Interview with Powell Moore, December 8, 2009

BOB SHORT: I'm Bob Short and this is Reflections on Georgia Politics sponsored by the Duckworth Library at Young Harris College and the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies at the University of Georgia. Our guest is Powell Moore, a native Georgian who spent 42 years in Washington and who served on the staffs of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and G. W. Bush, as well as press secretary to our distinguished Senator Richard B. Russell. Powell, welcome to our oral history series.

POWELL MOORE: Thank you, Bob. I'm delighted to be here. Great to be here at the Russell Library. It brings back a lot of memories for me and I've been here since yesterday, plan to be here all week, and it's quite a experience.

SHORT: Well, with your permission, Powell, we'd like to divide our conversation into three parts. First, your early life and formative years. Secondly, your career as press secretary to Senator Russell. And, lastly, your experience in the federal government and, particularly, with the presidents. Milledgeville, Georgia.

MOORE: Well, I'm proud of the fact that I'm from Milledgeville, Georgia. Some people say it's a small town in middle Georgia. I think it's a lot more than that. All of my grandparents were born in Milledgeville and I think most of my great grandparents. My great grandfather began his association with the newspaper there in 1847 and, for four generations, we succeeded in continuing our association with the newspaper. And on my mother's side, my grandfather was 00:02:00a doctor and his sons were doctors and they cared for the sick and the infirm and people who had mental illness. So Milledgeville is a wonderful town, produced some very interesting people. Carl Vinson was one of the true giants of Congress in the last century. There's a great respect and appreciation for the work of Flannery O'Connor who comes from Milledgeville. We're proud of the fact that we have a former member of the Cabinet there in Bill Usery. And Milledgeville is a good place to grow up and has produced a lot of interesting people, and I'm lucky to have been born there.

SHORT: Congresswoman Tillie Fowler was also from Milledgeville.

MOORE: Exactly, exactly. She was a dear friend of mine. Growing up, she was younger and I didn't know her that well. And I think she went away to boarding school. She was a contemporary and friend of my younger sisters, but she and I 00:03:00became particularly close friends in Washington. And after she left the Congress, she continued to serve the country in a variety of capacities. And when I was in the Pentagon in the first term of the Bush administration -- the 43rd President George W. Bush's administration -- she helped us with a number of things. She participated in investigations involving sexual harassment problems at the Air Force Academy. She also helped join a commission that was composed of Harold Brown and Jim Schlesinger to look into the outrageous developments at Abu Ghraib a few years ago. And she just was rendering a tremendous service to our country even after she left Congress, and it was a tragedy that she died so young.

SHORT: I bet you knew her father.

MOORE: I knew him very well.

SHORT: He was a colorful character.

MOORE: He sure was, and he was a man who, I told her that he set an example of constituent service that extended beyond what most people expect. He was a master at constituent service. He looked after people. And we have a lot of state employees in Milledgeville because of the Milledgeville State Hospital and so forth. And when they had -- when his constituents had -- problems, he came to their rescue. He even helped me out a few times.

SHORT: That was, of course, Culver Kidd who was a state senator here for many, many years.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: Powell, you're a self-confessed Republican in a state that was controlled by Democrats for more than a century. As I recall, your dad was a Democrat. Why did you leave the fold?

MOORE: You know, I tell people that I was reared in Milledgeville, but I grew up when I was 21, 22 and 23 years old. I was in Germany as a young Lieutenant 00:05:00in the Army and it was a time of a lot of international developments and so forth, and a couple of things happened to me. We got involved in more political discussions, believe it or not, in those days in the Army than I had had previously. I read a book called Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater which had a huge impact on my generation. I read a couple of other books. I happened to go visit the Berlin Wall about three weeks after it went up, and it made me fairly conservative, especially when it comes to national security and foreign policy. And I just felt more at home in the Republican Party. And I thought that Republicans, you know, should nominate Barry 00:06:00Goldwater in 1964 and, for me to promote that process, I had to declare myself as a Republican.

SHORT: So that was your first political experience?

MOORE: Yep, first personal political experience. I'd observed politics for a long time, but we wanted a delegation to go to San Francisco committed to Senator Goldwater, so, in order to do that, I went to the county Republican convention. I was trying to sit in the back of the room and be inconspicuous, but they elected me the temporary convention chairman and they elected me a delegate to go to the Congressional district convention in Greensboro and the state convention in Atlanta. So I was hooked. And I remember walking out and saying to a friend of mine that, "I guess there's no turning back now. I'm a Republican having gone to this county convention and agreed to go to the 00:07:00district and state convention." But I'll say one thing, and I, therefore, forfeited the right to vote in the Democratic primary in my opinion, but I said, "I'll change that commitment if Richard Russell ever needs my vote in the Democratic Primary. I'll vote in the Democratic Primary."

SHORT: So, growing up in Milledgeville, you went to Georgia Military College.

MOORE: Yes, I did. Wonderful experience. A wonderful institution, and it is doing a tremendous job now under General Boylan, their president. It's an exceptional school that is working not only on academic pursuits, but also on the development of character and integrity among its students.

SHORT: And then to the University of Georgia.

MOORE: Then to the University of Georgia, where I majored in journalism and studied under the tutelage of John Drewry.

SHORT: A very famous man.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: What happened after that?

MOORE: Well, I went in the Army and went to Fort Benning for six months, went to Airborne School and Ranger School, and then I went to Germany and stayed there for two years. And I gave very serious consideration to making a career of the Army, and I came back from Germany and was assigned at Fort Benning as a tactical officer in the Officer Candidate School, but then I decided that I would go home to Milledgeville and reenter the newspaper business. And, by that time, my father had sold the newspaper to Peyton Anderson and things were not the same, so I stayed there a couple of years and wound up in the public affairs operation of Southern Natural Gas Company, the principal gas supplier for the state of Georgia, and was down at a meeting in New Orleans when I got a call 00:09:00from Bill Bates who was Senator Russell's press secretary, and he said that he thought that he had safely worked with Senator Russell for his reelection in '66 and his reelection seemed assured at that stage because he didn't have a serious opponent, so he was going to leave Senator Russell, go back to Atlanta, and several people had been mentioned as a possible successor and asked if I was. And I told him I'd think about it and then I went back and sat down and wrote Senator Russell a letter of a couple of pages about how I admired him and would like to work for him. Shortly thereafter, he called me and offered me the job on the telephone. And I said, "Well, Senator, I think before we come to a final 00:10:00agreement, I'd like to come up and talk to you." So I flew up to Washington and went to see him on a Saturday morning, and walked in there and said, "Senator, I'm really anxious to work for you, but you need to know that everybody in Georgia who knows me thinks I'm a Republican." And he says, "Well, I don't care if you're a black Muslim. I'm not hiring you for your politics. I'm hiring you because I want you to do what I tell you to do." So that ended that. We came to an agreement and I went to work for him two or three weeks later.

SHORT: Let's talk for a minute, Powell, about Senator Russell's political career before he entered the Senate. He was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives at the age of 23.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: And, from there, he shot upward immediately --

MOORE: Yep.

SHORT: -- to the United States Senate.

MOORE: Yeah, he was Speaker when he was 29, and he was elected I think when he 00:11:00was 23 in -- it would've been 1920. And he served in the House until 1930 when he was elected governor. He was the Speaker when he was 29, governor when he was -- elected when he was 32. I think he was 33 when he took office; his birthday's in November. And then while he was governor (I think Georgia had two-year terms at that time), Senator Harris passed away. And he appointed a seat-warmer, a man I think whose name was Cohen, Jack Cohen with the Atlanta Journal. And he then ran for the seat himself, and I think he ran against a Congressman Crisp, if I remember correctly.

SHORT: Charlie Crisp.

MOORE: And won that race and came to Washington. He told interesting stories about his first term there, that the leadership had a big headache in a former southern governor named Huey Long, and they didn't know whether they were gonna have another headache with him or not. And the way he told it, he told them he wanted to go on the Appropriations Committee and he said the leaders told him that, "Well, we normally don't put freshmen on the Appropriations Committee." He said, "Well, my constituent, Senator Harris, was on the Appropriations Committee. My constituents expect me to be on the Appropriations Committee, and I think if I can't be on the Appropriations Committee, I just don't want to be on a committee," is the way he told it. And then they gave in and he became a 00:13:00member of the Appropriations Committee as a freshman in 1933 and, remarkably, he was on the committee for 36 years before he became chairman because ahead of him was Carl Hayden of Arizona who served in Congress longer than any other man in history until a couple of weeks ago when Robert C. Byrd passed his record of over 56 years.

