Andrew Biemiller, Oral History Interview – JFK#2, 5/24/1979 Administrative Information
Creator: Andrew Biemiller Interviewer: Sheldon Stern Date of Interview: May 24, 1979 Location: Washington, D.C. Length: 69 pages
Biographical Note Biemiller, a Representative from Wisconsin from 1945 to 1949 and Director of the AFL- CIO’s Department of Legislation, from 1956 to 1982, discusses the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ legislative records, particularly on labor issues; specific issues and pieces of legislation; civil rights; and the labor movement’s relationship with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, among other issues.
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Transcript of Oral History Interview These electronic documents were created from transcripts available in the research room of the John F. Kennedy Library. The transcripts were scanned using optical character recognition and the resulting text files were proofread against the original transcripts. Some formatting changes were made. Page numbers are noted where they would have occurred at the bottoms of the pages of the original transcripts. If researchers have any concerns about accuracy, they are encouraged to visit the Library and consult the transcripts and the interview recordings.
Suggested Citation Andrew Biemiller, recorded interview by Sheldon Stern, May 24, 1979, (page number), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.
Andrew Biemiller—JFK#2
Table of Contents
Page Topic 16, 43 Appointments to the Kennedy administration 18 Labor movement’s feelings on Lyndon Baines Johnson as vice president 20 Labor movement’s feelings on Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general 22 House rules committee fight 25 1961-’62 education bill 27, 40 John F. Kennedy’s (JFK) relationship with Congress 28 Minimum wage legislation 30 President’s Committee on Equal Employment 31 President’s Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Relations 33 Housing reform 34 Lawrence F. O’Brien and his staff 37, 41, 58 AFL-CIO’s close relations with the Kennedy White House and administration 38 1960 Democratic National Convention 45 Wages and the balance of payments 47 Medicare legislation 51 Civil rights 59 1962 executive order on collection bargaining and organizing by federal employees 60 Trade Expansion Act of 1962 62 Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 63 Agency for International Development 64 1962 congressional elections 65 Patronage 67, 76, 81 Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) 68 House Education and Labor Committee 71 Speakers of the House 73 Biemiller’s staff and operations 77 JFK versus LBJ in congressional relations 78 JFK’s personality and working style 82 Overall assessment of the Kennedy administration 83 Labor movement’s role in the 1968 presidential primary
Second of Two Oral History Interviews
with
Andrew Biemiller
May 24, 1979 Washington, D.C.
By Sheldon Stern
For the John F. Kennedy Library
STERN: Since your original interview covered the period through the election of 1960, why don’t we begin with the period from November up to the inauguration. I’ve got a few questions about that. First, can you tell me what contacts you had with the President-elect [John F. Kennedy] and with the whole operation of setting up the new administration?
BIEMILLER: Well we were in constant contact with him. Meany [George Meany] was conducting most of it. And one time when Meany went to Europe he called Jack and said, “Andy can handle everything except the cabinet level.” But anything else I handled at that time. And it was just a good give-and-take all the way. There’s a story right there though that I might as well tell you because it gets back later to the Goldberg matter. Meany wanted Goldberg [Arthur J. Goldberg]. He did not want a labor leader.
STERN: That’s interesting. I’ve seen some accounts that he didn’t want Goldberg.
BIEMILLER: Yes I know it and as secretary of Labor. He took the position that with the passage of Landrum-Griffin [Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959] that any labor leader just couldn’t function in that spot. That he would either be, in one sense, going back on his oath of office or, on the other hand, he’d be making so many enemies in the labor movement that he could never come back. Now he had no objection to Goldberg because he didn’t regard Goldberg as a labor leader. He regarded him as a servant of the labor movement, so to speak. But what really happened on it is kind of funny, because this business I’m talking to you about that where he’d put me in charge when he was in Europe. I got a call from Jack Kennedy—I knew it was coming—and I was amazed though at what was on his mind. He said, “Andy, you here are saying that you want to put Willard Wirtz [Willard Wirtz] in as head of the National Labor Board.” I said, “That’s right.” He said, “I can’t have
[-16-] two Jews in the leading labor spots in my administration„“ And that’s the tip-off, first tip-off we had firmly that is was Goldberg. I didn’t say another word. I then went on to explain to him that in the first place Willard Wirtz was not a Jew. He was a German all the way. And I discovered in talking on the phone that for some strange reason or other Jack Kennedy and Willard Wirtz had never met. It’s hard to believe with as active as Wirtz was.
STERN: Wirtz was a Stevenson [Adlai E. Stevenson] man.
BIEMILLER: Exactly. But anyhow but you’d have thought somewhere they’d have met. So we at least got that little thing cleaned up. But it also meant that we knew it was Goldberg. I got home here and the next morning, at an hour that I knew wouldn’t disturb Meany, called him in Brussels and told him. He said, “That’s fine. That’s what I want. Now,” he said, “you get together with Pierre Salinger [Pierre E.G. Salinger]. I’ll be back on such and such a date in December and we’ll work it out. No troubles.” So then I got in touch with Pierre and then ran into a nasty snag. When Meany came back the weather was so bad that he had to get off the boat in Boston and he couldn’t fly down. So he called me collect which he was apologizing for and said, “look you meet this train at such and such an hour. Get the chauffeur and we’ll be there.” And he said, “I don’t want anybody there. I don’t want anybody to know I’m coming back.” By arrangement with Al Zack [Albert J. Zack], our P.R. guy, I told him off the record. He said, “I don’t want to know.” I said, “Okay you don’t know. Nobody knows that I’m handling this.” So it worked all right. And the very next morning Goldberg and Meany went together to Jack’s house in Georgetown but they went in the alley. The guys on the outside never dreamt that they do that. They couldn’t figure out what was happening. Then all of a sudden the door opens and out comes Jack Kennedy, Arthur Goldberg, and George Meany announcing that Goldberg was the secretary of labor. It took a lot of people by surprise because, as you say, there were some people who thought Meany didn’t want Goldberg. I’m not saying that he was necessarily his first choice but he had no objection to him.
STERN: Right. I see. There’s some reports that he submitted a list of elected union officials. That he preferred elected union officials.
BIEMILLER: He did not want any. I talked with him many times on that. Now as I said he told me I couldn’t verify that’s one he was going to do himself. I worked on things like, for example, Esther Peterson [Esther E. Peterson] as head of the women’s bureau [assistant to the secretary for women’s affairs] at that time. The only
[-17-] other order I got from him that he wanted understood was that I was not to take a position in the Kennedy Administration. He wanted me staying in the AF of L-CIO and that Nelson Cruikshank [Nelson H. Cruikshank], our social security guy, was not to take a position unless they offered him the job of administrator of social security. Otherwise, stay here. Outside of that he said use your judgment. Work on it. And as I say the relations were good, particularly with the President himself. Now the last thing we did in terms of the good relationship we had was the day before inauguration, the day the storm started to hit here, we had an off the record luncheon with the then Senator Kennedy. I remember Meany starting out and saying, “Well, Jack, I’m glad you’re here. It’s the last time I’ll ever be able to call you Jack.” So it got started that way. And it was just a pleasant go around. And feeling was pretty good as far as Jack Kennedy was concerned. In that sense he started off with the absolute good will of the labor movement as I said. Right from the beginning relations were good. I was already working for example, working with Larry O’Brien [Lawrence F. O’Brien] on just setting things up and so on.
STERN: Right. Let me just go back for one question in the campaign.
BIEMILLER: Sure.
STERN: How serious was the AFL-CIO, [American Federation of Laborers- Congress of Industrial Organizations]—well if the word is resistance or discomfort—about the selection of Johnson [Lyndon Baines Johnson] for vice president?
BIEMILLER: Well, that was a good…. Now that’s a good story. We discussed it back and forth a lot. Many of the guys didn’t want any part of it, particularly Walter [Walter P. Reuther].
STERN: Was Meany consulted before the decision was made?
BIEMILLER: No he wasn’t. But Walter Reuther particularly, didn’t want any part of it. So anyhow we’re sitting around at that stage of the game—we in this case meaning George Meany, Al Zack and myself—around the pool at the Ambassador [Ambassador Hotel] and the phone rings and it’s long distance for Meany. Comes back and he says, “I wish somebody around here would keep me informed. That was Dave Dubinsky [David Dubinsky] in New York informing me that Lyndon Johnson was going to be vice president.” Now he said, “I tell you what you fellows do. You get into your clothes. You go up to that convention hall. I don’t want any labor leader opposing Lyndon Johnson for vice president.” And he said, “Find any member of the
[-18-] executive council that you can find. Get them back here to this hotel within the hour. We’ll have a meeting. Make sure that nobody gets out of bounds.” Well one thing that happened already, but that was the other side, McDonald. [David J. McDonald] had already embraced Lyndon very, very heavily...
STERN: Steelworkers union.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. And Reuther for some reason or other didn’t get too excited about it. He saw he could; Reuther was a realist. He could see what had happened. The only opposition on the floor came from ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] types. Like Joe Rauh [Joseph Louis Rauh, Jr.]—he got mad as hell about it and so on. But we didn’t have any great quarrel with Lyndon except we didn’t want him for president. We thought that Jack Kennedy was a superior guy. Now it was very funny in a personal sense. We’d argued this out one time, oh a dozen of us or so with Meany, and I had proved beyond a peradventure of a doubt that Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t be interested in the job because he was in a much more powerful position as the majority leader of the Senate than he would be as vice president. And I was later reminded of that by a few of my fellow labor leaders. But there was not any great trouble with it. I mean, Dubinsky was in his seventh heaven. He says, “It’s a master stroke. I don’t know who thought of it.” [Laughter] And away he went with his lovely motion that Dave had in those days. Well I guess still has except the poor guy’s pretty sick. But he was just full of…. Now he didn’t come to the convention, strangely enough, but he immediately got hold of George Meany to tell him. I don’t know who tipped him off. I never did find that out. But he got it.
STERN: Did labor people try in any way to quell the disturbances on the floor in Michigan and other states where there was G. Mennen Williams and others were really upset about it?
BIEMILLER: Not particularly, no. But we didn’t want him in it. One little byplay that also amuses you in that it does involve a labor leader on it. The last guy that Zack and I found on the floor was my old friend Emil Rieve from Milwaukee who was then—I first knew him as head of the hosiery workers and he was now head of the textile workers and a very prominent vice president of the CIO and later in merger. And we started walking back and Rieve says, “No sir, I don’t want any part of Johnson.” Al Zack, trying to make peace with him, says, “Now wait a minute. In 1932 I didn’t hear you endorsing Garner [John Nance Garner], making any howls about Garner,”—I shouldn’t say endorsing, but making any howls about Garner. “Oh,” says Emil, “I guess you don’t realize Andy and I didn’t support Roosevelt [Franklin Delano Roosevelt].
[-19-]
We were supporting Norman Thomas.” Which we were in ‘32. Just one of those little funny byplays. But it did at least stop Rieve or anybody else from erupting. And when they got down to the hotel Meany just simply said, “Look, this is a fait accompli. We know how to work with Johnson. Andy particularly has worked with him over the years and don’t get excited. Let it go.” He said, “We won’t raise very much of a row.” And he said, “Andy, I want you to check out his entire record and show me the best record you can on this.” And he called a meeting about in, oh, a couple of weeks later and formally endorsed the Kennedy- Johnson ticket for which I came up with something. Frankly, I was a little bit surprised myself. While he had some black marks on his record, for example he voted for Taft-Hartley, voted to override Truman [Harry S. Truman] and he also, of course, on civil rights wasn’t exactly too hot. Although he did let the bill in ‘57 get by. But with those two things the record wasn’t bad. Most people forget that he came in as a Roosevelt idolater.
STERN: Right.
BIEMILLER: All his life he was trying to stay close to what he thought F.D.R. was. And as you know, well, we’re getting ahead of the story, but when he later became president he felt he was following through on the New Deal, carrying it out to it’s logical conclusion.
STERN: Right. What about labor’s reaction to the appointment of Robert Kennedy [Robert F. Kennedy] as attorney general, given his labor record, and the McLellan [Select Committee to Investigate Improper Activities in Labor-Management Relations] and Hoffa [James Riddle Hoffa] and the whole business?
BIEMILLER: We were never happy with Bobby Kennedy on anything. Again, we saw why Jack appointed him. We weren’t going to quarrel about it. But we always notice—well put it this way, we’re politicians enough to know that any president want to be sure the attorney general is a guy he can work with. And from that angle we weren’t quarreling, you know. As time went on we got into a lot of rows with Bobby, but we offered no objections at the time.
STERN: Can you give any examples of difficulties you had with him?
BIEMILLER: Oh, yes, we had plenty of difficulties with him. In the first place, well, the major one is the one to talk about and then later on the civil rights issue. But the major one was that I was chagrined over this,
[-20-] and so were some of my friends in the Senate: he snuck a little bill through the Senate taking away Fifth Amendment rights in certain kinds of labor cases from both employers and union leaders. And when that bill hit the House, we had a fit. Frankly, I was caught short, I admit. I don’t know how it happened. There was no debate, no anything, just passed. Well, when it got over in the House that was another….
STERN: Was O’Brien’s staff supporting it, pushing it?
BIEMILLER: I don’t know, well I—you see it, no, it was done so quietly. Nobody knew the bill was being passed even. It was a very clever, in that sense, maneuver. Now when it got over in the House, things were different. Manny Celler [Emanuel Celler] didn’t want any part of the bill. He knew we wouldn’t want it. So we got together with Manny and decided we were going to kill that bill. And Manny just sat on it. Then one day in June of ‘62 I guess it must have been, I get a call from Manny saying, “Arthur Goldberg’s just been up here to see me and he tells me the labor movement no longer objects to that Fifth Amendment bill.” I said, “He’s not talking for us.” And I said, “Let me get hold of George Meany. I know where I can find him and I’ll make sure of this.” Well I happened to know where George was. He was sailing the next day for Europe. I just happened to catch him. And I got hold of him. Told him the story. He said, “Do you have Arthur Goldberg’s private number?” I said, “I do.” He said, “Give it to me.” Called me back in about fifteen minutes and says, “You can tell Manny Celler to forget Goldberg ever saw him. That’s dead.” So we killed it that way. Then also that time in the summer—this is a minor thing, and one sort of the kind of thing that made Meany mad as hell. My son was then at Harvard, and he was working here I think in the Labor Department at the time, but there were about fifty Harvard guys. So they arranged to have a meeting with Bobby Kennedy. Well my son like me never knows when to keep his mouth shut at times and so he sounds off and said, “I hear you’re in trouble with the labor movement over this Fifth Amendment bill.” All of a sudden it dawns on Bobby that he’s my son. He says, “You go back and tell your father I need that bill and I want it. You carry that message to him.” So he brought the message back. I told Meany about it and he said, “My God, trying to use a kid yet to influence us.” Well finally Bob saw that he couldn’t get any place. Manny wouldn’t.... He decides he’d better come and make the plea to Meany. So he came down with Whizzer White [Byron R. White] who was still the deputy at that time and Miller [Herbert J. Miller, Jr.]. I don’t remember Miller’s first name. He was in charge of the Hoffa squad. And Meany had Tom Harris [Thomas Everett Harris], our special counsel, and myself sit with him. Bob starts off saying, “Man, President Meany I admire you. You’re the only guy in the country, practically, that’s been willing
[-21-] to take Hoffa on in any kind of a fight. You’ve showed your courage.” And so on. “Threw him out….” Blah. “Now I need this bill. I want to get Hoffa. I want to put him in jail.” George said, “Look Bobby, I’m telling you this. I hate Hoffa just as much, if not more, than you do. But I’m not giving up the Fifth Amendment right for labor leaders just to get Hoffa. You’d better find some other method.” Meeting broke up. But it was the point that at least Bob found out he could not go behind Meany. He thought he could at one time, but it couldn’t be done. ‘Cause Meany, as you probably know, is a man that when he makes up his mind, he makes it up. It’s pretty difficult to move him. It’s been done but it’s very rare. And on this thing he was not going to give it up. He thinks the Fifth Amendment is very important. Now that was the major fight we had with Bob. The other one was on the civil rights legislation, but why don’t we take that up….
STERN: Right, we’ll take that up when we get to it. There was also some resistance in ‘62 on the part of labor, wasn’t there, to his wire tapping bill. I know I’ve seen some evidence that Manny Celler came and talked to you about that.
BIEMILLER: Yup, he did, he did. We never liked the bill but the opposition wasn’t as strong as it was on this Fifth Amendment thing. That’s what made us mad. On wire tapping there’s always been a bit of a schizophrenic situation in the labor movement. We recognize there’s got to be some wire tapping. Now how far it should go, that’s where your argument comes in. We had one or two people in those days like Joe Curran [Joseph Edwin Curran] of the National Maritime [National Maritime Union of American]. He just said, “No wire tapping.” Others to use it in espionage and so forth and so on. But it should be heavily controlled.” And that’s the thing we were trying to make sure was that if there was anything done, that we’d put some controller on it. Fortunately, as you say, we were very close with Manny and we knew what was going on. We didn’t get hurt any in the thing in our opinion. Now we, of course, didn’t get into the stories that now keep breaking of all the wire tapping that was being done.
STERN: You weren’t aware of that?
BIEMILLER: No, we weren’t aware of anything as widespread as it evidently was. Of course you had Hoover [J. Edgar Hoover] around that everybody would blame.
STERN: Right. Let’s turn for a few moments to the early legislative struggles. And particularly the House rules committee fight...
[-22-]
BIEMILLER: Yeah.
STERN: ...in the very beginning of the administration. I know you played a very important role in that. If you would describe what happened from your perspective. Whether, for example, you think Rayburn [Samuel Taliaferro Rayburn] handled it well. I know there were some people, for example, who say that he made a tragic blunder in moving out of the Democratic caucus. You know, that he should have purged Colmer [William Meyers Colmer] rather than try to expand the committee because then the Republicans got into it and he almost lost, etc. Was he losing his perspective perhaps by that point?
