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The original documents are located in Box 1, folder "Correspondence, November 1974" of
the Bradley H. Patterson Files at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Copyright Notice
The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of
photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Gerald Ford donated to the United
States of America his copyrights in all of his unpublished writings in National Archives collections.
Works prepared by U.S. Government employees as part of their official duties are in the public
domain. The copyrights to materials written by other individuals or organizations are presumed to
remain with them. If you think any of the information displayed in the PDF is subject to a valid
copyright claim, please contact the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
Digitized from Box 1 of the Bradley H. Patterson Files at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
November 4, 1974
MEMORANDUM FOR:
MR. BUCHEN
SUBJECT:
Files of this Office re
Indians and Civil Rights
In accordance with your conversation with Mr. Garment,
I think it will be cleaner and easier not to try to keep
working papers from these files here, even though
they may be duplicates.
Therefore as soon as we can we will box up the files
described in the attachment to my memorandum of
October 25 and send them to the proper White House
depository.
GERALD R. LIBRARY FORD
Bradley H. Patterson, Jr.
Executive Assistant to
Leonard Garment
November 5, 1974
MEMORANDUM FOR:
JERRY JONES
FROM:
LEONARD GARMENT
Assistant to the President
SUBJECT:
Request for boxes
Please send to my office (Room 182) fifteen (15) boxes
for packing files. This is in compliance with the
memorandum from Mr. Buchen dated October 24, 1974
requesting materials of the Nixon Administration.
FORD LIBRARY is 07VU30
November 7, 1974
Dear Mr. Clayton:
I appreciate being one of those invited to attend your
Federal-State-Tribal Law Enforcement Meeting to
be held in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on November 13,
1974, but I am unable to attend as I am soon beginning
a new assignment here at the White House.
In accepting this new work, I will no longer be dealing
directly with matters involving Indian people. I am
of course delighted to see that you have invited Mr.
Dennis Ickes, Director, Office of Indian Rights,
Department of Justice; he is a responsible federal
official and in a position to make a major contribution
to your conference.
Cordially,
Bradley H. Patterson, Jr.
Mr. William F. Clayton
United States Attorney
231 Fed. Bldg. & U.S. Courthouse
400 S. Phillips
FORD is LIBRARY
Sloux Falls, South Dakota 57102
bcc: Mr. Dennis Ickes
FORD
DRAFT
11-8-74
NATIONAL LEGAL AID AND DEFENDER ASSOCIATION CONVENTION
The past, present and future of legal services is a mixture of the
familiar and unknowable. The idea of legal representation for the poor,
of course, has deep roots in the American legal system. The assimiliation
of this tradition to the Federal program initiated in 1965 by OEO involved a
unique and creative collaboration between bar and bureaucracy and
produced the most effective of all OEO programs, genuinely acknowledged
to be so by its critics and supported for its evident successes by persons
and groups representing a wide band of institutions and ideology. At an
early stage the problem of keeping legal services out of politics and
standing off the politicians generated strong support for the idea--finally
adapted from a proposal by the Ash Commission in 1971 that an independent
Legal Services Corporation be created.
While I can understand some of the reasons for locating the Office
of Economic Opportunity within the Executive Office of the President back
- 2
in 1965, none of those reasons ever applied very well to the Legal Services
enterprise. The Ash Committee was right; there should have been more
insulation and distance between the Legal Services work and the Office
of the President.
As all here know, from 1971 to 1974 a series of erratic and prolonged
legislative and executive branch battles were waged, which happily can
now be regarded with nostalgia rather than fear, and on July 25, 1974,
Public Law 94-393 was signed. It is rumored that a puff of white smoke
was seen issuing from a White House chimney that day. But whatever the
case, thousands of lawyers did in fact rejoice for at last we have a Legal
Services Corporation, no longer part of the Executive Office but
semi-independent in the Executive Branch itself. So far so good.
The statute is a compromise, hopefully and apparently a workable
one. In the generality of its provision it necessarily incorporates a
number of potential conflicting issues which are left for resolution by
regulation of the Board of Directors of the Corporation.
