Transcripts For CSPAN3 U.S. Policymaking Presidential Commissions 20240713

Next on American History tv, a decision on policymaking and president ial commissions in political history. This talk from Purdue University lasts about 90 minutes. 90 minut. Welcome to our panel on president ial commissions. At the intersection politics, policy making and forgotten history of president ial missions im joanna grisinger. Im a legal historian of the modern Administrative State who has written about president ial commissions and Administrative Law reform. Thanks to you all for coming, unfortunately Cynthia Spence is unable to be here today but we still look forward to great conversation. We will be informal today. There are two panelists, dov weinryb grohsgal and frank popper will introduce themselves for their presentations. They will speak for 10 to 12 minutes at the most, i will enforce that with an iron hand about their Current Research on president ial commissions and then the three of us will talk in conversation about the role of president ial commissions and political history. And i will reserve the last half hour at least for questions and comments from you and for us to continue talking. As you can tell todays session is being filmed by cspan so do with that information as you will. All right. Frank is going to go first and introduce yourself. Yeah, my name is frank popper. I teach city planning rather than history, although increasingly i take a historical approach to city p rutgers and princeton. The reason im here is that nearly half a century ago i wrote a small book for the 20th century fund, now the Century Foundation in new york city on president ial commissions and its one of the very few sources, i think, on them and a couple of months ago dov dialed me up, dug my 49yearold book up and asked me to participate in this panel. Im fairly current on president ial commissions but i start well, i have a 49year head start i guess is the way to look at it. President ial commissions have a long history in the United States. In the late 19th century there were a couple of them on the philippines and theyve since Theodore Roosevelt had one on country life. There have been a whole bunch of others in a more modern period. They all essentially work the same way. The president appoints a bunch of notables who represent different opinions on the subject in question, they meet, they hire an executive director who hires a staff, the staff writes much of the report and eventually its released. The time spans can be as short as six months or as long as perhaps three or four years. I want to talk about president ial commissions as a form of National Literature. National literature at least to me has two kinds of meanings. One, its an Overall Record of the nations running concerns and big turning points. Running concerns would be things like race, the role of women, Public Health, the organization of the federal government. Big turning points might be, well, in the 19th century there was a filipino insurrection and eventually filipino independence and the United States had to decide how to arrange that or work with that. And more recently in terms of big turning points there have been commissions on pearl harbor, the kennedy assassination excuse me, the first kennedy assassinatioassas three mile island, the challenger rocket disaster, 9 11, deepwater horizon not that long ago. These commissions, these running concern commissions give you a pretty good sense of how, among other things, the nations elite has changed. If you look at the early 20th century commissions there are very few women, there are very few blacks, there are very few latinos and the more recent commissions tend to represent them more and i think also they tend to have more people from the sun belt as the region grows and becomes more prominent in the national politics. Very few poor people are on president ial commissions and in truth not that many who you would say are middle class, either. Thats one kind of National Literature. Another way to look at National Literature is in the sense of National Touch points. Intensely meaningful cultural experiences that mark a generation, that mark the mark the country forever. And here one has things like the kennedy assassination commission, the 9 11 commission and these things are sometimes treated, not necessarily by politicians, but by people with shall we say a finer sense of the nations culture, more refined one, if you will, as actual pieces of National Literature that are revealing in the way that bail wolf is revealing or hamlet was revealing or the great gatsby is revealing. So, for example, the great novelist don dalillo in his novel libra the astrology cal sign describes the Warren Commission as follows, its the mega ton novel that james joyce would have written if he had moved to iowa city and lived to be 100. Okay. The 9 11 Commission Like wise has occasionally gotten this sort of treatment. The great late harvard historian daniel aaron called it epic, not in the sense of an epic hype, but in the sense of an epic narrative, like bail wolf. With the terrorist as grinnedel and without the sort of miraculous moccana, if you will, intervention of bail wolf to save the towers or the American People from the attack and the lesson is very clearly the people themselves absent bail wolf will have to come up with a response and this is what the response should be. Like, okay. Two kinds of National Literature. Most literature, most books and poems, are what publishers call mid list. That is they may not have great circulations, they may not make great impact, but they sell year in, year out, the cumulative numbers are quite impressive, so sometimes are the cumulative profits. They form the background against which the bail wolf Type Commission or nonbail wolf Type Commission, the 9 11 case, can stick out. They are the baseline. The basic process is of negotiation for the literature, research it, actually writing it, editing it, marketing it. Problems of a more, if you will, mechanical nittygritty sort, but theyre actually as with most literature, as with most most human activities, they end with sort of unclear outcomes but clearly some positive ones, too. Basically in most of the commissions cases come up with the sense that they accomplish things. They accomplish important things some of them, but they may not necessarily achieve great public acclaim or knowledge in so doing. Dov in his description of the Income Maintenance Commission has a wonderful, wonderful description of the mechanics of how that particular commission worked and how its politics worked from the inside and is going to do a terrific job, i know, because he recruited me. Thats why i know. The more recent history of commissions is, well, about what you would expect. Obama appointed a couple, most notably the one on the deepwater horizon disaster in the gulf. Then more recently trump made some noises about appointing Chris Christie head of an Opioid Commission to look at the nations difficulty with opioids. He also formed one with kris kobach, the secretary of state from kansas on Voter Suppression. The christie one never got off the ground and the kobach one crashed and burned pretty specifically. I forgot to say, by the way, that no president ever appoints a commission on a topic that is going well. The topic always has to be something that is not going well where there are serious conflicts and thats another reason why at least in my view they resemble literature. Literature likewise would go nowhere without conflicts and where you have conflicts you have literature and you have conflicts you have commissions and there is this overlap. As i say, the Trump Commission or the trump experience with commissions has been with much else with trump rather disruptive of previous pattern, but i did notice about a year ago in the Atlantic Henry kissinger writing an article featured on the cover about Artificial Intelligence and concluding that this is a very weighty problem that requires, guess what, a president ial commission to assess in terms of its likely affects and how the nation should respond. And this is sort of a return to form in the sense that Henry Kissinger writing in the atlantic, were back to the notables of the sort who usually are on these things. When i did my research on president ial commissions, all those years ago, i discovered that there was a sort of interlocking directorate and a lot of people at the time who were quite noticeable but never quite ran for Political Office at least quite yet at the time got appointed to multiple commissions. So the three commissions were scored by george meany the labor leader, g. Irwin miller the industrialist to van cummings not far from here and who else . Well, there were a couple more like that. They were very inward and very incestuous, not just within the Democratic Party but within the nations elite as a whole. Let me and, again, the kissinger proposal for a commission on ai is reverts to form in that sense. Now, some day i suppose there will be a Trump Commission or commissions about his years in power. Maybe somebody in the room although there arent that many of you will serve on t more likely perhaps you or someone here will write about it, will chronicle it and if you do and you want to think in terms of literature, try shakespeares approach to richard iii. