Oral History Interview with James E. Jones Jr. (2004-2005)

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

TURNER: [00:00:01] Hello, I'm Kris Turner, a reference librarian at the University of Wisconsin Law School Library. This is a 17-hour oral history featuring University of Wisconsin Law School faculty member James E. Jones, Jr. It was recorded between June 21, 2004, and February 14, 2005. The interviewer is UW faculty member June Weisberger.

[00:00:23] There are times in the original recordings, including the first session, where the tape begins recording after Professor Weisberger begins speaking. The oral history was completed over 12 separate interviews. Between each interview is a brief interlude signaling the end of the previous session and introducing the next one, including the date it was recorded. The first session recorded on June 21st, 2004, begins now.

WEISBERGER: [00:00:46] June 21, 2004. I am in the office of Professor Jim Jones, and I am going to be interviewing him for the University of Wisconsin's oral history project. Okay, Jim? I said we probably ought to do a straight 00:01:00chronology, unless you want to deviate from that, but where were you born, where did you start school?

JONES JR.: [00:01:09] You're going to have to guide just to get me talking, we've been here for three weeks.

WEISBERGER: [00:01:14] Well-

JONES JR.: [00:01:18] But it's so, you ... A great number of the things I have done, the easiest thing to keep an orderly flow is to try to do it chronologically.

WEISBERGER: [00:01:28] Good.

JONES JR.: [00:01:29] It also is, I think, the quintessential way that historians ought to do stuff, rather than starting with their preconceptions, and then to go back and get the pieces and put them together, and nobody can understand.

JONES JR.: [00:01:40] So, you were asking me earlier about my autobiography effort. I have 1009 page draft, and it's chronological. How else would you [crosstalk [[00:[01:52]. Now, there's repetition in it because sometimes I'm talking about something and it's relevant in more than one year, and somebody needs to edit and put all of that together. I'm a lousy editor of my own stuff. 00:02:00But anyway, so, that's ideal because I can say.

[00:02:09] I was born on June 4, 1924, in Little Rock, Arkansas in a three-room shotgun house with no indoor plumbing, running water, and electricity. At 1105 South Broadway, and it's virtually in the middle of town now right on the edge of MacArthur Park. Of course, not far from MacArthur Park. And the relevance of this, and this is going forth-

WEISBERGER: [00:02:37] Going forward.

JONES JR.: [00:02:38] ... forward to come backwards. I was invited to give a funded lecture at the University of Arkansas Law School at Little Rock the same year that young Governor Bill Clinton had been elected President. The Governor's 00:03:00mansion is about a mile and a half, say, south I think from MacArthur Park. Where I was born is about a mile west.

[00:03:20] When I was a little boy growing up, the law school ... no, the building that was now the law school, the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, was the University of Arkansas Medical School, and rather than tear it down, they had refurbished this lovely old building, and they did a beautiful job. It's close to downtown.

[00:03:40] But MacArthur Park was off limits to Negros, it wasn't a place we could go, so when I started my speech there, I said to the people there, I said, "Well, I just told you where I was born, right, how far it was and I never say, it was a longer trip from 1105 South Broadway to this lecturn then the young 00:04:00governor's trip from the governor's seat to the White House, then I gave my speech.

WEISBERGER:[00:04:13] Well that was very fitting.

JONES JR.: [00:04:22] All right, my mother had poor choice in husbands, so I was, she had two children by her first husband was my father who deserted us when I was 3 years old, she had a fourth husband when I was 13, 12 or 13, my grandmother basically raised me because my mother worked, we had to have two incomes to make a living, she had a high school education, so did her sisters, but none of their brothers.

[00:04:55] My grandmother was three-quarters Cherokee, and my grandfather, her husband, was born a slave and was the master's illegitimate child, but he looked 00:05:00like him so there was no denial, and he learned to read, write, and figure, so when Emancipation came, he could write and read, and so he ended up teaching Freedmen school, my grandmother was his second wife since his first wife died, and he was a widower with two children, and he married one of the big girls in his one room school, which was this quasi-squaw, whose father was a renegade Cherokee, he wasn't going to no damn Oklahoma.

[00:05:36] So he settled in the hills of Tennessee and made brick and sold brick to make a living, and I don't know how many kids they had, and so this odd couple, my grandfather and his woman, had 10 children, and my mother was the youngest to really survive to adulthood.

[00:05:58] And Papa as he was called insisted that the girls go to school, the 00:06:00boys went to the fields and after the 8th or 9th grade because they could read, write, and figure, they wouldn't let you do anything else, you could do farm work, at least you'd know when you were being cheated, but the women went to high school because colored women didn't work in white folk's kitchens, and the reason was that his mother was an upstairs maid and they had, but they had this attitude, they both had these attitudes, and they brought up these kids, okay.

[00:06:33] In my hometown, they preached to young people the minority to the black community, and Negroes were the only minorities, and the rest of it wasn't on their radar scale, but people and my grandmother and everybody else said, "Go to school, boy, and get an education. You don't want to be, grow up and be like your father or be like your uncles," et cetera. Education was the way up somewhere, and somewhere could be plumbing porter or school teacher or mail 00:07:00carrier or anything but the certain jobs that were reserved for blacks in the south.

[00:07:12] So when people asked me what was the motivation to get educated, I say, "Well, in the community," and I was aware of the elders were always talking about go to school, that's the way, not to improve, and the schools were segregated, and there wasn't any business of arguing about it, integrated, and it's go to school, get educated, go get educated. And so as I went through school, I just really internalized that. The other thing that's from my upbringing is that grandma they were rural, and rural people had to do everything, right, the rural unit had to do whatever it was to keep the family going, right, so there weren't any boundaries about if you were stronger than 00:08:00the boys, right, and rather than them cutting the wood, they would do something else, she would cut the wood, if the boy could cut, so a part of that flowed over into my daughter says that the reason I was a feminist before you women discovered it was because I got raised by a bunch of women.

WEISBERGER:[00:08:25] Who were strong women.

JONES JR.: [00:08:26] But now the core of the family was my mother, no, my grandmother, my mother, and my mother's two children because I was never anywhere until my grandmother died that I wasn't with my grandmother, but between marriages, my grandmother would grab her two grandchildren and move in with another sibling while my pretty youngest daughter got her act together before [inaudible [00:08:50], my mother worked and we did, you did what you do, so grandma had this notion, and it wasn't, she never knew those dead white folks 00:09:00that you footnote this, you were capable of doing so-and-so, you were obliged to make your contribution, somebody couldn't do what, but they could do the best that they could do, so it's like from each to each, I never knew that she ever read any book but the Bible, and so she should've been, well, if you think about it, that's kind of tribal and it's kind of rural and it would be natural that, what do you mean? You know, get out here and do so-and-so, you were good at that.

[00:09:36] And that carried into all sorts of things I did, all the way through high school. I was always getting dragged into something I didn't really wanna do. But they would put the monkey on my back, right? You can do it! So that sort of permeates much of my life activities. If you think about the service kind of. 00:10:00Kept thinking about all those sorts of things I have ended up doing. And the explanation that leads to me is, where the hell did I get conned into that. And I say "Grandma cursed me."

WEISBERGER: [00:10:17] Oh bless you.

JONES JR.: [00:10:18] Well, if you want to. But the title of my memoir, if it ever goes anywhere, is Hattie's Boy. And that's my grandmother's name.

WEISBERGER: [00:10:31] That's a lovely tribute.

JONES JR.: [00:10:32] Well there's 'Hattie's Boy: The life and times of a transitional negro.' And that's..

WEISBERGER: [00:10:39] That's the theme.

JONES JR.: [00:10:40] The story is, well, if you look there and you look, and you think and reflect on the sequence of the events through my lifetime and our country and all sorts of things, and do the numbers and figure out my age, right? I'm just old enough to be drafted for World War 2, right? The GI Bill, 00:11:00the whole sequence, and where I end up in the later years I remember the revolution and the change that brings the two of us together is I'm in the middle of the hurricane, if you wanted, the eye of the hurricane, and the United States Department of Labor in the division of legislation and solicitor's office, trying to come up with something to meet these new needs. Would end up in there during the Kennedy-Johnson period, where Goldberg works in the department, sort of the brain trust, part of the brain trust of the Kennedy-Johnson social revolution.

[00:11:50] Pat Moynihan was a miscellaneous special assistant to the secretary of labor when I first met him. That man called Dr. Moynihan, right? He was just another joker around there with no particular portfolio, and you know the 00:12:00dynamics of what was going on between that and justice, the Katzenbach was over justice of legal council one time. It was really a real funnel of people whose names became significant.

WEISBERGER: [00:12:19] Right, people and legislation is still critical. What about grade school, high school? Are there some things that you recall either positively or negatively about it?

JONES JR.: [00:12:36] I'll let you put the spin on. First of all, between broken homes if you were to call that, right? We were going back and forth. I went to grade school in Chicago Heights, I went to grade school in Detroit, I went to high school in Detroit, at different periods between ages 6 and 18, that's when 00:13:00you finish, right? So we were bobbling back and forth across the Mason-Dixon line, so I would be in integrated school for the beginning part of a year, since I was a split. And I would end up back south, or vice versa. So there are stories.

[00:13:26] Most of my elementary education was in Little Rock. I first started school in parochial kindergarten. A segregated, a negro school, from kindergarten through high school, in the middle of Little Rock. Where all the nuns were white, and the priest was white, and all the students were black. The church was just like the rest of the world. And the students were miscellaneous colors and the mixture, right? It was cheap, sort of free school for working 00:14:00mothers, because if you were diaper trained and you could pay your 75 cents a month per kid, the Catholic Nuns would take you in kindergarten. There's still at least one person that was in kindergarten with me.

WEISBERGER: [00:14:25] That you're still in touch with?

JONES JR.: [00:14:27] We were in the same high school class too. And she's the secretary of, there is a high school alumni association, and they have classes, and the class of 1942 was dwindling. And she's not the only one there, at least half a dozen of us who were known since kindergarten.

[00:14:51] Okay so. When I first went to public school, there was 2 weeks in Little Rock and then we went off to Chicago Heights to move in with an uncle. 00:15:00The Chicago Heights, way out there, there were so very few blacks, as a matter of fact. And there were only four in my grade school, me and my sister and our two 'cousins'. And they were my uncle's wife's children, they weren't really related to us.

[00:15:26] This story relates to something else about my attitude about law.

[00:15:31] We moved back after a year in Chicago Heights, we moved back to Little Rock. And we went to public school, and I got sent to the public school that my mother went to when she was a girl. And it was old and it stunk like urine and linseed oil. And it was about 10 blocks away from where we lived. And I kept coming home complaining to my grandmother about this school that stunk like pee. And 'why can't I go to that school down on right avenue?' And she kept 00:16:00telling me 'you can't go there, that's a white school'. Until finally, with some trepidation, she didn't dispute much, she's a grandma, she was out of reach of her back hand. I'd say 'Grandma, I can see that school that's white. But you know what? It wasn't always that way, they painted it. Those bricks underneath there were red bricks.' You know the playground was grass, and the equipment worked, and was fenced in. And so she had to try and explain to a 7 year old or whatever it was, why I couldn't go to that school, because I was not a white person. When the school I had attended before there weren't but 4 blacks in the whole bloody school. Try to explain that.

[00:16:51] The law is, we go to Saint Louis and we can change. I said 'What? Alright.' And when Kress started talking about the indeterminacy of the law and 00:17:00you know, where the hell did these guys come from? What? I mean that's new?

[00:17:15] Okay. We went to school in Detroit, in grade school. Then in 1939 I was in high school in Detroit, same thing, back and forth, broken home. But in school I was a good student, and one of the things that I never understood, and I don't understand now, when I was in Chicago Heights school, they kept moving me, I moved three times before I finally ended up in the class that I stayed 00:18:00until the year was over. I had no notion of why every time I got settled in they moved me around. They were trying to find where I fit, because I had been with the nuns so I could read, and write my name, and so forth. So the word was that I was 'smart.' Went back to Little Rock, been gone a year, instead of putting me in the second grade, they put me in the top half of the first grade. So I'm behind where I should've been if I had stayed at home, by the way.

[00:18:27] And right away, it started again. He's smart, he's smart. So they skipped me. Then I went to summer school, they kept saying smart. What in the hell are they talking about, you know? This business. You got sort of identified and it stayed with me forever, I was always getting dragged around this notion, and I couldn't understand what they mean. You aren't getting this? If I can get 00:19:00this anybody ought to get that. And the family, so I did well in school. And we can figure out what that relates to. And as a matter of fact you can go through the whole testing thing. I remember taking the first intelligence test, I think I was in the 3rd grade. It was hot as hell, and it was long, and there was the cutest little girl across the way. I spent about as much time flirting with her as I had on the piece of paper.

[00:19:35] Well that factored in, and some of the teachers got on my mother about what she ought to do to encourage this kid. It stuck me with doing the summer school once again, it was over. I told my mother 'I'm not ever going to 00:20:00summer school no more, ever. And if you send me, I'm gonna play hooky.' But anyway, that factors into some of the things in the segregated high school, in the best high school in the state of Arkansas for Negros. Paul Dunbar High School in Little Rock. And it has an accelerated track record, by the way. One of our graduates was a PhD graduate from the University of Illinois, the research thing, he wrote a book on us, and demonstrated that the college attendance and advanced degree track record of the Dunbar graduates was better than the graduates of the central high school, which was the bad high school that all the ruckus was about, about all those kids, Ernie Greene, who was the leader of the Little Rock Nine, his mother was a school teacher, and so was his aunt and his uncle was a well made mail clerk.

[00:20:56] They had the best jobs for blacks, and they were people. A matter of fact, Ernie's mother taught high school economics and she was pregnant with 00:21:00Ernie when my sister was in her class. His aunt was one of the teachers, who was a tough teacher, in our high school, and I was one of her favorites. Now I was not the, I don't know how you put it, I guess you put it the same way, I wasn't much different in high school than any common man here. Although I talked -

WEISBERGER: [00:21:35] You mean I would recognize you as a younger person?

JONES JR.: [00:21:37] I talked less, fortunately. Because I had the unique talent of always saying the wrong things at the right time. The students were delighted, that I was saying what people were thinking. And I was stupid, and I 00:22:00looked around to find that somebody's gonna say something, right? And I'd get impatient and I'd say it, I ended up getting elected for stuff too, by the way.

[00:22:03] The other thing about high school is that if you don't have good grades, you weren't eligible for certain stuff, so I ended up being editor of the school newspaper and president of senior class, vice president of student council, and some other stuff. And I didn't wanna do any of this. I had an older sister, you see, and the class, the '42 class, the mid year was small. So there was a limited number of boys, and the business that they boys are supposed to do. I don't know why the hell wouldn't you ask for Anne Jordan to be head of the paper.

[00:22:41] I was always being dragged, and they would stick my sister, somebody, Ms. Graveley or Ms. [inaudible [00:22:46] and they would always call my sister and so she would go home and tell mother. And she'd be laying on me. And this is 00:23:00the Hattie thing, by the way. Why should I do it? Because they think you can and you were chosen. So, hell, let 'em choose, I wanted to play football. But also I was very religious, I could pray the hinges off the door. I was a boy scout. I was serious enough about religion, I promised one of them evangelist-type of preachers in the church that I was attending with my grandmother that I would read the bible every night.

WEISBERGER: [00:23:33] And you did?

JONES JR.: [00:23:33] Well as a chapter it started, I said alright. It got down to a verse, in my little 9 years old hand. And for 10 years I read the bible every night. I'd scribble in drawings. In the Navy -

WEISBERGER: [00:23:46] And you still do it?

JONES JR.: [00:23:47] And get a flashlight out and get the book out and read one verse. But I was also struggling with religion during that period, so I deserted the family church, which was an African-American Methodist and Episcopal, 00:24:00because they always squabbled about money, and it offended me. I was already high in the Sunday school class with the college boys. Landon Smith college was associated with Wesley Chapel. It's the family church.

[00:24:22] And it was just three blocks away. Still is. The land sort of expanded around it as the church grew. And my sister went there and two of my cousins. And that's a different story. I was in the Sunday school class with the college boys, because I knew a bunch of stuff about the bible, silly things. And the Sunday school teacher was my uncle. My mother's middle sister's husband, he 00:25:00wasn't blood. And we didn't like each other. [inaudible [00:25:01] And he didn't know as much of the bible as I did.

WEISBERGER: [00:25:06] I was gonna say that, that could do it.

JONES JR.: [00:25:06] But he was a fixture in the church, and between the two, I quit the family church and became Episcopalian, it was after grandma died. And by the time I was 17 I could just go to church and have high mass. Very small, the preacher was intellectual, he was a Canadian. The graduate in the family with a fabulous family, and he was the supposed scout, troop leader. Actually his two boys got in when I got involved in scouting and all sorts of.

WEISBERGER: [00:25:49] Sounds like you were a very very busy teenager.

JONES JR.: [00:25:56] I was packed in, and I worked. My mother threw me a key when I was 12 years old, ride or die. Momma left a little nickel and dime and 00:26:00told me to stock it up and move into other people's houses, and she did. I got to run an establishment. I was bellyaching about something that I wanted to do with her permission, and she threw me a key across the room, and said there, you can do anything you're trying to, but always let me know where you are so I don't worry.

[00:26:36] So I've been working ever since. And this relates to the machine, you know I was gonna come to college. I was always encouraged to go to college. And always told, if you go, the likelihood that we can help you go doesn't exist. Now junior college was pretty, you know the high school, but it was from 7th 00:27:00grade, to two years of junior college. But in the middle of Little Rock, there was Philander Smith college, Arkansas Baptist College, Dunbar Junior College, across the street north a little was Shorter College. The colleges were all religious schools, and Philander was the best of the lot, and the second best college for blacks in the state. Because the State University for Negroes was 34 miles away in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

[00:27:37] So if when I was gonna go to college, I didn't know what the hell they wanted. Literally I didn't know what going to college meant, but I'm big man on campus by now, you know I'm going to college. When it got close to time for me to go to college, I said, how do you got to college? I wonder where I need to go to college? I'll go to Philander Smith and go to the front office and ask for Mrs. Harris. You go on to Arkansas State, I don't know what you think, a 00:28:00lot of people went down here, my cousins were here too.

[00:28:14] But I was embarrassed about asking, I didn't know it was so easy and a dumb question. So I figured a way, I know, I went to the library once and asked the librarian, this was the high school librarian, I said 'Do you have some books on colleges and so forth?' And librarians love people who want to know something.

WEISBERGER: [00:28:41] Love when people ask questions.

JONES JR.: [00:28:41] Yes! So she said let's go see. Well I'm interested in chemistry, so she got me some bulletins and they have instructions about how you 00:29:00apply. Alright, well two things came out of that. One was school in the next state, Lincoln University was considered the second best black school in the United States for chemistry. Second to Howard. Well Howard was in another part of the world at this point in my life. Lincoln and Philander Smith were in the same athletic league.

WEISBERGER: [00:29:20] So you knew about it.

JONES JR.: [00:29:21] I played football in high school and Lincoln had been down to play Philander and we had free tickets to Philander and stuff. So I knew about that school and it was just right up the road. Jefferson City for St. Louis, and we had been through St. Louis every time we went anywhere to Chicago and Detroit. So, long story short, ultimately when I decided to go to college, I applied to Lincoln. So I finished in a little over a year and I went to work in the ditch.

WEISBERGER: [00:29:59] To save money for college?

JONES JR.: [00:30:00] Save money? To make money!

WEISBERGER: [00:30:01] To make money.

JONES JR.: [00:30:08] How am I gonna? It was just before we got into World War II, about the same time. I finished January '42, and you know Pearl Harbor was December '41. America was gearing up anyway, the supply chain for the allies. They were building what I thought was an Ammunition Dump, turned out to be more than that ultimately in the war. And a whole city grew up out there during the war, Jacksonville, Arkansas. And when Jacksonville just started, they were building, and I went out there and got a job in the ditch with old men. For 40 00:31:00cents an hour, the new minimum wage. That was a ton of money! And we were working 10 hours a day 7 days a week. When it didn't rain. So I went to work, left 3 o'clock in the morning, went to get breakfast, pack a lunch, and get a ride 25 miles over there. Pull up to work, work 10 hours, and come back. That lasted about 3 months, long story short, I saved as much as I can save.

[00:31:28] So when September came, I went off to college, with what little money I had saved. I finished 3rd in the class. My chem lab partner finished right behind me. Either we were second and third, or we were third and fourth, whatever.

WEISBERGER: [00:31:52] Right up there.

JONES JR.: [00:31:53] First was a girl. Anyway, the reason I mention him, he ended up going to Harvard medical school. And I was the better science student. 00:32:00He also was in the Air Force, the 99th. Which was also surprising as an asthmatic he was the most -

WEISBERGER: [00:32:09] Take two of the first take with Jim Jones and June Weisberger interviewing him.

JONES JR.: [00:32:20] I went off to Lincoln with train fare, a round trip ticket, and about 125 dollars. It cost 360 dollars a year to go to school, out of state fee and all. I had to have a job or I was gonna be toast. But I had enough money to pay first semester tuition fees, books, room and board, for a month. Room and board was $22.50 a month. Now keep in mind, the minimum wage had just come in. And most jobs weren't covered by it. My step-father was waiting 00:33:00tables, he had a high school education too. He was waiting tables at a club outside of Little Rock. Put cardboard in his shoes. 50 cents a day in tips. And who was tipping? Very few people. My mother was a beautician. A wash and a press I think maybe was 25 cents, a haircut was a quarter. So if you're working in someone else's barber shop, and they're getting their cut, maybe she was getting 15 cents out of a quarter, for whatever. A Marcel was 50 cents, you can get the 00:34:00idea. So living was extremely marginal. We were extremely poor, and we were so poor, I didn't realize we were poor. That poor. I thought everybody ... I knew everybody was differences, but it wasn't unusual for ... I wore Levi's and my hair cut off and T-shirts to high school in '39, '40 which nobody did.

[00:34:24] And, one of the teachers sent for my sister and asked her, and she was in junior college, and said, why is your brother wearing those cut-off overalls and underwear shirts?

[00:34:35] And, my sister was so funny, she was too embarrassed to tell her, 'cause he doesn't have other clothes. I had some Sunday clothes, jacket and real trousers, and a shirt, and a tie, and so on, but that was for going to parties 00:35:00and weddings and to church. Right? But, that didn't keep me from doing. That was right in the middle of everything else . It wasn't always easy ... Anyways, I went off to college, and I was gonna major in-

WEISBERGER: [00:35:12] Chemistry.

JONES JR.: [00:35:13] And, I was gonna major in chemistry and math. And, work and play football. And, I got interviewed by the intake person at the center, and I told him what I was gonna do. And, he said, you can't do that. And, I said, you mean there's a rule against it? He said, no, it's just too much for anybody to ... you just can't do that much.

[00:35:35] So, I said, well, I'm gonna try. And, then I told him, I said, I got a month. I'm paid up for a month. If I don't have a job, I'm outta here in a month. While I'm here, I'm gonna do everything. I signed up for everything. I 00:36:00went all over that place of the school, slopping hogs, cleaning dormitories, downtown at the hotels, at the barbershops, trying to find a job. Nothing.

[00:36:05] So, I went out for football, was down on the football field and this young chemistry professor ... he was my, I was sitting in his class in his freshman chemistry. Now, the freshman chemistry class for majors didn't have more than 12 people, mostly pre-med folk. A few people. There was a large freshman class for under-class freshman for women and people who had to have chemistry, mostly Home Ec. So, there was this other chemistry class, and the lab needed a lab assistant.

WEISBERGER: [00:36:39] Oh.

JONES JR.: [00:36:41] So, anyway, the first week or so we were at Lincoln, we were just constantly taking tests which I now believe that we were really not just entrance but intelligence tests. And, if you think about it, see, black kids coming from all sorts of miscellaneous segregated schools. They had no way 00:37:00to really tell what's honors from this high school versus that high school. What did these kids really know? And, so they had all this effort to try and assess them, so they could guide them and put them in.

[00:37:16] Anyways, we were down in the football field, and I laid down, and the coach laughed at me, and said, we don't have any water boy clothes small enough for you. [inaudible [00:37:25] I don't know ... the second week, I guess, there. And, Professor Taylor [00:37:35] came down and said, and asked the coach, can I speak to James Jones? And, the coach said, who? He said, James Jones. He said, is he here? I'm standing right over there. So, he walked over and said, Mr. Jones, and I said, yes sir. He said, are you still looking for a job? I said, 00:38:00yeah, doing what? And, he said, lab assistant freshman chemistry class. And, I broke out in a bitter laugh. I said, I've been all over this place trying to find a job, any kind of job, and you offer me a job I can't do.

[00:38:12] He said, we think you can. I said, when do I start?

[00:38:15] So, he said, after class tomorrow. So, to make a long story short, it's too late. This paid tuition and fee waiver.

WEISBERGER: [00:38:29] Oh!

JONES JR.: [00:38:29] And, $25 a month. We'd call that an assistantship now, right?

WEISBERGER: [00:38:35] Right.

JONES JR.: [00:38:36] I've got my $60 back and put it in the postal thing. Room and board was $22.50. After paying room and board, I had $2.50 left. I was rich. A haircut's a quarter, a hamburger's a dime, and a Coke's a nickel. Fifteen cents to go to the movies. I washed my own Levi's. I'm wearing Levi's in college then. My graduation suit and my other clothes hung up until you got ready to go 00:39:00to the dance or something or other.

[00:39:08] Now, you ready? I made the football team. Unbelievable. You talk about a success? I did it all! Man! When I went home for Christmas, so schools let out early and started late, so that you could clear the transportation system for the troops.

WEISBERGER: [00:39:29] Oh, I forgot about that.

JONES JR.: [00:39:32] So, we went home a little early and weren't coming back until the middle of January for the rump session of the first semester. They had to work that out. So, while I was home, since I was 1A, I had a fallback, so always have Plan B. If I had wiped out, I had a month of school, and I was going back home and punch my ticket to go to the military, and pre-buy my education 00:40:00which is what I was gonna due in the first instance, but it was the CCC that I was gonna go to. I knew a guy who went to the CCC, and he had taken shorthand and typing. He was the company clerk. It paid $50 a month. I was gonna sign up for three years and pre-buy my education.

[00:40:13] $50 a month? Money? You got room and board and $50? I would have been rich then. No way I wasn't gonna save at least half of that and still have plenty of party money.

[00:40:26] Anyway, I went down to see the draft board people and find out what my chances were for finishing out the year. And, the little lady there said, the year? The academic year, I told her. She looked at my number and said, son, you won't finish out the month. This entire sequence of numbers will be called up before the middle of January.

[00:40:54] So, she said, you'd be wasting your train ticket to go back to college. Have to turn around and come home. So, the vice-principal of my high 00:41:00school with a PhD was in the new Navy as a petty officer. Chief Petty officer. This guy with a PhD should have been a ...

WEISBERGER:[00:41:13] An officer.

JONES JR.: [00:41:14] But, the new Navy in June of 1942 issued an order that said, we'll let Negroes do something other than be servants. The right ones. They didn't say that. So, they had people like my [inaudible] he was young enough to be jail bait, so he went in the Navy. And, he was a recruiter for the Negroes in the southwest. The right ones with a high school education plus to go into the Navy. Be sure you have the right ones 'cause we have to prove it wasn't a mistake to let us in. So, he persuaded me that I ought to come to the Navy. Not just me. A couple of my friends. A couple of my friends who were in kindergarten with me also went in the Navy. They were in high school, we were in 00:42:00high school class-

WEISBERGER:[00:42:05] Right. Same group.

JONES JR.: [00:42:07] Same group. He said, look, you go in the Navy, you can learn a trade and when you come out, you can do something other than wash dishes and dig ditches. Those were the kind of things that Negroes were usually restricted to. Labor. That's for me. Going in the military, they're just gonna teach you how to kill more efficiently than you could learn down on Ninth Street in the black neighborhood, that's right. In the Army, rather. So, I went in the Navy.

[00:42:36] And, I was sworn in the Navy on the 13th of January 1943. School would have started again on the 15th. And, I went to Great Lakes Segregated 00:43:00Naval Training School, and while I was up there, I got a pink slip. I was on probation. They didn't have any way of dealing with veterans. So, I had two incompletes and a C in algebra. Me and another football player, the algebra teacher couldn't get over it that the two people leading his math class. I had a 96 average. The other guy had a 94. He was an engineering student. That these two football players were leading my class. Never in the history of me teaching this class have two football ... he gave a test every week, so when I wasn't there. I wasn't there for the test, I wasn't there for the final, I got zero. And, he added up the numbers, and it came out. That's the only C on my undergraduate transcript, by the way.

[00:43:39] In chemistry I got a B and that was okay. I was going to make straight As in chemistry or die. As long as I made As. I found out after I got 00:44:00that job that there was one for the second, for the sophomore year, the junior year, and the senior year. If I kept my grades up in chemistry, I was gonna ride right through college. And, I was ... I got up in the morning anywhere from 3 A.M. to 5 in the morning to study chemistry. And, my approach to studying was I'm gonna know everything in this chapter. And, if I don't understand it, I memorize it. So, my first class was 8 o'clock in the morning, and I ...