SHORT: What was your first impression of Senator Russell?

MOORE: Well, the first time I saw him was when I was a small boy and my aunt was in charge of the School Lunch Program and she wanted to have a picture of some Baldwin County school children presenting him with a letter of appreciation when he came through there in about 1946 or 1947. And so I had my picture 00:14:00taken, I was barefooted, handing him a photo -- a letter of appreciation for the School Lunch Program. And so that kind of developed an early interest to me in his career. And when he ran for president in 1952, my father said he'll put that picture on the front page if he wins. Of course, he didn't win and that was an experience for him. I remember very early working for him in Winder and driving down to, I think we went down to Thomaston, Georgia, to where he made a speech to the community down there about (I should've refreshed my recollection on this, I guess) the Flint River Water Project. And, coming back, he gave me 00:15:00the blow by blow account -- Bill Bates was in the car also -- a blow by blow account of his experience in running for president in 1952. Fascinating to sit there in car driving through the night in Georgia listening to him tell his story about the '52 campaign. And Bill Bates was, you know, he could chime in because he had been a reporter covering the convention in 1952.

SHORT: What did the Senator remember about the 1952 campaign?

MOORE: Well, one of the things was he said that he knew it was difficult for a southerner to win and that he thought that the Democratic nomination was not going to be worth much because of Eisenhower's popularity, but that he was convinced by his colleagues in the southern caucus to get into the Florida 00:16:00primary. And it was hard to get into the Florida primary and just be there to run in Florida because the members of the southern caucus were frightened by the prospect of Estes Kefauver being the nominee of the party. So he said that he got into the race to stop Estes Kefauver, and I think it's fair to say that Kefauver would have been nominated in '52 if he had not gotten into the race. He beat him in Florida. He won in south Florida and won in north Florida. And he won the Florida primary and then he went on to Chicago and he led -- I think Kefauver led -- the first ballot, he was second, and Stevenson was third. And then on the second ballot, Kefauver led and Stevenson was second and Russell was 00:17:00third. Then on the final ballot, Stevenson was nominated. So that was the end of his political aspirations.

SHORT: Did he consider himself really a serious candidate in 1952?

MOORE: I think I characterized it that he thought it was difficult for a southerner to win, and it was difficult for any Democrat to beat Eisenhower that year. And so, I mean, that was hindsight. I think people who were around him in '52 thought that he had hopes and it might happen. And he had a lot of support outside of the South. I think his campaign manager was a senator from Colorado and there were two or three Republican senators -- Milt Young of North Dakota and Karl Mundt of South Dakota who got themselves in trouble with the 00:18:00Republicans because they said, "If the Democrats are smart enough to nominate Dick Russell," that they would vote for him.

SHORT: Uh-huh. Harry Truman once said that if Senator Russell had been from anywhere except the South, ...

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: ...he would've been president.

MOORE: I think he said Indiana, Missouri or Kentucky. He..

SHORT: Yeah.

MOORE: ...would've been president. And he was the most qualified. That's what Truman said, he was the most qualified man to be president.

SHORT: How would you describe Senator Russell's political philosophy?

MOORE: Oh, I think he described it himself pretty well when he says, "In hard times, I'm a liberal and, in good times, I'm a conservative." And he was a very frugal man. He was frugal in his own habits and he was -- some people would stay he was stingy. But I would say he was frugal. And he, you know, was frugal with the taxpayers' money. Of course, the Atlanta Constitution 00:19:00occasionally would say that he was frugal with the taxpayers' money until he involved things in his own back yard, but he did believe in public works and in the importance of building power projects and dams and good roads and he said that he voted against a lot of spending programs. But when he lost the vote and the money was there, that he would beat his way to the head of the line to get the money for Georgia. It didn't bother him. You know, they accuse some people like Bob Byrd now for bringing too much pork to West Virginia. And, you know, the attitude of people on the Appropriations Committee is that you need to look after your constituents. And on this campus. He told a story that when he was 00:20:00Governor that he used a very small amount of his contingency funds to help a researcher named Charles Herty (who also happens to be from Milledgeville). I should have mentioned him as one of its outstanding students -- or citizens. But that the Herty research provided the basis for the pulp and paper industry in Georgia, and it really paid off in a big way and he was a big believer in putting money into research. And, you know, you have the Richard Russell Agriculture Utilization Building here in Athens that does agricultural research. You've got, I think there's a fruit and nut lab down in Byron, Georgia, that does research on growing peaches and pecans. And he was a firm believer in 00:21:00investing in research.

SHORT: You know, Georgia's been in a water war for gosh knows how many years now.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: But where would we be had not Senator Russell got the Lake Lanier Dam?

MOORE: It'd be a big problem. It'd be a big problem. When I was in the Pentagon, my friends over at the Department of Army who were involved with the Corps of Engineers used to walk down the hall and you could say, "What's the level of Lake Lanier today?" And they can tell you. I had friends in the Pentagon who got in the middle of the Georgia/Alabama dispute and they said -- it was my friend, Pete Geren, who was the secretary of army who was from Texas, former member of Congress from Texas, said that, "You know, we thought we had tough water wars out in Texas. In Texas, they say whiskey is for drinking and 00:22:00water is for fighting." He said, "But I've never seen anything like the dispute between Alabama and Georgia over water." And he and I had the same problem, you know. We've got good friends like Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions in the Alabama delegation and, of course, I have a little bias towards Georgia, so I'm glad I didn't have to get into the middle of that fight.

SHORT: Let's talk for a minute about your duties in the Senator's office. You were press secretary. But you had to deal, unlike many press secretaries, with the entire national media because of his stature. Tell us a little bit about that.

MOORE: Well, I think Senator Russell, at that stage of his game, he was no longer running for president and he felt a special obligation to be available to the Georgia media more than the national media and it used to frustrate them, 00:23:00the national media, a little bit that he would occasionally call a press conference and, you know, include only representatives of the Georgia press. And he just was more comfortable. We had two very fine reporters when I was his press secretary from the Atlanta Journal and the Constitution. Wayne Kelly with Atlanta Journal and Art Pine with the Atlanta Constitution. And they did an exceptional job of covering him and I thought they were exceedingly fair. There were times when we might have disagreements on their coverage -- but, also, he had pretty much a standing request to go up into the radio/TV gallery and all three networks always wanted him. He had standing requests to go on Meet the 00:24:00Press and Face the Nation and, in those days, the ABC program was Issues and Answers, and he would say, "Well, I don't want to go on one of those programs unless I've got something I really want to say, I've got a message I want to get out, and I just don't have a message this week." Unlike a lot of senators who basically would, you know, jump at every opportunity to get their face on television, he just didn't think it was necessary.

SHORT: He was a very private person.

MOORE: Yes, he was. Sure was. Bachelor. Lifelong bachelor. You know, he frequently said that one of his regrets was that he never got married, but I think the way he would put it, he says, "I regret I never took a wife." So he --

SHORT: But he did have a serious romance.

MOORE: Yeah, he did.

SHORT: One time.

MOORE: Yeah, a couple of them.

SHORT: Uh-huh.

MOORE: So it wasn't just particularly serious, which I only have secondhand knowledge of. Yeah, he did talk to me a couple of times about his --

SHORT: He was very close to his mother.

MOORE: I think so. She had, of course, passed away by the time I had --

SHORT: Yeah.

MOORE: -- but he was very fond of his mother. He said one time that he was a grown man before he'd ever seen her sleep, that he didn't think she ever slept, but...

SHORT: He had quite a big family.

MOORE: Yeah, he did, and he was proud of his family and they were a family of achievers. I went by his cemetery yesterday and you see his brother, Jeb 00:26:00Russell, was an exceptional Presbyterian clergyman. He had one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the country in Memphis, Tennessee. His brother, Fielding, was a scholar in English at Georgia Southern. You probably had him as a professor.

SHORT: I certainly did.