- 3
It also provides for an Ill-member Board of Directors to be
nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
I suppose you hope at this point that I shall make the White House
announcement as to who these 11 will be. Sorry. You will have to be
patient just a few days longer. The matter is pending before the President
and he has not yet made his final selection.
I would speculate in this way about the prospective Board: we
should all recognize that it will probably reflect a compromise of competing
interests. I am confident however that its members will be within
acceptable limits of professional competence and personal commitment to
the purposes of the new Act.
No, my task before you this noon is a different one. I would like
to try to look ahead -- to between now and the end of the decade and
examine the kind of American society in which the new Legal Services
Corporation will be functioning -- the kind of human resources universe
in which Project Directors and Staff Attorneys will be laboring -- and ask
how they will interrelate.
- 4
Where is our social order going in the next six years?
Perhaps I should just start and then also stop with Oretgay Gasset's
quote of
: "We don't know what is happening to us -- and that is
what is happening to us. 11 (check exact language)
But if I just stop there I am not even earning my lunch ticket, so
with some temerity I will go on a bit more.
All of us in the present and recent past have been observers of
and in fact participants in the engine of the American social system. I
have watched this engine, and in fact have pushed and pulled on some of
from a chair
its levers and buttons, from the top down, so to speak in the White House.
You have also been pushing and pulling on the social levers from the
bottom up, in the indispensable work you do with disadvantaged people
trying to get access upwards in that same social engine.
From our different perspectives, though, I suspect we may share
some similar observations on what kind of a social engine it is that we are
dealing with.
- 5
It's a pluralist engine, full of contending forces. If I were to
keep with a mechanical metaphore, it is an engine full of pistons firing
up and down in cylinders all awry from each other and with no crankshaft.
Business groups and unions, consumer groups and the elderly,
milk and cattle, sugar and grain lobbyists, mayors and county officials,
organized women, blacks, Indians and Spanish. And within these factions,
contending sub-factions: urban Indians versus Reservation Indians, the
National Tribal Chairmen fending off the A.I.M.
These groups individually, and especially when looked at en masse,
exemplify that familiar and apt description of the American scene so often
used: the revolution of rising expectations. The revolution is in part one
of sheer numbers: one, two or three decades ago, hundreds of today's
special interests groups didn't even exist; the American Indian Movement
is only four years old. In the bountiful American social testtube, groups
like these are forming and subdividing like cells in warm sugar water. And
6
let none of us be under any illusions that the "rising expectations" are
slowing down either. Just a week ago, when I began preparing this
speech, the Wall Street Journal reported that labor lobbyists now want
a law guaranteeing state and local government employees the right to
strike, the National Council of Senior Citizens wants to make the Social
Security Administration independent of any federal budget restrictions,
mass transit advocates want a $12 billion aid package, and that the National
Educational Association is calling for school aid to go up an additional
$25 billion in the next five years.
In a perceptive article in the current Public Interest, scholar
Daniel Bell describes this cacaphony of demands:
"Today.
the satisfaction of private wants and the redress
of persived inequities are not pursued, individually, through
the market, but politically by the group, through the public
household.
The modern appetite wants to enhance some
individuals, at the expense of others, and to aggrandize all,
through the public household. But the difficulty is that the
public household in the 20th centry is not a community but
an arena, in which there are no normative rules -- other
than bargaining to define the common good and adjudicate
the conflicting claims on the basis of rights. 11
- 7
The question before all of us social philosophers is: if there
are no normative rules, how does that bargaining get reSolved?
You, the present members and associates of the National Legal
Aid and Defenders Association, and you wherever you are, the future
recipients and staff associates of the new Legal Services Corporation,
have, I would think, a rather vivid interest in this question of social
allocation. You have been on the front lines of the allocation struggle
for more than fifty years; the Executive Office of the President itself
has been in that struggle with you for the last 9.
Perhaps it would be relevant, as we stand together at this new
transition point, to try to peer ahead and see what the alternative models
might be of the social decision-making process in the near future.
I can conceive of perhaps three models.