WEISBERGER:[00:44:25] And, it worked.

JONES JR.: [00:44:27] I carried that approach to education all the way through college. Not just get by but everything that's in it. Now, you aren't gonna know everything. Right? When you come to law school, the first year, try to ... But, that was my attitude. The other business I told you the business, you can, so, therefore, you're obliged to ... that kind of [inaudible [00:44:51] something.

[00:44:50] The reason I was gonna be a chemist is a black kid said it was too hard and the white people don't let you do that. Damn that they're gonna tell me what I can do. I wasn't gonna accept that. Well, that's hard-headed.

[00:45:09] So, we're gonna ... what do you mean? The other thing I guess I got it from sports is that, you know, failure ... that's you know you fail that doesn't mean you're a failure. So, you can't do [inaudible [00:45:22], well, we tried. I can't play the piano either, right?. But, I had this business of ... so, I didn't ... a dumb question. I got over the business of being embarrassed. Nobody else gonna ask it. If they all understand it, and I don't, I'm gonna ask.

[00:45:40] So, these are attitudinal things, right? So, I found out much later that the reason they decided that I could do the chemistry thing is I aced the exams for the freshman class. I had scores that ... from this little lousy black 00:46:00high school. I had three months in college. [inaudible [00:46:05] getting ahead, but that's a different textbook.

[00:46:09] I blew the Navy scores, too, by the way. At least the white folks told me that my test scores were in the 90 percentile. So, I got a chance to choose the service school that I would go to that was available to Negroes. And, one of them was at Hampton Institute to be an electrician. Well, that was that, I'm going back to college. So, I went to Hampton for four more months after my boot camp.

[00:46:31] It wasn't like college at Lincoln 'cause there must have been a thousand black sailors and troops at Hampton and maybe a hundred women. But, anyways, I went to Hampton Institute for electricity and that chemistry added to, I knew everything in it. We had 16 weeks of examination, and I made 15 100s and a 90. So, they waived the final, and I finished rated.

[00:46:58] They sent me off to New York where they would let me work as an 00:47:00electrician. Now, the Hampton Institute went all over the country to campaign with other naval captains at their stations. I won't let that Hampton boy, my Hampton boys come to your station unless you commit that they're gonna work at what they were trained. Now, [inaudible [00:47:24]. So, we all went to places where, and I was a repair electrician, and we went to New York for two years. Three months of it I was on a ship. The rest of it I was chief labor in a shipyard.

[00:47:39] There's a whole story about how I got on stage at a canteen, and I got introduced to a world I never knew of opera and theater. I met this wonderful girl that I fell in love with like two tons of brick. She was in college finishing her bachelor's degree. She was a stage door hostess. But, it 00:48:00was a new world. And, a bunch of us were refugees, guys from base were refugees from college, right? And, we're both into these girls who are hosting and ... well, one of them went to NYU, so didn't fraternize with them, and ... spoke with them from hostessing, but that didn't [inaudible [00:48:26] if you were down at that college. So, we hung out down there at Emerson Square, right, and had a whole clack of friends which was part of the education of this dumb country boy from Louisville.

WEISBERGER:[00:48:44] Well, you were no longer in that category.

JONES JR.: [00:48:49] But, it was really wonderful. I went back to New York after the war. I'm skipping a lot of pieces, but ... it has to do with performance and grades and stuff like that and how people value that.

[00:49:02] I was in the fleet for a couple of ... almost two years, and I got sent for by [inaudible [00:49:08] personnel. The Navy operated differently than the Army. And, he offered me the chance ... to come out of the fleet ... go back, I was a second class petty officer by then, go back to a first class seaman and go to Carnegie Mellon for a full year crash program and become an electrical engineer, four years to do five. And, with my degree, I would get a commission and be an officer and a gentleman in the Navy.

[00:49:35] See, at the tail end they decided to make some blacks, and they opened some of the stuff, and then they started recruiting, and then they got all the records. I've never seen these things, but from what the guys told me about test scores and so forth. I just figured I was bright enough to be an officer, but just wasn't white enough. Okay.

WEISBERGER:[00:49:55] Okay, so what did you decide?

JONES JR.: [00:49:57] Are you kidding? When they sent for me, I put down my 00:50:00toolbox and went in there to talk to these people about going. I said, chemist, electrical engineer, what the hell is the difference? This is another one of those things that they don't let us do. Not totally unrelated. I didn't care that much about chemistry. It was just a ... so, I said, oh, and one other thing I guess that I found out from my petty officer, my chief, when I was in boot camp, I had an array of tests, I had a functional one, a perfect on this math test which I thought ... I never even had trigonometry. But, I was taking high school algebra and chemistry, so the level of the test for across the nation was sort of legitimate to test us. And, I blew the curve.

[00:50:52] So, anyhow, I suppose that factored in to them keeping an eye on me, in this electrical, and this guy went to the electrical thing, look at this, 00:51:00he's one, right?

[00:51:03] So, I said, then what? Said, well, after four years of school, you'll give us two-for-one. I said, you mean, I commit to staying in the Navy 8 years after I finish with ... He said, yes, with a smile. I said, I've already been in the fleet 2 years, that's 12, that's 14 years. You're talking about a career. I'd be a fool to come out after 14 years. Six more years, and you retire with a full pension. And, they said, yes, that's right.

[00:51:35] I said, let me out of here, and give me back my toolbox. I want to get out of this man's Navy as soon as the war's over and they will let me out. I wonder what if I had gone the other way…

WEISBERGER:[00:51:50] Yeah, that was certainly a crossroads.

JONES JR.: [00:51:52] What was interesting was the Navy ... I was a borderline insubordinate, and I still had a big mouth. But, stuff that was obvious that 00:52:00somebody had to say something about after looking around for somebody else to say-

WEISBERGER:[00:52:09] There was no one.

JONES JR.: [00:52:10] Yeah. I would blurt out things, and it ... I guess that's ... I don't know where that came from. Maybe it's genetic or something from the family, from Papa. I would say, ... my mother's brothers were troublemakers, 'cause they didn't like my father and they didn't know their place. What do you mean "my place"? We had this notion-

WEISBERGER:[00:52:34] Question.

JONES JR.: [00:52:35] Well, the notion that they're equal. You got a problem, but I don't ... buy into that. Most of them went to jail at one time or another. I'm the first one ever to go to college in the whole tribe. Male. Not female. My sister got a Master's degree from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.

WEISBERGER:[00:52:58] Well, what happened when you said no to the two-for-one deal?

JONES JR.: [00:53:02] I went back to my toolbox and swore an oath and I had to go overseas. I went to Guam, and I was in Guam for I don't know 9, 10 months or so. It extended my tour by 3 months 'cause these people were bellyaching about being away from their family for a year. I was in the Navy for 3, almost 3 and 1/2 years and had 3 leaves.

[00:53:23] Well, when I came out of the Navy ... oh, by the way, I saved half of my salary while I was in the Navy. Now, when they sent me to go on things, and we were going to the South Pacific, the war was over supposedly in Europe. And, I gave the war bonds that I'd been saving to my mother to pay off the mortgage on the house. They don't like colleges, and you may not get out of wherever you're going in the Pacific since it was heating up.

[00:53:53] But, going ... I left New York and went west and ultimately to Guam, I saved all of my salary except for $20 a month. So, I came out of the military, 00:54:00I had about enough money to go back to college. Go back to real college like that. Even got the GI Bill and all that stuff. I was really rich. We got a muster-out pay for $300, and I had the maximum GI Bill. 48 months, full ride.

WEISBERGER:[00:54:30] So, what did you do with all these riches and options and GI Bill?

JONES JR.: [00:54:33] I hustled back to New York chasing after my true love and went to night school at NYU and worked in the factory at night trying to get in NYU as a freshman when they weren't even giving out applications. I had this scheme that I was gonna go to general education and take a full load and ace all 00:55:00the courses and ask for a transfer, and it worked.

WEISBERGER:[00:55:02] Good strategy.

JONES JR.: [00:55:02] Oh, yeah. I mean it worked, but my romance fell apart, and I got dumped. Then, well, New York was not really ... I went to New York chasing a dream. And, I figured I would go back to college where you don't have to work all day, wearing those crazy overalls, chasing the subway at night. I thought of going to Nebraska where I my lost high school chem partner was. He was in Nebraska. He'd been in the Air Force. He went there pre-med. He was doing great. Matter of fact, he finished Nebraska Phi Beta Kappa and went on to Harvard Medical School.

[00:55:51] But, to go to Nebraska and all that I'd have to explain Lincoln and I said, I'm gonna go next semester to college. So, I packed up my junk and hit the 00:56:00train and went back to Jefferson City and just went into the front office and said, I'm back! It was so ... what have you got to do to pick up where you left off, what about these incompletes, and ...

[00:56:17] By that time I had lost my religion, I wasn't gonna be a chemist. I thought blowing up the world, who needed another hard scientist. So, I was gonna be a journalist, somebody said you could major in journalism. So, courses, what? Pick some, everything you can get your arms around. So, I went back to college.

WEISBERGER:[00:56:40] And, you took everything.

JONES JR.: [00:56:45] Full load. And, they said, major in something you like, are good at, or both. So, I decided to major in government as they called it. I refuse because I know in political science there are other courses there called government. It was everything just to make up poli sci because the guy that was 00:57:00supposed to be the toughest teacher, and all demanding and such, I don't want an easy ride, I want to learn.

WEISBERGER:[00:57:09] It sounds like you.

JONES JR.: [00:57:14] Best teacher I ever had in my life. The first year, we had a little fight. I missed his class a couple of weeks. And, in the middle of lecture, he stops and says, Mr. Jones, you cut my class for [inaudible [00:57:28] This is not the first time you've cut. I said, Dr. Miller, I didn't cut. I was away on a track trip. He said, track trip? You the manager. I said, no, I run. He said, athletes don't major in my department. And, I said, I play football, too. And, the war was on.

[00:57:49] By the time of my junior/senior ... I went back to Lincoln and finished in 3 years. Took a full load, every summer school and everything. By the time of my junior or whatever it was after a year, he hired me as his 00:58:00teaching assistant. $25 a month. And, I graded and did the job. And, he kept up with my average better than I did. He was always bragging. I became one of "Miller's Boys." At least 2 of us, 3, 2 before me, went to this university as a grad student in poli sci at the law school.

[00:58:29] I had no intention of going to law school. I stumbled into labor relations. I told you law…

WEISBERGER:[00:58:35] You're still at Lincoln?

JONES JR.: [00:58:36] Yeah, I'm going to graduate school. I'm gonna go on to someplace, you know, what are you gonna do next? I had discovered unions. I had tried to organize one, and I didn't know what I was doing.

WEISBERGER:[00:58:50] And, this was back ...

JONES JR.: [00:58:53] This was back in Little Rock. I got fired when I ... I thought I had it all worked out, and I went down, and I was gonna go down and make the demand for pay increases for us [inaudible [00:59:03] 12 or 15 black 00:59:00dudes that worked, that just thought I was ... I started as a pot washer but I hanged in the kitchen. And, I ended up being the salad boy. From the lowest job to the top job.

[00:59:17] But, see, I could cook. The cook's the seventh ... make a pie, bone a ham. I'd been watching Grandma all my life, you hung around the kitchen, and I worked in the restaurants when I was 15 years old, the black restaurants. So, I could put together meals and so forth. And, pay me $12.50 a week, $50 a month, and all you could eat. And, discount for credit.

[00:59:48] We worked twelve hours a day, four days a week, 15 hours on Wednesday, and 18 hours on Saturday.

WEISBERGER:[00:59:55] Wow.

JONES JR.: [00:59:57] For minimum wage. Anyways ... [crosstalk [01:[00:02] I got fired. I made the demand for pay increase, and so forth, and they fired me.

[01:00:06] I had it all worked out - when we stop work on their anniversary, the whole place would have to stop, they couldn't wash the dishes, somebody thinking ... and all those dudes did that were learning something, saying "I owe the company money," blah, blah, blah, all these reasons why they couldn't. One guy quit with me.

WEISBERGER:[01:00:30] With you.

JONES JR.: [01:00:31] He also went to college. He went to Howard as an architect. He was in the military. Anyways, so after I got out, this was '47. I go back to school in January '47, three years after I left. Hey,-

HERTZBERG: [01:00:51] I'm Steve Hertzberg. You may not-

WEISBERGER:[01:00:54] ... continued.

JONES JR.: [01:00:56] I bumped into the editing process. A journalism teacher edited one of my poems, and they published it when I was out of town, and it was 01:01:00totally ruined. So, I was kind of in a tree. And, she took me for a long walk, and we talked about the process of journalism and writing and so forth. And, I concluded that I didn't reaaly have much to say, and I sure wasn't going to be trying to please somebody who's gonna publish stuff who who didn't even know what I was talking about. So, that wasn't gonna work, so, now what I'd do?

[01:01:26] Couldn't be a preacher.

[01:01:28] So, unions was ... everybody was screaming at these dumb unions with all this power, and they were misusing it. They didn't know what they were doing. And, this is pre-Taft-Hartley. This is '47. So, I got more interested, and I started saying, that's the kind of stuff I was trying to do back going when we were working and I got the notion that what the churches were doing wrong ... they had whole jobs, squabbling about jobs, they be doing some of the stuff these guys are doing. I'm too moral to be a preacher, but I could do that. So, I'll get educated to do some of that.

[01:02:03] And, then the thing about it said, you don't know any black people doing that. Well, that's another, it's like a being a chemist or an engineer. So, what? I'm gonna get in work, I'm for working. I'm going to go over. So, I went and got some stuff from Illinois on those relations. I don't remember what else I got. And, I was thinking well, I know, I'm gonna get educated to do that.

[01:02:25] So, I was gonna take ... I'm finishing in January, so I was gonna wait til September and I'd get a job for the rest of it. But, the chemistry chair of the department who was well known on campus, said, Mr. Jones, can you come back to my office? Come up here a minute. And, his tone of voice was ... damn, I don't know what to do, I hadn't had any contact with him since, so when I went to his office and sat down. He literally cussed me out. I never ... this mild old man. He never forgave me for leaving chemistry. He told me that.

WEISBERGER:[01:03:03] He must have loved chemistry.

JONES JR.: [01:03:05] Well, he was chair of the department. He said, you took that mind and went over there in that soft garbage stuff and now you lazy, S.O.B., you don't want to go right on to ... I hear you're not going to graduate school right away. You're gonna fool around and play until ... big excuse. He just ripped me ... boy, I didn't even know he still knew I was still on campus. When I left there I was really, I had to say, he's right, I'm sick of this grind. So-

TURNER: [01:03:39] This concludes the first interview of the oral history. The second interview conducted on June 22, 2004, begins now.

WEISBERGER:[01:03:54] Professor James Jones for the Oral History Project, and it is Tuesday, the 22nd of June, 2004. We're doing this interview in his office.

WEISBERGER:[01:04:06] Okay, Jim, I think as of yesterday, we got towards the end of your college career.

JONES JR.: [01:04:12] I can tell you exactly where we stopped.

[01:04:16] I just left Lincoln University to go to graduate school in Champaign-Urbana for labor-industrialal relations. Since Wisconsin still was in the old traditional labor economics. Though they had started the Industrial Relations Research Institute. It was just that, it was a research institute not degree granting. And, it's first head was a young lawyer named Robben Fleming. One of Nate Feinsinger's protégés. You recall Robben came back here as 01:05:00chancellor and then he went on to Illinois to teach and went on to Michigan, and when he retired, he was president of the University of Michigan. And, as I understand it, Robben is still alive. And, his son, Jim Fleming, you listen to on public radio.

WEISBERGER:[01:05:08] Right. [crosstalk [01:05:09]

JONES JR.: [01:05:10] I went off to Illinois January of 1950. I was so naïve about stuff, and this is the reason that integration is so important. It's being on the same communication link. I looked at the stuff they had for assistance, etc., and they had scholarships and research assistants. And, I looked at research assistants, and said "what on earth could I possibly do as a graduate from this school I was leaving?" You know, good school and all that, but research in what? I don't know from nothing about research. And, it said that it was a job. Well, nobody is gonna hire me for that. The other said on the basis of scholarships, scholastic, so forth, was a scholarship, so I applied for that. 01:06:00I didn't get it. I was listed as an alternate. The first alternate on the list. I don't think I found that out until ...

[01:06:15] I got accepted, went, I still had a little GI Bill left, at least enough to make my first semester. So, I went there figuring I would ... like I had always, figured if they had some work around there that folks could do, I could. And, I had that money. I'm still ... I got a bank account now. Train fare and eating money and so forth than what I started with when I got out of the military. And, being prudent, I had never spent. Though I had a real fancy wardrobe that I never wore - but I hadn't spent it.

[01:06:56] So, anyways, I went down there that first semester. Moved into a segregated housing and hooked up with some guys in there and figured out work 01:07:00part-time waiting tables [inaudible]. We did luncheon thing for $1.50 and a free meal, and the evening thing, the same thing, and you know, you do that 2 or 3 times a week, you're cooking along, right?

[01:07:22] Anyway, in the middle of the first semester, the director of the institute William Chalmers from whom I was taking a course said to me, Jim, why didn't you apply for an assistantship? And, I told him the story I just told you. I didn't know what the heck that was. It said work, the other one said money. And, research assistant, I didn't know what the heck I could do, what in the world could I do? He said, why don't you apply for it for next semester. I did.

WEISBERGER:[01:07:57] And, no doubt you got it?

JONES JR.: [01:07:59] I got the assistantship, and my classmate was Arnold 01:08:00Robert Weber, who went on to be all-world everything. And Arnie and I finished first and second in the graduating class of August 1950. And I used to say that he's one of two smartest guys I've ever known. And then I say we finished first and second, and they say well there he goes again bragging, and I say there weren't but two in the graduating class. (laughs) August of 51 right? But my, so I worked on Illini City and if you could find a volume, you opened up the front of it and they list all the researchers.

WEISBERGER:[01:08:42] Mm-hmm (affirmative)- And there you are.

JONES JR.: [01:08:43] James Jones. Anyway, I'm fussy about being James E. Jones, Jr. because if you just use James Jones, you ... However, in 1996 they finally decided I was a distinguished alum and they invited me back down to Illinois for the ceremony, 1996.

WEISBERGER:[01:09:02] A few years after you had finished.

JONES JR.: [01:09:05] A few years after I had been, director of a competing graduate program, head of a government's think tank and industrial relations in Washington and the chief lawyer for our area of stuff for the Labor Department to the extent that it existed. Anyway-

WEISBERGER:[01:09:23] Was that a good experience that graduated school program in Illinois?

JONES JR.: [01:09:28] It was fabulous. It was for me, actually ... I was about to tell you, I'm the first black to graduate in their program, which they discovered and I discovered in 1996 when they [crosstalk [01:09:44]. I knew that there were two who had attended before me, but they didn't get, they left the ABD and I wasn't going to get out of that chair till I finished that damn thesis. I figured too many people leave and never get it done. I'm going to sit here and as a matter of fact, I got a call from one of the young research 01:10:00associate professors. I went to Washington and there's a national director of the Case Analysis Division of the Waste Stabilization Board. The call [inaudible [01:10:11] was out, and since I was one of his research devils, this is a guy that could read my handwriting, as a matter of fact.

WEISBERGER:[01:10:18] (laughing)

JONES JR.: [01:10:20] Took my phone 47, that thing was called then or whatever was in my application with him in his coat pocket. And I got a call in the middle of the summer, et cetera, and asked me essentially when could I report to work. So I told him the Tuesday after Labor Day. I was in the middle of the fifth chapter of a nine chapter thesis. I wasn't going to get out of that chair till I had finished.

[01:10:55] So I got a letter shortly thereafter saying sorry you weren't 01:11:00available. Essentially it said sorry you weren't available and that seemed to me it said sorry you weren't available, you haven't got a job. So I called Morrie Horowitz and said, "You know Morrie, I got this strange letter and I thought I had a job." And he said, "I thought you did too." (laughing) "Let me go find out and I'll get back to you." So he went and then called back and said, "You did, but you don't." (laughing) "There's a freeze on Washington.

WEISBERGER:[01:11:30] Oh.

JONES JR.: [01:11:30] "I can't get anybody to go to the regions. Everybody wants to come to Washington so they've frozen all the Washington slots." He said, "Send me copy of the package that I have up to Chicago to Harry Henning, who's the Case Analysis Chief in the region, and I will drop him a note and I'm going to call him today." So I did what he told me to do. And to cut right through this, I finished that thesis the last week of the summer and I said-

WEISBERGER:[01:12:01] But you finished it.

JONES JR.: [01:12:02] I finished it, yeah, and I closed my desk in Champaign-Urbana, that would have been the on the Friday before Labor Day and I opened up a desk Tuesday after Labor Day in downtown Chicago as an industrial relations analyst for the Waste Stabilization Board. A white boy's job in downtown Chicago in 1951. Got 30 people in the unit got it, ABD's from Chicago working on their dissertations and a lot of other people. Some people who had Ph.D.'s. Bosses had Ph.D.'s and it was a great job and I was a phenom. I'm telling you this. I was surprised as I'd been on all sort of, I was a factory. I was turning out stuff that was overwhelming the clerical people.

[01:12:58] And what happened to me when I was a graduate assistant, Bill Chalmers, went out and loaned one of these dictaphones out to me and said, "You: 01:13:00talk, don't write." Everybody in the clerical pool was trying to understand what I, on piles of five by eight cards that you ... The reason I don't read the New York Times, I read 35 years of the New York Times and took notes on it. [Inaudible] I see a New York Times and I go blaaa. (laughing)

WEISBERGER:[01:13:31] You had your fill.

JONES JR.: [01:13:33] I had my fill, more than my fill. Well almost the same thing happened at the Waste Stabilization Board. We had a clerical pool and there was one tall gal, it was a ways to learn, had been a ways to learn, and her desk was right next to mine and she could actually decipher my handwriting. Nobody else could.

[01:13:51] So Harry Henning came out one day, by this time the technology had moved along. He came out with a little thing that looked like a record player.

WEISBERGER:[01:14:03] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:14:04] Except it had a little microphone, a little vinyl record and he said, "We can't afford to have you write. Everybody over there is trying to unscramble your handwriting." I was turning out cases. I didn't realize this, by the way, this has happened to me before.

[01:14:23] Anyway, I turned out so much work and there was competition between the units that the other two unit chiefs insisted to my chief, two of these younger chiefs were women, and one man, and they had a squabble. They were racing. We got the biggest backlog in the country and getting these cases for them. And so there's competition between the units and the two, my unit chief complained to the boss that the competition was unfair cuz Jim Jones turns out so much work. By the way, I'm on the lowest GS level.

WEISBERGER:[01:15:02] (laughing)

JONES JR.: [01:15:04] So, they made a deal. They took me out of Gilmore's unit and just attached me to the boss, to the director, for specials. Here I am a G-, by this, by the time I got promoted, after a year I got promoted to a GS-9, but I was a GS-7 right out of graduate school. We'd have special projects trying to get rid of a chunk of stuff so the boss would give it to me and assign two or three people to work for me. Nobody was as low as my grade. Just like when I was in the Navy with the CB guys, but, and I was so, it was interesting and fun, and I was too dumb to be scared so I guess the imagination and coming up with something because the implications of not just didn't occur to me.

[01:16:05] I thought, and I turned out a bunch of junk and after a while, we'd have really novel things and I'd come up with something and the boss would be dancing in the aisles and say, "This is going to do it, Jim." And then he'd say, "Gotta run it by legal." So literally sometimes we would go over to the law office and the lowest level lawyer would tell the Chief of the Economics Division you can't do that and the explanation didn't make sense. And Harry wasn't shy. He wouldn't necessarily take it and he'd boot it upstairs and the chair, the boss of everybody was a labor lawyer, Sam Edes. Half the time I was right. I remember one time Sam said, "What's wrong with that" later on to Chief Williams. Anyway, he said, "Well, why don't we send it to Washington?" So they sent off something to the General Counsel's and a couple of whatever it was, weeks that went by, and he wouldn't be privy to this. It looked, I was in the 01:17:00john at the urinal and the chief lawyer came in and said, "Hey Jim, you know that matter we were discussing that went to Sam's office?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "You were right on all points." And then everybody started nagging me to go to law school.

WEISBERGER:[01:17:21] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.: [01:17:22] I had already decided that I was going to go to law school cuz since I was trying to be so qualified, that black was going to be irrelevant. Silly me, but anyway, be less relevant, but if you're good enough, maybe somebody might give me another label, but I wasn't sure it would work. So I had decided, I'd get a Ph.D and I'd come up with something, one of these guys is going to tell me you can't do that so why in the heck don't I just go on to 01:18:00law school. So I said-

WEISBERGER:[01:18:02] So you'll know whether you could do it or not.

JONES JR.: [01:18:03] I wouldn't be able to argue with him in the terms that they understand, I wasn't backing off with, so this is an additional tool that improves my marketability for later on, wherever that is going to be, so I'm going to hate law school, but-

WEISBERGER:[01:18:24] Why Wisconsin?

JONES JR.: [01:18:28] The Boss, Sam Edes, was a University of Pennsylvania undergrad and a Harvard Law graduate and he was the most known arbitrator in the city of Chicago. He represented unions and management and he arbitrated.

WEISBERGER:[01:18:43] Which is fantastically unusual.

JONES JR.: [01:18:46] He was Chairman of the Waste Stabilization, he was on the Board, and he was one of the big people pushing me to go to law school. We were at a party once, the agency was about to fold anyway so the writing was on the 01:19:00wall, and we were at a Christmas party and I arrived early, and I was having a drink with Sam and Hennie came, the economist. He came in and said, "What are you guys doing, talking shop?" Sam said, "No Harry, I'm trying to convince Jim he ought to go to law school." I think now I'll see the fur fly and the flies between Ph.D. Harry said, "You're absolutely right. If I had to do it over again," so they both ganged up on me.

WEISBERGER:[01:19:30] Certainly right. No dissent.

JONES JR.: [01:19:35] But I had already decided that I was going. So talking to Sam, he said, "Jim, you know if you go to law school, you go to Harvard." He said, "Not because they're any good and everything, but people think they are." He told me, "You're good, but we need this type of law." Just a little-

WEISBERGER:[01:19:50] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:19:51] This type of law stuff. Except that I didn't want to be a civil rights lawyer and go back to Little Rock and try to get black folks out of 01:20:00jail and stuff. Civil rights, that's all that was and so there wasn't no such thing as civil rights. So he said, "But if you want to go to the best labor law school in the United States, you go to Wisconsin." Then he talked a little bit about Wisconsin's history. So I sent away my Harvard stuff and Wisconsin, took one look at Harvard's money line, and when they got through boarding me up, I figured after I got through paying for all this stuff I wouldn't have train fare left to get to Cambridge. That isn't quite true, but the difference in the expenses, I knew nothing about a private school in Boston, but figured I could, if I went there I could find some way to stay alive, but that was too,…why? I won't, I don't care, but what I want is some tools and it seems like the best tools I'm interested in are up the road.

[01:20:52] Nate had been chairman of the National Waste Stabilization Board. He got fired over the steel issue and he was back in Madison and he and Sam knew 01:21:00each other really well, so I sent my stuff up and got accepted, by the test that Wisconsin was giving anyway. And then Sam arranged for me to come up and visit with Nate. [inaudible [01:21:22].

[01:21:22] So I had enough money. I'd saved money and I'm making more money and I said, "Look, when I got promoted to a GS-9 in '52 or '53, somewhere, I had $5,000. That was more money than I thought was in the world." Well it wasn't very long that I was doing that and the, I went six months without a job when the agency closed-

WEISBERGER:[01:21:49] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:21:50] Before law school. But when I worked, I knew, my usual habit, I was salting away half of that, so I was ready. I figured I could pay the first year at Wisconsin without working, not that I was planning not to 01:22:00work, but I had enough to fund it and a little over-ride and time, and I figured that in a year I would find some way to make money and something where it got me thinking, now I've got two degrees, and I know [inaudible [01:22:23], but I might be able to pick up something that was going to see me through, so I went.

JONES JR.: [01:22:32] One of my kids that graduated from Lincoln, Mack Flash, he actually finished in May, June. I finished my schoolwork in December, so I immediately went to grad school, next semester. When my class graduated from Lincoln, I was studying my first cycle of exams at the graduate school and went 01:23:00off to Wayne State, by the way. I was a student in an internship program where I worked in the mills at night because at Illinois you had to have an industrial internship of three months and an exam and they had to know a whole lot of stuff.

WEISBERGER:[01:23:15] I didn't know that. That's very good.

JONES JR.: [01:23:18] Yup. In 1950. One of the best parts of the program cuz you already had this set of background, and you this analytical framework that you could go to the job and try to fill in the gaps of stuff that was important and kind of pay attention to and try to fit in, so I did that and I was completely anonymous, this would have been two months and three weeks or so, I worked right across the bench from the regular, we went to union meetings together and so forth, and the last week I was on the job, the HR Director would call and I came 01:24:00out to the midnight shift, I'd work the morning shift, and he would stop at my bench and sat and talked to me for a while. When he left, this kid that we'd been working with said, "Boy are you in big trouble. What did you do?"