MOORE: And he was -- but all of his sisters, you know, Ms. Ina Stacy and Mrs. Peterson, they were truly an exceptional group of people. And Judge Russell and Judge and Mrs. Russell did a heck of a job raising that family. Now one thing I should mention -- you asked me about Milledgeville -- is Judge Russell was in the Legislature in the 1880's and introduced the legislation that established Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville. That, in the 1880's, they 00:27:00established a technology school in Atlanta for boys. Some people call it Georgia Tech. And then the women came and said, "You know, it's time you do something for Georgia girls," so Judge Russell introduced the legislation to establish Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, which is now Georgia College and State University. And there were people that said he had conflict of interest in that because he had about six daughters that he had to send to college. And all of them except Mrs. Stacy, I think, went to school in Milledgeville. And there's a library down there that's named for his mother, Senator Russell's mother, and the auditorium is named for his father.

SHORT: His mother was First Lady when he was Governor.

MOORE: Yes, yes, exactly.

SHORT: Powell, you spent many hours away from the office with Senator Russell. What was he like away from the Senate? Did he have any hobbies or --

MOORE: Well, he was a reader. I remember the Washington paper had a series in their book section called A Portrait of a Man Reading, and they did a feature on him one time, A Portrait of a Man Reading, and he was interested in literature and reading; and didn't do too much of it in his later years, but I think there was a time when he'd go to Gettysburg and Chancellorsville and visit around. But he had a keen interest in history and that's the reason this library is such an important tribute to him because it's in research and studies of political activities is a contribution that he would approve of.

SHORT: He also liked baseball.

MOORE: Yes, he did. Yeah, he kept up with baseball. And he lived and died by the Georgia Bulldogs. He was a great fan of the Bulldogs and, you know, knew the players' numbers and statistics and so forth. And we had a WATS line in the office and I would get a speakerphone installed during football season, pay for it myself, and I'd get a friend to lay the phone next to, I guess it was probably in those days, Ed Thilenius, maybe Larry Munson, had by then and we'd listen to the Georgia game and he'd pick up the phone and listen to the Georgia game on Saturday afternoon.

SHORT: It's generally accepted that Senator Russell was responsible for the rise of Senator Lyndon Johnson, first as minority leader, then as majority 00:30:00leader, later as vice president and, finally, president. What created that bond between them?

MOORE: I think they first met each other when they were collaborating on the rural electrification administration back in the '30s. I think that's the first time Lyndon Johnson came to his attention. And I think when he got elected to the Senate in 1948, he courted Senator Russell because he was on the Senate Armed Services Committee and knew the key to his success was getting along with Senator Russell. There have been suggestions that Johnson manipulated Senator 00:31:00Russell, but I don't think Senator Russell was a man who was very easily manipulated. And I think that he willingly supported President Johnson, and he -- it was a funny situation. In 1950, the majority leader, the Democratic leader in the Senate whose name was Scott Lucas, was defeated by Everett Dirksen in Illinois. So there was a vacancy in the majority leader's position. Senator Russell I guess was instrumental -- and he could have been elected majority leader himself if he had been willing to be a candidate, but he thought he would have to sacrifice too much of his independence to go along with the caucus, 00:32:00including the fact that it would've made it difficult for him to oppose Civil Rights legislation, quite honestly. And they worked to elect Senator McFarland from Arizona to be majority leader. And they spent all their time working it out, and the way Senator Russell used to tell the story, that they were so focused on majority leader that they didn't focus much on the whip's position, and he said, "I was walking to the caucus with Johnson and I said, 'Lyndon, we haven't picked anybody to be whip so maybe you're just gonna have to be whip'." And so he nominated him to be the whip and he was elected, even though he had only been in the Senate two years. And then two years later, Barry Goldwater 00:33:00beat Senator McFarland. And it's funny, how Majority Leaders on the Democratic side have trouble. And Tom Daschle, more recently, can vouch for that. But then Johnson having been the Whip for two years was a logical one to emerge in 1953. And then a minority -- he was a minority leader because the Republicans controlled the Senate in '53 and '54.

SHORT: There was a time when Senator Russell and President Johnson were so close that the Senator made frequent visits to the White House.

MOORE: Yeah. Yeah.

SHORT: Those waned in the latter years.

MOORE: Yeah. Yeah.

SHORT: What caused that?

MOORE: Well, there were a number of things, I think. There were two members of 00:34:00President Johnson's cabinet that Senator Russell really didn't admire very much, and that was the Attorney General Ramsey Clark and the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And those, the problems that he had with them spilled over a little bit. They had a big dust-up because of Ramsey Clark's involvement over the selection of a federal judge in Georgia named Alex Lawrence.

SHORT: Who was a good friend of Senator Russell.

MOORE: A good friend of Senator Russell. He was the only man, later went to the Justice Department and the guy handling the judicial nominees said he was the only man over 60 years old who got an exceptionally well qualified rating from the American Bar Association. He was very, very highly regarded in Georgia. And they had some anonymous tips from people in Savannah that went to 00:35:00Ramsey Clark that said he had "traditional southern views". And so that was a problem for Ramsey Clark, and that created some tension between Senator Russell and President Johnson, and President Johnson, I think he said one time that President Johnson said, "Well, if I nominate Alex Lawrence," he says, "the Attorney General says he's gonna quit." And Senator Russell said, "Well, Mr. President, that's the best thing that could happen to your administration." So, anyway, that was a problem. And then Senator Russell opposed President Johnson's nominee to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas, and that was important to President Johnson. My experience with presidents is that 00:36:00they kind of take it personally when you turn down their nominees, and and the whole Vietnam -- the tension caused by the Vietnam War. Senator Russell was viewed as a man of the Senate, but he also had a great sensitivity about the difficulties of being president, and he was not one who ever took cheap shots at the president. But he and Mendel Rivers and other members of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Jackson, Senator Goldwater, Senator Tower, all believed that we should do what President Nixon did in May of '72, and that is close the Port of Haiphong and cut off the rail traffic coming down from China to stop the 00:37:00re-supply of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. And they were in favor of a more vigorous pursuit of our technical superiority to deal with the Vietnam situation and it created some disagreement.

SHORT: Senator Russell was very much involved in world affairs. What was his philosophy on war?

MOORE: Well, that's hard to say. He opposed -- when the French won the siege at Dien Bien Phu -- he opposed when the Eisenhower administration that we were gonna go in in a large way and try to bail out the French. He believed in what 00:38:00Douglas MacArthur said, and that is that we should never get involved in a land war on the continent of Asia. And he was reluctant and absolutely opposed to sending troops to Vietnam. He tells a story of Thurgood Marshall -- not Thurgood Marshall -- Thruston Morton of Kentucky was the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, a position I later held, and went down to Georgia to tell Senator Russell, who was about to be chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator George, who was about to be chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, that we were committing some technicians and advisors to Vietnam and that he said, "This is a terrible mistake. You can send a couple of thousand 00:39:00there now and it'll be tens of thousands later." And he turned out to be right. The Vietnam War was a heavy burden for him. I remember in early '68 -- '68 was a, you know, a lot of turmoil in '68 -- and the year began with the North Koreans picking up the Pueblo and capturing the Pueblo and taking it to North Korea, which he thought was an insult to a major power. And then it was followed up in February with the Tet Offensive. And although the people in the Pentagon argued that we prevailed in the Tet Offensive and that the Tet Offensive for the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong was a failure, I don't 00:40:00think public opinion saw it that way and it kind of underscored the quagmire that we had found ourselves in in Vietnam.

SHORT: What was his reaction to the conduct of Americans during the Vietnam War, the riots and the flower children and the hippies?

MOORE: It was probably the same as yours and mine was, Bob. I mean, he was very offended by it, I think. I remember this was not the flower children, but the, you know, just the attitude of disrespect. The riots that followed the 00:41:00tragic assassination of Martin Luther King, and he was troubled by that in a big way. If you remember, President Johnson was scheduled to go out to Hawaii to meet General Westmoreland, but they canceled that trip, and General Westmoreland came all the way back to Washington and they were having the meetings at the White House that morning and then invited Senator Russell to come by there and meet with them. And he came, went by, and then he was walking out with President Johnson and he said, "Mr. President, why don't you do something about this? You know, we've got troops around the White House. You know, 14th Street is in flames. Why don't you do something about it?" And it bothered him greatly. And I remember he was annoyed that he had to go home early on the day 00:42:00before when the town was evacuated. And he got in his car and went down Pennsylvania Avenue in his black Chrysler with USS-1 Georgia on it, and we were concerned about it. Charles Campbell jumped in the car with him and Bill Jordan and Proctor Jones and I got in Bill's car and followed him down there, and then he got to his apartment. And he used to, when he didn't have big dinner plans, he wanted to go down to the Howard Johnson's down the street there on Virginia Avenue and went down and found it closed. It just bothered him that -- that we were stifled by these anarchists.