Model I is a straight-line extension of what is happening in the
present: pluralist factions better and better organized and thus more and
more strident in the bargaining process. The locus of decision-making
would lie
- 8
somewhere among a set of ractured political parties, a beleagured
Presidency, a pressured Congress and overloaded Courts, all four of
which profess not to be moved by, but actually are acutely aware of such
tragicomedies as the # guerilla theater at Wounded Knee, anti-bussing mobs
in Boston or food distribution to the poor by the Symbionese Liberation
Army.
The old, accustomed political and social bargaining process would
past
through
continue in this model, the elections just held, the political
(and into)
and economic jockeying during the next two years, what proises promises
to be turbulent political conventions, at least for the Democrats, of 1976
and in the elections that Fall.
FORD
The result, in this model, is more of what we have had for the
past ten years: no one group gives up anything substantial for any
other group. they simply agree that the federal government should will supply the most
needs stated) of both
everybody.) Black colleges will get more, and so will the Indians.
- 9
Cattlemen and sugar growers will be pacified, and food stamps will
increase in value. The "wants" of yesterday will become the entitlements
of tomorrow: guaranteed education (at government subdidy), guaranteed
employment (if necessary by the government itself.) But E the wants and
are
appetites are limitless; the various groups increasingly efficacious in
their "demands" and in their appeal to mass media. Where is the end of
A
all this, given the much more finite limits to the revenues which can be
extracted from taxpayers?
Suppose real economic growth slows down and with it the ability
to tax and pay for constantly increasing increased governmental services
without cutting into that growth still further? Without normative rules,
and with the federal government perhaps much less able directly to
provide all the services so stridently demanded, how will the bargaining
be done and the compromises be reached? I hear talk that our Bicentennial
celebration may be marred again and again by confrontation tactics on the
part of factious groups who, poignantly, will want to use the 200th anniversary
of our nation to provide that the social processes of that very nation do
- 10
not work fast enough to suit them. I even hear discussion of the need
to safeguard our nuclear weapons storage sites not against any foreign
enemy, but against domestic guerillas who might be tempted to engage
in what might be called ultimate social bargaining.
Scare stuff, I suppose, but where does our Model I social order
go after Wounded Knee and South Boston? And in this milieu what contribution
can Legal Services lawyers make? Like PR men for the sugar lobby or
the National Rifle Association, add to the cacophony?
Parenthetically, this discussion reminds me of a sign which
after only a few months in the White House I ordered my secretary to
make and hang on my wall. It read: Patience NOW
1)
There is a second model one might describe. In fact it has been
described by Hans Morthenthau in the current issue of The New Republic.
"One realizes", he says,
"that the crisis of democratic governments is but a special
case of the crisis of government as such. That is to say,
contemporary governments--regardless of their type, composition,
program, ideology -- are unable to govern in accord with
the three requirements of legitimate government. They
are no longer able to protect the lives, to guarantee the liberty,
- 11
and to facilitate the pursuit of happiness of their citizens.
Governments are thus incapacitated because their operations
are hopelessly at odds with the requirements or potentialities
of modern technology and the organization it permits and
requires.
It has become trivil to say -- because it is so obvious and
has been said so often that the modern technologies of
transportation, communication and warfare have made the
nation-state, as principle of political organization, as obsolete
as the first industrial revolution of the steam engine did
feudalism. While the official governments of the nation-states
go through the constitutional motions of governing, most of the
decisions that affect the vital concerns of the citizens are
rendered by those who control these technologies, their
production, their distribution, their operation, their price.
The official governments can at best marginally influence these
controls, but by and large they are compelled to accommodate
themselves to them. They are helpless in the face of steel
companies raising the price of steel or a union's striking for
and receiving higher wages. Thus governments, regardless
of their individual peculiarities, are helpless in the face of
inflation; for the relevant substantive decisions are not made
by them but by private governments whom the official governments
are unwilling or unable to control. Thus we live, as was pointed
out long ago, under the rule of a 'new feudalism' whose private
governments reduce the official ones to a largely marginal
and ceremonial existence. "
Morthenthau concludes:
"The decline of official government, both in general and in its
democratic form, has still another consequence, transcending
form, has still another consequence, transcending the confines of
politics. In a secular age men all over the world have expected
and worked for salvation through the democratic republic or
the classless society of socialism rather than through the kingdom
of God. Their expectations have been disappointed. The charisma
of democracy, with its faith in the rationality and virtue of the
masses, has no more survived the historic experience of mass
irrationality and the excesses of fascism and of the impotence
and corruption of democratic government, than the charisma of
Marxism-Leninism has survived the revelations of the true
nature of Communist government and the falsity of its eschatological
expectations. No new political faith has replaced the ones lost.