WEISBERGER:[01:24:14] (laughing)

JONES JR.: [01:24:17] "What's the man out here talking to you about?" And I told him, "This is my last week. I've got another week and then I'm going back to school." I'm a graduate student in labor relations and he didn't believe it. I completely blended in with the work assignment.

[01:24:36] I interviewed, and at various functionaries, including the union functionary. So if we went to school in the daytime, from noon till three or four or so, and I worked from seven, from 11 to seven in the morning, six days a week.

[01:25:02] Do you know Mark Conn?

WEISBERGER:[01:25:04] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [01:25:05] Mark was a young professor who taught at the school.

WEISBERGER:[01:25:07] Oh.

JONES JR.: [01:25:10] And the reason that, it was a great idea that Wayne had the connections to get you placed. It was great for everybody cuz they put these students in these donkey parts of the job while the real workers went on vacation, right?

WEISBERGER:[01:25:26] So it worked out all the way around.

JONES JR.: [01:25:27] It worked out great cuz at the end of the summer, the kids were able to learn after unemployment comp, they're going to have a [inaudible [01:25:33]. I waited tables on the Santa Fe Railroad with a Master's Degree in industrial relations for about four months when I got this job in Chicago. Nobody would hire me. There were some agencies that were interested, but as soon as I told them that I was going to go to law school, the interest disappeared. I wouldn't lie, I'd put that on there, so I couldn't get a job.

[01:25:57] I finally got a job, a union, it took some union force, I got a job 01:26:00in a factory, airplane motor and everything. They thought they were doing me a favor. They got me a job as an inspector. It's the hardest job I ever had in my life. All I did hours at a time was stand and wait till somebody else got through grinding the inside of the motor and I would shine a flashlight up there and mark in yellow the rough parts that hadn't been done and I'd pass it along to somebody else they were going to sell it to. You couldn't read. It was noisy, you just stand there and wait.

[01:26:31] When I went and quit the job, the person, the people, the person in the office couldn't understand why I was quitting. I told them, "This has got to the the dumbest job in the world. I'm looking at the guy who's stripped to the waist and ringing wet in sweat cuz he's handling these and envying him." I said, "I would much rather have that job."

[01:26:50] Anyway, so I bumped into one of the kids from Illinois who was in medical school. He had been in undergrad when I was in grad school then, and for 01:27:00black folks, the interaction was pretty good. So he came by and was talking, and I was telling him that I couldn't get a job and that I was ... He told me about the parking and stuff he had made and [inaudible [01:27:14] and he said, "Why don't you go down there with so and so at Santa Fe", and I said, "Well, you know," and he said, "Look. That's what they do. Half the wait staff down there are medical students, black, all blacks. And you tell them, cuz George Clark had told me." And he said, "I've worked there a couple years. They hire, they've got the most educated wait staff you could imagine during the vacation months for the same reason. Vacation people take vacation and put these students in there, medical students." He said, "They'll hire a law students. September you're gone, right?"

WEISBERGER:[01:27:49] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [01:27:50] The regulars are back and work and you don't have to end up on the railroad, whatever it is, the railroad has an unemployment comp thing too. Then the whole business with my social security, by the way, I think 01:28:00there's three months of railroad that they got out of it and I had to keep sending it back cuz they keep up with all that junk. It's the social security you know?

WEISBERGER:[01:28:10] Oh yeah.

JONES JR.: [01:28:12] So that's what I, I went to California a few times and out to, the first time at the Grand Canyon, and we ending up with a run from Chicago to Kansas City going out at night, closing up the bar and stuff in the middle of the, getting up at 5:00 in the morning, doing breakfast in Kansas City, layover till the evening, turn around and come back. It was really a donkey run, but it was two days on and a day off, et cetera, and it was steady, and so that was my summer job.

WEISBERGER:[01:28:43] That was your summer job and your pre-law school or immediate pre-law school experience.

JONES JR.: [01:28:49] Right. But, my classmate from Lincoln was on a scholarship, fellowship. We talked and I'm coming to law school and so he said, 01:29:00"Why don't you apply for a scholar … fellowship?" I said, "Well, why? Nobody gives fellowships to law students." He said, "This outfit does. John Hay Whitney Minority Fellowship Fund." I'd never heard of it. John Whitney had an affirmative action type program in the 50s for negroes. An academic-type competition, no limit on the field. So Gus told me about it and I said, "Well send me ..." and he gave me the site. So I sent away and got there and filled out the stuff and I figure well, since we were classmates, and my grades were as good as his, maybe a little better or the other way around, I don't know, we were either two and three and I was two and he was three or the other way around.

WEISBERGER: [01:29:49] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:29:51] But I had this whole raft of extra-curricular stuff and work and all he did was go to school. (laughing)

WEISBERGER: [01:29:57] But you had a good chance.

JONES JR.: [01:30:01] If he got one, my grades, my record's as good as his. My Master's Degree was from Illinois. His was from Missouri. He was in Wisconsin for labor law, for labor economics, and I wanted to come to Wisconsin and I have this background, but you're right to reason that this was, yeah, that's the first luck. The second luck was the director, Robert C. Weaver, who had a Ph.D. in labor economics, one of the earliest rising stars.

WEISBERGER: [01:30:28] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:30:31] I didn't know any of this, but Bob Weaver obviously looked at what I was proposing to do and probably said, "My God." I don't know, when I graduated from law school I don't think there was another person in the United States with my combination of professionalism, training.

WEISBERGER: [01:30:48] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:30:50] Cuz who the hell went there and got two professional degrees? Well, if you're from Little Rock, … cuz there was a kid in law school--no he had just finished law school when I came--that I'd known since I 01:31:00was 12 years old or younger. He was finishing his MBA here in accounting. Before we had anything that we recognized as a dual degree, Conroy Harris got both of them. He ended up working for the government too. He's, by the way, he married the twin sister of the wife of my high school chemistry partner that was going to become a doctor. ( laughing) Small world department.

WEISBERGER: [01:31:32] Small world department is right.

JONES JR.: [01:31:35] But also there's the business of network. Where's the school that in those days would let you in and is not as oppressive as other places and so that kind of thing. Well anyway, so I got, after counting my money, I got the Whitney that paid the full ride. It would have paid Harvard. (laughing) Then, so I came up here. I've still got my little chunk of money that 01:32:00I've been hanging on to forever, right? Which is very fortunate cuz that between, there's gaps when you gotta pay rent, and eat and so forth. There wasn't no place to go to but me.

WEISBERGER: [01:32:15] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:32:16] My family couldn't, there was no help and by this time, I wasn't expecting help. I'm not only a grown man, I'm an old man. They wonder, why the hell are you just going to go to school forever? Matter of fact, a young woman that dumped me when I was, it was my major college girlfriend, my not too sophisticated roommate at Illinois bumped into her and asked her, "What happened to you and Jimmie?" And she… and he came back and told me. She said, "Well, you know he can't seem to get enough education. I think I got enough to go on and make a life." (laughing) So, I'm thinking, when he told me that I said 01:33:00… Yeah, I wasn't that cut up anyway about her deciding I wasn't it, cuz …

WEISBERGER: [01:33:07] You weren't ready -

JONES JR.: [01:33:11] I wasn't ready, cuz, marrying or what, I'm trying to figure out how to do what you gotta do, and I don't take on obligations I can't manage. What do I want to do with a wife and some kids? She was Catholic anyway and-

WEISBERGER: [01:33:24] Lots of complications.

JONES JR.: [01:33:26] Well, she was, well anyway, she was a wonderful lady and all that, but we weren't joined at the hip. And I hadn't totally recovered from that first dumping that I got in …

WEISBERGER: [01:33:39] In New York. Well what about, what was your first year here like? Were there any big surprises, little surprises? Did you love law school right away?

JONES JR.: [01:33:49] I hated law school.

WEISBERGER: [01:33:50] You hated … Okay.

JONES JR.: [01:33:51] Not right away, three years. I knew I wasn't one particularly … I don't like lawyers. We screw up more than we help. And 01:34:00what you teach lawyers to find ... People think it was so surprising for Bill Clinton from one of the leading law schools in the United States that says it depends on-

WEISBERGER: [01:34:10] What is, is.

JONES JR.: [01:34:12] What is, is. That isn't, you know, that's lawyering. That's a kind of, you know-

WEISBERGER: [01:34:18] Weren't there any problem solver types in the faculty that had a different model than a traditional law area model?

JONES JR.: [01:34:26] If you thought about that when you were going to law school, you were way ahead of anyone I know.

WEISBERGER: [01:34:32] No, I didn't think about it. It was a whole new world. I didn't even know what to think about the world-

JONES JR.: [01:34:36] When I was in law school, I was trying to understand what the hell the book is saying, etc., and make my notes, and be able to take the exam and pass it, and do the best I could since ... The word was that Whitney only gave two years and they gave 50 first years and about 10 second years on 01:35:00the basis of first year competitions. Well since the fields were open, how do you get a second? I figured the only way you get a second, get a shot at a second ...

WEISBERGER: [01:35:28] And this side B of the tape. I think its-

JONES JR.: [01:35:29] Goodness. Today is Wednesday?

WEISBERGER: [01:35:36] Tuesday.

JONES JR.: [01:35:37] Tuesday. Okay, you're right. My clock is screwed up. Okay, alright.

WEISBERGER: [01:35:42] Alright. First year law school.

JONES JR.: [01:35:46] First year law school. First of all, I came up here to learn something about the "liberal reputation" of the law school.

WEISBERGER: [01:35:50] Mm-hmm (affirmative)

JONES JR.: [01:35:51] Paisan's used to be over on University Avenue, about three doors down from the cornder. It sits on the University park, right across from 01:36:00that building … where the old drug store used to be…

WEISBERGER: [01:36:08] Yeah, where extension-

JONES JR.: [01:36:09] Well. Whatever, that new building that's over there-

WEISBERGER: [01:36:13] Oh, where the business school was.

JONES JR.: [01:36:15] No, no, no. Going downtown.

WEISBERGER: [01:36:18] Oh, ok.

JONES JR.: [01:36:18] Right over there on that corner, going that way. Business school's this way, right?

WEISBERGER: [01:36:22] Right.

JONES JR.: [01:36:23] It's right across that way. What is over ... Anyway, that area was a bunch of little stores. Right on the corner there was a florist shop, and then there was a grocery store, and next to that was Paisan's. Store front. And the guy who ran it, Roy, what's the name … he got married in the family. He wasn't Italian, and he was a fairly young guy. And I lived right down in one of those big old houses that ran into the groves, and I was there cuz that's where Gus was, and that was, that was the network-

WEISBERGER: [01:36:59] Right, you had a good network going.

JONES JR.: [01:37:01] So I, I got a room in there and I used to go around to Paisan's at ten o'clock at night and eat such a lot. I'd break from studying and go around there and have a cup of tea and at 10:15 I would come and I could finish my till midnight study routine. And the first week or so I was here, I wasn't here very long, and I was coming out of Paisan's and I was leaving at the same time some women were leaving. I didn't know them, they didn't know me. They were white, I'm black, and we get to the corner, stop. A car swirled around the corner and some yahoos yelled out of the window, right in their faces …this was to the girls, right? … "Nigger lovers!"

WEISBERGER: [01:37:55] What an introduction to Madison.

JONES JR.: [01:37:59] The only time in my tour that I relaxed myself on the race 01:38:00issue … I misjudged. Madison had this reputation, well it had a reputation. But one that it doesn't deserve, even now. Housing was segregated. They had a listing in the housing place where they would let you know where people would accept … So there was no law that says we can't say, "We don't take niggers" in Wisconsin. They even had one run about Jews that said, you could show up at a place that rent an apartment and they'd say, "We don't rent to New Yorkers." That was the code word, right?

[01:38:38] Grove's Co-Op, where Louie's drew back, Grove's began, was an inter-racial inter-religious women's living co-op experiment. And Harry Groves was the sponsor of the women's organization cuz most of the other, weren't too many people anxious to, just ... As a matter of fact at one time, the Dean of 01:39:00Women told one of the women who ran it, was president, and said, "Why don't you people give it, you know you've already proved your point that Negroes and Jews and Protestants and Christians can live together. Why don't you give it up?" It's, you know … it was a struggle to keep the thing together.

[01:39:27] They rented their basement facility to the Green Lantern and co-ops cuz the women didn't do their own … it was an old sorority house. The chemistry building is there, at Johnson and … That used to be the building. Across the street was a big old raggedy house where Mifflin Street stands, there a grocery store, and the grocer, Rothblatten, he rented it to Negroes. I had an "apartment" there the last year in law school. But I quit Law Review and cooked 01:40:00at Green Lantern.

[01:40:02] When I was "invited to Law Review" … See the bullshit they use now, my name would be on the door. In those days, Law Review and Coif were the same people, only top ten percent of the class, in the first year class. And then you had to do the scut work like ... I'm 29 years old and I come to law school, I have written professional stuff for a living and these punks, fraternity boys, going to try to tell me how to write? And they want me to do a "scut work", checking footnotes and chasing this sort of dull stuff, which was time consuming. I'm spending a lot of time and I'm thinking, okay, I got this first year, gotta start working on second year. I wasn't spending all that Whitney was paying anyway. I was saving, pinching off and getting ready for how 01:41:00to do the second year.

[01:41:02] I got over in the co-op and found out that they had lousy cooks and they had some openings for a cook and I took a job. I used to cook four meals a week for 85 people. And when they had special meals, I was always, I did the Thanksgiving and the special meal stuff. And that's where I met Louise and David. David Trubek and Louise Grossman and a whole bunch of other folks.

[01:41:28] And they were all this … integrated liberals, and they were children, really children. He kind of skipped through high school almost and he was an activist. He was an editor of, one of the writers for the Daily Cardinal and started a monthly magazine, he and some guys, and so I knew David. And the notion that they would ever be a couple would have been laughed out of the Greenland co-op.

[01:41:55] David didn't belong to the co-op, but you had to pay $ 6.75 a week 01:42:00for 12 meals.

[01:42:00] … and three hours of work of sweat equity, and you had to meet your obligations. Louise was a member of both co-ops. Anyway, so I quit Law Review ... spent that time ... you know, what the hell I need with Law Review? What am I gonna do with Law Review anyway?

[01:42:24] I was … six months after I quit, and Nate Feinsinger sent for me and said "What's this I hear about you quitting Law Review? Don't you know the big law firms want to know where'd you go to law school? Where'd you stand in your class? Were you Coif, were you Law Review?"

[01:42:42] I said "Which big law firms gonna wanna know that about me?"

WEISBERGER: [01:42:49] Did he answer?

JONES JR.: [01:42:49] I said only time and 30 odd years of association I had stumped Nate.

WEISBERGER: [01:42:54] He was speechless.

JONES JR.: [01:42:55] He went on to talk about ... I'm thinking, you know, if a 01:43:00law firm was going to hire the editor in chief of the Law Review and the other candidate was me, with what I was bringing to the table, to do labor law, I would be completely comfortable with that choice because I wouldn't respect their judgment enough to work for them. Not that that was possible. They didn't even tell the black students that the law firms interviewed. And it was an act of kindness.

[01:43:28] I'll tell you my other story. True story. Number one interview, Foley & Lardner, which was Foley & Sammon then, which was the number Wisconsin law firm, was already set up for the number one man in the class. I ran, interview partner, automatically. Went around the law school my second year, and they said that it was all set in arrangement. At that point in time, a student knocks on the door, and the partner says, "Come in". Student walks in and says, "good 01:44:00morning, I'm Jean Gallagher." The partner stood up and said, "You're Jean Gallagher? But we don't hire women."

WEISBERGER: [01:44:13] I'd never heard that story. I believe it, because I know of my own experiences.

JONES JR.: [01:44:18] By the way, you can check, Jean Gallagher, class of '55, I think. Maybe '54. She was a long tall .. There weren't very many women in the law school, I think it was about nine or ten. And, had I walked in and said, "Good morning, I'm Jean Gallagher," he would have fainted.

[01:44:42] Because see I know it's true because when I was in Chicago, the applicants for some … they had a case pending before the board. You had to get permission under the freeze for whatever kind of changes you wanted to make 01:45:00in your wage structure. You had ten percent to play with, so somebody had to put together your plea and present it to the decision-makers, and I was one of those somebodies in this instance.

[01:45:18] After awhile, I was the hottest property in the place, so I was getting the tough ones, and the people would come in for a meeting with the analyst, and we had this strikingly beautiful, very sophisticated receptionist. She would really give them the treatment, get them in the conference room and introduce them to our Mr. Jones, and they would all undoubtedly go... And then in the course of … one old dude, I forgot, they had a lot of business … He was older, fairly. He cross-examined me the first time. The second 01:46:00time, he came over, he just couldn't believe that, you know. By the time he got through with this ...

WEISBERGER: [01:46:11] He was glad you were doing it.

JONES JR.: [01:46:12] Are you kidding? He would call up and ask me questions over the phone, like free advice, and I'd say "you know, I can't buy in the agency", and he'd say, "I know, I'm interested in your thoughts". So he used to pick my brain. But the first time he saw me, I thought he was going to have a hard attack. He was an old, white-haired guy, and these other guys said, "what the hell is he doing our stuff?"

[01:46:36] Well, I'll tell you what, we'd get all of this. There was a great big dude. He came in, and was doing it, and after was all over … they had all sorts of ways of trying to get the question. He said, "how long have you been with the government, Mr. Jones?" I told him, "this is my first job." He asked me my background, and he said, "I hope you think, you don't take offense. But would you tell me why in the world a Negro would decide on this profession?" He said, 01:47:00"I'm a former All-American from the University of Illinois, football player. This stuff is highly personal in connection," and he talked about the differences. "Why would you, an intelligent young man, choose to go into this rather than something else?"

[01:47:25] So I gave him my, I don't know, 101 performance. I said, "You know, we always hear this business about what people would do about hiring Negroes if they could find qualified ones. So some of us have to get qualified in fields that we ordinarily wouldn't pursue, or they can always give that excuse."

WEISBERGER: [01:47:51] That's a great answer.

JONES JR.: [01:47:53] Well, it also is a true answer. I said, "I was gonna be a research chemist, you know?" And they'd have to say, "No, we don't hire y'all with PhDs in chemistry," right? And so here I am still in the field. I didn't 01:48:00desert the business, I'm not gonna be pushed into something. Plus the fact, can you contribute?

WEISBERGER: [01:48:11] I'm interested, getting back to your first year. You at least had some experience in your prior government job with lawyers even though you didn't think they were maybe the most qualified or something, but you knew what at least some lawyers did. Was that helpful in your first year? You obviously did very well. So you worked hard, I know that. It must have been something positive about the law school experience, or something that worked.

JONES JR.: [01:48:39] I'm learning tools, I came to get some tools, not to get patted on the back. And as a matter of fact, when there were courses and two people taught them, and one of them had a reputation of hard and the other was easy, right, I would take hard. They're talking about grades and all, I said, you know, "I came to get some tools to use. You can't come and decide which 01:49:00tools you're gonna get." I don't care what they were putting out, I was trying to figure out, well, alright, what can you do with this? How does this fit? How does this fit the toolkit?

[01:49:17] Now, I came there for labor, and anything with labor on it, I took everything, there wasn't but four courses. I took all of them and aced all of them. I also took Willard Hurst's two courses, which were sort of untraditional, and I got my two worst grades in law school from Willard, and I knew his courses cold. I never went back to talk to a teacher in my life about a goddamn grade.

WEISBERGER: [01:49:51] Unlike some students nowadays, or many students, I don't know.

JONES JR.: [01:49:54] By the way, your name was on your blue book, and everything was … And I got some colored grades at Illinois. Such that 01:50:00students in the class who got A's could not believe that they got an A and then, for white boys to say, "you mean Matt gave you a B, how could he give you a B? I got an A."

WEISBERGER: [01:50:19] But you must have caught on the game of law school, or what it's about.

JONES JR.: [01:50:26] I didn't think it was a game. School was a game, but I approached school to learn everything I could in the time I had allotted. By the way, one thing I came to law school with, I don't care how the court came out, or how the lawyers ended up, but I don't internalize that as the right and God, et cetera. I came bringing my own judgments. I knew that United States law was a goddamn fraud. I lived the fraud all the way through up to this. It doesn't have 01:51:00to go to Chicago.

[01:51:06] But seen now, we're dealing with things that have nothing to do with race, but see, I bring to the table with, "Well, here's where they come out, here's why they came out, here's how they got here. Here's what they claim is the justification." And I'm gonna be able to give that back to whoever asks. And then if they make the fatal question of asking me, "What do you think about its fairness?" I would scald them, but I did that as an undergraduate. The best teacher I ever had was Professor at Lincoln-had a PhD in political science from Pennsylvania, where he was a Harrison Fellow for his whole PhD career, and he's senior to me, right? And you imagine how racist things were when he was going on, so you'll figure just how good-

WEISBERGER: [01:51:52] He must have been.

JONES JR.: [01:51:57] Well, he brought his demand for excellence right into that 01:52:00little black school. And, they don't know about him now, but when I was there, he was a legend. Miller's boys, he was one of Miller's boys. Miller taught his courses, these courses that people were required to take with the notion, and I was his teaching assistant for awhile after he adopted me. And I used to tell him how unfair he was. You know, "These kids, you know, what you're putting them through to pass. They do so and so. If you do all the homework, you understand this stuff, you can answer the questions, that ought to be an A." And he said, "You know, no. That's a C. A's and B's are honor grades. If you don't go above the standard, how are you gonna get an honor grade?"

[01:52:50] And a matter of fact, if I hadn't taken him, I would've had a much better average. He used to keep up with me, and he would say, with his cigar smoking, " Mr. Jones, I see you almost made a three point." And I would say, 01:53:00three point was an A average in that. I would say, "Yeah, if I wouldn't have taken some unreasonable person for one of my courses … I would get one B … So finally, one year, I said, okay, one semester, I'm gonna get him this year. But I had to slack off on something else, so I aced both of his courses, but then I dropped off on something else and still didn't get a three-point.

[01:53:31] He said, "You know, that's a University of Pennsylvania grade." He was really something, Dr. Miller. He taught Constitutional Law for 14 years, he gave two A's. Me and a kid from my hometown, my high school, who went on to become a lawyer, and Robert Hall. He's dead now. And by the way, in Miller's class, we argued all the time. He called me a communist … He said, "You 01:54:00don't have to agree with my interpretations, but you better know it. We're doing political theory, and it's Socrates or whatever. You gotta know that, and you have to know my take. And then you can put it."

WEISBERGER: [01:54:19] Right, and then you can have your take.

JONES JR.: [01:54:21] "And then you can put in your own. But you can just sort of get up there and belch out." So that's part of it. You know, I took that kind of approach to all of my advanced education. I'm not gonna be making judgments like these idiots in this law school. They come thinking we're just gonna rubber stamp their damn biases. Well, they're cynical. I ain't even cynical, but I said, "Dude, this is how it works. You have to understand how it works. You don't have to buy that it's the best way, but if you don't understand it, you don't have any credibility."

WEISBERGER: [01:54:52] Right.

JONES JR.: [01:54:53] I was the first-semester, first-year law student at a 7:45 class in Domestic Relations, we used to call it. And Edwin Conrad, long-time 01:55:00city attorney, and he taught in law school. And he was teaching the class, and it was some particular point. And after the case got put out and we ended discussion, I raised a question about why that result. And he said, "Because it's the law." And I said, "If that's the case, the law is an ass." I'm a first-year student, but we've already discussed, wow we're talking about another issue. So that's the kind of first-year student I was. By the way, I wasn't scared of law professors.

WEISBERGER: [01:55:46] That I believe. Of course you came in with a lot of independent experience.

JONES JR.: [01:55:54] Well, yeah. I'd been in and out of the law, and halfway around the world and back. I'd been through a whole lot of adversary stuff.

WEISBERGER: [01:56:04] Right? And a very responsible, relevant job.

JONES JR.: [01:56:08] I wasn't afraid to fail.

WEISBERGER: [01:56:12] Well, did there come a time during your law school years when you became less interested, or did you only become more interested in labor law? Was that a constant, or were there fluctuations in your interest?

JONES JR.: [01:56:33] There were fluctuations in my effort, the time I put into it. By the way, I got an A average, and I got a second Whitney. There was no third Whitneys, so all that business of what I was doing to try to have it so surrounded that I'm gonna end up with an A average and so forth was no longer relevant to me. I've gotta talk about surviving the third and the fourth year, 01:57:00so I can't spend all that time. Even if I had it, I probably would've burned out anyway. I can't spend all that time on this, because I need to spend some time on something else. Law Review didn't pay a damn thing, I needed the extra credits, right?. Financing is standard, it's important, that's irrelevant, right? So, I shifted down a little bit so I wasn't putting 60 hours in the books. And some of the courses, you gotta know, this is part of the core. So don't come to law school and just cherry pick and go out and be a lawyer. You know, I'm gonna take all the labor law, but this other stuff that lawyers do, I've got to know some of this, because who knows what kind of job opportunities you're gonna get-

WEISBERGER: [01:57:57] Who knows?

JONES JR.: [01:57:58] Or what you end up doing. The other thing is, John A. 01:58:00Whitney paid for two years of my education on the basis of my academic achievement, my effort. I don't take what I don't deliver, so I always felt that they deserved an honest effort for their money so I wouldn't be an embarrassment in having financing. And when Gus told me that they granted fellowships for law study, I found out shortly thereafter that the first guy that got one had gone to Yale and flunked out.

WEISBERGER: [01:58:41] You weren't gonna do that.

JONES JR.: [01:58:43] I wasn't gonna have them think that law is not … Anyway, all of that went into it. But then I had to sort of time budget. So Domestic Relations would get less attention than … I was in this building taking Con Law the summer after Brown was decided, and Bill Foster was my teacher.

[01:59:07] The other thing is that you didn't have that much choice. You see, the first year was set, and half of the second year was set, and then you could choose one of two or one of three courses.

WEISBERGER: [01:59:22] Yeah, so limited choices there.

JONES JR.: [01:59:23] It's structured, and then if you had a clerkship, an internship, you could do 80 and 6 months with a law firm and get certified that you were doing law work, and then you would get your law degree. But for us black kids, where the hell were you gonna get a clerkship? Turns out that Carly Barby got one, but the other option was 80 and 8, as they said, 88. But the eight was structured, you had to take the advanced procedure course and you had to take the, what was it called, the practice. Stuff that, actually Jim McDonald 02:00:00taught, and I did it in summer school. Eight credits, or was it six credits, all morning long, and all afternoon you were dogging the library to do the assignments.

WEISBERGER: [02:00:14] Assignment for the next day.

JONES JR.: [02:00:15] And I went to summer school, both summers. If I was in charge of the world, you could only do clinical in the summer. The worst law education, you didn't have to shift gears and just sort of too concentrated. But you know, there were courses, and I wasn't gonna fail intentionally, and I'm gonna give it a good, solid effort.

WEISBERGER: [02:00:44] Best shot.

JONES JR.: [02:00:45] Though I won't necessarily … I didn't give anything what I gave the labor stuff, and I got a job. I ended up as Gus Eckhard's assistant, so the Law Review crap, I added to the whole volume. We can't find it, by the way, of labor papers for a big conference that Nate sponsored. Gus 02:01:00was the one who was outreach. Gus was the one that had the responsibility, I don't know where the forms came from. And I was Gus' assistant, so I actually ran the damn programs after he hired me. The first academic staff for what now has become outreach half time, and a half time secretary.

[02:01:32] And Gus, I never took a course from Gus, he was a property guy. When the regents approved the degree-granting program that was effective September of '56, the PhD, and Gus found out what the regents did since they had approved his stuff. He said, "Jim, guess what? The regents have approved the PhD program, the 02:02:00industrial relations," he said. And he knew, I could tell you how I started out with this stuff and what I was about. He said, "Now you can stay and get that PhD." And with a big smile, he said, "And you can keep this assistantship the whole time."

WEISBERGER: [02:02:20] He had some self-interest there.

JONES JR.: [02:02:21] Well, of course. But, he was on the faculty when they hired me. He left and went to Arizona. Put my name, ultimately, in the pot in Arizona for the deanship, I think he was trying to get me to go there. That's what Gus thought to me.

WEISBERGER: [02:02:34] I know he's still alive because Stuart Gullickson is in touch with him.

JONES JR.: [02:02:39] Yeah, they practiced both in Maryland and stuff like that, he's one of my fans.

WEISBERGER: [02:02:47] Okay, so law school's coming to a close, and what happens next?

JONES JR.: [02:02:53] Nate was writing letters, and I wanted to work for a trade union. See, I'm gonna help save the world, and the churches ain't doing their jobs, so I was dying to get in the UAW was the gold standard of liberal trade. I 02:03:00had done my thesis on the UAW's famous article 25, the one that brought Fair Employment, FEPC. I was looking at it the other day, I told [inaudible 02:03:20] last week. Good thing I trumped everybody in the room. I had a good standing card from west side local amalgam 174 UAW. Victor and Walter.