BIEMILLER: It was a very difficult situation. I was very much in the middle of that thing. Now, actually, we organized a group of comparatively new people. Bolling [Richard W. Bolling] only had twelve years, which was regarded as still a junior. Thompson [Theo Ashton Thompson] only had about eight years. But these were the kind of people we put together. Stu Udall [Stewart L. Udall] was part of that group. Jimmy Roosevelt [James Roosevelt] and so on. And we thought we had a very firm commitment form Rayburn. As you probably know, Bolling was very very close to Rayburn in those days.
STERN: Right.
BIEMILLER: Well, all his life he was very close to Rayburn. And I remember on a given Sunday, this group with a couple more people in it, and I met and we decided that the thing wasn’t quite right. You remember he kept postponing the vote, on the grounds he didn’t know where he was. We knew we had a fair majority. It wasn’t very good but we knew we had it. The whole question that we were trying to buck was what our little delegation called the old bulls. They were worried that Carl Vinson and the guy from eastern Pennsylvania—I can’t think of his name at the moment. Well anyhow these two guys were powerful. They were powerful guys. And we were afraid they were going to influence him, so Bolling got Rayburn on the phone. And Rayburn had said, “I think I’ve got a pledge here via Vinson X that he won’t interfere, that they’ve got Smith [Howard W. Smith] agreed that they won’t interfere.” So I remember Bolling’s words, “Mister Speaker that isn’t enough. We’re going to make this fight.” And the next morning he saw Rayburn and they worked it out. Rayburn agreed we’d have to go ahead. I mean Bolling convinced him that there was no way to stop it. Now in the meantime, I’d been meeting constantly with Bolling, Thompson, O’Brien and Donahue [Richard K. Donahue], were the people that I was particularly meeting with.
[-23-]
STERN: How about Henry Hall Wilson [Henry Hall Wilson, Jr.], was he involved in that?
BIEMILLER: He may have been but I didn’t know him at the time, I mean know him well. The two people that I was working with were O’Brien and Donahue. Oh, I’m sure he was involved in it. I just meant that in the sessions I was in. Then what happened was that we simply were dividing up the list, comparing notes. The night before that vote was taken, Meany said, “Are we all right?” He was interested as hell in it and I said, “Yup. And I’ll tell you what the vote’s going to be. It’s going to be 217 to 212.” The next day when the vote was taken he said, “How the hell did you know it?” I said, “I sat in the gallery watching the votes. Everybody voted as we expected. The absentees were the same as we expected and we didn’t lose a person.” Now that’s almost unheard of, you know, when you’ve done a roll call in advance. The opposition didn’t lose any either. That was always a story around that both sides had three or four people in reserve, that everybody knew that both sides supposedly had them. I don’t know who they were. I just know that this was the story around. I didn’t pay any attention to it because the people that I worked with, that I was working with, were having no trouble. We got an unexpected ally in that fight that I—I respect him for his argument. Tom Curtis [Thomas Bradford Curtis] who was about as conservative a Republican as there ever was stuck with us all the way on the argument. He didn’t want to give Democrats the excuse that Republicans on the rules committee were blocking their legislation. Therefore, he thought that they were entitled to have a revamped committee where they could get a majority. And he was backstopped on that with Brad Morse [Frank Bradford Morse] who was a freshman at the time but stuck his neck out and went ahead from Massachusetts. And as I remember there were about twenty Republicans. I don’t want to be held to that figure but that’s about what it was. And most of the northern and western and eastern Democrats stuck. We didn’t pick up too many in the south, but here and there you’d pick one up, you know, and it worked out. But that was an awful tough, tight vote. Now you got to also remember that when we walked in there we had fewer Democrats than we’d had in the preceding Congress.
STERN: That’s right.
BIEMILLER: That’s one of the peculiarities of the 1960 election that most people forget. They know Jack Kennedy won a big…. Won the election, therefore they assume he must have carried. He didn’t. It was a significant loss and it made a difference on that vote.
STERN: Particularly the eighteen liberals.
[-24-]
BIEMILLER: Exactly! That’s what was worrying us, you see. If we’d had them, pshaw, we’d have just jammed it through without any trouble. But we had to go around picking up Republicans here and there as well as making sure Democrats would be with us.
STERN: I’ve seen some accounts that you were involved in determining that the House was pretty much divided about roughly 180-180 conservative-liberal, and then there would be seventy swing votes. And those I presume were the people you really worked on.
BIEMILLER: That’s right, exactly right. Now, that work was done very thoroughly. With the seventy odd or whatever the figure we finally worked on, we were going back home to our people where there was any chance, you know, of maybe swinging a guy and working on it. And it was as thorough a job as I ever participated in with one exception. That was the fight on Haynsworth [Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr.] and Carswell [G. Harrold Carswell]. But that’s a later story entirely. But it was that kind of a job. We went back home on it. And I remember the machinists had a guy in those days who was a very good political operator and he had all of his people at work. You see, I mean, we were doing a job, working on the thing. And it worked very well.
STERN: Did you have any contact with the President during that struggle at all?
BIEMILLER: No, strictly Larry O’Brien. When you get into that kind of a fight there’s no point in bothering the President. Larry would see him., obviously, and that was enough. No, we had no direct contact with Jack during that time.
STERN: Let’s turn to the, another one of those really difficult struggles in that early period, one which the President lost, which was the education bill...
BIEMILLER: Yeah.
STERN: ...which he lost in the House rules committee, ironically after winning this fight. What part did you play in that, and I’m particularly interested in McCormack’s [John William McCormack] role. There are those that claim that he was less than helpful to the President.
BIEMILLER: You’ve got to remember that that whole fight, Jack Kennedy had two strikes on him. In ‘49 Jack
[-25-]
Kennedy killed a federal aid to education bill. And as you know, I’m sure because you’ve looked into these things, the only reason it was never used in the ‘60 campaign was that Dick Nixon [Richard Milhous Nixon] also voted against the bill. Thank God for that! But that was still rankling a lot of people, that Jack had voted to kill that bill thirteen to twelve the thing went down to. So he was a marked man. Now when we got into the education fight in 1961-62, I think you’re right. I don’t mean John McCormack was dragging his heels, but he just didn’t show the kind of enthusiasm that John would when he was really working on one. The whole fight over the years on federal aid to education was a very, very interesting situation. In round numbers you had about a hundred and seventy five people who were for any kind of federal aid to education and a hundred and seventy five who were against it. The in-between group. Now unfortunately the in-between group was of such a nature that about half of them said, “We’ll take federal aid providing there’s no aid to parochial schools.” The other half said, “We won’t take federal aid unless there is aid to parochial schools.” So you were stymied and you just couldn’t move things in the House. Now what finally happened—well I’m going ahead in the Johnson days, Hugh Carey’s [Hugh Leo Carey] the guy that saved that one with the education bill that passed successfully by offering the compromise of permitting parochial schools to use certain installations of the public schools. The didn’t regard that as federal aid so to speak. And they worked it out….
STERN: There was a compromise, of course, which Adam Powell [Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.] et cetera, was involved in ‘61 which would have separated loans, essentially for the construction of facilities which was separated from the regular education bill, but Delaney [James J. Delaney] killed that in the committee anyway.
BIEMILLER: He killed that. He didn’t want any part of it. See, it was still a remnant of this thing I’m talking about. No federal aid unless it’s across the board, everybody. And it was a devil of a job, which is why I’m worried these days that somebody’s going to revive that fight. But thank God so far we’ve avoided it. Yesterday we got some more money out of the Senate, though.
STERN: Kennedy, of course, was in a terribly difficult position given the fact that he was, of course, the first Catholic president. For him to advocate it in any way aid to parochial schools would have been a disaster. It would have been the worst thing possible.
BIEMILLER: Exactly! It would have been the worst thing that could have happened.
[-26-]
STERN: Right. And yet Ribicoff [Abraham Alexander Ribicoff] was pushing for some, as secretary of HEW [Health, Education and Welfare], was pushing for some limited aid. Then when Kennedy essentially backtracked at a press conference and said he would support loans, he probably cost himself more support than he gained as a result of that.
BIEMILLER: You’ve also got to remember that while he was in one sense really respected in the House except for his power. And the fact that he was for that bill didn’t do any good, on the whole thing. Adam was an unfortunate figure in the House. He had as much ability as probably anybody I’ve ever known who served in the House. And he was always flaunting his views on people. Well he was the early Bella Abzug [Bella S. Abzug]. He just rubbed people the wrong way. His support wasn’t always good.
STERN: How about Kennedy’s relations in general with the House leadership? Johnson is supposed to have made a statement early in the administration that Kennedy had all the minnows but no whales: that is, that he didn’t have strong relations with Rayburn or McCormack because of difficulties in Massachusetts in the latter case, that he didn’t have strong relations with Kerr [Robert Samuel Kerr] or Stennis [John C. Stennis] or people like that. What was your perception of that?
BIEMILLER: Well first on Rayburn. This is an interesting story in itself. I’d gone to see Rayburn about three weeks before the convention and he was just dismissing Kennedy. “That kid! Who wants him as a candidate.” Then you know the story, what happened at the convention. It was Rayburn as much as anybody who persuaded Johnson to run. I come back. I go to see Rayburn a week or so afterwards. “Boy have we got a candidate!” And he was so enthusiastic it wasn’t funny. Now he felt close to Kennedy after the convention. Before the convention he had no use for him at all. You’ve got to remember that in the House, Jack Kennedy didn’t play any real role at all. He was just another congressman. And one of the reasons that I always worried about McCormack with him, even though McCormack, as you know, was his floor leader in ‘60, was McCormack tried to get a petition signed to free the old…
STERN: Oh, Curley.
BIEMILLER: ...Curley [James Michael Curley] and Jack wouldn’t sign it. And I remember hearing McCormack sound off to a few of us one day that this was unheard of. It took a long time to breach that thing. But at the same time, as I say, Kennedy’s role in the House was never very big and Rayburn, or course, judged people by what he
[-27-] thought they’d done in the House. He didn’t care what they’d done in the Senate or anyplace else. He was really just a one-house man. And so Jack could work with Rayburn but it wasn’t the real simpatico outside of the fact that, I repeat, that he said, “Oh, we got a candidate now. We’re going to go places,” and so on. Now as far as the old club in the Senate is concerned, Jack never cracked it. And it was pretty difficult to play around with that group. And there were some very prima donna-ish type people in that group to put it mildly. In fact the only liberal I ever knew—until in his later years Hubert Humphrey [Hubert H. Humphrey]—the only liberal I ever knew who cracked that group and still remained a good liberal was Pat McNamara [Patrick V. McNamara].
STERN: From Michigan.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. He and Kerr became great buddies and worked out a lot of things together. Kerr was chairman of public works and McNamara was chairman of a subcommittee on rivers and harbors. And it was quite a deal that those two boys worked on, worked out. But, you’re right that relations weren’t good. Now O’Brien was able to maintain fairly good relations but it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t the kind of thing that if you got stymied with somebody that he knew he could rely on the President to call. It didn’t work, because these old people in the Senate they had control and they knew it. That thing they always referred to as the “club,” nobody could quite define it in terms of who was in it and who wasn’t. But you knew if you were working around the place who was in it and who wasn’t. And you couldn’t budge them, when they made their minds up. Now, by and large this is one of the reasons that the original Kennedy program didn’t go as fast as it did later on when Johnson took over. Now, that was done in part on the memory of Jack Kennedy, but it was also done in part because once Johnson was president it was entirely different from his being vice president.
STERN: Sure. Another one of the major early bills, one that was a great embarrassment to the administration was the defeat, although they ultimately got it, on the minimum wage bill.
BIEMILLER: There wasn’t a defeat on the minimum wage bill.
STERN: Well, the teller vote. The one that was defeated by one vote.
BIEMILLER: Yeah, but we came out of conference with no trouble and got it through. There was no real trouble on that. Sure we were sorry to lose that teller vote but it wasn’t fatal. We knew it wasn’t fatal. We knew we could haul it out. The real fight as you remember
[-28-] went back when Jack Kennedy agreed with us in ‘60 to scuttle that bill.
STERN: At the rump session.
BIEMILLER: Yeah, on account of Barden’s [Graham A. Barden] attitude. Barden just wouldn’t give an inch. Damnedest thing I ever saw. He wouldn’t concede one thing to Jack Kennedy during that period. So we made up our minds that we’d take the gamble and Jack agreed. Now, sure, there was a little trouble on the thing. Again it was the southern-Republican coalition at work. But they melted when we got a fairly decent bill out of the Senate.
STERN: You went by the Senate route, didn’t you? First got through the Senate then went back to conference.
BIEMILLER: And then we went back to the conference.
STERN: You differed with the administration on this though. Didn’t you want the dollar-twenty-five immediately and the administration wanted it over three years?
BIEMILLER: We didn’t quarrel with the dollar-fifteen, dollar twenty-five.
STERN: You accepted that?
BIEMILLER: That’s the kind of a proposition that you always work out. The dollar and a quarter was part an asking price. But we got to it and that was the important thing and I remember Dubinsky and Potofsky [Joseph Samuel Potofsky] who were particularly interested in it saying, “We got our dollar and a quarter.” This is what they were concerned about. There’s a lot of symbolism goes into that kind of a fight. We had the same thing later on with Johnson when we got the dollar-sixty, dollar-forty. That was a compromise but we agreed when we got up there.
STERN: Now the press made a lot of the, particularly the fact that laundry women were dropped from the bill and that Kennedy had specifically promised in the campaign. So there was embarrassment.
BIEMILLER: Of course it was an embarrassment. But it wasn’t a real knock down drag-out the way things like Medicare. What a damned knock down drag-out that thing turned out to be.
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STERN: Yeah, we’ll get to that in a little while.
BIEMILLER: Sure, sure.
STERN: What relationship did you have to the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity—the one that Johnson was nominally the head of—Robert Troutman [Robert B. Troutman], the plans for progress and all the rest of that? Did labor play any role in that?
BIEMILLER: We were in touch with them. But we had no quarrel with it. We didn’t think it went far enough.
STERN: That’s what I mean. Did you feel they were doing enough?
BIEMILLER: No. And that’s why we wanted legislation. So that there would be real power that you could exercise. Meany testified point blank on the Hill. “I want an FEPC [Fair Employment Practice Commission] because I need it to bring some of my recalcitrant unions into line.” That’s in the Senate hearings. You can find it in there. He was hot as hell on it. And that whole fight that we got into there with the Kennedy brothers was partly because Meany felt very strongly he had to have that power. And he got it and we exercised a lot of it after that. It gave us something to beat people over the heads with. We finally got it straightened out. I’m not saying there still aren’t a few isolated examples of discrimination, but by and large we were able to clean it up with the passage of the ‘64 act.
STERN: Right. Was Meany involved at all in pressuring Kennedy to get rid of Troutman? Do you recall that at all?
BIEMILLER: I don’t remember.
STERN: There were a lot of problems about Troutman’s performance.
BIEMILLER: Yeah, I know there were a lot of things but I…
STERN: Particularly the question that he accepted percentages from businesses.
BIEMILLER: That’s right.
STERN: They would say, for example, that we increased our minority employment by fifty percent which meant that they had two and they increased it to three.
[-30-]
BIEMILLER: Three, exactly. You know that kind of thing. But it wasn’t anything that I was close enough to to pass judgment on the thing. But as I say the thing we still wanted was law on it and not just executive actions and so on.
STERN: How about another thing. The President’s Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Relations. Meany served on that as did a number of major labor leaders.
BIEMILLER: Yeah there were a number of them on it. This is become almost a tradition from that time that there’s to be a labor-management advisory committee and it’s finally really been busted up at the present time but it dates way back to there. Amen. But they never exerted any great influence and Meany of course is always, always very, very opposed to any voluntary guidelines. Most people think this is a new thing he’s thought up on Carter [Jimmy Carter]. It was like hell. He had it on Kennedy, he had it on Johnson. He quarreled with Johnson on this also. It’s an article of faith. Whether you like it or not it’s there. And this was what they were fighting about in the labor-management committee. And they never did finally resolve the thing. And there was no way of resolving it. Just as there isn’t any way of resolving it now.
STERN: I’ve seen…. Some of the evidence that I’ve seen suggests that there was as much tension in that committee between Meany and Reuther as there was between Meany and let’s say Henry Ford [Henry Ford, II] who was also on the committee.
BIEMILLER: Well, I didn’t sit in the meetings so I can’t tell you, but I’m not surprised there was tension, because this was one of the rules of the game, you know, that went on. The problem there was a very simple one. Reuther thought Meany was going to last maybe five or six years as president and then he was going to take over. Didn’t happen.
STERN: No, it didn’t.
BIEMILLER: There’s a lovely little anecdote that was run in the Wall Street Journal. When Reuther finally pulled out, somebody asked Meany, “How do you account for this?” He said, “I don’t understand Walter Reuther. I’ve never done as unkind thing to him in my life. Unless it is that I’ve kept my health.” And that was the whole story wrapped up in that little one-liner, you know. That’s what happened.
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STERN: You recall if—did you have any role at all in suggesting names of people for that committee, the labor people who were on it or the public people?
BIEMILLER: Meany made the recommendations and they were accepted. Nobody quarreled with us. Our relations were very good all the way on that kind of thing. I don’t remember a single row, not a…. Beyond that committee, anything that we ever really got into with him.
STERN: Did you participate at all or have any role at all in their preparation of that major automation report? That was a very big issue at the time- automation and unemployment. That was probably the biggest thing that they did.
BIEMILLER: Yeah, Abel [I.W. Abel] was working on that. By and large we weren’t too angry about it. The whole question of automation is a very debatable thing in, always has been, inside the labor movement. The American labor movement is not a luddite-type movement at all. On the other hand, they’re leery. We’re losing jobs. We got to watch it. This was the whole thing and this was Abel’s job to work on the thing.
STERN: I.W. Abel is that?
BIEMILLER: Yeah.
STERN: One thing, another thing which didn’t get as much publicity…. The committee turned out a report on revisions of the Taft-Hartley Act which then died in Congress. I’m sure you were involved in pushing for that.