- 12
There exists then a broad and deep vacuum where there was
once a firm belief and expectation, presumably derived from
rational analysis.
No civilized government that is not founded on such a faith and
rational expectation can endure in the long run. This vacuum will
either be filled by a new faith carried by new social forces that
will create new political institutions and procedures commensurate
with the new tasks; or the forces of the status quo threatened
with disintegration will use their vast material powers to try
to reintegrate society through totalitarian manipulation of the
citizens' minds and the terror of physical compulsion."
Suppose Morthanthau is right. Suppose both governments and their
citizens, especially their most disadvantaged citizens, are indeed "compelled
to accomodate themselves" to decisions made by mega-institutions like the
Under this Madel II
global corporations. 1 is not the whole work of the Legal Services Corporation
then very much like what Marx called the role of the Church: merely the opiate
of the people?
FOND
There may yet be a third model, and for this insight I am
LIBRARY
again indebted to Daniel Bell in his article "The Public Household" in the
current Public Interest".
He starts with the Model I of today's pluralism. "The peculiar
strength of a modern democratic polity", he observes, "is that is can
13
include so many interests. True, the very increase in their number,
and their concentration in the political arena, lead to an overload, a
fragmentation, and often a politics of stalemate. Yet the nature and
character of the diverse group interests cannot be denied for that is the
character of a contemporary democratic polity. "
Bell makes another observation: no one of these pluralist
contenders for public favor and the public purse can unite the others, or
can claim an overriding priority. A nation at war might, I suppose,
pose such an overriding priority, but after our Vietnam experience I am
not even sure of that any longer.
Bell then turns to searchx for a principle of allocation -- an
alternative to the criterion of mere stridency which tends to be the end-point
in Model I and to the totalitarian manipulation hinted at in Model II. He wants
to find a statement of principle from which could flow the rules and rights
of "the public household" (which of course is distinct from the domestic
household and from the free enterprise marketplace).
14
What Bell asserts is that that the social allocation process should
be governed by what he calls the "principle of relevant differences". We
some
treat some of our citizens differently because
differences are relevant:
the progressive income tax distributes a differential burden; the more
lenient treatment of youthful offenders is another example; but there is
a relevancy to each of those disproportionate obligations. Eight years ago the
Selective Service System also tried to levy a disproportionate but relevant
burden on young men but, as a Presidential Commission under Burke
Marshall found, carried out its mandate in a way full of other disproportionalities
which were irrelevant, as affecting students and minority and
disadvantaged registrants.
The number and type of automobiles a man owns is and should be
relevant to his income; the adequacy of his family's health care is probably
irrelevant to his wealth.
- 15
Bending over backwards to attract minority candidates into medical
a
school may be differential but relevant treatment in the overall practice
A
of medicine in the United States; but in the final licensing and examination
of doctors as such, race is an irrelevant difference.
Bell, quoting Michael Walzer, sums it up by saying that "a relevant
principle is 'the abolition of the power of money outside its sphere
a society
in which wealth is no longer convertible into social goods with which it has
no intrinsic connection. 1 11 The example of the principle of relevant
differences best known to all of us here is that of access to legal services:
it should be irrelevant to wealth.
FORD
CRAED
There may be other services and rights with which money should
LIBRARY
have "no intrinsic connection" I think it will be the task of the Legal
Services community to help define those services and rights -- to help set
forth the necessary distinctions between relevant and irrelevant differences.
The ERA is an example of a current effort to set a new distinction. Once
- 16
those distinctions are more clear, a social allocation process among
competing pluralist demands has a chance of being supported.