WEISBERGER: [02:03:32] They're local.

JONES JR.: [02:03:40] Local. I had joined the union on the job, when I went back to school I took out a card. It's 1950. And then I went back to graduate school and ended up doing my thesis on the UAW. And it was a field thesis, in fact.

WEISBERGER: [02:03:57] So was that where you looked for your first job or was a hopeful?

JONES JR.: [02:04:02] Well yeah, it was that, I wanted a union job. Nate was the quarterback of where there were jobs, and everybody knew him, so he was my entrée. He wrote letters and sent my stuff to them. The conference of Tom Harris, who was AFL CIO, Houston, he was in those programs. All these were contacts from Nate. Abner nagged me to apply to the Labor Department. I was scared to death I was gonna get hired there and have to litigate fair labor standards law. But anyway, he was relentless. Abner came out of the litigation thing and they were DOL. So I filled out the government thing and sent it in, just to get Abner off my back.

[02:04:52] NLRB was the next thing, and up in the general counsel of NLRB was Ted Kammholz who was a Wisconsin graduate. Nate was-

WEISBERGER: [02:05:01] Pushing in that direction.

JONES JR.: [02:05:02] Well, no. If I didn't get a union job, that would have been the job of choice.

WEISBERGER: [02:05:05] That was your fall back.

JONES JR.: [02:05:08] Well, whoever bought first, because that's labor relations law. I would have loved that. Management didn't even apply to anybody, and not even the state. We're talking about Jim Crow City, American apartheid. We lie about our history, you know. And, I didn't even know any black labor lawyers. The closest thing to a labor lawyer was a civil rights lawyer, the guy who was the architect of Duty of Fair Representation was Charles Hamilton Houston. And the two young lawyers on the two cases were Bill Hasty and Thurgood Marshall, okay. That became really labor law, although it was civil rights-driven. But put that to one side.

WEISBERGER: [02:06:00] Okay, so there you were, standing, having your 02:06:00applications out there. Union, labor, and NLRB.

JONES JR.: [02:06:10] And government.

WEISBERGER: [02:06:12] Okay, and who got you?

JONES JR.: [02:06:17] DOL, the only one, I got one job offer after four months graduating from Wisconsin. I dropped out of the top 10 percent, I didn't do Law Review. But I, you know-

WEISBERGER: [02:06:29] You were high in the class.

JONES JR.: [02:06:31] I was an honors grad. When I went on the market, I stood 02:07:00number 17 in third-year standing of 121 or something like that. See, they didn't have, and by the way, it's meaningless, 'cause you-

TURNER: [02:08:22] This concludes the second interview of the oral history. The third interview, conducted on June 23rd, 2004, begins now.

WEISBERGER: [02:08:32] June 23rd, 2004. And this is June Weisberger interviewing professor James E. Jones, Jr. I now have it correct. And this our third take. And, we'll probably finish for the summer right now, and then pick up in the fall in September.

JONES JR.: [02:08:51] The way that it's going, we'll need at least three more takes.

WEISBERGER: [02:08:54] Well, that's okay.

JONES JR.: [02:08:56] Or more.

WEISBERGER: [02:08:56] Okay, Jim, when we left off yesterday, you had graduated 02:09:00the University of Wisconsin law school, but you were in Chicago waiting to see which of these jobs where you had submitted your qualifications.

JONES JR.: [02:09:13] Waiting to see if anybody would call me.

WEISBERGER: [02:09:14] Whether you'd be a nibble. Alright.

JONES JR.: [02:09:17] Okay.

WEISBERGER: [02:09:17] So what happened?

JONES JR.: [02:09:18] By the way, interestingly enough, I don't know if you watched TV today, it's the big comeback of Raisin in the Sun.

WEISBERGER: [02:09:25] I know, yeah.

JONES JR.: [02:09:28] One of those roommates, the architect, is married to Elaine Hansberger's first cousin. And she herself is in the theater, because she teaches in New York.

WEISBERGER: [02:09:38] That's a great play.

JONES JR.: [02:09:38] Connections, connections, connections.

WEISBERGER: [02:09:38] Yes.

JONES JR.: [02:09:45] At any rate, I was sitting around down in... My roommates, and this will tell you something about the time, I moved back in with them, they had this big raggedy apartment on the south side of Chicago, multi-room. It was just two of them. And they refused to take any rent.

WEISBERGER: [02:10:05] That's a good deal.

JONES JR.: [02:10:07] I know, and that was typical of how we were way back. But you know, you can kick in your 10 bucks a week for food. You know, telephone here, and so forth. Well, I kicked in my 10 bucks a week. They also had a good deal because I was the cook, I would do the shopping. I was the house man, I kept house. I did the shopping.

WEISBERGER: [02:10:27] They got a good deal then.

JONES JR.: [02:10:30] And I cooked. I used to do most of the cooking way back when we were … Anyways, so it was a great deal, sitting around there.

[02:10:40] So, I think I said my college roommate, who I only found out when I was about ten years old that he wasn't my first cousin, we finished Lincoln and left Lincoln on the train. He was one of those people I was telling you earlier about how the young vice principal of the high school was recruiting; he was 02:11:00recruited for the Navy and he went to the Navy too. So he had Navy, and he ended up with Lincoln University. He was a Business Administration major, and went onto NYU. And we left Lincoln on the same train, me going to Illinois, and he was going to New York. I finished, I think he left NYU ABD and I don't know if he ever got back, but he has a sack full of honorary degrees, of which I have none.

[02:11:44] Anyway, Tom came by and said, "Why don't you come on, and I've got a company car." He'd been there doing some … he wasn't paid for marketing, but since they knew his background, they pulled him and he was in Chicago, and 02:12:00he was doing a marketing testing of one of the cigarette companies that they had bought. And so, he was South Side, black dude, going all these places. Great big, beautiful dude, by the way. 6'3" and chocolate, dimples. Shock of black curly hair and a big belly laugh, you know. Everybody just loved him. Anyway, he said, "Come on and go back, hun, we'll hang out for a couple weeks, and then you go to down to Washington and knock on doors. Nobody's gonna come out here to Chicago and drag you out of here," so I went.

[02:12:37] Before that, I was sitting in Chicago, Abner Brody, one of my professors who had nagged me about applying for the Labor Department, called. And said, "You're right there in Chicago"--this will tell you how long ago--he said, "For a nickel, you can go downtown on the subway and visit with Herman Graham, a regional solicitor." So I did. And it was a delightful visit. I 02:13:00enjoyed him, he obviously enjoyed me, and he told me that he was gonna call the boss and tell him to hire me. I don't know whether that had any, I didn't know how the system worked or anything.

[02:13:17] And as a matter of fact, he asked me a question that, he said, and this conversation never happened. He said, "Do you know any Republicans?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Well, you know, it would be nice if once of the references you had was a Republican." So, I filed that away and went about my business.

[02:13:46] I had been interviewed in Chicago by representatives of the National Labor Relations Act, the board. And one of them was a guy named Ivan McLoud, and he was obviously just a straight white boy by the terms that we used in those 02:14:00days. But he looked like an East Indian, very handsome, and he was fairly senior in the board structure somewhere, I know not where. So he interviewed me, somebody else there, I had nine interviews as I count it , nine different interviews with somebody ultimately. Four of them, at least four, maybe five of them were in Washington with those people. But Ivan was the senior person that interviewed me in Chicago, and he was absolutely certain that they were gonna hire me. He said, well, he was just delighted, so I thought, well, I've got a pretty good shot, right?

JONES JR.: [02:14:47] But he left, I never heard anymore from anybody in the board either. I hadn't heard from anybody either-

WEISBERGER: [02:14:54] In labor.

JONES JR.: [02:14:55] I hadn't heard from anybody anywhere, alright? So I went, 02:15:00hung out and parted with Tom in New York, and then I went down to Washington and found me a very cheap room in a tourist home. And I had some friends in Washington, you know. As a matter of fact, from here. One of whom, I hope is gonna be a candidate for an honorary degree from here, a PhD in psychology. The other was Mary Wilburn, do you know?

WEISBERGER: [02:15:32] Yes.

JONES JR.: [02:15:34] Mary Wilburn's husband, who was the first assistant vice president of the university system.

WEISBERGER: [02:15:42] Is it Steve?

JONES JR.: [02:15:43] No, his name is Adolf, Adolf Wilburn. And he got a bachelor's degree, and a master's in chemistry from Marquette. The first black professional hired by one of those outfits in Milwaukee.

[02:16:00] Ultimately, got a PHD from Harvard. They did fabulous. We was for practical purposes, the dean of education, of american education in Cairo, the county of Egypt for a long period of time. But anyway, so my connections, they sort of steer me to things. And I got interviewed by the labor department. I don't know what I told you, and the interview with the labor department, I thought I was taking my orals for my masters thesis again.

[02:16:44] I'm sitting at the end of the table and there's a table full of people sitting around, including one woman who was obviously a significant player, at least one. It might have been more. Not another black, but it turns out there was another black, not only on my staff, but in that division and he 02:17:00was senior and had been a labor law professor at Howard University, and went on to become the first black board member. Howard Jenkins.

WEISBERGER: [02:17:16] Certainly a name that many of us recognize.

JONES JR.: [02:17:19] Anyway, they ultimately offered me a GS9, which is exactly the grade level I left the government to come to law school. During the three years I was in law school, there was a statutory increase. And so the GS9 salary was 400 dollars a year more than it was when I left. So I improved my economic state by 400 dollars at three years of rather unpleasant ... I shouldn't say the total experience at Madison was unpleasant. Law school was a chore, which I did. There were other parts of it that were pleasant enough. I had a circle of 02:18:00friends, some of whom I've maintained throughout the years.

[02:18:10] Allright, so. I got some interviews in Washington DC, the knock on the door thing. These were people that Nad had written. Two of them in particular … Tom Harris was the Associate General Counsel of the AFL-CIO, or was it just ... Yeah, it was AFL-CIO, 'cause this was post '55.

WEISBERGER: [02:18:30] They had merged.

JONES JR.: [02:18:31] They had merged. Plato Papas was the general counsel of machinists. And he was one the mate's contact and stuff. I had an interview in Plato Papas' office and called up and said I was here, and had to apply by them, and come in and talk. And we were looking at briefs and yacking, and so forth. And I thought, "Man, this is really nice." Maybe there's something here. And I 02:19:00met with Tom Harris, and they didn't have a job. He was just well, [inaudible 02:19:10]. And by the way, Tom was from Little Rock, Arkansas.

[02:19:16] And his home place and mine were about eight blocks apart, different neighborhoods, but I could have run from my house to his house. We were both long gone from Little Rock, at any rate. And Tom was such a fabulous person, and one of the more liberal ... He was a southerner, by the way, but he caught all that other junk. But he said-- he'd be very practical--he said to me once in a conversation, he said, "You know, it's gonna be a little more difficult to get you employed by a trade union, more difficult than Hugh Hayfer and Dick Donaldson," my classmates. The three of us were the labor skates in that class. 02:20:00Tom Crowmarty was just a little bit at the edge, but we were Nate's boys. And both of them got offers from union side law firms. Hugh went to Milwaukee, and Dick went to Seattle and became partners. No, then Hugh left Padway, Goldberg and Premium and went to Seattle and joined up with Dick, and they became partners in the Seattle law office. Hugh was doing the heavy lifting and they were working on making partner over that. Anyway, Tom Harris said with a twinkle in his eye, it's much easier to place Dick and Hugh. After all, they're catholic.

WEISBERGER: [02:20:43] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.: [02:20: 46] Well, he knew what he was telling me, and he knew that I got it, right? So anyhow, but, I got nothing. The interview with Plato. Several years later I was at a party, an integrated party over in D.C. See, with my 02:21:00miscellaneous connections in school, I always had a huge … it was a substantial integrated circle of friends. Washington was a Jim Crow town at the time. So I was in three communities really: the black regular community, the integrated job community downtown, plus I had friends who worked in other places who were connected with us from either Illinois, and Wisconsin and the spin off. I was at this party sitting on the floor, and everybody's about half drunk. And this guy came over and he said, "You know, I've been wanting to tell you this for a long time." He said, "I'm just drunk enough now to tell you." And he said, "Don't repeat it really, 'cause I still work there." He said, "But you remember 02:22:00when you were being interviewed by the legal office and the machinist?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "I've been mad about that for two years. That was absolute fraud. We didn't even have a black janitor. They wasn't about to hire a negro lawyer, or in a professional job." Anyway-

WEISBERGER: [02:22:26] So there you are, still without a job.

JONES JR.: [02:22:27] Yeah, but finally I get the labor department interview, and they were talking about starting over as a brand new lawyer, and I'm admitted to the Bar, so I'm ready to go so they could offer me a GS7. Had I not passed the bar yet, I would've gone on as a temp at a five til after I passed the bar. And I kept saying, "You know, it's not about money, but I really feel unloved, or whatever it is." I was a nine when I left the government to go to 02:23:00law school. You guys want me to start all over again. Since when I first got my job, my federal job out of graduate school, I started as a seven. It was the bottom rung of the Master's econ and so forth, and so on. So anyway, they called me up.

[02:23:22] Somebody called me up the next week and said, "Mister Rothman' says we can offer you a nine." And I said, "Okay. I'll take it." Reluctantly, I figured, heaven forbid I have to do fairly the standard stuff of the labor department, or unemployment comp, whatever the wagon of Peyser stuff was, but I can learn, you know. This notion that if you're still learning something, then it's worth it -

WEISBERGER: [02:23:57] It's worth while.

JONES JR.: [02:23:58] Right. And you know, what am I, single? I have no debts. 02:24:00Right? I'm getting bored and my money's getting a little low, and the options would've been to go out to California since I had some classmates, some friends from Lincoln who were practicing law. And they could do it in California, I could do it; go out there and just get in the general practice, do something 'til I pass the bar then start practicing and see what goes. See, I had no ultimate objective in life except do something useful.

WEISBERGER: [02:24:39] Yeah, I was gonna say, it's not just something or anything, it's useful.

JONES JR.: [02:24:43] Useful, make a contribution.

WEISBERGER: [02:24:44] Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JONES JR.: [02:24:45] And money was a secondary consideration, always. Money was you pay the rent, eat, a little bit left over, right? A hedge against the need next time. Always have a contingency, always best you have it. So what the heck? 02:25:00You know, five thousand dollars, I'm gonna be rich again, I ain't gonna spend all of that right? I don't know what the living is in ...

WEISBERGER: [02:25:18] D.C.

JONES JR.: [02:25:18] D.C, but I knew that the range of blacks and employment in the federal Government, and GS9 was at the upper edge, not the bottom edge. Most of them were wage grade like my stepfather. He died working for the veteran's administration in the vet's hospital, high school education. By God, best job he ever had in his life. He was really a super laborer, 'cause he was the top of the labor grade side, 5200 dollars a year, best job he ever had in his life. And that's substantially after what I'm talking about.

[02:25:57] He was working in the vet's administration when I went to the labor 02:26:00department. As a matter of fact, the good thing about him landing that government job in Little Rock, is I no longer had to worry about my mother since he had a steady GI check, and she had her little home beauty parlor. She opened up a little beauty parlor in the house that she could do as little, or as much work as she wanted to do with her clients. And so she was … first time in our lives we ... I look after myself, right? My sister was married to a kid we also knew in kindergarten.

[02:26:45] By the way, she was six months older than he was. And they stayed married for 47 years. Now when we were growing up with all these miscellaneous break ups and the old moralistic old folks … they ought to take those two 02:27:00children away from that girl. She ought to have sense enough running around with all them miscellaneous men. It's me and my sister. Particularly, when my grandmother died and my mother's husband number three tried to kill her, tried to bash her brains out, and that didn't work. And he shot her. It was in the paper, and they talk about black folks in the paper when there's something something bad.

[02:27:39] And so, she was … she died with buck shots but three inches from her heart, they never did get it all the way out. And trouble comes in bunches. That shortly after that, we moved in with my rich aunt across the street with my 02:28:00grandmother who was dying of ovarian cancer. So my mother was trying to get her health back to go back to work. Her mother was upstairs dying.

WEISBERGER: [02:28:17] Dying.

JONES JR.: [02:28:20] And I never recovered from my grandma's death.

WEISBERGER: [02:28:25] Well the title of your autobiography shows the close connection.

JONES JR.: [02:28:30] I mean, in the period link she was out of her head, and so I would go in the room where she was quartered. The other kids were scared to go in there. They thought cancer was catchy, and so I didn't give a damn, and I realize now she was out of it, but I'd go in and sit with her. And I remember now when the undertakers came and they took her out. She was a chubby lady, and she was kinda wobbling around on this thing, like just a piece of meat that just 02:29:00killed me.

[02:29:04] That was my heart and soul. And I look back on it you see, my mother did rid of me. By the time grandma died, I was already a person with too much perception I guess and concerns about stuff. I was already away and working and so her mother actually raised her two kids. We ended up the three of us, we were a team and had to do it all until we got this new fella, who was really a gem. He was a gentle drunk. And throughout the marriage, he'd bring his paycheck home, and sign it and put it on the table, pick up his change for his lunch money ... Never touched her. And they were married for about 28 years.

[02:29:58] They weren't married for one year. I told her the first time we had 02:30:00breakfast together if he ever did, I'd kill him. And he knew it wasn't a bluff, 'cause I tried to kill that other guy and hadn't been for my grandmother, I would've two weeks before he almost killed mom. He was beating her in the room with us. It's a little three room house and I quietly hear him up there, and I had this little single shot rifle that he gave me and taught me to use, and I could ... At 20 yards, I could strike a match with a 22 rifle without breaking the stand. That's huge.

WEISBERGER: [02:30:37] Yeah, you knew how.

JONES JR.: [02:30:38] But if my mother would've stopped moving, with one little bullet, I was gonna put it right there. Had that happened, I-

WEISBERGER: [02:30:45] Your life would've certainly-

JONES JR.: [02:30:47] Totally different. I probably would've ... He didn't spend but a year and a half in jail for trying to kill her. Got out, and came back and kidnapped her and probably raped her, but they didn't share with ... I went 02:31:00looking for him to kill him again and almost killed him again. So these kids want to talk to me about hard times? Can't match my story.

WEISBERGER: [02:31:18] That's true. I have to admit that.

JONES JR.: [02:31:24] Now this is just a little of me, you know, the business of just enough food to go around. And there wasn't no relief. And if there had been, we were probably too proud to take it. Strange people. Anyway, so education, education, they get out of the … All right, so I take the job in the labor department. I go to work in the office of the solicitor, the division of legislation and general legal services. I could not have designed a better job for me.

WEISBERGER: [02:31:56] Was it sheer luck, or were they smart enough to know something about you at the beginning?

JONES JR.: [02:32:05] Sheer luck on my part. I'm just applying to the office. I don't know anything about that … they had multiple divisions. But my hindsight was they wanted me because of my dual degree. They won't pay me for it, but the legislation division didn't have an economic research back up for anything but barely the standards. Following the standards, they had a whole bureaucratic structure, one division of the law office. Two divisions, 'caus the litigation division and the interpretation division. Although, interpretations handle a bunch of other stuff, but the litigation was ... The labor department was the only agency other than justice department that had the statutory authority to prosecute cases in the name of the secretary of labor by their own 02:33:00attorneys. You only include that language in the statute …

WEISBERGER: [02:33:06] The justice department.

JONES JR.: [02:33:08] The justice department takes the legal stuff. And when they passed Landrum and Griffin, that language wasn't in there, and so justice took the Landrum-Griffin enforcement except the junk stuff, and cases that they say, "Oh, this is a loser." We'll let labor litigate it. They can always delegate and the lousy cases they would delegate. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of the story.

WEISBERGER: [02:33:33] Okay, so-

JONES JR.: [02:33:36] Not only my dual educational background, my strong labor law stuff of Wisconsin and the fact that I had worked professionally in the non-law and in my graduate program had been a reach assistant, all this factored into the people in legislation. It turned out almost every body had multiple qualifications. And here I guess is one of the things I never knew until after 02:34:00the fact, didn't really appreciate the significance until much, much later. One of the supervising lawyers was E. Gerald Lamboley, 1936 LLB University of Wisconsin.

WEISBERGER: [02:34:20] That's it.

JONES JR.: [02:34:21] His niece lives here now, Jerry's still alive. I met her at something and noticed that name, and I said, "You wouldn't be ... Would you be related to Jerry Lamboley?" She said, "That's my uncle. I'm on my way now to see him. He's in a nursing home. He's 90 something years old." Well he was one of those supervising lawyers in legislation. And one of the other beginning, the first level supervisors was Edith Nancy Cook who was born in Madison, Wisconsin. When her famous father Walter Wheeler Cook was on this faculty. And she went to 02:35:00Goucher and went to Columbia, one of the early women, and went to work in the labor field, which was more accessible particularity after Francis Perkins.

[02:35:13] And even with the shifts in the administrations that were …. even in the state of the labor department, so one of the things I discovered at the labor department, they had a bunch of women lawyers. One of the division chiefs was a woman, Carin Clauss' mentor, strikingly beautiful, never married, had all three law degrees. Bessie Margolin, she rose to the top of the litigation division. And Earl Warren said she was the best appellate lawyer in the United States. I'm sure Bessie agreed. At the time that I knew the record, 02:36:00she had argued 48 cases in the supreme court of the United States. And he lost two.

WEISBERGER: [02:36:10] That's not a bad record.

JONES JR.: [02:36:11] She didn't admit she lost them. She said, "We lost the decision, but I won the opinion." And I understood the importance of that. Since in the labor department you got your own litigation program, you could guide the shape of the law by which you prosecute and push, alright? And if the decision comes out, but if you get the language out of the opinion that you were looking for, then you go back and change the rule system a little bit and now you got a clear line to go back up there again. She was very meticulous. She was authoritarian and probably the worst administrator in the world, but lawyers aren't good administrators.

WEISBERGER: [02:36:52] Yeah. Unfortunately, there are too many examples of the Peter principle, getting promoted based on one set of skills into a job …

JONES JR.: [02:37:04] And then you get stuck with something, you're supposed to do something else, and you know, it gets done one way or the other. But when you have a system like that, and the person at the top insisted everything has to go through their hands an you can't do but so much. Anyway, I worked with Bessie even a few times on supreme court matters, which wasn't the labor department's business. They'd come out of a legislation bill and I was kind of a ... Even though I was a runt down at the bottom frequently, I was pointing in on stuff because … If it was labor relation stuff, Bill Evans and Edith Cook would get leadership assignments, and then they would squabble about which one of them got Jim Jones.

[02:37:49] Edith usually won 'cause they made her ... Sheer luck, they put me in the office with her. They asked me … "Do you smoke cigars?" I said, "No. I 02:38:00smoke. I smoke but I have a cigarette with a cup of coffee or something. I don't smoke at my desk." They said, "Fine, you get the desk, that empty desk in the office with Edith Cook," who was a great arrangement. We became a fabulous team, and she was my mentor in a sense that you didn't have a word for that. But I'm a junior lawyer, and she's the senior lawyer, and I'm working with her, and she's giving me whatever assignments that ... And she was wonderful, and I learned a lot about using the steps just from working with her. So when I became a boss, one of the things, one of the things that were not generally done, I institutionalized.

[02:38:54] Telling you about Bessie Margolin, asked me once, "Where did you learn all this administrative stuff?" And I took over an office and we did stuff 02:39:00that nobody believed. That little new operation with that law that hardly exists and so few people, none of them with any ... There weren't any courses in this stuff, could possibly be the stuff they were dumping on us. And we blew them away. Really, because the young people only ... They wasn't involved in our end. I was involved in training in the junk we did. Most of the stuff was in there I had worked on something or the other. And I let lawyers be lawyers.

WEISBERGER: [02:39:42] June 23rd, 2004. Okay, you first started with the labor department in 1956.

JONES JR.: [02:39:49] Right, September '56.

WEISBERGER: [02:39:52] Okay.

JONES JR.: [02:39:52] And shortly thereafter, Congress got into the Landrum-Griffin stuff, to regulate internal union affairs. That's a legislative 02:40:00matter, right?. The labor department was in the middle of that. James Mitchell was secretary of labor. Stuart Rothman was the solicitor, and he was my boss. And the Eisenhower administration was interested in regulated unions, and the actual staff worked for the Eisenhower administration … It's ultimate bill was drafted in the solicitor's office in the legislation division.

[02:40:39] And I was a key player of a small team of about five of us that worked on it for the whole two years before it was passed. And as a matter of fact, I covered the first three days of the McClellan hearing … To show you how important it was, a guy who's hardly wet behind the years, but see, I'd been 02:41:00in ... I'd only been there a year. So they sent me up to cover the hearing and takes notes. And after three days, I came back and banged out on a typewriter with my terrible typing a little memo that said, "The McClellan committee is holding hearings to line up witnesses to establish factual predicate to support the union and the law to regulate the internal affairs of unions covering the following areas:" in twenty two short paragraphs. Twenty of them are in the Landrum-Griffin law now.

[02:41:47] And the two that are not in there, Jimmy Hoffa's lobbyist, a guy named Sidney Zagri, blocked those two and cut them out. But we drafted the 02:42:00Eisenhower-Kearns bill and I drafted considerable chunks of it. Anything relating to labor would funnel through the labor department for the secretary of labor--who's the chief policy officer's-- input even if it's the laws that labor had nothing to do with administering. Only one policy office, one department, that's the secretary of labor. The NLRB's substantive people did not appear before congress to make suggestions about substantive law. They only talked about process and stuff like that.

[02:42:41] So the secretary of labor had to carry that weight. The labor act had miscellaneous entities to it. So somebody in legislation had to be keeping an eye on these areas and have some familiarity with those that already exist. Then other areas that were around the ragged edge, there's no place else to put them, 02:43:00you put them in in legislation. So that's why it was important that they have people who had some sort of research sense. The people told me that Rothman considered legislation division is fair hand lads. Legislation and litigation were the prime cut, so he was always sensitive to who was gonna work there.

WEISBERGER: [02:43:31] Of course, it was the most visible too, politically visible.

JONES JR.: [02:43:36] Well, litigation, unless you followed that arcane stuff, didn't get …

WEISBERGER: [02:43:42] Legislation certainly was.

JONES JR.: [02:43:45] And he was since the interface with probably the other policy officers, we wrote letters for the rest of them. They sifted through the law office and went round to them. If it was anything of any significance, the 02:44:00secretary appeared to testify in before the congressional committee [inaudible 2:44:06]. And the lawyer that did the real work might with luck get a chance to carry the brief case even though he wouldn't sit at the table and your name wouldn't be in the … Anyway, it was to some extent like continued graduate school, right? And I've got an arrangement with the librarian, a law librarian to let me have a look at law reviews before he cataloged them. I would turn around quickly to look and see if there's anything in it that would be …

WEISBERGER: [02:44:46] Relevant.

JONES JR.: [02:44:47] Going on in our shop, and I did that on my own, particularly in Landrum-Griffin. They're looking for ... I mean, what? If somebody said, "What kind of fiduciary obligation are you gonna impose on you?" 02:45:00What are they talking about? I mean, there's a whole category of law involved in the law of trust, etc. that has to do with ... I said, "You gonna put all that in the statute, or you gonna write?" We had sort of the intellectual problems that you would hardly imagine.

WEISBERGER: [02:45:23] But that sounds like a heady time.

JONES JR.: [02:45:27] Well, you know what? I was so busy in trying to be assured, I wasn't embarrassing to myself of anybody else, that it takes you a while before you get a bigger picture of this.

WEISBERGER: [02:45:38] That's true.

JONES JR.: [02:45:40] The more it went on, the more I could see the breadth of it. And by the time I got to be a ... We got up to the sort of a little bit visible and other people start trying to get you, a number of things are invisible too, the business of it's time to get some black folks around here. 02:46:00Right. Then you get a real view, and I thought about this, and I tell students this now. You know, when I left the labor department, the labor department administrated 166 separate statutes. The NLRB has only part of one. Okay? Where do you think is the better law branches, right? I turned down going to the board at least three times after ... I mean going to motions, and … Rothman went over there as general counsel and within six months, Bill Evans who was sort of Edith's twin went with Rothman. He sent Bill to try get me to come over for a substantial promotion and a supervisor job, and I turned him down. They tried 02:47:00twice I think as a matter-

WEISBERGER: [02:47:11] Was it easy turning down these?

JONES JR.: [02:47:13] Yeah, by that time it was for two reasons. I didn't wanna go over there a rookie Rothman had a terrible reputation of being a slave driver. He was gonna change a lot of stuff, and I'm gonna be supervising those guys over there that are administrating that one piece of that law with a little bit I know about the realities of it and the new bosses' guy. I mean, you gotta be kidding. I don't agree with the way Rothman would be getting the work done. I had by that time a notion of, there's a better way to get people's loyalty. But you start behind the eight ball if you would of ... I said, besides, it's a 02:48:00little late.

