no longer really want to live in the suburban communities and look after a suburban two- or three-acre plot, find it easier and more pleasant to be in the Center City area. They want new apartments, particularly if they can get something in

44 middle-income circumstances so that they don't have to be a millionaire to live in Center City. I think that middle-income housing in Center City area high-rise is a very important thing. I think we are going to need a lot of office buildings because Philadelphia in service industries is going to continue to expand. I think we have pretty well leveled off in our loss of manufacturing, and I don't think we are going to get any more. However, I do think we are going to get service industry because this is a very effective, efficient, pleasant place for service industries to be located. Companies are finding this out, and we are going to find quite an influx of movement here in the next few years.

I think that also we want to make some effort to develop 52nd Street and 5th Street and Olney and Germantown and Chelten Avenues. I'm thinking of those three specifically -- along the lines of those areas 30 or 40 years ago when they were extremely important retail centers. I think they can be more important retail centers again. That's going to take some form of federal investment. It's being studied and I think it will probably be brought about.

Another factor that I think is going to work very much in the favor of the city is the impact of the energy crisis. Because, as people find it more and more expensive and more and more difficult to drive their automobiles and follow the traditional pattern in the last three decades to the suburban shopping center, they are going to find out how easy it is to drive a mile or so to a railroad station, get on a fast train, and come into Philadelphia and enjoy the magnificent retail facilities that are being developed in the Market Street East area. If Market Street East comes out the good way, it is going to do for us what the combination of downtown development and the subway have done for Montreal. Montreal had lost most of its shopping to the suburban communities and the last 10 years since they built their subway and developed the tremendous complex in Center City, , they have recovered much of that business, and their downtown area is just absolutely flourishing. I think the same thing can happen here.

I think that we've got to continue to work for some resolution of the SEPTA problem, so that suburban communities put in a larger share of the cost of operating SEPTA and so that we get sufficient rolling stock and sufficiently large numbers of trains so that people regard the mass transportation as something that is so pleasant and dependable that they will use it regularly and replace a great deal of the automobile traffic that gives us such a problem.

Another major need of the city certainly is for the Phillies to win the World Series. It would do wonders for our morale.

Now you ask, "What civic leadership do you see in the offing to deal with the problems that are bound to arise? Do you see any young leadership on the scene which will take an interest in the city in the future?"

I think that lack of leadership is the biggest vacuum that we face right now. I don't see civic leadership appearing on the scene at the present time. I don't really see people like Dick Bond or Fred Potts or Gus Amsterdam or, going back a little further, Hopkinson and some of the business leaders

45 who just put so much of themselves into the scene. Now, part of our lack is that so many of the major businesses are not around anymore. There is not Arco to the same degree. Abbott's is now just a part of something in the Midwest. So you don't have the corporations with the top officers with either the time or the inclination to be available.

In some instances younger people are not sufficiently secure to get themselves involved in the civic scene and we don't have as many wealthy older ones as there used to be. There's an old saying: "In order to do good you have to do well first." There aren't enough young people who are that interested. For example, I have a son-in-law who is an extremely successful stock broker in his early 30's. He is so busy making money and so caught up in the success syndrome (he is a guy who is a rock in the investment business), that you couldn't get him involved in the civic thing if your life depended on it. It would take time away from making money, which is his goal right now. I have a son who is in charge of the Latin American desk for Philadelphia National Bank -- speaks fluent Spanish, gets along with people beautifully, is born to be a civic leader, has the knowledge, the background, the mind, the personality. All he wants to do now is just knock that bank for a loan and show it that he is the finest international banker around so that he can get to be Vice President in charge of something else. Until he reaches the point where he has achieved what he thinks he ought to, from a business standpoint, he has no interest at all in the civic scene. Another factor that I think is worrisome along those lines is that the lawyers, who have always provided a very important part of civic leadership and who, in the'past, for the most part, provided support for the establishment, now in increasing numbers regard it as the thing to do to take on the establishment, so that many of them are now in adversary positions where they are fighting any kind of thing that you are trying to do. When you had a good idea in the old days, people rallied to the idea and tried to bring it off. Now you get any kind of an idea and more people rally to oppose it than to support it, and, as a consequence, a lot of things just don't get done that used to get done. vV I regard as one of my major responsibilities that of identifying and involving businessmen in the leadership area of Philadelphia, and I might add that I would include with that identifying businesswomen because they are becoming increasingly important and will, in the long run, be that extra ingredient in the development of civic leadership that we are going to need. We no longer have to limit our involvement just to men. We've got a tremendous number of women who are going to be available and who are going to improve the quality of leadership.

"Now, would you say that the non-profit corporations created jointly by the city government and the Chamber have been effective in underpinning the economy of the city and would you tell about their major operations and achievements?"