Relevant differences can be the cause of differential treatment,
and be understood as such;
correspondingly, we can work more
effectively to eradicate differential treatment which is based on only
irrelevant differences.
I would stress that what differentiates Model III from Model I is
what I mentioned: that "principle of relevant differences". There are
differences which XXX are relevant. I can share with you two poignant
examples from my years in the White House.
We faced, as you remember, the question of what action to take
when the Supreme Court in the 1970-71 period lost its patience with
foot-dragging on school integration and mandated integrated schools
in de jure areas "forthwith".
The irrelevant difference was black vs white: state-action
segregation was unconsitutional no matter what color child was affected;
the practice was to stop.
17
there
The relevant difference was between A school systems unprepared
for the courts' mandate and unsophisticated in how to integrate, vs systems
not under such pressure.
We resisted the pressure to mix up these distinctions; we worked
assiduously with local citizen groups to make the courts' mandates a
reality. But we also proposed -- and the Congress finally enacted -- a
special aid program where federal funds went to those school districts
under the gun, as differentiated from those which were not. The legislation,
however, itself had a sharp edge: any community which itself acted as if
that distinction did not exist and which let any of the aid money be used
to support the irrelevant differences, was immediately ineligible.
The second example was in dealing with Indian militancy. There
is no relevant difference between a demonstrator making his point
graphically, to the full extent what our free speech doctrine will allow
and a soap-boxer at Columbus Circle.
- 18
On the other hand, a relevant difference -- which justifies
there is
differential treatment, between felonious and non-felonious conduct.
Which was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz?
included as it
--
did
embarrassing and in fact threatening antics, bordering on the felonious
We determined that even this guerilla theater exhibited a difference between
amendment rights and the commission of felonies, and for a year
and a half let the demonstration go on, in the face of painful criticism
on the one hand that we were soft on criminals and, on the other hand, that
we did not sympathize enough with the Indian cause which was being only
innocently stated.
GERALD
FORD & LIBRARY
At Wounded Knee the issue was the same but the degree of intensity
far higher. Clearly the burning and sacking were felonious conduct, but
Can actual
formal
was it insurrection demanding al Presidential finding and the use of
federal troops? -- a relevant distinction of enormous consequence. We
determined that it was not of an insurrection character, withheld the use
of troops, end the occupation by negotiation -- and then we went to trial later
on the felony indictments.
- 19
These examples point up a most important addendum to the
principle of "relevant differences": determining which is which in a
murky and chaotic factual xxx situation is a special art in itself, and
is an action which both Legal Services attorneys and government policy-makers
are advised to enter into with especial perspicuity.
Turning again from examples to abstractions:
in the
Model III which Bell outlines and to which I subscribe, a "new social
compact" is proposed, the core of which is "recognition of the limits
of resources and the priority of needs, individual and social, over
unlimited appetites and wants".
I should emphasize one other characteristic of this third modèl:
movement toward governmental financing of but not actual provision of
those social services which should be the entitlement of all, irrelevent to
differences in wealth, race or sex. If the Great Society format was
government housing, government hospitals and (for Indians) government
schools, I think the model of community development and human resources
20
distribution into which we are moving now - - and which we should
accelerate -- is one of basic rights and entitlements directly to the
Individual - DSXEEE often in the form of cash so that the individual
can choose his own health, housing, educational and, yes, even someday
his own legal services, without what Bell calls the "bureaucratic overload"
of which goes with the government's furnishing these services itself.
If we should try to move toward the "new social compact" which
Bell describes, what are the consequences of this movement for the new
Legal Services Corporation and for legal aid and defender work in general?
First of all, it seems, to me, as human resources programs
move from a discretionary meeting of wants to a mandatory meeting of
entitlements, yourjob is made easier. OEO, and the whole human resources
community, was so full of so many "experimental" and "demonstration"
programs for so long. I am sure you and your clients often found it painful to
try to get into Headstart classes or Job Corps camps or to try to get
continuation for a second year of a program funded for a first-year-only,
- 21
only to be told that the enterprise in question was a "demonstration"
project and that its admissions or continued funding were not a matter of
your client's right, but were wholly discretionary. Hopefully the new
Congress assembling in January will, in cooperation with our new President,
make some progress in the areas of health insurance and income maintenance
and move toward entitlement rather than discretion as the principle of
program operations.