[02:48:03] By this time, we got so much stuff going on over here, why the heck should I go over … ? I have more input in the legislative arena then them guys over there, 'cause when it comes up to the top now, now I'm at the point where Edith has moved on up, so she's at a real supervisor level, and if it's with the labor relation,. I'm gonna get it. And eventually, I became a counsel for labor relations and general legal service, and I got to a GS15. Before that, I was something... There's a story about when I became principle attorney.

WEISBERGER: [02:48:39] Okay.

JONES JR.: [02:48:40] GS14. The first time in the use of the labor time department that a black had been promoted to principle attorney. I didn't know that until many years later sitting in this chair and saw this. A fellow named George W. Crockett, the black students had him. He was a judge and a congressman 02:49:00from the Detroit area ultimately, and he was out here and came in to visit with me. And I knew that he had been in the labor department, the 11th labor department 1941. Black guy.

[02:49:19] So we were talking and he mentioned that he had left the department. I connected. I told him, "I know who you are. You used to be in the solicitor's office. I come out of the solicitor's office, you left, blah, blah, blah" And he told me a story of why he left. He said, "You know, one of my white liberal friends told me, I was a GS13. And they told me, 'George you oughta get the hell out of here. You're never going to do 14. The world is not ready for a principle attorney who's negro, and you're too good to be locked in at your level." Now his level, the black community was ... He's a what? That's unbelievable you get 02:50:00that far.

[02:50:00] But they told him forget it, get out of here and go do something else with yourself. And then it hit me, it took them a year to get my paperwork through, after they sat at the shop. And Edith was the partner in there. She was, I guess she was either the assistant solicitor for the legislation or the associate. I think she was the assistant by then. Which meant by then we had two women, four divisions, and two of them were headed by women. And the senior division head was Bessie. Bessie had been in her job 30, 40 years when I got appointed to the division. In her job, not just in that job as the chief.

WEISBERGER: [02:50:53] Okay.

JONES JR.: [02:50:54] Anyway, this stuff kept coming back and coming back from wherever. And we were sitting in her office one day. And I don't know when this 02:51:00was, I could be wrong. And the paperwork came back. I was sitting there and we were working on something. And she looked ... Kenny put it by her and she looked at it, and she got red and started to cry, and picked it up, and charged out. I don't know where she went. She was furious. Well, I hadn't realized at the time what the petition really was. I let them … whatever it was, and dragging their feet because ... well, later on I saw a memorandum written, a confidential memorandum in the security files. Yeah, it was confidential because it was political, right?

WEISBERGER: [02:51:52] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [02:51:52] It was an analysis, a whole profile of the labor department and the use of minorities. It was a confidential memo to the secretary of labor which said: "The only black ... " Whatever, he didn't use the 02:52:00term blacks. The only black career, GS14, we have in the labor department, in the entire labor department, is Jim Jones in the solicitor's office. And it had a breakdown of all the categories, and how many people were in them.

WEISBERGER: [02:52:27] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.: [02:52:27] And so we had ... the only people we had above the GS14 level who were black were political appointees. So when I made 14, it was a historic, you know, first for a black.

WEISBERGER: [02:52:42] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.: [02:52:43] And then I didn't stop. I went 15 and 16.

WEISBERGER: [02:52:46] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.: [02:52:46] Every move up was a first in the history of the labor department. And that's the liberal department, right?

WEISBERGER: [02:52:50] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [02:52:50] The liberal department. Can you imagine? Well, anyway. So when George Crocket told me why he left, I said, "Damn!" And then I told him the 02:53:00story that I didn't understand. And he said, "Now you understand." That was really hard to get through the system. But all the noise they were making, the system was, you know, as usual, fraudulent around here, so.

[02:53:22] Okay. I went up the pipe. I went up the ladder. There were kind of things that were just sort of mind blowing like the first time I appeared as lawyer of record, on the hill. I'm a turkey, you know.

WEISBERGER: [02:53:36] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.: [02:53:37] I think the first one I went at was, Mitchell was still secretary of labor. And I was working on the secondary boycott thing. And one of the assistant secretaries testified. And I wrote the testimony, and went up the hill with them. And I went up with the under secretary once, Jack O'Connell. My most celebrated one was during the Kennedy Administration, when Arthur Goldberg 02:54:00was secretary of labor. And by this time, the senior democrat in the house, of the labor committee, was Adam Powell. And the guy who had been senior, Graham Barton, McCraken, from Kentucky, I believe. And he was the chair, and Adam was, you know, next.

WEISBERGER: [02:54:34] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.: [02:54:35] Graham wouldn't even look at it. Never even called on him. Graham died and Adam became chair, right. Adam had FEPC on the brain, you know, he had been trying to get a fair employment law since he first went to Congress, and it wouldn't go anywhere. Well, he's chair now, and he got this new administration, and he wants the Secretary of Labor to testify on FEPC. This is 02:55:00before the Civil Rights Act.

WEISBERGER: [02:55:05] Right.

JONES JR.: [02:55:05] This is 1961 or '62, I guess. And James Roosevelt's in the Congress. And Jimmy Roosevelt had introduced the exact same, you know, in the House, people agreed, and they introduced in their name the same bill. In the Senate, you know, co-sponsors. Well, Jimmy's bill was the same as Adam's bill. And Adam decided to have hearings on Jimmy's bill. The administration had no position. Big Jack did not want to address the bullet of discrimination. It was too early anyway in the administration. And so you have to get position of administration.

[02:55:46] The process of legislation is very complicated. The Bureau of the Budget, we used to ... it's Budget Management now. All the bills, et cetera, the commentary from the various agencies has to really filter through that, and clear, and they get various sort of clearance. You know, the administration is 02:56:00in support of this. The administration has no objection; you know what I mean? The other ones now, it won't have anything except the word will come from whoever it is to the agency: You can go it on your own, but you can't, you know, indicate we support it and stuff.

WEISBERGER: [02:56:21] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [02:56:21] So there were all these multiple levels of game playing. Anyway, he didn't have any position, and Goldberg was anxious to avoid. He said, get up there, you got to go up and say something. You know, at this point, at the beginning of the 60s, you sure don't want to stir the pot by being against it, right? But you can't really stir it by being for it too either, because you've got so many in your own party. And the Congress is going to sandbag you. So it was a terrible dilemma. And I don't know where big Jack stood on the matter anyway. But he had issued, you know, an executive order, and he had his program put together. So Adam got impatient with, you know, the labor department 02:57:00dancing around the maypole, and not committing to come and testify. So he sent the order down.

[02:57:13] And this administration and the Congress is really wimpy now. But in our day, the President had to be very careful because, you know, you stiff these people, they'd cut your damn budget. They'd find exactly which part of it was your private project, and redline it. So they played hardball and, you know, people were much more respectful, right?

WEISBERGER: [02:57:36] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.: [02:57:37] So Adam got impatient finally and said, "He will appear tomorrow morning at ten o'clock, lead witness and committee." Goldberg was out of town.

[02:57:49] Now, they have a court supervisor. He never got …

WEISBERGER: [02:57:56] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [02:57:56] Well, he didn't deserve to be. And he was a klutz and a 02:58:00plug. He was a good hearted guy, you know, but … I was having lunch down in the cafeteria. My usual soup and salad and tea and a piece of pie. And Phil came down and said, "Jim, the secretary's got to testify tomorrow at ten o'clock before the House Labor Committee, and you have to write the testimony."

[02:58:24] So I said, "Okay." And proceeded to eat my soup. And he stayed. He was drained of color, right?

WEISBERGER: [02:58:33] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.: [02:58:34] He said, "Did you hear what the-

[02:58:36] I said, "Tomorrow at ten o'clock." I looked up and said, "We got 22 hours, Phil, it ain't going to get any shorter if I don't finish my lunch."

WEISBERGER: [02:58:47] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.: [02:58:47] I've got a reputation of having ice water in my veins. I'm scared to death, too. But, you know, by this time I'm getting appointed ... I'm the point man. They decide I'm it, well, this is what they get. And I ain't going to, you know. I'm having... I was an ulcer candidate anyways, because we 02:59:00were always in crisis. And I've had this terrible stomach since a kid. I have gastrointestinal something. But we had 22 hours. Usually on a major case, we would have six weeks to prepare on major thing.

WEISBERGER: [02:59:21] (Laughing.) So what did you do with the 22 hours?

JONES JR.: [02:59:24] I wrote some testimony. And I got together whatever scraps of some ... there had been some sort of hearing once before, when

[02:59:33] Taft was Senator. There was a little booklet that had some stuff in it. You know, miscellaneous attempts at an analysis of the bills pending. It wasn't but one. The Roosevelt bill was Adam's bill. And then you get to trying to figure out what other stuff is in the department, that the committee members might have. And they keep saying they got the secretary and they want ... irrelevant to what he is there for.

[03:00:03] But the kind of business of pulling together ... setting out a hot immediate business ... if any agency ... the entire department said, if you've got anything in there on any of the members, with a list of the members, you got to get the members. Get some way of identifying them. If they got other bills in the hopper. So the secretary-

[03:00:21] -seems knowledgeable on anything. But all that's going on, and I'm trying to write a statement that doesn't say anything. I mean, it says some nice things about the idea and so forth. And so, well, you know, one thing probably to say is that, you know, we think this is a marvelous idea, et cetera, but this bill is not, you know, we're not in a position to support this bill. But we can offer our technical and support of a ... I mean technical assistance to work with you, to come up with a supportable bill.

WEISBERGER: [03:00:59] Uh- huh.

JONES JR.:[03:01:04] Goldberg was a magician, you know. So we put all of it in, whatever we could get together in the secretary's notebook, after clearing, you know, internal things, testimony and so forth. Took it to the garage, put it on the chauffeur's seat. The chauffer, whatever [inaudible [03:01:33], gets advised that when you get in the limo to pick up the secretary at the airport, you will sit on the briefing book. Give it to him and have immediately, because he has to appear before a committee tomorrow morning at ten o'clock. He was expected back at midnight.

WEISBERGER: [03:01:50] That was tight.

JONES JR.:[03:01:56] That was tight, too. And we got it put together in sufficient time, at least to read it, and go home and then come back, because it 03:02:00was actually scheduled at eight o'clock the next morning. There was a briefing session with Secretary as well [inaudible [03:02:11]. He hadn't even seen his testimony yet. (Laughing.) So we, you know, and guess who's-

WEISBERGER: [03:02:23] You're, the guy.

JONES JR.:[03:02:25] As a matter of fact, if you can find the hearing as a matter of record, I'm the secretary's lawyer. Can you imagine [inaudible [03:02:37]. I'm labor lawyer for Mr. Labor Law.

WEISBERGER: [03:02:40] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.:[03:02:41] Secretary Arthur Goldberg, you know, the magician. Which he was. He just handed it in and the statement was harmless he emoted, and then offered to help.

WEISBERGER: [03:02:56] And it worked?

JONES JR.:[03:02:57] Well, what worked? It didn't work ... it worked right. 03:03:00Guess who got sent up there to be the help. I spent three weeks in the executive session with the House Labor.

WEISBERGER: [03:03:09] Of course, that's great experience.

JONES JR.:[03:03:12] You sound like Stewart Rock. That's great experience, if you want to die from pressure. We had no position on nothing.

WEISBERGER: [03:03:18] Oh, dear. Oh, dear.

JONES JR.:[03:03:20] All these policies issues and he was just, you know. They're up there and they had to fast track a bunch of people. They're marking left who's supporting these ... no, no, not that. And then it actually helped them, because it took three other lawyers, including ... I never told you that I got interviewed to death by the NRD people. And the last person that interviewed me ... no, the second to the last, was an assistant general counsel. This is the guy that asked me in view of my background if I think I can be objective in administering the law. And I couldn't imagine how dumb he could be to ask that 03:04:00question. Or maybe how smart, you know. It's like you're not a political pick. But what he's saying is they're cheating.

WEISBERGER: [03:04:12] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:04:13] And that's when I said, well, I guess all this isn't really about labor management relations and labor laws, and them young lawyers that were there. They handicapped me, I guess I have a problem. This guy by this time, again he was so dumb he got booted upstairs. He was now minority, part of minority counsel. House Labor Committee, he wasn't their counsel I don't think. So he was there and there was two people who were from Adam and them's staff. One of them was a beautiful woman, but that isn't why she was there. She was a lawyer, but she was on Adam's [inaudible [03:04:58], and me. And we get this instant, you know, no we need something on there, and this is a part of the law 03:05:00they won't change. And that to reflect whatever or to amend somebody sitting there trying to take out what they object to, but not fix it so it's meaningless. And, you know, you hand them the piece of mail, and they thought that out, and in it would go.

WEISBERGER: [03:05:21] What is it they say, the closer you are to legislation, it's like seeing sausage made; you don't want to.

JONES JR.:[03:05:26] Worse than that. Sausage made in the sewer.

[03:05:32] But anyway we went through the whole thing. And Adam called on me a couple of times for, you know, the administration's position. If you can imagine.

[03:05:47] One of the things that I had anticipated and actually had some input that they obviously had to go along with, that bill was going to cover the Wagner Pizer stuff, you know, the federal/ state unemployment compensation, so 03:06:00that they would get those state agencies, and nobody paid much attention. And the labor department went along with it, because they didn't really control the locals, except for the purses string kind of thing, and would get much more leverage if they could. And they just decided, you know, it's the state anyway; you're damn right, we ought to get them if they discriminate.

WEISBERGER: [03:06:25] Yes.

JONES JR.:[03:06:25] Right. So, I went back and got something written, I guess, and brought that back to contribute to Roosevelt, and to put, yeah, back that part. Okay.

[03:06:40] But the first time he called me, it was an absolute blindside. I had absolutely no notion. I had learned something by then. They teach you to write or they try to teach you with precision, how to write with precision in law school. The best skill is how to write and seem that you said something without saying it.

WEISBERGER: [03:07:01] That's the most challenging.

JONES JR.:[03:07:02] Or seeing that it said yes, but it really meant no, right? So that first time I was proud of myself. I must have talked for three or four minutes. It was, you know, a filibuster. I don't think it even mattered much. It was like, well, thank you very much.

WEISBERGER: [03:07:13] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.:[03:07:16] It was Eisenhower speak.

WEISBERGER: [03:07:17] (Laughing.)

JONES JR.:[03:07:17] (Laughing.) So anyway we, you know, we stood up. And that was my ... it's wasn't my first trip up the hill, but that was a major one.

WEISBERGER: [03:07:28] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:07:29] For a state senator and under the circumstances. Crazy.

[03:07:34] Well, after that, you know, the rest of the panics were, you know. I was there two hours to write a proposed bill, an amendment to the Taft-Hartley Law that would cover agriculture workers.

WEISBERGER: [03:07:50] Ooh, that's a challenge.

JONES JR.:[03:07:52] It took me about an hour. My roommate at that time had the same sort of [inaudible [03:08:04]. But this was for some Congressman, and he 03:08:00wasn't introducing nothing. And so but I'm the Taft-Hartley guy, and [inaudible [03:08:09] Williams was the FSLA guy. So somebody posted saying Mr. [inaudible [03:08:15] wants a bill; blah, blah blah, and blah, blah, blah. Right or right, say, well, right or right. So then, two hours he's got to ship it up the hill at three o'clock. So I turned and said, "Milt, you got FLSA, I don't know a damn thing about it. I'm going to take the other." So, you know, those what if kind of things. What I really did was to look at the casual employment to construction kind of approach and use that as the basic knowledge to put the ... you learn a whole lot of stuff, right, on the fly.

[03:08:53] I don't know what else you want to know, but.

WEISBERGER: [03:08:56] Well, you stayed with the labor department until when?

JONES JR.:[03:09:00] September of 1969.

WEISBERGER: [03:09:02] Oh, I see.

JONES JR.:[03:09:03] Oh, I left once. I finally got a shot at a trade union. I first got a shot at it, and then the guy who was pushing me in this first union had been one of the associate surgical professors at Illinois. And he really wanted me.

WEISBERGER: [03:09:20] Right.

JONES JR.:[03:09:21] And he was pushing it. And I got up to the last two people, and Ralph Bergman was his name. Ralph said to me, " Jim, I tried but I couldn't get you." And this was a time when I regretted I hadn't gotten that Ph.D. He said, "We got you and the other person." And the other person had the Ph.D., and he was lawyer. And he was scared of the lawyer.

WEISBERGER: [03:09:53] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:09:53] So I lost out on that one. But somebody else was interested. And then Ralph told George Brooks and Sir Gam.

WEISBERGER: [03:10:05]Yep, I know them through the Cornell days.

JONES JR.:[03:10:07] You know them. Okay. Well, they were at Cornell because they got fired from the jobs they had in D.C.

WEISBERGER: [03:10:12] I didn't know that.

JONES JR.:[03:10:12] The director and the assistant director of the Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers international union, was in the national union research and education department. And they had this slot they wanted filled. And Bergman told them about me, and told me about it, and I applied. And I had this marvelous interview with George and Sarah, and it just went so swimmingly. And so I went back to my office.

TURNER:[03:10:43] This concludes the third interview of the oral history. The fourth interview conducted on October 4th, of 2004, begins now.

WEISBERGER: [03:10:49] And this is June Weisberger. And I'm sitting in Jim Jones Law School Office with Professor Jones. And we're going to be doing Tape 4, of an oral history for the university archives.

[03:11:02] Okay. Jim, as I recall, we were talking back in June, about your role in Landrum-Griffin Legislation, and the fact that there you were, a relatively junior member of the legal staff. And you actually were able to play a very, very key active role.

JONES JR.:[03:11:22] Well, you're being generous. I was a real junior lawyer of the legislative staff. Although I had started as a GS9, usually if you were a brand new member of the bar, those days you started at a GS7. I had been a GS9, as an industrial relations analyst, before I ever went to law school. And so they decided that they could hire me at the level that I was before I left to go to law school, because as I suggested to them when they offered me a seven, that I was a nine before I went to law school. They said, "But you are not a lawyer." 03:12:00And I said, "But this is the labor department, and what I was doing was labor, wasn't it?" As a matter of fact, I don't know whether I told them or maybe they checked, there was some interest in me from BLS, in the Chicago region, at a promotion to a GS11. (Laughing.)

WEISBERGER: [03:12:18] (Laughing.) Maybe they checked.

JONES JR.:[03:12:21] I wasn't going to, you know, take a job for six months. I told people anyway, that in six months I'm going to law school, but I'd come to work for you. And nobody was interested in a temp. And working in factories and places that I got turned down because I would write down all this education. They would look down and say, what the heck? And I then I would tell them. I couldn't convince them that ... but, you know, for six months you'd have stable worker that's going to work hard. But, you know, it's funny, that's history.

[03:12:55] So here I was, and it was early one in the ... I started in the labor 03:13:00department in September of 1956. And I think Landum-Griffin started early part of the next year. Well, we're in legislation. And one of the things that we ... I say we now, because again even when I got up at the top, I did the same thing. When there was something in Congress that was obviously going to generate business for the labor department, legislative committee hearings, somebody from our staff, one of the staff would be sent up to cover the hearing. So I got tapped to cover the first three days of the McClellan hearings. Bob Kennedy was counsel. Didn't know anything to speak of it seemed. And was really abusive of witnesses, I thought. But anyway, it meta morphed into something entirely 03:14:00differently. I mean he was bratty little, oppressive, and pushy ... anyhow.

[03:14:09] But I covered the first three days. And I went back to the typewriter and banged out on the typewriter. And my typing was never that great. And at that point, you know, with strike overs, and you didn't have all the sophisticated stuff we have now. And we weren't really into the dictation mode, which I got later on, because they couldn't read my handwriting. And I passed this on to my immediate supervisor, who was Edith Nancy Cooper. One of the lawyer daughters of the famous Walter Wheeler Cooper, who taught at the University of Wisconsin. And Edith was in fact born in Madison.

WEISBERGER: [03:14:53] Interesting connection.

JONES JR.:[03:14:54] And then she went out east, grew up, went to [inaudible [03:14:57], and went to Columbia Law School. This was when, you know. And she 03:15:00was at least the beginning supervisor. And for a woman in law, in 1956, and she wasn't the only one in the labor department. We probably had more women lawyers in the labor department than they had in the rest of the government, working as lawyers.

[03:15:15 Anyway, I had banged out this report, and given it to Edith. And it said, "I have monitored the first three days of the hearing. It is my sense or opinion that they are getting evidence and a witness list, et cetera, to establish ... and I don't think I used this term but I wish I had ... "factual predicate. Pass a law regulating internal affairs of unions, covering the following matters: And there followed twenty-two short paragraphs. Twenty-one of those areas ended up in-

WEISBERGER: [03:15:56] Landrum-Griffin.

JONES JR.:[03:15:57] -in the final Landrum-Griffin Act. And the only reason that 03:16:00all twenty-two didn't make it in, is a guy named Sidney Zigori, who was a Washington lawyer lobbyist, for the Teamsters, it was one of Hoffa's lawyers, and he blocked two of those things, and they didn't make it out.

[03:16:16] Well, you know, Landrum-Griffin, there were five different versions of that bill, of a bill, rather. One of them was drafter in our office, and introduced in the Senate by Senator Goldwater, and in the House by Congressman Kerns, from Illinois. That's Kerns with a K-e-r-n-s. And that was the administrations board. And they all covered the same areas. And they all had ... and the last title of it amended the National Labor Relations Act. And we have, I believe, the administration's push, certainly their PR for the organization recognition picketing provision; which the White House labeled blackmail 03:17:00picketing. I used to hate that terminology, by the way. It was just so, come on. But at any rate.

[03:17:11] So I don't know where Howard ended up. But, you know, it was a draft piece of paper. And one day I was sitting in the office, and the door burst open, and there stood Waffling, who was a strange dude. He was a solicitor of labor. And he had this grubby piece of, you know, this thing in his hand, and I was so embarrassed. And he shook it in my face and he said, "This is the kind of work we really expected to get out of you." And then he closed the door and left.

[03:17:40] And I said, "Edith, who sent that? At least somebody could have had it re-typed, with these strike overs and re-iterations and so forth. I don't even know what Edith said. She mumbled something, I guess, about everybody was so startled, you know, that we couldn't wait to get the boss to see it. So 03:18:00that's the first thing that I can remember that he ever ... because, see, people talk behind your back. You don't know good or bad what's going on. But, anyway, I was thinking afterwards, well, if that's what you expected to get, why did you offer me a lousy G9. You all should have given me more money.

JONES JR.:[03:18:20] (Laughing.)

WEISBERGER: [03:18:20](Laughing.)

JONES JR.:[03:18:21] Now our kids ... now I'm switching. Our kids from the university here, since I've come back to teach, that start out with the combination that I brought to the trade-

WEISBERGER: [03:18:34] The IRN Law Degree?

JONES JR.:[03:18:36] -would start at least at years 12, if not at 13, and way up the ladder. It took me I don't know how many years to get up to GS13. Now, maybe they should have started at that. But by the time you're 13, you were sort of first-level supervision.

WEISBERGER: [03:18:48] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:18:49] Working with a, what do you call, crew leader or something like that. And maybe even beyond that. But I guess the government might argue that you're a supervisor, since you participated in recommendations about who's 03:19:00going to be hired. And might even be asking about how somebody, like how John Bell performed, right, for his next promotion or something like that. But anyway, so that's how it all started. And I worked on Landum-Griffin from that first three days, until it was cemented.

WEISBERGER: [03:19:21] So that was a couple of years, wasn't it?

JONES JR.:[03:19:22] Yes. It got passed in September of 1959. Maybe it wasn't quite about that. Yeah, '57 or '59. And we drafted the Goldwater/Kerns bill in the legislation division of the Swift results. So some of the stuff in that bill is pure Jim Jones.

WEISBERGER: [03:19:44] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:19:44] I mean O'Laughlin was a guy to work for. You know, a Minnesota Republican,

WEISBERGER: [03:19:51] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:19:51] Jewish. It was really difficult. But he encouraged you to use your imagination and your mind. I mean analyze everything you can possibly 03:20:00come up with, problems, because you know he didn't want any ... he wanted to know everything.

WEISBERGER: [03:20:07] Any booby traps. Right.

JONES JR.:[03:20:09] Right. So it was great training to grow up under that system, though it was really kind of oppressive. But it taught you, you know, research a certain way, total coverage. And then in the end, when you analyze stuff, the political stuff, the whatever it is; at the bottom line, he wanted to know supposed you had all the votes, how would you do it. Which was really almost like being in graduate school, right?

WEISBERGER: [03:20:33] Right.

JONES JR.:[03:20:33] So some of the stuff, you know, got picked out of the air. There are some provisions of the Goldwater bill that are pure Jim Jones. I mean, I'll tell you what I did. I put something in the bill. I don't know where. That essentially, and now you would think this is quintessential republican theology, right? I said, "Look, minimal government." Right? Voluntary and such. Why not 03:21:00put in the structure that here are standards. And if a union puts all this stuff in their constitution, government takes a look at it, and approves it; then they will get some concessions in terms of their reporting and disclosure stuff, and performance, right?

WEISBERGER: [03:21:16] Uh-huh.

JONES JR.:[03:21:16] So here you get self compliance, and don't have to get the money to monitor them.

WEISBERGER: [03:21:20] Yeah.

JONES JR.:[03:21:20] And O'Laughlin & Mitchell, who was Secretary of Labor-

WEISBERGER: [03:21:26] They loved it.

JONES JR.:[03:21:28] Yeah. So that was in there. And, actually, it was modeled in my mind, from the cupboard and re-board concept from the United Auto Workers constitution. I did my Master's thesis on the UAW constitution.

WEISBERGER: [03:21:46] I didn't know that.

JONES JR.:[03:21:47] Yeah.

WEISBERGER: [03:21:50] See, one of the advantages of doing this, I get to know things I never knew.

JONES JR.:[03:21:51] Neither did the current president of the United Auto Workers. Although, I don't even know the previous ones, what they looked at. But 03:22:00the UAW passed the first Civil Rights Constitutional Provision in their collective bargaining. They had a whole lot of anti-communist stuff in there, trying to anticipate where maybe, you know, the Hoffa-driven hearings were going to go. And they put a lot of stuff in. The put the public review board in there, on that period. Having been aware of the UAW's constitution stuff, when the public review board thing came on stream for them, you know, I was also aware of that. And I can't remember, but maybe ... but anyway, this notion of if he could get the unions to do it themselves, that would encourage the reform that they're talking about, and it would be cost effective. And so the Goldwater folks adopted that.

WEISBERGER: [03:22:53] Yeah.

JONES JR.:[03:22:55] The other stuff, the secondary boycott stuff and all that, the Taft-Hartley stuff, that was Edith and Bill Evans, and me I'm the Junior. 03:23:00But that was because the other degree in the labor management stuff, gave me a leg up, plus going to this law school, with ten credits in labor law. I was the most qualified worker that you could find in the United States, right? And they exploited it. I had a ball. I was up to my eyebrows in all sorts of this fancy stuff. I didn't realized much later that, you know, people should have paid you for that.

WEISBERGER: [03:23:31] ( Laughing.)

JONES JR.:[03:23:31] You know. So normal about how this stuff goes. Same thing when I was in real estate. You're getting to really use your maximum talent, and some that you don't have. You're going to have somebody pay you more for this, right?

WEISBERGER: [03:23:46]That sounds like a very heavy time.

JONES JR.:[03:23:51] Oh, yeah. Well, look, the entire 13 years or so I was in the labor department was heavy. It was one sort of thing like this after 03:24:00another. Because think about it, you're in legislation and general legal service. Legislation is a law that ain't, or a law that is that needs fixing.

WEISBERGER: [03:24:10] Fixing, right.

JONES JR.:[03:24:12] General legal services, anything that doesn't fit in the mandate of the Labor Department, that has any relationship to labor or whatever, has to be addressed somewhere, because the Secretary of Labor is the principle policy spokesman for any administration. It's the only cabinet officer for labor. Whether it's railway labor or NLRB, agricultural workers, or public sector workers, it's gonna come through the secretary of labor.

[03:24:44] The legislation division sort of interfaced with the policy makers, because programs that were already established had their folk running 'em and so to put all of this-

WEISBERGER: [03:24:58]New stuff.

JONES JR.:[03:24:59] The new stuff, particularly since it also wouldn't be 03:25:00frequently we had tremendous political implications.

WEISBERGER: [03:25:04] Policy implications.

JONES JR.:[03:25:07] Rothman's approach, so some people who didn't have the interesting stuff we had used to be envious until they figured out we were working 80 hours a week and not getting overtime for it, but they used to talk about the fair head lads. Lads, by the way, even though there were at least four women in the [crosstalk [03:25:29].

[03:25:28] And the other one was litigation. It worked around the clock too, and that's where Carin Clauss came in. Anyway, Landrum-Griffin started it and when Landrum-Griffin, after two years of living with it when it was passed and the labor department got a bunch of administrative responsibilities, well they had to sorta recruit from amongst the people already working, if folks would be interested in joining the new law firm. It circulated, if you're interested, 03:26:00indicate to them. Harold Nystrom, who was the acting chief by this time, when he got all the stuff together, he sent for me and he said, "Jim, I noticed that you didn't indicate a preference for joining the new Landrum-Griffin Unit."