SHORT: Getting back to the relationship between President Johnson and Senator Russell, was there ever, to your knowledge, any oral discussion of their fallout?

MOORE: Not to my knowledge.

SHORT: It just occurred?

MOORE: Just occurred. You know, it's hard. I mean, it's hard for presidents to maintain the personal relations in office that they might've had out of office. I mean, I've seen that in other cases. So I remember when I was working at the White House when Gerry Ford became President. And all of his friends in the Capitol on the House side thought, you know, things were gonna be the same with old Gerry. And they never can be.

SHORT: Uh-huh. Caro said in his book about Johnson that Johnson, after he was elected vice president, insisted on holding onto the power in the Senate. Do you recall that?

MOORE: I was not there then. I joined Senator Russell in 1966. I mean, I -- I've heard that too and I have read that in the Caro book. But, and I've heard it discussed that when he gave up the majority leader's job, it was a loss of power. And, you know, I think this is right, Bob; I'm not totally sure. But I think President Nixon, who had been a vice president, made sure that Agnew had 00:45:00an office in the Executive Complex; he put him in the Executive Office Building. But I think that was the first vice president to have an office downtown and their offices were up in the Capitol and they truly didn't have much to do. I give President Carter credit. He moved Walter Mondale into the West Wing. And so, but, I think it was Speaker Garner who became vice president and he says, "Not worth a warm bucket of spit." And...

SHORT: President Johnson seemed to be unhappy the whole time he was Vice President.

MOORE: Yeah, I'm sure of that.

SHORT: He didn't like to cut ribbons and --

MOORE: Yeah. And I think that there was a lot of tension between him and the President's brother. It was notorious. So that made it difficult for him. But 00:46:00I don't have any personal -- I mean, direct knowledge of that. I've just read the same accounts, that you've read.

SHORT: Were you with Senator Russell when he was appointed to the Warren Commission?

MOORE: No.

SHORT: You weren't there then?

MOORE: I heard him talk about it.

SHORT: Tell us about that.

MOORE: One of the first assignments I had, I went to work for him in late October of 1966, and the third anniversary of the assassination was marked about three weeks later and we got a million press calls. By then, all the conspiracy theories were out. And we put out a rather extensive one-page statement that he dictated that kind of summed up his view. Then he said that he told President 00:47:00Johnson that the American people would never be satisfied with the conclusions involved in this assassination. He said, "There's still doubts about what happened to Lincoln, and that's a hundred years ago. And the same thing is gonna be true with Kennedy, that it'll be very difficult to ever satisfy the public about the outcome." And he said Johnson almost came out of his chair when he said, "Mr. President, it won't be long before there'll be people who will suggest that you had something to do with it." And this guy, Oliver Stone, made that prediction come true.

SHORT: Well, Senator Russell was the unquestionable leader of the opposition to the passage of Civil Rights legislation. But, unlike most southerners, he based his belief on constitutional grounds rather than on racial equality. Isn't that correct?

MOORE: That's correct, right. He was not racist, but to say that he believed in segregation now, um, whether you can say it's possible to believe in segregation and not be a racist, I guess is an open question. But I'll have to -- I don't know. But he did oppose it on constitutional grounds.

SHORT: I've heard his speeches over the years on that subject and, to me, he raised some very interesting constitutional questions like the right of the federal government to send troops into Little Rock. I remember I heard him speak on that subject.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: And it was very thoroughly researched and he brought up the constitutional reasons why things like that should not happen.

MOORE: You know, it's amazing to me that he, as you say, was head of the 00:49:00Southern Caucus -- leader of the Southern Caucus -- was involved in all those Civil Rights debates and so forth, but he did that without ever losing the respect of people like Philip Hart of Michigan and Jake Javits of New York and people who felt very passionately about this.

SHORT: Let's talk for a minute about his relations with presidents. When he went to Washington in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was president and he had been a Roosevelt supporter.

MOORE: He had a remarkable relationship with -- I mean, if people -- I've thought about this frequently. People like Paul Laxalt had a very close relationship with Ronald Reagan, but there have been few times in history that one senator had closer relationships with more presidents than Richard Russell. 00:50:00I mean, as you say, Franklin Roosevelt was a part-time constituent of his when he was Governor and Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York because he spent a lot of time in Warm Springs. And they would trade visits between the Governor's Mansion in Ansley Park and then Warm Springs. And he sat next to Harry Truman for eight years on the Senate floor. He knew Eisenhower as a Major. And if you read the tribute that he made to President Eisenhower when he died, it was truly a statement of great affection. And he, of course, his relationships with Kennedy and Johnson are famous. And I know that President Nixon had a tremendous admiration for him. I mean, I have heard that directly 00:51:00from the horse's mouth that he is great. He thought he was exceptional. And he paraphrased what -- what Truman said, that -- and he put it differently, and you and I have seen huge changes in the South. As septuagenarians, we, we've seen a lot of -=

SHORT: Careful there, careful.

MOORE: -- a lot of change.

MOORE: But he said that if he'd come along later, he would've been president. But President Nixon relied on him. And he's -- President Nixon is quoted on his tombstone as saying that seven presidents relied on this patron -- this patriot -- with the issue of national security and he never failed them.

SHORT: He was very nonpartisan.

MOORE: Very nonpartisan.

SHORT: How would he fare up there today?

MOORE: He'd have a hard time, I'll have to tell you. I used to think that it would be better if all the conservatives were in one party and all the liberals were in another party. I think that we should be careful about what you wish for because we have that now and we have a very, very partisan environment that undermines confidence in our federal government and makes it hard to get things done. When you had Javits and Weickers and people like that, Clifford Case in the Republican Caucus and you had people like Dick Russell and John Stennis, Russell Long, Herman Talmadge in the Democratic Caucus, it tended to cool down the partisanship.

SHORT: Then in 1969, Senator Russell finally accepted a high position in the Senate when he became President pro tem. Tell us about that.

MOORE: When he became President pro tem? SHORT: Yeah.

MOORE: I remember I helped him get together his remarks when he presided at the retirement announcement for Carl Hayden, a man he had great affection for. And after it was over, I said, "Well, Senator, I guess now you can become president pro tem." And this was kind of a classic story; I almost hesitate to tell it. He said, "No, I don't think so. I don't think I want the job of president pro tem." And he says, "I think," he said, "you know, old Carl just kind of treated it as a ceremonial office. I think that it should -- the president pro tem 00:54:00should preside and spend more time in the chair and be in the Capitol more. And, you know, I think it should be treated as a serious position, and I'm not sure I want that job." And I said, "Well, you know you get the same salary as the majority leader and the minority leader." He says, "Is that right?" He said, "That's a different proposition." So he pulled down the rule book and found that not only that, if it -- if there was a vacancy in the office of vice president, he got the vice president's salary and his entertainment allowance, which he had to account to no one for. So he changed his mind about President pro tem, about the way you and I would make a choice between being a senior vice 00:55:00president and a vice president, you know. And he says, "Well, I'm not gonna use that big limousine." He says, "I'll just be and feel more comfortable driving myself." But that lasted about two weeks also when he found out what it was like to have a limousine.

SHORT: [Gap on tape] Powell, as I recall, Senator Russell had serious opposition only once during the 38 years he was in the Senate. That was in 1936 when he was opposed by Gene Talmadge. Did he ever talk about that campaign with you?

MOORE: Yes, he did. Yeah, and he had some great stories to tell about it. When people would make that comment to him, when a senator would say, "Well now, Dick, you haven't had a tough campaign since 1936," he would always answer back, he'd say, "Well, I ran a very vigorous campaign to avoid a campaign." And I 00:56:00think that was true in 1966, that you remember that he ran a very vigorous campaign in 1965 to avoid a campaign with Carl Sanders in 1966. He used to say that, you know, that the fifth year is the most important year of a six-year term, in terms of, you know, if you -- these -- these are my words, not his. But if you sweat a lot in your fifth year, you don't bleed in your sixth year. But, yeah, he would talk about that campaign and how bitter it was and how law partnerships broke up and that you'd be speaking at a rally and you'd look out there and fist fights would be breaking out and so forth. But it was a very, very vigorous campaign. And he said one time when it was all over -- shortly 00:57:00after it was over -- he was walking down the street in Atlanta, and he said he'd said some very mean things about Gene Talmadge and Gene Talmadge had said some very mean things about him, and he looked up and here's Gene Talmadge walking down the street. And he says, he said, "I didn't know whether I should duck into a store or cross the street or what I should do." He said, but he ran into Gene Talmadge on the street and he said he couldn't have been more cordial. And he said, "Ah, great to see you, Dick. We had a great time running, you know. It's wonderful." And he said, "That was a heck of a campaign," and that he was just as cordial and as friendly as he could be, and finally he said, "You know? You know, Dick, the problem with that campaign is that we both had the same friends. You and I had the same friends." He said, "The only thing was they were better friends of yours than they were of mine."

