Inside: A Public and Private Life (Hardcover)

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From Publishers Weekly
This is the most revealing political memoir from a Washington insider since Katharine Graham's Personal History. Launched into government out of Harvard Law School after a boyhood in middle-class Brooklyn, Califano (b. 1931) was a player in many of the key political conflicts of the past half-century. A "whiz kid" in Robert McNamara's Pentagon, he rose to be virtually "deputy president" for domestic policies under Lyndon Johnson. As a high-powered Washington lawyer during Nixon's administration, he represented both the Democratic Party and the Washington Post during the Watergate crisis. As Jimmy Carter's secretary of health, education and welfare, he launched a controversial campaign against smoking, defended Title IX anti-sex discrimination rules on college sports and grappled with ethical issues like in vitro fertilization-indeed, a running theme of this frank autobiography is Califano's inner struggles to reconcile the demands of politics with the dictates of his Catholic upbringing. There are a few startling moments: a youthful Hillary Rodham cursing out Califano at a congressional hearing in 1970 (two years before applying for a job at his law firm); Califano advising his friend and White House chief of staff Alexander Haig to have Nixon burn the incriminating Watergate tapes; House Speaker Tip O'Neill warning Califano that tobacco firms were capable of having him murdered for his anti-smoking stand. LBJ, Post publisher Katharine Graham and law partner Edward Bennett Williams emerge as Califano's heroes, while the portraits of Carter and New York governor Mario Cuomo are scathing. In sum, this is a revealing self-portrait filled with vivid scenes from four decades near the center of American government. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Unless I overlook a figure of comparable magnitude, Joe Califano has had a finger in more, and bigger, pies in Washington than anyone else of his generation. From his days in the early Kennedy era as a thirtyish protégé of Robert McNamara and Cyrus Vance, he went on to the White House, where as a domestic policy counselor he helped design Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, then under Jimmy Carter to Health, Education and Welfare, of which he was the last secretary before Education was split off. And all this with profitable timeouts in law firms headed by such figures as Thomas E. Dewey, Paul Porter and Edward Bennett Williams. It's been a busy four decades.

But before wading through more than 500 pages, which open with fond accounts of his Italian Catholic boyhood in Brooklyn, the reader may ask what all the frantic activity amounts to. Were some of the pies mud pies? Yes, and Califano doesn't hide his failures and regrets. Indeed he seems to feel now that the world in which he maneuvered so brilliantly for so long has rotted a bit -- too much money chasing furtive influence, too many lawyers and lobbyists pulling hidden levers and invisible strings. This is a familiar refrain. Unaccountable processes have made many Americans cynical about politics and turned even some of the best public officials into mendicants. (It was, Califano writes, the prospect of having to raise a cool $8 million that prompted him to resist the urging of influential friends that he run for the U.S. Senate seat in New York vacated by the ailing Jacob Javits nearly 20 years ago.)

Nor does Califano palliate his own involvement in episodes typical of the twilit world. When the tranquilizers Valium and lithium, manufactured by Hoffmann-La Roche, were about to be listed as potentially addictive under a 1970 "dangerous substances" act, he approached House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Okla.) for help. Albert, a good man but an alcohol abuser himself, turned out also to be a regular user of one of the pills. He and Califano arranged to adjust the House version of the pending bill so as to remove the onus from the two tranquilizers, an operation worth billions to Califano's pharmaceutical client. Califano received a $500,000 bonus, above his billings. His partner, Paul Porter, more inured to such dealings, thought he should have asked for a million. The two tranquilizers are still widely abused.

Multiply the Valium-lithium deal by scores or hundreds, and you see why Washington has become the target of populist dissidents, right and left, who think the capital needs a roughing up by a latter-day Savonarola.

By no means all of Califano's private lawyering was of this secretive sort. Much of it was public-spirited. Of all his causes, the one he enjoyed most was his civil suit against the Nixon campaign's Committee to Re-elect the President after Watergate. The story includes an amusing whiff of the trickster's arts. His partner, Edward Bennett Williams, took the deposition of Nixon's former attorney general, John Mitchell, who headed CREEP. Williams confronted Mitchell with three large binders, labeled Mitchell I, II and III, and ostentatiously leafed through them as he questioned the ex-attorney general. Mitchell was naturally nervous. The notebook pages were blank.

In his intervals of private practice, Califano bought with reservations into the Edward Bennett Williams rationale that even rascals deserve lawyers, and that lawyers who do well are in a position to do good. It was the latter view that led to the monumental indiscretions, and fall, of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a great figure at the Washington bar and in government. Thinking it a good joke, Fortas brassily listed the White House as his office address in Who's Who -- he had been a constant confidential adviser to Johnson even as he helped rule as a justice on a number of politically sensitive matters; and he added indiscretion to impudence by accepting a $20,000-per-year lifetime honorarium from an old friend with important business before the court. Yet Califan