BIEMILLER: Oh sure, but nothing happened on it. We didn’t have the troops. That’s why we didn’t try anything. I mean I had the counts that just were appalling. I mean you couldn’t get near it. This goes way, way back even to ‘58 with that great big campaign, you may remember, we wound up with Landrum- Griffin [Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959] which the machinists insisted on calling Landrum-Griffin-Kennedy. But Kennedy wasn’t responsible on that. But what was happening, you see, was that our people had gotten…. Oh, what I started to tell you was right after that election, COPE [Committee on Political Education, AFL-CIO] had a great big victory celebration and they called me down and they wanted me to say now what’s going to happen in Congress. I said, “I want to warn you of something. If you count that House tough, and
[-32-] that’s the only way you can do it on labor legislation, we can’t go above two-hundred. That’s our absolute strength.” We got two hundred and one votes on the final test vote in the House. And that was all there was. The votes were there in the Senate but not in the House. It doesn’t do you much good just to have that, you know. And so we knew we didn’t have the troops. Now, well that’s ahead of the story, but in ‘65 we did haul out a repeal of 14-B because we had the troops in the House and had them in the Senate except we couldn’t get beyond Dirksen’s [Everett M. Dirksen] filibuster. That’s what killed us there. But when we had the troops, we hauled them out just as in this last one we had the troops except that seven or eight Senators lied to us and didn’t vote with us on cloture and that was the end of it. We couldn’t get that sixtieth vote.
STERN: How about on Kennedy’s promise during the ‘60 campaign to issue an order on housing which he then delayed until November of ‘62?
BIEMILLER: Well as I say, that’s all mixed up in that fight about establishing a department and so on and Lashman [L. Edward Lashman] is the guy that worked on that all the way. You can catch him up in Cambridge.
STERN: Yeah, I certainly will talk with him.
BIEMILLER: And he knows that story very well.
STERN: Did labor put any pressure on Kennedy about the housing order? The civil rights groups were very.
BIEMILLER: Oh, sure. We wanted it very badly. But as you remember we never really got what we wanted and even today that law doesn’t work too well. It was the ‘65 Housing Act was the time, the only time we ever were able to get it. Again, the executive orders, they’re useful, they’re good but you’d better get it down in a statute if you really want to make it stick. And the fact that he couldn’t establish the department, which again I suggest you talk with Lashman about, was the thing that really killed everybody’s feeling about the thing at the time.
[BEGIN TAPE #2 OF 4]
...or had goes way back to ‘49 Taft-Ellender-Wagner [Housing Act of 1949]. And since then we’ve been almost going downhill. Now sure, you can claim victories. You’ve done this and you’ve done that. Housing is a tough thing. They’ve just been, for example, in this county where we are, Montgomery County here, another pretty thorough survey of the
[-33-] question of discrimination in housing. An awful lot of whites out here say, “We don’t want to live in an apartment house with Negroes.” It’s rough.
STERN: Did you feel that the major cause for the defeat was that Kennedy had announced beforehand that he would appoint Weaver [Robert C. Weaver]? Did you think that was a strategic mistake?
BIEMILLER: Well, I think it probably was a strategic mistake and yet…
STERN: Because he lost, for example, people like Sparkman [John J. Sparkman], who had been a traditional supporter of housing legislation.
BIEMILLER: Exactly, I know it was a…. He shouldn’t have announced...
STERN: Smathers [George Armistead Smathers].
BIEMILLER: ...it early, you know and going out on the thing, but Johnson got it.
STERN: Different times. Right.
BIEMILLER: Exactly. You know, but it was done. But you’re right. I think it probably was a tactical error to have announced it from that point of view. I understood why he did it. He was at the same time trying to appease the blacks. But those things work two ways without any question.
STERN: Sure. I’d like to get into as much detail as possible about the whole Larry O’Brien operation in the House with which I know you had a great deal of contact. How effective were they? For example the appointments at the beginning: Donahue, Henry Hall Wilson and Chuck Daly [Charles U. Daly], Manatos [Mike N. Manatos] in the Senate. O’Brien deliberately chose people who had basically no political experience in the congress.
BIEMILLER: That’s right.
STERN: His theory was this way they had no ties to anyone. On the other hand they were all strong Democratic party people. Good political backgrounds, but they came in really very innocent, in some respects.
BIEMILLER: I know they did. I remember talking particularly to Donahue at the time. He just didn’t have any
[-34-]
real feel for the thing. He caught on awful quick, though.
STERN: On-the-job training.
BIEMILLER: Oh boy! That was a very good OJT deal that Larry worked out there. Now Larry had had enough experience.
STERN: He’d been with Furcolo [Foster Furcolo].
BIEMILLER: He knew what he was doing. But you’re right. The others had none at all when they came in.
STERN: Do you feel that was a real problem at the beginning?
BIEMILLER: At the very beginning, except it wasn’t on that vote. They really worked on that...
STERN: Rules committee.
BIEMILLER: ...rules committee vote. They really worked well on that. Now actually the whole program got stalled. But it was stalled primarily because the troops weren’t there. That’s what hurt so much. They just weren’t around. The loss of the eighteen liberals was an awful blow. This was apparent to any of us that had worked that Hill as long as many of us had. But they were going to be in constant trouble. Also, with all due respect to Mike Manatos whom I know and like very much. I’d known him when he was with O’Mahoney [Joseph Christopher O’Mahoney]. He was a damn good man for O’Mahoney but he never really had too much influence in the Senate. You can’t put your finger on in. It’s just that he didn’t get it. Same thing is true today. It doesn’t work to pick up those old Senate people and think they can work up there. They don’t do it. On the other hand on the House side—well I’m getting ahead in the story. Cabell [Waller B. Cabell] is a respected guy in the House and he is an old-timer there. But by and large picking up these people just doesn’t work. Now, for example, of what I’m talking about Califano [Joseph A. Califano, Jr.], for example, didn’t pick up a guy off the Hill. He picked up a guy who’d once been on my staff and later was with the auto workers and as a result he got some things done that most people couldn’t get done. However that particular person is leaving. He’s fed up. But let’s not get into that. But I meant that if you get the people who have really had a background in a lobbying, you’re better off than to take a guy whose work is sometimes anti-lobby if you’re an administrative assistant or a legislative assistant.
[-35-]
STERN: Right, right.
BIEMILLER: You’re not sure that you can get along too well. Now that’s the kind of problems that we’re faced with.
STERN: How did, how was the credibility of O’Brien’s operation established? I know that there are a number of people who claim that Kennedy made a major effort to say, “have you approved it, have you spoken to O’Brien?” I mean, to make it clear that O’Brien spoke for him. For example, did you ever see O’Brien authorize changes in legislation on his own? How much independence did he have? Could you feel confident talking to him that...
BIEMILLER: Yes. If we worked out a deal with O’Brien I wasn’t worried about it. It would go. That is, it would go if he can make it go on the Hill.
STERN: Well, sure. Sure. All things considered.
BIEMILLER: But as far as the White House was concerned we never had any great quarrels anyhow to start with that was the other part of it, you see. By and large we were in agreement. Only a couple of times here and there. First time got into a real disagreement was on that ill-fated move of Ted Kennedy’s [Edward Moore Kennedy] to repeal the poll tax law and the administration fought it. He didn’t want it and I remember sitting in Larry’s office one day and he says, “God damn you. I find your footprints all over this bill. I hope you work as hard when you agree with me as you do when you don’t.” But that was about the only time we ever got into a big row. Larry was a very easy guy to work with. He knew his way around. And I sometimes asked him about this, but I mean it quite seriously. Part of the best training he ever had was when he was bartending for his father in the saloon. A bartender picks up that kind of a feel, you know, on what you can do with a guy and what you can’t do with him. I don’t mean it’s the only training I think that Larry ever had it but it was good training.
STERN: What was your view of Daly and Wilson? Did you feel they were...
BIEMILLER: Oh yes. They were both competent guys. They both had to learn their way around and we got on with them very well. As time went on Donahue left, you remember.
STERN: Right. October of ‘63.
BIEMILLER: And we, as time went on Henry Hall Wilson was more
[-36-]
and more the guy that you depended on. Then Chuck went out to the University of Chicago as I remember at the time.
STERN: Right. Wilson actually stayed longer under Johnson than he had been…
BIEMILLER: Yeah. That’s what I meant. Yeah. So we saw a great deal of Henry Hall and we got on with him very well. Now he did not have as much influence as Kennedy thought he would have with some of the southerners. But who the hell did have any influence with those hard-boiled southerners.
STERN: Ideologically, he was not a southerner.
BIEMILLER: No he wasn’t really. And they knew that. You know, what the heck. You’re right here.
STERN: Do you feel that it would be right to say that—some critics of the labor movement at the time said that the AFL-CIO, for example, was very reluctant to criticize the administration because they wanted to remain on the inside after having been excluded from the Eisenhower [Dwight D. Eisenhower] administration. For example, that Meany liked to be invited to the White House. That kind of thing. Is there any truth to that?
BIEMILLER: Meany didn’t have to be invited to the White House by Kennedy. He was there under Eisenhower just as much as he was under Kennedy. A little story on that. The last day Eisenhower was in office he calls George, Eisenhower personally calls him and said, “What are you doing?” And George said, “I’m just sitting here waiting for the inauguration.” “Could you come over here? I’m lonesome. I want to talk to somebody.” And Meany went over and spent two hours with Eisenhower the last day he was in office.
STERN: Isn’t that fascinating.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. He had no great regard for Ike as a leader. Of course, we regarded the Eisenhower administration as a caretaker administration. That’s what it was. So our contacts were not too, you know, not too great in those days. Bryce Harlow [Bryce Nathaniel Harlow] we’d see once in a while. But it wasn’t like it was once Kennedy took over then we started living in the White House, so to speak. And did all through Kennedy and Johnson. We lived in the White House.
STERN: Good. I want to get some details on that. How,
[-37-]
for example, what were the mechanics of…. One report says that your staff and O’Brien’s staff essentially coalesced your lobbying efforts. There was a great deal of cooperation. How did you go about, for example, reaching understandings? What kind of written records did you keep? To what degree did you share information? Things of that kind.
BIEMILLER: We just simply shared anything. We didn’t hold back on each other a bit. Both of us had an open book as far as the other group was concerned. And it’s true there was a lot of meeting. I used to, oh I’d say, twice a week I’d be in touch with Larry. Usually in person and certainly by phone. Comparing notes, what’s going on, what’s the matter with this guy, how can we straighten him out, and so on. Normally we could do something that he couldn’t do and he in turn could do some things we couldn’t do. So you’ve got a real, an honest coalition of the two groups working on the thing. But it was just a matter of constant contact. Like any lobbying effort.
STERN: Right.
BIEMILLER: It’s just constant work. There’s no great magic wand you can wave around in lobbying. It’s just plain work. Day in. Day out.
STERN: I was struck by the fact that it’s evident in the Kennedy administration that people whose departments or interests were not necessarily in a particular bill would work on that bill. For example, I saw evidence that you were involved in the farm bill in ‘62. There was very much a sense of a White House program—a total program.
BIEMILLER: We wanted the White House to be successful.
STERN: That’s what I mean. Right.
BIEMILLER: As you know we went all out for Jack. In fact shortly before the convention we really broke our alleged…. Business of neutrality. I remember Meany and Zack and I made the rounds of the candidates. The Kennedy operation was just superb. They knew what we wanted. We had our own program. Zack said, “Absolutely. Don’t see anything in here we’ll have any trouble about. Go right ahead.” And everything was fine. Oh I remember we had to sit around and wait for twenty minutes or so and somebody said, “You want a drink?” I said, “Yeah.” Then we go to see Stu Symington [Stuart Symington, II]. That was the damndest funeral parlor I’ve ever been in in my life. He was so happy to see us! Nobody’d come to see him, you know.
[-38-]
STERN: A dead candidate, yeah.
BIEMILLER: Oh he was happy that we’d come to see him. Then we hit Johnson and got into a row. A real one. And Meany told off Johnson because Johnson had made a crack via George Reedy [George E. Reedy, Jr.] to me. “If you guys want to get something done in this session that’s coming up, the rump session—if Johnson gets the nomination you’ll get what you want. Otherwise be careful.” And this got Meany so damn mad he exploded openly at the press conference at the convention. And that really blew it. And that’s what Johnson was trying to get straightened out. We never did get it straightened out.
STERN: I’ve seen reports that was a long and bitter meeting.
BIEMILLER: Oh it was a nasty one. I remember that at one stage of the game, poor George Reedy, I felt sorry for him. I’m very strong for George. I think he was the best thing there ever was in the Johnson camp but what happened was they brought him in and he had to say, “Well, I’m not sure that’s exactly what I said to Andy.” Johnson turns to me and he says, “I trust George Reedy.” Meany hit him, “I trust Andy Biemiller.” You know it was that kind of a damn meeting where you just were getting into each other’s hair. And I remember…. Oh and they called Rayburn in and Rayburn pulled one of the damndest pulls I’ve ever heard. He didn’t like Kennedy at this stage. He says, “You know, that kid, he’s got about as much chance of president as I have of being the Pope of Rome.” Well Meany isn’t the most devout Catholic but the same time it hurt him, needless to say, very much that Rayburn pulled that crap. So the feeling was awful hot. That was a day or two before the convention. We were in there really rowing.
STERN: After that was over, didn’t your people pretty much work on the floor for Kennedy?
BIEMILLER: Oh sure!
STERN: I mean there was no neutrality.
BIEMILLER: No! I said we were out in the open. I was sitting up in the gallery with George and Mrs. Meany [Eugenie McMahon Meany] and Al Zack. The four of us. All of a sudden Sorensen [Theodore C. Sorensen] shows up. He said, “Would you like to see our list?” And we went over it with him and he already had, was pretty sure that he had the thing. You know. I mean the feeling was good. They were trusting us. We were trusting them. We had a number of people scattered
[-39-] around. They were for Kennedy. There wasn’t any two ways about it.
STERN: Getting back to the Kennedy operation in the House. What was your sense of Kennedy’s own ability, for example, to influence people in the House? For example he courted Carl Vison very effectively. At least there are a number of accounts that he did. Vinson was deeply impressed. Do you feel Kennedy did as much as he could have? How do you feel?
BIEMILLER: Well, yes. I think he did about as much as he could do. Vinson was a very key guy and he did get to know Vison quite well. I happened to be very close to Vinson myself all the way through it. And I served on a naval affairs committee and got to know the old boy very well.
STERN: When you were in the House.
BIEMILLER: And as a result if you had Vinson you had a lot because he still had a lot of influence. Now he couldn’t pick up a whole block, but he could pick up the scattered votes you needed once in a while on something you were playing around with. But I think Jack did what he could on the whole business and…
STERN: Could you recall any other example of Kennedy personally calling people or….
BIEMILLER: I can’t off hand, no. But I know he was doing it here and there. But again I come back to this thing we were before that the loss of those eighteen liberals is what ruined the administration. I mean not ruined it, but made it very difficult.
STERN: Set it back. Right. Were you present at this meeting that Donahue, O’Brien and Wilson had with Frank Thompson [Frank Thompson, Jr.] Carl Elliott [Carl A. Elliott] and—who was the other one—Dick Bolling very early in the administration in which they went over all the members of Congress….
BIEMILLER: Oh, yeah. I was there, oh yeah.
STERN: You were there: do you have any recollections of that?
BIEMILLER: Well it’s simply as I say, we did a thorough job on every single person there was and decided who could do this and who could do that.
[-40-]
STERN: Did you kind of assign...
BIEMILLER: Sure. Exactly. That was the beginning of really…
STERN: The whole operation.
BIEMILLER: ...our whole operation with O’Brien later on. I mean, we never got anything, as I said earlier, as thorough as that which was the kind of thing we were doing.
STERN: There was, I think one of the really key things in the Kennedy legislative effort was the placing of Kennedy people in the departments and in the agencies as legislative liaisons. Which is a pretty, I think a much, much more well developed than it had been, for example, in the Eisenhower administration.
BIEMILLER: Oh the Eisenhower administration was awful. Yuck!
STERN: Did you have any role in choosing people like, for example, Wilbur Cohen [Wilbur J. Cohen] for HEW and Sam Merrick [Samuel Vaughan Merrick] for Labor and people like that?
BIEMILLER: Not particularly. I mean Larry would occasionally call and say, “Do you got any real objection to X?” And the answer was almost always “No.” We weren’t too happy about Merrick but that was another story.
STERN: Are you willing to tell about why you weren’t happy with Merrick?
BIEMILLER: Well, simply that we didn’t think that he knew very much about the labor movement and somebody in the labor department should have known more about the labor movement. It was that simple.
STERN: How about Cohen? What was the relationship...
BIEMILLER: Oh Cohen. We were very close to Wilbur all the way. In my case it goes way back to the thirties. I mean we were very, very close with Wilbur and he was without any question the best guy on social security that they had around the place.
STERN: I have the list of the other legislative liaison people. I wonder if I could mention some of the names and have you comment on how effective you think they were. For example, well of course, there’s Cohen. In Justice [Department of Justice] there was either Joe Dolan [Joseph F. Dolan]
[-41-] or Katzenbach [Nicholas deB. Katzenbach]. Did you have much...
BIEMILLER: Oh we were constantly meeting with Katzenbach and Joe mean as an agent on the civil rights bill. But we, oh sure, we were meeting with them. Frequently. There was no trouble on that score. I mean in terms of meetings there was no trouble ever.
STERN: How about people like Ken Birkhead [Kenneth M. Birkhead] in Agriculture [Department of Agriculture]?
BIEMILLER: Ken Birkhead was a guy that we’ve known for years, thought he was great. Worked with him all the way. I wish we had a few more like him around.
STERN: How about in Interior [Department of Interior] Max Edwards [Max N. Edwards]?
BIEMILLER: I just knew him. We weren’t doing too much with Interior at that time. What I would, if I had anything to do with Interior I’d go to Udall usually.
STERN: How about Fred Dutton [Frederick G. Dutton] at State [Department of State]?
BIEMILLER: I knew Fred and we had some cooperation although not as much as you might have expected. In later businesses we were close. But we knew Dutton. We had no quarrel with him.
STERN: And Joe Barr [Joseph W. Barr] in Treasury [Department of the Treasury]? Did you have any…
BIEMILLER: Oh yes. Very, very close to Joe. I was very strong for Joe. Always have been. I’d known him in the House and worked with him there. And I thought he did a very good job for Treasury. In fact he outwitted us. Well Kennedy outwitted us. We’ll come to that later on the tax bill. But he outwitted us.