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you all for being here. Thank you to nicole, katie and leah who i know arent in the room for putting together this. Sorry, for putting together this conference. Now . Thank you to leah, nicole and katie for putting together this conference, my name is dov grohsgal i teach in the department of history at the Woodrow Wilson school which is our Public Policy school. Im primarily interested in the intersection of Public Policy and social movements specifically in the context of race and inequality. I first got interested in president ial commissions after stumbling into the archives of a late 1960s president ial commission created by Lyndon Johnson called the president s commission on income maintenance. The commission has been mentioned in the literature before by scholars like michael katz but no scholar has ex ploered this particular president ial commission in depth. Lyndon johnson created the commission in january of 1978 and charged it with investigating, quote, in i and every plan however inn conventional to meet the income needs of all American People. In announcing the creation of the Commission Johnson said, quote, our challenge in the coming years is to extend human insurance and Human Dignity to persons who are not able to buy their own protection. The commission was to focus specifically on the possibility of instituting a universal basic income. Remarkably i would argue the idea of universal basic income was not quite a radical idea by the late 1960s, in fact, there was a broad consensus from across the political spectrum behind impl ofmenting some form of guaranteed income. That consensus included the likes of Martin Luther king jr. And milton friedman. Much of the interest in guaranteed income was driven by the realities of the historical moment. The war on poverty which was just four years old in 1968 had focused on the quote, long run creation of opportunities in employment, housing and education rather than on income transfer programs. But that approach failed to eliminate poverty which had been the kp he can tags of Many Americans and the rhetoric johnson had used in commencing the war on poverty. Perhaps more importantly the war on poverty had also failed to resolve a stubbornly high poverty rate among minorities, especially africanamericans who in 1969 had a poverty rate of 32 compared to the white poverty rate which was under 10 . A number of factors had converged to keep africanamerican poverty rates high, the nexus of automation and migration was one of the central culprits. Automation in rural parts of the country had uprooted millions of africanamericans for decades who migrated to northern cities in search of jobs. In the cities, however, africanamericans face dim employment prospects. Automation had also changed the urban labor market. At the same time white city dwellers and employers left for the suburbs, depleting the urban tax base and shrinking the job market. The historian tom segru and others have written extensively about this phenomenon. He concluded, for example, for a large number of africanamericans the promise of steady, secure and relatively wellpaid employment proved i will louis sieve. When Richard Nixon was inaugurated in january of 1969 he decided to keep the president s commission on income maintenance in place and to provide it with more time and additional Financial Resources to complete its work. In other words, nixon pushed forward with the johnson Era Commission that focused on poverty, poverty policy and guaranteed income. That story is an important one, better told perhaps in another session. But the connection between the president s commission on income maintenance and the Nixon Administration is an important one in theg0c inception of my project. I came across the commission in Research Daniel patrick moynihans involvement in a major welfare reform proposal introduced by the Nixon Administration in august of 1969 called the family assistance plan. The proposal never became law due to congressional opposition but at its core was a guaranteed income even though nixon hesitated to call it that. As it turns out part of the basis for this proposed family assistance plan could be found in the work of the president s commission on income maintenance. What i found most interesting about the commission, especially in thinking about methods for doing american political history was its Investigative Approach in how it went about its work. Investigative processes have not generally been the focus of scholars who write about president ial commissions. They have instead focused on why president s appoint commissions in the first place and on commission recommendations. With less attention to how commissions reach their conclusions between january of 196 and november of 1969 the president s commission on income maintenance visited 17 cities and towns across the country to conduct its investigation. In each location the commission convened local hearings and invited the poor, local officials, activists and advocates to testify about the circumstances and experience of poverty. In addition, commissioners physically visited the homes of the door. What emerged in both of these settings in the hearings and during home visits was a set of interactions between commissioners, the poor and their advocates which were remarkable in three ways. First, given the opportunity witnesses made a case in front of commissioners for the value of their expertise about the lived experience of poverty. While at the same time challenging the professional authorities who had often dictated poverty policy. A welfare recipient named sanders testified at maerngs in new york city, for example, that any new poverty policies would, quote, have no meaning unless welfare recipients participated in those changes. The commissions chairman an industrialist from chicago named benjamin line amman eventually around just reading about a problem and theorizing and thinking in an office is not enough to understand the problem. That approach did not, quote, convey the baronsness of poverty or humanity and diversity of the poor. Instead poverty policy needed to be shaped by those who had experienced poverty firsthand. Second, witnesses challenged dominant narratives about dependency and recast themselves as able selfadvocates within a system that had created significant obstacles to mobility. For example, in quincy, florida, a predominantly africanamerican tobacco farming down in the northern part of the state a witness named bessey mae thomas told commissioners she was able to secure an increase in her payments through a persistent Letter Writing Campaign to the office. She said i kept telling them we couldnt meet our needs and they raised our assistance level. Witnesses through commissioners attention to their ability to survive even on scant resources. Third, by painting a bleak picture of the role of structures and systems in imposing the conditions that created cyclical poverty witnesses challenges commissioners ideas that poverty was the consequence of a series of individual choices. In quincy, florida, for example, where tobacco farms were the towns primary industry mostly africanamerican Agricultural Workers faced low wages and sporadic unemployment due to the crops short growing season. At the same time, however, owners punished workers who sought employment away from farms in months where there was no crop to cultivate. As a result families had to borrow from their employers to survive during the offseason. Walty gurley, a deacon and naacp activist in quincy testified that, quote, the poor man had to borrow the white mans money to try to keep his family alive and this is how he keeps him tied. He is in debt, the tobacco season doesnt last long enough for him to get out of debt where he is a free man. Other structural on stack bls were found in out of touch job training programs, the concentration of the poor in inadequate schools and numerous other areas covered in the testimony of witnesses in all 17 cities and towns. In addition to the hearings there was another important component of the commissions investigative strategy. Commissioners visited the homes of the poor. The conditions in which many of the poor lived exasperated commissioners and created a sense of urgency about developing a solution. Commissioner epstein a harvard trained economist described the houses of the tobacco harvesters he had visited in quincy, florida. He reported, quote, we saw these unpainted wooden shacks of two or three or four rooms in which 12 or 14 people lived which had no windows, just shutters, no indoor water. Most of them did not have inside toilets. Living conditions, cracks in windows and floors which allowed the weather to seep in and a lack of indoor plumbing and Running Water exposed residents in quincy and elsewhere to disease and illness. The archives of the commission are full of these kinds of observations about the Living Conditions of the poor. Another discipline, sociology, offers tools to help answer im sorry. The commission poses a question, studying the commission poses a question, how and why did the home visits and the testimony offered by witnesses at local hearings affect commissioners . Another discipline, sociology, offers tools to help answer this question. The sociologist Irving Goffman has argued that changing the context in which participants view a particular set of conditions can cause them to see the conditions differently. According to him this phenomenon which he calls keying plays a crucial role in determining what it is we think is going on. Building on that idea david snow, rockford, warden and benford have similarly argued that changing the framing of a particular set of circumstances can motivate new kinds of actions, new values are planted and nurtured and new meanings