SHORT: Well, Senator Russell usually avoided participating in state politics.

MOORE: Yes, he did.

SHORT: Well, in 1970 when Jimmy Carter ran against former governor Sanders, he claimed that Senator Russell had endorsed him. Did he endorse him?

MOORE: No, he did not. He did not. He, consented to meet with him at the request of a neighbor of his, Bobby Smith, from Winder, who was a big supporter of Jimmy Carter's. And he met with him in his home, but it was not an endorsement. And that was a very unfortunate development that came out of that. He was quoted by a guy named Bo Cuts with the Marietta Daily Journal that he said that, "Senator Russell said he was not gonna -- or couldn't -- endorse me 00:59:00in the primary. He was not gonna endorse me, but that he was gonna vote for me." And so I went to Senator Russell and I said, "This is what the reporter's saying is that you told Governor Carter," I mean, Senator Carter I guess, State Senator Carter, "that you were gonna vote for him." He said, "I did no such thing." He said, "I never told him anything like that. That's just a bald-faced lie. I never said I was gonna vote for or how I was gonna vote." And he said, "I'm not taking sides in this campaign at all." And so I called Bo Kotz back and said, "He didn't say that." And he says that he talked to Carter about it and Carter said, "I said it, but it was off the record." And then in a different conversation about the same time, Jimmy Carter was saying that he 01:00:00never said it. He denied ever saying it. So, you know, somebody was not telling the truth in that triangle.

SHORT: Senator Russell died of complications from emphysema at Walter Reed in Washington on January 21, 1971. Were you with him at the time?

MOORE: I was not with him at the time of his death. I was in my office in the old Senate Office Building it was called then; it's now called the Russell Senate Office Building. And we had reporters in there because he had gone into a coma that Tuesday morning. I had gone out there the Tuesday morning he went into a coma, and I'd been out there two or three days earlier than that. I went out on the 12th of January, I remember, but I'd been out several times since 01:01:00then and brought a statement because it marked the 50th anniversary of his -- no, it was the anniversary of -- it was the 12th of January, his anniversary in becoming a Senator. And we -- I thought he ought to put out a statement. And he put out a statement. I found it yesterday going through these files. And we put out a statement, you know, about his gratitude for the opportunity to serve and so forth. And I found it just yesterday. But he -- he died about 2:20 in the afternoon, and I announced it about 20 minutes to 3. I remember the reporter for the Atlanta Journal says, "I'm gonna be a big problem if Senator Russell 01:02:00dies on Journal time and you announce it on Constitution time." And I said, "Well, I'm not worried about things like that." But the Blue Street Final in those days had a 2:30 deadline, so they put out a special Street edition that afternoon and he died about 20 minutes 'til. Senator Talmadge had cast his proxy that morning in the race in the Democratic Caucus between Senator Kennedy and Senator Byrd to be the whip. And he died at the -- the proxy was good at 10:30 in the morning. He'd signed it earlier in the week. And if he had died at 2:30 that morning instead of 2:30 in the afternoon, Senator Byrd would not have opposed Senator Kennedy, so he cast a historic vote the day he died. And the 01:03:00people who I got press inquiries -- "My editors--" you know, reporters never -- "My editors want me to ask," you know how they do that, "whether or not he might have died earlier." And I says, people were not -- you know, a man's life was at stake out at Walter Reed Hospital and the last thing they were worried about was who was gonna be the next whip. So, it was a memorable day.

SHORT: Senator Russell had told members of his family and possibly his staff -- and he wanted to be returned to Georgia as quickly as possible after his death.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: Who looked after his funeral arrangements?

MOORE: Well, his two executors were Richard B. Russell, III, and Hugh Peterson, Jr. And, you know, as far as I was concerned, as the executors of his estate, they had the final word. I had, you know, I knew pretty much what it was, what 01:04:00he wanted, so I wrote a press release announcing his funeral plan. And that kind of outlined what the plan was gonna be. Then we got a call from Bill Timmons in the White House who was offering -- President Nixon wanted to offer -- Air Force One to bring his remains back to Georgia. So we all flew back on Air Force One with his casket.

SHORT: President Nixon attended his funeral.

MOORE: Yes, he did. Sure did. No, he didn't attend his funeral. He came to the State Capitol and paid his respects. Senator Russell wanted to be to lay in state in the State Capitol for 24 hours, which he did, and then he was taken to 01:05:00Winder to be buried. He would have been surprised to learn that there were only two senators at his funeral. One was Hubert Humphrey; the other one was Lawton Chiles from Florida who he did not know, who came up with Spessard Holland. But the largest delegation ever to attend a -- to set out to attend a -- senatorial funeral got diverted by bad weather and was unable to land at Marietta. And they adopted at that time something called the Mansfield Rule, which I benefited from, because I've been to a lot of Senate funerals of people that I knew and admired because there was usually space, but no more than 15 Senators can now fly on one plane because it was -- an interesting story. As a former staffer, 01:06:00you will appreciate this. They had three planes coming down to the funeral. One was filled with the Vice President and the Congressional leadership was on one. The second one was filled with all the Senators, maybe 50 Senators. The third one was filled with staff. So they got up over Dobbins to decide whether they were gonna land, and they decided to send the staff plane in to see if it could land to determine whether they'd bring in the other two. So, but anyway, Senator Humphrey and Senator Spessard Holland, who was then a former Senator, and Lawton Chiles were able to make it up I guess by road from Florida. So thanks to the help of Jasper Dorsey, who with AT&T, we had asked Leonard Rich to assist in organizing the funeral coverage since he had organized the funeral 01:07:00coverage for television of President Kennedy's funeral. But we were able to arrange a hookup between a station in Charleston, South Carolina -- where all the participants in the funeral were. We got a bunch of television sets brought out from the local television store, set up around, and most of the eulogies were delivered from a studio in Charleston, South Carolina. Spiro Agnew, Mike Mansfield. Phil Landrum is the dean of the Georgia delegation. And I think President Carter was also -- offered a eulogy as a governor.

SHORT: President Johnson was not there?

MOORE: He was not there.

SHORT: Well, the question came after Senator Russell's death who Governor 01:08:00Carter would appoint to the Senate.

MOORE: Yep. And he took a long time to do it. And I remember running into Senator Talmadge one day going over to the Capitol and he and I rode the subway together, and he said, "He's taking entirely too long to make this choice. He's just creating problems for himself by waiting so long and so much delay because you've got campaigns breaking out all over the state. You're gonna have a lot of hard feelings once you've made the choice." He says, "You know, when I was Governor, if somebody died, and people would say, 'Well, you need to appoint Bob Short to take this man's place,' I'd say, 'Don't talk to me about that. I'm not gonna talk to anybody about this until after the funeral'. And while they were 01:09:00making preparations for the funeral, I was trying to decide who I was going to appoint." He said, "The moment the first shovel went on the grave, I was out with my announcement. That way, you know, I didn't get a lot of competing pressure.' " But we were all surprised when -- I remember being surprised when -- David Gambrell was the choice. I mean, this, obviously, the sentimental favorite among Russell's staff and Russell's family was Ernie Vandiver.

SHORT: Right. Mrs. Vandiver told us that that -- that the family really believed that -- that Governor Carter had made that commitment to Governor Vandiver before Senator Russell's death.

MOORE: I don't know about that. I know there was a rumor about there was some kind of arrangement where Senator Russell was gonna resign with the understanding that Ernie would be appointed. Then I remember Senator Russell responded to press reports as, "You know, I wouldn't mind seeing Ernie. I'd 01:10:00like to see Ernie in the Senate some day, but he's not and I don't want him to get there at my expense."

SHORT: Yeah. Ernie, of course, having married Senator Russell's...

MOORE: Niece, yeah.

SHORT: Powell, before we leave Senator Russell, I'd like to ask you a very serious question. What do you think was Richard Russell's biggest accomplishment when he served in the United States Senate?