A second type of movement in the human and community development
resources area is a product of initiatives and legislation in the early '70's:
revenue-sharing. Not only in general revenue-sharing, but in the areas
of manpower and housing, decisions on programs and on the accompanying
resources are being shifted from the banks of the Potomac to City Councils
and County Commissioners. These officials are much more accessible
to you and your clients: you can get to them easier and watch over them
more directly. You can attend their hearings, speak up at their meetings
often in
(thanks to the Vatues Regats
(and your clients can vote for them
setting where their votes make a
difference).
22
The poor citizen and his Legal Services lawyer will now tend to
start off on a different footing together than was the case in 1965: the
citizen with some resources of his own, with some clearer entitlements,
and with his local government nearby itself provided with some of the
extra resources he needs and to which he is entitled. Insofar as law
reform may still need to be part of the Legal Services agenda, class action
suits will be in this new setting of problems, rights and resources close
at hand. It will be a home-town job.
Example: if there is a Legal Services job to do on the Pine Ridge
Indian Reservation, it will be to help the poorest Oglalla Sioux Indian
assert his rights vis a vis the Tribal Judge, the Tribal Courts, the
Tribal Police and the Tribal Council in Pine Ridge; it will not be directed
to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington or the Governor of
South Dakota in Aberdeen.
If there is a disadvantaged client in Fresno who needs legal help,
the forum of focus will likely be right there in Fresno, less likely in
Sacramento and least of all in Washington.
- 23
There may be however, one area of exception to this principle:
civil rights protections under general revenue-sharing. These protections
are federal, they come under Title VI of the Federal Civil Rights Act
and they are, in the end, federally enforced. As general revenue-sharing
expands and is continued for another five years, Legal Services
attorneys would do well to xk keep a special eye on the special "entitlements"
which Title VI confers on the potential recipients -- and to be ready to
bring them to the attention of both local and the Federal government if
necessary.
You know, as I do, that these first nine years of Legal Services
have been full of tumult and controversy. There have been times when
FORD & LIBRARY
you have taken local, State and Federal Governments to task.
In looking ahead, as I am trying to do, I see perhaps not less
litigation, but more recognition of the value of that litigation by us
administrators.
In preparing this speech I called up one of the federal governments
24
top operating executives. He told me of about several suits which had
been brought against the Department of Labor, two, for instance, alleging
that
State Employment Services were not delivering services to
migrants according to the Employment Services' own plans of operations.
In both instances consent decrees were obtained, the Court set up Review
Boards. It was painful for the government to admit error but the Review
Boards are now going to see to it that a whole new series of actions are
taken so that the Federal and State officers live up to their own plans
and promises. At first, I am told, the Federal agency people were
The reforms maudated by the Review Boards)
miffed, but now they see this procedure as a model for their agency.
In the current legislative debate about the future of OEO, I was
impressed by the numbers and kinds of communications coming into the
Congress from State and local government officials: urging the Congress
to extend the Community Action Probram. The new Corporation thus
begins, as I see it, with a sophistication and a degree of sensitivity on
- 25
on the part of Federal and local administrators which was not at all
present nine years ago. Which of us would have thought in 1969 that one
former OEO Administrator would now Under Secretary of HEW, and
another would be Chief of Staff to the President of the United States?
There is one other function which I see Project attorneys and
Defenders fulfilling (nothing new to you I am sure, but an indispensable
task): being the first and closest source of information about clients
rights and the operations of government. In these days of computers,
instantane{ous transmission of mega-information, retrieval and display
systems, etc., one would think that Federal and State governments
would have some system of communicating to their most disadvantaged
citizens simple and comprehensive statements of their rights and
FORD
eligibilities. Alas no. The rights are there, but it seems as though the
LIBRARY
people who are in charge of informing the poor are alumni of CIA's
Division of Clandestine Services.
