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Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
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And I told Mac this later, by the way -- that my first impression of him, when he spent that day with us at the Herter Commission was: my God, I wish he had a little more doubt; I wish he had a little more sense that things are not necessarily as clear and as direct and as simple as he is stating them to us.

Strangely enough, I didn't dislike him. I was just scared. And I think that was in the Kennedy -- before Kennedy was assassinated, around Bay of Pigs, although it might have been even before Bay of Pigs, but anyway, then I didn't have any more direct contact with him again until after he came over as president of Ford Foundation. And he remembered that, plus something else. And we talked, after he became president of the Ford Foundation, about a number of things, but obviously particularly about MARC, and what I was doing here. I think, by the time he came as president, we had already gotten our first grant, but he invited a number of us -- Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Vernon Jordan, I don't know whether Vernon was in on that-- but a number of us, to talk about an expanded role for the Ford Foundation in the whole civil rights area.

And I liked his manner then. Soon after that, when we were alone together, I told him what my initial impressions of him were, when he came before the Herter Commission, and we laughed, etc. ((I'm getting to the point.)

Then a few years ago, Halberstam's book came out, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, and I took it with me on a cruise. And I read it. And I should have agreed with Halberstam, because certainly his position on Vietnam and a lot of other things was similar to





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