MOORE: Well, I think that, to me, it all goes back to my experience when I was a young Army officer at the Berlin Wall. Thanks to American leadership, the Soviet empire has been -- is disintegrated, and eastern Europe has been liberated. And I just got back from two years in -- three years in -- Vienna, 01:11:00Austria, working with eastern European countries, and the transformation of eastern Europe is a magnificent thought to consider and the disintegration of Soviet imperialism is a great accomplishment. And that was done with American leadership. Richard Russell was an integral part of American leadership for 25 years and with presidents who had eight-year periods. But he was at the center of American leadership and fostered the policies that led to that dramatic transformation in Europe and in the world and to remove the threat of, as Ronald Reagan said, "the evil empire". But he was part of that leadership and an essential part of that leadership and fostered the policies that led to that 01:12:00outcome. That would be my evaluation. There are others. I mean, I think his contribution to the growth of Georgia would be it, but he was a man of many parts and I think the fact that he was such an important part of American leadership at a critical moment of our history was his single most accomplishment. And I would say this before we leave Senator Russell, and I've said it many times before. I had thought a lot about what distinguishes him from other senators that I've encountered in my 42 years in Washington, and I think that the thing that distinguishes him is the fact that he was the most trusted man I have ever known. People trusted his integrity, his patriotism, his diligence in doing his homework, his intellect, his scholarship, his 01:13:00honesty. They trusted every aspect of him. And, as I say, he kept the respect of his opponents in the Senate in a very remarkable way.

SHORT: Well, after six years with Senator Russell, you took a job in the Nixon administration in the Justice Department with the Attorney General who, at that time, was John Mitchell.

MOORE: Yep.

SHORT: Tell us about your work there and a little bit about John Mitchell.

MOORE: Well, I enjoyed my work at the Justice Department as much as any federal service I've ever had. We had an exciting time and, you know, I'm energized by excitement. We had to deal with all the disruption created by the flower children that you referred to earlier. We had the ITT controversy. We had the 01:14:00controversial nominations of Lewis Powell (which was not so controversial) but also Bill Rehnquist, who was a colleague of mine at the Justice Department. We had to deal with his confirmation. And it was a very exciting period and I had a great relationship with Attorney General Mitchell. I traveled with him a lot. I was a deputy director of public information. The director was a good friend of mine, and he, you know, we shared the travel assignments. And General Mitchell always wanted to get home at night because he had kind of a -- he had a wife that could create scenes and embarrassment for him, so he was not comfortable leaving her for a long time. So we'd fly back from various parts of the country and get in at 2 in the morning. I think we had a lot of interesting 01:15:00discussions about politics. He was viewed as someone who was new to politics, but he really was not. He was a bond attorney for 30 years where he represented state governments and local jurisdictions and he had amazing relationships with senior government officials, people like Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, and he had ties all over the country. And he was a very tragic figure. There's a book out, if anybody's interested in studying John Mitchell, there's a book out called The Strong Man that really captures his difficulties. He was handicapped by the fact that he had to be -- to worry a lot about his wife, who was mentally 01:16:00ill, and he also worried about President Nixon because President Nixon had some instincts that were not constructive and healthy. He was a brilliant president, had the potential to be one of the great presidents of all times, but he had weaknesses that made that difficult. But I was invited to go with him over to the campaign in May of 1972. I was there for 14 months. And I really didn't much want to leave and I told the man who was the attorney general at the time I didn't want to leave to go to the campaign because I knew the campaign was gonna be run out of the White House and not out of the campaign headquarters. I'd always wanted to work on a presidential campaign, but I just -- some things had 01:17:00happened that made me doubt the judgment of some of the people who were involved in the campaign, and I just figured I was better off staying at Justice, but I was not given a choice so I went over to the campaign.

SHORT: What was your responsibilities there?

MOORE: At the campaign?

SHORT: Uh-huh.

MOORE: I was the what they call the Director of News and Information. We had a director of public affairs and we had one person who was responsible for the 24-hour news cycle -- you know, the immediate news -- and another person who was supposed to be doing the long-term thinking. And I was part-time spokesman for the campaign.

SHORT: Did you participate in the planning of the National Convention?

MOORE: Yes, I did as a matter of fact.

SHORT: As I recall, you changed the location.

MOORE: Yeah, we did. The original plan was to go to San Diego, but there was a suggestion that there had been a relationship between the settlement of the ITT antitrust case and the fact that Sheridan, which was a subsidiary of -- of ITT, had given $250,000, which today would be a drop in the bucket of a campaign. But they had given $250,000 to the San Diego Conventions arrangement, and so President Nixon just decided to move it back to -- he'd been nominated four years earlier in Miami. You know, he had a house in Key Biscayne and the town was already set up for a convention. Miami Beach is not a -- there's a lot of hotel space down there in July and August because it's so damn hot. So it was 01:19:00-- it was good. And I spent about five or six weeks down in Miami that summer.

SHORT: Democrats met there too.

MOORE: Yeah, they did. And then I was down there for the Democratic Convention. We went down and set up a little hospitality suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel, and then we brought in Rogers Morton and Governor Love of Colorado as spokesmen for the campaign. You've got all the national media in one location; it just made sense for us to have somebody there. And they went on The Today Show and served as spokesmen for the campaign.

SHORT: During the 1972 reelection campaign, did you sense some paranoia in the administration during that period? Was the White House too concerned about who their Democratic opponent might be?

MOORE: A little bit, yeah. There was a little -- there was an obsession. I mean, to me, I guess it traced to President Nixon's experience in 1960 when he felt like that maybe the outcome was determined by the sitting leadership in Chicago and that he lost a very narrow race to Senator Kennedy at the time, and there was an amazing concern about Senator Ted Kennedy. In my mind, in the summer of '72, Senator Kennedy was a political corpse because of his experience in the summer of '69 by leaving the scene of an automobile accident where there was a fatality. So, I mean, he was unelectable. But, and that was what was so, 01:21:00you know. Senator McGovern represented an extreme wing of the Democratic party and was a candidate that should be fairly beatable. And it turned out that President Nixon carried 49 states. I used to say he would've carried 50 if it hadn't been for Watergate. But it was a landslide of monumental proportions simply because of the -- the Democrats nominated somebody that was from the wrong element of their party. I think that both parties have a tendency towards self destruction. I think George W. Bush was beatable in 2004, but the only way 01:22:00the Democrats could lose was to nominate a, you know, someone who had participated in the counterculture of the '70s and came from Massachusetts and was viewed as an extreme liberal. But McGovern was extremely beatable and we should have approached that campaign with more confidence.

SHORT: You mentioned Watergate. Let's talk about Watergate.

MOORE: Okay.

SHORT: Do you think we'll ever -- have we learned the real truth about that break-in?

MOORE: I think that the break-in, and that, that book, Strong Man, probably goes into it as well as anybody. It exposes it. I think that the break-in itself kind of led to some other things, but the break-in was probably the 01:23:00dumbest thing anybody ever did in the history of politics. It was not only illegal. It was not only immoral. It was just stupid. McGovern had just won the California Primary and basically locked up the nomination. There was nothing at the Democratic Committee Headquarters. There was no information, no files, no -- nothing, that would have made a difference in the campaign. You know, Bob, you've had a lot of political experience, a lot more than I have, but there are no secrets in politics. So it was just a foolish enterprise. But I think that Gordon Liddy viewed the Democratic Headquarters the way that mountain climber viewed Mt. Everest. "Why do you climb Mt. Everest?" "Because it's there." But, I mean, there was no strategic logic to that break-in, in addition 01:24:00to being immoral and illegal.

SHORT: But do you think they really expected to find something there?

MOORE: I don't know. I don't. I can't imagine. No, I don't. I don't. There was a taste among certain people in the Nixon operation for always looking for gossip, but I don't think that there was anybody with any political judgment. And when I say anybody with any political judgment, I don't count John Dean and Jeb Magruder in that category. I don't. I wouldn't bet my life on their political judgment, at that time in particular. But it was -- it was dumb. And it's a tragedy because, as I say, there's nobody better equipped to be president of the United States, who had a better vision of how to deal with the political crosscurrents in the world and actually had some fairly aggressive domestic 01:25:00policies, some that I was not always totally comfortable with; but Richard Nixon could have been a great president and it was spoiled on a almost a triviality.