STERN: Each of these people would prepare for the Tuesday morning legislative breakfast which went to Desautels [Claude John Desautels] in the White House a fairly extensive list of what their department and agency legislative priorities were. Did you attend those meetings?
BIEMILLER: No.
[-42-]
STERN: You didn’t. Did you have a representative there?
BIEMILLER: Nope. We weren’t invited to those meetings. They kept that strictly an administration meeting. Just as in turn we met Monday mornings with our people. And once in a very great while I’d get Larry or Donahue or somebody just come in explain why they were doing this. But by and large they didn’t attend normally at all.
STERN: Oh I see.
BIEMILLER: And we kept to our own groups.
STERN: What about meetings outside the White House? Did you ever meet in any regular kind of way with these liaison people?
BIEMILLER: No.
STERN: When you were, for example, pursuing particular legislation?
BIEMILLER: Well, like I say when you’d get to a bill where you were working with somebody on, yes then you would. But there was no regular series of such meetings. It was just a thing that you did on an a priori basis.
STERN: Did you feel, did you ever feel that there were conflicts between the White House priorities, the White House programs and sometimes people in the departments who might have their own priorities. In other words was there any kind of an inevitable difference there. I’ve seen some examples which suggest to me that there were.
BIEMILLER: I’m trying to remember.
STERN: Sometimes people had to be reminded that it was the total program.
BIEMILLER: Off hand I can’t think of any such illustration. It may be. I’m not saying that it couldn’t have happened. We didn’t have any great rows of that sort anywhere that I remember. No.
STERN: Well if you think of one, interject it. Okay? Going back to the early days of the administration, a point that I should have mentioned earlier, what was your role in, labor’s role in general in the whole talent search? In other words, in filling positions below the cabinet level. I’m sure you must have made a fairly substantial number of recommendations.
[-43-]
BIEMILLER: Not many.
STERN: Not really?
BIEMILLER: No. Meany’s theory was always was he didn’t want any great number of labor people kicking around in government. Now we did, for example, keep in touch with Ralph Dungan [Ralph A. Dungan]. I mean when anything would come up. And we worked out a very interesting deal one time. The very important job came up that we were interested in. That was general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. So Meany put together a list of five names. Took them over. Gave them to Jack Kennedy. Said, “Any one of these five. Don’t care which one you take. Anyone’s all right.” And we knew that as of X date they were going to determine this thing. So about two days before that determination was to be made he called me up and said, “Look, come on up and bring Tom Harris with you.” Went upstairs and he said, “Al Woll [Albert J. Woll] has persuaded me that I ought to add a sixth name to this list. Ted St. Antoine [Theodore J. St. Antoine] who’s now a dean at Michigan Law School.” And he said, “I’m willing to add the name but I want it understood there’s no preference. Now you two guys you go over and see Ralph Dungan and make sure that he understands this thing.” Then we got into the kind of story you’ll like on this. So I explained carefully what the situation was. And Harris, who’s as dry a guy as there is anywhere in America, says, “And now Ralph, before you tell us he’s too young for the job we’d be perfectly willing to have him serve a term as attorney general before he went to the board.” Ralph laughed hard as anybody did. But it was another example of our attitude about Bob if you want to get down to it. But out of that we got what the hell is his name now. I was talking with him yesterday. Well anyhow, the guy that became counsel was on our list. We were very happy. He was a career guy and we got no objection to a career guy. We had a couple of names like the attorney for the ILG [ILGWU-International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union] was on the list. That type of thing. But as I said that worked fine. It was one of the few times that we’d agreed that we would submit a list of names. Because we recognized that there was a lot at stake in that thing and we weren’t going to get into a row about and we didn’t. And Jack lived up to his word. He appointed one of our people. You can’t quarrel with that kind of thing, you see, when you get into it. We used to see Dungan every now and then and mainly just sort of chitchat around about who was going in and who wasn’t. But we’ve never gotten too active until recently. Now we’ve been a little—that’s again way ahead of the story. In trying to push our people into spots in government we…. Enough of us got an experience during the war that we decided we didn’t enjoy
[-44-] being in government. Me one of them. You know this is a feeling you get. And a lot of people in the labor movement are faced with this also. If you do get them appointed to a government job, they lose their standing in their international union in the sense of seniority and every other damn thing. We had such a guy, for example, just to give you an illustration of it. Leon Schacter [Leon B. Schacter] who was vice president of the meat cutters. He did a very creditable job in Turkey for about two years under the old Marshall Plan operation. One of the best anybody had done. And later on they looking for a guy to, you know, a labor guy for that operation. And they asked us for a name. So we finally, Meany and I got Schacter to come in and talk with us. He said, “Look, I’m, flattered, I’m honored that you’ve got this kind of confidence in me, but I’m going back to my international. I’m back there now and I don’t intend to get out because I’ve got ideas of where I want to go in the international union.” He said, “If I took a couple of more years out I’d be dead.” And this is the kind of thing that you got into frequently. You see they’d say, “No, no, no.” Now the kind of people that you did put in from time to time would be a lawyer here or there or somebody like that. But very few actual labor leaders ever wanted to go in. Well, that’s a modern story but….
STERN: Who was the.... I know there was a considerable amount of difference of opinion between Meany and the administration on the questions of wage guidelines and on the balance of payments issue. I’ve seen some evidence that Meany felt that Kennedy was too, what word should I use, let’s say timid on some domestic issues because of the balance of payments question. And that when Kennedy came down to the AFL-CIO convention in December of ‘61 he endorsed moderation in wage demands based on increased productivity but that Meany said, “Look, I will not take responsibility for holding the line.” And there’s one account I saw that Meany exploded at Goldberg over this too and there was a great deal of tension. I wonder what was so critical about that?
BIEMILLER: There was no public explosion on it.
STERN: I realize the Goldberg incident was private.
BIEMILLER: It was private. Well, in the first place, a lot of people misunderstood the whole structure of the AFL-CIO. While Meany is the forefront guy and the guy people listen to and it’s gotten so tragic that the press won’t pay attention to anybody except Meany these days that he doesn’t regulate the bargaining, the bargaining is strictly in the hands of the international unions and their local unions and we have nothing to do with it. Now when it comes
[-45-] to a matter of overall public policy, then we get into the thing. But this is what Meany meant when he said, “I won’t take the responsibility of telling a local union out in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that they can’t go for a 2 percent more money. They’re going to do it and I’m not going to interfere with it.” He said, “You’ve got to trust those guys to know what they’re up against.” and this is what Meany has been mad about all along on this question that people can handle the question of wages. Now the big issue that later came up with Johnson didn’t come up in Kennedy’s day, as I remember, we are on record, as you probably know, from 1966 on and it’s the current position also. We believe that if you need controls, let the Congress pass an overall control bill on everything under the sun. That’s the position and it has been the position since ‘66.
STERN: Including prices?
BIEMILLER: Oh particularly prices, particularly, we want to get at. This is the other side of the story. We say, “If you’re going to make people sacrifice, do it across the board.” Particularly do it in terms of corporate salaries and that kind of thing. There’s nothing I know of that you can work up a rank and file meeting on faster than you can by pointing to the excessive salary of some corporate leader. They go wild!
STERN: Some of the press did pick up though on the differences between Meany and Kennedy on wage guidelines. It did get some public exposure.
BIEMILLER: Oh yes sure. There wasn’t any secret that we were fighting him on it. And as I say that’s always been true.
STERN: Did it ever come up when you were in the White House? In any of your discussions with Kennedy himself, do you remember talking about that issue?
BIEMILLER: Not anything that I was in on. That would have probably been with the labor-management committee and I was not on that committee.
STERN: Right, right.
BIEMILLER: That’s probably where you would have had that kind of a discussion. I had the same thing with Nixon.
STERN: Okay. Let’s turn to—I think one of the most fascinating stories of the Kennedy administration
[-46-]
was the Medicare bill which I know you had a major role in. Let me just give one point of background before I turn it over to you. Henry Hall Wilson claims that he reached a major breakthrough with Mills [Wilbur Daigh Mills] on the day that Kennedy was killed, the morning of the assassination. That Mills had been reluctant to go along because he did not think he could get a majority on his committee and that as of that morning they had worked out their differences and Mills thought he had a one vote, or Wilson said he was sure he had a one vote majority on ways and means. And he then took this hand-written agreement over to Wilbur Cohen whose staff was working on it that afternoon when the news came in from Dallas. Indeed Wilson had called Larry O’Brien in Texas and was told that the party had left for Dallas. Now, so Wilson insists that there would have been a Medicare bill under Kennedy. I don’t know that you know about that, but if we could get into the whole story of why Medicare failed by two votes and particularly why people like Smathers, Monroney [Almer Stillwell “Mike” Monroney] and senators like that who should have voted for it didn’t. I’m sure you have much to say about it.
BIEMILLER: Two reasons, one of which had nothing to do with Kennedy. It simply has to do with the composition of the Senate at that time. On any basic issue you not only had to get your Democrats but you also had to pick up a couple of Republicans. And the only guy we ever got on Medicare until the final deal was Cliff Case [Clifford Philip Case]. He came through. But you couldn’t budge Javits [Jacob K. Javits], for example, on it. I don’t know why. He wouldn’t budge. They just wouldn’t budge. Now on the House committee it was adamant but Mills never showed to us at least any great desire to go ahead. He kept constantly saying, “It’s impossible. It can’t be done.” I am not aware of this. This is news to me that Henry Hall Wilson thought he had that thing worked out. Now we were working on a somewhat different angle. We thought it was possible to put a bare majority together. Nelson Cruikshank and I, Nelson was our Social Security man, went over to see Larry one day and I said, “Look, Nelson’s got an idea we want to try out on you for size. Can’t you arrange a dinner with both the President and Jackie [Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy] with the Democratic members of ways and means and their wives and see if you can’t pick up the vote or two we need?” Larry said, “That isn’t a bad idea. I’ll try it out.” Came back couple days later. Said, “Sorry. I struck out. Jackie won’t stand still for it.”
STERN: Isn’t that interesting. I wonder why?
BIEMILLER: But she just wouldn’t do it. Well you remember she never got very much into any real politics of this sort when you come right down to it.
[-47-]
STERN: A very different relationship than…
BIEMILLER: But the feeling was there that it would be possible to move Wilbur on this thing. However I would say in fairness that if Henry had that worked out it sure didn’t hold in ‘63-’64 cause Mills was just as adamant. I mean in ‘64 cause Mills was just as adamant at that time as he was in ‘63. He wouldn’t budge.
STERN: I discussed this with Wilbur Cohen recently and he felt that Mills was just not to be trusted and would probably not risk his reputation on a one vote majority in his committee.
BIEMILLER: On a one vote! This is the thing that he used to hammer at me on all the time. He said, “If we can’t get the fourteen votes, no.” He’d been licked on just once in his life on a thirteen-to-twelve vote. I’ve forgotten what it was but he lost a bill that he wanted. It came off thirteen-to-twelve. He said, “Never again. I won’t trust it.”
STERN: Wilson perhaps was…. Well I don’t know. Perhaps he was taken in by Mills. I don’t know. It’s hard to say.
BIEMILLER: You see, well it’s a little after the story but it’s an interesting part of it. In ‘64 there was a Social Security bill passed the House, went over to the Senate. Clint Anderson [Clinton P. Anderson] amended that bill in the Senate for a fairly decent medicare business. And Wilbur wouldn’t yield in conference. So Clint Anderson came down to see Meany and me one day and he said, “Look. Here’s the situation. I say what I’m going to propose is pretty drastic but I thing it’s the only way out of this.” He said, “I think you agree with me that the election of ‘64 is going to be a very good election to improve our position. I suggest we just scrap this bill. But it’s a gamble because it would deprive some old people of a rise in Social Security on January 1. But,” he said, “I’m confident we can pass a good bill for both Social Security and Medicare in ‘65 early and the result is we can backtrack the Social Security payments. The won’t be hurt too badly.”
STERN: Similar to the sort of thing you did on the minimum wage at the rump session.
BIEMILLER: Exactly. And Meany said, “I think you’re right. We’ll do it.” So we scrapped it. Now we had an unexpected ally as you remember in that campaign.
[-48-]
Goldwater [Barry M. Goldwater] who wanted to destroy the whole Social Security system and you couldn’t get anybody interested in a little bit of thing than a bill that’s going down the drain. We were just fighting Goldwater. That was the simplest campaign I was ever in in my whole life. But that late in the day you see we had this thing and Wilbur wouldn’t yield an inch. You get to ‘65 and suddenly he’s a great convert. Boy, he sponsored the bill and worked on it and so on.
STERN: And that you feel was because he had the majority in his committee in ‘65?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. He had it and away he went.
STERN: Why couldn’t the administration get people like Smathers and Monroney? Particularly Smathers coming from Florida where so many retired people were living.
BIEMILLER: Smathers was a very, very conservative guy.
STERN: I would think that would be a very bad vote for him in Florida.
BIEMILLER: Well I would too. But he wouldn’t do it. But Smathers was a tough guy to deal with. A very amusing incident at one of the things you had was we met with Kennedy, the executive council of the AFL-CIO and the top staff at a luncheon one day. Harry Bates [Harry C. Bates], who was never known to hold his temper, turns to Kennedy and say, “Why the hell can’t you do something with that no good son of a bitch Smathers. He don’t amount to anything see. He’s no good. He’s against us on everything.” Well there was never any answer. Jack just managed to play around. I knew a lot of people didn’t know how close Smathers was to Kennedy. There were a lot of things that were going on between Kennedy and Smathers. But he couldn’t budge Smathers on a vote like that. Now Smathers, you know, felt that he’d established himself, he felt, by licking Pepper [Claude Denson Pepper] and that he wasn’t going to play around with this liberal stuff. He was a conservative. Secondly, the railroad companies weren’t very happy about Medicare ever and he was really a spokesman for the railroads. And he is today a lobbyist for the railroads. But he was a railroad man. He was marked as the railroad guy in the Senate. Monroney mystified me. I couldn’t….
STERN: Was it simply because of Kerr?
BIEMILLER: That’s the only thing I can come to that it must have been Kerr. But you couldn’t budge Monroney.
[-49-]
I tried it myself. I know what that one was. How tough it was.
STERN: Can you recall any other senators you tried to change?
BIEMILLER: Well Javits was one that I was really working on and couldn’t get anywhere with him until ‘65 when everybody was with you. But in ‘64 he was bad, ‘63 he was bad. By and large…. Well, I talked with Kerr but I knew it was useless. I had a pretty good relationship with Bob, personal relationship but it was useless; he’d made up his mind he was going to play it the other way. And I tried to get Russell Long [Russell B. Long] interested where we’ve always been on very good terms with Russell. Couldn’t budge him. And nobody could budge him. The President couldn’t do it. Nobody else. Now Clint Anderson was the guy that stuck through thick and thin on it. And really worked on it and meant it very seriously. He had a grievance against the AMA [American Medical Association] and that was one of the reasons he was always so hot on it. So away he went. That was a very exciting battle all the way. But you could not budge those people in the Senate and in the House; you couldn’t budge the committee. In the Senate at least you could offer amendments but not in the House. Wilbur Mills would never let anything come out except a closed rule. And that was one place where the rules committee agreed with Wilbur. They didn’t want things out. They were always fearful that if they ever let it out it would go on forever in the House. Even to this day, as you probably know, you occasionally get a modified closed rule but you never get an open rule.
STERN: Do you know at all if Kennedy made any personal appeals to senators that you were aware of?
BIEMILLER: Not that I’m aware of, no.
STERN: I know generally O’Brien felt that the President should pretty much stay out of these things, for obvious reasons.
BIEMILLER: Oh I mean generally speaking, he kept him out. And particularly because of the point you were making earlier too that Kennedy let it be known that O’Brien was talking for him. And if you don’t trust O’Brien, what can I do? You know that kind of thing.
STERN: Did you ever discuss with Kennedy in any of your private meetings or with groups in the White House the whole question of his slim margin of victory and the whole, the problem…. How did he perceive that as
[-50-] far as….
BIEMILLER: We never really got into anything that I was in and I don’t think any of us got into that discussion with him much. It was just something you took for granted and again, as I say, he was relying on O’Brien to work with us on that kind of thing.
STERN: Right. Where did, in what cases did you decline to support the administration? Where for example did the priorities of the AFL-CIO differ with those of the administration?
BIEMILLER: Well the two big things were first, taxes. Secondly, civil rights. We were always opposed, and still are to this day, to investment credit in tax legislation. It was Jack Kennedy that put that to a vote and he put it in over our protest and in the House he put it in over the protest of the Chamber of Commerce, which at that time for some reason I could never quite understand didn’t want investment credit. When they got to the Senate, the Chamber pulled back but they never really endorsed in those days. And we always thought it was a great mistake and still do. So on that one as I’ve sometimes put it that if you want to know who the best lobbyist in America is it’s the President of the United States. Because Jack Kennedy put over investment credit when practically nobody was with him on it. I’m talking about interest groups being with him. But he did it. And we were unhappy about it but we weren’t going to make a break on it. We didn’t feel that strongly on the thing. Now on the civil rights, that became a very nasty fight. On January one, 1963, yeah, January one, 1963, George Meany issued a New Year’s message which he does every now and then.
STERN: That was the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t it?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. And what he was stressing was also the time has come for an FEPC. And he just hammered away on it. Well then the thing starts. There’s no FEPC in the omnibus bill. The bill was in but not in the omnibus bill. And that is where that same group that worked on the rules change was very busy with Katzenbach. I attended several sessions they had with him and he was under orders not to yield, that they weren’t going to add FEPC. So we finally went to Humphrey on the thing also who was handling things in the Senate. Mansfield [Mike Mansfield] in the first place, he was a bad leader, but on this one he left it up to Humphrey entirely. And Hubert agreed with us that it should go in but he said, “Look, I want protections. You fellows from the leadership conference on civil rights, give me a memo in which you say point blank you won’t take a bill unless it
[-51-] contains FEPC.” So I was delegated by the leadership conference to write the memo. Cleared it with Clarence Mitchell [Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr.] and other people but particularly with Clarence. He liked it. Sent it to Humphrey. That would have been in June of ‘63.