and understandings jettisoned. Thus reframing a situation can galvanize support among decisionmakers. While circumstances may not resonate among interpretive frames seeing them facetoface can have a significant impact. We can see this phenomenon play out in realtime over the course of the work of the president s commission on income maintenance. Commissioners largely realigned their views with those of witnesses, especially in how they thought about the poor individuals responsibility for their own condition. When otto was brought facetoface with the poors Living Conditions, for example, his perspective shifted. In his own words while he had been, quote, skeptical about the use of the home visits he was, quote, overwhelmed by what he saw in quincy. He described poverty that was really much deeper than i have ever encountered in my life. The visits he said provided, quote, an invaluable frame of reference for the physical reality of poverty. Commissioner spalding an insurance executive from North Carolina was also surprised by the dire conditions he observed in quincy. I thought i knew something about poverty and the condition under which people lived but what i saw there i havent seen anyplace else spalding said. Commissioner tom watson jr. The chairman of the board of ibm had called the conditions he saw, quote, intolerable and appalling, especially for minorities. The combination of testimony and home visits thus changed the means of poverty for commissioners. That could be seen in the commissions final report where they wrote, quote, the reason for poverty is not some personal failing, but the accident of being born to the wrong parents or the lack of opportunity to become unpoor or some other circumstance over which individuals have no control. That conclusion led the president s commission on income maintenance to endorse a guaranteed income without preseasons. That kind of income transfer could be implemented quickly and could circumvent the very structures and programs that had hindered economic mobility. How, then, does the story of the president s commission on income maintenance inform and reshape our understanding of American Police cal history . First the story complicates ideas about the role of ordinary citizens in shaping policy. In the case of the president s commission on income maintenance and other president ial commissions and advisory committees new dynamics were created between the nonpowerful and decisionmakers which had an affect on polly recommendations. Frame works from sociology and psychology helped to illuminate how those dynamics worked. Second i argue that the president s commission on income maintenance should push us to think about where social movements begin and where they end. Douglas mcadam has written that the boundaries of the movement are never as clearly defined as those of formal organizations. Movements are much more ephemeral. To distinguish participants from nonparticipants is extremely difficult. As the views of commissioners became realigned with those of the poor and their advocates commissioners could be seen becoming a part of a late 1960s social movement that pushed for Better Outcomes for the poor. Third and finally the president s commission on income maintenance left behind a rich archival record of poverty created by those who had experienced it. In a broader sense those archives are provocative in suggesting the possibility of numerous unexplored or underexplored historical sources which capture the voices of ordinary citizens and the nonpower in particular historical moments. These archives have led me to ask whether source material documenting the experiences of nonelites in american political history is more plentiful than we have acknowledged. Should we be more vigilant will tracking down those sources in order to continue to pursue the inclusion of all voices in historical analyses even in bureaucratic and administrative histories with even greater attention paid to not privileging the voices of elites. Thank you. [ applause ] great. Im going to ask some very broad questions about president ial commissions. First so president ial commissions are a very conventional political history topic and id like to start out by having our speakers talk about how to rethink president ial commissions, sorry, as we rethink political history. So some of the advantages of studying president ial commissions, as dov suggests, there is the archives are rich, theres reports, theres materials, theres memos, they are generally kept and preserved in a president ial library or at the National Archives, there is a clear start date and clear end date. A president ial library may have done oral histories with participants and staffers, you know, after the fact. So the records are there and theyre great and theyre typed. Always a plus. They can be a great statement of what these particular set of handpicked experts thought although im going to qualify that statement immediately by saying its a great statement of what the experts thought they could say or what they thought might be received well by the audience so we obviously want to be careful about taking these as all evidence at face value but even with these qualifiers attached these reports, the internal memos, the discussions, the publication and the editorials around them are valuable as a certain articulation of ideas. The disadvantages of setting president ial commissions. If we put president ial commissions at the center and, again, i speak as someone who had done this myself, if we put president ial commissions at the center i wonder worry that this suggests an importance to president ial commissions that isnt necessarily there. The history of president ial commissions often is of these discussions that are created, you know, they have a life, they have an executive director, they have a staff, they file a report and then the report goes in the library and then it just sort of sits there. They may not have altered and often do not alter either political conversations on the topic or the political incentives involved for the decisionmakers and the topic. Dov was telling a story of success in changing that conversation and really interesting ways that i want to get back to, but nonetheless the proposal doesnt happen. The ultimate end is failure in certain ways. So question what do we get from studying president ial commissions as president ial commissions . Should we be studying them as institutions . How do they help us think about a broader political history story . One key facet of political history, of legal history is focusing on where Decisionmaking Authority is placed. If theres little actual Decisionmaking Authority placed in president ial commissions what should we do with these entities and what should we make of them . Frank was telling a story of these as a National Literature, again, which raises questions if no one is reading them, again, what do we do with this, but it does raise the question that maybe intellectual history is maybe a better approach than political history and i dont actually believe that, but im throwing that out to provoke conversation. Well, i did distinguish between the running concern commission and the National Turning Point commission. Those things get read, the turning points one. Not completely by everybody, multiple volumes, lots of appendices but they do make a difference i think in a way that some of the worth yer but more technical ones do not. One thing im not really a historian, but it occurs to me that its possible that histories might view president ial commissions as a really accurate barometer of what the elites of the time were thinking. Of what the kind of person who gets appointed to a president ial commission considered as a class of people is thinking and that can be useful in itself regardless of what happens to their proposals. And even the proposals, the inner documents that you are talking b the first drafts, the propos proposal, the outlines of a section that may or may not eventually get written may tell you a lot about the deliberations of the commission. And, again, these may or may not become policy, but it will tell you what that kind of person was thinking in that period. And that can be useful in itself i discovered that i actually had two recommendations that i kind of like that still work today, one is that the people who are appointed to president ial commissions ought to have some actual early life experience, preferably early life experience, with the problem theyre talking about. Looking at president ial commissions all those years ago i could find very few people say on the all volunteer army who had ever been drafted or on the various Public Health commissions whoever given any sign in their life of lacking medical care. Or there was another one. Oh, yeah, the various riot commissions. There was very little evidence that i could find that any member of the commission had ever been affected by a riot or around a riot or near a riot or in the neighborhood of a riot, much less having participated in a riot. And i thought that somewhere there there ought to be the sort of experience that dov was talking about where, you know, harvard professors discovered kinds of poverty that never showed up in their statistics. Was there anybody on the Income Maintenance Commission who came from a poverty background, do you know . Not that i know of. Not that i know of. Okay. But i will say that the discoveries were over the course of the commission work. So with this particular commission by design those who served on it had not taken a public position on income transfer