SHORT: Well, as director of press relations (or I don't recall your title now) with the committee to reelect, how difficult was it for you to deal with the media during this period?

MOORE: Well, they obviously were spending a lot of time trying to find out the facts about Watergate. I mean, maybe I was naive, but I thought it was such a stupid thing and I couldn't believe that anybody with any political judgment in the upper reaches had anything to do with it. And, but I know that there were some embarrassing things that people wanted to avoid, but it was -- the press 01:26:00was persistent at that time. I got to know two reporters pretty well, namely Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and I still keep in touch. I run into Bob Woodward; he's a neighbor of mine. And we have a very cordial relationship. I just had lunch with him over at his house not long ago, and he's -- but it's a period of my career that I wouldn't want to relive. I'll have to say that.

SHORT: Was it general known that President Nixon had a taping system in the Oval Office?

MOORE: No. No, I was as surprised as everybody else was when Alex Butterfield put that out.

SHORT: As I recall, when the tapes became a factor, President Nixon claimed 01:27:00Executive Privilege and refused to turn them over to -- to the Justice Department, I guess, was it?

MOORE: Yeah, or to the Congressional committee.

SHORT: Committees?

MOORE: Yeah. By that time, I was in the White House. I went to the White House in March of '73 and was there until January of '75. And I, you know, that was an unfortunate situation. But he was not the first one to have a taping system in the White House, but I don't think -- I think he was the first one where it ran continually. I think President Johnson had the capability of taping meetings and taping telephone conversations, but I think he was somewhat selective.

SHORT: Who erased the tape?

MOORE: I don't know. I have no idea. That's as big a mystery to me as anyone.

SHORT: When did you first hear the "smoking gun" as -- as they call it?

MOORE: About three days before he resigned. There is an account in that book, All the President's Men, about a bunch of us being in the Roosevelt Room and reading the smoking gun tape for the first time, and we knew it was all over at that stage.

SHORT: What did President Nixon do when the curtain fell? Was he really sincere about wanting to resign or did he consider impeachment?

MOORE: I think that he thought that he had made a mistake, but he didn't think that it rose to the level of an impeachable offense. But I remember John Rhodes, Minority Leader, and Hugh Scott, the Minority Leader of the Senate, and Barry Goldwater came down to the White House and kind of encouraged him to leave. And then I had a guy on the Hill calling me and telling me what House members had gone over to the radio system that the House Congressional campaign committee had set up, and when people like Trent Lott started going over there and recording statements for their constituents back home, then it was time for the President to resign. And Chuck Wiggins, his Southern California ardent and 01:30:00articulate opponent -- I mean, supporter -- on the House Judiciary Committee, when he said it was time for him to go, that he had to leave. So we had a carefully orchestrated plan that evening where the Congressional leadership came down and met with the president over in the Executive Office Building at 7:30, where he told them he was leaving. And then he went to the Cabinet Room at 8:00, where he had his 40 closest friends in Congress in the Cabinet Room. I was not there because my assignment was to take Senator Eastland over to Bill Timmons's office and give him a drink; that Senator Eastland liked his Chivas 01:31:00Regal and, but he didn't have it at home, so we -- I took him over there and he and I sat there. And I had a Jack Daniel's and he had a Chivas Regal before he went home. Then, but the President went with his -- sat in the Cabinet Room with his -- 40 closest friends in the House and the Senate. And he, I think that he broke down in that meeting a little bit. But then he went on television at 9:00 and was remarkably strong. And I remember when Senator Eastland left, I went over to the family theater in the East Wing of the White House where we had a little setup there with drinks and hors d'oeuvres for his 40 friends who wouldn't have time to get back to their television sets to watch the speech and 01:32:00went in there, and it was a sad sight. There were a lot of grown men who were in tears.

SHORT: There was a last-minute effort, wasn't there, the Stennis Compromise?

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: To try to --

MOORE: Well --

SHORT: -- smooth the water?

MOORE: Well, that was a -- the Stennis Compromise was intended to preserve executive privilege but give the Congress access to what was on the tapes. And the idea was for Senator Stennis, who had enough to do and was pretty long -- I think he had gotten older by then -- to sit there and listen to the tapes and then tell what -- what was on them.

SHORT: Uh-huh.

MOORE: To the...

SHORT: Well, let's change the subject for a minute.

MOORE: I'd be happy to. That's not my favorite subject.

SHORT: On October 10, 1973, Vice President Agnew was allowed to resign as part 01:33:00of a plea bargain on the charge of income tax evasion by the IRS. President Nixon was then faced with the task of choosing a replacement. Do you remember who was being considered before he chose Congressman Ford?

MOORE: Yeah, I do. I remember. I think his choice, the man he would have liked to have had as vice president, was John Connally. But that's my impression; I never heard that directly from President Nixon. But I think Governor Connally was having some problems at that time over -- it was called the milk scandal, I guess. And I think he was exonerated, but he was not a highly confirmable candidate at that time. And I think that everybody admired 01:34:00and respected Jerry Ford and he was the most confirmable man in the country. And I think it was a great blessing that he was selected because I think he did a fine job as president in the interim and he almost won that election in 1976, although he was carrying the burden of the pardon and, you know, he made the mistake early in the debate about Poland. And all these burdens, and he still came within -- a change of 10,000 votes in Hawaii and another state would've changed the outcome and he would've been reelected.

SHORT: So President Nixon resigns. Gerald Ford becomes president. Looking back on the Nixon administration, what do you think were his strengths and what 01:35:00do you think were his weaknesses?

MOORE: His strength was his vision. I think he'd had a lot of experience in government. He'd traveled a lot and he had a vision of what he wanted to do. And he also had a fairly comprehensive domestic vision. And he was decisive and he didn't give in very easily. I mean, he had a backbone. I think that's what Senator Russell admired about him was his backbone. His weakness was his suspicion and his tendency to want to get even with his enemies and stuff like 01:36:00that. I think Bill Safire said that Nixon was a very sore winner, you know, that he just had this and he was always troubled by leaks. And everybody is troubled by leaks. But one of the problems that led to some of his difficulties was the leak situation.

SHORT: Moving on to President Ford, you were on his staff in what capacity?

MOORE: Well, I was in the legislative affairs office working with Bill Timmons and kind of an inside deputy to Bill Timmons. But most of us left. I didn't 01:37:00want to go out the door on August 9th because of the appearances of that, and the transition team was very courteous to what we used to call "Nixon leftovers". Some people called them "holdovers". And I left in January of '75 because I really -- I just didn't think that he was gonna be around much longer and I -- it was ready for -- time for me to leave government, and I think that it was better for Nixon, people who were on the Nixon staff, not to try to hold on. So I left with the intention that if I didn't leave now, I was gonna leave in two years. I had no idea that the Democrats were gonna nominate Governor Carter. If I had, I might have stayed around. I did go to work in the Ford 01:38:00campaign, and I think the fact that I'd had some experience with Governor Carter might've been helpful.

SHORT: So what did you do after that?

MOORE: I developed a foundation client and a consulting business, Marketing Corporation of America. And I set up a little shop in the Madison Building next to the Madison Hotel where I advised and represented people in Washington. And I did that for six years. Had a good time in the process. Didn't make as much money as a lot of people in our business did, but I worked for Travis Stewart and Hoffman-LaRoche was a -- I got some assignments from him and had a good time in the process. But then I was an early supporter of Ronald Reagan. Most people 01:39:00in the so-called lobbying community in Washington were gravitating towards Bob Dole or George Bush, but I was an admirer of Governor Reagan's, had pretty good relations with his staff, and became an early supporter of Governor Reagan. And so then when he won, I had -- was invited to come back to the White House as a head of the Senate component of the legislative affairs operation. And I jumped at that opportunity.

SHORT: How did you get acquainted with Governor Reagan?