STERN: Just about when Kennedy delivered his civil rights speech.
BIEMILLER: So I with malice of forethought thought we…
[BEGIN TAPE #3 OF 4]
BIEMILLER: ...gave a carbon of the memo to Hubert in my name on behalf of the leadership conference to Kenny O’Donnell [Kenneth P. O’Donnell] and said, “Kenny, I think your boss might be interested in this.” That’s all I said. Just left it with him. That afternoon I get a call from Meany in Italy. He said, “What kind of a memo did you leave with Jack Kennedy today?” he said, “He’s had me on the phone here. He’s all hot and bothered. Said we’re going to ruin his bill.” He said, “What did you do?” So I told him. He said, “You’re absolutely right. That’s our position.”
STERN: No bill without FEPC.
BIEMILLER: And he said, “And stick to it.” “Now,” he said, “I think you’d better call over there. I think the President wants to talk to you.” So I called over to Evelyn [Evelyn N. Lincoln] and she said, “Yes, our bosses have been talking a long time.” And I said, “All right. I understand your boss wants to see me.” She said, “Wait a minute. I’ll put him on the phone.” “Uh-uh-uh,” I said, “you don’t have to put him on the phone with me. I’ll come over if you’ll call back and give me a date and I may bring Lane Kirkland [Lane Kirkland], Meany’s then executive assistant, with me.” So she called back very shortly and said, “Come over. Come in the back door. We don’t want any publicity on this.” Which we did. And it was one of the most painful meetings I’ve ever been in in my life. Jack Kennedy insisted we were going to kill the bill. That would be the end of this bill and he wanted a civil rights bill. And he kept insisting you didn’t really need the FEPC at that stage. He said, “Now mind me, I’m not opposed to it as a separate piece of legislation. But I don’t see it’s important as these other things are. And I can’t go with you.”
STERN: Voting, public accommodations, and all the rest?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. And he said, “I can’t go with you on this.” We said, “We’re sorry but we’re going to stick it
[-52-]
out.” In other words a real head-on confrontation. Well time goes on. We keep our….
STERN: Just curious. How did handle himself on this sort of thing? Was he, did he show anger?
BIEMILLER: No he was angry.
STERN: He was angry. You could see that.
BIEMILLER: I don’t mean he was blowing up but he was angry. I knew Jack well enough that I could tell by his voice tones and so on you know what was going on. And he was angry about this and he thought we were doing him in, so to speak. Well then we kept the agitation up on the Hill. We ran into some trouble with Adam Clayton Powell who didn’t want to let go of the FEPC and yield jurisdiction to Manny Cellar but he finally saw the light of day with some arguments. Katzenbach wouldn’t give and finally Bob Kennedy stuck his nose in to this one. And he tried an old game. He thought he could use the Reuther-Meany thing. Well on this issue there was no fight between Reuther and Meany. He called Jack Conway [Jack T. Conway] who was then heading up the IUD [Industrial Union Department], one of the Reuther’s top lieutenants, and said to Jack, “I want you to come up here. I want to talk about this FEPC with you.” And Jack said, “I won’t come unless Andy Biemiller will come with me.” “Well all right,” he said, “bring him along.” So Jack came down see me and he and I made a compact we would neither of us talk to Bob Kennedy alone. Anytime we were going to see him the two of us were going to be there. And we had it out with him. Now as recently as about the, oh I would say, the fifth of October you will find a record of Kennedy on the Hill still opposing FEPC. Saying not as a separate bill but in this context I don’t want it. Well we got it in.
STERN: Under Johnson.
BIEMILLER: Well, yeah. We got it in the bill that came out of the House committee. It was in the bill and then that bill got tied up in the rules committee. Then when Johnson came in he immediately moved it and tried a discharge. He got Bolling to get busy on a discharge. And as it turned out we didn’t need a discharge. But one of the things that happened there and this again is the kind of thing I’m talking about. Again it was stretching things. He got Meany to come down to a meeting with the cabinet and the leaders. This in turn cemented Johnson with Meany. You know, one of those kind of things. And said, “Now George there’s just one thing that I want you and Andy to do. You go up and see Charlie [Charles A. Halleck] and get him off his damn high horse. We’ve got to get that bill out. If we have to use the
[-53-] discharge route we will.” So Meany and I went up to see Halleck. Halleck ran into a tartar on it. He said, “Look, all right. But wait a minute George. You don’t want that damn (it was Title Six then) that damn Title Six in there.” George said, “What are you talking about. That’s my Title. If I catch anybody monkeying with that I’ll be mad at them forever.” “Oh,” Charlie said “I didn’t know that.” So as it turned out we didn’t need it. We got the bill out of rules committee with the help of Clarence Brown [Clarence J. Brown] who was very, very helpful on all civil rights legislation. Passed it and got it over to the Senate and then got into the row over there where Humphrey finally persuaded Dirksen that he’d better give. That’s what started the thing. That was a very funny deal in the Senate. Well I’m getting us off of Kennedy but it was really his legislation. Tommy Kuchel [Thomas H. Kuchel] was with us. And the two whips were handling it. They ran that operation like it was a military command. You couldn’t leave town for a weekend unless you got a pass from the Democratic side from Humphrey and on the Republican side from Kuchel. I’m talking about the friendly guys.
STERN: Sure.
BIEMILLER: They lived up to it. They’d report and they’d start counting and all right you can go but this is the last time. You know. This kind of thing. It was done very efficiently. And Kuchel was very strong on this. Always was.
STERN: How do you think it would have worked out if Kennedy had lived and he would have gotten the bill with FEPC in it? Would he have vetoed it?
BIEMILLER: Oh, no.
STERN: You don’t think so.
BIEMILLER: Oh, no. I don’t think he would have ever dreamt of vetoing it. He just felt a little bit chagrined that he couldn’t get his friends to go with him on the thing. It was just a question of two points of view conflicting.
STERN: If you were close to people like Clarence Mitchell…. Mitchell was very critical of Kennedy, as I’m sure you know. As were a lot of other civil rights people. Martin Luther King [Martin Luther King, Jr.], James Farmer, et cetera. Many of these people felt that Kennedy was much too cautious and timid on civil rights.
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BIEMILLER: Well of course, now also on this same business that the first tip-off that I got, early in the game, in ‘63, that we were going to have trouble with the Kennedys on this was from John McCormack and Lyndon Johnson.
STERN: That’s interesting.
BIEMILLER: They both said, “Look it, you’d better watch your knitting here and tend to business. You may find yourself without an FEPC.” I said, “Well that would be tragic because we’re going to fight it if that’s the case.” They said, “We know that. It ought to be in and we’re with you.” Now Johnson goes back to a story that, goes way back to ‘57 when we were having a row about that little bill.
STERN: The civil rights bill in ‘57.
BIEMILLER: We got a bill but it was very minor. I was arguing with Johnson we needed a better bill. I remember walking out with George Reedy. He said, “Look Andy, there’s still something you’ve got to realize. Lyndon is still a senator from Texas. He’s got his neck out pretty far already. But let me tell you something. If he ever gets national office you will see the damndest civil rights program you ever saw in your life.” Now that goes back to ‘57. And I remembered this in ‘63 when Lyndon tipped me off that this thing was going on. That is, he was, you see, he was still chairman of that commission, or nominally the chairman. He didn’t do much with it. He always had this sneaking civil rights feeling in the back of his head. I don’t know where he got it but he had it. And George Reedy saw it very early in the game. Played around with it. So we had an ally. We had allies in both the Speaker and the Vice President on the thing. Well John was only leader when it started and then Rayburn died in the meantime. But John McCormack’s explanation was very simple. He said, “I know about discrimination. When I was a kid trying to get my first job, ‘No Irish need apply.’” He said, “I’ve never forgotten it. I’m against discrimination.” On that he was very serious.
STERN: Did you feel that his general relationship with Kennedy was good? I know that…
BIEMILLER: The general relationship was good. As I say, I always had the feeling though in the background that there was this bad, little bad feeling.
STERN: How did the Kennedy-McCormack ‘62 Senate race
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affect their relationship?
BIEMILLER: Well, poor John. I felt sorry for him on that one. I came into his office one day. Well you know enough about it to know that McCormack wouldn’t have been a disaster, the kid.
STERN: No.
BIEMILLER: He said, “Here’s a great piece of campaign literature,”—his nephew’s name–
STERN: Edward [Edward J. McCormack, Jr.].
BIEMILLER: “That Eddie’s gotten out.” And he shows it to me. It’s a little thing that you open it up. One side, “McCormack’s Accomplishments for Civil Rights.” Oh boy. The other side Ted Kennedy’s accomplishments. In agate type, “Brother of the President.” That’s all it said. I said, “John this is the craziest piece of campaign literature I ever saw. What the hell do you think he’s running on. Of course he’s the President’s brother. And it’s going to take a lot of...” “Ah, I don’t believe it. We’re going to elect Eddie.” Day after that primary, I happened to be seeing John and I’ve never seen him so down in the dumps. And he said to me, “I don’t understand it. In my own congressional district? The Jews, whom I’ve worked with on everything under the sun, voted for Teddy? Lot of my Irish voted for Teddy.” Teddy carried that district big. You know old Eddie McCormack. And poor John just never quite got that through his head that good as Eddie McCormack might have been, barring Ted Kennedy, you couldn’t do it. I mean, hell it was the temper of the times. We all saw the thing very clearly that Teddy was coming down. At that stage of the game Teddy wasn’t too popular with a lot of our people. He’d evidently in the campaign of ‘60 had rubbed some of our people the wrong way. But we were under no illusions. Then I remember we had a dinner for the incoming senators in January of ‘63 and Meany was so entranced with Ted Kennedy as to be incredible. He says, “Hey that guy’s got it. He’s better than either of his brothers. He’s going to be better.” It was a long shot but Meany had an uncanny sense of that kind of thing. He wasn’t hot for Teddy but he wasn’t going to fight him. I gather that most of our labor leaders up there backed off Eddie. Even the Irish labor leaders and God knows it’s full of Irish labor leaders. I’ve had my quarrels with them at times.
STERN: Back on the question of civil rights did you and the labor movement feel, particularly in ‘61 and ‘62, that Kennedy was too timid on civil rights? For example one of the first things that he did was to say that there would be no civil rights legislation in ‘61. And
[-56-] that disappointed a lot, certainly people in civil rights movement.
BIEMILLER: The civil rights movement was very disappointed in it. We thought, we were of a mixed mind. We thought he was probably right.
STERN: He persuaded Wilkins [Roy Wilkins]...
BIEMILLER: That it wasn’t the right time to push it. Let’s wait until the next election. Well then unfortunately the next election as I remember it, we again lost two or three people, didn’t we? Wasn’t a bad election.
STERN: No, ‘62, no. They lost two in the House and gained four in the Senate.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. But we lost two in the House. I mean it was a minor loss. And then he decided that he’d go ahead. I was very active in the leadership conference. Meeting with everybody all the time. You’re right though. Most of them were very disappointed and they were little bit put out that we wouldn’t start raising holy hell with him on it which we didn’t do. But as I say, we could see the argument that it wasn’t the first thing to push if you’re trying to run a general program through.
STERN: Especially with the kind of margin that he had in Congress.
BIEMILLER: But that again was the reason why Meany issued that statement in ‘63. He wanted to put the pressure on Kennedy at that stage to go ahead. Incidentally in that while we were stressing FEPC we were certainly for accomodations, equal rights and everything else but it was FEPC. And we knew generally what we were up against. Not necessarily with the Kennedys; at that time we weren’t aware of their feeling. But we knew we were going to have plenty of trouble in the House and Senate on it.
STERN: Did you feel that the administration handled the major crises well? Meredith [James Howard Meredith] and Birmingham and even back in ‘61 and the freedom riders?
BIEMILLER: About as well as could be done. It was a tough thing to do. You had nobody friendly in the South really when you came right down to it. It was a tough one to handle. But we think they did everything they could. Katzenbach certainly was active on the thing. We were meeting with Katzenbach on the thing. With the exception
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of fights on legislation we agreed with much of what he was doing. And moved ahead on it. Bobby, of course, was there all the time but I don’t think we ever met with Bobby except that in ‘63 the thing I was telling you about earlier with Conway. But the leadership conference as I remember never met with Kennedy. Maybe once, with Bob Kennedy. Katzenbach was the guy we worked with and Joe Dolan.
STERN: Did you or Meany have any input at all into the ‘63 civil rights speech? Did they ask you for your opinions? Do you recall? That was his major….
BIEMILLER: Well, we simply sent them over our documents and the resolutions passed at the convention. They knew our position all right. That was a disappointment, or course, that he didn’t stress FEPC. But otherwise we had no quarrel with the basic thing. I repeat it was one of those unusual kind of things, the kind of a fight we got into on that because we didn’t want to fight with Kennedy. That’s really what it was.
STERN: How about your access to him? Did you have pretty much direct access? Did you have to go through O’Donnell? I gather you were close to Evelyn Lincoln.
BIEMILLER: Oh very close to Evelyn. No we never had trouble seeing Jack Kennedy when we wanted to. Meany has always had a deal. He calls the President. He doesn’t go through anybody. That’s the way it works.
STERN: What about his policy staff? People like Sorensen and Feldman [Myer Feldman]?
BIEMILLER: Feldman I saw a great deal of. I didn’t see too much of Sorensen. Mainly because Sorensen was generally up in clouds a bit as far as the day-by-day work was concerned.
STERN: [Laughter].
BIEMILLER: I don’t mean it in the mean sense. It was his job.
STERN: Yeah I understand. That’s an interesting point. As a matter of fact I’d like to pursue that with you. Wilbur Cohen, when I was talking to him, made a very interesting distinction. He said that in the Kennedy administration there was always a gap between what he called the process people—Larry O’Brien and his people—and the policy people—Sorensen, Lee White [Lee C. White]
[-58-] and Feldman. And he said that too often one didn’t know what the other was doing. There was too much of a gap between policy and process.
BIEMILLER: I think that’s true. We’d see Mike Feldman every now and then. I saw Lee White occasionally. But basically our contacts were almost entirely with Larry O’Brien.
STERN: Process people.
BIEMILLER: Now that was not true in the Johnson days, you see. That was the first great move that was made was when he brought Califano in. He told Califano. He said, “You can tell Andy Biemiller anything that’s going on here because we know the labor movement doesn’t leak.”
STERN: I see. So Johnson broke down that gap.
BIEMILLER: It meant I still was seeing O’Brien. But Califano and I, again I was living in his office half the time and working with him. I’ve always liked Joe. I think he’s a damn able, bright guy. How he kept everything moving I’ll never quite understand, but he did. I think the remark you say you got from Wilbur I would agree with. There wasn’t too much coordination between the lobbying operation and the policy operation.
STERN: He said particularly, for example, he mentioned Medicare. He had a lot of problems. He said that there were times that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. It caused him a great deal of grief. How about some of the specific, in ‘62 there were a number of very specific things that I think affected labor. In January of ‘62 Kennedy issued an executive order on bargaining, collective bargaining and organization for federal employees. Was that something that you had been pushing him on?
BIEMILLER: Yup. We pushed like hell on it and we worked with him and again while we would liked to have a better order, we were happy when it came out and we hailed it. Our unions were happy with it and we regarded it as a real definite achievement of the Kennedy administration. To get that thing out. We had to struggle under it for along time afterward. It was full of flaws.
STERN: What sorts of things were you unhappy about in it?
BIEMILLER: Well that you couldn’t get any kind of check off at the beginning. We later got that modified.
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That there was no way to get a union shop. We’re still fighting about that. It wasn’t anything spectacular. It’s just the normal kind of fight that you get into when you’re getting into a new field is really what it was. I remember many people including, I think, Sorensen once threw that at us was that—I may be in error but somebody like that— threw at us, “You know Franklin Roosevelt never wanted any unions among government employees.” We said, “We know that. What’s that got to do with today?” And so on. But I mean they weren’t too happy, some of them, with the thing. But we worked on it. Our lawyers worked on the thing with them at that stage. I’m not a lawyer so I didn’t get mixed up in the day-by-day drafting of the thing. I’m just concerned with policy, not with details.
STERN: [Laughter].
BIEMILLER: But that was very definitely a forward movement from Kennedy and his administration. We were happy.
STERN: How about the steel price crisis?
BIEMILLER: I wasn’t in that at all. That was handled by the union, by Goldberg and so on. And I wasn’t in it. I mean I knew what was going on but, I mean I didn’t get mixed up in it. It never got to the Hill, you see.
STERN: It was not in your bailiwick.
BIEMILLER: I had enough to do without looking for more work, you know.
STERN: One major thing which I know you were involved with in ‘62 was the Trade Expansion Act [Trade Expansion Act of 1962].
BIEMILLER: Yeah. Very much so. I had been a, Kennedy had appointed me as the labor advisor to the ‘61 GATT [General Agreement on Trade and Tariff] conference. And we came back—in those days we were still agreeing that this was the way to do things—and we passed the bill with the trade adjustment part in it. And—oh what’s the guy’s name? He came out of the national committee. He was working with Commerce I think at the time. He’s now with Federated Stores [Federated Department Stores Inc.]. Starts with an h. He worked in ____.
STERN: Hyman Bookbinder [Hyman Harry Bookbinder]?
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BIEMILLER: No, no, no, no, no. He came off of my staff over there. This guy was a journalist. Hoving. Hoving [John Hannes Forester Hoving]. I had a nice note from him the other day that I almost frankly forgot. He said, “Sorry to see you’re retiring and so on. I want you to know that I feel very strongly that you added a lot to Washington and so on. Above all I’ve never forgotten that you’re the guy that taught us how to pass the ‘62 trade act.” He was mixed up in it. Now we did meet on that and we wanted that bill.
STERN: What exactly in it was so critical to labor?
BIEMILLER: Trade adjustment. That’s what we had to have in it.
STERN: Aiding American industries that were hurt by….