programs. Okay. And had thought very little about it. The idea being that they would have a clean slate coming into the work of the commission. And it sounds like then they filled that slate very dramatically, very graphically. Exactly. Most of the other ones that i looked at you couldnt see very much in terms of, you know, grounding and reality. Maybe one or two members, maybe very early in their life, but they never seemed to even talk about it. In the deliberations of their commissions. I think both as institutions as well as as windows into or on to particular historical moments. So one of the most interesting things that happens with a president ial commission as an institution is the dynamic among the commissioners themselves. Amy zeger if i pronounced that right in 2004 wrote an article about political constellation commissions and argued theyre commission that is by design are aimed to create consensus among elites and decisionmakers. The so the processes matter less than bringing together a group of decisionmakers in order to reach consensus on a particular issue or particular question. My interest is in shifting the focus away from why the intentions of a president in creating a commission in the first place and on whether the recommendations of a Commission End up being codified into policy and to much more look at the document production and source production thats going on over the course of the commission. So not all commissions have testimony and hearings, but all commissions are producing an people mouse amount of paper over the course of their tenures. Like joanna said its all typed and usually neatly organized and oftentimes in the National Archive or president ial library so that we have a window of source about various levels of decisionmaking and various interactions with the commission and various dynamics thats readily available for researchers to be able to bring light to a particular historical moment. So following up on one of the threads certainly in dovs paper is this question of how we think about these as profoundly unrepresentative entries. The elite nature of the staffing of these commissions, who gets to be on the commission and it was in your paper, more about who actually was on the commission you are talking b whats in it for the president and whats in it for the commissioners . Who gets to be on these commissions, how seriously are their views taken . How seriously do they expect their views to be taken and how what kind of expertise are they bringing to this . This picks up on the point frank was just making, what kind of expertise do we looking at these commissions by that commissioners should have, should have had, versus what expertise is seen at the time as being valuable. Educationally, employment background, veteran status, et cetera, and what might also be relevant but not valued, again, getting to the point of franks question that do you have people who have received welfare, grew up in poverty, experienced poverty, is that not considered expertise . Right . So this is sort of a bigger question about thinking about president ial commissions. They are not strktly speaking the kind of bureaucracies that we often talk about when we mean bureaucracy and when we talk about expertise in that context, but at the same time theres similarities there and in some ways the people who get to be on president ial commissions are the people who get to be on president ial commissions and the fact that people are on multiple, i believe, hineman was on multiple commissions, you talked about meany, having been on a shall commission for one thing validates your ability to be on a president ial commission for something completely different. I wonder if you can talk about this question of expertise. Yeah, so the president s commission on income maintenance and, again, may have been an outlier, but it drew together expertise from politics, from industry and even from organizations like the National Mental Health Association. So jerry joseph was the president of the National Mental Health Association in 1969 and served on this commission. You know, in addition to robert solo who is an economist won the nobel prize in economics and otto epstein aflcio was represented, the ceo of westinghouse cooperation was represented, the chairman of the board of ibm was represented. This particular commission had representation from both social services, politics, industry and several other sectors. Hineman made a consideration decision when he decided to hold the hearings, he was going to challenge the expertise of the experts. So he was calculated in insisting that hearings were going to be a part of the investigative strategy. I think both to destabilize the idea of expertise coming from statisticians in washington but also to very legitimately and genuinely try to educate commissioners who hadnt grown up with the experiences of poverty. I guess my sense of this well, first of all, it agrees with yours, but a lot and a lot of these people are chosen for general wisdom. General segacity. They have impressed other notables like themselves with this particular quality. Not everyone has. Ive looked at it in myself for years and years and always come up empty that way. And i suspect a lot of people who dont get appointed to president ial commissions are like wise lacking as i am and you phrased it very nicely, the kind of people to get appointed to president ial commissions are the kind of people who get a pointed to president ial commissions. They are also the people the kind of people who ascend in University Life to become chairs and deans and so forth. They do have this particular quali quality, very different from technical expertise, very different from necessarily real reality basis in their own past, but they are able to by means of this segacity ascend in organizations and move them. Its a magical trait at least to me. I have never really seen any good Academic Studies of how this works even from my daughter who went to business school. She came away this is her fathers impression, not what she conveyed, not what she said to me that this kind of segacity was a religion among the people who had it. Being drawn together and ascending through leadership in Large Organizations because they displayed this eerie but very tangible quality. Some people have it and most people dont and thats why most people arent on president ial commissions. Lmplt thats a good transition to my next question base based on the fact that that intangible quality is often whiteness and maleness. Yeah, theres that. So yesterday dr. Leah talked about the knee to desegregate attention and turn our attention to incentives and understand the white supremacist roots of american politicians. There hasnt been much work on this on the nature of these commissions, focusing on whatever racist characteristics might be inherent in president ial commissions but i think nobody could look at the history of most president ial commissions and cull them antiracist. There have been plenty of commissions on race. Yes. But is that the same thing . No. No. Not at all. Right. So i think a general question what would looking at president ial commissions with a race, with a gender, with a class analysis with that at the center, what would that look like and how might that change the way we think about the role of president ial commissions in political history . I have a real simple quick answer about the race commissions and also the commissions on the status of women and maybe a few other commissions as well. If youre going to have a commission on race make the clear majority of the appointees to the commission representatives of the races youre worried about. Seems very simple, very straightforward. Has never happened in any of and there is in any of the long history of president ial commissions, on racial subjects, there have been a number of state commissions in places like california and i believe illinois as well, looking at Racial Conditions and always the racial minorities were racial minorities on the commission itself. Now, maybe that would discredit the commissions, but it would be an interesting experiment to try. Its never been tried at all. Using again, using this commission as a case study, well, so in the personnel of the commission there was representation from people like randolph serves on the commission and cliff forward alexander served on the commission and julian samara who was an academic at notre dame in the 60s who was one of the founders of latino studies. So there was representation, you know, not completely diverse, but some diverse representation on the commission. I might argue that in the findings of this particular commission itself though perhaps not antiracist, necessarily, the finding that there were discriminatory built into American Society in housing and employment and education that thats print that go finding as part of the commissions work is part of a project that one might argue leads to progress on issues of equality. The commissions final report was called poverty amid plenty and it was 155 pages and many of those pages were spent talking about discrimination and bias in the structures and institutions of american sowed that had will he had to systemic and cyclical poverty. I want to push this just a little bit further, though. So how boo going back to say the 9 11 commission, going back to the hoover commissions which ive looked at, going back to some of these commissions and really thinking through the kind of expertise, people who were on the panel, the kind of proposals and the assumptions that those people