I have been extremely pleased with the results of particularly PIDC and the Philadelphia Port Corporation. I've got to give credit to both Tate and Rizzo, up to the present, in not filling them up with political hacks, in enabling us to make good appointments. As a result, in Walter D'Alessio, who runs PIDC and Irv Good, who runs the Port Corporation, you've got two

46 dedicated, highly competent civil servants who I think could compete with anybody. I wouldn't want anybody other than those two guys. As a result of this, the achievements have been outstanding. PIDC is generally regarded as the best Industrial Development movement of any big city in the country. They come in from far and wide to look at it and observe it, and they go back and copy it.

That still doesn't mean that it is able to do the whole job, because the forces that are working against maintaining important business establishments in the city -- particularly manufacturing establishments -- are still very, very difficult to overcome. However, what can be done, I think we are doing it.

The development of the new Philadelphia Story -- which in effect is an advertising and promotion campaign on a national level to attract business to Philadelphia and on the local level to hold business in Philadelphia -- is the biggest thing of its kind in the nation. We've raised $500,000 a year for three years. (We're just finishing the second year of that program at the present time.) A million two of that money has come up from private industry -- voluntarily given by the banks and insurance companies and the large companies here in Philadelphia (all Philadelphia businesses). Then PIDC has put in some money itself to help make that thing go. And we've used W. C. Fields as the advertising spokesman for the program. We're running ads in Time and Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, etc., and we've gotten 13,000 inquiries about Philadelphia as a place to locate or expand business. We've gotten a dozen or so businesses that we can actually point to that we've attracted here or expanded here. That's been a very successful program out of PIDC.

Now, if there are some things that I have failed to bring out in my list of questions, would you please initiate them yourself and make whatever comments you think are appropriate. * % %. The last point that I would like to make is one that goes back to the politi­ cal programs that you talked about a little bit earlier. How can you have a good government in a big city where the number two political party really doesn't operate very effectively? where you don't have the benefit of a two- party system? where the "out" party puts pressure on the "in" party to keep them honest and effective? and where, in effect, more and more the Republicans are going to be controlled by the Democrats and simply be a straw party they keep alive for purposes of their own convenience? My recommendation would be along those lines that we would end up better by eliminating the two- party system entirely in Philadelphia for local government. Let's do it the way they do it in Detroit or Cincinnatti or Los Angeles where you simply have a city government. There is no city committee; there's no Republican or Democratic way to do it. Anybody that wants to run for office can do so. You have run-offs and then the two top vote getters are elected to the Council, Mayor, and District Attorney and positions of this sort. It is possible for Republicans to be elected, and therefore you still maintain Republican office holders in the city, instead of having so many of your good ones just go out into the suburban communities if they have any kind of a political interest, or else have them register themselves Democrats because it's the only way to be successful in Philadelphia politics.

47 I give you a classic example of this to show you what I mean. One of the better Mayors of Detroit was a man named Cobo, and Cobo was a Republican. Cobo was elected in Detroit where no Republican ever wins in a non-partisan election. No one knew he was a Republican. He was Cobo. He ran, and he ran a better campaign than the other guy who happened to be a Democrat, and he was elected Mayor. Then after four years he was reelected Mayor -- by an even larger margin than the one by which he had originally won. So the Republicans said, "We lose the Governor's race in Michigan because we always get creamed in Detroit. We always come out of there 100,000 behind, and we can't make it up in the rest of the state. Now here is Mayor Cobo, who has carried Detroit twice now -- once by 50,000 and once by 100,000; so obviously he has a tremendous following in Detroit; so we will run him for Governor, and he will come out of Detroit either ahead or very little behind, and he will be our next Governor." That made pretty good sense. So they ran Cobo the year after he had been reelected by this enormous margin. He just got creamed. He got beaten by over 100,000 in Detroit, and he lost the election. Do you know why? It was because he was identified as a Republican. Now, all those people that had voted for him in Detroit when he was Cobo, as soon as he was Cobo the Republican, voted against him. I think it indicates why in the long run it is going to be desirable to eliminate the two-party system in Philadelphia and local politics and make it a non-partisan government.

(WMP; One thing I wanted to go back to has to do with Jim Tate. You made a remark that you though he was a weak Mayor. We've interviewed Jim.)

Jim Tate's got a working knowledge of the city which is extraordinary and unique.

In his first term Tate had the Dilworth-Clark planning. He had a good share of the Dilworth-Clark people, and he was sufficiently wise or fortunate to really not attempt very many changes from what had been set in motion. He knew that he was in a caretaking position and he "caretook" in an appropriate fashion. The great debacle in the Tate administration, to my way of thinking, came about in the 1967 election when he was dumped by the Democratic organi­ zation primarily because he has one of the more abrasive personalities that you will find in politics -- which has always hurt him. It is hard to work for a guy who is as unpleasant to be around as Jim Tate. At the time when he was dumped by the Democratic party he naturally turned to other sources of political support. He got in bed with the devil, sold his soul to the devil, i.e., the labor unions, and they won him the primary. (They didn't win him the general election, but they did win him the primary.) Then he and the Democratic party won the election, and he had the obvious obligation going back to the primary that a man is apt to have. And when the unions came in and asked for the moon, as they did throughout his second term, he gave it to them. You've got to realize that the labor leaders, in their desire to support their brothers, made a mistake that is coming back to haunt them now. The labor leaders encouraged and made it possible for state and municipal unions to be formed, because they felt that they would be disloyal to the labor movement if they didn't do something of this sort. Now they realize that by the development of these monstrous unions which keep getting more and more pensions and more pay -- way beyond any realistic aspects — they are creating a problem for their members, who are taxpayers.

