Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team's Retreat on Civil Rights

by Leon Panetta, Peter Gall

Leon Panetta's memoir of his time as Richard Nixon's Director of Civil Rights, criticizing the president's supposed indifference towards supporting desegregation policies and hostility to the black community.

380 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before becoming an eminence grise in the Democratic Party, Leon Panetta came to Washington as an idealistic young Republican, assigned to head the Office of Civil Rights under Richard Nixon. Barely a year later, Nixon fired Panetta for pursuing his prerogatives too zealously - a liberal victim to the President's Southern Strategy. Panetta's memoir (cowritten with journalist Peter Gall) recounts his brief service in scabrous detail; his efforts to enforce desegregation laws run afoul not only of predictable opposition from conservative congressmen and southern superintendents, but hostile White House aides John Ehrlichman and Harry Dent, and HEW Secretary Bob Finch, a mealy-mouthed pseudo-liberal who spoke grandly about racial equality then refused to act. Panetta obviously has an ax to grind, yet his cynical view of Nixon's civil rights policy has been verified by four decades of research (Nixon once responded to a complaint about his "confused" policy towards school integration by saying, "The confusion is deliberate"). More generally it's an evergreen cautionary tale of an idealist who comes to Washington hoping to change government for the better, only to see his efforts undercut by a cynical Administration interested only in solidifying its own power.