were starting from, now, again, my first question was premised in the fact that maybe these dont matter that much, but assuming that they do and, again, have been important in the writing of policy history and political history, how might sort of going back with that and looking at them through that lens change the way we think about their role in political history . I think there was an enormous implication to the question which is a good one which is if we think about how one might put together president ial commissions going forward, are there possibilities that we can use the experiences of past president ial commissions to diversify the makeup of current president ial commissions to give more voices or give more kinds of people a voice in deliberation and recommending policy. The second part is then it becomes even more important to understand why the recommendations of president ial commissions do or dont shape policy. Because if a commission is diversified and many voices coming up with a consensus recommendation it doesnt matter if there is no opportunity to turn those recommendations into policy. I dont know if you meant the question to have but it has really, i think, important implications for thinking about the construction of president ial commissions going forward. I have a somewhat different answer, not really a historians answer at all. One of the great problems of American Society as we are all aware of at this conference, people are across the country, is this huge dislike and distrust of government. This is beneath all the sessions weve had here in West Lafayette at purdue, Political Polarization and the roots of the radical right and the origins of violence. All of these have at their core what seems to be a native american hatred for government that is particularly virulent these days. If i had one president ial commission that i would suggest for me, president or successor would actually look into is a commission on why people hate government so much and what government could actually do to tamp down within legitimate democratic norms, how government could change to create a less alienated population. This is an enormous problem and it underlies all these policy issues. Whatever they are. Except perhaps the bail wolf style National Turning Point commissions but certainly the mid list ones, the alienation of the American Population from government, its disapproval of politicians, disapproval of bureaucracies, disapproval of government in general, the sort of hooting that comes up with any political almost any political speech, the people on the fringes of the speech who are obviously there to get laughs or something or to express vitriol rather than participate in the political process, that would go a long way. On that commission ng i would be less worried about who was appointed to the commission as long as they did a decent job of actually looking at why americans hate government so much. So i guess im sorry. I was just going to go back to your original question. I think in a way youre right to point out that the composition of president ial commissions historically give us an idea of what which voices were privileged and the conversation in which were marginalized and thats kind of a super important framework for thinking about american political history. I would add they who is creating national priorities. President reagan had a commission on National Aspirations and objectives in 1980 which is really interested to read but its one particular voice of what the National Project should be in 1980. Yeah, i think that just to go back to my question in that also there is the question of competition and, again, this is going back to what dr. Kennedy was talking about yesterday in terms of you can change the people, change the institutions and those are two Different Things is the president ial commission itself is an institution. What value independently does it bring, which, i mean, the followup question i was going to ask frank is you said there was one president ial commission it would be to pursue a solution to the problem of current polarization. Why a president ial commission . Thats a good question. Theres got to be other ways to deal with the problem, too. But i think in some ways it gets to the heart of the economy of, you know, what advantages, what disadvantages do president ial commissions have in politics . Well, they do have the advantage to some extent they still have the advantage of rest eej. You may not like government but you look at the people on president ial commissions, these are clearly successful busy people who have made interested varied lives for themselves. You may not respect any one of them in particular cases but the group of them, you know, the 10, the 15 or whatever might as a group carry some weight that a president would not. A president who is arguing with congress about this or that or doesnt like the last three Supreme Court decisions or whatever, but this group of people with this magic segacity i was just talking about might carry some weight in terms of just saying we understand your problem. We understand where youre coming from. There are things that can be done to reduce this polarization. The next followup question, what would those things be. Please dont ask it, i dont have an answer. I will ask one more broad question that is not that question. Which is what you know, as political historians what should we be looking for, what should we be skeptical of when we turn to president ial commissions, when we read these reports, drafts, letters, read the editorials the members right in support of their findings, how might we read against the grain . Frank had talked about conflict and its absolutely true we dont have a president ial commission created without some commission but when you read the works of president ial commissions theyre drained of conflict. So how might we try to find that tension . How might we try to find that conflict when its missing in the formal materials . Another question saying where is the violence that must be there . Where is the conflict . I will take a first shot at that. So i think in two places in the dissent that comes in the production of the final report and sometimes the dissent is published and sometimes its not published. Frank spoke a little bit about that. Oftentimes there are some large percentage of the commission writes dissent to particular parts of the commish report. So theres rarely complete consensus. I think, too, in the relationship with the executive who appointed the commission and oftentimes correspondents and internal memos from president ial administrations shed different kinds of light on the work of the commissions themselves, especially in pointing out where the abrasive moments are. Two answers on that. One of the lines that recurs a lot that originates with the president ial commission was a commission that Lyndon Johnson appointed on the race riots of 1967, the Kerner Commission and the particular line that resonated is america is in danger of becoming two societies, one black, unequally not equal to each other and no on. Two societies, one black, one night not equal to each other is an approximate paraphrase. I think that has stayed in the national memory, again, not necessarily creating in any particular policies to undo the divide or even to explore it further. A second moment of dissent and this may be something that some of the older people in the room remember came when the challenger rocket exploded in i think it was spring 1986 and there was appointed a commission with richard Richard Nixons secretary of state William Rogers as the chair of the commission and it had a lot of technical people and some political people and some businesspeople after all there had been a lot of Business Investment in the challenger, there had to be automatically. But also appointed to the commission was a physicist named Richard Fineman who may have been the greatest american born physicist of the 20th century, certainly would be on the top three, certainly top five or so. Who was on the commission and he actually had two forms of very nasty cancer at the time. He was dying. But he smelled a rat in the testimony of the nasa people who had sent the rocket up and he figured out not so much from the testimony but inferring from the testimony that it was, in fact, this decision to send the challenger up in relatively cold weather was a very risky decision. Nobody actually had said so in the testimony, but he had done some fineman who had great practical segacity apart from scientific segacity figured out that this had to be a riskier decision than it looked. Over a weekend while the commission was meeting he hunted around to a Department Store where he got some very simple equipment that enabled him to show publicly in front of hundreds of people and then on the daily news basically forever and of course its on youtube as well what it is specifically that went wrong with the with the shot, a structure called the o ring which was made of rubber and which held together two metal parts of the rocket had disintegrated and he showed right here, i mean, on this scale, you know, as a witness, you know, right in front of everybody with the stuff he had bought in the Hardware Store when it got too cold. He had cold water in the vile he had gotten. When it got too cold the rubber would snap and when the rubber snapped the challenger blew up. I mean, it was a long chain of events leading to the explosion, but the basic fault, the basic break in the chain was the o ring disintegrated, breaking really, and that was one of