[03:26:17] I said, "That's right." He said, "I would try to respect your preference, but I might have to transfer you in it if there are not enough people that wanna go that gives the new unit strength." Now that was a compliment but I was like, "I sure hope they don't have to do that," 'cause God, by that time I hated the thing. There was so many things in it that I thought shouldnt've been there and the way they were staffing up with three commissions and they were bringing in somebody from the FBI. These people now think that they're the [inaudible [03:27:01] of trade unions. It's like Russia. This is not 03:27:00to impose to take over the operation of unions, this is to encourage unions to do what they oughta do. This is the mechanism that will encourage you and if not, then your members will sue you.

[03:27:20] And we discovered something that Bessie Marvin, the famous Bessie Marvin stopped by my office one Saturday and she'd been reading a new bill, see what's in there for litigation, with her southern drawl said, "Jim, you realize that," or "don't you realize ..." I don't know how she put it but I was the one she was talking to. It's my bill. What about these other people at the top? "The problem is it's not gonna have enforcement authority in this building." I said, "What are you talking about? The Secretary of Labor is the complaining party." 03:28:00She said, "Yeah, I know, but it doesn't say in the bill that he can prosecute the cases by his own attorneys. And without that by his own attorneys, [crosstalk [03:28:20]. It's the Justice Department, Title 28.

JONES JR.:[03:28:26] Nobody but nobody-

WEISBERGER: [03:28:27] Had brought that up before.

JONES JR.:[03:28:29] I mean, I'm a junior guy, after all, this is from way up, and I'm thinking, where are all these other people up there all the way up to the GS-15 level and been in legislation, some of them since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, where they do have litigation authority. Bessie, being a bureaucrat, you know, if it's litigation it's gonna be hers. And I'm thinking, that's interesting since I don't know whether that was an early period when 03:29:00Bessie actually talked to me but she was really sort of, if you weren't at the proper level, you didn't exist. But I might've ... I guess she had finally discovered by then that I was a real person worth-

WEISBERGER: [03:29:17] Talking with?

JONES JR.:[03:29:18] Yes, because I had been involved in two Supreme Court briefs and memos that filtered through her shop before they went other places. And since her shop didn't have the legal expertise for these labor management stuff, but we didn't have ... well, probably Jerry Lamboley would argue that, but I graduated from this law school in '36 and this was one of my supervisors and had written the longest brief that anybody had filed. 140-something page brief is hardly a brief. So Jerry ... I don't think Edith was ever in litigation ... but some of them ... the turf battle, " If it's litigation, it's mine." And 03:30:00unfortunately they didn't send it to her 'cause she would've been looking-

WEISBERGER: [03:30:09] Exactly [crosstalk [03:30:10]

JONES JR.:[03:30:09] Specifically for that and I said, wait a minute ... and it was simple, that's just one phrase. Now Justice Department wouldn't miss what you're doing. So on the turf battles. And maybe somebody raised that and the powers that be said, no. This is against labor unions so we're not gonna give that enforcement to the Labor Department. We'll give it to Justice. Y'all have to work together, but Justice would have [inaudible [03:30:38].

WEISBERGER: [03:30:37] There's some logic in that, isn't there?

JONES JR.:[03:30:38] Well, that's true if you decide the Labor Department isn't trustworthy but that's not true.

WEISBERGER: [03:30:43] Well, yeah, I didn't mean because of that, but it might be perceived by the union community ...

JONES JR.:[03:30:50] No, by the management community.

WEISBERGER: [03:30:52] By the-

JONES JR.:[03:30:53] Perceived by both-

WEISBERGER: [03:30:55] By both.

JONES JR.:[03:30:56] As a matter of fact, no matter, the union community in Washington is very sophisticated. They knew the Labor Department had a call and 03:31:00the Justice Department was never gonna develop the expertise in the substantive law, so they had [crosstalk [03:31:10] rubbing around in there, just in getting to the list of labor and talking about ... and I suspect if you got all the details from Carin you might found out that ... turn that off.

WEISBERGER: [03:31:26] Okay.

JONES JR.:[03:31:28] So anyway, I didn't go and it ... everybody went, people who were into grubby things, not interesting, so we had plenty of people to go over there and get into that. But I didn't go because it seemed to be the direction that the government was gonna take us I thought was undesirable and furthermore I didn't wanna get locked in with just that narrow thing. Legislation simply had more interesting possibilities and at the time-

WEISBERGER: [03:32:03] It did it turned out.

JONES JR.:[03:32:04] Well, that's true. At the time I was still hoping I was gonna go get a job at the NLRB. It turned me down in the sense that they interviewed me but never never offered me a job. AnduUltimately when Rothman went to the NLRB as general counsel, the first year he was over there, Bill Evans went with him, he sent Bill back to try to get me and I turned him down at that time.

WEISBERGER:[03:32:38] well,wWhat were some of your next assignments after Landrum-Griffin passed?

JONES JR.:[03:32:44] Landrum-Griffin. That's probably the most exciting one during the pre-Kennedy/Johnson era. Except, say for secondary boycotts and national emergency disputes. The reason I got into that part of it, every time 03:33:00there was a big strike and you're about to run out of the tools for resolving it, neither the Railway Labor Act nor the Taft-Hartley Act has the ultimate resolution. It's a mediation, arbitration ...

WEISBERGER: [03:33:23] Fact-finding.

JONES JR.:[03:33:24] Cooling off period and so forth. And then at the end of that a report to the president and he has to go to Congress to get another law to deal with the problem. When it got pretty much to that end, there would be panic in the Labor Department. And as a junior man, for a nasty assignment with a labor management background, if I were the only, I'd be one of the lawyers from the solicitor's office and if it was hot enough, the solicitor himself. And once they sit around and decide which way they're gonna go, the person with the 03:34:00yellow pad at the table is getting down all these specs, and they all go for cocktails and go home and I'm left there trying to draft the damn bill for tomorrow, when they come back to [inaudible [03:34:15].

[03:34:15] So a number of those things came up and I'd be in the middle of that. One of the major things that I got in the secondary boycott stuff was because there was this constant concern that the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Taft-Hartley law involving the construction industry, Denver Building Trades, was over the top. The other thing that they were constantly ... the other side was always yacking about is the excessive power of unions and the exemption from the antitrust law. So two things that were almost recurring themes in whatever Congress of the people were there were these two labor managements and I was always at the beginning of the working with everyone. And one of the things that 03:35:00I find to sort of laugh about at one point I had written ... I guess it was the minority report of the House of Representatives on the amendment to the Taft-Hartley secondary boycott provisions on dealing with the Denver Building Trade's problem. This is joint-site activity and who can do what and why and all that sort of problem.

[03:35:42] And somebody always ... there was a bill in there and whatever got heard or the committee then there would be the majority report and the minority report. And depends on who was in power at the committee, which sort of tilt the 03:36:00statute would have or the interpretation of the committee. In the beginning, I think the Democrats had control of the House and the Senate and so the Republican members was the minority report. And there were a couple of Eastern Senators, New York and New Jersey I think, Frelinghuysen and Goodell. Well, if you go back in the record and read the minority report on this in the House Labor Committee, on this subject, authored by Frelinghuysen and Goodell. They put their names on it, Jim Jones wrote it. In the Labor Department they don't know me from Adam [inaudible [03:36:45].

[03:36:44] Then when the administration changed and so forth under the Kennedy people, and them people there and so forth, I wrote the majority report.

WEISBERGER: [03:36:55] You wrote the majority report.

JONES JR.:[03:36:58] That's how I actually first established my bonafides with 03:37:00my long time boss, Charles Donahue, who had been in the Labor Department pre-Eisenhower and Solicitor's office [inaudible [03:37:12], got kicked out 'cause he was in a political slot, I guess, and he went to work for the plumbers [inaudible 03:37:19]. So when the Democrats came back he was Solicitor. And one of the first assignments under Charlie was this committee report and it was his stuff and we sat there across the table and got into a fight. I'm a brand new law clerk, but I guess it started my reputation. So you're the boss but now you're playing lawyer and I'm lawyering and you can deal with my lawyering but you can't bully me out of it. Something Charlie said, "I wrote this," so I said, "And I wrote that."

[03:37:55] Charlie was an interesting fella, as was his predecessor. Ultimately, we came to terms, and I wrote the revision, which he found satisfactory and away 03:38:00it went. Somebody goes, I would be an interesting witness if somebody was litigating me and trying ... what did they really mean when they wrote this statute and I'd say, "Which year?" Anyway, so that was the two and that was right in the middle of the secondary boycott stuff, so once you're in, you're in forever. I can't think of anything else in that era that excites you.

WEISBERGER: [03:38:34] So, you were still in the Labor Department when the Kennedy-

JONES JR.:[03:38:37] Oh, by the way, I quit.

WEISBERGER: [03:38:39] You quit?

JONES JR.:[03:38:40] I left the Labor Department once. I went to graduate school and I got into labor to be the answer to the argument that Trade Union professionals were dumb and ill-prepared. And also, another one of my own personal things, they don't let black people do that. And so I went in to this, 03:39:00I looked at what unions were supposed to do, having grown up Christian and lost that, and said if churches were doing what they're supposed to do, they'd be doing some of this stuff. I could do that. So, I set out to get so qualified they'd have to hire me but they wouldn't. They wouldn't hire me either.

[03:39:25] So, I had a couple of people who knew I was interested in working for unions who were trying to get ... one of the guys, Ralph Bergman, was with the rebel workers and he was a deputy research director so he'd been associate professor of Illinois and whom I work [inaudible [03:39:42] and he got me in the loop for a research and education slot. I went all the way 'til he said the last two. They never interviewed me. Two people came, and they chose the other fellow who had a Ph.D. because they were scared of the lawyer. Ralph was-

WEISBERGER: [03:40:02] That's a familiar theme.

JONES JR.:[03:40:03] Right? And I said, here I am, this close. So anyway, he told some of his research friends, Sarah Gamm and George Brooks, they were number one and two in the pulse of [inaudible [03:40:22] and paper mill workers [inaudible [03:40:23]. And they had an opening and they interviewed me and it was a love feast. It was wonderful. And, I'll make a long story short. About a month went by and I called them back and said, "I thought it was a great interview and we got along so well," and they said, "We did too." I said, "And?" They said, "Well, we think you're overqualified for this job." I said, "Aw, hell, not again." One you're scared of my credentials and now I'm overqualified. So I talked them out of that and I quit the solicitor's office and went to work for Sarah and George. And six months later I quit them and went back to the solicitor's office. They were right, I was overqualified ... for what they would 03:41:00let me do.

WEISBERGER: [03:41:05] For what they wanted. Oh, what they were gonna let-

JONES JR.:[03:41:12] Let me do. And they did a lot. They covered a lot of stuff that they let me do. My own title was the Senior Professional. But George and them wasn't averse to doing a little law practice on the side so they got a real lawyer and I used to get stuff. But they were very unprofessional in my judgment 'cause they would give me stuff in the bottom line position with the file, I ain't even looked at the facts. Ideological. And more than once I went back to Sarah, who was the working supervisor and said, "I got three Supreme Court cases saying your position is dead wrong. We gonna put that local union out here on the limb and management will saw it off in the first meeting. And we'd have a discussion and she'd send me back to write the ... that irritated me. 03:42:00Idealistic, I guess.

[03:42:05] The other thing was that I was coming in on weekends-

WEISBERGER: [03:42:08]... of an interview with Jim Jones in 2004. Okay.

JONES JR.:[03:42:13] Sarah and George discovered I was coming in working on weekends and at night on company business, union business, and threatened to take my key away from me if I didn't stop. And the reason was, they couldn't pay me overtime, I wasn't asking for any overtime but it was against their ideology to have you work for free, you're supposed to be paid but if you pay excessive hours, it was overtime. And I said, "Look, these are arbitration matters and you mean I got to go out on the plant and interview the witness right with the foreman look at us for the case you're gonna hear?" I was going by workers' places at night and so, yeah. I didn't say that to them but I thought, this is 03:43:00the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. You're not gonna get ... first you're targeting your people ... so that bothered me and ... the combination of stuff.

[03:43:12] I decided these people are really weird and I don't mind doing ... I ain't so proud that I won't do stuff work but there's a ceiling here that hell, I left a better job and certainly intellectually better. 'Cause even the Republican, my boss at least, wanted to know-

WEISBERGER: [03:43:35] What the other side ...?

JONES JR.:[03:43:37] Everything. Right? He wanted to know the whole thing and then he would decide. And he'd debate whether or not his decision was what the hazards were and so forth, and he was very up top about it. I said, okay, this is the policy position right here, so now, once the decision was made, you got a different role, to put together the best you can for whatever it is. And, by the 03:44:00way, talking about Landrum-Griffin, I told them not to put that dumb Communist thing in the provision. Literally, I wrote a blistering memorandum that criticized the business of ... exclude the Communist and put 'em in jail and that, even if you gonna do some of the stuff that the ... corruption, it was a stupid way to do it. I didn't use those terms, at least I didn't write 'em in the discussion I might say ... You'll have crimes for which they would disqualify, don't specify the crime, specify the magnitude of whatever it is.

[03:44:39] On these two things, I lived long enough for the Justice Department had to get that stuff after they passed that junk anyway. Somebody over there at Justice looked at it and said the Supreme Court will say, "Oh, oh, this is a loser. You better let Labor Department litigate it." Labor can write the brief. I turned down writing a brief in the Supreme Court of the United States on the 03:45:00Landrum-Griffin thing on the Communist exclusion provision. Somebody, whoever was my chief at the time, said, "You wanna write the Supreme Court brief on so-and-so?" I said, "Wait a minute." So I went and got my memo and I gave them a copy of my memo and said, "If the government is willing to confess error and convert this memo into a brief, I'll write it, otherwise, hell, no. I told you it was wrong, now the Supreme Court's gonna tell you." Nine to zip.

WEISBERGER: [03:45:41] Good crystal ball.

JONES JR.:[03:45:42] Well that was part of what we were supposed to be doing and, first of all, it was always a crap shoot. But the fellow who wrote the Supreme Court draft was a classmate of Shirley Abrahamson and a member of the Law Review with her, a black guy from Jonesboro, Arkansas who came to the Labor 03:46:00Department and went up the ladder and then went private. His name was Rufus McKinney. But Rufus wrote the brief. Rufus said, "I don't care what it is," he's a Law Review junkie, "A brief in the Supreme Court is a brownie point." He was right but he lost. Anyway so, where are we?

WEISBERGER: [03:46:26] So, you're back in the Labor Department.

JONES JR.:[03:46:28] I called up Edith, they didn't want me to go, anyway.

WEISBERGER: [03:46:31] I'm sure that's true.

JONES JR.:[03:46:32] I wasn't sure unless they told me. I took a pay cut to go to work for this union. Some part of it was kinda good 'cause we used to teach union functions, research and education, that part of it. And we taught people how to bargain over pension and it was a lot [crosstalk [03:46:58] some real interesting stuff. And we wrote a service thing, sort of a poor man's version of 03:47:00BNA for shop stewards and so forth, converted it into language that was much more manageable for people in the shop and all that was sort of, you know.

[03:47:17] One of the things that George and them kept talking about, they wanted to get to meddle in the segregated local stuff in their union and I kept thinking, these guys are crazy. They didn't get elected to do anything. They get out there and they gonna send me down south to get into the stuff. They gonna get fired and I would too. Not that that worried me that much about ... but that didn't seem to me to be a very smart way to be doing it. Now they weren't doing anything but talking about it. Let's see, this was pre-60's. Ultimately, they got caught meddling in politics and got fired and both of them ended up at Cornell in Trade Union Education. They got caught on the wrong side of the 03:48:00research and education politics. That ain't your business and I ...

[03:48:12] Anyway, so I called up Edith and said, "I'm gonna quit this job. You guys are talking about me coming back. I'll come back if you want me back. Otherwise I'm thinking of packing my stuff and going out to California." I had some buddies out there from my undergraduate that had gone straight to law school and were practicing law. That wasn't what I had started out to do but Los Angeles was a better market and who knows, I might go out there and gen up some union side practice or whatever. But I was young, I was single, didn't have any debt, and so ...

[03:48:56] Oh, and I said, "And by the way, while I was gone, my class, those 03:49:00guys and gals that were the same level, had moved up past our promotion date. When I come back, since I been doing labor over here, I expect I'll come back right in the ladder just like I would've been if I'd stayed there." So she said, "I expect so, too." The following ... week I got called for a meeting that said, "Mr. Rothman said come on back and we'll slide you in."

WEISBERGER: [03:49:35] So there you were back in labor.

JONES JR.:[03:49:37] Back in labor. But I had my taste-

WEISBERGER: [03:49:39]With a little detour to the union-

JONES JR.:[03:49:41 I had my taste of the union side, which cured me of looking for union side stuff, if that's the way the game is played. I know how it's played on the government side, but at least my experience to date and how we did it in this office was a much more intellectually and ideologically respectable 03:50:00one than these people over here that were just ... and I don't know how far that went 'cause George and them are real ideologues and, you know, the principle. The principle my rear end, you gonna get those people out there crucified.

WEISBERGER: [03:50:17]Well I always admired George and Sarah when I met them but I was also very skeptical of some of their views. Like how great it was for unions not to have any union security provision so that would force all the union officials to get out there and persuade each member to voluntarily come up with their dues.

JONES JR.:[03:50:40] Completely idealistic and so forth, you say, "Which world are you living in?" Right? Anyway, but I love them both. They were such ... I sorta suspected that they were more than just colleagues too but that wasn't my business. But they were such wonderful people. You admire these crazy guys. 03:51:00These purists.

WEISBERGER: [03:51:05] Right, right…Working with them is a different story.

JONES JR.:[03:51:07] First of all, when I went back into the pits of labor and got up to talk I used to tell my young 60's, I would say, "Look, I don't want no martyrs. Please, I want survivors so we can live and fight another battle, maybe ... these are battles. No individual one is the war. And I don't want no summertime soldiers. We gotta be here, so look, we have to ..."

WEISBERGER: [03:51:33] We all have to be here for the long run.

JONES JR.:[03:51:34] Right, so we have to maneuver around some things. We can push but when it's ... if that's a suicidal thing, Derrick Bell was always calling for people to commit suicide. He never does. He seems to but he always ends up surviving. Wait a minute ... I'm getting ahead of the story because this is ...

WEISBERGER: [03:51:53] Okay, when you came back after the union experience, what kind of assignments were you thrown into or did you take on?

JONES JR.:[03:52:01] I don't remember anything that was any great moment since ... this was '58, '60 and the usual grist of the legislative mill, the waning days of the administration. They weren't breaking any new path. Landrum-Griffin was rocking. Probably that business of turning down writing the brief was during that period. I've forgotten when it was. There were some things like, and I'd have to look at the records, the big foreign flagship ... no, that might've been post '60.

[03:52:47] But maybe a Machinists v. Street. That's a Supreme Court case that started the court down the wrong way. But I wrote the first memo on Machinists v. Street and so much work that Harold Isom thought they should've put my name 03:53:00on the brief. By the time the brief got back from the White House, I was delighted that my name wasn't on it. That's just plain crazy. It's not gonna ... you can't administer it. In fact, you're sliding down the edge and ultimately, they're still sliding down-

WEISBERGER: [03:53:22]They're still sliding.

JONES JR.:[03:53:26] You've given the court an impossible job, line by line by line, all of that business, and furthermore, to compare trade union people with corporations is the most idiotic comparison. A corporation is a paper person, association and trade union folks is like church. So to make them the same is a political ... and continues to keep unions weaker than they ought to be able to do. I was telling somebody the other day, he asked me which was the worst 03:54:00decision that the Supreme Court made. Most people would say the [inaudible [03:54:08] Minority, but it's gotta be simple. I said, "Well, I'm not so sure. I think that decision that said a corporation is a person, a U.S. citizen, and entitled to all the protections of the Constitution-

WEISBERGER: [03:54:19] Including free speech rights, etc.

JONES JR.:[03:54:22 Even though they saw the commercial speech as [inaudible [03:54:25]. But all the constitutional challenges contract rights, the Yellow Dog contract thing was constitutional. That's the worse things that's happened to our country, because it's destructive of democracy.

WEISBERGER: [03:54:40] And we're still seeing the [crosstalk [03:54:45]

JONES JR.:[03:54:44] And we're suffering the ultimate now since the president has a notion that he's CEO of America and that America's a great big old corporation with a bottom line syndrome. What else?

WEISBERGER: [03:54:58] Well, I wanna figure out what you were doing from the 03:55:00time that we just talked about to the time you came to the academic world.

JONES JR.:[03:55:11] Oh, God, that's a long reach [crosstalk [03:55:12]. But now I'm talking about nine years, so let's take it a piece at a time. Change of administration. I could tell you a lot of things that happened in my personal life. Let's see, where are we?

WEISBERGER: [03:55:24] 1960.

JONES JR.:[03:55:25] Okay. I didn't get married. I got married May 6, 1960. That's probably most ... and on that side of it, you read some stuff and the memoir will tell you some of the agonies of the personal life of a hard-charging, hard-working and the few times I was free, hard-partying and hard-drinking bachelor and it got to be too complicated and I got caught 03:56:00standing still by this proud woman that I still don't understand, and we got married.

WEISBERGER: [03:56:10] So that was a highlight even though it's not on the professional side.

JONES JR.:[03:56:14] Well, it was. She was a professional. She was a computer programmer with the Army NAP that had the only online computer in the Federal Government with UNIVAC. One, bigger than this floor.

WEISBERGER: [03:56:31] Right, they had big, enormous rooms, I remember.

JONES JR.:[03:56:33] That's all. There was no other ... maybe they had one at the NASA... but it was the only major computer. And they were doing Earth measurement. And she was a math major from a little black college and got a job. And she worked there until the space agency started and then NASA stole the lead mathematicians from Army NAP because they had two things: computer savvy and 03:57:00celestial mechanics.

WEISBERGER: [03:57:08] A nice combination.

JONES JR.:[03:57:11] That's right. Essential for NASA. So the water center at Maryland got started and they stole all of Joan's bosses. And then the bosses went back and stole some of the other people out there. So, we got married and she switched from Army NAP to NASA and so she was going out to Greenbelt when they had only two buildings, and the roads were still muddy and I was up to my eyebrows in the Labor Department, and the 60's came.

WEISBERGER: [03:57:48] What difference did the Kennedy administration make?

JONES JR.:[03:57:50] First of all, we went absolutely ballistic in the first 100 days. The Labor Department was in the center of Camelot. The best and the brightest. You can't get any bestest than Arthur Goldberg for your Secretary of 03:58:00Labor. I believe the first Jew. His number two was W. Willard Wirtz. You have got to be kidding. I'm going to be the lawyer ... I'm the labor lawyer for these two ... one of the labor lawyers for these labor lawyers?

[03:58:24] Well, first off, let's see ... Moynihan [03:58:35] was a Miscellaneous Special Assistant to the Secretary of Labor. Ran around in the Labor Department looking for a job assignment, or something to do during this period. At one time we had four former Supreme Court clerks who were special assistant to the secretary. Whatever, they tucked them in, and they were busy 03:59:00meddling into the legal stuff. John Bell [03:59:08], who was a Prettyman [03:59:11] clerk, which was, if you want on the Supreme Court, E. Barrett Prettyman was the judge that people had to clerk for. The Solicitor's Office was a first-rate law office. Archibald Cox used to be Associate Solicitor Labor in the '40s. Cam Nickeljon [03:59:34]. Celebrated bunch of people that went through there and went to other places. It was a high quality outfit.

[03:59:50] The whole manpower, the War on Poverty, all sorts of stuff, the dynamics were going on. They were looking for ideas. We were up to here in 04:00:00stuff. I go at call from Edith to come to Edith's office, Edith Cook. I went up the ladder a little bit. I was [GS13 04:00:16] right now, first level supervisor, and a candidate for promotion to GS14. Mini-supervisor. Run projects and so forth by myself. Edith was ... I don't know whether she, by this time was ... (phone rings)

WEISBERGER: [04:00:41] You were called into Edith's office.

JONES JR.:[04:00:42] I was called into Edith's office, and she said, "What are you working on, Jim." I said, "Secondary boycotts. The secretary's about to testify." She said, "When?" I told her. She said, "That's six weeks away. We're going crazy right now." She says a task force in Assistant Secretary Hollander's 04:01:00[04:01:00] office, he was a new assistant secretary ... we were still trying to figure out who was in what slots, by the way. We know Goldberg and Wirtz and Jim Reynolds [04:01:11] was a bullet. That was a new guy at the FMCS and all that stuff.

[04:01:19] I started out the door, and I said, "By the way, this is a one-man job?" A little politically, incorrect, right. I said, "I'll take that new kid. He doesn't know anything yet." That new kid was John Bell. I picked up John Bell and we went down to Hollander's office. It was the new President's Committee apparatus for anti-discrimination and Affirmative Action. Kennedy's brand new Executive Order that used the magic words, and they got to have some rules and regulations drafted. This huge president's committee, but has the legislative 04:02:00part. The Secretary of Labor is on the committee as well as some other agencies because ... I can't think of the name of that bigoted Congressman that passed that law that first killed the Roosevelt Initiative, but then some of the people went to him and say, the defense people ... this was pre-Defense Department, you see. We had Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force. They said, "Your prohibition doesn't allow us to participate in things that we share in common with our monies, without getting specific approval for an act of Congress." He said, "Oh, you didn't need that."

[04:02:50] The next Congress he put in the thing that really trashed the original one he said that you couldn't have a program for more than one year that spends the government's money without specific authorization from Congress, 04:03:00right? That precedent ran from Roosevelt to the point that whenever they started this big outfit, committee, it's a little bit of preachers, and teachers and some union folk and management people. Couldn't do that anymore, unless you had inter-agency. So you have them do a little preachers and teachers and union and management people and Labor Department and Defense Department and another agency. Away you go, business as usual, right? The Labor Department end up, usually, having to do the staffing for it, whatever they could get from other ... it's the same old business, man.

[04:03:50] He gets 25 people on that, including George Higgins [04:03:52], by the way, he was on that committee. They had to do the rules. Administration was 04:04:00delegated to the Secretary of Labor, but rule writing was the committee. They hadn't been assembled yet, but it comes time to get started. I didn't know anything, not absolutely nothing about the substance, but I knew how to do rules and get them ready. John Bell was a very good and careful lawyer, good contract writer, we had good ... he was a very good guy to work with.

[04:04:39] So,we went down there and got the specs. What it was the rules and regulations for the Kennedy Executive Order that, for the first time in the history of presidential executive orders on anti-discrimination in government contractors, also imposed the Affirmative Action Laws [inaudible 04:04:54]. No definition. No definition of anything. That was who made it, and this was forced 04:05:00march. Everything is, got to have it by tomorrow.

[04:05:07] Anyway, we wrote some rules and regulations, and when we wrote them up, we've given instructions about to whom they should be sent for comments. The usual, Justice Department, obviously, and amongst these people was Abe Fortas [04:05:25] and I said to Edith, "What agency is he with?" She said, "Nothing, yet. He's still over in the law office." Reedy [04:05:36], I've forgotten Reedy's first name, he was press secretary.

WEISBERGER: [04:05:39] Was it George Reedy?

JONES JR.:[04:05:39] George Reedy. There were a bunch of, a whole bundle of names. Oh yeah, write that down and just ... it ain't for us to judge who these people are and where. Just send this stuff out.

[04:05:54] I cobble all that together and we put together some rules. The first thing, I was looking at John and I said, "I've got some problems that I can't 04:06:00make up stuff to sort out. First of all, what the hell do they mean by 'contract?'" Nobody had ever talked about contract law. I don't know, since they had never made any real noise about enforcing the damn thing in the 20 years they had had it around since Roosevelt, but one special thing that the Kennedy Executive Order had in it was not only Affirmative Action, but it had specific provisions for enforcement, including debarment, blacklisting was the ultimate, cancellation and revocation of contracts. I've forgotten what else.

WEISBERGER: [04:06:50] Well that's pretty strong.

JONES JR.:[04:06:51] Very strong. Right out of defense contracting [inaudible 04:06:58]. In addition to indicate... that I've said ...to indicate that they 04:07:00weren't being frivolous, they had provisions in there to protect the contractors' due process rights. You couldn't just impose sanctions on them without hearing, etc. All right, all of this was new, so I'm looking at this stuff and then I'm thinking, "Wait a minute. Everybody talks about contract, we've got all this stuff in federally assisted contracts and all this give away. They're grants. Is a grant a contract?"

WEISBERGER: [04:07:32] The definitions were non-trivial. To figure it out.

JONES JR.:[04:07:38] Right, but there were no definitions. Now, I looked at the Affirmative Action thing, we looked at, I'm the lead lawyer and John is still trying to find where the men's rooms are, but he was a very good lawyer, classic in a sense. They've already said no discrimination on the basis of ... by the 04:08:00way, specifically missing was sex. Wasn't no gender stuff in there.

[04:08:19] That's old-fashioned, intentional discrimination, with malice aforethought, or malum in se or whatever you want to call it. Therefore, this other stuff has got to be different. I learned from Sam Berman [04:08:34] and John Conway]04:08:34], right, and lawyers going, you're going to change what you're saying, you've changed the meaning. You want to mean the same thing, say the same thing. With something sitting out like that, they obviously intended-

WEISBERGER: [04:08:46] Something more.