MOORE: Oh, I guess I can't claim that I had a close personal relationship with Governor Reagan, but his -- the guy who represented him in the Governor's Office was a good friend of mine named Jim Lake, and I got to know him through him. 01:40:00And then I also spent some time with Dick Allen who was his National Security Advisor. And, but although I had some -- had a fairly good bit of personal contact with him once I was in the White House, during the campaign, I didn't know. I saw him during the debate. I was there and I ran a Truth Squad for Governor Reagan during the campaign, and that was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had. We had a Learjet and we had two kind of anchor spokesmen: Elizabeth Dole and a guy named Art Fletcher, who was an African-American, prominent Republican. But then at various times we had people on our plane from Don Rumsfeld to Al Haig, people I worked for later, to Bill 01:41:00Simon, Barber Conable, John Chafee, Al Simpson, and we would bracket President Carter. We'd, if he was going into Pittsburgh, we'd go in the day before and, say, well, and meet with the press and say, "Okay. When President Carter comes in here tomorrow, you need to ask him about A, B, C and D." And then we had another Learjet that would go in the day afterwards and say, "You know, President Carter was in here yesterday, but he didn't tell you about this, that and the other." And so that's what we called bracketing the candidate, and we had a lot of fun. And I remember everybody -- the only two states that were up for grabs at the end of the campaign were Washington and Oregon. And I took a 01:42:00jet out to Washington and Oregon with John Tower, John Warner, Art Fletcher, and I think Elizabeth had left then to go to Kansas to be with her husband when he was reelected, and we had a -- had a great time. Coming back, we lost an engine up over the Rocky Mountains and the plane went down, and it was an unforgettable experience. Senator Warner said that his wife had already lost one husband in a Learjet, referring to Mike Todd.

MOORE: And then I asked Senator Tower, I said, "Can I fix you a drink?" He says, "No." He said, "I don't want to meet my maker with liquor on my breath."

SHORT: Were you surprised when Jimmy Carter got the Democratic nomination for President?

MOORE: I was totally surprised. Were you?

SHORT: A little.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: A little.

MOORE: I was totally surprised. I mean, if you remember, the word around the state was that he wanted to run against Senator Talmadge and he ran a poll and he couldn't beat him. So he couldn't get elected to the Senate and so he had to -- and so he ran for president. And when people asked me about it in the early -- in late, let's say; he announced pretty early, say in '75 and I'd say, "Well, you know, I don't think he could get reelected in Georgia. And so I don't -- I think it'd be hard for him to get elected president." But he surprised me. I mean, he's a very resourceful politician. You have to admire that resourcefulness.

SHORT: Let me ask you this question about President Reagan that I asked you about President Nixon. What do you think were his strengths and what do you think were his weaknesses?

MOORE: I think he was -- I mean, his strength was his vision and the fact that he believed that we shouldn't contain the Soviet Union, that we can triumph. And his vision to collaborate with John Paul and with Margaret Thatcher to resist Soviet imperialism. And I think it was in Central America -- I spent a lot of time working on Central America issues. But his resolute determination. 01:45:00And his strength was also a consuming confidence in the United States of America. He clearly believed in exceptionalism when it comes to the United States and that we had a special place in the world to advance the cause of freedom and free markets. And he was suspicious of government, with a lot of justification in my opinion.

SHORT: Your career continued to the office of secretary of state where you were assistant secretary for Congressional relations...

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: Working, I believe, with who, George Shultz?

MOORE: Well, I was initially invited to come to the State Department, leave the White House, by Alexander Haig, who had been the Chief of Staff of the White 01:46:00House when I was working there under President Nixon. And I went and worked initially for Alexander Haig, and then he resigned after about six months. He was secretary of state a year and a half, but I was only with his six months. And then I -- Secretary Shultz asked me to stay on in my position, and I think that he asked me very early after he was selected and I think that was because I had some strong friends who he admired like Bryce Harlow. And Bryce Harlow was an interesting man who got his start working for Carl Vinson, by the way. But, anyway, I stayed on and worked with George Shultz, and there's nobody that I encountered in my time in Washington that I admired more than George Shultz. He was a smart man and very practical outlook on things. And he, too, was a 01:47:00trusted individual.

SHORT: Then, in 1982, along came Bill Clinton. Republicans were no longer in charge of the White House.

MOORE: 1992.

SHORT: '92. Sorry, yeah.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: 1992. What did you do during that period?

MOORE: Well, I went back to K Street and advised and represented people in Washington. Some people call it lobbying. I'm not embarrassed. I think that, you know, the exercise of your right to petition government is something that people have as a right and, to help people exercise that right, is an honorable business. And I had some interesting clients. I worked for the government of Turkey. I worked for the Better Hong Kong Foundation. I worked for Agusta Group, the Italian helicopter manufacturer. Worked for Lockheed. Had some 01:48:00interesting experiences.

SHORT: But then it was back to government again.

MOORE: Yeah.

SHORT: George W. Bush.

MOORE: Well, actually, I went back before that. I got a little tired of K Street, and I joined Fred Thompson and was his Chief of Staff in 1998. And I'd known Fred, got to know him when he was part of the Watergate investigation. Had a lot of admiration for Fred. And I also had some financial justification in going back because I could round out some retirement time and get what they call a better High-3, which I benefit every day from right now since I retired 01:49:00from government. I mean, I'm not retired; I receive a government annuity. And I had a good time with Fred. He's an interesting man, did some interesting things. And then another former chief of staff of the White House provided me with the opportunity to be the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, and I did that for four years.

SHORT: That's in the Bush administration.

MOORE: This was in the administration of George Bush. I started there. I was confirmed by the Senate in April and confirmed on the same order with a colleague of mine. He and I were the third and fourth ones confirmed out of 45 presidential appointments in the Defense Department behind Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Wolfowitz, and had a memorable experience from being in the 01:50:00Pentagon on 9/11, and the aftermath of that dominated our focus for the four years I was there. I told Secretary Rumsfeld a year before the term was over that I was -- only would like to stay in this job only for the first term, and if the President was reelected, that I should -- I'd like to go on back to the private sector unless I could have an overseas assignment some place. I never got over being in Europe a couple of years as a young man. And so I went out and worked for McKenna Long & Aldridge, an Atlanta law firm, or a Washington law firm, a Denver law firm. I mean, it has offices all over the country. And after I'd been there about a year, they called me from Secretary Rumsfeld's 01:51:00office and said, "How would you like to go to Vienna for a couple of years?" So I called my wife and I said, "How would you like to go to Vienna for a couple of years?" And she said, "When do we pack our bags?" So we had 33 months where I was a representative of the secretary of defense at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which you get to know the country if you spend time with Congress. You get to know Europe if you spend time with the OSCE because it has 56 members, including the Russian Federation, which is always a challenge. I spent a lot of time with Russian diplomats and that was an enlightening experience.

SHORT: Well, you've certainly had a very interesting career.

MOORE: Well, you have too, Bob.

SHORT: As you --

MOORE: We've been friends a long time.

SHORT: A long time. As you look back over your various assignments in government, which one did you enjoy most?

MOORE: I think my year as head of the Senate component. I enjoyed them all, to tell you the truth. I enjoyed my time in the Justice Department. I cherished my time with Senator Russell. But the year that I was head of the Senate component of the White House Legislative Affairs Office and we -- I got involved in a lot of confirmations, including the confirmation of Sandra O'Connor to be the first woman justice of the Supreme Court. We had a thrilling fight over AWACS for Saudi Arabia and, you know, dealing with the Senate and it was an 01:53:00experience. I also enjoyed my time in the State Department and Defense Department. The United States military is considered to be the most admired element of American society, and I think they deserve it. I mean, it's a privilege to work with general offices in all three services and I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Pentagon. I enjoyed my time in Europe. I enjoyed my time in Europe when I was a platoon leader. I mean that -- I've enjoyed it all.

SHORT: Well, we could go on talking 'til bull bat time and still leave out many interesting stories and historical stories, I know. But before we wrap it up, is there anything we've left out that you would like to discuss?

MOORE: Not really. I can't think of anything. I think that one time Senator 01:54:00Russell surprised me. We had invited Margaret Shannon over to meet him in Winder (or maybe she made the request) and he went over there, and he made some statements about the importance of -- and it was time for -- us to reconsider our relationship with the People's Republic of China, that we could no longer keep them isolated and that we need to find another way of dealing with the People's Republic of China. And, looking back, I think he and Richard Nixon had probably collaborated on that. And then that was something that I have never talked about very much, but I think that. And I think President Nixon's opening relations with China has helped to transform the world, and I think Senator 01:55:00Russell was part of that.

SHORT: Well, Powell Moore, a great American, I want to thank you on behalf of the Duckworth Library at Young Harris College and the Richard B. Russell Library here at the University of Georgia for being with us.

MOORE: Well, Bob, thank you for all the work that you are doing for the Richard B. Russell Library here at the University of Georgia. It's a very important institution for me. And I'm sure that the Duckworth Library at Young Harris deserves my praise also, but this is a very important institution and I'm glad you're associated with it.

SHORT: Thank you.