the great moments of dissent on any commission. Rogers had, by the way, gotten quite furious with fineman throughout the whole thing, there were clearly not exactly temple mts that would come to understand each other, but fineman who did many Hidden Services for the American Government for once did something in public that actually displayed the idea that it was not a wise decision to agree to send up the rocket in the first place. And it was based on a risk, a gamble, the people who made the decision knew the gamble, it was Something Like a 70 30 decision, at least in their minds about the Risk Assessment and the 30 came up. Thats a form of dissent. Very effective form of dissent. In fact, they forced the commission primarily by means of this desktop demonstration to be much more critical of the space industrys and their testing requirements. The actual story is a little more complicated and a little more technical but you do there is opportunity for certain kind of person with certain kind of expertise or temperament to dissent and increasingly i think they do and this is, again, part of the polarization or the sense of, you know, rising individualism to the point of well, nobody quite anticipated, but these are not close institutions, president ial commissions. There are ways for dissent, for lack of consensus or failed consensus or consensus thats just flawed in the first place to be demonstrated. All right. Well, thank you so much. And id like to solicit any questions from the audience. Im going to pick up on this i think you want to wait for i want to pick up on this idea about participation and maybe how to get to this antigovernment because similar to joanna im not sure how this is going to work not entirely sure how a commissions going to work. The thing thats interesting to me and i would extend it back to the president ial task force. A lot of people named dont do anything. And lbj, he has this idea of task forcing. Well, a lot of that was actually the government bureaucrats. My favorite example of this is clark kerr. Just about around the time when he is being fired from ronald reagan, doesnt show up at all for all the things that will actually shape the highereducation act, which he would eventually sort of oppose. But there is this idea that whos left behind are nameless bureaucrats hidden behind that and i think who actually participates and who is actually shaping what we need to think about . And i think it goes to the question of that who is being appointed to these questions are not actually government officials. Is it any wonder that we have no real sense about the men and women in the Civil Service, who have done so much and tried to do so much . How does that work with this . Does our focus on these commissions, which very rarely actually, you know, lead to any sort of effective policy change and dhi this that those are not the people on the ground trying to implement and fight out policy. Just a thought. Wonder what you all think. One possible answer, its not a complete answer. The staffs are frequently people who are seconded by their agencies at the request of the executive director. So that the lifetime Civil Servant, often, makes up a half, a third, Something Like that, of the commission staff. And theyre sort of nameless in in the nature of these things. The staff is distinct from the commissioners, themselves. Yeah. Yeah. And and they, of course, because theyre fulltime job and theyre there all the time, you know, can influence what the report says a lot. They are the people who pull the all nighters on this stuff and i gather all nighters do happen, and its not the commissioners, for the most part, doing it. But the the lifetime Civil Service staff does have this reputation. I think of of of being influential. In the commissions, i think part of the larger problem in the United States is that we dont respect Civil Service the way we should. And they and they know things and theyve been there, and theyve had reality and so forth. To your idea about as we treat this as literature . Because who is actually writing this . And who is actually shaping this . Is it that authorial intent is and theres this lack of conflict in them. That is sort of foundational. Are these president ial commissions, do we learn less about the administration . Although theyre really interesting in the fields of higher education, you can see a huge difference in which University Administrators they bring in and all this kind of stuff. The liberal ones or the sort of highbound ivy league ones. But who fundamentally is left, at the end of the day, writing this stuff and doing this work are the Civil Servants who are there throughout the administration. So what does that tell us . And theyre the people who write the midlist reports, not the epic ones. The epic ones, just by the nature of the situation, draw more attention. Would you would you argue that the report maybe there are two ways to answer your question or think about your question. That the report, itself, would be different if it were the Civil Servants who are writing it, a. And, then, b, the effect that might have on the reception of those recommendations. Actually, our attention are respect for the actual Civil Servants. The reason we know so much about whats going on going wrong right now in this particular white house but also the Nixon White House was the Civil Servants screaming their heads off to woodward and bernstein and to all these reporters. They were not actually giving i think we might need to think in how historians have been complicit in not giving the Civil Servants their respect as opposed to focusing on the headlining names, that are picked by the president , in these really fancy, often, you know, rose garden ceremonies. That, are we complicit in our very own frustrations of how little we understand about these blueribbon commissions and what they represent for american political history . Well, certainly, the how to put this . The present white house doesnt seem to have a staff, whether political or Civil Servant, that would score very high on selfrepression. Its a blununch of blabber mout. At least if you read the papers. These are not people who have the passion for anonymity, that was apprised in, for example, theodore excuse me Franklin Roosevelts administration when the white house was starting to grow. Often, again, with people seconded from the agencies. And great public administrator talked specifically about how the ideal Civil Servant had this and this was a quote passion for anonymity. This does not seem to be a problem for the current white house. Wasnt that also the title of his memoir, which does cast the anonymity aspect of it into some relief . I think that the more wellknown of the appointees are certainly theyre out there for a name and blabbing. But i am talking about the ones, right now, who are talking and letting us know about all the evils going on in the epa. Like, that kind of stuff. Those are actually we dont know i mean, its true i have not had a chance to read, thoroughly, the mueller report. We dont know who talked to him or even, actually, in terms of what we now know about how poorly the epa was being run and that sort. Those people are quiet, but they are coming forward and saying theres something truly rotten in the and so they are an anonymous bureaucrat. Michael lewiss quote. Exactly. And i think you make a really good point that, in thinking about historical or thinking about president ial commissions historically, we think about how to add underprivileged voices back into the conversation, which is important. And weve already privileged the elite voices but with president ial commissions, especially, we know who the Civil Servants with to whom youre referring are because theyre in the reports. And theyre correspondents in their documents. And their significance to the life of the commission are also in the archives and i think you are making a really good point that we overlook that middlelane group even though we have sources as historians, to see what their role was in these commissions. Growing up in the d. C. Area, i know this is not true really before the civil rights act. Take a while. But some of those Civil Servants are women of color. That this is good employment for them. That we could actually add some of the kind of the diversity and questions that are going on there, in terms of who, as the Civil Servants, would grow, especially to be more inclusive . Especially, when its easier to push for equal opportunity in Public Employment than it certainly was in the private sector. Thats an interesting way of thinking a think about how these things might have changed over time. Sorry. Just get some more questions. Couple comments. My experience with government, president ial Governmental Commissions, is as a librarian, specializing in history, political science, and government information. I like when i get the chance to introduce students and faculty to this commission, ill tell them theyre products of their time. You can look at their findings and determine how whether their policy recommendations are good or bad or indifferent. A lot of them are now available online. You dont necessarily have to go to a president ial library to look at them. And its also it can also be helpful to look at the hearings that were held by these commissions. We should also go beyond just president ial commissions, to look at congressionallyappointed commissions. A even quasi Governmental Commissions because they all can influence policymaking. One thing i would caution about is there should be experts that for these