JONES JR.:[04:08:47] Something more than this right here. I said, "Okay, executive orders are usually drafted in the Justice Department, or at least Justice ought to know who drafted it. Since we're going to send this stuff over 04:09:00to Justice, maybe I'll save myself a bunch of time by making an appointment over at the Assistant Attorney General's Office for Legal Counsel with their chief people to get an idea what they had in mind." So I made an appointment, and the Assistant AG for Legal Counsel was the famous Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach [04:09:28].

WEISBERGER: [04:09:28] Oh, I got it. Yeah.

JONES JR.:[04:09:30] I went over and met with the great Nick and his number one guy, the Korea guy whose name I've forgotten, was chief of that operation. We sat and talked. My primary thing, I'd get to Affirmative Action later, but what did you guys have in mind when you said "contract?" Because we're in the business of all this highway aid money, and you're giving it to the states to 04:10:00then contract with it.

WEISBERGER: [04:10:03] Is it going to follow that?

JONES JR.:[04:10:05] What is this? Is this is a contract, first, right? The follow part I didn't have any difficult with, because the most comprehensive subcontract language had been litigated in Walsh-Healey in the '30s and '40s. I knew where I was going to get that from with Supreme Court citations to say what the language meant. By the way that's one thing I learned about the legislation. When I wrote a committee report, I didn't always put it all in there, but for terminology and stuff, usually if there was someplace else it had been litigated and the language had a meaning, I would have all that briefing back-up stuff for if we need them in court. Maybe the Supreme Court wants to change it's mind about what this language means, but that's what ya'll said it-

WEISBERGER: [04:10:53] But you'll have to deal with what they said.

JONES JR.:[04:10:55] That's what you said it meant, and even if Congress changed that statute, that was if that language was in there, this is the classic 04:11:00definition of that term. That's the way I used to research and document that stuff, when we had something. When you haven't got anything, you say, "Where do you get this stuff?"

[04:11:14] Anyway, Nick and them chatted with me nicely and turned me over to a senior person to take me down to the library and show them the wonderful resources of the Justice Department's law library. The best in the world. I didn't have the heart to tell them, "Fellas, I've been using this library for five years. Where do you think we go when our library doesn't have enough?" We went down there and I went back to the office and I said, "We're all on our own." I didn't raise the question, just used sorta standard language. I went out there and preserved the Affirmative Action mandate without trying to articulate 04:12:00what, in detail, we had in mind.

[04:12:07] Now, coming from the labor management world, I knew what Affirmative Action in the National Relations Act model gave to the board. If they ever want to expand, but somebody's got to see, because we can go almost wherever you want to go, if it effectuates the purposes of the statute. We'll leave that later. We can't handle overt discrimination, obviously not ready to address that in detail in this short period of time.

[04:12:47] We put together some stuff, sent it out for comment, got back preliminary comments, and to whatever extent they gave us anything, we did them. 04:13:00Draft number two. Sent it out to the people who got to pass this stuff. That's 25 or so. Still didn't have a definition section in the rules. I said, "Worry about that a little later."

[04:13:24] Sunday morning, I'm back now working on secondary boycotts-

WEISBERGER: [04:13:27]This is tape number two, an interview between June Weisberger and Professor James Jones.

JONES JR.:[04:13:33] Alright, we were talking about this magic Sunday in the first 100 days of the Kennedy Administration, after we'd sent out to various and sundry, two drafts of rules and regulations, and Abe Fortas, who was still-

WEISBERGER: [04:13:49] In private practice.

JONES JR.:[04:13:51] In private practice called my boss, my supervisor, Edith Cook [04:14:00], and she got me on the phone to talk to me [inaudible 04:14:08] 04:14:00attorney. He complimented us on our efforts and that. "I assume you are now working on the second ..."

WEISBERGER: [04:14:19] Draft?

JONES JR.:[04:14:20] "Draft." I said, "Yes." He was complimentary, he said, "I've some small suggestions." He gave me eight small, he said small, suggestions. When I thanked him and hung up and studied them, I said, "Small, my right eye."

WEISBERGER: [04:14:39] (laughs)

JONES JR.:[04:14:42] First of all, they were the only real, substantive suggestions we got. Justice sent us back some ticky tacky crap about the form to put it in before we submit it to the federal register for whatever we were going to go with that. I'd already sent the word up the line through the system to the 04:15:00Secretary of Labor saying, "We got these rules. They are our rules governing government contracts. There's an exception in the Administrative Procedure Act for rules and contracts. We don't have to go through the process. Do you want to go through the proper ... notice and comment, etc.?" Had I been asked, I would have put them through that. Since this ... obviously this was the business of ... you can't have a kid like John Bell in charge of something. You've got to know some nuances of things that you learn by being around long enough or just be cautious.

[04:15:43] I would put them through there, but I think that things ought to be done up front. Furthermore, you get some stuff that is very useful since, contrary to the current government, we don't know everything. The word came back from Goldberg, "Of course we're going to post it for notice." We got by that hurdle.

JONES JR.:[04:16:05] Here I get aid, and all of these of substance. The rest of the stuff was-

WEISBERGER: [04:16:12] Trivial.

JONES JR.:[04:16:12] Right. Then I'm kind of thinking, "We already got all this stuff out to these people who have the authority, how am I going to deal with these changes?" I had my first brilliant idea. Think I'm going to go run a meeting pretty much like a body would run a meeting. I said I will suggest ... by the way they had a lead counsel called Hobart Taylor [04:16:43] who was going to come in and was closing down a 12-man law office in Detroit. Only inclination that I ever had that there was a black law firm in the United States, and he was going to close it out to come to Washington to be Assistant to the Vice President and Counselor to the President's Committee at EEO. I never met the 04:17:00man. He ain't there and I'm doing his work. I would think ... but anyway, I got this brilliant idea. I will set it up so what they do is, there's a motion to put the rules before the committee, and there's a series of motions to amend the proposed rules one through eight, which meant that in every place in the original draft that this amendment, of course the change would be approved.

[04:17:42] Then I had my real stroke of genius. The ninth proposal, the body with the authority would give to the Secretary of Labor and/or the General Counsel, and the General Counselor, a gift [inaudible 04:17:58] to that lawyer, Reviser of Statutes authority. If you know anything ...

WEISBERGER: [04:18:04] Yeah, I know about the reviser Wisconsin statutes.

JONES JR.:[04:18:08] But there's a reviser standard at the federal government that there's something that goes so they put all that stuff in the code book, etc. Somebody has to fit it where they've changed and make it make sense. The legislative history will tell you a lot of stuff about it.

[04:18:26] This is a little bit slippery, I guess, but you know, these lay people, etc., so the counsel could say, "We need this to fix the thing so that the clean copy and all that, plus we need to add the consistent definitions that make sense [inaudible 04:18:42]." They passed all eight ... they passed all nine, and essentially gave to the lawyer the Reviser of Statute, including writing definitions. Then when I talked to stuff, I'd tell an administrator or I'd tell the students, "I'll let you write the statute, if you let me write the 04:19:00definitions, and I assure you that when I am finished, it will mean what I say it means." Since there was no reason for them to doubt that we were playing games, and they passed it. We crafted definitions after this.

WEISBERGER: [04:19:20] That's very interesting, because the logical thing is to say how important it is to do these definitions first.

JONES JR.:[04:19:27] Of course, but you see, can you imagine a bunch of lay people who don't know a damn thing about it, and also don't know this business about the contract thing. We just, the contract was a compliment, the subcontract thing, I knew I had that wired. We finessed the contract thing and just didn't answer the question.

[04:19:50] Anyway, they passed the whole thing, and out it went and got that moving. I think the second ... there were two sets of rules. There was some clean up stuff after Hobart came.

[04:20:04] Okay, so that got out there and in the ... what it amounted to was I became an instant expert in civil rights. That was my very first assignment as a professional in the Labor Department.

WEISBERGER: [04:20:23] You were in the thick of things with that assignment.

JONES JR.:[04:20:25] And it had anything to do with race. Nobody knew how much in the thick it was. This is the president and then he's almost 20 years to the day, come up with the same kind of ... an approach that Roosevelt started under pressure from the North.

[04:20:46] Now, we posted these things for 60 days note of comment, so the world at large that follows this stuff, had advance notice.

WEISBERGER: [04:20:53]Were there many reactions?

JONES JR.:[04:20:56] Garbage.

WEISBERGER: [04:20:58]I'm not surprised.

JONES JR.:[04:20:59] Most of it, just lauditory [inaudible 04:21:01], nothing of ...

WEISBERGER: [04:21:02] Substance.

JONES JR.:[04:21:02] One of the things that always troubled me later, since we're learning ... we put together, and John was very good at discuss ... some of this is civil procedure type stuff, administrative process. We put together a complaint-based process for enforcement. Knowing what I know now, I would have raised with somebody, said, "Hey, look do you really want an individual complaint-based process so that individual complaints will trigger an enforcement action against General Motors. The bottom line on this one, stop doing contract with the whole corporation? You don't have a provision in here for breaking it up?" Or as John McEnroe say, "You can't be serious?"

[04:21:58] I wasn't sufficiently aware at the time, and we were in a hurry, so 04:22:00who's going to complain about the process of filing a complaint and investigation and the government prosecutor and take it on up there and impose such sanction as the body. Well, the body was [inaudible 04:22:14] and it had mediation, arbitration [inaudible 04:22:18] for a panel of experts built in the arbitration, this sort of arbitration alternative dispute. Didn't have that name then, but the idea behind it.

WEISBERGER: [04:22:26]That's what it was.

JONES JR.:[04:22:26] Then ultimately go to the committee for ultimate disposition.

[04:22:36] We had all that in there and none of the ... the civil rights organizations didn't scream, etc. Then when they got around to the business of, much later, trying to enforce these things from outside, they were tied into the administrative process. Once I got out here and became a scholar and got looking at stuff, I said, "I knew we could've done a better job. What's new?"

[04:23:02] What happened a year later, or somewhat later, I think it was a year later, they realized that actually asked the questions I had raised about, "What do you mean by contract?" That language didn't really carry it by itself, so they issued another executive order to clarify the first one, which took care of all the federally assisted contractors and the whole thing.

[04:23:32] Now, let's see. What happened after that that was of great note?

WEISBERGER: [04:23:34] Well, it was an exciting time, I'm sure to be in Washington, to be a lawyer, to be in the Labor Department.

JONES JR.:[04:23:39] Let me tell you, I was right down there in the middle of right at 14th and Constitution Avenue. The real excitement is to come later. In '63, the March on Washington, I was at work.

[04:23:53] Before we get to that point, Adam Powell]04:23:56] had been finally ... because Graham Barton]04:24:00] died or didn't run, etc. Adam had been the 04:24:00ranking Democrat on the House Labor Committee for years and the chairman wouldn't even acknowledge his presence. Powell became Chair. He immediately started activity to get an FEPC bill considered. He introduced one. James Rose-, in the House, bunch of people introduced the same bill over their name. In the Senate you have people, a number of people, sponsor the same bill. In the House there was Roosevelt's bill and Adam's bill, which was the same. Adam is chair, he schedules hearing on Roosevelt's bill and invites the Secretary of Labor to come and testify. Jack Kennedy didn't know anybody [inaudible 04:25:02]

WEISBERGER: [04:25:03] Testify?

JONES JR.:[04:25:04] Mucking around with no FEPC stuff. If they're going to have a civil rights bill, that was not one ... that issue ... he wasn't interested in opening up that issue because it was going to be a keg of maggots for the trade union support, plus all sorts of other things. That wasn't on the table. I forgot the sequence, but you're talking about things that are most important, rivaling getting married, dictated how much time ... she was going out to NASA because they were getting ready to launch stuff. I'm downtown because they were launching all sorts of stuff and I'm in the middle of it.

JONES JR.:[04:25:42] Anyway, so Roosevelt ... I mean ...

WEISBERGER: [04:25:46] Kennedy?

JONES JR.:[04:25:46] Goldberg dodged the ...

WEISBERGER: [04:25:48]FEPC?

JONES JR.:[04:25:52] He was not available. Adam finally got ticked and he sent the word down to the Labor Department. "The Secretary will appear tomorrow at 10 04:26:00a.m. to testify on HR whatever [inaudible 04:26:10]" The Secretary was out of town. One of the many supervisors came down to ... many, small ... came down to my office and said, "Jim-"

WEISBERGER: [04:26:24] "We have a problem."

JONES JR.: [04:26:25] "The Secretary has got to testify on the FEPC tomorrow at 10:00 in the House Labor Committee. You've got to write testimony [inaudible 04:26:32]." I was eating my lunch, which in those days was soup, salad, dessert and tea. Breakfast was a cup of coffee, orange juice, a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I'm having lunch. I said, "Okay." I was finishing my soup. Phil Jahne was his name, he had grown up ... he'd been a Secretary and he had grown up on the [inaudible 04:26:58] went to college, went to law school and became a lawyer 04:27:00all at the Labor Department. A nice kid from Pennsylvania. He was drained of color, at a loss. He said, "Did you hear what I said." I looked up and said, "Yeah. I have 22 minutes to get ready and it ain't going to get any longer if I don't finish my soup." I'm not that cavalier, but I've got to have some fuel in me. I can think while I'm eating.

JONES JR.: [04:27:33] Boy, he was really mad, probably, I don't know what he thought. He thought I had more courage than he had. He was dying. He'd never been up to the Hill, so here I'm going to go up with the Secretary lawyer. I wrote some testimony. Put together whatever we could and it didn't say anything much, but since we couldn't get a clear view of the budget because the administrator didn't have any position. They wasn't going to wade out in that 04:28:00water. What Goldberg did was to go up there and talk sort of sympathetically about the problems and the needs, etc. and offer the assistance of the Labor Department in drafting a supportable bill.

[04:28:19] I put together this stuff and we put a little hand briefing book out and got to the Secretary's chauffer and said, " When you pick him up from the airport and midnight, you're going to put this in the limousine so you sit on it and you won't forget, when he steps off the plane, give it to him. He's got a 10:00."

[04:28:46] Anyway, the next-

WEISBERGER: [04:28:47] That's what happened.

JONES JR.: [04:28:47] That's what happened. The next morning I met him, I guess about 9:00 or whatever, we had a little round table briefing and I'm up the Hill in the Secretary's limo. Arthur Goldberg, I believe the first, if not the only 04:29:00Jew to be Secretary of Labor, is testifying before the House Labor Committee, chaired by a black Congressman from New York on a bill introduced in Congress by the son of the former president, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Secretary of Labor has a black lawyer to reckon, who I believe, I might have been a 14 by then, but if so, just barely because there's another story about when I got promoted to GS14. It was the first time in the history of the Labor Department that a black lawyer had been promoted to Principle Attorney. Not even Howard Jenkins, who had been a political appointee.

[04:29:50] I didn't know that until after I came out here to teach. I knew that there had been a black lawyer in the Labor Department in the '40s, named George 04:30:00W. Crockett. He left the Labor Department, went back to Detroit, I think he became a judge. He became a Congressman. I think he took Diggs' seat, but I don't know whether he was a judge first and a Congressman later. The black law students had Judge Crockett out here for something, and he came up to visit with me. I knew who he was. I told him about our common background, and that I had been ... I knew he had been in the Labor Department, and he left. He told me the story of why he left.

[04:30:35] He was a GS13 hot shot and one of his liberal, white friends said, "George, you're too good to retire in the government at a 13, but they're never going to promote a Negro to Principle Attorney. You ought to get the hell out of here and pursue a career with your talents someplace else." He said that's why he left. Then it hit me. It took a year to get my paperwork through, and Edith 04:31:00was my ... I mean, this lovely gal was my supervisor, and so she was the one that was signing, steering this stuff through the process, and it kept coming back. I don't know whether it was during this explosive period or later, but we were in her office working on something ... the reason that I can't edit very well ... I never did. I did the real work and Edith was the best editor and rearranging, communication ... she said, "That's repetitious." "I know it is, but you got to maintain the attention of these people and by the time they get to the fourth page, they've forgotten what was on there, so you just carry them right along to the end." She was marvelous.

[04:31:59] Anyway, we were doing about something and she picked this stuff up, 04:32:00the mess and they put it back.

[04:32:00] Something, and she picked the stuff up, but eventually put it back. And, she teared up, she was furious. She picked it up and charged out and went somewhere. So, I knew what it was, 'cause it had been back and some of the stuff I had changed and put some more in. But, she snatched this up and she went into [inaudible 04:32:25].

[04:32:24] I always fretted about, you know, "Why the hell is it taking so long?" None of those other pieces of paper have taken long to get through. Now, there weren't that many 14's of any kind. Once you get to be a 14, you've got a title, okay? But, I wasn't, by this time she's obviously a 15, I think. She might have been the associate solicitor, assistant solicitor. It took ... and I said, "Those son of a bitches." 20 years later, it's 20 years or more since Crocker left the department.

WEISBERGER: [04:32:57] Crocker.

JONES JR.: [04:32:57] They still ...

WEISBERGER: [04:32:58] They still ...

JONES JR.: [04:33:00] I also found out something later, that a lot of this fell 04:33:00in place. I was reading some stuff from a confidential... bunch of junk that I had to go through a special security to get that rod out there and that lock to open in that office that I took over when I got to be a 16. Top secret and all that stuff I read, and most of it was absolute junk. Clippings from newspapers, there weren't nothing that I didn't already know in there, and some things I found out... the missile site crisis that I wished I didn't know. It was at that meeting that somebody asked me, "Do you have..." somebody... security people there, "I assume everybody has crypto-sensitive clearance." And I said, "I don't." It was too late. They already told us. They already told me some stuff I really didn't want to know. Well obviously I wasn't going to share it with anybody, but it really was hair raising. Went through this stuff and found out 04:34:00there was a confidential memo. It was political. It didn't have anything to do with security. The famous Anne Thompson Powers, who was Bill Wirtz's exec, had done an investigation of affirmative action at the labor department. How minorities had applied and he had this report. He said, "The highest level of negro..." I hate to use that garbage term, you know what I mean. "...that we have in a professional job, who is not in a political department is Jim Johnson of the solicitor's office. GS14."

[04:34:35] There was one or two who had political jobs. Sylvester being one and Arthur Chape and some other guy who's name I never really... he had. There were three of them that were at least in the super grade 15, 16, 17 I think. Tom had 04:35:00some comments to say about the process and obviously there was talent around here who could ascend to these other positions, but we around preaching other people to advance, etc.

WEISBERGER: [04:35:19] Our own backyard.

JONES JR.: [04:35:20] By the way it's really tragic and I'm upset to say, we had the best profile of any agency in the country.

WEISBERGER: [04:35:27] Ooh that hurts.

JONES JR.: [04:35:30] Well for those of us...

WEISBERGER: [04:35:31] You're not surprised?

JONES JR.: [04:35:32] Nothing surprises me anyway. After all I came to Washington it was a Jim Crow town.

[04:35:40] Anyway, found that out many years later. Took that long to break through. Every move I made after that, wasn't but two more, 15 and 16. When I topped out as a GS16, I was Chief of the Legal Division and I had already been a 16 by the way. Chief of the Research Corporation and Labor Relations. That's as 04:36:00far as a black had ever gone.

[04:36:07] By the way, when I left... getting ahead of the story, but Larry Silverman told me, "You have to teach us or we're going to have to quit." Because he would give me his absence. He needed to bring in a political, someone with political coverage for my job. I was sitting on a hand grenade. I was sitting on all his hand grenades. The rest of these guys fixing to run themselves.

[04:36:37] To accommodate what he was bringing in they upgraded the job. They made it a GS17 after I left. Ultimately when they put it back in the structure they cut it in two and made two 17s.

WEISBERGER: [04:36:51] So a two 17 job is a 16?

JONES JR.: [04:36:56] Right. Labor relations has it's group from the public 04:37:00sector stuff and that's a story too. Who we haven't gotten to back up there.

[04:37:08] I don't remember the exact timing of the writing of the Kennedy Executive Order. We wrote that. Me and John. Took all of the support stuff, the structure. By that time, I'm a 15 at least. I'm council for labor relations in the Division of Labor Relations. That's after the Kennedy Administration. I don't know when I got the 14. I could look it up. Before they came in or I got it right after they came in. Then ultimately I got to be a 15 and then ultimately a 16.

WEISBERGER: [04:37:48] Maybe this is a good point to stop today. We're going to pick up next week at this point.

JONES JR.: [04:37:54] Let me back up and cap off the...

WEISBERGER: [04:37:55] Alright. Go ahead.

JONES JR.: [04:37:58] I went up and Goldberg testified and he finessed and then 04:38:00guess who they sent up as the "Department of Labor's Assistance in drafting a bill"? Me.

[04:38:09] I thought they were going to send up Hobart Taylor the Vice President's... Hobart wouldn't touch it. He says obviously the administration has changed. So I go back up there and I send three weeks in executive session while they mark up this bill. In a sweat we didn't have a position on anything.

WEISBERGER: [04:38:30] Oh my.

JONES JR.: [04:38:32] Adam knew it and a couple of times he called on me to respond.

WEISBERGER: [04:38:37] Right.

JONES JR.: [04:38:38] That's when I learned how to talk without saying anything. We we're fast tracked revising a statute. Me and couple of other real lawyers and a klutz from the minority side who didn't know means. After it was all over Roosevelt sent Goldberg a glowing letter thanking him for the assistance 04:39:00provided by James Jones. I have a copy of this somewhere.

WEISBERGER: [04:39:11] Oh neat.

JONES JR.: [04:39:14] Isn't that neat? I don't have the original, if I had that original maybe... some of these funny programs would think it's important. Beyond that actually I discovered an original letter signed by Jack Kennedy, that broke entire party orders in the Justice Department, and it said it was I was a real guy.

WEISBERGER: [04:39:38] Good for you.

JONES JR.: [04:39:39] I made a copy of it and kept that damn thing because it would probably be worth something. Send it back... but anyway I got that nice glowing letter, a copy of it, from Goldberg. As well as when Goldberg went to the bench, I got a personal from the bench thanking me and I think that is...

WEISBERGER: [04:39:59] That is something very special.

JONES JR.: [04:40:16] We have to stop there 'cause we now have just sorta.

TURNER: [04:40:21] This concludes the fourth interview of the oral history. The fifth interview conducted on October 11th, 2004 begins now.

WEISBERGER: [04:40:29]...11th, Monday 2004 and I'm in professor James Jones' office. We're going to be take number five in the oral history project that we've been working on and Professor Jones, my recollection was that we left off during your Department of Labor years just when Arthur Goldberg went off to the Supreme Court as a justice and Willard Wirtz came in.

JONES JR.: [04:40:59] That would be a good time marker I guess because Goldberg 04:41:00was Secretary of Labor for 20 months. Bill Wirtz was under Secretary of Labor and when Goldberg went to the Supreme Court he also stole my boss's secretary. The Solicitor of Labor's secretary, chief secretary. Took her to court with him. Then Bill went up to be secretary and James J. Reynolds became under secretary, so that would mark you figure '63. That must have been '65. Somewhere right around then.

WEISBERGER: [04:41:44] Okay. What sort of things happened to you during the period that followed?

JONES JR.: [04:41:49] Does that say '65? What does that say?

WEISBERGER: [04:41:51] Oh, you're going to ask me to see something I can't see?

JONES JR.: [04:41:55] Maybe I have the numbers screwed up. '63... no it would 04:42:00have been '64. Well this right here is March 4th, 1963. This that I'm pointing to is the Secretary of Labor's Career Service Award. That's been given to me by Bill Wirtz. This certificate. What it does is entitles me to a year off with full salary and whatever expenses to do... a year and a proposal that I had made was to do research on national emergency disputes. Another Taft-Hartley. Since I had been in the hot seat for several years going back to the previous administration. When they have another Taft-Hartley, or for that matter even later on when the Labor Act proceeds for dealing with an economic strike were 04:43:00exhausted, the next move was up to the President. If it works out in the process or you go to Congress to get a bill to fix that particular dispute. They assembled all these experts and legislations was involved and solicitors office would be the labor relations worker bee, with the background. So I was always detailed to whatever that was.

[04:43:35] You know how it works. The chieftains make all the big decisions and they leave a bunch of specifications and then they go out and have cocktails and dinner and the worker bee is left there till three o'clock in the morning to figure out how am I going to get from here to there? They didn't give me any advice. Try to put something together and as time passed I realized that all these so called experts were about as expert as I was because when the crisis 04:44:00would hit and the telephone would network would be working, some of these experts would be calling me. I said, "They're calling me?" I concluded that...

WEISBERGER: [04:44:19] That you had to be one of the experts.

JONES JR.: [04:44:19] ... that no body really knew enough and it was just irresponsible. That's my term because there's so many things that I discovered that the government lacked expectations were irresponsible for saying no to everything. If it didn't create a crisis, don't even bother with it. So the expectations that we grew up with about this all knowing, all right government. The world doesn't fit that model at all and I eventually got less uncomfortable with being the person in the hot seat. Which certainly served me well as I went 04:45:00up the line. So in fact, I was the last technical in the whole call on something, right? And I didn't know anything. As we've learned since we've become "scholars" the more you know the more you realize how little you know, right?

WEISBERGER: [04:45:25] True.

JONES JR.: [04:45:28] That's March 4th, '63 and Bill Wirtz is Secretary of Labor so Goldberg must have moved up earlier than that. I don't know... the timeframe is good enough.

WEISBERGER: [04:45:39] Right.

JONES JR.: [04:45:41] So what did we talk about? I think I pointed out that on Goldberg's watch I had appeared as loyal record and this very peculiar setup where the chair of the committee is a black Congressman and the bill we're on is the former President Roosevelt's son. I believe the first Jewish Secretary of 04:46:00Labor is testifying that he's got a black lawyer. That was in '62 I think. Somewhere in there. If you really wanted to be precise on this I got stuff on it I could probably dig up.

WEISBERGER: [04:46:23] Right. I thought that one easy thing that I could do is when I hand the tapes over to the university archives I could have your most current entry in the AALS book that has... pin points a number of these.

JONES JR.: [04:46:38] Which may or may not know everything.

WEISBERGER: [04:46:41] Right.

JONES JR.: [04:46:42] Since this is an oral history and the nature of the memoirs, if they want documentation I have to go deep into my records. I got copies somewhere of the testimony. If they're not worried about that then we can just do what we remember in sequence reasonably close.

WEISBERGER: [04:47:05] Just to follow one thing you said just a bit earlier, did you take a sabbatical because of the career service award? And what was your time spent on national emergencies?

JONES JR.: [04:47:19] Yes, but it got delayed because when I was supposed to go... by the time I was supposed to go and take my time off, we were in the middle of the run up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Labor Department was up to their eyebrows in it. Bill Wirtz was the second witness before the House Judiciary Committee, which wasn't the Labor Department's usual turf. The first witness was Bobby Kennedy, so we can at least set that in [inaudible 04:47:58] because Bobby was Attorney General. Jack had not been killed yet.

WEISBERGER: [04:48:02] Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

JONES JR.: [04:48:03] He was in the White House.

WEISBERGER: [04:48:04] Okay, so it's pre-November '63.

JONES JR.: [04:48:06] Right. Since Bill was a critical player in that and we had compulsory abirritation in the railroads pending. He was the critical player in that and I was his lawyer in both of them. Obviously, he couldn't let me go to go play research.

WEISBERGER: [04:48:32] To study.

JONES JR.: [04:48:37] Right. My time would start when I went, not when this thing was sent. This was the honors program where they have the little merit badges and this thing is given to me. As I jokingly said to him once and he corrected my grammar... I was spending more time with Bill than with Jane. We 04:49:00were in our labor arguments and said, "I didn't know you were spending any time with Jane." He was such a card.

[04:49:19] There were some changes. Bill became Secretary of Labor. Jim Reynolds became under secretary. He took his top staff guy who was also a labor management relations guy, a lawyer too. Both of them became under secretary himself. Jack Gentry. They had to go on the outside and get somebody else to be the assistant secretary for labor management which is what [inaudible 04:49:54]. Tom Donahue who ultimately became President of the AFL Seattle, who came out of 04:50:00ASCIU, and the current AFL Seattle president was mentored by Tom Donahue. Tom Donahue became available, okay? Lot of things in the mix right here and how we can fix them. It's hard to put them all in clear steps because they collapse on each other. Lot of things can happen in a short period of time.

[04:50:34] Shortly before this or maybe about the same time. During the same period of time. John Kennedy appointed the first black to the National Labor Relations Board. Howard Jenkins Jr. who was a Department of Labor lawyer when they came... he was a professor of labor lawyer at Howard and came into the 04:51:00Eisenhower administration in the solicitor's office. At a GS level that was insulting to his ability, but that's... because...

WEISBERGER: [04:51:17] That's the unfortunate history.