48 Tate's sell-out to labor, which resulted from labor's support of Tate in the '67 primary, I think, is responsible for many of the economic problems that face the city today. I don't think they are Rizzo's problems at all. Some are his, but most are a continuation of Tate's unwillingness to face up to any kind of a fight when it came to preserving the fiscal integrity of the city or the position of the taxpayer, and that's the major reason that I am so bitter against him.

Also, I think a good share of Tate's appointees were abysmal -- the ones that he did on his own: Harry Galfand as Director of Commerce. The guy that ran the city -- the automobile dealer, Corletto. You could go down the line: Ed Martin, the Fiscal Director. I think that that kind of appointment, along with the sellout to labor, plus the fact that he was always operating as the head of the Democratic party and the head of the 43rd ward, they were more important to him than the things that happened in the city by a long shot. He became a highly suspicious, neurotic man, and has been responsible for a number of the problems that the city has.

I urge for your reading an article that came out in the Bulletin. I'm sure that one of the political writers down there can give you the approximate time. It was in the winter of 1970 (might have been December of 1970). Tate had an operation, a hemoroid operation, and it was very uncomfortable and he was in very considerable pain, and he was recuperating down at the shore. He came up to Philadelphia, and apparently he went to somebody's wake>and had a couple of drinks, and the drinks had an effect on the medica­ tion he was taking for the operation. The Bulletin got him into an interview, and I've been told by a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist that this interview is used in his class as a classic example of a schizophrenic in the process of his schizophrenia, exclaiming on the state of the city. It is a long, long interview, and it is in the Bulletin. He just tore Corletto to shreds. He took this entire staff and absolutely debased them. I never heard a man put down people the way he did. It is the irrationality and the abrasiveness and the cruelty of this interview that give you as good a sense of Jim Tate as anything I've ever seen.

I'll.tell you about an incident that I had with him in 1966, before I got involved in the political scene here for the second time. I was asked to take some action out in West Philadelphia to get something off dead center out there relating to the University of Pennsylvania. They called on me to make an attack on the Black community in West Philadelphia, Paul D'Ortona (President of City Council), Mayor Tate, and Gus Amsterdam (Chairman of Redevelopment Authority). It was originally determined by a meeting of Bill Wilcox of GPM and Gaylord Harnwell and several other people and myself that I would be the fall guy in this because I was less susceptible to harm from Tate than some of the others. So I was the mouthpiece, and I made several statements. I immediately got a call from Gus Amsterdam, saying "You are absolutely right..." and "I'm sorry that we've done this..." and "We'll remedy it right away." I never heard a word from D'Ortona. The guy named John Clay, who was a Black promoter that I attacked, sent his attorney around and said he was going to sue me for defamation of character. I said, "Go ahead and sue. I didn't say these things without some knowledge of what goes on out there. Obviously, if you sue me I'm going to have to prove that I didn't defame your character, and I can prove it." He said, "I'll forget this. You won't hear any more about this." I didn't.

49 However, Tate called me up and said he wanted to see me. So I went to his office, and he closed the door -- just him and me. I was sitting in a chair alongside his desk, and he got up and started walking around and came over and put his finger in my face and just started to chew me out all over the place. Why was I attacking him? Why was I attempting to destroy him? A fair amount of profanity and just all sorts of threats: He would ruin me. He would drive me from the city, etc. I listened to this for four or five minutes, and then it made me mad. So I got up. When I get up, I'm a lot bigger than he is, and I'm also an awful lot tougher, and an awful lot younger. I just said, "Jim, I just want to tell you one thing: You keep this up for just one more minute and I'm going to punch you right in the mouth." He looked at me and said, "You wouldn't do that." I said, "I'm just that close from doing it right now." My hand was trembling, because I was really mad. I said, "I know it doesn't take very much courage to sock a man who is older and weaker than you are, and you are that, but I'm mad enough so I'm perfectly willing to do it. If I hit you once, you're not going to get up." He said, "Oh, you mustn't do that. Just calm down. Sit down." From then on, I've never had a rude action or an unkind word from Jim Tate. Now, I'm not even sure he remembers it. Probably doesn't. Nevertheless, to me, that was a perfect characteristic of Jim Tate and the way to get along with him.

Yet, I've been involved in the last year with him on this ward realignment commission and I am astonished at his knowledge. He is a very knowledgeable man -- knows detail inside and out; knows the structure of the city probably better than any man who ever lived. I must admit that I really kind of like him. I've gotten quite fond of him in this past year (which I never thought I would ever do). He's the kind of guy that, out of power, is all right. In power, he is unbearable.

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