BIEMILLER: And American workers. That’s what we were after. Ruttenberg [Stanley H. Ruttenberg] and I testified together on that.
STERN: That had really begun in the fifties, hadn’t it? I mean the effort to get it.
BIEMILLER: The effort to get it had, yes. By the CIO not the AF of L.
STERN: Before the merger.
BIEMILLER: Just in fairness it ought to be mentioned that that was the situation. The AF of L thought that it was an impingement on unemployment compensation. I never did. That’s a personal opinion. I say I never did. So when we got the merger it was one of the things we agreed on. I sat down just premerger with several of the CIO boys and we worked out a joint program. Put that in. Meany just said, “Anything you want. Put it in. No quarrel.” So away we went. But that was what we wanted in that bill and we got it. That was the last time we agreed with the administration on trade. By ‘65 or 6—I’ve forgotten which year it was—the council made a complete turn around. Which I agree with. I’m not quarreling with the council on this. But we didn’t realize the extent that the old free trade was going to hurt us on jobs. And as you know, that fight’s still on with Robert Strauss [Robert S. Strauss] now and what not. But ‘62 we were in agreement. We worked on the bill very hard. Testified all over the place. Did routine visiting of senators, congressmen that were involved. I think we did have something to do with it.
STERN: There was a departure in the way in which the
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administration handled that bill. Instead of using the usual liaison people in the departments and agencies, he set up the special unit in the White House under a Republican, Howard Petersen [Howard C. Petersen].
BIEMILLER: That’s right.
STERN: What was your view on that? Did you work with the Petersen group? Did you think it was a wise move?
BIEMILLER: Yup, yup. That’s where Hoving was working at the time. And incidentally Petersen was a damned intelligent guy to be working on that. I thought it was a smart move on Jack’s part. You probably have got to know that the labor movement is not wedded to the Democratic Party as such. We’ll work with anybody we think is fair and square so we had no trouble working with Petersen’s group. But I think it was one of the smartest things he did was to put that group in the White House.
STERN: In terms of bringing in Republican support and such.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. They had a number of people but Hoving was the guy that I knew best of all. I’d known him way back in Milwaukee days. We had no trouble working together.
STERN: Did you feel that O’Brien’s people worked effectively on this trade expansion thing?
BIEMILLER: Oh yes. Everybody worked on it. But it made sense to set that thing up so that you could knock down some of the Republicans on the thing. The Republicans never quite accepted that kind of free trade at the time but they didn’t at that time.
STERN: How about some of the other things like the manpower act [The Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962]. I know you were involved in that. In ‘61 and the AID bill, Agency for International Development.
BIEMILLER: Well the manpower bill was something that we felt was badly needed. We’ve never thought it went far enough. See that goes way back as you probably know to ‘59 with the, what the hell did we call that thing? The defense training act, [The National Defense Education Act] something of that sort. On that I got the craziest business with a now dead Republican from Massachusetts, Nicholson [Donald W. Nicholson]. Nick was a great guy with the bottle. He was generally plastered. I got on the thing and I’m up in
[-62-] front of the committee testifying in that first defense training bill, defense education act and all of a sudden it comes to his turn to question. He starts out and I could tell by his voice tone that he’d had a few belts. “Andy, level with me. Are these Sputniks for real?” [Laughter] He just couldn’t understand it. Yet this was the feeling among a certain group of them. And they thought we were trying to play games with them on the whole thing. So that the manpower act we were glad to get it. We wanted to go a lot further.
STERN: Did you work with Wirtz at all on that? That was one of his major bills.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. We worked with Bill on it. We got on with Bill reasonably well. Meany didn’t like him very much but we lived with him. I like Bill myself. I always got on with him pretty well but we worked with him and his whole staff on the thing. And that was the beginning, as you know, of a real manpower act. That first one was just a sort of joke all around, the first thing we passed. But when we got into that and since then we’ve just been playing with it. Now there’s been a slight retrogression recently but that’s neither here nor there as far as we’re concerned.
STERN: Of course, a lot in the Johnson administration built on that original manpower act.
BIEMILLER: Exactly. You see that was the basis that you needed. That you have a precedent established. Hence, you could go ahead. Very good deal.
STERN: Even Wirtz felt later on that the initial bill, for example, had too much emphasis on technological unemployment which later he realized was not really the issue. It was far more than that. Particularly training of minorities and various things. How about the AID bill? Agency for International Development.
BIEMILLER: Oh we were into those things up to our ears. Every year the AID people would come around and say, “We need you.” So we’d have to go to work on the thing. Now I was particularly interested in that by working with Doc Morgan [Thomas E. Morgan] and with Clem Zablocki [Clement J. Zablocki] who were old friends. Knew them both very well. I remember one of the things the AID people did and came around to us very proud. And I said, “I think you’re right. This is a great thing.” They put together lists of, in each congressional district, of what AID might mean in those districts. I went to Zablocki with one of them. “My God! I didn’t know….”
STERN: That’s what works.
[-63-]
BIEMILLER: It worked very well. A very good job was done on that. The AID people were always praising us to the skies. Meany feels very strongly about AID.
STERN: Dick Maguire [Richard V. Maguire] did a lot of that sort of stuff didn’t he?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. It was a good job. The whole thing was, I think, fairly well handled. Because even in those days, much worse now, there was no great feeling in the country for AID. You had to buck them. That’s why those lists that we took to one congressman after another, saying, “Look here what’s going into your district.” The idea, well that was that simple old idea that we helped, I hope, knock into a cocked hat that we were just sending over twenty dollar bills in large numbers, you know, to Europe. They didn’t realize that about 90 percent of the money was being spent in their districts. And that finally convinced enough of them that their real opposition finally disappeared.
STERN: How about the ‘62 congressional elections which the administration did pretty well in? [Interruption]
BIEMILLER: ...started on what did you say?
STERN: The ‘62 congressional elections. The administration did pretty well losing only two seats in the House and gaining four in the Senate. I imagine you must have worked pretty hard in those campaigns.
BIEMILLER: Particularly the Senate we were working on. We couldn’t see any great gains or losses in the House. That was right. Our analysis was correct. But we did see a chance of gaining in the Senate and so we were over there working damn hard. I think the only real argument there…. Yeah that was the year Bobby was elected, wasn’t he?
STERN: No Bobby was ‘64.
BIEMILLER: That’s right it was ‘64. Sixty-four we got into a row on that. That’s what I meant. No you’re right. Sixty-two we picked up some senators. It was a good campaign. I mean you could go out, quite honestly and say, “We got a new administration that needs strengthening.” Just playing it that way.
STERN: Did the missile crisis help you think?
BIEMILLER: Oh yeah. I don’t think there’s any question about
[-64-]
it. I was, I remember being out in California at that time, and I had a date with Tommy Kuchel. He called me and said, “Hey, I’m sorry, I can’t. I gotta get in a plane and go to Washington. The President’s asked me to come in.” I said, “What’s up?” He said, “I don’t know but it must be something serious because he’s pulled me out of the campaign here.” So all right. When he got back, oh boy was he a hero. His plane had been late somehow and he didn’t get to the regular meeting of the leadership. Then, Jack had a special meeting with him. And did he have a field day with that in California. And then he told me about the thing so I got a fill-in right away on it. I think undoubtedly it had a good deal to do with it. I think it was handled very well. From what I know of it. I obviously wasn’t on the inside but that was a tough situation to handle.
STERN: Did you feel that with the gains made in ‘62 that your program was in better shape?
BIEMILLER: Oh yeah.
STERN: For second half of the administration?
BIEMILLER: Certainly. Certainly in the Senate without any question. We were in much better shape. And we looked forward to getting some things done and might have. Nobody can ever tell you what might or might not have happened if Jack hadn’t been assassinated. But Lyndon sure knew how to pick that one up and play it for all it was worth. It was a good job.
STERN: Some of the sources claim that there was a, Neil MacNeil for example, that there was a pretty major distinction made between patronage and Larry O’Brien’s operation. That John Bailey [John Moran Bailey] really handled the patronage, but some of the things I’ve seen tend to suggest that that’s not really the case.
BIEMILLER: I don’t think that’s the case at all. I don’t mean Bailey didn’t have a finger in, God knows.
STERN: That was more a formality than a reality.
BIEMILLER: Yeah. Larry was a great guy on this kind of thing.
STERN: And Dick Donahue too, right?
BIEMILLER: They knew what they were doing. This current administration might study that a little bit.
STERN: Do you feel they used patronage effectively in
[-65-]
getting legislation through?
BIEMILLER: Oh yes. I don’t think there’s any question about it. And they saw to it that people got their calls returned and they’d talk about it and what they wanted done. And if there was any way to do it, they’d do it. That was the great significance of this team. Well that’s not—that’s part of Johnson. Larry really manipulated. The thing that he did later that was the first big public works bill. Boy did he use that thing for all it was worth. That was the little bitty public works bill that was passed. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand and so on. Carl Perkins [Carl D. Perkins] came to me one day and said, “You’re kinda close aren’t you to Larry O’Brien?” I said, “Yup.” “Well would you just tell him I’ve got to have one more of them little public works projects in my district? I need it.” “All right. I’ll take it up with him. Next time I see Larry,” I said. “Oh yeah by the way,” just as I’m about to leave, “Carl Perkins asked….” “What the hell, is he after you too? Let me show you something.” He pulled a list out. He had it on his desk. And it was something like twenty-two projects Carl already had in his district. “Now,” he said, “you tell Carl, ‘All right since you asked me I’ll give him this one. But tell him it is absolutely the last one. He can’t find anybody else to persuade me.’” But this is the kind of thing that they were doing in Washington.
STERN: O’Brien’s people actually had lists of each member of Congress with the number of favors he had asked for. How many had been granted. How many had not been granted….
BIEMILLER: Precisely. They knew where they were.
STERN: Fascinating.
BIEMILLER: That was a good operation. There isn’t any question about it.
STERN: Did you feel, I gather you didn’t feel that the Senate operation under Manatos was as effectively run.
BIEMILLER: No, as I say I don’t want to be unkind to Mike but I just never had the feeling that he did it nearly as effectively as the House side was done. It may be unfair but….
STERN: Do you think his staff wasn’t as good?
BIEMILLER: I don’t know. You just didn’t get the kind of reaction that you did in the House from these
[-66-]
people. Those were good people that he had working in the House. Mike wasn’t a bad guy. I’m not trying to infer that, but I just had the feeling that he wasn’t clicking the way the House people were.
STERN: How about Johnson’s role in the whole thing? I realize that a vice president is in a very difficult position, obviously, but considering how important and powerful he had been...
BIEMILLER: Well do you remember though what happened to him?
STERN: The caucus business?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. He attended the caucus and they invited him out. They said, “You are now in the administration.”
STERN: In the executive.
BIEMILLER: “And you’re not in the Senate. And don’t go interfering with us.”
STERN: You feel that really hurt deeply?
BIEMILLER: Oh very much, very much. And I think this is true of any vice president. Whether he’s served in the Senate or not. You lose a lot of your influence automatically. The feeling between the congress and the White House regardless of who’s there is still there. It’s rough. Truman came closer to breaking it, strangely enough, and yet he didn’t get very much done when you come right down to it. But even he couldn’t sway the Senate very much. This is the only thing that I see on it that the Vice President can’t do but once you become President then Johnson really went to town. He was back again and he was power. As vice president he had no power.
STERN: He apparently had certain illusion about what he could do as vice president. He said to someone just before the inauguration, “Power is where power goes.” In other words he thought he could hold on to this.
BIEMILLER: I know it. But he couldn’t.
STERN: It was a great shock to him when the caucus did not give in.
BIEMILLER: Oh when they tossed him out of that caucus right away it was an awful shock to him.
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STERN: Somebody on his staff also prepared an executive order for Kennedy to sign—which specifically detailed responsibilities and authority which would go to the Vice President. The fact that he had to be invited to certain kinds of meetings. It was an incredible thing which went to Kenny O’Donnell who simply just…. It disappeared. No wonder that Kennedy never said a word about it. And between those two things apparently Johnson just withdrew and became quite passive.
BIEMILLER: Well you remember also they worked out a situation where he was abroad a hell of a lot.
STERN: He did a lot of traveling. Right.
BIEMILLER: You’re right though. He became almost passive. He didn’t do very much.
STERN: And yet Humphrey as vice president was I think pretty effective. I mean relatively speaking.
BIEMILLER: Yeah, but mainly with the mayors and with foreign aid. Those were the two areas that…. He was a very unhappy guy too.
STERN: As vice president?
BIEMILLER: I don’t know why anybody wants that damn job, frankly. But they’ll fight for it.
STERN: How about the question of committee assignments. I’ve seen, in some cases, direct quotes from people who say that you and John McCormack almost virtually named members of the House Education and Labor Committee.
BIEMILLER: This is true. In fact, John said so openly one time at a meeting up in Boston. A meeting or labor leaders that he was addressing, including Republicans were in the group. It was an annual event. I don’t know if they still do it, but the state federation used to invite everybody in. And John got up and said point blank. “I want you all to understand I won’t let anybody go on the labor committee until I clear them with Andy Biemiller.” I was amazed because he’d never said anything like this publicly before. He’d said it privately. And it happened. Now strangely enough just once did he try to cross me and I was able to throw it back at him. When Phil Crane [Philip Miller Crane] got elected to the Congress of the United States I had a personal grievance with him. I didn’t know him at the time but he’d written a book in which he said that the worst menace in the United States was the League for Industrial Democracy.
[-68-]
Far worse than anything else in the United States. It always amused me a little bit. And he said, “A prominent member in that organization is Andy Biemiller. He’s responsible for corrupting George Meany and Walter Reuther.” Well I told this to George one time and he laughed like hell. And he said, “I don’t know about Walter but Andy, I was corrupted long before I knew you.” Anyhow, then I pick up the Record [Congressional Record] about a day after he’s been named and I thumb through it, as I would do in those days, and suddenly I see a resolution introduced by the leadership of both sides that they are going to add one Democrat and one Republican to the labor committee. And I find out it’s Phil Crane they’re going to put on. I went to see John. I said, “John, what are you doing to me?” He said, “My God, Andy, I admit I pulled a bull. I should have talked with you. But,” he said, “I’m sorry. It’s done now. You can’t stop it.” I said, “The hell I can’t.” I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. So I did. I went to my old friend Tom, Frank Thompson, Thompy. I said, “Look, Thompy, this is a hell of a situation. I tell you what’s going to happen. We got no objection to,”—the colored gal from Brooklyn…
STERN: Chisholm? [Shirley A. Chisholm]
BIEMILLER: “Shirley won’t mind going on. But I don’t want Crane on that committee.” He said, “You give me what I need to block it and I’ll see to it that it gets blocked.” I said, “How are you going….” He said, “Never mind. Don’t ask me.” Well to my utter amazement the next morning they bring it up. Unanimous consent. “Objection. Louisiana objecting.” He’s now quit. He represented Shreveport. [Joseph David Waggonner, Jr.] He was the leader in the ways and means committee.
STERN: I know who you mean but I can’t think of his name.
BIEMILLER: All right. You can remember the name some other time.
STERN: I’ll look it up.
BIEMILLER: He gets up and objects. Well everybody was so startled that they didn’t bother to move it. They moved the goddamned thing and got it up under unanimous consent and it flopped. Well that was the end of it. Now I found later what was done. It was one of those nasty little things that congressmen know how to do. Frank went to his pal down there and said, “Do you want Shirley Chisholm on the labor committee?” He said, “Hell no.” “There’s a resolution coming up in the morning and you can block it.” “Well you’re goddamn right.” That’s what happened. Then poor, I’m sorry, poor Phil Crane. Without
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knowing all that I’ve now told you the Chicago Tribune—Crane was one of their darlings— found out that I’d worked on this thing in blocking him. Ha-ha big front page story. Poor Phil Crane. He came to congress thinking that the two people who controlled people on committees and so on were the Speaker and the minority leader. He got them agreed that he could go on the labor committee. But he soon found out that wasn’t right. Andy Biemiller runs things in terms of naming committee people. So we took care of it. Now we wound up with Phil Crane on ways and means but we didn’t want him on the labor committee. Now I said I had a little personal grievance I’m frank to admit it in going after the thing. I later met him at a party and he was…. I wasn’t introduced to him. It was just a group standing around as you do. And he was sounding off on every damn possible thing. I said, “Wait a minute, Congressman. It’s only fair that you know who I am. I’m Andy Biemiller.” “You’re Andy Biemiller? I’ve hated you all my life but I like you.” [Laughter] That was one of those damned kind of things.
STERN: Did you have trouble with Powell over appointments? Or did he pretty much….
BIEMILLER: He couldn’t do much about it. I mean he didn’t have enough power to project himself on that kind of thing. So see that was still the ways and means committee kind of thing that was going on and it worked.
STERN: What about committees other than education and labor? Were you able to influence….
BIEMILLER: Yeah. We could generally strike a deal with Wilbur Mills on most of them. The only other thing I got into a row—and that wasn’t labor committee and I couldn’t quarrel with him. We once blocked Landrum [Phillip Mitchell Landrum] for ways and means, which was after McCormack was Speaker a vacancy occurred. And that was a rival candidate from Virginia. He later became clerk of the House and he’s now a lobbyist. Anyhow the fight was on and we decided we were going to knock off—it was right after Landrum-Griffin….
STERN: Right. Just a couple of years later. Sure.
BIEMILLER: So in fairness I went in to see John McCormack. Said, “John, we’re after you. We’re after Landrum. We’re going to lick him.” “Oh, Andy. The leadership. Don’t worry he’s our candidate.” “I’m sorry. We’re going to lick him.” So I then go to see Carl Albert [Carl B. Albert] and tell him the same story.
[BEGIN TAPE #4 OF 4]
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...well, why can’t I think of this guy from Virginia? Any how we actually had a very narrow margin, about that big to lick him. But what happened in the Democratic caucus, thank God I had a couple of people sitting right in front of the Virginia caucus so I knew what happened. Jimmy Roosevelt gets up and says, “I am authorized by Mr. Landrum to say that if he is named to the Ways and Means Committee he will vote to report a Medicare bill. Whereupon Howard Smith turns to his fellow from Virginians and says, “For Christ’s sake if we’re going to have to vote from a turncoat, we might just as well vote for one of our own.” And the result was that the guy from Virginia got all the Virginia votes where he only had two up until then and became almost a landslide with that turn over. But that was another time we had to take John on. He never quite forgave me for it but I warned him. I said, “Look I played square with you. I told you what would happen.” Now it isn’t often that you can mount that kind of a campaign. You can do it just once in a while. So we did it.