JONES JR.: [04:51:17] A GS13 and anyway Howard when I joined the solicitor's office, Howard was in the legislation division. He was beginning nationally. Not only he had a track record as an academic and as a professional, he had political connections it turns out that when Goldwater was running for President, Goldwater's wife and Howard's wife were touring the country pouring tea together and campaigning. He tapped Kennedy up on at Howard to the NLRB. Really sorta a typical political move. While the statute doesn't said that as a matter of practice the NLRB is always bi-partisan. We have republicans and 04:52:00democrats. Howard's vacancy was a republican vacancy. Jack Kennedy put a black in it. They wouldn't dare go at him with great credentials. The opposition wouldn't dare try and he stayed for a long time.

[04:52:29] How this fits in the story I'm telling, NLRB, the National Labor Relations all started was part of my beat not Howard's. For the national and some other stuff Howard was in. Then he went on to Landrum-Griffin thing for the commission, but when the secretary had do something about the Taft-Hartley law. The three people in the legal office was Edith N. Cook, who was Walter Cook's daughter, and William Evans, and me. I was their first choice for the worker bee 04:53:00because of the background I brought with me in industrial relations. The more experience and the more stuff I got and when we went to Capitol Hill I think I was Goldberg's lawyer. Under Congress on the second day of boycotts and stuff like that.

[04:53:29] When Howard came back from the White House finding out he was going to be nominated by the President he made two telephone calls. He called his wife to tell her and he called me and asked if I'd come to talk to him. The talk was he told me he was going to be nominated by the President and if he was confirmed would I go with him as his chief legal. Now the significance of this is two fold. One, this is a historic move. In the history of the board it's only had 04:54:00two blacks [crosstalk 04:54:08]. Your generation, I'm older than Liz. Well if the legal relations emergency of black folks and Bill became chair. He's the only chair now. Howard stayed for, I don't know, 20 years. Since I had been interviewed by the NLRB, and I had when I first started out, if I was going to work for government that was the agency and they wouldn't hire me. So here I get an offer to go to the top of the structures since the chief legal for each board member is a GS16, his supervisor is 25.

[04:54:55] Well I guess I skipped a part, when Rothman was secretary. Stuart 04:55:00Rothman was solicitor, he ultimately left the solicitor's office and went to the NLRB as general counsel. After he was over there about six months, he sent for me, except he didn't. He took Bill Evans with him and Bill called and said Stuarts wants you to come over and be a supervisor in one of these divisions. I would have been delighted for any kinda job over there when I started, but by the time that Rothman went over there with Rothman's curious reputation. I turned that down for something. I'm going to over there with... these people administered this one law all the time. I'm going to go over to supervise them? They going to hate me more than they hate Rothman. That's just going to be just [inaudible 04:55:53] trying to manage that. Who needs that? For one great 04:56:00promotion? I'm in the labor department, I guess by this time I'm a GS13. I said 14 ain't worth that. Well somebody would argue that because there aint too many more steps. It would have been a breakthrough over there too for a negro, but I wouldn't play. I turned that down.

[04:56:25] Now this is...

WEISBERGER: [04:56:28] Howard Jenkins.

JONES JR.: [04:56:29] This is a leap up. In fact it would have been a one or a two grade promotion when it occurred. I'm not so sure what I heard. A 14 or a 15, but I had moved up. We talked about that 14 thing didn't we?

WEISBERGER: [04:56:49] Yes.

JONES JR.: [04:56:52] I maybe was at that principal. I might even had gone up to the next step since, but that's unclear and not terribly important. Here I had 04:57:00this dilemma. I had this year coming to study. One of the conditions if you take that year off, you have to come back for at least a year. Certainly if you're thinking of going to another agency, you could quit your job and go private I guess and what would they do about it? Sue you to get the money back? So I hadn't taken the year. That's pending. I got this offer. It's pending. I guess the way that I would put it is two things I want you think about, would you go with me? As my chief legal, but even if you don't do that would you be willing to prep me for a legislative appearance on... you know the Taft-Hartley stuff. If I need somebody to go with me for the... which was very complimentary.

[04:58:08] So there I was. If there ain't enough pressure on you, you got these substantive things and then you go these other issues, right? I was having trouble because you know making a decision. I did something the only time I did it in my whole career in the labor department. I requested an audience with the Secretary of Labor on a matter of personal privilege and he granted it.

[04:58:42] I went down to his office and he was in the back of the little office eating lunch at his little desk and I'm sitting there and I told him my dilemma. He reacted as if I had punched him in the stomach. He said, " I can't advise you 04:59:00on that. I'm sorry I even agreed to talk to you about it." Well now I realized what he was saying and he didn't go into detail, but it was a conflict of interest for him. I was asking for career advice. He knows the whole field. It was a matter of career advice. Should I take that move or stay here?

WEISBERGER: [04:59:28] But he's an interested party.

JONES JR.: [04:59:33] He's thinking great. Naive and sophisticated as he's supposed to be, set aside that all and he... some people I guess would be surprised by this. That just shows you the extent of what I really didn't appreciate the significance. Although if I thought about it say well if I go who's going to pick up [inaudible 04:59:57]. Are you kidding? I'm it. They'd have to go... at least... well they went deep into the pile when I started doing 05:00:00this stuff.

[05:00:07] If I thought about it, I would have said why did they go into... no body wanted to hire me it and it turns out I had a special bunch of credentials that was hard to duplicate. A matter of fact I would suspect, but we couldn't prove it, when I finished law school there wasn't another person, black or otherwise, with two professional degrees and experience, practical experience in the industrial relations part on a sophisticated level. A law degree from the labor law school with great credentials. They under hired me and threw me in with all these clerks and law review from Columbia and Chicago and Yale and did we have anybody from Harvard at that time in the junior group? Oh LLM from 05:01:00Harvard. We had a kid got her LLM from Harvard. Archie Cox was her advisor.

[05:01:12] I never paid that much attention to look backwards on stuff and [inaudible 05:01:16] choose people. So if I had thought about it I would have said gee, gotta find out from somebody else. I shouldn't ask Bill. Well who you going to ask? I can't ask Charlie. If I ask my boss he'll say are you kidding? Well no Charlie would have been a lot less ethical. He would have probably said no way and further more if they ask me I won't release you to go. I don't know how that worked.

[05:01:48] That was a short... then I left and he's struggling and I really struggled and I decided I told Howard I really appreciate the offer, but I suggest that for somebody... an older guy with a whole lot of legal stuff that 05:02:00didn't know much about that law, but he knew about supervising people. Was a forceful person on our staff and was up the line. Was a brief writer and he chose Howard, Lee. Lee became his chief legal as they call him and I stayed. I don't know what was amidst in one of these crisis that we were down a brief and a secretary now. I'm a supervisor or the other hand grenade. As it was all over I said to him by the way Mr. Secretary, I decided to turn down that other job offer and stay. He really lit up and said how delighted he was that I had chosen 05:03:00to do that. Then he said I think you made the best choice. So it was a two fold.

[05:03:15] I don't know whether I explained it to him. I didn't explain it to him. It was a short thing. I explained to myself. If I go over to [inaudible 05:03:22] I have no independent personality. I'm just Howard Jenkins' man. He's the... talk about bird member Jenkins, they almost never referred to... well it was a career if I spend... well I didn't realize I could have spent 20 years and retired from the board or I could have left for chief legal and became an administrative law judge and retired from the board. All of those slots were at the top of their civil service structure and each would have been a breakthrough for us. Black folks. A lot of women by the way. Women had moved up a little bit. 05:04:00I had decided that in the labor department, even though I didn't have a... I don't think I had a title yet, if I did it was a mini title, deputy or something. I was a person in my own right. I was not so much outside, but within the confides of the agency.

WEISBERGER: [05:04:27] Well also the areas that you were developing expertise were broader. Even though the National Labor Relations Act is very very important and plays a key role... played a key role we can argue whether it still does, but I think the labor department's jurisdiction when you were there, it was just exploding.

JONES JR.: [05:04:49] No question. First of all, we had 160 some lawyers on the laws already that they administered. None of which I wanted to be involved in. The period of time, you have to go back to '59 or '57. From '57 to '60 fire, 05:05:00avertible explosion in labor law. Quietly the public sector was one that we dashed that off on and pushed that out and went on to OSHA. The reporting and disclosure thing for pension and welfare stuff. All that stuff was coming out of the labor department and we were the legislative division was up to here.

WEISBERGER: [05:05:31] That's even before we throw the civil rights...

JONES JR.: [05:05:36] Yes.

WEISBERGER: [05:05:36] ... legislation into the mix?

JONES JR.: [05:05:39] Right. I don't know when OSHA came in. Maybe it came in a little later.

WEISBERGER: [05:05:43] I'm not sure either.

JONES JR.: [05:05:47] Equal pay thing... it went through so easily, but that other thing was rattling around. No body paid much attention to that one. All 05:06:00sorts of dynamics.

[05:06:00] And you know, all sorts of dynamics were going on. The other is, a comfort zone. This is my umpteenth administration where I've survived, I'm now up ... and in the legislation, where you're always close to the policy. But I'm getting to the point now that hey, I'm Principal Attorney, the next step, they had to upgrade the whole offices before they could make room for any more promotions for folks. I remember a story about my office mate, who'd been in Clement Haynsworth Law Office, graduating from the University of North Carolina Law School. A white male, Episcopalian probably. He was a delightful Southern, obviously liberal fella named Milton Wiliiams. Got an LLM at Georgetown in Labor Laws and Environment working at a desk. Various people who started about the 05:07:00same time kind of went up in lockstep, you know, after you were eligible and you would get a promotion and it would be a ripple effect, so. I remember once, Milton and I had gotten GS-13s, that's the beginning supervisor, you know. But I understand that, that's the level at which that fella was in the White House, what was that name, that Lieutenant-Colonel ... Oliver North, the equivalent translation in the military, Lieutenant-Colonel, who was a 13, maybe he was a 14.

[05:07:37] But anyway, they don't quite exactly parallel but you get so you start running out of room on the ladder, alright? And these people have got substantial responsibilities, and so Milton said to me after this one day, he said "Well, Jim, I guess we have to relax now and wait for somebody to retire or die before we can expect another promotion."

[05:08:03] And the arrogance of this Southern colored boy to this white boy that had been an Associate in a major law firm in the South. I said "Don't include me in that." You know?

[05:08:19] And then he said, "Well, what do you think you're going to be, Assistant Solicitor?"

[05:08:21] I said, "Yes, and if you don't plan to be, then you'd better get ready to work for me!"

[05:08:28] Right? Now, where does this come from, I mean?

WEISBERGER: [05:08:29] Yeah, where does it come from?

JONES JR.: [05:08:31] I don't have the political outsider says ... the business of .... Why should I, I'm looking around these other people, why should I-

WEISBERGER: [05:08:40] Defer to them.

JONES JR.: [05:08:41] -why should I decide I don't even aspire to anything else?

[05:08:46] I was unwilling to just accept it. You know, Well that's the end of ... what are you, a displaced rose? I mean, I'm gonna ...

[05:08:55] Well, the bottom line that ultimately occurred, he ended up working for me. Not in the same division, and he wasn't assigned to me.

WEISBERGER: [05:09:05] Mm-hmm (affirmative), right.

JONES JR.: [05:09:05] But if he worked on stuff in the area that I was Counsel for Labor Relations and General Legal Service, I was his supervisor. He ultimately left and went to work for Sarge Shriver and had I gone over and taken the opportunity to go work for Shriver, he'd have ended up working for me anyway!

[05:09:26] Shriver tried to ... did I tell you that story?

WEISBERGER: [05:09:29] No.

JONES JR.: [05:09:29] Shriver tried to steal me over to OEO. He made a fatal mistake. I probably wouldn't have gone anyway, but we'd scheduled an interview, one-on-one with the great man.

[05:09:41] I went over at the appointed time, at 15 minutes early from that point, and sat there for a whole hour or so. And then when he showed up, what he was doing ... but he had another appointment up on Capitol Hill and he said "Come ride with me." So we walked out of the place, got in the limousine, rode 05:10:00up to Capitol Hill and got up there and so we walked up to, you know, "Let's continue til we get to my appointment."

[05:10:10] He interviewed me on the walk and in his limousine and on the walk down to Congress. Well. If I had been persuadable, right-

WEISBERGER: [05:10:21] He now guaranteed you would not be!

JONES JR.: [05:10:24] He just blew it. It said, this job was so unimportant, he couldn't even make real time to interview a candidate who was black.

WEISBERGER: [05:10:35] You don't want that job.

JONES JR.: [05:10:36] Nah, nah, nah. John Bale, the kid I told you that the two of us wrote ... in 1988 and all that stuff, went over to OEO and that was [inaudible 05:10:50] another one of the kids out of the legislation division of [inaudible 05:10:57]. Sarge Shriver knew where to go to steal good talent, 05:11:00because he had these promotions, and these guys had topped out of Labor. The structure was such that they weren't gonna-

WEISBERGER: [05:11:13] They weren't gonna-

JONES JR.: [05:11:15] Well, no, there's no more ... If I move up to a 15, that means these three guys are, they've got to wait until ... they could've stayed in because they didn't anticipate that Labor was going to explode. There had been some explosion in those jobs with that interest in that field, but you know, the business of waiting for some development when you've got a bird in the hand, you have to be stupid like Jim Jones and, say like, "I ain't going to nowhere, that's 16. That's not what it's really about, right?"

[05:11:46] So anyway. I got promoted, and I came over and this was to GS-15. It was probably very close to-

WEISBERGER: [05:11:58] I have an interview between June Weisberger and Professor 05:12:00James Jones and, Jim, you were telling about the title.

JONES JR.: [05:12:09] Okay.

[05:12:11] Having broken through at the 14, because of the expanded responsibilities in the Legislation Division, and the established Counsels and then the deputy counsels so they could justify some more 14s and a 15. The problem was they hadn't upgraded the assistants' jobs to 16s. So when you move up to 15, except for the step grade, you're the same grade as your bosses, that's-

WEISBERGER: [05:12:40] Yeah. That's no good administration.

JONES JR.: [05:12:43] Well, they are, they go through the Civil Service Commission, and the allocation of super-grades, 16, 17 and 18, was constricted.

[05:12:52] So you'd have to get all sorts of things before you could make room for them. They ultimately did it and moved things up, but. I'm thinking on one 05:13:00time, my boss, whom I referred to, when I joined, she was a first level supervisor. By this time, she's the assistant solicitor for legislation. Seeing a woman in the legal, second senior, because ... She joined her rival in calling Bessie Mardelen who was the Assistant Solicitor for Litigation, and had been for years, but she was locked in at a 15 too. The only 16 was the political slot that was right up with the Deputy Solicitor and he only had one. So you had a bunch at the top, ultimately.

[05:13:39] Anyway. So when I got promoted to Counsel for Labor Relations and General Legal Services and the GS-15, that General Legal Services covered all that Civil Rights stuff, so should have, right, all that other junk folded into there, okay. Well ... where were we going with this?

WEISBERGER: [05:14:06] As I flipped it, you were describing the full title and your responsibilities when you got the promotion.

JONES JR.: [05:14:14] Okay. That really covered ultimately what was going to have to be strung off into an entirely different little law office, as we would call it. Because the Labor Relations and General Legal Services if you took in the Civil Rights under them, had generated so much traffic in the division of legislation and general legal services that the tail was wagging the dog, right?

[05:14:44] So manpower training came on, they all ... well, they forgot that, the manpower training stuff. All that stuff was, percolating all over the place and they had the staff for it. Now, the government were always slow in staffing, because of the structures you have to ... but anyway.

[05:15:01] So when this bundle of stuff, this business here and so forth, well ... the highlight, I guess you would say, of that part of my career was when their words appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on the second day of the Congressional Hearings on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was the Civil Rights Bill of 1963. Bobby Kennedy had been the test-

WEISBERGER: [05:15:37] Lead-off-

JONES JR.: [05:15:38] Lead-off witness. And he went up there and really tore his britches.

[05:15:47] Now, so sophisticated, all these politicians, he realized, "We ain't got a prayer of getting a Civil Rights law passed unless we get substantial Republican support." And there was some Republican senators at Congressman 05:16:00level, from places where they had a need, let alone whatever ideological positions they might hold, they had a political need to make some showing on this.

[05:16:19] One of them was a senior guy, Bill McCulloch from Ohio. And he had a little bill in, right? It was a more symbol than substance kind of thing, but it was a little bill. That basically, what it did was recognize, congressional recognition or ratification as we call it, of the legitimacy of the President's executive order effort for anti-discrimination.

[05:16:47] And if you remember a little vaguely, Roosevelt started it and one of them, I forgot that senator's name from Georgia that ... I looked at some of my publications, I have a document ... that got this law passed that made it 05:17:00impossible for Roosevelt to continue operating the FEPC thing out of the White House, out of his back pocket. Requiring any program exists for more than a year to have to have specific appropriation in the back office.

[05:17:20] But then it went too far, and the pre-defense department, the War Department, the Army and Navy and so forth, they went through some of whatever-his-name and said "Hey look. That law prohibits us from co-operating together and doing stuff out of the budgets we got that relate, so that ought to be coordinated and worked together, and it's, you know."

[05:17:47] So then he got, passed another one that made an exception for an inter-agency thing, which just let the cat right out the bag. Which explains why President Kennedy's Executive Order was the President's Committee since it had 05:18:00multiple agencies.

WEISBERGER: [05:18:05] Inter-agency.

JONES JR.: [05:18:06] Labor was always one. Labor, Defense, some by whoever ... And then tripartite preachers, teachers, labor management. Made it a huge thing, and it had the fundamental flaw in it which then ... something gets delegated and then the administration supplying the money to run the thing like asking for it and then some.

[05:18:31] So Labor was always involved in some fashion in staff support.

WEISBERGER: [05:18:37] Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JONES JR.: [05:18:39] Even for the Eisenhower thing that was aided by Nixon. But it was in another building and virtually no contact with the rest of it that I know about, so. It was only when the Kennedy people came along and I got detailed to write the rules that threw me into the mix of the civil rights 05:19:00stuff. There was nothing in the Legislation Division except the old things from the Senator Taft days, and Roosevelt and stuff like that that didn't go anywhere.

[05:19:12] But that was the data bank. And that other stuff was some place else, right? Almost foreign. So we got into a thing where it's, so you gather what you can, you know, in a move where this, you know, people say, "I hope that the people over in Haiti and various places ain't operating like this."

[05:19:34] I'm not so sure about that. Anyhow. Well.

[05:19:38] I had this woman that worked with me. Barbara Evans. Was I at the ... I was the chief about then, how does that work? Anyway, Barbara was a good lawyer. And she was a good secretary. She took shorthand, as fast as you could talk. Then come back and type it up. So we covered legislation here.

[05:20:07] And obviously, I had all this other stuff that was crawling all over me, so I sent Barbara up there to cover the hearing, and she came back from the hearing with her notes. She said, "You won't believe the attorney general has put the secretary in a terrible position," so she told me. He had dumped on as inadequate, on employment things the responsibility on this old ... I don't know what they knew, but there was several other Republican congressmen that had introduced the same thing, that wasn't anything any stronger in the original title seven, it was just the same little. These guys had introduced it to the 05:21:00secretary, and the thing in the bill was the same thing and he was ... so he dumped on all this, dumped it on these people too. Said "Oh boy, we're all ready to go up with the secretary's testimony and that, so."

[05:21:20] The next day in the briefing session, the secretary is there, we have to clear the testimony and I had written the testimony and, this is another story, the last, it used to drive Edith crazy because she couldn't write something that Bill would accept and I decided that, the majority of it, I don't care how good it is, Bill's gonna write his own stuff. So I'd write my testimonies. I'd touch all the substantial points too and then, sometimes you'd be writing and looking for a nice quote or something, a bird in the hand or .... 05:22:00and I'd say "No, not gonna put that in my testimony. I'm gonna make a copy of that and put it in the briefing book, so when Bill rewrites my testimony and sees the words there, he's likely to pick that up and put it in his", right?

[05:22:19] Well anyway, he was going through a number of drafts, and there was one Sunday afternoon I went out to the secretary's house to get his final editing of the testimony, and when I went up there, Jane answered the door and she was in an apron. She was in the kitchen making cherry pie, and Bill was up on a ladder in the backyard picking cherries. I can still remember the summer, it was hot as hell!

[05:22:47] Anyway, so he came in all hot and sweaty, he said "Now when I speak about the farm-workers, you know, I can speak from first hand experience about just how difficult that is."

[05:22:59] And then he gave me his changes and I jumped into my VW and I went 05:23:00back down to the office and turned them over to Edith, I guess and they had to put them in the hopper with the ... you know, we didn't have copy machines, you'd have to make these mats and then run it all ... because she had to deliver six hundred copies to the Hill.

[05:23:23] And anyway, I took the little 5 by 8 cards and do a few notes on it, so that after all these people didn't want to get in on the act of briefing the secretary and all, some of it ain't very useful because she never did that, paid attention or something. But I'm writing up the hearings, because they appear with my name, I'd have the briefing notes in my hand, copy for the solicitor, copy for his legislator guy and a copy for Hobart Taylor who now was a special 05:24:00assistant to the vice president. I'm thinking. Maybe he wasn't. Yeah, I guess he would've been.

[05:24:18] And the quiet ride up in a limousine, occasionally we used to call the cars and he looked at it and said, "It makes a substantial amount of difference doesn't it?"

[05:24:37] Basically, what it says is, this guy's really screwed up and something's got to be done to reassure these, particularly Congressman McCulloch, who was on the committee, who was the lead on, to take the sting out of ... essentially, Bobby's insulted them by saying, by trying to make some distinction between administration standards ... well he's the man, and, you know. See Bill and Bobby. I think Bobby should've known better anyway. I 05:25:00believed Bobby, I never talked to Bobby, but Bill was trying to get a strong one, this piece of the bill, and I understood that Bobby wanted a stronger bill. Because ... see, I'm getting my time somewhat screwed up, this was the hot summer, because the day of the March on Washington-

WEISBERGER: [05:25:30] Which is '63.

JONES JR.: [05:25:31] Right.

[05:25:33] I had work that day. I was counsel for Labor Relations. Because my deputy was Bob Gutner, who ended up, ultimately ... he wrote the Kennedy [inaudible 05:25:49] Bill and ultimately selected him as his chief of staff. After three months, he fired him and hired Bill Kristol. And the reason I 05:26:00suspect he fired Butler was, Butler was pure pro, and didn't cut you any slack because of your political stance. If he's a staffer, you know. And I think that he wasn't part of something enough for Graham. But he's half a against Bill Krystol and that's saying something because, obviously, he's not shabby. But Bob Gutman finished Harvard College sooner, there was nobody. The year before I think Kissinger was sooner ... but he was tied with somebody else. And then Bob stayed on and quit the graduate program at Harvard at the ABD stage as a PhD 05:27:00student because they bored him and it was trivial. And then went to work for the Library of Congress. And then left it all a bit later.

[05:27:09] He ultimately went to law school at night when he was working full-time ... maybe he and Pat Harris were tied, but he was in Pat Harris's class. Bob was something. Only guy whose handwriting was worse than mine.

[05:27:25] Anyway. We were on the March on Washington, we were detailed to go up to the senate. Because Wayne Morris, Clark, Hubert Humphrey and Jabbetts, were livid also because the employment thing was so weak. So they wanted technical assistants to have a real bill drafted, so I got to sign up and took my number one guy with me to get specs for, you know, basically you get a pay-off. But it's [inaudible 05:27:59] so you get momentum.

[05:28:01] So when people are marching down toward the Lincoln Memorial for jobs in civil rights or what have you and there was wall to wall people out there. Pennsylvania Avenue was a vacant lot. We went out the back door of the Labor Department in one of the limousines and went up to the Senate Office Building to get specs. How's that for people demonstrating on work and [crosstalk 05:28:27]. And we wrote a bill that had so much muscle that nobody wanted to draft it. I don't know whatever happened to it. But that's a good little story.

[05:28:35] All these things go on in a crisis.

WEISBERGER: [05:28:37] Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JONES JR.: [05:28:39] Actually with the railroad stuff going on too. We won both of them and we were down there one weekend working on something and oh, everything they wanted the day before yesterday. So we're coming "secretary wants this so, and so." I would move out the chair and say "When?" Charlie said "Somebody could pick up the phone and ask him when he needs it and if you don't 05:29:00want to, I will." When you're so essential they can't do without you and a little bit reckless I guess, but blunt. But anyway, so Charlie picked up the phone and gave us a date. So we already got one crisis. We were down there that weekend working on this railroad thing and it's pretty much, got it sorted out and it's filed. I said to Bob, I said "I don't trust these people in time."

[05:29:38] Well, we're fooling around nursing this thing too, why don't we write that other bill. Now here's what my practice is by this time, getting prepared for the crisis probably. What's the problem in [inaudible 05:29:51], we worked on it a little bit, I started a file. Then any time after that, as we sort of played with ifs and went to coffee and you know, anything that would come up that would be related I'd make a copy of it and stick it in that file-

WEISBERGER: [05:30:03] Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JONES JR.: [05:30:04] So I was always putting it in a file and stuff .... sorting out what's happening and impressionable. So we were almost never stuck with just-

WEISBERGER: [05:30:14] A piece of paper with nothing on it.

JONES JR.: [05:30:17] Nothing on it start right now. So we got out our file and the two of us wrote a bill ... and you know, stealing stuff from various places and you learn a lot of shortcuts like, you know, if they're gonna talk about big organizations, hell, we've got two different statutes, and one of the comprehensive one that defines it Landor Griffin, we've been that route before. We put this in there for that.

[05:30:44] What about an injunction? Well, we don't wanna put that up top but all that hang up about during the strikes always pick the most language and stick it in here in the contract and so ... you know, when you've got a file like that and you got specs that somebody talked about, these pieces fit specs. 05:31:00Most people who are in charge of a lot of money won't tell you how to do this, right? This is worth a gazillion dollars if you allow this, right? Which I also didn't realize, I never went up the Hill, whereas some of my young people went up there that worked for me and wound up getting chief counsel of the Labor Committee.

[05:31:29] And we sent a kid from here, by the way, one of my students, and handed in, Gerald Linfield. Anyway, so we put this thing together, me and Bob-

WEISBERGER: [05:31:40] I know you were juggling a lot of balls. Would you say that there came a time when you spent most of your time on civil rights issues, legislation?

JONES JR.: [05:31:55] Kind of hard because-

WEISBERGER: [05:31:57] Yeah. There were different crises that came about so-

JONES JR.: [05:32:00] Yeah, and by the way, the railway labor thing got taken care of before the Civil Rights Bill got passed. But then there came a time when we got out of the crisis part of the civil right's thing, because our part of it was over. Where now it's a legislative fight with all the dynamics and Dirkson and Mansfield and all this stuff, but all the pieces now are in play. And it's a question of what you're gonna put in it. And the Justice Department was probably in the midst of the screwing around with the Civil Rights Act because it had 11 titles, and ours was just two.

WEISBERGER: [05:32:40] Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JONES JR.: [05:32:41] Well, one and a half, really. Since everybody had some Title Vi concerns. But the employment part of it was our big one. And the relationship with the President's existing programs on it and the executive order. But once that was, sort of, resolved then the big fights were between 05:33:00whether or not that commission was going to be the ... now our B-type model which was the one we had, something like that-

WEISBERGER: [05:33:07] Yeah.

JONES JR.: [05:33:09] By the way, me and Bob fixed the problems with that one. When you've got to write a statute, you don't just buy into all the problems, Let's fix this too, right. But so both of them subsided in terms of the Labor Department's involvement. Then I was released to go take my year.

WEISBERGER: [05:33:31] And what was the year that you were off on your research?

JONES JR.: [05:33:34] Oh, hell.

WEISBERGER: [05:33:35] Roughly.

JONES JR.: [05:33:38] I would have to. It would've been '63-'64. Since ... oh, by the way, I almost had to put it off again, you've reminded me of something else and this really cements the fact that one subsided before the other. When they passed the railway ... the mediation to finality, Jim Rhodes goes and "That 05:34:00has got to be the dumbest thing. What are you talking about?" That's all well, you know.

WEISBERGER: [05:34:09] But everyone loves mediation, so I can see the-

JONES JR.: [05:34:13] But to finality [crosstalk 05:34:14].

WEISBERGER: [05:34:14] Right, right.

JONES JR.: [05:34:16] Don't say arbitration! But anyway. When that bill got passed, it had some public staffing thing in it and the proposal was made and I don't know where in the department they made it, that Tom Powers, who was the secretary's exec and then moved ultimately moved up to be a deputy solicitor under Charlie Bowers for a while that the party should choose Tom for staff director for this little whatever thing. The procedure just stature ... and take 05:35:00Jim Jones as Counsel and I don't know if I ever would've gotten out of it. It would have been several years later before I got a chance to do this research because it was an opportunity you couldn't decide not to do, right? The party vetoed it. I think it had nothing to do with me and Tom but they wanted to make their own independent, however they made their choices, because we would've been quite a team, we were too much of a team with the second year labors.

[05:35:43] Anyway, so that disappeared, right.

WEISBERGER: [05:35:46] Cleared up.

JONES JR.: [05:35:48] And then the civil rights thing, you know, the crisis part of it subsided.