reports to be credible with the public, they should be based on substantive, technocr technocratic expertise, regardless of the ethnic or gender or political background of the appointees. If its if its perceived as just being appointed as diversity for diversity sake, its not going to the report is not likely to resonate with the general public, particularly outside of the policymaking in historical circles. And id also mention, where you were talking about a lack of distrust in government, thats we made a mistake and other countries in the world. Civil servants are like any other people. They can make mistakes. They can also do great things. So we need to have realistic expectations of what government can do, as well as should do. I mean, i agree with much of what you said. I will push back a little bit. I dont think any of us were suggesting that, you know, diversity, in and of itself, but to say the kind of expertise that has been valorized, as we were discussing earlier, has often been nonexpertise. Has been this person who went to harvard, which a lot of people in todays modern world have gone to harvard. That, alone, cant be the kind of expertise or having been on a previous Governmental Commission. But to say i mean, one of the questions i didnt have a chance to ask and im not going to ask right now, just going to lay out there, is engage with the kind of expertise that was valorized. Like, it was very clear in your paper that these hearings opened up the commissioners to experiences they hadnt heard. And they listened, and they took it deeply seriously, and it influenced their recommendations. But that is that those people had the expertise that the commissioners lacked. Right . I mean, im not going to say why werent those people on the commissions instead . Because i think we know. But why werent those those are the experts, right . And to be actually just reconceiving what we think of when were talking about expertise and knowledge and background, that helps us look back and realize how sort of how very limited its been in the past. And what do we actually want people to to know and to have and to have done on on commissions . And i think that, by definition, is going to result in a very different look for president ial and agency and congressional committees. Ethnic or gender. Adhere to one prescribed view on a particular subject. Another thing with the Governmental Commissions is how often the subjects commissions are repeated. Like, if you go back in u. S. History, there have been tons of commissions on immigration. Space exploration. There was the Challenger Commission in 86 and then about two decades later, there was the columbia investigation. So you can often get very interesting themes and currents in american political history, through Governmental Commission examination of them. One one thing shines through, though. And the Income Maintenance Commission that dove talked about seems to be a very important exception. In the 1960s, the commissions i was basically looking at. And, even today, in all of american politics, one of the rarest things you hear in their entire big chunks of government, you never hear it at all, is the voice of a poor person. Rarest thing in america politics. Was then, is now, and we have to find better ways to do this stuff. We have all this experience that i mean, dove and i represent, in a very small way, of studying commissions. But its not just the lack of people whove really suffered from American Society and commissions. Its throughout government. And, somehow, when they do get into government, theyre minimized, marginalized, whatever the term is. And i i just wish we could face this directly. Though, again, i dont want to be told, dont want to be asked, how to do that directly. But i think this may be, oh, you can do the usual professors copout. You, students, solve it. Your generation can do it. We never have. But, you, you the gldolden generation, go get it. Yeah. Patiently waiting for the microphone. All right. First, thank you for doing this panel and for coming out and for revitalizing president ial commissions or the significance of president ial commissions. So i greatly, greatly appreciate th that. So i have a lot of thoughts but im going to try and boil it down because i know there are some other folks in the audience who have questions as well. So there are a couple of things that i id really like for the panel to to think about. In particular, i find myself convinced by the panelists and their significance placing a significant amount of attention on president ial commissions and using president ial commissions to specific ends. And i find that this is, actually, particularly when we frame it in very specific ways, that this is actually, in fact, a useful tool for historical analysis and for historians. To think about the intersection of traditional models of political history and nontraditional models. But, also, bringing social history, ethnic history, you know, race history, what have you, these marginalized p perspectives and voices into conversation. And traditionally elite spaces, representative of the state. But then, also, treating some of these spaces as representative voices that disrupt this idea of elite. So, to the i i cant see who is up front, but to this question of, say, whistleblowers. Thinking about whistleblowers as underrepresented voices and narratives or Civil Servants, within the apparatus of the state. So kind of distilling out this idea of power within the hierarchy of the state. I, also, think its useful for thinking about questions of class. And i think, frank, this was to your point, about thinking about how president ial commissions can be useful in rendering an understanding of elite perspectives on a broad array of issues. In this case, you know, particularly by by doves point about, you know, all of these elites basically going into poverty. Venturing into the unknown territory. And then, being deeply in this case, being deeply influenced by their an experience they, otherwise, would not have had. So i think that is useful in telling a story about that. Next, i do think president ial commissions are useful in talking about the significance of failure in history. And so, this is not just simply an issue or problem for the discipline of history. Its, very much, a problem for political science, particularly ideas, you know, i think the subfields of American Political Development has tried to discuss this. But the idea that failure, therefore, renders something insignificant, is actually the wrong way of looking at it. So we should be thinking about, you know, what is the story that this failure tells us . Right. So what does it mean that the Kerner Commission puts out this explosive report and then the only two things that are taken out of it are things that greatly increase, you know, mass incarceration . All those other things, structural, institutional, those get tossed out. Thats a story, in and of itself, right, that also does tell us something about contemporary the foundation of contemporary problems of inequality, race, things like that. And then, i think, you know, the last one of the last points that i think is is useful, in kind of teasing out here actually, maybe ill ill rephrase it. Im really interested im really interested in the panel in thinking about the not just the intentionality of these president ial commissions because i think the story changes, depending on what president ial commission youre looking at. But, perhaps, using president ial commissions, not as kind of some objective truth or some kind of archive of, you know, rich sources that tell us x. But, instead, to tell us, as a analytical way of looking at a particular moment. And then, extrapolating it out. So using it as part of a toolkit to extrapolate out. So i am thinking of president trumps commission on electoral integrity. So, if we take that at face value and go back go into the future and say in 20 years, historians are looking at this. That doesnt actually tell us what we need to know about that particular commission. But its only in using that commission within a very specific context, and contextualizing it, and then kind of looking at the intersection of the political like, the political history with social history and cultural history, that we get a fuller narrative that actually tells it that this is a sham commission, with a very specific intent at a particular moment in time. So im wondering if, perhaps, the the panelists can comment on this. You know, in terms of how you see the purpose of using these commissions in a way that speaks to the overarching significance of the intersection of political history and social history. Yeah. No. I think youre right. To identify commissions. Thanks for the questions. Theyre really good ones. I think youre right to identify president ial commissions and the materials that are produced in the processes of president ial commissions, as tools to do political history. But not, necessarily, as artifacts, in and of themselves. And i actually think your second and third questions are related to each other in really interesting ways. So that understanding a president ial commission, only in the particular context of a historical moment, is the value of looking at that president ial commission as an object of study. And, then, the question becomes looking at that president ial commission in relation to what . And to which other groups . And to which events . And, you know, it it in in relation to the second question you asked about the what happens to the recommendations for those commissions and whether