STERN: Did the legislative operation in the House change in any major way when Rayburn died and McCormack succeeded?
BIEMILLER: Well it changed particularly in terms of tenor and temper. John worked damn hard. In some ways he worked harder than Rayburn but he didn’t have the chits that Rayburn had sitting around. And Rayburn had more respect of the members in the purest sense of that term than John ever had. Now John would work hard. We’d go in to see John in the middle of a vote that was tight, I mean just before a vote that we knew was going to be tight. We’d give him a list of twenty people. He’d sit right down in front of us and call them. “This is the Speaker and I’m asking you you’ve got to go with me on this thing.” Rayburn never did anything like that except quietly. He’d go on floor is somebody, you know, catch him up on some promise of I’ll do this for you. You probably know the story of how he got the draft?
STERN: No, I don’t.
BIEMILLER: Passed by one vote. Just think of that. Two months before Pearl Harbor the draft was renewed by one vote in the House. Rayburn walked on the floor to see Martin Dies [Martin Dies, Jr.] who was against him. He says, “Martin, I’ll make a deal with you. You vote with me on this draft bill. You’ll get your goddamned Un-American Activities Committee revived just for this Congress.” They struck a deal and that’s how we got the draft renewed. A few weeks before Pearl Harbor. Now Rayburn played it that way rather than John appealing you know and so on. But John
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McCormack worked very hard and was I think on the whole, a good leader. Some of my friends don’t agree with me on it. In the rough and tumble kind of fighting that does on in the House he was damn good. Tip O’Neill [Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr.] is equally good. But in taking on the Republicans and ridiculing them, raising hell with them, and occasionally taking on a Democrat. He took John Rankin [John E. Rankin] apart one day. Didn’t mention his name. Rankin tried to interfere with him. He was talking about “What is a bigot?” And all of a sudden Rankin, “Are you referring to me?” John said, “I wouldn’t refer to any person in particular, of course. If you think it applies that’s your concern not mine.” But he would do this kind of thing and get into a fight and make no bones about it. Now he, uh, I don’t think John ever thoroughly understood a piece of legislation. I’m talking about tough legislation. He didn’t…. He wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in the technique of getting it passed. Rayburn knew the legislation. As you probably know Rayburn was the author of a great deal of the New Deal legislation and so on. Tommy Corcoran [Thomas G. Corcoran] told me how he worked with Rayburn and so on. But if you look back, John’s name isn’t on anything except the three point two beer, the first beer deal of 1933. And one day I asked him, I said, “Where the hell did you get that three point two?” He said, “Oh, we just grabbed it out of the air.” He said, “We felt you know, we ought to do something in a hurry. We decided that was not intoxicating.”
STERN: Wasn’t there at least some rumbles of discontent over McCormack’s succession? I know Bolling wanted to challenge Albert and there was even some talk the administration might kind of quietly sanction a….
BIEMILLER: Well, I don’t know that the administration was willing to sanction it. But Udall did run against him, you remember and got murdered. No…. There were rumblings on Carl Albert and if Carl hadn’t quit I think he’d have been up against a real tough problem. But it never got to a point of being very drastic. Now one time we were going to…. What the hell was that one with John McCormack. He was appointing somebody to something. Oh, I know. It was when he appointed the guy, who’s now been licked, from Texas to the Rules Committee. Young [John A. Young]. Of Texas. I went to see McCormack on this with two or three of my fellow aides like Frank Thompson and so on. I said, “You know this is pretty bad. We may have to fight this thing at the caucus.” Well John said, “If you want to fight it, it’s all right but if you do I’m going to make this a question of confidence in the Speaker. Then where you going to be?” Well he was quite right. We couldn’t have done it if he’s put up so…. He said, “Now furthermore....” He
[-72-] grabbed me, he says, “Stay behind. I want to talk with you.” He said, “I’ve got a deal with Young. He’ll vote any way I want him to in the committee. He won’t commit himself on the floor.” I said, “All right. I’ll take it. And it is true. He never went wrong in committee if you had something that you were really hot on and he didn’t like. He’d vote to report the bill. So that John worked that one out. And that one I said he turned on us very neatly and said, “I’ll make it a matter of confidence in the Speaker. Take that one on if you want to.” That we weren’t in a mood to take on.
STERN: Very often researchers at the library ask for information about the daily operation of various sorts of things. I wonder if perhaps you could at least briefly describe what your daily schedule was like. In other words, where you spent your time. How much of it was in your office, on the Hill, in the White House, with people in meetings, lobbying groups, et cetera? How big was your staff? In other words, a sort of internal description of how.... Maybe even a kind of an average day if that’s possible.
BIEMILLER: Now that’s the trouble. There’s no such thing as an average day.
STERN: Of course. Of course, there isn’t.
BIEMILLER: They vary a great deal from one time to another. The only day that was routine was a Monday when we had a meeting of all of our legislative reps going over what was coming up that week and the next couple of weeks.
STERN: That’s the union legislative reps.
BIEMILLER: Union legislative reps. But that’s the only very firm routine thing we had. Otherwise I would probably once a week run up to see Meany and tell him what was going on. Then I would head for the Hill if I thought it was important. I’d go to see McCormack or whoever was around. Or Rayburn when he was still there. I spent a lot of Saturday mornings with Rayburn. That was the time to see Sam. He was relaxed. Nothing going on. Working things out with him. I saw the chairman of the education committee frequently. But after Adam Powell really took that thing over, then I didn’t see too much. I’d see Adam occasionally. We were at least on speaking terms. My quarrel with him goes way, way back to when we were serving together in the House. We lived together. But then once Perkins took office then I saw him constantly. And the thing worked very well.
STERN: How big was your staff?
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BIEMILLER: Oh let’s see. At that time….
STERN: In the Kennedy administration.
BIEMILLER: One, two, three... Only three legmen.
STERN: Three full time people, besides yourself.
BIEMILLER: Only three. It later became seven but that was accretion.
STERN: Under Johnson?
BIEMILLER: Started under Johnson then went…. Then under a guy named Nixon we had to add a couple of more. I understand they’ve just added a couple of more. I mean I’d asked for two more people. I think they finally got it. Which they need. I mean like hell you could use twenty people in that office. Then the other thing was, as I say, see now I happened to have personally on very good terms with a great many senators and this made a difference. You see, I knew them. A lot of senators just don’t bother to see lobbyists very much. But I’d served with some of these fellows, you see, and others I’d gotten to know very well. When old man Murray [James E. Murray] was in charge of the labor committee in the Senate, I knew him quite well. In fact he once asked me to go out when I was in Congress and speak for him at a Democratic convention in Montana. We were that close you see and so on. And Ribicoff I’d served with and so on you see. And Humphrey had always been a great pal of mine. We’d worked together for years. Paul Douglas [Paul H. Douglas] and I had been friends for many, many years. So I’d drop in to see these guys. Sometimes just to shoot the breeze.
STERN: But it keeps the relationship….
BIEMILLER: Exactly. You get more accomplished if you’re doing it that way. Then I’d raise something. “What do you thing about doing so and so?” He’d say, “Sure. That’s not a bad idea. Will you help me on it.” On the House side the interesting thing was that I’ve often said this. Sometimes I got more business done just by going up there without appointments. Or if you had an appointment, as you walked the halls you’d bump into one guy after another. “Hey Andy, I want to talk to you about so and so.” It was true I didn’t see very many members of the House. It’s simply so damn big you couldn’t do it. Now with Bolling I was very close. I knew Dick Bolling before he came here. We’d been friends before he ever came here. And as close as he got to both Truman and to Rayburn he was worth his weight in gold. That friendship still goes on with one exception. For a
[-74-] period of six months we didn’t speak to each other. He says I beat his reform bill in the House. I didn’t think I did it singlehanded but I had a finger in the pie, you know. Waggonner is the guy from Louisiana cause he worked with me on beating Bolling. And Bolling called, “Do I understand you guys are going to fight me on this?” I said, “Yes sir.” “Well someday you’ll have to come around see me. I’m going to be chairman of the Rules Committee.” Bang. I wasn’t going to say anything about it and he was mad. Bolling has a temper. So I let him ride for six months and then when he decided he was going to take a shot at the leadership, he called me and you’d have thought nothing had ever happened. And we’ve never mentioned it. Just picked up where we broke off. But that was the kind of thing Frank Thompson and I see a great deal of. He is the ranking member under Perkins and chairman of the labor subcommittee. So he’s a guy you see that I…. And I’m very fond of Thompy anyhow. He was a very amusing guy. Has the damndest list of stories always and that kind of thing. And I told you the little Waggonner incident. It worked there. So anyhow this is what I would do. Now as time went on and I got a bigger staff I’d spend more time in the office. And I could do more on the telephone than anybody else on my staff could do. I knew enough guys that trust me to talk on the phone. Sometimes a guy won’t talk to you on the phone. To a lobbyist. They don’t want to talk to you. So it was a hodgepodge kind of thing. Also, as time went on I spent less and less time in the field. I used to go out and talk to state federation conventions. But that was in the days when the Congress wasn’t meeting in the fall, you see, at all. Make the rounds of some of the states which I enjoy doing. Meeting people and so on. I haven’t been in Massachusetts to a state fed meeting in fifteen years. But I used to go up there every now and then and so on. This was a use full enterprise. And then I had, I spent a lot of time, as I was telling you earlier, with Clarence Mitchell. Clarence came to lobby me when I was in Congress. We go back that far, you see. He’s just retired now, too. We’ve always gotten on fine. Meany was always happy to have Clarence around. He thought he was the best of all the Negro leaders. He felt very strongly about him. And he was good lobbyist. No question about it. One of the best I’ve ever known. The leadership conference is a little puzzled as to how they’re going to run. Without either of us around on a day-by-day basis. I mean I think Clarence is still putting in a day a week or something like that which I’m not doing. I’m keeping as far away from the office as I can because I don’t think it’s fair to be looking over the shoulder of my successor whom I picked anyhow. So I don’t want to be interfering. He calls me once in a while. That’s another matter. I’ll talk. But I’m not going down and be seen there very often.
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STERN: Did your routine change very much when Johnson succeeded Kennedy?
BIEMILLER: Not a heck of a lot.
STERN: Did the operation remain pretty much the same?
BIEMILLER: Pretty much the same except I saw more of Johnson than I did of Kennedy.
STERN: Personally, you mean?
BIEMILLER: Yeah, but as an old, old friendship that went way, way back. I don’t know if I mentioned before I may have mentioned it. He was chairman of the first subcommittee I ever served on. Three-member subcommittee. Johnson, chairman. Maggie Smith [Margaret Chase Smith].
STERN: That’s in the House?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. In the light of my subsequent history it was a great break because Maggie Smith would talk with me when she wouldn’t talk with a hell of a lot of people. But that’s another story too. But I just meant it. See, and oh hell, I’ve been in Johnson’s home several times. He’s been here. I remember he came to a big party I was having one time when he was vice president. God, everybody was just gaga. The Vice President comes to Andy Biemiller’s party, you know, and that kind of thing. But Johnson also knew me well enough that he in turn would occasionally call me and say, “Now god damn it you’ve got to do so and so.” I remember another time he called said, “Now look: you’ve been lobbying me,” I’ve forgotten what the bill was, “on such and such a bill. Come and fly up to Wagner’s [Robert Ferdinand Wagner] wife’s funeral with me tomorrow.”
STERN: Mayor Wagner of New York?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. And he says, “Where’s Meany? I’m trying to find….” I said, “He’s in New York.” Well he said, “You tell George that if he wants to come back he can come back with us too.” Well thank God I had the foresight to call George up in New York and tell him about this. He said, “I’m not going to desert Gena. She’s with me.” When we walked into the funeral home here’s Meany way over here in corner somewhere in the front row. He’s got reserved seats for us—this funeral was late proceeding. We walked in. I think if I hadn’t told George what was going on I might have heard about it. See Johnson as leader was the damndest manipulating guy, and I’m using that term in its best sense. He could get things done. Even when
[-76-] he was minority leader in ‘53 he grabbed me one time and he said, “Now you guys been wanting to kill that damned Taft-Hartley Bill that Taft [Robert Taft] and his guys got out here.” Well he said, “It’s on the floor and I know how to kill it if you’ll follow what I want you to do.” I said, “All right. What do you want me to do?” Well he said, “There’s that damn Ives-Lehman amendment….” That was going to give the National Labor Relations Board FEPC power. We didn’t want it because we thought the board had enough to do. I said, “You know we been fighting….” He said, “I don’t care if you fighting it. But I need to get the votes of my southerners. I want you to get seven or eight guys that you’re close to to get up on that floor for just a minute or two and tell of their great interest in the Ives-Lehman amendment, how they’re going to be pushing it tomorrow at the right time bell.” I did it. Calls me back next morning and says, “Get down here. You did good but you’ve got to do something else.” So I went down. He said, “You know I can get them all but it would be easier for them to vote for a motion to recommit.” You see in the Senate you can make the motion to recommit at any damn time. You can’t in the House but in the Senate you can. If the motion was made by Lister Hill instead of Jim Murray—Jim Murray was the ranking member in that session, ranking minority member. He said, “Could you sell this to Jim Murray?” I said, “I think I can.” As I said I was very close to Jim. Went over and sat down with him. “Jesus, you’ve got a great idea! I’ll go over and sell that idea to Lyndon Johnson.” I thought, “Oh boy.” But this is Lyndon, you see. This is the way he operated. So I go back on the subway. Go up in the gallery. In about five or ten minutes I see Murray riding Lyndon. And Lyndon positions himself where he can look at me and he winks at me. About half an hour later Lister Hill made the motion to recommit and every single Southerner voted to recommit that labor bill. And I had six Republicans so that was it. We got rid of it. Now this is the kind of thing that Lyndon knew how to do in the Senate and did magnificently. And as I say, even then he was just minority leader. He wasn’t majority leader. But he knew how to manipulate the place. And this is the kind of thing that he knew so well. After he became president he was able to do this kind of thing. But as vice president they just didn’t want him around.
STERN: How would you compare Kennedy’s perceptions of and ability to work with the Congress and the Senate to Johnson’s?
BIEMILLER: Oh Johnson far out classed him on the thing. I mean what the hell, this was Johnson’s life. I don’t think Jack Kennedy ever really completely appreciated being a member of Congress. He had his eye on the presidency for a long, long time. And this was what he was working on. Now he worked very well as chairman of the Senate
[-77-] labor committee. We had no quarrel with him. He worked very, very closely with us. And that’s where I got to know Evelyn particularly. I never had any trouble seeing him. Going into anything. She was a damn good secretary. I mean in those days I remember once in a while she’d call me and say, “Andy you’d better not come in at three o’clock. Come at three- thirty. He’s running behind. I don’t want you sitting around.” That kind of thing you appreciate knowing. I remember one time I went up with Goldberg to see him. That’s when we were killing the ‘60 bill. My daughter was with me.
STERN: Minimum wage bill?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. And I said, “Now look Nancy you’re going to have to wait while we go in.” He comes out, sees us sitting there. I introduce him. I said, “Now Nancy, we won’t be too long.” “Oh,” he said, “she can come in.” She came in and oh boy was that the thrill of her life to sit through this thing. And then she’d imitate him. As you know he had a great habit which I didn’t object to. I loved it. Putting his feet up on the desk and opening his collar and talking away and she’d just know, and he also had a nervous habit of tapping with a pencil. And she used to imitate his tapping. She came home and told her mother about it you know. Picked up a pencil and tapped. But he had a charm for little girls. There isn’t any question about that. But by and large I’d say that he wasn’t in the same league with Johnson. I don’t know anybody that was in the same league with Johnson. With that long experience he had, you see, it made a great difference. And boy, the less said about the present administration....
STERN: About the present administration?
BIEMILLER: Boy. This thing is really crazy.
STERN: This list of White House appointments? Did this call anything particular to mind?
BIEMILLER: Not particularly, no. Not really.
STERN: I was wondering if you might have any anecdotes or any specific recollections of any of these meetings.
BIEMILLER: One signing I went to that was an interesting thing. This was the signing of the equal pay for equal work bill [Equal Pay Act of 1963]. I’ve got a lovely picture of it. There are only three men in that picture. Everybody else is a woman. The President, the Vice President and me. Nobody else is in that picture. He had himself surrounded by all the dames he could find. And that
[-78-] was a good bill. We passed that tone all right and got it in good shape. But he would do that kind of thing you know. He’d get you over and talk about it. Oh yes, I can tell you one anecdote that I think is a lovely anecdote. You know the famous Keogh Bill that’s now law. HR110. This is the bill that set up the right of an individual...
STERN: Oh retirement? Individual retirement, sure.
BIEMILLER: Well he tried passing that year after year after year. And we thwarted him. Finally he got it through and the signing of it took place the day or two after the big signing of the trade bill [Trade Expansion Act of 1962]. And by sheer luck I’m standing right behind Keogh [Eugene J. Keogh] on the list together lined to get our pens. We used to do that still in those days. So we come through and Gene says, “Mr. President, I’m very happy that you signed this bill but I don’t see any great crowd around like you had yesterday for the signing of the trade bill.” Jack says, “Gene I signed that bill in a dark closet with no light on.” [Laughter] He wasn’t going to take Gene on by vetoing the bill because Gene had worked his tail off to get the thing through. But this was the kind of thing that Jack could do. He could wisecrack with you as well as anybody. Went down very well. He handled himself beautifully in the early part of the ‘60 presidential thing. People out in Wisconsin, most of the labor leaders, for example, were for Hubert Humphrey as you might expect. But he beat Hubert, as you know. But he made the rounds. He asked me for a list of labor leaders, key labor leaders. I said, “of course I’ll give it to you.” So I gave him the list. He saw every one of them. Just charmed the pants off of them. The opposition sort of quieted down a little bit you know. And he did this, as you know, other places. But I know about that one because they were all talking to me about it. Those that I’d said, “You want to tell them that I suggested you come see them, I think it will help you.” Did that you know, this kind of thing. So we got on very well.