- 26
A poor person's transportation expenses to and from a hospital
can now be considered a proper Medicaid expense. How many Medicaid
recipients know this? Every Medicaid child is entitled to a health screening
exam. How many of their parents know this? Nine years of individual
and class action lawsuits have defined and clarified one right after another
that poor people and/or minority have vis a vis governmental institutions
and services. But where is the tote-board, the display console, the
computer print-out of what these rights and entitlements are? I don't
think it exists. You, each of you, are the display consoles, the walking
computers, the information system between the government and the poor.
It is a task you have been performing for nine years and a task you must
continue to do; if you don't do, it, it doesn't get done.
- 27
I should not conclude without assigning you generally and this
organization specifically, one more task. This is to help the new
Corporation look ahead, to anticipate the initial policy questions with
which the new Board of Directors will be faced, and to have ready for
their consideration your own ideas of alternative and recommended
directions.
The new Board will set the conditions of employment for its
staff and this will in turn have a great deal of effect on those same
conditions within each recipient project group. Tenure and salary level
are crucial questions; the new Board should have your views. Each
Governor will be appointing a State Advisory Council which is to "notify"
the Corporation of any "apparent violation" of the new Statute or of the
FORD LIBRARY
Board's rules. Suppose there is such a "notification". What comes next?
What evidentiary requirements will be imposed on the State Advisory
Councils to back up their findings? Where will lie the burden of proof if
a recipient project is cast under such a cloud?
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Under the final version of the law, the Corporation is to do its
own research, training and technical assistance. What does NLADA
consider are the high-priority areas for such research and training?
What should the Corporation get into first?
The new Act mandates the Corporation to issue rules on a whole
series of questions and issues: what will be the proper income levels
for eligibility? What should be done to ensure that the neediest get the
first crack at the available services? How are "frivolous" appeals to be
defined" What is to be meant by "persistent incitement of litigation".
Governors' comments are to be invited prior to starting up any project.
Suppose they are negative? What weight is going to be assigned to them?
The new Corporation is directed to make a study of "alternative and
supplemental methods of delivery of legal services to eligible clients".
What are NLADA's views on these alternative approaches and the pros
and cons of each?
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I note in the Executive Director's Annual October Report for
1974 that NLADA has already been gathering ideas and materials. You
know what a timely enterprise this is and how important it will be for the
new Corporation to have your analyses and recommendations.
Perhaps I should conclude with an apology: that my talk this noon
has been so full of abstractions and deals so much with a murky analysis
of future contingencies.
From out of these conflicting and portentous abstractions I have
tried to look ahead a bit and identify the kinds of tasks which will fall
on the shoulders of those of you will continue to labor in this all-important
area.
The list, as I have indicated, is varied and long.
But if some of the foregoing analysis is murky, my concluding
admonition is as clear as spring-water: you must work at them with the
utmost professionalism.
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The Congress has told you that you must put aside picketing, dem-
onstrations, "frivolous" appeals and the "persistent incitement of
litigation".
I will tell you that you must also put aside any residual temptation
for malarchy or rhetoric, any secret desires to imitate either Sol Alinsky
or Jane Fonda.
Representing an Executive Branch that has had its Watergate,
not to mention its Kent State and Wounded Knee prosecutions, I am not sure
how much clout my words this noon bring with them.
But, to reverse an older adage, watch what I say rather than whka
what we do. Do a razor-honed job in each of these areas of responsibility --
whether it is determing the limits of "relevant differences", or filing for a
poor woman's divorce. It will be then your excellence, "playing in Peoria"
which will at last illumine the play in Washington.
November 11, 1974
Dear Jerry:
Thank you for your note and its thoughtful and proocative
attachments.
As of tomorrow morning, I shall be going on to a new
assignment here in the White House not connected with
Indian affairs. I want to wish you and your colleagues
well and particularly thank you for your courtesies and
special helpfulness.
Cordially,
Bradley H. Patterson, Jr.
Mr. Jerry Tuttle
12305 Eastridge Drive, N.E.
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87112
FORD & LIBRARY GERALD
Central Files