commissions are considered quote unquote successful or not. May get us to a better understanding of the way the power flows, within governments and societies, at particular moments. So the ideaing commissions in historical context, to to various moving parts of the way in which decisions are made and resources are allocated. And and why, or why not, particular recommendations have an impact . Whether thats in the rejection the process of their rejection or in actually shaping policy, i think, is really interesting to think about. In other words, theyre not just lenses on to particular historical moments but maybe lenses on to the way which power works at any particular moment. Just to your point about failure, i mean, i think its absolutely key. And i think we need just a lot more work on failure in political history. Weve i think it tends to come up in writing sort of paths not taken. Where you can see sort of alternatives but, you know, the eye is on where we went. Where we couldve gone but where we went. But really centering heres what people wanted to do and here is why it didnt work. I think we tend to, you know, talk about the things that work or mostly work, and we dont really dig into what the constraints were, what the institutional constraints, the political constraints, et cetera, were that made something fail in really putting that at the center of the main story. I know that isnt your main question but i think its such an important thing we dont spend nearly enough time talking about. Id start with that last example you gave about the Voter Suppression commission, which i suspect sounded plausible to, lets say, 40 of the population. The national population. And, for the other 60 , you look like just another trump stunt. Okay . And maybe in 20 years from now, that will be the metaphor of the trump administration. The only president ial commission in history that got appointed, got money, and collapsed anyway. Now, thats a failure. Thats a meta failure, really. And maybe, you know, failure studies. If if if historians start doing them. They could start with that one. It is a meta failure. And it does sum up a lot of the context of the time. And it does sum up what lots and lots of people think of the trump administration. I think theres, also, an important critique in your question, of the way that hihis and other scholars have written american political history. In two ways maybe. If we know that the sources are in the archives for the voices of both the nonpowerful but also Civil Servants for example. But we have chosen, largely, not to write about them. Thats a conscious decision what we write about and what we dont write about so what we privilege is not just what archive material is available but the decisions weve made about who should have a voice in the in the history that we that we write. And thats kind of a really important critique i think in the way we think about writing voices into american political history. One more thing, coming back to failure. Dove and i are both in our schools respective Public Policy schools. Woodrow wilson, for dove. Princeton at rutgers for me. Those schools do a lot of, lets call, policy analysis. That is, they look at particular initiatives and see how they played out. See how they were implemented. And, in truth, the vast number of policy analysis that get done of particular programs show failure. Show shortfall. Show partial achievement but they shouldve looked a little more here and they couldve gone from 60 to 85 or something Something Like that. I this this this may be the passage of time speaking or the light shining in my eye. But failure is a big part of life. I mean, what, one of ten Small Businesses actually succeeds and is still operating after five years . Why should it be any different for Government Programs . Most of human life, a lot of human life, is about failure. And sometimes the failure is structural. That is, it was doomed to fail to begin with. And, other times, its what you might call more situational. It could have worked, if different decisions had been made, at different times. But we shouldnt be surprised, as such, by failure. Okay. So i wanted to see if there is a way to connect some of the themes of other panels to what you all have been talking about. In terms of the history of failure, i wonder if if government officials and historians and political scientists are all able to somehow come clean about the importance of failure, the significance of failure. Wont that feed into the conspiratorial mind view that government cant do anything right, number one . And then, the second thing i was thinking, im married to and related to a number of career Civil Servants, lawyers, scientists, and they cant talk to the press. You know, so when you talk about, you know, the need to prescription out the sort of work a day voices of the government, its not possible to. Its not possible to talk to people who are working for the Census Bureau right now because of, you know, because of government regulations but, also, because the whole things in litigation. So there isnt as much access to what the the daily tasks of government are and what how theyre being attended to. As wed like to think, theoretically, there is. I mean, those people, you know, they they cannot speak, even off the record, in much detail about what theyre doing, depending on the kind of job they have. And, of course, they far outnumber the they what . They far outnumber the political employees. Oh, yeah. Greatly. 2 million. In some ways, though, i think i mean, that is a source question, right . Their work is instead of bureaucracy, youre looking at their work they produced. The question of what kind of archival management is happening, what kind of records retention is happening, i think thats getting at the point, right . What work are they doing . Again, question mark, but ideally, in 20, 30, 40, years, one could go to the archives and see at least some of the work they were doing, and use that to to figure out. Right . Along with oral histories and whatever after the fact things we might have. We would also just have the files. I think is at least we we know theyre partial. We know theyre limited. We know theyre constrained. But, you know, were reading them against the grain, and were doing what historians do. The reference should have some content. I agree. But i think were not going to were we cant trust those records to tell us the full story. And you know that, as well as anybody. But you never can. And, also, there is a certain amount of the press and, again, some of my best friends are journalists. I thought that was funny but i guess its not. But the press, i mean, inevitably given deadline constraints, given pay constraints. All kinds of things. Often, tends to simplify an actual problem. And you get the nuance of the problem, the complexity of the problems, from the people youre talking about. But the press operating on a deadline and so forth, often tends to exaggerate certain kinds of things. It likes to focus on personalities. It it creates man gods and monster women and all the other gods people up, if theyre in a particular category. Sort of like theyre sports figures or entertainers or Something Like that. And of course, all these gods and monsters have their fallibilities. And the press delights in finding those, too. This is very different from the life of the Civil Servant, if youre talking to who you are related to. Its the tortoise versus the hare, and eventually the tortoise can win. I think your questions interesting and connects to leahs question about thinking much more as historians and maybe in conversation with political scientists in particular about the ways we talk about success and failure. And how those are included or incorporated or excluded by virtue of being failures for example from the scholarship we write. I think its actually a really important challenge to rethink the ways we think about the framework of success and failure. And how it affects research really. You know, in terms of skepticism about government, when you when i think of the 9 11 commission, for instance, which may have been more congressional than president ial. No. It was president. It was president ial. Okay. Good. Then it fits. But so many people did not trust what that commission produced. You know, there are all kinds of conspiratorial convictions that grew out of 9 11 that the Commission Report did absolutely nothing to allay. You know, nobody wanted to be pacified by that report. And that, i think, is part and parcel of this larger problem of, you know, this sort of ideological conviction that we cant trust what comes out of the Government Printing office or its digital equivalent. Well, unfortunately, we are out of time but i want to thank you all for coming and for participating in our discussion. Thanks so much. Thanks. Thank you. Cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court, and Public Policy events. From the president ial primaries, through the impeachment process. And, now, the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online, or listen on our free radio app. And be part of the national conversation, through cspans daily washington journal program. Or through our social media feeds. Cspan. Created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Tonight, on American History tv beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, historian and tour guide garrett peck discusses prohibitions rise, as well as its fall, 13 years later, with the repeal of the 18th amendment. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the ar