STERN: When you had personal meetings with him or with other people in the Oval Office what sorts of things, kind of information did he try, did he seek? People generally say he was very direct. He didn’t like to talk around questions.
BIEMILLER: No! He wanted to know point blank, “Now are you really working on these people?” he knew who they were, you see, that was bad and so on. “Now are you really pulling all the stops? You’re not just playing a game here.” And this is what he wanted to know. On most cases this was true. We weren’t playing games. But this is the kind of thing that he wanted to know and why couldn’t we
[-79-] button up X when you could button up Y. What’s the difference? And usually he was right in terms of their general assessment. They were the same kind of a guy. And he was wondering why you couldn’t button X and you had Y. Larry, of course, who sat in on most of this though, which you’d expect. I think the whole thing was run pretty well. It’s just regrettable that that damn assassination was enough to…. Meany was so hard hit by that assassination it wasn’t funny. He’d been in New York and he was driving back when the assassination took place. He tells the story himself that he’d stopped to eat somewhere up in Delaware. He had a chauffeur who was kind of sleepy. He was a good chauffeur but outside of that he was awful. He didn’t know what was going on. In fact he was an old minister type, reading the Bible all the time. Meany comes out from his lunch and the guy says, “The President’s been shot, Mr. Meany.” Meany says, “What are you talking about?” “Yeah.” George says, “You drive up to that filling station.” He found out it was true. Well then Meany was on his way back. I kept a line open to New York. Zack was still up in New York. Lane Kirkland was in my office. We kept the line open because we! had prepared a statement. Obviously going to have to get a statement out. As soon as Meany got to town he came to the building. He figured something like this. He came down to my office. He’d been told by his secretary that Lane was in my office. We got hold of Al. I think he changed two words or something in the statement. Then he sat around and he said, “You know as far as I’m concerned this town’s never going to be the same. We’ve lost a great deal here.” And he didn’t cry but he came so close, you know. Then he went on home. Called me almost immediately and said, “By the way make damn sure there’s a couple of reserve seats at that funeral for Mrs. Meany and me.” Well that George Reedy was handling so I had no trouble taking care of that aspect of it. It was almost a father-son type of relationship.
STERN: You mean Meany and Kennedy?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. I never heard Jack Kennedy call him anything except Mr. Meany or President Meany. Never called him George.
STERN: Isn’t that interesting. What did Johnson call Meany?
BIEMILLER: George. Hell you know what I mean, they were buddies. Arms around each other all the time and so on.
STERN: That was not Kennedy’s style at all.
BIEMILLER: No, not at all. That wasn’t Jack’s style. There
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was nothing of that sort….
STERN: Did Johnson make a major effort to, what’s the word, well to woo you and Meany in those early days and call you and say I need you and that sort of thing?
BIEMILLER: I say that the first thing that he did really was when he got Meany to come down in very early January at a meeting of the cabinet and the leaders. When he said, “Now I need your help. I want to pass this bill.” I don’t think he’d ever invited anybody in to one of these leadership meetings you know until that time. And this impressed George you know. George wasn’t too happy about Lyndon. He swallowed him and was ready to go. He said, “Thank God you know him so we’ve got contact.” He said, “I don’t mean that I dislike him but….” From that time on he and Lyndon hit it off very well. But this was the kind of thing that Lyndon knew how to do and did very well indeed. Now Jack did very well by inviting the executive council over for a lunch. One of the things you’ve got there. There was a meeting I think several months before that in the late afternoon. He would occasionally get the fellows in but he wouldn’t say very much to them. He’d just say, “I need your help. Appreciate it you’ve helped in the campaign. Between Meany and Biemiller they’re working, you know. Keep going with it.” And so on. So it worked. God, that assassination hit everybody between the eyes. I say I often wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t been taken away. I don’t know whether he could have passed the stuff or not because Lyndon had a beautiful thing to play on. The memory of Kennedy.
STERN: Henry Hall Wilson who I interviewed recently very strongly insists that the thinks Kennedy would have been just as successful legislatively as Johnson.
BIEMILLER: I’m not sure.
STERN: He thinks it was all moving toward the second administration.
BIEMILLER: I think it was moving. I agree but I’m not sure….
STERN: And if he had killed Goldwater which he would have by a substantial margin, I don’t think he would have won by as much as Johnson did. Because he wouldn’t have done well in the South.
BIEMILLER: In the South, no that was a set-up. I think Henry
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is right in the sense that the thing was moving. I don’t think there’s any question about that. And that we might have done just as well. I say I raise the question. There’s no way of knowing. How in the hell can you prove it either way.
STERN: The first page of the letter, the outline that I sent you, there are these points that I sent you.
BIEMILLER: We’ve got to move fast. I’ve go to leave here in about ten minutes.
STERN: Okay. This will be the end then. These points that COPE [Committee on Political Education] listed in November of 1960 that Kennedy had been elected on this program of Medicare, civil rights, increased aid to education, depressed areas, minimum wage, housing, closing tax loopholes, etc. Looking at that as a total sense of what labor thought in November of 1960, how would you assess Kennedy? The Kennedy Administration. How successful was he? In over-all terms.
BIEMILLER: Well, unfortunately a lot of this stuff came after him but he was working on it pretty well. Now you’ve got in the Social Security, civil rights, aid to education. That was moved. Aid to depressed areas we got. And the higher minimum wage we got. The housing—nyah—that was such a mess that I said, “Talk to Lashman.” The end of the tight money policy wasn’t too good. We thought he should have gotten rid of Martin [William C. McMartin, Jr.] long before he did. Closing the loopholes we didn’t do very much on.
STERN: Neither have any of his successors.
BIEMILLER: No. I’m not saying. But we had a thing not only him but his successors as you say the same way they don’t want to take on that kind of a lobby. And it is a tough lobby. No question about it. I always feel sorry for the guys we have detailed to work on a tax bill. We maybe have three, four people of ours over there, a couple of them are on my staff. The rest of them pick up two, three more. They go up on the Hill. They’re trying to handle the whole bill. On an oil section there’ll be fifty, sixty guys just working on that oil section. You know. Boy what a problem. And it’s a tough thing to meet. Very tough thing to meet. Oh we’ve won a few victories but not enough to make anybody very happy. And as you say that fight’s still on. So I’m not blaming him for this. I just said that not much was done on it.
STERN: One final point in the last few minutes that we
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have. I wonder if you might be able to give me a little insight into labor’s role, and your position particularly, if we jump up to ‘68 in terms of the Kennedy, Humphrey, McCarthy [Eugene J. McCarthy] campaign, etc.
BIEMILLER: Well, you remember right from the beginning, in fact within a week after the Johnson abdication, Meany helped form a committee to draft Humphrey. He wanted Humphrey all the way. There was not question about it. He didn’t like Bobby. We didn’t like Gene at all. Gene became so enamored of being president that he forgot everything else he was doing. I remember sending Jack Bideler up to see him one time on a tax bill around that time. He came back said, “Andy, I can’t get him to talk. All he talks about is, ‘Do you think I’ll make a good president?’ That’s all he was going on.” We were for Hubert all the way. See that goes way back to the also ‘60 thing, I mean the ‘64 thing. Meany called, or Johnson called Meany over and says, “George, who’s your first choice for vice president?” George says, “Hubert Humphrey.” “Who’s your second choice?” “Hubert Humphrey.” “Who’s your third choice?” “Hubert Humphrey.” That ended that. Gene McCarthy thought he had a promise on that, you know. That was one reason he got sour. Now with Bobby….
STERN: Other people have mentioned that to me. McCarthy thought he was going to be vice president in ‘64.
BIEMILLER: Yeah, he did. And he never had a chance. And I don’t mean just because of us. I mean in general he never had a chance. The only guy that he ever gave any consideration to was our friend from Connecticut—Dodd [Thomas J. Dodd]. But he didn’t really, he wasn’t really playing around with him. He was for Humphrey for the last couple of months there. He liked to keep Hubert worrying.
STERN: Did the Bobby Kennedy people try in any way to get any, to talk to you about his candidacy?
BIEMILLER: Not to me or Meany. I don’t know whether they did to anybody else. Al Barkan [Alexander Elias Barkan].... But, you see, we were so committed what was the point of talking to us? We were all out. No two ways about it. And that’s what we were going to do.
STERN: Do you think that the nomination would have gone the same way if Kennedy had lived?
BIEMILLER: We think so. It would have been a tough fight but we think we had it. You still had the old bulls
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with you in those days. They still exerted a lot of weight with you in those days.
STERN: Had your views and particularly labor’s views of Kennedy, of Robert Kennedy now, changed at all from ‘64 to ‘68?
BIEMILLER: Nope.
STERN: Not really.
BIEMILLER: Nope. We never thought of him as being any great friend or helpful. He didn’t do anything particularly in the Senate to irk us, but he wasn’t the kind of guy we knew. Now he did one thing in the Senate that also we were mad about. You may not know that we had at one stage through Russell Long passed a bill for federal aid in presidential elections. Federal primaries. The two Kennedy brothers knocked that over. After it had been passed. They knocked it out. And we never could figure out why they did it buy they did it. The only idea was somebody, “Well that means that...”
STERN: Bobby and Teddy you’re talking about?
BIEMILLER: Yeah. Bobby and Teddy together. Now the reason that I mention that is that the current legislation was also passed by Russell. We went up to see Russell Long about it and, Al Barkan and I, and he said, “Look fellows, I’m not going to get mixed up in this fight unless Ted Kennedy will cosponsor the bill with me. But if he will I’ll do it. I’ll pass it.” Well by sheer luck we beat it upstairs to see Ted Kennedy and he was free. Which is a rarity, God knows. He said, “Sure. I’ll see you right away.” We sat down with him and in five minutes time he said, “You tell Russell Long I will cosponsor the legislation and we’ll pass it.” We go back and again Russell was free but he’d have broken into anything on this. He said, “My God. Thank God. At least we’ll get this through.” Now Bobby was the guy that really killed the thing and got Teddy to go to work with him. This made us mad. There’s the only grievance we could have against Bobby as a senator.
STERN: Obviously though if it had come to RFK versus Nixon in ‘68 there’s little doubt where the labor movement would had to have gone.
BIEMILLER: Oh no. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. Although there was in ‘72. We didn’t do anything here you remember. We just couldn’t stomach McGovern [George S. McGovern].
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STERN: But by then of course Nixon was an incumbent president and he was going to win anyway.
BIEMILLER: We just couldn’t stomach McGovern. Also on that you see there was another angle. I took fifty dollars away from a friend of mine on this. ____, was arguing with me one night. “Ah, this is the most stupid thing the AF of L -CIO….” That was after we’d said no to George. “We’re going to lose both houses.” “Oh,” I said, “stop your nonsense. This is the way we’re going to keep both houses. We’re going to concentrate on senators and congressmen who are in trouble. There are so many of our own people are anti-McGovern that if we were for McGovern we’d lose them there.” “I’ll bet you fifty bucks.” I said, “Taken.” there nothing to it. I mean the re-election of the houses. There was no great deal.
STERN: It was an anti-McGovern vote. It wasn’t an anti-Democratic vote.
BIEMILLER: Anti-McGovern pure and simple. Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. That was it.
[END OF INTERVIEWS]
[-85-] Andrew Biemiller Oral History Transcript – JFK #2 Name Index
A Donahue, Richard K., 23, 24, 34, 36, 40, 43 Douglas, Paul H., 74 Abel, I.W., 32 Dubinsky, David, 18, 19, 29 Abzug, Bella S., 27 Dungan, Ralph A., 44 Albert, Carl B., 70, 72 Dutton, Frederick G., 42 Anderson, Clinton P., 48, 50 E B Edwards, Max N., 42 Bailey, John Moran, 65 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 37, 41 Barden, Graham A., 29 Elliot, Carl A., 40 Barkan, Alexander Elias, 83, 84 Barr, Joseph W., 42 F Bates, Harry C., 49 Bideler, Jack, 83 Farmer, James, 54 Biemiller, Nancy, 78 Feldman, Myer, 58, 59 Birkhead, Kenneth M., 42 Ford, Henry, II, 31 Bolling, Richard W., 23, 40, 53, 72, 74, 75 Furcolo, Foster, 35 Bookbinder, Hyman Harry, 60 Brown, Clarence J., 54 G
C Garner, John Nance, 19 Goldberg, Arthur J., 16, 17, 21, 45, 60 Cabell, Waller B., 35 Goldwater, Barry M., 49, 81 Califano, Joseph A., Jr., 35, 59 Carey, Hugh Leo, 26 H Carswell, G. Harrold, 25 Carter, Jimmy, 31 Halleck, Charles A., 53, 54 Case, Clifford Philip, 47 Harlow, Bryce Nathaniel, 37 Celler, Emanuel, 21, 22, 53 Harris, Thomas Everett, 21, 44 Chisholm, Shirley Anita, 69 Haynsworth, Clement F., Jr., 25 Cohen, Wilbur J., 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 59 Hill, Lister, 77 Colmer, William Meyers, 23 Hoffa, James Riddle, 20, 21, 22 Conway, Jack T., 53, 58 Hoover, J. Edgar, 22 Corcoran, Thomas G., 72 Hoving, John Hannes Forester, 61, 62 Crane, Philip Miller, 68, 69, 70 Humphrey, Hubert H., 28, 51, 52, 54, 68, 74, 79, Cruikshank, Nelson H., 18, 47 83 Curley, James Michael, 27 Curran, Joseph Edwin, 22 J Curtis, Thomas Bradford, 24 Javits, Jacob K., 47, 50 D Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 18, 19, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 39, 46, 53, 55, 59, 63, 65, 66, Daly, Charles U., 34, 36, 37 67, 68, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83 Delaney, James J., 26 Desautels, Claude John, 42 K Dies, Martin, Jr., 71 Dirksen, Everett M., 33, 54 Katzenbach, Nicholas deB., 42, 51, 53, 57, 58 Dodd, Thomas J., 83 Kennedy, Edward Moore, 36, 56, 84 Dolan, Joseph F., 41, 58 Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier, 47 O Kennedy, John F., 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, O’Brien, Lawrence F., 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 47, 50, 51, 58, 59, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65, 68, 62, 65, 66, 80 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 O’Donnell, Kenneth P., 52, 58, 68 Kennedy, Robert F., 20, 21, 22, 30, 44, 53, 58, 64, O’Mahoney, Joseph Christopher, 35 84 O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip”, Jr., 72 Keogh, Eugene James, 79 Kerr, Robert Samuel, 27, 28, 49, 50 P Kirkland, Lane, 52, 80 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 54 Pepper, Claude Denson, 49 Kuchel, Thomas H., 54, 65 Perkins, Carl D., 66, 73, 75 Petersen, Howard C., 62 L Peterson, Esther E., 17 Potofsky, James Samuel, 29 Landrum, Philip Mitchell, 70, 71 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 26, 53, 70, 73 Lashman, L. Edward, 33, 82 Lincoln, Evelyn N., 52, 58, 78 R Long, Russell B., 50, 84 Rankin, John E., 72 M Rauh, Joseph Louis, Jr., 19 Reedy, George E., Jr., 39, 55, 80 MacNeil, Neil, 65 Reuther, Walter P., 18, 19, 31, 53, 69 Maguire, Richard V., 64 Rayburn, Samuel Taliaferro, 23, 27, 28, 39, 55, 71, Manatos, Mike N., 34, 35, 66, 67 72, 73, 74 Mansfield, Mike, 51 Ribicoff, Abraham Alexander, 27, 74 Martin, William C., Jr., 82 Rieve, Emil, 19, 20 McCarthy, Eugene J., 83 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 19, 20, 60 McCormack, Edward J., Jr., 56 Roosevelt, James, 23, 71 McCormack, John William, 25, 26, 27, 55, 56, 68, Ruttenberg, Stanley H., 61 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 McDonald, David J., 19 S McGovern, George S., 85 McNamara, Patrick V., 28 Salinger, Pierre E.G., 17 Meany, Eugenie McMahon, 39, 76, 80 Schacter, Leon B., 45 Meany, George, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 30, Smathers, George Armistead, 34, 47, 49 31, 32, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 51, 52, 53, Smith, Howard W., 23, 71 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 69, 73, 76, 80, Smith, Margaret Chase, 76 81, 83 Sorensen, Theodore C., 39, 58, 60 Meredith, James Howard, 57 Sparkman, John J., 34 Merrick, Samuel Vaughan, 41 St. Antoine, Theodore J., 44 Miller, Herbert John, Jr., 21 Stennis, John C., 27 Mills, Wilbur Daigh, 47, 48, 70 Stevenson, Adlai E., 17 Mitchell, Clarence M., Jr., 52, 54, 75 Strauss, Robert S., 61 Monroney, Almer Stillwell “Mike”, 47, 49 Symington, Stuart, II, 38 Morgan, Thomas E., 63 Morse, Frank Bradford, 24 Murray, James E., 74, 77 T
Taft, Robert, 77 N Thomas, Norman, 20 Thompson, Frank, Jr., 40, 69, 72, 75 Nicholson, Donald W., 62 Thompson, Theo Ashton, 23 Nixon, Richard Milhous, 26, 47, 74, 84, 85 Troutman, Robert B., 30 Truman, Harry S., 20, 67, 74
U
Udall, Stewart L., 23, 42, 72
V
Vinson, Carl, 23, 40
W
Waggonner, Joseph David, Jr., 69, 75 Wagner, Robert Ferdinand, 76 Weaver, Robert C., 34 White, Byron R., 21 White, Lee C., 58, 59 Wilkins, Roy, 57 Williams, G. Mennen, 19 Wilson, Henry Hall, Jr., 24, 34, 36, 37, 40, 47, 48, 81 Wirtz, Willard, 16, 17, 63 Woll, Albert J., 44
Y
Young, John A., 72, 73
Z
Zablocki, Clement J., 63 Zack, Albert J., 17, 18, 19, 38, 39, 80